Robert Plant’s favourite Bob Dylan song: “Moved some minds and mountains”
Picking a favourite Bob Dylan song is a near-enough impossible task. The man has been through many different variations of himself throughout his life. He has committed so many beautiful words to paper and to sound that picking out one piece of work that stands above the rest feels about as hard as writing the songs themselves. That being said, for many songwriters, a specific Dylan song speaks to them as it lines up with their own ability as a songwriter. Robert Plant certainly has a favourite.
If you want to find praise for Bob Dylan, you don’t have to look very far. For instance, when Leonard Cohen was asked what he thought about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for literature, he said it was “Like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.”
Equally, Bruce Springsteen once described the songwriter as “the father of my country.” In a speech he gave about Dylan, he recalled the first time he heard his music, saying, “I was very influenced by Dylan. I always say he’s the father of my country. He initially provided me with a picture of a country that I recognised. One that feels real, feels like the truth.”
Of course, while this is high praise, given the realism that makes up so much of Springsteen and Cohen’s music, it’s easy to see where the parallels between them and Dylan begin. For Robert Plant, it’s slightly different. Granted, he also had his fair share of songs that focused on the real world, but he was no stranger to submerging himself in mythical escapism. As such, it’s hard to see that there is as much of a kinship, but the connections are certainly there.
In fact, the reverence of Dylan is par for the course owing to the fact he was largely the first to inject profundity to emerging pop, and Plant is nothing if not profound.
When asked by Mojo what his favourite Bob Dylan song was, Robert Plant quickly offered up ‘Talkin’ World War III Blues’. Reciting the lyrics, Plant focused specifically on the lines, “’Some time ago a crazy dream came to me / Dreamt I was walkin into World War Three’, I love where he goes – ‘And I drove 42nd Street in my Cadillac / Good car to drive after a war’.”
He continued, “For a guy who wanted to be in The Teddy Bears with Phil Spector, he’s certainly moved some minds and mountains, hasn’t he? I’ve got his autobiography [Chronicles Vol.1], but I don’t want to read it. I read something about him being a piece of work who lied and danced with Mimi Farina a bit too often. I thought I don’t need to know this; I just need to know a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.”
The amount of artists that Dylan has been able to touch throughout his career is truly remarkable. Whether the connections seem obvious or are a bit harder to make sense of, there is no denying the influence of one of the best songwriters ever to grace the stage.
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