The song Bob Dylan wanted to be the theme song for his generation: “I knew exactly what I wanted to write”
The greatest songs that Bob Dylan ever wrote didn’t start out trying to be masterpieces of poetry.
Dylan was more than happy to follow in the folk tradition like a lot of his peers, and if the rest of the world went along with it, that was practically a pat on the back for a job well done. But when more people start listening to what you have to say, anyone would start taking better care of what they’re putting down on that piece of paper whenever they write a tune.
Then again, it didn’t seem like Dylan was going to be one of the greatest songwriters of all time right out of the gate. His debut album is a fine entry point into his career, but it’s clear that he needed to dust off some of the Woody Guthrie inspiration and start finding his own voice if he wanted to stick around. And by the time that The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan came out, people knew exactly the kind of artist that they were working with.
In a world full of rock and roll troubadours and blues belters, Dylan was the one who was telling the hard truths that most people would have been too scared to touch on. ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ may have been the obvious example of him making a modern standard, but across the entire record, you get a good sense of what makes him tick. ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right’ showed that he had a heart, and even tunes like ‘Oxford Town’ went back to that folksy tradition that he started in.
However, there are a few songs that seemed to point the way forward a lot better than ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. ‘Masters of War’ was a firm condemnation of how pointless it is to engage in warfare, and ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ is a modern parable of what was going to happen if none of us stuck up for our fellow man. And it’s not like Dylan didn’t realise that kind of magic when he saw the crowd’s reaction.
Keep in mind that this was not the best time for the US. The President had been killed, and the civil rights movement was only just beginning and putting a spotlight on the racism in the country, and Dylan wasn’t going to sweep that under the rug. He couldn’t speak as eloquently as the almighty figures of history like Martin Luther King Jr, but if he had a guitar in his hand, he was going to use it any way that he could.
And when ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ fell out of him, he knew exactly what the tune needed to be, saying, “This was definitely a song with a purpose. I knew exactly what I wanted to write and for whom… I wanted to write a big song, some kind of theme song, ya know, with short, concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way.” But even if a song is “big”, it doesn’t mean that it has to cater to sloganeering at every turn, either.
Dylan isn’t advocating for any one side of the cultural conversation, but he was warning the rest of the world what the next generation could do. They weren’t going to roll over and watch as atrocities were happening around them, and given where rock and roll went at the height of the Vietnam War, every other person at Woodstock was transfixed by the truth that Dylan was speaking on his tunes.
Whether ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ is actually the theme song for his generation is up for interpretation, of course, but it does have a lot more to say than any of the countless Dylan copycats. Because for all of the great artists that took a few cues from his playbook, the ones that last are the ones that had something to say, and Dylan was never short of getting a message through with his guitar.
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