Dylan hit all the right notes

WHEN I saw “Bob Dylan” trending on Twitter, naturally I assumed he had died — or as he put it himself, he was “trying to get to heaven before they close the door”.

Turned out that people were arguing frantically about an old Rolling Stone magazine list from 2008, which had Dylan in seventh place in the Top 100 Singers of All Time — he was just behind Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke and John Lennon, but the deepest anger was directed against his placement ahead of Stevie Wonder, Al Green, Tina Turner, Nina Simone…

For guidance on this I would turn to Dylan himself, who in a 1966 interview with Nat Hentoff said that he considered himself to be as good a singer as Enrico Caruso: “You have to listen closely, but I hit all those notes. And I can hold my breath three times as long as I want to.”

This has been described as one of Dylan’s “cryptic jokes”, but I don’t think it’s a joke at all. I don’t believe Dylan would joke about anything which relates so directly to the nature of his talent, and I also believe that he was right.

There may be some confusion around the fact that his voice and that of Caruso sound very different in a superficial sense, but I guess he meant that the little guy from Minnesota was as good as the big guy from Naples, pound for pound — and by the way, Caruso never wrote his own material.

Yes there were many reasons why Bob Dylan became a star at a time when there were about 50,000 other folk singers in New York City alone — yes, he had the songs but his voice also had the magic.

And the more he would hear that voice being disparaged (“like the sound of a dog with his leg caught in a barbed wire fence”), perhaps the more it confirmed one of the central tenets of his creed — that you can’t be going around believing what other people think about you.

As Robbie Robertson recalls in a recent interview, Dylan and the Band spent many months touring the world being booed by audiences who hated the fact that they were using electric guitars and the like.

Robertson confessed that he was doubting himself, that he would be listening back to the tapes at night, trying to prove to himself that this stuff was great, and not terrible. Trying to trust his own judgment, as a master musician, and not that of the general public.

But Dylan was cool about it all. He wasn’t listening back to any tapes — at least not for reassurance. As Robertson put it, “he never took a step back”. He was right about that, too.

So I’d accept his Caruso line, no problem. And there are times when I’d put him up there with Count John McCormack.