Bob Dylan - best songwriter ever?

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ido1957

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Bob Dylan - best songwriter ever?



Current listings contains 5870 covers of 350 different Dylan songs by 2791 artists!
Top ten songs covered:

1. Blowin' In The Wind - 375 versions

2. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right - 217

3. I Shall Be Released - 181

4. Mr. Tambourine Man - 176

5. Like A Rolling Stone - 172

6. Knockin' On Heaven's Door - 150

7. All Along The Watchtower - 144

8. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue - 133

9. I'll Be Your Baby Tonight - 121

10. Quinn The Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn) - 118

It Ain’t Me, Babe
 
I think this has a lot to do with people listening to Bob Dylan singing his songs and going, "That's awful, I could do a better version of XXXX" and proving it. Royalties are nice though.

Most covered and best are two different things in my mind...
 
Best songwriter? IMO, not quite- best poet for his (my) generation, for sure.

(I like getting into this kind of threads, early, so that lots of peeps see my opinion, and also so I don't need to wade through 16 pages of equally personal, biased and ill-informed opinions, just to state mine. :D)
 
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If there's one thing that could turn me overnight into an axe wielding homicidal maniac, it's seeing the words "best" and "ever" in the same sentence.
I think Bob Dylan was a fantastic songwriter. Without a doubt, his efforts from his 1965 albums liberated a whole slew of lyricists and indirectly, pretty much every lyricist since. Dylan's strength in the 60s was in his lyrics. Melodically he wasn't outstanding, but he came up with good melodies. Instrumentally his stuff wasn't outstanding but there were some interesting moves here and there. His voice wasn't great but it was unique. I've always dug his voice. People tended to hang their own projections on Dylan and over half a century this has built up into this amazing mystique. Dylan himself hated all of that and it's interesting that a song like "Maggie's farm" was taken by the counterculture and left wing to be this wonderful anti establishment diatribe........whereas he was saying "*&%$£"^% off !" to acoustic guitar folk purists.
But it was those rhyming dictionary surrealistic lyrics that inspired other writers. That's what pushed Lennon and Jagger and Ray Davies and others to start putting themselves in their songs in very conscious ways. Without Dylan, there wouldn't have been "Mother's little helper" or "Dedicated follower of fashion" or "I can see for miles" or "Norwegian wood". Dylan once said to Keith Richards "I could've written 'Satisfaction' but you couldn't have written "Mr tambourine man".
Even when Dylan went through his born again christian phase, he was writing some fantastic lyrics. And good music too. But good lyricists will write good lyrics whatever circumstances they're in.
 
Like I said... great poet (lyricist.) And, Cohen is great, too- but of an earlier half-generation.
 
While I'm more of rock/hard rock kinda guy, I have to say that in my estimation Billy Joel could be the best songwriter out there. His stuff always impresses the he'll out of me.
 
Dylan's chords structures, lyrics and bare bones/economical melodies do present great songs. He certainly wasn't the greatest performer of his generation. That so many have taken what he provided and interpreted those parts so brilliantly is very telling. My fav Dylan interpreter is Cocker.
Cohen is from a similar place: his chords structures, lyrics and bare bones/economical melodies present great songs too. Cocker again being a leading interpreter. Cohen's lyrics have an even more complex nature if that's possible. Mayhap from his poet & novelist careers before he moved into song performance. I'd rather cover a Cohen song than a Dylan personally but Dylan was the 1st wave in popular music & Lennie came along in his wake.
Jimmy Webb is a superb pop songwriter. He is also an incredible song writer away from poop - the Richard Harris LPs being a good example. He didn't do such a great job perfomring his own work though. The definitive versions seem to be those he wrote specifically to be performed by others.
Randy Newman was a contender but was seduced by Hollywood. Nilsson's album of covers was ppossibly his artistic highpoint & speaking of Harry...
Harry Nilsson was seduced by power & booze then his main tool was destroyed in screaming competitions with Lennon.
Lennon? Up until Walls & Bridges we was canny, intelligent, clever & I loved every minute after that it was further & faster downhill that his old mate had managed.
McCartney - well, once Linda came onto the scene he went even lower in my books than before. Oh, he was great - but not my cuppa.
Paul & John together were often able to compensate for each other's short/pratfalls. Guess who my fav. L&M interpreter is?
Each of the above, possibly barring Harry who is mired in his successful renditions of other's songs himself, has a significant number of songs they have written which inspired interpretations that have taken the leap up to the next level & have been, arguably, better than the original.
What was the question?
 
VU is kind of like that with me, where i prefer the covers over the originals. as an extreme example i've had White Light White Heat since high school and, though i listened to the other songs quite a bit, i've probably only listened to Sister Ray twice all the way through. the Joy Division cover, probably hundreds.

the Dylan recordings from the mid 60s are so iconic that the songs just don't seem right when i hear them performed by someone else. it's ingrained in my head somehow that they need to have that nasally whine and out of tune guitars.

my fave Cohen interpreter is Judy Collins.
 
Dylan had some good lyrics. I don't think you can identify any artists as the best. Definitely a master. But lyrically I think there are many great songwriters in the same league as Dylan - Simon and Garfunkel, Lennon and McCartney, Tom Waits :)
 
I'm going to go out on a limb and say yes, he is the greatest song writer ever.

I don't even particularly like too many of his tunes myself and didn't care for his performances much at all, but in terms of the enormity, staying power and critical acclaim of his work, I'd say he takes the crown. Lennon/McCartney combined beat Bob, but neither on their own does.
 
comparing songwriters can get a little ridiculous though. i mean "songwriting" is kind of a vague arena. like Grim pointed out Dylan was a great lyricist for his time, but that was his strength. and many people feel he jumped a shark in the late 60s. Bacharach/David arguably wrote some of the defining melodies of that generation. and the lushness and complexity of those arrangements were way beyond Dylan's capabilities at the time. but Bacharach/David couldn't have wrote Highway 61 or Bringin It either. i think even Dylan and Cohen were worlds apart in both musical and lyrical style. as someone earlier pointed out, Dylan put out records before Cohen, but Cohen was a known and published writer when Dylan was still farting around in Dinkytown stealing records from Jon Pankake, so their respective generations do blur.

anyways, they are all pwned by Throbbing Gristle. :D
 
Joy Division's cover of Sister ray is a stand out you're right. Judy Collins did a very nice Dylan album too. She also did a superb version of the Moon's A Harsh Mistress which I think is a Jimmy Webb (Cocker did a good version of it as well).
I like Dylan doing Dylan but nothing after Blonde On Blonde.
Did Art Garfunkle wriet with Paul? Another superb songwriter is/was ElvisCostello/Declan McManus. His work with Bacharach was a real surprsie but then again there were indications of his ability as a general songwriter with the stuff he wrote for the soundtrack of Grace of My Heart.
Throbbing Gristle, ah I remember. I guess the old lady who wrote Happy Birthday to You would rate and Brian Wilson too.
We'd really have to set criteria for a conversation on this to avoid going in 1000 directions whilst going around in circles. Popularity, Number of creditable covers, influence, (which is an unfair criteria for anyone who's been at it for less than a decade), arrangements, performance, lyrics, melody, singing ability, meglomaniacal tendencies, honest crediting of collaborators, plagarism, theft, appropriation, genre establishment, sheer beauty, sheer brutality, cultural authenticity, impact on society etc etc and finally but in no way least to be considered - the personal taste of the critic.
Oh, I declare Waites as invalid - he's too impatient: Tom Waites for no one & he won't wait for me!!
 
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rayc said:
Another superb songwriter is/was ElvisCostello/Declan McManus. His work with Bacharach was a real surprsie but then again there were indications of his ability as a general songwriter with the stuff he wrote for the soundtrack of Grace of My Heart.
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i remember really liking that movie, though i don't remember the specifics. is that main couple supposed to be Goffin and King or something? Elvis C, i find i have to be in a real specific mood for. his songs are just too much damn work for me, not so much on the first four but more on the ones after Get Happy (except for Blood and Chocolate, which i dig for some reason). Waites, i could just NEVER get into. and i tried many times. and lived with people who played his albums constantly. i think he's really creative and all, but for me he's nails on a chalkboard.
 
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The Small Change album is killer. I dunno if Garfunkel actually wrote any of that stuff, maybe it was all Simon.
 
I'd certainly say one of the greatest.

"Like a Rolling Stone" was over 6 miniutes long, I dont think anyone had a hit that long, Dylan changed what could be considered a Pop song. He told an entire story.
 
By the year 2000, there had been over 1250 covers of "Yesterday". It was {and may still be} the most recorded song in history. Dylan doesn't come within the Kalahari desert of that. No song of his does. But does that make "Yesterday" the best song ever ? It's an OK tune to me, at best. The story surrounding it's creation, how McCartney dreamed the melody and blocked in the words "Scrambled eggs, oh baby how I love your legs" and couldn't think of any words for 2 years and then eventually wrote them on holiday, perhaps subconsciously recalling his Mum's death when he was a teenager, how the Beatles couldn't do anything with it because they liked it sparse and George Martin suggesting a string quartet and Macca recording the vocal in the same 3 hour session as "I've just seen a face" and "I'm down" ~ all that is far more interesting to me than the song ! But it's had tons of covers !
Bob Dylan enabled lyricists in the mainstream to write about anything. That alone was revolutionary. Truth be told though, it was a period where so much was in flux and there were changes happening almost daily as old certainties were being eroded and resistance to progress came tumbling down and young people were utilizing a voice they'd never had in the then annals of human history.
 
grimtraveller said:
People tended to hang their own projections on Dylan and over half a century this has built up into this amazing mystique. Dylan himself hated all of that and it's interesting that a song like "Maggie's farm" was taken by the counterculture and left wing to be this wonderful anti establishment diatribe........whereas he was saying "*&%$£"^% off !" to acoustic guitar folk purists.
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I think it was more that Dylan didn't like that people thought they had him understood than anything else. I think he probably loved the mystique he created, but hated that it meant people felt they could nail him down to anything in particular.

The man's a born contrarian and determined to be an outsider. Contrarians hate nothing more than someone else agreeing with them - so he moved from one 'era' to another as soon as people started defining him or hailing him as a beat poet, a civil rights campaigner, a Christian etc. I bet he loved the sell out accusations when he did that Victoria's Secret ad a couple of years back (fortunately not as the model).

I’d say for me personally, he’s the best songwriter ever – I’ve got more albums and songs written by him than anyone else in my cd collection and the combination of great lyrics and melodies is a winner for me. I’m not particularly bothered about technically good singing – I’d rather listen to Tom Waits shouting into a bucket than Mariah Carey over-emoting her way up a scale in some pishy saccharine ballad.

Where he’s let down as far as I’m concerned is the recording quality of his music – Blood on the Tracks is muffled, Street Legal is flat and I’m not sure he’s that fussed either way on this front. Plenty of folks on here could have produced a number of his records better.
 
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