The one band Bob Dylan said brought pride back to America
When people write about what American music was like in the 20th century, Bob Dylan should really be a central talking point.
He never claimed to be a legend by any stretch, but the kind of music that he brought to the table made every other rock star look like a sideshow compared to his tunes. He wanted to follow in the footsteps of the greatest storytellers the country had ever known, but he also knew when some of his fellow legends were coming in to turn the entire genre on its head.
But when Dylan first started, it would have been a stretch to call him anything close to rock and roll. He had first decided to be a musician when he was young by watching people like Little Richard, but when he heard what artists like Woody Guthrie could do, he knew he had found his calling. His goal was to make music that reflected his time period, and listening to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan must have felt like a hurricane back in 1964.
The likes of Elvis Presley may have shaken people up with the raw sound of his music, but Dylan shook people up from the inside. His lyrics made people really analyse what was going on in the world, and even if tunes like ‘Masters of War’ were almost a little bit scary to listen to in some respects, it wasn’t like some young lads from Liverpool weren’t paying attention when they were sent a copy of the record.
The Beatles were immediate fans of Dylan, and when looking at their transition towards folk music on albums like Rubber Soul, they were quick learners when it came to getting the right sound for any number of their tunes. But it wasn’t like Dylan wasn’t paying attention right back when he started listening to what the Fab Four could do when they first premiered on The Ed Sullivan Show.
For him, this was the kind of music that America needed to hear at the time, and despite not being citizens of the US, Dylan knew the band had a greater impact than anyone else realised, saying, “America should put up statues to the Beatles. They helped give this country’s pride back to it. They used all the music we’d been listening to– everything from Little Richard to the Everly Brothers. A lot of barriers broke down, but we didn’t see it at the time because it happened too fast.”
It’s easy to hear a lot of that history if you look at a lot of their early records. Everyone might like to celebrate the era when they began to get a bit more experimental, but listening through to albums like Please Please Me and With the Beatles, you can hear the echoes of everything from Little Richard’s wail to Chuck Berry’s swagger to the sweet sounds of Motown with their covers of tunes like ‘Money’.
But what truly made them stand out was that they actually served as an introduction to rock for a lot of people. It wasn’t clear at the moment whether or not rock and roll was a legitimate genre of music or a flash in the pan, but even some of the concerned parents of the world had to admit that there was something special about these four lads who tossed their hair every time they walked onstage.
And given how much the country was struggling in the wake of the Kennedy assassination a few months prior, bringing The Beatles to America to play their signature brand of music is what a lot of people needed. It was difficult for anyone to recover from that dismal time in American history, but when listening to The Beatles, you could feel some of those wounds starting to heal.
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