Syd Barrett’s scathing attack on Bob Dylan
Since time immemorial, musicians have enjoyed mocking Bob Dylan. For the most part, he has rightfully been appraised by his peers as perhaps the most important elevator of pop culture history. However, two factors also made him subject to parodies and scorn: his deeply singular style and the reverence he received from folks who clung to his gingham coattails.
Syd Barrett, like his Pink Floyd bandmates, was a huge fan of the original vagabond. After all, the folk star had brought a new level of intelligence to popular music that allowed the likes of Barrett to experiment with the backing of a newly open-eared public. But as Barrett’s life began to slide without having reached a level of success that may have provided a safety net, he began to look rather jealously upon his former hero.
In his solo effort ‘Bob Dylan’s Blues’, Barrett rattles off a string of Dylan’s schtick in a tone of deriding cynicism. “Got the Bob Dylan blues /And the Bob Dylan Shoes /And my clothes and my hair’s in a mess /But you know I just couldn’t care less,” he sings in an affected drawl. “Going to write me a song /’Bout what’s right and what’s wrong /’Bout god and my god and all that /Quiet while I make like a cat.”
Within two simple verses, Barrett has skewered Dylan’s repetitive rhythm style, his carefully causal dress code, his aura of apathy, his moral piety, his religiosity, and his trait of quirking it all with a bit of nonsense when he has run out of another rhyme. Nevertheless, given that Pink Floyd were all fans, it is likely that Barrett recognised these tropes as central tenets of an artist who crafted some of the finest songs of his generation, and it was merely the circus that surrounded him that became the victim of his spleen.
After all, Barrett wouldn’t be the only one who respected Dylan but parodied him all the same. This is the same camp where Paul Simon resided for a time. With his contemporary pushing on into electric music around the time that the apparent parody of ‘A Simple Desultory Philippic’ was recorded in June 1965, Simon began to weigh in on the hysteria surrounding the star, making a mockery of it all. In this clear divergence in style for Simon & Garfunkel, they added the twists of organ and psychedelic guitar sounds that had entered Dylan’s oeuvre.
However, Simon then takes a look at Dylan’s songwriting style in a similar fashion to Barrett by seemingly mocking his penchant for throwing in obscure lines and listing off literary and pop culture references. In a Dylan-esque vocal affectation, he purrs: “Not the same as you and me, he doesn’t dig poetry / He’s so unhip, when you say Dylan / He thinks you’re talking about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was.” In both Barrett and Simon’s case, there is also a distinct aura of: ‘See, we can do it too, what’s the big deal?’
Simon, however, would treat the track as more of a satirical exploration than a full on dig at the man who he has dubbed an inspiration. As he told Rolling Stone: “One of my deficiencies is my voice sounds sincere. I’ve tried to sound ironic. I don’t. I can’t. With Dylan, everything he sings has two meanings. He’s telling you the truth and making fun at the same time.”
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