Bob Dylan’s favourite classic rock songs

Bob Dylan is not a classic rock musician, he’s a classic folk musician. However, he recognised early enough that rock was set to be the great contemporary artistic exploration of our age. So, like any self-respecting businessman of the times, he decided to shoulder in on the act and grab his piece of this new pie. In the process, he inexorably altered the zeitgeist for the better, bringing the timeless wisdom of folk to the fresh vitality of emerging rock ‘n’ roll.

Thus, it is perhaps no surprise that when Dylan focuses on classic rock, he does so in a more idiosyncratic way than most, delving deeper into what we mean by classic. When he tackled the topic in his Theme Time Radio Hour, he looked at the term in a more poetic sense as he appraised his favourite ‘classic rock songs’ of all time. Offering up this mystic snippet as a vignette for the genre: “It’s night time in the big city, a woman dances beneath a strobe light, a man rolls a joint on the second Johnny Winter album.”

Then, without further ado, he offered up an anthem by one of his heroes musing upon our place in the solar system: Jimi Hendrix’s classic ‘Third Stone from the Sun’. Dylan is a huge admirer of Hendrix, so much so that he thinks that the late guitar God actually stole ‘All Along the Watchtower’ out from under him, declaring: “Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it’s a tribute to him in some kind of way.” In many ways, it seems like the most fitting tribute of all that there is an aura of mysticism to the whole thing, given that Dylan and Hendrix were both acutely aware of the profound hidden power of music and used that to spin out the counterculture revolution in a whirl of strangeness.

Elsewhere in Dylan’s eclectic mix, he also picked out legends like Ray Charles as premium property in classic rock. While many would say that Charles doesn’t fit the genre, Dylan keenly argues that nowhere in the blueprint of rock ‘n’ roll does it say that you can’t deliver it laidback. As Dylan once said: “It’s still hipper and cooler to be Ray Charles, sittin’ at the piano, not movin’ shit. And still getting across, you know? Pushing rhythm and soul across. It’s got nothin’ to do with jumping around. I mean, what could it possibly have to do with jumping around?”

Alas, it is at this point in proceedings that some of you might have realised that Dylan doesn’t just take a poetic look at the primordial energy implied by classic rock, but a quite literal interpretation of ‘rock’ comes to the fore in his choices in a geological sense, even throwing in Bill Conti’s Rocky theme. As Jack White revealed in his contribution to Dylan’s list: “I love classic rock myself. I saw a great classic rock once in Australia. I was riding around Ayres Rock, it’s a pretty big one, I think the biggest. And somebody said while we were that only Aborigines are allowed in most of the spots surrounding or on top of it because it’s holy to them, so that’s pretty classic.”

All of this is proof – as Chris Morris once said – ‘if proof be need be’, that Dylan might be one of the most profound songwriters of all time, but he has always maintained a solid sense of humour about music and art. This quirkiness not only colours his work with a more discerned taste but also stops him from getting moored gathering moss and slicks his freewheeling excursion.

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