Ask anyone to name two definitive voices of the 1960s and you’ll likely receive the same answer every time: Bob Dylan and The Beatles. Dylan and McCartney wrote some of the most iconic songs of the era, and both wound up becoming figures of a burgeoning counterculture movement too. But their approaches to songwriting are incredibly distinctive, separated by a vast creative gulf. Here, Dylan explains the fundamental difference between artists like McCartney and himself, claiming that it all comes down to their contrasting attitudes towards performance.
During a conversation with The Huffington Post, Dylan was asked to explain why he doesn’t perform his songs in the same way twice like the rest of his generation. The musician’s penchant for warping the melodies – and occasionally the rhythms of his tracks – during live performances has become something of a staple of his set. Many, myself included, have regarded this as a deliberate affront to the innately commercialising music industry. According to Dylan, however, he couldn’t play a song the same way twice “if he tried”.
Dylan went on to compare himself to the likes of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson, claiming: “Those guys you are talking about all had conspicuous hits. They started out anti-establishment and now they are in charge of the world. Celebratory songs. Music for the grand dinner party. Mainstream stuff that played into the culture on a pervasive level.”
The man’s got a point. The Beatles’ decision to stop touring in 1966 was a rebellious, anti-commercialist act. It implied that the group revered artistic integrity over wealth and imbued their work with a sense of anti-establishmentism. Of course, this reverence for integrity became an essential aspect of popular taste during the hippie era, allowing The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and other apparently authentic artists to make a hell of a lot of money while espousing immateriality. By the time Dylan sat to talk to the Huffington Post in 2011, the songs of Paul McCartney and the other Beatles had become so embedded in the collective imagination that they had no option but to pander to the consuming nostalgia of a culture obsessed with its own past, playing them the same way each and every time.
Dylan seems to have viewed himself as standing outside this sphere of influence: “My stuff is different from those guys,” he continued. “It’s more desperate. Daltrey, Townshend, McCartney, the Beach Boys, Elton, Billy Joel. They made perfect records, so they have to play them perfectly … exactly the way people remember them. My records were never perfect. So there is no point in trying to duplicate them. Anyway, I’m no mainstream artist.”
In Dylan’s own words, he was always an outsider looking in. He never had a desire to fit into dominant modes of expression and so gave himself the freedom to explore, rework, and reevaluate his own music. “I’m coming out of the folk music tradition and that’s the vernacular and archetypal aesthetic that I’ve experienced. Those are the dynamics of it. I couldn’t have written songs for the Brill Building if I tried. Whatever passes for pop music, I couldn’t do it then and I can’t do it now,” he concluded.
