The two contemporary songwriters Bob Dylan “made special efforts to see”
In April 1961, Bob Dylan stepped out onto the stage at Gerde’s Folk City for his first paid show at the famed café venue in Greenwich Village. Behind him was a sign, in typical folk fashion, made from mere cardboard and biro that read: “Appearing tonight: Son of Jack Elliott.” A mere six months later, he was stepping into a Columbia recording studio. The results of that session became his debut album, and the liner notes declared, “At only 20, Dylan is the most unusual new talent in American folk music.”
During that frighteningly brief window, the original vagabond had decided that he wasn’t anybody’s son—he was a complete unknown. He was through with singing the same songs as everyone else on the folk circuit, but rock ‘n’ roll was too facile. “The thing about rock’n’roll is that for me anyway, it wasn’t enough … There were great catchphrases and driving pulse rhythms … but the songs weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way,” he told Cameron Crowe.
He figured, ‘how else can you reflect life accurately than depicting your own situation and those unfurling on the streets around you’. So, he dragged the dogeared world of folk away from the past and applied its poignancy to the happening zeitgeist of the 1960s. This changed songwriting forevermore.
Much like one of Dylan’s favourite writers Fyodor Dostoyevsky said regarding the explosion of Russian literature that “we all came out of [Nikolai] Gogol’s Overcoat”, it would seem that every reverential songwriter after 1962 crawled out from Dylan’s cambric shirt. As Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys said half a century later, “I pay quite a lot of attention to songwriters as good as Bob Dylan”.
The young lad from Sheffield added, “A brilliant songwriter, no question.” Dylan made it clear recently that the feeling is mutual. Both stars carry that same torch that Dylan first lit of using your idiosyncratic way of phrasing things, trusting your own poetry rather than conforming to typical pop platitudes, creating catalogues that are dripping with originality as well as a proclivity to capture the times in some fashion.
In some ways, the same can be said for the second artist Dylan heaped praise upon when he announced: “I’ve made special efforts to see Jack White and Alex Turner.” Much like the ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ singer, White reprised the power of the blues with The White Stripes and his subsequent projects, but he has always brought a visceral new edge to that.
In this pursuit, White has championed Dylan as “an incredible mentor”. The folk star has not only gone out of his way to see White perform, but he has gone one step further in his admiration, as White explained regarding their first meeting: “It was just by accident. I went and saw him play in Detroit and he said to me, ‘We’ve been playing one of your songs lately at sound checks.’ I thought, Wow. I was afraid to ask which one. I didn’t even ask. It was just such an honour to hear that.”
You can check out Jack White with the rockabilly legend Wanda Jackson – who Dylan described as ”an atomic fireball of a lady, could have a smash hit with just about anything” – covering Bob Dylan’s ‘Thunder on the Mountain’ below.
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