When Prince revealed his favourite Bob Dylan song
Prince and Bob Dylan share broad global fan bases and attained artistic immortality as two of the 20th century’s most iconic performers. Beyond that, the pair don’t overlap a great deal. Dylan emerged from the acoustic folk boom of the early 1960s and maintained a successful ongoing career by blending blues-rock and country influences into his prolific oeuvre. On the other hand, Prince emerged in the late 1970s as a dynamic pop artist capable of channelling the forces of R&B, funk and soul to meet his lyrical demands.
It is unclear exactly what Dylan thought of Prince as a person and fellow musician, but ‘Dirty World’, one of the tracks he recorded with the Traveling Wilburys, was allegedly inspired by Prince. “Bob’s just very funny. I mean, a lot of people take him seriously, and if you know Dylan and his songs, he’s such a joker, really,” Dylan’s fellow Wilbury George Harrison recalled of ‘Dirty World’ in an interview with Classic Rock in 1990.
“And he just sat down, and we said, ‘Okay, what we gonna do?’ And Bob said, ‘Let’s do one like Prince!’ [laughs] And he just started banging away, ‘Love your sexy body. Ooh, baby.’ And it just turned, you know, like into that tune. It sounds nothing like [Prince]. But that track, I mean, I love that track. It’s just so funny, really.”
Dylan no doubt made that joke recognising the stylistic gulf that lies between him and Prince. It’s difficult to imagine Dylan grooving along to a funky dance number, but lyrically, Prince would sometimes venture closer to Dylan’s more expansive narrative style. Wordsmithery seemed to be the only point of contact between the pair and the attribute Prince most admired in Dylan.
In a 1985 interview with Rolling Stone, Prince admitted that he didn’t listen to Dylan’s music much but grew to appreciate his lyrical talent through Jimi Hendrix. “I don’t know too much about Dylan,” Prince admitted. “But I respect him a lot. ‘All Along the Watchtower’ is my favourite of his. I heard it first from Jimi Hendrix.”
It appears that Dylan’s musical and vocal styles might not have been Prince’s cup of tea, but fortunately, Hendrix’s virtuosic cover helped open a window to words that otherwise might have passed him by.
Listen to both versions of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ below.
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