“There’s nothing wrong”: The Bob Dylan song so good John Lennon thought he couldn’t match it
There should always be a healthy sense of competition for any good songwriter. Anyone can write for themselves, but using blueprints laid out before you can be just as helpful. While John Lennon does seem to be one of those few songwriters who no one could ever equal, he knew that the standard Bob Dylan set with ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ was something even he would fail to replicate.
From the day that he broke out into the scheme, though, Lennon was already looked to be far more literate than the average rock songwriter. Most acts, like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, penned standalone stories with just a handful of lyrics, but there was something different about Dylan the minute he came on the scene.
Other folk singers had tried to catch the ear of their generation, but when Dylan spoke, it was about more than just complaining about the problems with the world. He wanted to shake people up in terms of how they would live their lives, and if he wanted to reach the widest audience possible, that meant picking up an electric guitar now and again.
Bringing It All Back Home may have seemed like a weird experiment when he first started, but ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ was something much different than before. Dylan’s rapid-fire delivery was already a change of pace from standard rock and roll, but listening to every line, it’s not intended to just be a word jumble. It was a statement on what the future of suburbia looked like, and Lennon was transfixed.
Despite Dylan already being a fan of how Lennon wrote, the ‘Smart Beatle’ looked at this song and saw a challenge. Though ‘I Should Have Known Better’ and ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ were decent Dylan knockoffs for the time, Lennon thought his inspiration threw down the gauntlet.
Although Dylan was still a main inspiration, this song put Lennon’s philosophy about meeting heroes as succinctly as possible, recalling, “Listen, there’s nothing wrong with following examples. We can have figureheads and people we admire, but we don’t need leaders. ‘Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters.’”
That’s not to say that Lennon didn’t have songs that direct, either. Dylan may have hit the nail on the head, but no one could argue with Lennon’s pedigree when he wrote lines like “God is a concept by which we measure our pain”. And when it came to love songs, Lennon’s ‘Girl’ is miles ahead of anything that Dylan could have conceived of at the time.
Considering how fast Dylan was going and how he seemed to be using his voice as a percussion instrument, though, Lennon’s love of this tune may have bled over into hip-hop music had he been able to see the 1980s. Because if he was such a fan of the written word, than this would have been the next step for what he was trying to do.
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