Bob Dylan – The Man of the Century

Bob Dylan – The Man of the Century

 

Bob Dylan is my man of the century. I don’t think anybody has done more to improve the human condition.

 

Back in the early sixties Rock Music was dead. We were seeing sugary, watered down Rock. It was the stuff of teenage love. The charts were full of Bobbies. Then came Bob.

 

Bob Dylan took Woody Guthrie’s protest songs and ran with them to produce some of the angriest, most biting songs that have ever been written. He revolutionised song writing. With masterpieces like Blowing in the Wind, A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, Masters of War, To Ramona, The Ballad of Emit Till, Only a Pawn in the Game, The Ballad of Hollis Brown, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll and Chimes of Freedom he brought social concern into Pop Music. He highlighted civil rights, anti-war sentiment and social issues in a way that made them accessible. He raised the consciousness of a generation and raised their sensibilities too. It was not for nothing that they called him the spokesman of a generation. He articulated the concerns young people had about the establishment and put in poetic words what we were thinking. He brought us together behind the cause of justice and freedom. He was largely responsible for focussing our minds on what was wrong. He made us think.

 

Instead of teenage love we now had songs that told stories, songs that were pure poetry and songs that dealt with real adult issues. The two and a half minute Pop song was out the window.

 

Not content to do that he turned on the Byrds and the Beatles so that Rock Music was infested with the virus of poetry and social comment – songs now had to have content and be lyrically meaningful as well as a pretty melody.

 

You can see the effect of Dylan by comparing Love Me Do and Please Please Me with Strawberry Fields Forever and Revolution. It was the influence of Dylan that sparked that revolution in song writing, that transformation to Adult Rock.

 

But Dylan didn’t stop there. He then harnessed the stream of consciousness poetry of the Beat poets to create an electric storm of riffs and words that blew the mind most elegantly. He assaulted the senses with machine gun bullets of ideas. Suddenly we were in that subterranean basement with the blues and we weren’t ever gonna work on Maggie’s Farm again. We marvelled to Like A Rolling Stone and were blasted with From A Buick Six and It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding). This cool polka dotted dude was the coolest and hottest thing on the planet. He stormed our heads with Desolation Row and a host of other dynamite songs seething with poetic imagery that tore your eyeballs out.

 

There was an endless stream of songs that made you sit up and set your neurones sparking.

 

My contention is that Bob Dylan not only affected Rock Music and changed it for ever – being the fulcrum point on which it pivoted from teenage Pop to Adult Rock – but he changed the minds of all those young adults. It was a change that led to the huge creative burst that was the sixties. It generated the anti-war movement, the fight for civil rights and social justice, feminism, gay rights, environmentalism, love, peace, equality and tolerance.

 

That movement went out all round the world and impacted everywhere.

 

While it is true that those fires have damped down and the establishment, that briefly tottered, is now firmly back in control, it still resonates.

 

Bob Dylan changed the world for the better.

 

The question remains – where is the next Dylan coming from who just might finish the job?

 

There’s never one around when you most need them!