by Dan O

I’ve been a Beatles fan my whole life. In stages. The best thing about becoming a Beatles fan was chasing down their influences, the artists they covered, the ones they elevated their game to in order to stay on top. They had a way of taking the temperature of what was going on at the moment and pulling all those sounds into a giant event album. Doing it again and again. So I used those albums to unpack the sounds of different moments. It worked! It was a great education but understanding the world the Beatles existed in and gave us…meant I could no longer bow to them as the one stop shop for great music.

Getting into Bob Dylan took much much longer. I heard the important albums most people do and hunted down more based on soundtrack pulls but whenever I listened to a Greatest Hits I felt dirty. This guy has way too much for a simple or even complex Greatest Hits. I need to dive in. The weight, influence and longevity is impossible to wrap your mind around. Tom Petty doesn’t exist without Dylan but he does without The Beatles. I have isolated the major reasons why The Beatles are thought of as more important than Dylan and by unpacking those I will make the case that is the title of this article.

1.The folk scene Dylan came up in doesn’t mean much to the public sphere-

This point cannot be undersold. Listen to Bob Dylan’s 1962 debut album, you need to understand the environment he wanted to be a part of. Not only do most people today not value Rock as much as when I was growing up but Folk has been out of the spotlight for longer than that. My family is from California so I knew Arlo was Woody Guthrie’s son before I could pronounce filibuster. I grew up on Peter, Paul and Mary as well as Pete Seeger and most people don’t. It’s not seen as nearly important in the history of 60’s music as Hendrix or Led Zeppelin. A lot of the stuff people love about 60’s music happened in a two year period at the end of the decade. If you’ve never heard Joan Baez or Doc Watson you’ll process The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan as pretty cool without understanding why it reshaped music from what it was. Dylan had many phases and influences but he was born from a scene where lyricism was King and Queen. You should know that and listen to With God On Our Side to really have the foundation of how powerful a focused Dylan was.

2.The 60’s are remembered in bands

When parents recall the music of the 60’s they bounce from Beach Boys to The Doors and The Who. It is thought of as a time where groups of kids in tight jeans plugged in and jammed! Dylan doesn’t fit that narrative. He exists within the singer-songwriter tradition with folks like Leonard Cohen and Kris Kristofferson. Bob Dylan also doesn’t fit the beloved British Invasion narrative.

Those 60s bands all made songs that play in grocery stores, that soaked into our bones. The impact of a song like Blowin’ In The Wind was massive and incomparable for my parents but negligible for my sons generation. Dylan’s music is very cerebral and doesn’t fit nicely transportable pop settings. He was also on a presentation level always an abrasive dude, an antagonist, not a cute mop top.

3. Dylans longevity works against him

My most important point. The Beatles discography starts in 1963 and ends in 1970. A nice tidy 12 album run. It’s easy to digest, the phases and shifts make sense as Revolver warns you of Sgt. Peppers. Very few people will ever listen to EVERY Bob Dylan album. The best thing to do in studying Dylan is isolate periods of time. Lets take the 60’s. Within the ten year period he released nine albums all of staggering quality. At least three of these albums (Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing It All Back Home, and Nashville Skyline) are better to me than the best three Beatles album you could place them against. That doesn’t factor in the 70’s when Dylan dropped the best break up album I’ve ever heard (Blood on The Tracks) and the legendary Basement Tapes with The Band in the same year! One of my favorite individual songs ever written is Make You Feel My Love which Bob Dylan wrote in 1997! I didn’t know that until the mid 2000’s because I wasn’t listening to new Dylan in 1997. I fell in love with the song as it got covered over and over by the likes of Billy Joel and Adele.

That’s the cheat of this article. It’s not about The Beatles being lesser. It’s that I know you have lived with them long enough to understand their greatness and Dylan’s is so utterly vast that in all my studies of him…I still don’t fully grasp it. I still haven’t heard every Dylan album and am floored by new discoveries. Bob Dylan is woven into the fabric of everything, I’m always finding traces of the pattern.