Dolly Parton once gave what is probably the most accurate assessment of Bob Dylan known to mankind: “I love his music but he’s a weird buckaroo.”
Has there ever been a better way to describe someone like Bob Dylan? He was always considered a bit of an outcast in his hometown, so when he decided that he’d finally had enough of said hometown, he hopped on a bus to New York in a bid to make music and follow in the footsteps of his heroes. He even declared as much when he took to the stage for his first ever gig in the Big Apple.
“[I’ve] been travellin’ the country,” he said, guitar strapped, voice smooth as you like, “Follwin’ in Woody Guthrie’s footsteps.” When he played that night, it was a performance of covers, as was the case for a lot of his early career. I wonder if the crowd knew exactly what they were watching.
Bob Dylan’s career was never going to stick to covers, of course. He famously moved from acoustic folk to the electric folk-rock sound championed by bands like The Byrds. That shift ruffled feathers at the time, but looking back, it was a fairly mild turn – especially when you stack it up against the many creative curveballs and stylistic detours he’s taken over the decades since.
Even his live shows have morphed into something that supports Dolly Parton’s “weird buckaroo” claims. That man who stood with an acoustic guitar in front of a half empty crowd has morphed into a different style of performer, one who plays shadows of his classics, lets his music be a backbone to his shows but very much leans on spontaneity. You may catch a chord you recognise, or a vocal line you find familiar, but Dylan performances are very much confined to that room specific and the moment contained within it. The sounds created exist in that period of time, and that period of time only.
“In this particular case, he had his back to one half of the audience and was playing the organ, beautifully I might say, and just running through the songs,” Leonard Cohen once said, describing the strange experience he had when seeing Bob Dylan live, “Some were hard to recognise. But nobody card. That’s not what they were there for and what I was there for.”
Some might call Bob Dylan’s shifts in style and performance a bit odd, but George Harrison – both a fan and collaborator – didn’t see it that way. He believed Dylan’s work stayed relevant because he poured something real into everything he made, no matter how much his sound changed. That’s why people connect with it (whatever shape it takes) because it’s brutally honest and never phoned in. It was these aspects of Dylan that led to Harrison calling him one of the most consistent musicians on the planet.
“Bob Dylan is the most consistent artist there is. Even his stuff, which people loathe, I like,” said Harrion. The former Beatles explained in more detail, “Every single thing he does represents something that’s him. He may write better songs tomorrow, sing high on this album and low on another, go electric or acoustic, go weird or whatever, but the basic thing that causes all this change is an incredible character named Bob Dylan,” he said.
