“Not one note is misplaced”: The one song that Bob Dylan felt was perfect
The key to any great hit song comes from the quality of the writing before anything else. Not every single note has to be perfectly in tune, but hearing the real person behind those layers of studio effects usually gets people to relate to someone beyond the melody they’re singing. And while Bob Dylan was far from the first person to have a real knack for songwriting in rock and roll, he knew the difference between someone who was still learning and one who had totally mastered their craft.
But for many of Dylan’s greatest works, it usually comes down to him making music that people could identify with. Even when he went electric and pissed off countless folk purists who would have preferred that he stick to his acoustic guitar, it was always better to see him in his purest form rather than have to deal with the same industry tropes of working with the hip new producer in town.
And as soon as the 1960s ended, a whole new genre of music seemed to come up in the wake of Dylan becoming popular. Some of his contemporaries like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen thrived when making their own hits in the late 1960s, but the beginnings of singer-songwriter music were becoming far more prominent, with people listening to acts like Cat Stevens or James Taylor to hear about the characters that occupied their classic hits.
But there was always something a little different about how Dylan portrayed many of his greatest story songs. Whereas someone like James Taylor seemed earnest from skin to core whenever he sang his most beloved songs, Dylan wasn’t afraid to throw in a few sarcastic lines or add a bit of a cynical twist into his tunes, and by the time that Warren Zevon started working on his records, he made sure to put that same type of sardonic humour or general absurdity in his material.
While it’s easy to pick out what he was trying to say on records like ‘Werewolves of London’, ‘Poor Poor Pitiful Me’ offered a bit of a different take on his usual formula, even if Linda Ronstadt did the most obvious version of the tune. For Dylan, though, he knew that Zevon was working with something more than standard songwriter chops when listening to a track like ‘Dirty Life and Times’.
Compared to all the rest of Zevon’s material, Dylan felt that there were pieces of this tune that could never be improved upon, saying, “It’s not the Warren we usually know. This is a different voice, but just as authentic. It is a hell of a performance, and that includes everybody playing on it. Not one note [is] misplaced; from the guitar player to the bass player. The content of this song is what it’s all about, and it’s delivered in the most accurate way.”
But part of the magic is that the kind of perfection Dylan talks about doesn’t mean everything is in tune. Many of the biggest names in music are never precisely in tune from one track to the next, but as long as the band themselves can work off each other in a tuneful way, that’s usually all that matters when it comes to getting the right performance out of a tune.
And thinking about the kind of lyrics Dylan would write, it’s easy to see a little of his style in what Zevon does. The piano player was never trying to be a carbon copy of what Dylan was, but he knew that if he took his approach one step further, he could find something more original.
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