The rock legend Robert Plant said “woke us all up”
In the early 1960s, it wasn’t clear whether rock and roll had staying power or not. The very beginning of the British invasion may have been getting started, but since most of the genre’s titans were either fading from the limelight or going through rougher patches in their careers, it looked like the movement that set the world on fire was finally starting to burn itself out. Though the Beatles helped start the flame again, for Robert Plant, everything changed when Bob Dylan began singing.
If you didn’t know a thing about his music, though, chances are the first thing you would say when you heard Dylan would be to get the dude with a sonic infection away from the microphone. Yes, Dylan does have a relatively nasal vocal tone and a breathy voice that is hit-and-miss with people, but the core of what he was talking about was what got everyone paying attention.
Carrying on in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Dylan seemed to be writing songs that felt like lectures on human nature. Whereas most people would go to college to learn about the “real world” was like, you almost didn’t need to in the 1960s when you listened to Dylan sing about the hardships of modern life on ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ and ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’.
Beyond being a great lyricist, Dylan was a storyteller, and every single twisted tale he told felt like an old parable that somehow got lost to history. While not everyone can relate to the story within a song like ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, the cautionary tale about learning to treat everyone with respect is still as relevant today as it was back then, which is either brilliant or sad the more you realise how little progress has been done.
For every aspiring British artist, this was the moment they started to understand where music should be going, with Plant telling Charlie Rose, “How can I forget Dylan’s contribution when he was the guy who woke us all up? So there was a reactionary musical scene on the college circuits with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Woody Guthrie, Odetta, Dave Van Ronk, all those people who were around. But Dylan made it sexy, and he also brought it home in such a vital way”.
Although Plant was more interested in discussing tales of folklore during his time with Led Zeppelin, it’s not hard to pick out some of his Dylan influence. The band’s acoustic material always lent itself well to a Dylan makeover, and the vision of a girl out there with love in her eyes in ‘Going to California’ felt like Dylan himself could have written it on some obscure B-side.
By the time Zeppelin became kings of the world, Dylan had already left behind his soapbox era of performing. Now he was just the same as everyone else, talking about the hardships he faced trying to hold onto his marriage on the album Blood on the Tracks, with equally heartbreaking songs on ‘Shelter From the Storm’ and ‘Buckets of Rain’.
Still, Plant always admired the way Dylan changed up his styles, even going through his own transformation when working on albums like Now and Zen and when he later turned to a career in rootsy rock and roll with Alison Kraus on Raising Sand. Plant usually had his own copycats to worry about when Zeppelin were in their prime, but if you’re a lyricist and aren’t taking a few cues from Dylan, you’re probably approaching it all wrong.
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