The “brilliant” musician Bob Dylan wanted everyone to praise
Bob Dylan didn’t want to be seen as a god among men when he made his first records.
He felt that there was always room for him to grow as an artist, but there were just as many times when he wanted to have a laugh and not be as serious as everyone took him for whenever he made a record. It was all about trying to make a good song at the end of the day, but Dylan felt that there were some artists who never managed to get the kind of recognition that they truly deserved.
But when you listen to his records, Dylan was proud to wear a lot of those influences on his sleeve. Especially on his debut, a lot of the songs were covers, and even when he wasn’t showing people the more traditional tunes happening around that time, his vocal delivery and general performance are dripping with Woody Guthrie influence every single time he plays one of his tunes.
Then again, Dylan didn’t want to be known as a guy who played one style of music. There’s never any way to fully describe the kinds of songs that he was making, but by the time that he went electric in the mid-1960s, he felt that there was a new world that had been opened up to him from the first time he sang ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. The rest of the world may have been pissed, but Dylan didn’t want to stay in one lane, either.
In fact, there’s almost a chameleon aspect to what Dylan did that puts him on par with David Bowie. He never wanted people to understand the full Bobby Zimmerman underneath everything, and even though he didn’t change his image as much as Bowie did every single time he made an album, he felt that he had the same mystique as all the old bluesmen did whenever he made a record.
Over time, you can hear a lot of that influence coming out in his later albums, but in between his love for people like Muddy Waters, Dylan was captured by what Robert Johnson could do whenever he sang. He only had a few songs ever recorded in his lifetime, but Dylan knew that he was listening to someone who had lived his entire life on the edge and was trying to tell everyone what it was like when he heard songs like ‘Crossroads’ and ‘Me and the Devil Blues’.
Johnson was speaking the truth, and Dylan felt that he still hadn’t received the praise that he deserved, saying, “Robert Johnson only made one record; his body of work was just one record. Yet there’s no praise or esteem high enough for the body of work he represents. He’s influenced hundreds of artists. There are people who put out 40 or 50 records and don’t do what he did. He made a record called King of the Delta Blues Singers. In ’61 or ’62. He was brilliant.”
And while there are plenty of blues artists who have pulled from the greats like Buddy Guy, it’s not easy for anyone to copy what Johnson did. He was making music that came from the heart before anything else, and the smartest musicians in the world usually liked to take his songs in completely different directions, whether that was Jack White doing a more garage-rock version of ‘Stop Breaking Down’ or The Rolling Stones turning ‘Love in Vain’ into a heartbroken country song.
But Dylan knew that no matter how many people tried to copy what Johnson did, there was no replacing what that one original record could do. This was someone that was laying everything out on the table for the world to see, and Dylan was going to do whatever he could to make something that could measure up to that whenever he worked on some of his classic rock and roll songs.
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