The artist who made rock and roll “badass”, according to Dave Grohl
Rock and roll hasn’t been known as the coolest genre in the world for years now. For all of the great music that has been made under that huge umbrella, there are just as many people who see any band brandishing a guitar as generic dad rock these days. If you’ve got any hope of staying relevant, that means having to evolve, and Dave Grohl knew that the genre was progressing seeing Bob Dylan.
When rock and roll first started, Dylan wasn’t necessarily considered to be at the genre’s forefront. Whereas every other band was filling sockhops playing electric guitars, here was a humble songwriter with an acoustic guitar playing the kind of tunes that sounded like they should have come out of Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger.
What Dylan lacked in stylistic choices, he more than made up for with how he presented himself. A song like ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ might be pretty compact in the world of folk music, but his scathing tongue when it came time to tear through the monsters of society is something that can only come from someone who doesn’t want to follow the program.
If anything, his approach seemed almost punk rock years before the genre existed. The whole appeal of rock and roll artists was about being the antithesis of the mainstream, but if you look at any of Dylan’s interviews from around that time, he never looked like he remotely cared about anybody’s opinion, occasionally toying with the journalist trying to squeeze a straight answer out of him.
While Dylan had weathered the biggest changes in rock and roll by the 2000s, he was still known as a living legend when Dave Grohl was asked if Foo Fighters would open for him. Despite going through a massive change in his vocal style, Dylan was just as enamoured with expanding his vision, even paying attention to Grohl’s tunes on tour and asking the grunge veteran if he could teach him how to play ‘Everlong’.
As the band prepared for the tour, Grohl said that opening for Dylan was ascending to a level of rock and roll royalty, telling Q, “Being asked by Bob Dylan to go on the road with him is like being knighted or something. How could we say no? We were asked by the man who turned rock ‘n’ roll from boogie-woogie into bad-ass. Respect and honour, and for us, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Although hearing songs like ‘Learn to Fly’ and ‘My Hero’ right before ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ is strange for anyone to visualise, remember this is Foo Fighters coming off the album In Your Honour. Sure, they could still make abrasive rock and roll when they wanted to, but maybe Dylan heard the back half of that record and saw the sensitive side of Grohl that hid behind that distortion. It’s one thing to be able to get an entire crowd jumping in an arena, but the minute that you’re able to have them hang on your every word with just a guitar in your hand, that’s something you wouldn’t trade for the world.
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