Credit: Far Out / Bibliothèque nationale de France

“I get a kick out of that”: the songwriter Bob Dylan was happy to come second to

Tue 23 June 2026 18:00, UK

Being one of the greatest songwriters of all time is bound to be a heavy burden for Bob Dylan to bear.

He didn’t like the idea of becoming an icon of his generation, and half the time he seemed more intent on running away from whatever he created than trying to stay in one place for too long. In many ways, he was as much a chameleon as someone like David Bowie, but a lot of that came down to the fact that he didn’t really like going back to some of his old songs every time he listened to his records.

Most people already had some issues with Dylan’s voice in principle, but the songwriting genius never felt the need to go back to his records in his spare time. All of those albums were simply documents of where he was whenever he was making them, and while not all of them were knockouts by any stretch, every fan could normally understand that the songs were always going to sound different once he played them live.

There was no reason for him to play exactly like the record, and a lot of what Dylan did live was going to reflect the bands that he was listening to at any given time. The Hawks were a great backing band while they lasted, but when Dylan started to get a bit more rambly or needed some fresh blood, it was easy for him to transform his songs when working with The Heartbreakers or stretch them out with Jerry Garcia and the rest of the Grateful Dead.

But Dylan was still looking for the greatest lyricists he could find, and all it took was the right record for him to start paying attention. He wasn’t going to be the voice of a generation forever, and by the time he started talking about his personal feelings in the 1970s, the entire world was about to dramatically change when punk came into view. The Mohawk crowd was rebelling the same way that Dylan was back in the day, but he found something a bit deeper whenever he listened to Jonathan Richman.

Modern Lovers had already been one of the greatest undiscovered gems of the punk regime, but Dylan felt that Richman was the kind of lyricist he could listen to all day, saying, “It gives me more of a kick to see somebody else do it. I need to do it. Like that Jonathan Richman. I get a kick out of that. I’d rather listen to that. Whereas my stuff, I need to do it, I have to do it, I’m inside it all the time. So I’ve got to get out of it. When I hear my old stuff I just think of how badly it was recorded.”

And when you look at Richman’s journey, it’s not that far off from what Dylan had been doing. Richman had come to New York in search of Lou Reed the same way Dylan had come in search of Woody Guthrie, and when you look at the kind of lyrics that he was weaving, Richman was clearly carrying on the same kind of storyteller operation that Dylan excelled at whenever he worked on his records.

His band didn’t last for very long, but even for those few moments in the spotlight, Richman clearly showed himself as someone with the same spirit as Dylan. He didn’t need to have the same kind of poetic references that the folk icon put into his songs, but Richman had the same kind of sardonic and slightly snide attitude that made him one of the giants in his field whenever he picked up a pen.

It’s hard to think of anyone who was going to replace Dylan at the top of the rock and roll world, but Richman seemed like someone who could genuinely take up that mantle for the underground music scene. He was a fellow outsider, and while the rest of the punk revolution fizzled out, there were always going to be people like him who were searching for that next great song.