The one band Bob Dylan was always desperate to join: “Still dynamite”
There is an unavoidable pull connected to being in a band. The idea of swanning around with your friends, a gang among the cultural wasteland, attempting to lift any morsel of artistic nourishment you can and blow town with your haul. Even icons like Bob Dylan can be drawn into such a beautifully balanced fantasy.
Dylan’s relationship with rock and roll has always been tricky. In his earliest days, he shunned the burgeoning genre in favour of more pure folk stylings. But when it became impossible to ignore just how big rock music was getting throughout the 1960s, Dylan hitched his wagon to The Band and went electric, much to the chagrin of his acoustic fanbase.
It wasn’t the only rock band that would turn his head. As well as being a big fan of The Beatles’ ability to be commercially savvy and creatively pure, rock bands would prove to be a huge attraction. Later in his life, other acts would appear like second homes for his genius. His famous tour with the Grateful Dead would even promote a shared album, and Tom Petty seemed another kindred spirit alongside his band, The Heartbreakers. Being in a band was always a huge lure for Dylan.
But Dylan’s roots as a rock and roller actually go further back than his origins as a folky. Like a lot of teenagers during the mid-1950s, Dylan was enthralled by the sounds of early rock and roll music. Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis were early favourites, but one singer, in particular, had a major effect on Dylan: Little Richard.
Back when he was still Robert Zimmerman, Dylan played in a series of high school bands that delivered early rock and roll to high school dances and sock hops. It was in his senior yearbook while attending Hibbing High School that Dylan professed his fondness for Richard, where he filled in the section that started with: “We’ll remember always…” by finishing “to join ‘Little Richard’.”
Eventually, Dylan would leave rock and roll to the wayside. “The thing about rock’n’roll is that for me anyway it wasn’t enough,” Dylan told Cameron Crowe in 1985. “There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms … but the songs weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.”
But after he reintroduced himself to rock and roll, Dylan was actually able to perform with Richard later in life. “I played some shows with him in Europe in the early ’90s and got to hang out in his dressing room a lot,” Dylan tweeted out in response to the performer’s death in 2020. “He was always generous, kind and humble. And still dynamite as a performer and a musician, and you could still learn plenty from him.”
Adding: “I’m so grieved. He was my shining star and guiding light back when I was only a little boy. His was the original spirit that moved me to do everything I would do… In his presence, he was always the same Little Richard that I first heard and was awed by growing up, and I always was the same little boy. Of course, he’ll live forever. But it’s like a part of your life is gone.”
It’s not particularly easy to see how the exuberant Little Richard and his music can filter into what we know of Bob Dylan today. Of course, not all influence has to be linear, however, it still feels strange that someone with such charisma and effervescent pzazz could have shaped the intellectual and, dare we say, somewhat dour Dylan. But all it does is prove a few things: firstly, inspiration can strike anywhere and, secondly, that Dylan would rather just sit back in the shadows of the band and watch Little Richard dominate the stage.
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