Quentin Tarantino’s two favourite Bob Dylan records
The great Hunter S. Thompson once wrote: “Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.” Quentin Tarantino ravenously taps into it in a similar manner.
The soundtrack is so important to Quentin Tarantino that his name can be used to define a music genre. It isn’t a typical genre like country or indie, it’s some swaggering amorphous beast united by an air of pure atmosphere. As he once declared of his own process, “I go through my record collection and just start playing songs, trying to find the personality of the movie, find the spirit of the movie.”
“One of the things I do when I am starting a movie, when I’m writing a movie, or when I have an idea for a film,” Tarantino writes for the liner notes of his soundtrack compilation, “Is I go through my record collection and just start playing songs, trying to find the personality of the movie, find the spirit of the movie. Then, ‘boom,’ eventually I’ll hit one, two or three songs, or one song in particular, ‘Oh, this will be a great opening credit song.’”
This sense of atmosphere is an underrated virtue of Bob Dylan’s output as an artist. Much has been said about his lyricism and pioneering ways, but his work also has a deep sense of cinematic time and place. As the poet John Cooper Clarke recently told Far Out: “I like those ones that seem to be set in a border town. He does that real well. I think that’s what got him the part in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, he looked dead right in that. He seems to write a lot about Spanish-speaking chicks, and Spanish leather, he seems to have this thing about it, the Catholic world of Mexico, all that fatalism. And the Aztec ruins. ‘Past the Aztec ruins and the ghosts of our people, Hoofbeats like castanets on stone,’” he sings.
Therefore, it perhaps comes as no surprise that when Tarantino – a man who loves coupling cutting dialogue with brooding atmosphere – was picking his favourite albums, Dylan, a songwriter who does much the same, was featured twice. When Melody Maker asked Tarantino to champion ten favourite albums, he promptly exclaimed, “This is my favourite album ever,” regarding Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks.
“I spent the end of my teenage years and my early twenties listening to old music–rockabilly music, stuff like that,“ he explained. “Then I discovered folk music when I was 25, and that led me to Dylan. He totally blew me away with this. It’s like the great album from the second period, y’know? It’s his masterpiece.”
He then pronounced his love for Dylan even further when cooked the books a little for his second choice. “OK, maybe I’m cheating here,“ he continued. “I know this is off Blood On The Tracks, but it’s my all-time favourite song. It’s one of those songs where the lyrics are ambiguous you can actually write the song yourself.“
Concluding: “That’s a lot of fun – it’s like Dylan fooling around with the listener, playing on the way he or she interprets the lyrics. “It’s very hard to take individual songs off Blood On the Tracks, because it works so well as an entire album. I used to think ‘If You See Her, Say Hello’ was a more powerful song than ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ but, over the years I’ve kinda realized ‘Tangled…’ has the edge, just for the fun you can have with it.’“
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