Neil Young on why Bob Dylan is the best poet in rock history: “He’s the master”
Rock and roll never concerned itself with being the most literate genre in the world. Half of the songs that got the ball rolling for the movement had nothing more to say except partying and having fun, so it’s not like we would see some Shakespearean levels of lyricism coming out of Elvis Presley whenever he shook his hips. In the wake of the 1960s, though, many artists were starting to make their voices heard, and for Neil Young, no one quoted their heart better in song than Bob Dylan.
Young was certainly no slouch in that department, either. Aside from not caring one bit about what his label thought of him, tracks like ‘Heart of Gold’ and ‘Hey Hey My My’ are brilliant studies of what the Canadian icon was experiencing, whether that was a traditional love song or looking at the sad state of rock music around that time.
But if you look at who Young hung out with, it was always still typical rockstars. It wasn’t out of the question to see him hanging out with David Crosby backstage or even in the 1990s when he made friends with artists like Pearl Jam. Dylan certainly had his musician mates, but looking at where he came from, his best friends were people like Allen Ginsberg, who took great pride in shaping poetry into something new.
In fact, given the way that Dylan tends to write, it doesn’t always have the same structure as a typical pop song. Looking at a song like ‘Desolation Row’, it almost feels like Dylan had an entire outline of what he wanted to say and then started writing out the melody as it pertained to the syllables he had per line.
And without Dylan, maybe we would have never had artists like Lou Reed, who were willing to make something a lot more artsy than what had come before. Young had tried his hand at rustic music, but even if it sounded closer to Dylan than most, that was just because it was baked into the fabric of his being.
When talking about Dylan decades later, Young still felt that no one could ever compare to what he did in terms of wordplay and lyricism, saying, “I’ll never be Bob Dylan. He’s the master. If I’d like to be anyone, it’s him. He’s the one I look to. I’m always interested in what he’s doing now or did last or did a long time ago that I didn’t find out about. The guy has written some of the greatest poetry and put it to music in a way that it touched me, and other people have done that, but not so consistently or as intensely.”
Beyond just his wordplay, Dylan has also served as a basis for how Young has conducted his career for years now. Dylan never cared at all for what his label wanted him to do or what was trendy at the time, and considering how Young has gone down many career detours throughout his career, it may as well have been a way for him to stay true to his art the same way his idol did.
However, the most important part of Dylan’s music is that he’s never fully slowed down. Even as late as the 2010s, tunes like ‘A Murder Most Foul’ are still landmark pieces of his discography that deserve to be studied by anyone looking to break into the field.
While others, like Patti Smith, were more focused on making pure poetry and setting it to music, no one can discount what Dylan brought to the world every time he had a guitar in his hand. His muses were still poets, but he managed to harness that energy and make it suitable for rock and roll.
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