Credit: Far Out / Bob Dylan

The musician Bob Dylan crowned as the greatest electric guitarist: “All this wizardry”

Thu 23 April 2026 1:00, UK

Bob Dylan doesn’t usually strike anyone as the kind of person who was insanely particular about guitar tone.

A lot of his best records from the 1960s were all about trying to document the song, and you can hear more than a few discrepancies in the way that he plays his acoustic tunes compared to the more polished electric tracks that he made later. The folkies were beyond pissed when he started to bring in the amplifiers, but Dylan knew that the power of an electric guitar meant more than just a bunch of noise.

After all, nothing had changed about Dylan’s songwriting when he first picked up an electric. Bringing It All Back Home was already flirting with the idea of making songs with a rock and roll edge, and when he walked out onstage playing tunes like ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ for the first time, he was speaking with the same kind of vitriol that he did when making ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’. It was a new way of working, but what everyone else saw as treasonous was downright revolutionary.

Rock and roll didn’t have the chance to be this intellectual yet, and while Chuck Berry and Little Richard paved the way for rock and roll through party songs and the odd romantic ballad, Dylan wanted to peel back the layers of someone’s mind. ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ was a statement of intent, but even if Mike Bloomfield gave him the blues licks that he needed on the rest of that album, Dylan was more fascinated by what he heard out of the first great bluesmen before rock and roll existed.

Robert Johnson had already laid the groundwork for rock and roll by talking about his own struggles with the devil on his trail, but Elmore James was the first one to truly electrify everything. The sound of an electric guitar wasn’t anything new by the time that Dylan picked one up, but if you look at how James was using his instrument, Dylan felt that he was one of the few electric guitarists who truly understood his instrument.

Most other guitarists wanted to make songs that were all flash, but Dylan felt that James was the first of his kind that actually used the guitar correctly, saying, “You see all this electricity speaking, all this wizardry. Pull out the plugs and probably very few of these people could move you, because they can’t play. They are dominated by the electricity. Guys like Elmore James played acoustically and used electricity so they could be heard in a crowded room. They weren’t depending on electricity to hide talent they didn’t have. I don’t want a bunch of flaky sounds. It’s a dead end.”

And while Dylan does sound like a crotchety grandpa talking about how kids these days are only making noise on their instruments, it’s not like he doesn’t have a point. There’s a reason why the best songs in the world only need to be played on one instrument to impress someone, and James was the one taking the volume and using it to make everyone pay attention to the tales he had to tell.

Then again, it’s not like that electric noise couldn’t be used as art in itself. Jimi Hendrix could have still been great had he played acoustic for his entire career, but the spectacle of hearing him play with feedback and use his whammy bar during ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ is one of the reasons why he is so revered in the rock and roll community. He was making art, but that was never the intention behind Dylan’s music.

His songs needed to have everything stripped down to the bare essentials, and even though not every one of his tunes was that complicated, it was never in service to a great guitar lick or a face-melting solo. James was only using the electric guitar to tell his stories, and if Dylan wanted to raise up his voice that much more, he was going to need a bit more than a harmonica and an unplugged guitar.