The artist Bob Dylan said “wouldn’t stand a chance” today
The music of Bob Dylan always meant more than a bunch of simple singalong tunes.
That was reserved for the pop stars of the world, and whenever he stepped up to the microphone, you were going to get songs that told a story rather than ones that made everyone want to get up and dance. But even if he was following in the footsteps of some of his own heroes, he knew that what connected every one of his idols went beyond being merely a bunch of good songwriters.
I mean, look at the kind of artists that Dylan would put on a pedestal whenever he talked about his influences. He had people like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger showing him the ropes, but it’s not like they were writing songs in the same way that Little Richard was. Both of them had two totally different approaches, but none of that mattered to Dylan as long as left an impact on their audience.
While the folk scene may have looked down upon rock and roll for being nothing but noise, it’s not like Little Richard didn’t know what he was doing at the time. People had grown tired of the same kind of blues music that had been happening around them, so watching him give the people a show by dressing to the nines, screaming his lungs out, and throwing his leg up on top of the piano was like watching a circus act playing music for the uninitiated members of the crowd.
But before rock and roll was even a term, there were people like Johnnie Ray paving the way for everything that came after. Even though the first recorded rock and roll song has always been somewhat contested, it’s easy to see why Ray is considered the true originator. His background may have been strictly in blues, but the attitude that he had in the beginning was a lot closer to what rock and roll would sound like once Chuck Berry started making music.
Dylan had a healthy respect for Ray’s music whenever it came on the radio, but he was a little disheartened looking at the next generation of music, saying in 1997, “When I was young, America was connected above all by means of the radio. You had stations who could play whatever they wanted. And all of this was broadcast over thousands of miles. I don’t know when they started to play all that pap, I only know that radio today is different. Someone like the singer Johnny Ray, he wouldn’t stand a chance today. He had heart and soul and he really wanted us to feel something when he sang.”
While Dylan has had many opportunities to look like an old man screaming to the heavens about how music was so much better back in the day, he has a fair point. As much as we all have fond memories of the 1990s these days for being a glorious time in music, the late 1990s were bound to do a number on people like Dylan, especially when seeing the singer-songwriter genre give way to acts like the Spice Girls.
For Dylan, the importance of leaving an impression seemed to be slipping away a little bit, but it’s not like there weren’t people still willing to push the envelope. The White Stripes would come out only a few years later to strip rock down to its essence, and even if the charts were getting a little too tasteful, there were bound to be people willing to push themselves a little too far to get the whole world’s attention.
So while everyone at a certain age usually has thoughts about how the music world is going to hell in a handbasket, just remember that artists like Ray are never going to go away. They’re not going to look the same as he did back in the 1950s, but they will always be there to shift people’s perception of what a pop star could be.
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