The musician Bob Dylan said played better than anyone: “I thought he was just great”
There was never a moment in his career when Bob Dylan claimed to be one of the best musicians in the world.
He didn’t exactly have the greatest voice, and even when listening to some of his early records, it’s not like he was looking for the highest production value when a lot of his songs featured only his voice, a guitar, and a harmonica if he was feeling it out that day. The songs were all that mattered whenever he performed, but it didn’t matter that he couldn’t marvel when he heard someone who was in true command of their instrument.
Because even when he put his full band together, Dylan wasn’t going to surround himself with a bunch of amateurs. The Band had an almost-telepathic way of communicating every time they performed with him, and even if we ignore the massive help that he had when working with the Traveling Wilburys, some of his best later albums all came from having the right person cracking the whip behind the scenes.
Dylan himself would be the first to say that he wasn’t a production genius by any stretch, but getting someone like Daniel Lanois into the mix did help him have a better understanding of what he wanted. Lanois had spent his entire life trying to find music that moves people, and while his work for artists like U2 and Peter Gabriel don’t exactly sound alike, both of them left a mark on their audience that they felt in their heart whenever they got done listening to one of their records.
But even in the golden age of rock and roll, Dylan was looking for other avenues for where he could take the guitar. Chuck Berry had his own vocabulary when it came to finding the right guitar lick, but aside from what he was doing and the more country-leaning work that Carl Perkins was doing, Dylan was just as satisfied hearing Woody Guthrie strum away on his guitar when singing ‘This Land is Your Land’.
At the end of the day, it was all about how the musician made their audience feel, but what Lonnie Johnson did was far away from anything Dylan had ever heard. Most people of his generation may have known the inner workings of the blues, but whenever he heard what Johnson could do on the guitar, he felt like there was a lot more going on there than what anyone else was doing.
While Dylan could only learn from afar, he had to admit that Johnson could put any other guitarist to shame, saying, “I thought he was just great. He could play rings around anybody and sang fantastic. One night, he showed me something on the guitar that didn’t make any sense to me at the time, but it was a style of playing that was mathematically different than any other way to play. This was just one of the ways he could play. He could play very intricately also. It didn’t mean anything to me at the time and I wasn’t able to develop it until years later.”
Then again, Dylan’s schtick was about trying to copy someone for the hell of it. He might have worn some of his folk influences a little too well on his sleeve when he first started making music, but there was also a lot more of his own voice coming through even when he was singing the blues. That nasal delivery might not have been the most powerful instrument in the world, but it could manage to cut through any of the other bullshit in anyone’s record collection when it came on.
And that’s probably the biggest lesson that people like Johnson had on Dylan when he was still honing his craft. It’s one thing to be one of the greatest guitar players that ever lived, but even if people spend their entire lives trying to master their instruments, Dylan was far more interested in making a record that gave the audience something to remember rather than blowing them away with solos.
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