The 1970 song by The Who Bob Dylan said had everything he hated: “They are lost souls”
Bob Dylan’s always possessed a unique skill of heaping praise and scorn on some of rock and pop’s biggest names in equal measure.
From admiring The Beatles’ songcraft one minute to lambasting ‘Yesterday’ as a “cop-out”, to dubbing The Rolling Stones “the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band” before deriding them as “a funk band” in the absence of bassist Bill Wyman, Dylan is notoriously fickle with where he stands on his peers.
The Who are no exception. The mods turned arena behemoths found their way into Dylan’s barbed tongue with a sharp careen, a whiplashed shoehorning of some surprise topic in typical interviewing style when discussing how his 1966 motorbike crash prompted mass mythmaking as to his former countercultural stature and the ensuing immersion into rootsy country and a step away from fame’s pressures.
It was a chapter in his life that triggered exasperation even years later when reflecting on how his private life had provided fuel for a lore he never asked for.
“So fucking what?” Dylan snapped to Rolling Stone in 2012. “They want to know what can’t be known. They are searching – they are seekers. Like in the Pete Townshend song where he’s trying to find his way to ‘50million fables’. For what? Why are they doing this? They don’t really know. It’s sad. It really is. May the Lord have mercy on them. They are lost souls. They really don’t know. It’s sad – it really is. It’s sad for me, and it’s sad for them.”
It’s difficult to know quite what to glean from such a statement, but alarm bells ring that it ain’t great. The song referenced is 1970’s ‘The Seeker’, a stand-alone single from The Who exploring the supposed frantic search of a brutish individual’s trail of violence and destruction as they clamour for meaning, regardless of the lives wrecked.
Not only does Dylan get a lyrical look-in, but the Fab Four and an acclaimed neuronaut psychologist also find a presence in Townshend’s raucous existentialism, “I asked Bobby Dylan / I asked The Beatles / I asked Timothy Leary / But he couldn’t help me either.”
Is that what got up Dylan’s nose? The idea that a mere songwriter can, or should, be expected to be able to “help” anyone in the pursuit of deep spiritual exploration. It could just be a useful analogy, referencing ‘The Seeker’ to illustrate the dead ends often smacked into when consumed with morbid navel-gazing over simply taking that first step into the unknown that everyone in life must at some point take.
As ever, our Dylan’s hard to put down. We know he’s just as prone to effusive praise as he is cool chide, highlighting The Who’s eternal youth rallying cry, ‘My Generation’ in 2022’s The Philosophy of Modern Song as an enduring flame fuelled with “chip on the shoulder” fire and intriguingly “casts doubt on everything.” But ‘The Seeker’ may well stand as a step too far for Dylan, another reminder of the pedestal his work thrust him to, which he spent much of his life and career steering well clear of.
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