After a rise to prominence in the early 1960s, Bob Dylan became the biggest name in folk music and the spearhead of an unsettled counterculture with his politically evocative material. As he became more successful in his own right, he became less liberal when naming artists he admired, seemingly unwilling to feed the egos of his peers until they reached a certain high standard in his eyes. This would become a constant throughout the rest of Dylan’s career and served to add a touch more conviction when he did, on rare occasions, express his admiration.
Over the years, Dylan would maintain his love for early blues and rock pioneers like Jimmy Reed, Little Richard and Elvis Presley. After his departure from folk in the mid-60s, he regularly partnered up with some of the musicians he revered, such as George Harrison, Mark Knopfler, Tom Petty and Johnny Cash. Meanwhile, he happily called Stevie Wonder a “genius” and said Paul McCartney was pretty much the only musician he ever envied.
His taste is specific and hard to define. He still keeps his ear to the scene to some extent, but it’s sporadic. That being said, he explained that he had gone out of his way to see Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys perform. He also said he is fond of Julian Casablanca, the Klaxons, Grace Potter, Jack White and, while he didn’t offer a review, said he has seen Metallica twice.
Now in his ninth decade, the original vagabond has lived through a lot of music and a lot of time. “From 1970 till now, there’s been about 50 years, seems more like 50million,” Dylan said in a 2017 interview with Bill Flanagan. “That was a wall of time that separates the old from the new and a lot can get lost in this kind of time. Entire industries go, lifestyles change, corporations kill towns, new laws replace old ones, group interests triumph over individual ones, poor people themselves have become a commodity.”
“Musical influences too – they get swallowed up, get absorbed into newer things, or they fall by the wayside,” he added, waxing philosophical. “I don’t think you need to feel bummed out though, or that it’s out of your clutches – you can still find what you’re looking for if you follow the trail back. It could be right there where you left it – anything is possible. Trouble is, you can’t bring it back with you; you have to stay right there with it. I think that is what nostalgia is all about.”
Though he didn’t put to fine a point on it, Dylan has always been obsessed with time. Or perhaps, more accurately, timelessness.So, it wasn’t much of a surprise that in the same interview, Dylan revealed that he’s a fan of the late Amy Winehouse, despite not listening to a great deal of modern music and having devoted many of his recent recordings to standards of the Frank Sinatra era. “I liked Amy Winehouse’s last record,” he said. “She was the last real individualist around.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone around the time of Winehouse’s final album, Dylan discussed the same topic but didn’t bring up Winehouse. “Who’s the last individual performer that you can think of,” Dylan asked. “Elton John, maybe? I’m talking about artists with the willpower not to conform to anybody’s reality but their own. Patsy Cline and Billy Lee Riley. Plato and Socrates, Whitman and Emerson. Slim Harpo and Donald Trump. It’s a lost art form. I don’t know who else does it beside myself, to tell you the truth.”
Seemingly, his discovery of Winehouse was largely posthumous, but she fits the mould he likes his artists to fill. While the reality that she conforms to might have been one that borrowed plenty from the past, she brought her passion for soul forward into a new age that was far from crying out for a Motown revival. That’s why she didn’t give the world one; she transfigured the classic stylings of Sarah Vaughan and the likes with a gritty new Camden heart. It was a spirit that Dylan appreciated, and he hasn’t seen all that much of it since the heyday of counterculture.
Elsewhere in the interview, Dylan discussed his modern tastes further, revealing that he likes Iggy Pop’s 2012 French-language album, Après, and extended his praise to Imelda May, Stereophonics and Valarie June. So while Dylan may be long in the tooth and somewhat rooted in older musical traditions, he likes to keep his finger on the pulse for any intriguing modern acts that come along from time to time.
