“Insurpassable”: The one band Bob Dylan said no one can beat
Anyone who plays music shouldn’t be looking to be merely good whenever they make their classics. The entire business is about trying to progress music forward, and it’s up to the songwriters whether they want to become a part of the machine or take a swing on something that their fans might consider to be a turning point for rock and roll. Bob Dylan has already had time to have a few of those moments under his belt, but he knew that many bands could go far beyond anything he could do.
Then again, Dylan didn’t even need a band to become one of the biggest artists in the world half the time. Armed with only an acoustic guitar in the early days, he was able to channel so much of his greatest material by saying what was on his mind, taking the basic essentials of song form and turning it into some of the greatest anthems of his generation on songs like ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’.
But once he decided to go electric was when a lot more depth came in. Many people considered it to be the moment that he officially sold out, but Dylan was looking to make things a lot more palettable for the mainstream, and if he had electric guitars as his weapon of choice, he knew that fans of The Beatles would be able to latch onto what he was saying a lot easier than the casual folk fans.
As he made his way through his middle period, though, people like the Grateful Dead were doing for music what Dylan was doing for the written word. Whereas Dylan was trying to make an epiphany go off in the listener’s head whenever he made some of his greatest songs, Jerry Garcia was looking to take people on a journey with music, usually allowing the songs to stretch out for as long as possible and making each solo feel like a conversation between every musician onstage.
When Dylan decided to collaborate with the band on Dylan and the Dead, the results were a little bit mixed. It’s one thing to have someone who’s phenomenal at lyrics, but when both creative forces get together, it can normally lead to everything sounding a bit too overwhelming when it’s going on for hours on end.
Still, Dylan walked away from his experience working with The Dead as working with true masters of their craft, saying, “The Dead are [in] a different world from their contemporaries. Phil Lesh is one of the most skilled bassists you’ll ever hear in subtlety and invention. And combined with Bill Kreutzmann, this rhythm section is hard to beat. That, along with elements of traditional rock and roll and American folk music, is what makes The Dead insurpassable. A postmodern jazz musical rock and roll dynamo.”
And while those qualifiers do sound more than a little bit confused when looking at their records on paper, it’s easier to understand in the context of the live show. The band were born to play in front of an audience, and there was a certain push-and-pull that happens whenever they played that put them in another league compared to what everyone from Quicksilver Messenger Service to Big Brother and The Holding Company were doing during the psychedelic movement.
Dylan was operating on a different playing field than most when he was working, but he also knew when to spot a true original out in the wild. Many people could spend their lives trying to make the best music they could, but Dylan knew that Garcia was always about internalising the kind of music he made before he even played a note.
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