The “thrashy” musician Bob Dylan could listen to forever: “Sincere”
Bob Dylan didn’t always go out searching for the hottest new talent every single time he made a record.
Even though he liked the idea of having a band behind him, it was never going to be able to replace the power of the song whenever he made one of his anthems behind the scenes. He had the chance of making so much more when he had the right band behind him, but when looking at his favourite artists, Dylan tended to gravitate towards people who were more individualists than anything else.
The entire rock and roll world has always been built on three-dimensional personalities, and Dylan wasn’t going to waste his time worrying about someone who was only technically great whenever he heard them. There needed to be something extra to rope him in, which probably explains why some of the greatest songs in his catalogue are the ones that seem to belong in the same league as people like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
Both of them were mentors for Dylan in the beginning, but he also knew that he needed to buck the trend if he was going to be remembered. He never liked the idea of being a copycat for his entire life, and when he went electric, it shifted the entire paradigm of what a musician could do. There was no way that most people would have gone for this in the mid-1960s, but Dylan seemed to spend his time doing whatever the hell he wanted.
He didn’t like the idea of being contained in a box, and some of his favourite artists from around the same time seemed to be doing the same thing. He inspired countless people to start writing songs of their own, but if The Beatles knocked him out the first time he heard their songs, he had a far more uncomfortable period learning to love someone like Neil Young when ‘Heart of Gold’ blew up.
For one thing, Young was making the kind of folk tunes that Dylan had grown out of, but given his nasal voice, there were already spots where he sounded too much like what Dylan had been doing. Mr Zimmerman had no real time for people who aped his entire style, but he did come around when he saw what Young could do live. He was a completely different animal when he had an electric guitar in his hand.
Young was looking to make the Earth shake whenever he plugged in and played with Crazy Horse, but beyond the sheer volume of the whole thing, Dylan felt that there were a lot of pieces to Young’s music that always had him singing along every single time he heard one of his tunes, saying, “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. 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. There’s nobody in his category.”
Which is strange, because Young never claimed to have the best voice in the world. He was only singing the songs that he felt he could bring across well, and even though the rest of the band behind him was making the heaviest tunes imaginable, a lot of his best tunes felt like they were written with his voice in mind. They were technically demanding in spots, but you can’t imagine anyone else singing his tunes.
Dylan’s songs can be interpreted in a million different ways depending on who’s singing it, but when you look at the work that Young had done throughout his career, it’s never been about him trying to flex his technical ability. All he’s after is writing that next great song, and Dylan had all the respect in the world for that kind of mentality.
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