“He is the mountain”: The one singer Bob Dylan said everyone needs to hear
Bob Dylan is never going to get the same praise as one of the greatest singers that the pop sphere has ever known.
Let’s face it: the guy wasn’t trying to be the next Sam Cooke by any means, but when you heard his voice, it was impossible not to listen to every one of his stories whenever he played one of his tunes, especially with lyrics as biting as what came out of ‘Masters of War’. But even with that much gusto behind his words, Dylan felt that there were certain singers people needed to listen to longer before they even considered buying his records.
Then again, it’s hard not to look at Dylan as the fracturing point between what pop music was going to be in the 20th century. The biggest names before rock and roll had started were all from the worlds of jazz and classical music, and while people could appreciate someone like Bing Crosby when you put on his tunes at a party, Dylan helped open people’s eyes to what was going on. The Beatles stirred up a lot of excitement at the time, but Dylan seemed to be lecturing you about the real horrors of the world.
You weren’t going to hear the average rock and roll band singing about the horrors that came from everyday people on tracks like ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll‘, but Dylan wasn’t doing it strictly to be contrary to what else was out there. He wanted the chance to show people the kind of lyrics most people were afraid to say, and his bravery is the reason why we had people like David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen speaking out for what they believed in later.
At the end of the day, though, music is still about entertainment, and Dylan could give people a show just as much as his contemporaries. He could be a brilliant performer with a harmonica in his mouth and a guitar in his hands, but even when performing a tune like ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, you can hear the cynical side of his voice come alive whenever he starts jostling at the piano stool.
A lot of that might have had to do with the drugs that he was taking at the time, but there was a lot of swagger that he got from hearing those pre-rock and roll records as well. There are times when he could perform like an old blues singer or embrace his inner Woody Guthrie, but there is no one else who seemed to have the finger on the pulse of pop music more than Frank Sinatra did.
And while Dylan seems like the last person to give Sinatra the time of day, he could always give ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ his flowers for being one of the blueprints for what a superstar was supposed to be, saying, “When you start doing these songs, Frank’s got to be on your mind. Because he is the mountain. That’s the mountain you have to climb, even if you only get part of the way there. And it’s hard to find a song he did not do. He’d be the guy you got to check with. People talk about Frank all the time. He had this ability to get inside of the song in a sort of a conversational way. Frank sang to you – not at you.”
Not everyone was ready for Dylan to embrace these kinds of standards, and Roger Waters, especially, wasn’t happy to see him cowering to those records, but that was what was great about Dylan. He didn’t mind going outside the norm, and even when he was doing everything he could to move away from Sinatra’s brand of easy listening, it’s easy to understand what made those songs so beautiful once you hear them over time.
They’re definitely a safer pick for people who wanted to hear music that was a bit more mellow, but when you hear Sinatra’s voice, there’s nothing subtle or cowardly about it. His voice was about as strong and robust as the liquor that he sipped from whenever he performed live, and there’s a good chance that even the greatest vocalists in rock history would have killed to have had that specific instrument when they were making their iconic tunes.
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