The bands Bob Dylan said made rock and roll respectable
When Paul McCartney first played the songs from Revolver to Bob Dylan, the future Nobel Prize-winning songwriter supposedly assessed the album by saying, “Oh, I get it. You don’t want to be cute anymore”.
In fact, thanks to Dylan’s songwriting and his marriage of poetry with music, plenty of other writers became more ambitious with their words, more serious about their art, what they had to say and how they were going to say it, more inventive and ultimately, more creative in the mid-1960s.
It wasn’t just The Beatles who heard his stuff and decided to toughen up a bit – his influence sent shockwaves through bands like The Byrds, The Rolling Stones, Fairport Convention, Jimi Hendrix, Manfred Mann, and a whole bunch of others. It’s mad to think how quickly things moved on – from daft novelty tracks like ‘(How Much Is That) Doggie in the Window’ and ‘Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’ to the raw poetry of ‘Chimes of Freedom’ and ‘Desolation Row’, and then on to the likes of ‘Gimme Shelter’, ‘Across the Universe’, and ‘Voodoo Chile’. A total shift in gears.
Much later, when Bruce Springsteen was inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, The Boss said that “The way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind”.
It’s an important and keenly observed connection between Dylan and Elvis, and one that ties together two artists who sparked the biggest changes in the direction of music and culture in their times. Barack Obama went as far as to say in 2012 that “there is not a bigger giant in the history of American music” when awarding Dylan the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but Dylan himself would probably argue that Elvis should take that particular title (and he should, Elvis is as close to a deity figure as America has ever gotten).
Elvis took the music of black America and injected it into the cultural consciousness. His own immense talents can not be understated, but neither should the origins of the music he performed (and, crucially, Elvis himself was the first to say so). Dylan took it all one step further, mixing up the so-called “low art” of Rock and Roll with the supposed “high art” of Literature. In this amalgamation, a new possibility for music and what could be done with it was born.
But Dylan has never sold as many records as his contemporaries. He didn’t shift singles in the way that The Rolling Stones or The Beatles did, or like any of his other acolytes, like The Kinks, The Animals or Pink Floyd.
But, as we have learnt again and again throughout the course of music history, there doesn’t seem to be much that American audiences like more than hearing their own music played back to them through a British lens. Maybe it’s in our accents.
Dylan briefly touched on the phenomenon in a 1991 interview with Paul Zollo, when talking about a time “after the Beatles came out and everybody from England” hit the scene, saying that “Rock and Roll still is an American thing. Folk music is not. Rock and roll is an American thing, it’s just all kind of twisted. But the English kind of threw it back, didn’t they? And they made everybody respect it once more”.
Dylan’s 1991 comments more than echoed the taunt he levelled at a less than respectful British crowd at the Royal Albert Hall (no, not the Manchester Free Trade Hall) in 1966, when he told the combative and booing audience that “this is not British music, it is American music, now, come on” before launching into a ferocious ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’.
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