The singer Bob Dylan wanted to go down in history like: “I could easily see myself becoming him”
There was never any rhyme or reason to the way that Bob Dylan looked at himself in the public eye.
As much as people loved to build their own myth around the godfather of rock and roll songwriting, he never claimed to have all the answers and would often toy with people’s expectations of what he was supposed to be making. He was still having fun with the public’s perception of him, but he did at least have his eye on the rock stars that he wanted to go down in history with.
Then again, maybe he didn’t. Because if there’s one thing that Dylan is known for more than anyone, it’s using that tone of voice where you’re never sure if he’s pulling your leg or not. He can be unapologetically sincere in his songs, but whenever he sat down to discuss his career, it was always c;ear that there was a certain mask that he put over his true feelings so as not to let his innermost feelings show all that often.
But it’s not like he couldn’t open up if he wanted to. He was more than happy to talk about the kind of musicians that he loved when he first got started, and when working on some of his greatest tunes in his pre-rock and roll days, you could tell that he was pulling heavily from all the great American songwriters that he had grown up listening to, like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
Rock and roll may have been looked at as the enemy by that crowd, but Dylan never saw it as the devil’s music by any stretch. He knew that he could respect Little Richard just as much as he could Hank Williams, and a lot of his best records of his electric period are where both genres met seamlessly. ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ may have been thought of as some strange experiment, but when people heard him singing ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, it was no longer a joke. This was a kid that was willing to take on the world the same way that Elvis Presley or The Beatles were doing.
But while the Fab Four were able to reach the top of the mountain together, Presley was his own unique entity. There are a lot of qualifiers around him, allegedly lifting songs from black artists without giving them as much credit, but when looking at the way that he strutted across the stage every time he sang, Dylan felt that he could have carved out a place for himself in that lane as well.
Making political songs to sing to a bunch of folkies was all well and good, but if his heroes were all living legends, being someone like Presley seemed much more attainable to Dylan, saying, “You’re just not that person everybody thinks you are, though they call you that all the time. ’You’re the prophet. You’re the savior.’ I never wanted to be a prophet or savior. Elvis maybe. I could easily see myself becoming him.”
And while the entire world saw him as something else, you can see what Dylan was talking about judging by the way he performs. He was trying his best to give the audience the kind of show they wouldn’t forget, and even when he was behind the piano for ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, you can see that all of the energy in his body is practically bursting out of every single pore in his body.
It was a lot easier for the rest of us to dissect the lyrics and try to figure out what the hell he was on about, but Dylan never forgot about the one rule of all good rock and roll. He could write the most impressive set of lyrics imaginable, but by the mid-1960s, he wanted to make music that could make the kids move and think at the same time.
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