Bob Dylan knows Frank Sinatra’s legacy will last forever: “He is the mountain”
No one in their right mind would claim that Bob Dylan has the greatest singing voice in the world.
He was a fantastic songwriter every single time he made a new record, but even during his prime, nothing that he ever sang was going to be on the same level as someone like John Lennon or even fairly decent singers like Tom Petty. He wasn’t into those vocal acrobatics, but judging Dylan’s singing strictly on his tone of voice was never how he thought about his performances.
A lot of the best Dylan songs come from him inhabiting the songs as only he knows how, and while they aren’t the most useful things in the world, it’s easy to hear the kind of passion that he has behind everything he’s saying. There are countless songs in his catalogue that focus on the politics of the times, but the reason why a song like ‘Masters of War’ works so well is because you feel the vitriol in his stomach as he’s talking about these warmongers that want nothing more than to see innocent people give their lives away for their country.
In many respects, what he’s doing in his songs is closer to acting than anything else. He never claimed to be the subject of any of his songs, and even when some of them hit way too close to the bone on albums like Blood on the Tracks, you can hear him easily putting on a different musical mask every time he made a record. Other times, he could have fun, but the real classics are where he takes the listener on a journey within the span of one song.
But that’s not to take away from the other brilliant singers out at the time. Dylan was no Brian Wilson whenever he sang, but the immaculate pop arrangements on all of those Beach Boys records are worthy to stand next to anything that he ever made. The same could be said of The Beatles as well, given the fact that John Lennon took the same approach Dylan was using while also taking all of his musical masks off when working on his first solo records like ‘Mother’ and ‘God’.
The biggest names in rock and roll were more than capable of making the same kind of classics that Dylan could, but there was no one who could mess with the true classics in his mind. The biggest names in rock and roll may have brought the teenage demographic into the pop sphere for the first time, but as Dylan reached his twilight years, there was no way he could ignore the sheer impact that someone like Frank Sinatra had on popular music before Chuck Berry and Little Richard even came out.
‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ may have hated all things rock and roll, but Dylan could relate to the sheer power behind his voice when he took on some of his classics on Triplicate, saying, “When you start doing these songs, Frank’s got to be on your mind. Because he is the mountain. I myself never bought any Frank Sinatra records back then. But you’d hear him anyway — in a car or a jukebox. Certainly nobody worshipped Sinatra in the ’60s like they did in the ’40s. But he never went away — all those other things that we thought were here to stay, they did go away. But he never did.”
Rock and roll may have started as a direct rebuttal to people like Sinatra, but you can’t defeat anyone who could sing that well. Sinatra was a lot more professional than what the average blues-rock outfit would have been doing during Dylan’s prime, but that voice is about more than singing lilting ballads. This was a man who had experienced life and was one of the shining examples of what it means to live through every single song he sang, whether that was the softness of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ or him belting out every single line of ‘My Way’.
And considering many pop stars have tried to recreate the kind of retro ‘Rat Pack’ look when they want to grow up, it’s safe to say that Sinatra is probably never going to go out of style. Trends might change, and other people might join the ranks of him in pop culture history, but there’s hardly anyone else in the world who managed to look as effortlessly cool as he did with a drink in one hand and a microphone in the other.
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