The one genre Bob Dylan said was never inspiring enough: “They are so lateral”
No one could have scripted the kind of career that Bob Dylan has had over the decades.
He was always going to march to the beat of his own drum, and while many of his greatest tunes are still staples of the rock and roll world, his later period is proof of him being the kind of artist who is always in search of the next great song. But even when looking at some of his contemporaries, Dylan felt that there were some bands that helped push him a little further than he would have if he had stayed a common folk singer.
Dylan was never one to stop making new inventions after he became one of the biggest names in music. Being able to say that you wrote the greatest anthems of a generation and participated in the March on Washington would have been more than enough for any other musician’s entire career, but with the rock and roll landscape shifting beneath his feet, Dylan had a lot more to offer than a bunch of good-hearted folk tunes.
He was looking to make social commentary, and he needed to have the right instruments to help bring his point across. After all, The Byrds had built an entire legacy out of making his songs some of the greatest jangle pop tunes of the 1960s, but when Dylan strapped on an electric guitar, he was about to show everyone how it was really done. He wasn’t the most precise guitarist or anything, but with people like Mike Bloomfield behind him, he was a lot more biting than anyone else at the time.
That’s probably because Dylan didn’t mince any of his words once he started to plug in his instruments. Sure, he had a different kind of tool to work with this time around, but he still had the habit of speaking out of both sides of his mouth. He could be direct when he wanted to, but there were a lot more abstract pieces of his work that you weren’t going to find in some of his contemporaries.
With most rock and roll, most listeners only needed to hear a song once to get what it was about. Those early Beatles aren’t necessarily the most complicated lyrics ever made, but even when Dylan’s favourite folk singers could be incredibly direct, he felt that the kind of stuff that he was hearing on the Broadway stage was about as far away from his style of music as anyone could have possibly got.
He didn’t mean to put down the hard work that went into those songs, but Dylan felt that there was nothing about Broadway music that really inspired him that much, saying, “I don’t think in lateral [sic] terms as a writer. That’s a fault of a lot of the old Broadway writers…. They are so lateral. There’s no circular thing, nothing to be learned from the song, nothing to inspire you. I always try to turn a song on its head. Otherwise, I figure I’m wasting the listener’s time.”
So if Dylan was going to make his own records, he was going to shake his audience up a little bit. Not everyone was going to be ready for some of the more wild lyrics that turned up on his records, but even if some of his songs didn’t have the happiest ending or through in a bit of snide humour, it was all about taking the audience with him on that musical journey rather than sitting down with them and telling them the traditional love story angle.
The characters in his tunes needed to have flesh and blood, and no matter how many times that Broadway shows had actual character arcs throughout their duration, it wasn’t what Dylan catered to. Anyone could have sang their feelings out for everyone to hear, but whenever you walked away from one of Dylan’s records, it almost felt like you knew the guy on a much deeper level than any other rockstar.
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