“A deep conscientious cat”: The one singer that touched Bob Dylan’s heart
Bob Dylan was never the kind of musician to come off as overtly sentimental by any stretch.
He knew that he could level someone with just the right words, but a lot of his emotions were reserved for his songs rather than wearing his heart on his sleeve whenever he went out in public. But there were occasionally those few bands that could bring that certain twinkle in Dylan’s eye whenever he heard them on the radio.
But that also meant going through more than a few records that made Dylan’s skin crawl as well. It wasn’t a secret that everyone and their mother wanted to have lightning strike twice when he started to become one of the biggest artists in the world, but even if everyone from The Byrds to Barry McGuire were trying to rip off his songs, all the proof they needed that Dylan was better than all of them was listen to him sing songs like ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ or ‘Like A Rolling Stone.’
There was no point in trying to be a Dylan clone, and the greatest artists of that time usually took what Dylan did and applied it to their own music a lot more subtly. John Lennon would have been the first to say that he was one of Dylan’s biggest fans when he first heard the Freewheelin Bob Dylan back in the day, but there was also a lot more nuance in the way he approached relationships. Dylan may have been chastising on ‘Just Like a Woman’, but he probably couldn’t have written a man to be as vulnerable as Lennon could when making a tune like ‘Norwegian Wood’.
After the Summer of Love, though, it felt like a lot of Dylan copycats had fallen by the wayside. Even Dylan himself was tired of being the voice of a generation, and after spending months away from the limelight after his motorcycle accident, he didn’t sound all that similar to his earlier work when he started making country records like Nashville Skyline. But where Dylan moved on, Bruce Springsteen was there to pick up the pieces.
‘The Boss’ wouldn’t have wanted to admit that he was a Dylan fan given all of the comparisons that were made between him and his hero, but what he did with the E Street Band wasn’t exactly all that similar. Dylan had been a storyteller half the time he played, but Springsteen managed to set up scenes in people’s minds that they wouldn’t soon forget, like the honest stand in ‘Jungleland’ or the bittersweet romance that turns up in the song ‘The River’.
But the tone of Springsteen’s voice was something that Dylan never took for granted when he heard him do a version of his classic ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’, saying, “He did that song like the record, something I myself have never tried. I never even thought it was worth it. Bruce pulled all the power and spirituality and beauty out of it like no one has ever done. Bruce is a deep conscientious cat and the evidence of that was in the performance. He can get to your heart, my heart anyway.”
And that’s because Springsteen is one of the few performers that understands the importance of every single line that Dylan wrote. Dylan himself was good at downplaying some of his greatest tunes whenever he was asked to talk about them, but ‘The Boss’ truly believed that songs had the potential to move people, and he wanted to give anyone within earshot the same kind of rush that he felt when he heard those songs when he was woodshedding with his guitar in his bedroom as a kid.
Springsteen understood the importance of taking on a mantle of work like Dylan’s, but it wasn’t simply about making the best performance possible. For all intents and purposes, he was a missionary of all things rock and roll, and he was going to put everything he had into making the older rock and roll prophets proud of him.
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