The original tear-jerkers: The songwriter who broke Bob Dylan’s heart
Any songwriter who has ever gotten a nod from Bob Dylan is usually doing something right with their work. Dylan has been known to never really stray too far from the beat of his own drum when picking out the music he likes, but he was always keen to listen to his musical counterparts to find something he could incorporate into his own music. Woody Guthrie never left his turntable, and Johnny Cash was a huge influence, but Doc Pomus got to Dylan’s heart in a way few others could.
Because if there’s anything Dylan knows about more than anything else, it’s poetry. Some might have just seen him as a brilliant songwriter, but Dylan always fancied himself someone who could take the common problems with the human condition and turn them into just a few lines of text without really thinking too hard.
Dylan came from an era where every word had to be accounted for, but Pomus was just looking to make the next great pop hit. Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller had already been making the rounds as songwriters and bringing in hits for Elvis Presley, Pomus, however, was about the romantic side of love songs rather than just infatuation.
Although it might not have been all that different from the typical ballads, the soul behind a song like ‘Save the Last Dance For Me’ is both adorable and unbearably sad. There’s a point where this guy doesn’t know if his other half is even going to be with him by the end of the night, and hearing him plead with her that she could be his only one forever and ever is miles above the likes of ‘Love Me Tender’.
Once Dylan started getting his foot in the door alongside other classic songwriters, he admitted that Pomus saw something in him that no one else did, remarking at Musicares, “I didn’t really care what Lieber and Stoller thought of my songs. They didn’t like ‘em, but Doc Pomus did. That was all right that they didn’t like ‘em because I never liked their songs either. Doc’s songs, they were better. ‘This Magic Moment’, ‘Lonely Avenue’, [and] ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’. Those songs broke my heart. I figured I’d rather have his blessings any day than theirs”.
As much as Dylan may have resonated with the sentiment behind the tunes, that wasn’t really his forte. Since most of his work dealt with the state of the world and how everything was going down the drain in every social circle, no one was expecting that guy to suddenly come out with a song about romance.
If you look a bit later in his career, though, Dylan’s grasp on his romantic side is still indebted to what Pomus first wrote. He may have the voice of a sandpaper-soaked barfly sometimes, but when you hear him sing about his broken heart on songs like ‘Buckets of Rain’ and ‘Make You Feel My Love’, you believe that he has lived through those same stories that Pomus only hinted at.
And Dylan doesn’t stop, either. When working on tunes like ‘Murder Most Foul’, he would never rest until he found something he was 100% satisfied with once it finally dropped. But Dylan isn’t really looking to make a follow-up to ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. He’s just looking for the next good song, and every time he puts pen to paper, he might still see Pomus as an example of what a great writer can sound like.
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