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(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
There’s always been a mystique that coats any Bob Dylan song. As much as he might believe in what he’s saying whenever he makes one of his classics, you could never tell the moments when he was being serious or when he was toying with what the listener’s expectations were. It was always about keeping the people guessing, but some of the greatest artists in Dylan’s mind didn’t even need to put on a show to be considered legends.
After all, Dylan’s role was always supposed to be that of a lonesome troubadour trying to find his way through the music industry. He had followed in the footsteps of the folkies that came before him, but he knew that he wasn’t going to get anywhere trying to be the spiritual successor to someone like Pete Seeger. He needed something more, and that came from him hearing rock and roll for the first time.
He had already been knocked out by people like Little Richard, but as soon as The Beatles arrived, he knew there was an avenue for him to work in rock and roll. The Fab Four had started breaking down barriers and proving the genre could take itself seriously, but when Highway 61 Revisited came out, Dylan wasn’t wearing the genre as a costume. He was resculpting himself from the ground up and using electric guitars as his guide.
But when looking at his rock phase, Dylan was never looking to make the traditional poppy single. As celebrated as ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ is, it would have been delusional for him to think that a six-minute song had hit potential, and when he made ‘Sad Eyed-Lady of the Lowlands’, no one could have predicted any rock and roll song could have gone on for that long. It was alien to this genre, but for jazz artists, it made all the sense in the world as long as the groove was right.
The entire mentality behind great jazz artists was about taking the basic mechanics of song structure and warping it into something new. There had been people like Dave Brubeck introducing new time signatures that no one had heard before on ‘Take Five’, but when looking at the biggest names in the genre when Dylan was growing up, Miles Davis had all the jazz vocabulary with a rock star’s approach to the stage, always going down like a badass whenever he performed.
Mr Zimmerman may have only played folk music, but he knew nothing could beat the way Davis carried himself, saying, “Miles Davis is my definition of cool. I loved to see him in the small clubs playing his solo, turn his back on the crowd, put down his horn and walk off the stage, let the band keep playing, and then come back and play a few notes at the end. I did that at a couple of shows. The audience thought I was sick or something.”
Then again, Dylan’s idea of walking offstage may have been a little bit different. There had been times where he had hotshot musicians like The Band and The Grateful Dead behind him to carry the load, but whenever someone comes to a show expecting to hear ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, it would have been alarming to see Dylan absent-mindedly walk offstage so the band could have a chance to shine.
That’s because Davis’s sense of swagger isn’t really something that you can grow into over time. He had the experience under his belt to be a bandleader, but those kinds of leadership skills and that ability to command the stage just by walking onto it is something that people are either born with or they’re not.
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