The song Bob Dylan could never have written himself: “Give this to McGuinn”
In a world full of rock and roll revolutionaries, no one walked to the beat of their own drum quite like Bob Dylan.
He never exactly fit in with the rock and roll scene to begin with, the first time he went electric, but when listening to his songs, he was slowly reshaping what most people thought rock and roll could sound like if they bothered to take their music seriously. Dylan was throwing down the gauntlet for all other players, but that didn’t mean that he could write the kind of songs that his contemporaries could.
That said, he probably would have appreciated it if there weren’t so many copycats trying to steal his sound. The Beatles and Paul Simon may have gone in their own direction whenever they took influence from him, but there were always going to be people like Barry McGuire to deal with. Those kinds of singers were taking the Dylan playbook and selling it back to the pop charts, but it’s not like Dylan couldn’t see why he didn’t exactly fit in with the hit parade to begin with.
For starters, it’s not like his voice was exactly radio-friendly all the time. ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ and ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ were fantastic songs that hit people right in their soul from the moment that they heard them, but they weren’t hits in the traditional sense. Those were songs with messages that didn’t need to rely on a massive hook, so it was only natural to give some of his greatest songs to The Byrds to sing.
Roger McGuinn had that fantastic jangly guitar sound that everyone went crazy for, and while Dylan was happy to be friends with the band, he was the last person to play the game of being a pop star when ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ came out. That song was a battering ram from the moment that opening snare drum hit your eardrums, but when he got calls from people looking to make songs specifically for movies, Dylan started to crack up a little bit.
He could write to order later on in his career, but he wasn’t about to play by someone else’s rules when he first got the chance to write for the movie Easy Rider. The film itself is a 1960s classic that deserves to be studied alongside the greatest countercultural records of the time, but Roger McGuinn remembered getting the call to write the song after Dylan said that it was out of his league.
He may have been one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived, but McGuinn remembered Dylan saying that he couldn’t have dreamed of writing a song for a movie, saying, “Peter [Fonda] got the idea that he wanted Bob Dylan to write him a theme song, so he flew up to New York and screened [the film] for Bob. Bob wrote some notes on a napkin and said, ‘Here, give this to McGuinn. He’ll know what to do with it.’”
And to his credit, McGuinn did get a decent tune out of the deal. ‘The Ballad of Easy Rider’ might have had a bit of help from Dylan here and there, but McGuinn took the basis of the song and managed to bring a little bit of sunshine to the whole thing. Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to be Wild’ promises that the movie would be about people from the wrong side of the tracks, but with McGuinn’s guitar in the background of this tune, you would have sworn that they would have driven out into the sunset with their heads held high.
It would take a few more years before Dylan found the confidence to make terrific movie songs like ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’, but him not being able to make a song on the spot is almost an assurance to every other songwriter that gets stuck in a rut. Because for all of his perfect tunes, even Dylan could get stumped now and again.
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