“He’s sincere, and he’s got a God-given talent”: The songwriter Bob Dylan said was in a league of his own
Beyond being a true musical icon himself, Bob Dylan could probably have had a great career as a music journalist if things had turned out differently.
That said, Dylan’s relationship with telling the truth has always been complicated. When it came to his personal life, it was often difficult to get a clear sense of the real man, especially because he spent much of his early career misleading the press. He spun stories about running away to join the circus and dodged questions about his romantic life so intensely that he would sometimes outright pretend not to know the women he was involved with.
It’s hard to ever get a clear view of Dylan when there’s so much smoke and mirrors surrounding him. Take his mysterious 1966 motorcycle crash, for example. Dylan claimed to have broken several vertebrae, yet there are no hospital or accident records confirming it. But when it comes to his music taste, he has always been surprisingly open. He seems more than happy to talk, or even write, about the artists he loves, as shown by The Philosophy of Modern Song, his non-fiction music book that many journalists would have been proud to write themselves.
Moving through the great artists and songs that define history, he touches on all kinds of milestones. He drew out his rankings of the greats, and amongst them, there sits one key hero when it comes to songwriting.
“Neil is very sincere, if nothing else. He’s sincere, and he’s got a God-given talent, with that voice of his, and the melodic strain that runs through absolutely everything he does,” Dylan said to Rolling Stone in 2007. Reflecting on the artists of his era who truly blew him away and continue to do so, Neil Young stood out to him as one who has been enduringly great through phase after phase.
“He could be at his most thrashy, but it’s still going to be elevated by some melody. Neil’s the only one who does that,” he said. Putting Young in a ranking all on his own as a man who can master soft folk just as much as he can rule heavier rock, it stands out to Dylan as a complete rarity, having tried that himself and been mostly crucified for it.
Even though Dylan has successfully dipped between those two poles, it has never been easy. When he first went electric, his folk fans lost their mind and called him Judas. Then, after time spent doing the more classic rock thing, it seemed hard again to move back into folk, or move into anything else.
There’s also the fact that, even when greatest hits compilations of Dylan are made, they’re predominantly populated by his older tunes. In Dylan’s eyes, Young seemed free of that because he mastered both and mastered them early on, never letting himself get stuck in one spot. Perhaps that’s part of the reason for the pair’s complex love-hate friendship.
“There’s nobody in his category,” he set down as his professional music journalism conclusion on the hero that is Neil Young.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.