The one singer Bob Dylan said never made a bad song: “I love everything”
There’s a good chance that Bob Dylan didn’t really want all the accolades that were bestowed upon him.
All he wanted to do was make songs that he felt captured the zeitgeist in the right way, but if anyone was told that they were going to be the voice of their generation, they would probably want to give that title to anyone else. That’s simply too much pressure to put on just one person, but even outside of the folk-rock world, Dylan felt that plenty of artists deserved to be celebrated just as much as he did.
That said, it’s not like Dylan didn’t know how to lean into it when he started having an effect on people. The electric guitar was considered alien in his fanbase, and even if he looked like a contrarian when he first plugged in and started singing tunes like ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, it wasn’t about trying to piss people off. He knew the power that rock and roll had, and he wanted to do everything he could to harness that power for his own use.
Because when you look at where the rock scene was headed, there were far more artists taking pages out of Dylan’s playbook. Everyone from John Lennon to Brian Wilson had been astounded listening to Dylan’s lyrics back in the day, and when you look through some of the biggest hits that Dylan would come out with later, he would be listening right back when he reinterpreted pieces of ‘Norwegian Wood’ for ‘4th Time Around’.
But there were also musicians who made music in a way that Dylan couldn’t even understand. There were bound to be musical geniuses in every single genre, but whereas most people were off trying to figure out the strange chords in Beatles songs or how Wilson arranged those beautiful harmonies across records like Pet Sounds, there was no real explanation for where Stevie Wonder was going.
Or at least there wasn’t if you weren’t looking hard enough. Wonder was a phenomenon in the world of pop music before he was even out of his teens, but after spending his time listening to some of the greatest names in everything from soul to rock to jazz, every one of his albums was a love letter to what music could do. And whether it was Talking Book, Innervisions, or Songs in the Key of Life, Dylan knew he was dealing with someone who could reshape the musical landscape if he wanted to.
Sure, there were many people fawning over Dylan’s lyrics, but as far as he was concerned, Wonder deserved the biggest bands that anyone had ever seen, saying, “I love everything he does. It’s hard not to. He can do gut-bucket funky stuff really country and then turn around and do modern-progressive whatever you call it. In fact, he might have invented that. He is a great mimic, can imitate anybody, doesn’t take himself seriously and is a true roadhouse musician all the way, with classical overtones, and he does it all with drama and style. I’d like to hear him play with an orchestra. He should probably have his own orchestra.”
And while Dylan wasn’t even close to Wonder’s level as a musician, you can definitely hear what Wonder got from him. Aside from his brilliant impression of Dylan during ‘We Are the World’, Dylan’s way of spinning a phrase around wasn’t all that different from how jazz musicians improvise, and Wonder was doing the same thing whenever he came out with one of his tunes.
He wasn’t looking to be the best artist in the world or anything, but not many people that are crowned the kings and queens of their genre are. They’re simply looking to make the best music they can, and in doing so, they end up creating the kind of art that’s going to last for centuries after they’re gone.
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