The “groundbreaking” musician Bob Dylan said no one truly understood
It’s nearly impossible for anyone to possibly get a read on what Bob Dylan was really like throughout his career.
It’s easy to look back on his records and admire the craft of songwriting whenever he performed, but there’s a good chance that even the members of the Traveling Wilburys only had a small semblance of an idea of what Dylan was about whenever he wrote his tunes. He may have been straight and to the point in his music, but it’s not like his heroes were exactly easy to understand all the time, either.
He was already an acolyte of rock and roll artists when he first started playing music, but the folk tradition always brought a certain level of mystique to it. People like Woody Guthrie may have written some of the most groundbreaking songs that the genre had ever known back in the day, but it was never about knowing the person behind everything. You could try and sort out what his personal life was like, but in his mind, all that mattered was whether the songs were going to hold up over time.
And that’s the same tactic that Dylan used when he was making all of his tunes. He was notoriously cagey in interviews about what every one of his songs meant, and even if there was a lot of mystery surrounding him, that was also part of the charm. None of his quotes were about giving a straight answer, because when you look at the true greats, people were going to remember how they felt when they heard the music rather than what they had to say about their songs.
But beyond rock and roll, parts of Dylan’s work wouldn’t have existed without him listening to jazz behind the scenes. His music didn’t necessarily have the strange chords that you would find in a Miles Davis song or anything, but the way that he improvises different lyrics and how he lets some words fly off his tongue when he sings isn’t all that dissimilar to hearing a soloist interpret a melody differently on a jazz record.
Everyone has their own way of approaching that kind of music, but Ornette Coleman was a bit too eccentric even for jazz fans. He was a brilliant player when he had a saxophone in his hand, but when he played with the rest of his group, the discordant noise that would happen was often a bit too harsh for those initial jazz crowds, which probably explains the alleged story of how the crowd threw his instrument off a cliff.
It wasn’t normal by any stretch, but Dylan felt that fans didn’t truly understand what they were seeing at the time, either, saying, “I knew Ornette a little bit and we did have a few things in common. He faced a lot of adversity, the critics were against him, other jazz players that were jealous. He was doing something so new, so groundbreaking, they didn’t understand it. It wasn’t unlike the abuse that was thrown at me for doing some of the same kind of things.”
Dylan wasn’t even the only one that was championing Coleman in the rock world. Lou Reed famously loved the solos that Coleman would do, and when you listen to the way that The Velvet Underground utilised discordant noise in their songs, it was almost like a salute to that reckless style of playing whenever they started working on records like White Light White Heat.
You could call Dylan a contrarian for liking Coleman if you want to, but the influence that he had on the history of music has a lot more to do with his attitude towards his music. Everyone might have been saying that he didn’t have a shot next to the jazz greats, but he wanted to give the audience something they hadn’t heard before, and that mentality is the key to all great musical rebels.
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