The “perfect” song Bob Dylan knew no one could beat: “Their songs would create an empire”
Bob Dylan didn’t have time for beating around the bush every time he wrote one of his songs.
He wanted the opportunity to shake people up every single time they heard his music, and he wasn’t going to get anywhere by writing the same drab pop songs that everyone else was doing. And besides, even if he wanted to make pure pop for the rest of his career, it didn’t help that there were probably 50 different bands out there that had a better handle on that genre than he did whenever he picked up his acoustic.
It’s hard to imagine a voice like Dylan’s singing Beach Boys songs, so the most that he could hope for was making tunes that had much more to do with the greater world around him. No one was really talking about the current events that were happening at the time, and even if everyone else was a bit too scared to talk about the war or the injustices going on amongst different races, Dylan was willing to jump into the deep end every time he wrote tunes like ‘Masters of War’.
He didn’t care what anyone thought of him when he aired his opinion, but the rest of the music world wasn’t exactly ready to go along for the ride. Dylan was an artist who seemed to be more respected than played during the first few years of his career, but when you look at the rest of the biggest names in rock, the right people were listening when the British invasion got underway.
The Animals already had a great deal of respect for the folk genre when making their own rendition of ‘House of the Rising Sun’, but The Beatles were the real Dylan fanatics when they first heard him. John Lennon always felt that Dylan should have been a key part of his sound from the moment that he first heard him, and Dylan was paying attention right back when listening to the kinds of songs that they were making.
It was unheard of for a band to primarily write their own material at the time, but Lennon and Paul McCartney were making tunes that were indebted to American music when they first started. They wanted to make songs on par with what Gerry Goffin and Carole King were making, and Dylan could recognise that in an instant when they started making tunes like ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’.
Rock had come a long way from the days of that style of songwriting, but Dylan knew that the Fab Four had the kind of chops that none of their contemporaries had when making a song like that, saying, “I remembered when they first came out. They offered intimacy and companionship like no other group. Their songs would create an empire. It seemed like a long time ago. ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’ A perfect ’50s sappy love ballad, and nobody but them could do it. Somehow, there was nothing wussy about it.”
That’s a much harder feat to pull off than it sounds like, but the reason why it worked all came down to the way that George Harrison sang every word of the tune. Harrison was always the quiet member of the band, and while he usually sang his own material every time he performed, hearing him sing this song about someone telling his crush that he loves her fits his personality perfectly.
The band were already on their way to taking over the world, but the fact that they were making tunes this sophisticated at their age was what reality blew Dylan away. He knew that the British invasion was going to offer America a different kind of ride, but he didn’t realise the kind of magnitude that it would have when it had songwriters like this leading the way.
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