The best songs of the 1970s, according to Bob Dylan
By the time the 1970s arrived, a 29-year-old Bob Dylan was already on his fourth or fifth lifetime. He went from a wandering vagabond to the voice of a generation, a mystic motorbiker and then something close to a family man. As the folk star himself fittingly proclaimed with a glint in his eye, “All I can do is be me, whoever that is”.
He had seemingly reconciled earlier than most that the counterculture revolution had gone awry. He took an almighty swipe at it with ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, recognising how the idealism had become spaced out on hypocrisy. But that didn’t mean the end of the music renaissance it had spawned. Quite the opposite; in fact, the evolution of pop was just getting underway.
For Dylan, a man who didn’t really go for the whole psychedelia thing, you almost get the sense that he figured that the end of the summer of love was a good thing in a musical sense. Many of the songs he has hailed over the years bear less of the hallmarks of his own flower power era and lean further into the blunt and unabashed ways of the ’70s.
Dylan himself found himself at a new cutting zenith in the era. Blood on the Tracks differed from what he had offered before and restated his claim as the finest artist of a generation. With grit and grooves, the album was a hard-hitting masterpiece in an age of many such works. Dylan himself has hailed many of these tracks as among the greatest of all time, and we’ve compiled them below.
Bob Dylan’s favourite songs of the 1970s:
Joan Baez – ‘Diamonds and Rust’ (1975)
The folk revival scene in New York’s Greenwich Village was far from a fairy tale. Although the zeitgeist was abuzz with the things that money couldn’t buy, chief among them was poverty. However, within this hodgepodge stronghold of artistry was the blossoming romance of the king and queen of folk music: Dylan and Joan Baez.
Although their relationship and break-up may have spawned a thousand songs in a nebulous sense, it was Baez’s 1974 reflection, ‘Diamonds and Rust’, that seemed to deal with the end of folk’s most dazzling couple head-on. This wasn’t lost on Dylan, and he was, in fact, delighted to have been part of the pastures from which the song flowered, no matter if it was nettlesome. “I love that song ‘Diamonds and Rust’, to be included in something that Joaney had written, I mean to this day, it still impresses me,” he says.
Randy Newman – ‘Sail Away’ (1971), ‘Burn Down the Cornfield’ (1970) and ‘Louisiana’ (1974)
Randy Newman is widely accepted among artists to be one of the greatest songwriters ever to try his hand at the craft. However, this sadly hasn’t led to widespread acclaim with the uninitiated masses. Thankfully, Dylan was more than happy to shine an illuminating light on his work in an interview with Paul Zollo in 1991, where he reflected on his finest works in the 1970s.
Dylan declared: “Now Randy might not go out on stage and knock you out, or knock your socks off. And he’s not going to get people thrilled in the front row. He ain’t gonna do that. But he’s gonna write a better song than most people who can do it. You know, he’s got that down to an art. Now Randy knows music. He knows music. But it doesn’t get any better than ‘Louisiana’ or [‘Sail Away’]. It doesn’t get any better than that. It’s like a classically heroic anthem theme. He did it. There’s quite a few people who did it. Not that many people in Randy’s class.”
Dylan has even pointed out his favourite Newman period in the past, stating: “I like his early songs, ‘Sail Away,’ ‘Burn Down the Cornfield’, ‘Louisiana’, where he kept it simple. Bordello songs. I think of him as the Crown Prince, the heir apparent to Jelly Roll Morton. His style is deceiving. He’s so laid back that you kind of forget he’s saying important things. Randy’s sort of tied to a different era like I am.”
Eagles – ‘Pretty Maids in a Row’ (1976)
While discussing his latest record with Douglas Brinkley of The New York Times, Dylan was dissecting the influences that he croons out in the final dirge of ‘A Murder Most Foul’. When asked for his favourite Eagles track, he replied simply: “’New Kid in Town’, ‘Life in the Fast Lane’,” before pausing and adding with a huge mark of commendation, “’Pretty Maids All in a Row’, that could be one of the best songs ever.”
Songwriter Joe Walsh revealed the importance of the song to the band when he remarked: “To make the Eagles really valid as a band, it was important that we co-write things and share things. ‘Pretty Maids’ is kind of a melancholy reflection on my life so far, and I think we tried to represent it as a statement that would be valid for people from our generation on life so far.”
Ramones – ‘Do You Wanna Dance’ (1977)
Dylan was punk in his outlook from the get-go. His sound might be pretty far apart, but his attitude abided by the same spirit as the likes of the Ramones. He is a noted fan of the band, and the band are fans of his, even covering his songs on occasion. Still, it may have come as a shock to hear Dylan speak so fondly of the group when making his selection for the best dance tracks of all time on his radio show: “Joey Ramone, along with Johnny, Tommy and Deedee, all brothers from different mothers, they were an influential early punk band, and some people say they invented the form of pop-punk.“
Maybe somewhere in the metaphysics of pop culture, Dylan contributed to that, too. He burst into the folk scene, marching to the beat of his own drum, and continued not to care one iota about what anybody thought until, well, today it would seem. As the actor Edward Norton recently opined: “He was more punk rock than anybody.”
Johnny Thunders – ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory’ (1978)
According to an interview with New York Dolls’ Syl Sylvain at the end of the biography Looking for Johnny, Dylan once told the rocker that he wished that he had written the Johnny Thunders classic ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory’. While Dylan has never formally ratified this claim himself, it’s far from a stretch of the imagination that Dylan may well have ‘dug’ the viscerally raw pine for love.
The track even adheres to Dylan’s fancy for liberal appropriation. For ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory’, Thunders stole the title from the decidedly uncool TV show The Honeymooners and made it into perhaps the greatest punk song ever written. So cool, in fact, that even Dylan wishes he could steal it off of the late punk pioneer.
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