The song that made Bob Dylan hate his producer: “You hear somebody talking?”
With Bob Dylan, you don’t just have a poet, a songwriter, and a musician; you have somebody who is totally obsessed with their craft. After growing up in a town where he didn’t feel like he fit in, he decided to leave, pursuing the same path that some of his musical heroes had done and trying to find a space where he fit.
He found that place on stage as he confronted the audience at his first show in New York and started playing. “[I’ve] been travelling the country,” he said, before playing the first few notes on his guitar, “following in Woody Guthrie’s footsteps”.
He made a name for himself as an excellent folk musician, but he wasn’t satisfied being boxed into one simple category of music. Instead, he wanted to write something that excited him, and that came with versatility. This led to him embracing different styles of music throughout his career, one of the first being folk rock, which was met with controversy initially.
There are a number of possible reasons as to why Dylan turned towards playing folk rock, but one of the most likely is because he heard The Byrds covering his song ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. Despite being one of Dylan’s most famous tracks, it was the band that got the song charting, and there are reports that for the musician, hearing how good his music sounded with electric instruments was a huge turning point.
“He came to hear us in the studio when we were building The Byrds,” recalled David Crosby. “After the word got out that we [were] gonna do ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and we were probably gonna be good, he came there, and he heard us playing his song electric, and you could see the gears grinding in his head. It was plain as day. It was like watching a slow-motion lightning bolt.”
Going electric was just the beginning for Dylan, as throughout his career, he has worked with a range of different genres and styles of music. He has used jazz, gospel, and blues on various albums, meaning that while he always has folk music at the centre of what he makes, there are other styles at play.
This became a problem on his ‘Can’t Wait’, which was released on his 1997 record Time Out of Mind. There were a few different ways the song could be played, and Dylan recorded a number of different versions. He eventually grew tired of the song and asked his producer, Daniel Lanois, to pick a version for the album. Instead, his producer wanted to record some more iterations, which led to Dylan and him falling out, with the former refusing to speak to him for days.
“Dan wanted to get back to the gospel version of ‘Can’t Wait’ we cut in Oxnard,” recalled engineer Mark Howard. “We cut three or four different versions and named every take. The ‘Pink Floyd’ version’s quite psychedelic, and the ‘Rag Doll’ version is country rock. Bob’s like ‘I don’t wanna hear this song any more, we got a vision down’. Dan was trying to get to the original. Bob shut down and wouldn’t talk to Dan for a couple of days. Bob would only talk to me. Dan would say something, and Bob would say, ‘You hear somebody talking?’” The move may have been a little childish, but it worked out for the best.
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