The one genre Bob Dylan said kids will never like: “My motto is never follow anything”
Getting the younger generation on board with your music is half the battle for any artist. No one can spend their time making millions off their elders, but if there’s something universal to your sound, you have a better chance at getting everyone to listen. But Bob Dylan knew better than to give his audience musical homework.
Dylan was always about living in the here and now whenever he made his greatest music. Even though many of his songs have taken on the same mantle as the icons before him, it’s not like he intentionally tried to write them like that. It was all about capturing the world as he saw it around him, and looking through every one of his albums, he always gives his take on life with a guitar in his hands.
It was easier for him to spout out whatever he wanted in his radical period in the 1960s, but even when he started shifting his sound in the next few decades, it never got boring seeing where he would go. Some were objectively scattershot, like Self Portrait, but everything from Blood on the Tracks to the Traveling Wilburys albums to later triumphs like Time Out of Mind helped people see one of pop music’s greatest poets continually throw different styles into his songwriting arsenal.
Then again, Dylan wasn’t a chameleon in the same way that someone like David Bowie was. He wasn’t always going to be donning makeup every time he played music, but what did change was his approach to writing. The young and fiery Dylan would have gladly picked a fight with someone who tried to act too big-headed, but there were also moments where he could open his heart up, like when he deconstructed the fallout of his first marriage or wrote the occasional love song like ‘Lay Lady Lay’.
But in terms of Dylan’s personal diet, he was more interested in artists who managed to tell a story over the course of a song. The more technical side of music never appealed to him all that much, and while he did like to surround himself with people who could play a lot of different things, he felt that there was no way for people to connect with him if he played jazz during his prime.
Around the time he began working on records like Blonde on Blonde, Dylan felt that it was no use trying to get any teenager interested in jazz all that much, saying, “I don’t think jazz has ever appealed to the younger generation. I don’t think they could get into a jazz club anyway. But jazz is hard to follow; I mean, you actually have to like jazz to follow it: and my motto is, never follow anything.”
Despite being a little bit resistant, Dylan did end up inheriting a lot of tropes from jazz musicians whenever he played his instrument. He was folk down to his core in those early years, but considering how well he played off the band and Tom Petty talking about him constantly changing up his manner of singing whenever he played live with him, he understood the mindset of being able to able to improvise the same way jazz greats like Miles Davis and Charles Mingus used to do.
Sure, a lot of jazz seems reserved nowadays for the kind of cocktail music people throw on, but Dylan seemed to learn that the truly inventive is where everything seems on the brink of chaos. It can be background music to some people, but if you’re listening carefully, you can hear someone’s entire life story within one solo if it has all the right inflexions.
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