The night Bob Dylan almost wrote a song with Pearl Jam: “It was seven in the morning”
When you think of Bob Dylan, you think of him as a solo artist. One of the most visceral images of him is him standing on stage with nothing but his voice and an acoustic guitar, pouring his heart out. This image of Bob Dylan propelled him to fame. The vulnerability and honesty of his music were unlike anything people had ever seen.
Inspired by other folk artists who had come before him, Dylan was allured by their unwavering and unapologetic nature. This is wonderfully reflected in the first words he spoke when he stepped onto a stage in New York. On a cold evening in January, he left his hometown of Minnesota and headed for the Big Apple, where he went on stage and announced, “I’ve been travellin’ the country, followin’ in Woody Guthrie’s footsteps.”
While a lot of us often think of this solo image of Bob Dylan, he was someone who didn’t feel the need to stick to one specific style of music. He was an artist, after all, which meant that he was open-minded and had an affinity for various types of music. If you ask a mix of Bob Dylan fans what their favourite era of Bob Dylan is, they will all have different answers, and that is the beauty of his art.
We can see this now with hindsight; however, when Bob Dylan left behind different moments in his career and stepped into a new sound, it was often a move met with controversy. This was the case when he ditched his acoustic guitar and started playing electric, going into a heavier, folk-rock-influenced sound.
While many people hail his electric era now, when he stepped on stage on July 25th, 1965, Bob Dylan made history as disgruntled fans cursed the site of a Stratocaster under his arm. The move set up Dylan’s whole career as he cemented himself as a musician who put his art before the audience. The message was simple: come along if you want. If not, there’s the door.
A lot of other artists believe the same thing. David Bowie was adamant that you should “Never play to the gallery.” He said, “Always remember that the reason you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society.”
When you consider how controversial Bob Dylan’s move to the electric guitar was, it might be even more surprising when you find out one of the rock bands that he was keen on making music with. Pearl Jam have a sound that feels a million miles away from that which Bob Dylan played during his first gig in New York, and yet, they still have a sound that he could connect with and wanted to work with.
Eddie Vedder recalled the night that he and Bob Dylan sat down in a pub, and Dylan said he was keen on working with them, but it was a request that Vedder never called him up on. “He calls me Eddie and I call him Bob. He actually likes our music a lot,” said the Pearl Jam frontman discussing their friendship, “Did he ask me to write a song with him? I didn’t take that seriously. We’d had a few pints that night. It was about seven in the morning, and we’d been up all night in this Irish pub in New York, Tommy Maken’s.”
Of course, it’s not the first time Dylan has saddled up with a band. Aside from his time in The Traveling Wilburys he also neatly cosied up to Grateful Dead for a time and threatened to join Jerry Garcia and co on their wild ride. But, despite all that, we are left wondering what a Bob Dylan and Pearl Jam collaboration would have sounded like.
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