(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Stills)
Bob Dylan is often treated as a kind of musical deity. With the music world wrapped around his finger, worshipping at his feet from the moment he took the folk world by storm, it’s easy to forget that, at the end of the day, he’s just a music fan too.
All your heroes are. No musician is an island in that way, as for every performer, no matter how looming their reputation became, it all began with a spark of inspiration. For most of the 1960s big leagues, it seemed to all begin with a song on the radio or them as a kid, catching a grainy black and white performance on television.
Plenty of artists are upfront about that, happily sharing these stories in interviews throughout their careers. But given that Dylan is always too busy either avoiding the press or delivering press lies and ruses, actually pinning him down with a genuine word on his heroes is slightly more rare.
However, his passion is always clear. His books are dedicated to them, as his Chronicles and his latest work, The Philosophy of Modern Song, are utterly dedicated to discussing the impact of certain artists and certain tracks, both on him and on the world at large. Even the fact that he wrote songs like ‘Song To Woody’ as an ode to his hero Woody Guthrie shows that while he’s known for being more aloof, that doesn’t extend to the topic of laying his praise and devotion at the feet of his idols.
In fact, when one of them was lost, he was open about his devastation in a truly candid and vulnerable way. “I had a breakdown. I broke down. One of the very few times,” he said in 1977, with the cause being the death of Elvis Presley.
“It was so sad,” he said, admitting the impact ‘The King’ had on him despite always having a more complex relationship with rock and roll. “The thing about rock and roll is that, for me anyway, it wasn’t enough. ‘Tutti Frutti’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ were great catchphrases and driving pulse rhythms. But they weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way,” he once said, explaining why he found folk so gripping instead. But somehow, Presley was immune to this.
“I went over my whole life… my whole childhood. I didn’t talk to anyone for a week after Elvis died,” he said as the loss of the musical icon sparked some serious reflection. It led him to one conclusion – “If it wasn’t for Elvis and Hank Williams, I couldn’t be doing what I do today.”
Placing Presley alongside Hank Williams, whom he’s previously called “the best songwriter”, the combination of the two begins to feel like a kind of blueprint. While Williams delivers the lyrical sincerity and raw, country feel captured in Dylan’s folk work, the appeal of Presley seems to explain the artist’s own rebellion and covert desire to still be a performer despite his mixed feelings towards his position at the mic stand.
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