How Bob Dylan inspired a classic Rolling Stones track: “He was already very important”
The mystery surrounding Bob Dylan makes him an impossible figure to pin down. Despite being in the public eye for 60 years, he’s remained something of an enigma, and the only way to attempt to understand him as a person is through his songwriting.
Many new artists have been hailed as Dylan’s successors, but nobody has come close to taking his mantle. If anybody deliberately sets out to follow in Dylan’s footsteps, it’s bound to fail because of the originality that seeps out of his every pore. However, many songwriters, including Mick Jagger, have used their love of Dylan as a force for good, inspiring them to reach greatness with their own creations.
Although Dylan influenced Jagger, he never once tried to be musically identical to him, as he knew it would just be a pale imitation. Instead, the Rolling Stones singer studied Dylan’s work, which taught him pivotal lessons regarding the art of storytelling that he interpolated into his songs, including one huge hit.
On one occasion, Jagger had the honour of observing Dylan’s magic in the studio while he was recording Blood On The Tracks. This opportunity was a dream come true for him, as Dylan had been an important figure in his life since he was a teenager, once telling The Guardian: “I was playing Bob Dylan records at my parents’ house when he was still an acoustic folk singer, but he was already very important, and his lyrics were on point”.
He added: “The delivery isn’t just the words; it’s the accentuation and the moods and twists he puts on them. His greatness lies in the body of work. I was at a session for Blood on the Tracks and really enjoyed watching him record ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’, with this incredible depth of storyline, surrounded by all these boring people from the record company who he had sitting in the control room. I couldn’t record like that.”
While he couldn’t record with a million eyes watching him like Dylan, he could change how he approached the writing process. For ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, the Rolling Stones frontman had Dylan and French poet Charles Baudelaire at the forefront of his mind, who both helped him create a legendary rock anthem.
Jagger once explained to Rolling Stone: “I think [the lyrics were] taken from an old idea of Baudelaire’s, I think, but I could be wrong. Sometimes when I look at my Baudelaire books, I can’t see it in there. But it was an idea I got from French writing. And I just took a couple of lines and expanded on it. I wrote it as sort of like a Bob Dylan song.”
It was one of the first tracks Jagger wrote without assistance from Keith Richards, proving he was a serious songwriter in his own right. “I knew it was a good song. You just have this feeling. It had its poetic beginning, and then it had historic references and then philosophical jottings and so on. It’s all very well to write that in verse, but to make it into a pop song is something different. Especially in England – you’re skewered,” he later reflected.
Although many artists have made serious mistakes when taking inspiration from Dylan, Jagger used it perfectly in ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. While Dylan’s essence is in the vocal delivery, it’s mainly Jagger’s clever usage of metaphorical language and literary devices that showcase the inspiration. Rather than copy Dylan, Jagger merely tried to think like Dylan, which he did with aplomb. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ also signified Jagger’s progression as a songwriter, finally settling into his groove.
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