The song Bob Dylan couldn’t believe history has forgotten: “One of the most powerful records I’ve ever heard”
Folk music might have been Bob Dylan’s route into the music realm, via those dingy underground clubs in Greenwich Village, but the songwriter has never been one to shut himself off within one specific sound. Even during his busiest years, he always seemed to keep his ears to the ground for new and emerging sounds.
If you look across the admittedly overwhelming discography of Bob Dylan, you will find a kind of sonic breadth afforded to very few of his contemporaries. From the grassroots folk sounds of his still underrated debut, to the gospel-tinged releases of his 1980s period, the songwriter has consistently refused to stick to one sound, owing to his ever-expanding range of influences.
During his early emergence, of course, that range of influences risked alienating Dylan’s core, folk-centric audience. For a genre obsessed with historical accuracy and faithfulness to the source material, it is no surprise that Dylan’s folk fanbase resented the songwriter’s incorporation of styles like blues, R&B, and electrified rock and roll during the counterculture era – so much so that he was lambasted as being ‘Judas’ during his infamous 1965 set at Newport Folk Festival.
That presumably rather strange experience of being hated by the very fans that had launched his career in the first place did little, however, to deter Dylan from continuing to explore those influences.
After all, if you could ignore the mounting scenes of LSD-fuelled psychedelia and self-aggrandising jam bands, the late 1960s were a veritable golden age for R&B, soul, and pop music, with the radio stations dominated by the likes of Motown, Atlantic, Stax, and a select few names that never truly caught on.
One such name was the underappreciated R&B master, Johnny Thunder – not to be confused with the heroin-addled punk prince who arrived some years later. It was all the way back in 1963, when Dylan’s career was just beginning to take off, that Thunder struck up his biggest hit with ‘Loop de Loop’, but that single certainly is not the greatest song he ever recorded.
That accolade goes instead to his 1968 recording of Tommy James’ ‘I’m Alive’, a single which Bob Dylan was outspoken about his adoration of. “I heard a record by Johnny Thunder. It’s called ‘I’m Alive’,” he told Rolling Stone in 1969. “Never heard it either, huh? Well, I can’t believe it. Everyone I’ve talked to, I’ve asked them if they’ve heard that record.”
“It was one of the most powerful records I’ve ever heard,” the songwriter declared. The power of the song, however, is not something that can truly be put into words, as Dylan explained: “It’s called ‘I’m Alive’ by Johnny Thunder. Well, it was that sentiment, truly expressed. That’s the most I can say. If you heard the record, you’d know what I mean.”
A raucous, adrenaline-pumping rock and roll declaration, the song might not have been as big a hit as Dylan believed it should be, but it represented the pinnacle of Thunder’s output, and it went on to have an extensive history within the realm of garage rock, covered countless times by a wealth of different artists.
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