The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #70786 Message #1209298
Posted By: Little Hawk
17-Jun-04 - 01:52 PM
Thread Name: Dr Bob Dylan - you better believe it
Subject: RE: Dr Bob Dylan - you better believe it
If I may name some of the finest songwriters of the 60's to now: Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Al Stewart, Buffy Sainte-Marie (not many will name her on this list, but I do without hesitation), Jackson Browne, Jagger & Richards, Warren Zevon, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Leonard Cohen, Willie Nelson.
There are others who could be on that list too. In all the above cases there is nothing else as good as hearing them do their own material...and that goes specially for Dylan.
He was the most influential of them all. Because of marketing? No, because he was so good that there was no way he wouldn't get marketed once the other professional singers (like Joan Baez, for instance) got wind of what he was doing and flipped out over it, and started recording it themselves.
People who listened only superficially to what was most popular and because it was "trendy" to do so at the time have got less than even a clue about it. If they were 19 now they'd be rhapsodizing over Green Day, Korn, or Eminem...or some other godawful stuff like that.
There is nothing much in mainstream music now that even approaches the incredible originality and brilliance that took the music industry by storm and completely transformed it between 1960 and 1975...courtesy mainly of the people I listed at the beginning of this post, and some others at the time (specially the Beatles).
Dylan got the Beatles interested in writing songs that meant something, as opposed to just silly love songs. Dylan affected the Stones powerfully too. He was the biggest lyrical influence on Hendrix. He was the biggest influence on Springsteen and probably on David Bowie too. Hell, he was the biggest influence on almost everybody that seriously wrote songs between 1962 and the decades that followed. He will be remembered longer than any other popular songwriter of his time, and he will be remembered as a poet too, not just a musician.
This doesn't mean he's a super being of some kind or on some unique pedestal of perfection. It doesn't mean that he didn't write some lacklustre material now and then. It just means he had a great gift and he used it to powerful effect. Good for him.