Bob Dylan — The Entrance

First in a Series of Articles Evaluating Bob Dylan

PREAMBLE

There are very few artists in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who have had widely different critical schools and theories grow around their art in the way that Dylan has, so complete are these schools that it is reasonable to describe which one I belong to as the introduction to the article.

I am of the school that assumes that Dylan’s lyrics are in the first place musical, and not poetic, that he is trying to achieve a musical effect with the lyrics and as such does not always think as much about the meanings as many of poetic school believe he does. The meaning is a side effect of the musical feeling.

This is a pretty core tenet in modern Dylan studies, but one should still assert the standing when starting out

If he were a poet he would surely not have written about following a “pack of wild geese”, among hundreds of other examples, in When I Paint My Masterpiece. Also the fact that lyrics for him are always somewhat fungible, and a song is not likely to be found with the same ones across all performances, goes against at least some definitions of poetry, which often define poetry, per Coleridge as “the best words in their best order”.

For example the lyrics according to Lyricfind for the particular verse with pack of wild geese is

Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory
As the daylight hours do retreat
Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody
When I paint my masterpiece

which seems to perhaps be taken from

Although, to be frank I am not sure if I hear the word retreat, increase, decrease, or just a couple of syllables ending with eeee(swallowed sound at end might be s or t or v or nothing).

This conception of himself as a songwriter or a song and dance man and not a poet is found in many of his interviews — an example we will refer to the 1991 Song Talk Interview

Obviously the only fool bigger than a lawyer who defends themselves is a critic who takes an artist’s statements at face value, as can be derived from

Amble

In the original Vulture article that started all this series this was said about Dylan (at position 3 in the rankings)

3. Bob Dylan (1988)

Dylan took rock lyrics to places they hadn’t been before and haven’t been since. He remains not just the nonpareil avatar of pure artistry with all its peevish, unadulterated glory — and missteps, stumbles, stubbornness, and exasperations — but also the ideal of the artist for whom those missteps, stumbles, stubbornness and exasperations are part of the point. Blood on the Tracks is the best rock album ever made. Not even the Beatles can compete with the sheer quantity of his essential songs.

Which is very nice and really as meaningless as my words about him in the following article where I placed him at position 2 in the rankings, shared with James Brown

Where influence is concerned you also have to think about secondary influence, the next generations of top artists who were clearly influenced by you.

For Dylan you can see that in every scruffy guy with a guitar and maybe a harmonica and lyrics that are poetic.

While that is the extent of what I had to say about him in that entry, I have written quite a bit on him in the article focusing on Elvis Costello

based on the contention that Costello was the first great lyricist of Rock and Roll who could write things Dylan could not have written.

Essentially the two things that I claim Dylan lacks that Costello has is an ability to pun, and wittiness. In the following quotes:

Dylan certainly writes complicated things, hilarious things, poetic things, multi-layered stories — but he does not pun to any degree worth mentioning.

&

Dylan is brilliant, poetic, clever, sarcastic, ironic, snide, able to be insulting, insightful, almost everything you would want — but he is just not witty.

Given his career and the many areas to explore in it, this article will have to be an entry to the subject, and not the entirety, so let’s start where it is most reasonable to start — the beginning

That Unimportant Young Pup Bob Dylan

If you were walking down the street and you heard this guy singing,, or you sat in a cafe and he sang there for you, you would be reasonable in thinking “hey, this guy is pretty good” but not if you thought he was a genius who totally moved your soul and was the greatest thing you ever heard, if you thought that you’d be a tasteless dork. Even in the early 60s that would be a little bit much, and people with taste would feel obligated to give you some lessons in true greatness plucked from their record collections.

Looking through the music of the time young Bob was certainly not the only fellow who seemed to be working the same field. There were a number of people who sang traditional folk tunes and in some cases wrote their own pastiches of some well known folk styles.

And that’s basically what. you get here — a bunch of songs that are covers by some young guy who is doing his best, and a couple of new songs that were pretty good.

This was the first album that Bob Dylan did, and the last one when he would be an unimportant artist.

This will be the first article in our attempt to categorize the importance of Dylan, similar to our series of articles trying to rank the Beatles

If you would like a good book about the early Dylan we recommend you follow these down (affiliate links)