The one singer Bob Dylan said could outdo every pop star: “A tribal medicine man”
Bob Dylan was never concerned with being the biggest pop star in the world.
He certainly knew that embracing rock and roll would have gained him a lot more leverage over the casual folkies with whom he had been sharing stages. However, when he rose to the biggest stages in the world, he knew that his friends could leave any stadium rock act in the dust.
Of course, Dylan didn’t set out to make folk rock music in his prime; it was always about being able to tell a story with a guitar in your hand. While a lot of people flocked to hear him sing songs like ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’, there was always more money to be made once that guitar was plugged into an amplifier. But there’s a good chance Dylan also knew he was playing with fire.
The whole idea of rock and roll was alien to the folk community, and as far as most people could tell, it bastardised what they were doing. Whereas Woody Guthrie tried to make music to unite people, hearing Chuck Berry or Little Richard sing songs about nothing but partying was trite to them. On the other hand, Dylan saw power in their delivery, so why not bring that to the folk genre?
The biggest names in folk needed to have their voices heard as loud as they possibly could be. Sure, The Beatles had their place in history and would gladly be worshipped by many people as the world’s most beloved rock and roll act, but by the time Dylan reached the 1980s, he started wondering where a lot of the revolutionary artists that he had grown up with had gone in the mainstream.
There were some fantastic artists willing to change what most people thought of as a traditional rock and roll live show, but when looking at the biggest pop stars of the day, ‘Bobby’ felt that Pete Seeger could tower above them all, saying, “I think he could appeal to people as much as Sting could, because he could make them feel like they matter and make sense to themselves and feel like they’re contributing to something. Seeing Tears for Fears is like being a spectator at a football game. Pete is almost like a tribal medicine man, in the true sense of the word.”
It’s not like he doesn’t have a minor point, either. Artists like Tears for Fears did have some fantastic tunes in their arsenal, and Songs from the Big Chair should rightfully go down as one of the finest records of the decade, but whereas most people could understand the premise of a song like ‘Shout’, they were thinking much more critically when chanting alongside Seeger as he was playing his banjo.
Granted, it’s hard to say whether Seeger wanted that attention. If there’s one thing to be taken from his music, it’s that he wasn’t looking to be a man to be idolised, and even if he saw someone like Dylan take folk music to places it had never been before, he was much more satisfied playing music for all the right reasons rather than worrying about the mechanics of some massive tour.
‘The Bard’ may have taken Seeger’s troubadour tendencies to heart when working on his own Neverending Tour, but the rock icon scaled things back because he knew what made Seeger so good to begin with. Before thinking about a platinum record or even a half-decent single on the charts, Seeger wanted to have people connect with him on a more visceral level than simply being a rock and roll star.
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