The two songs Randy Newman calls Bob Dylan “at his best”
When it comes to huge, looming artists, picking a favourite song is like picking a favourite child. It’s especially hard when it comes to a name like Bob Dylan, who was not only prolific but constantly dynamic, too, evolving from album to album for his entire career. Trying to compare one decade to the next or one release to another feels impossible. But in the case of Randy Newman, his answer on which era he lives best is obvious.
From one year to the next, Dylan transformed into a whole different artist. When he first broke onto the scene in the 1960s, he was folk’s new wonderkid. As he penned protest song after protest song, he was considered the new mouthpiece of a generation.
But then he moved on from that, declaring protest music pointless and stepping into his crowd-shocking Electric Dylan era. From then on, there’s been Country Bob, Vegas Bob performing strange covers of his own songs, Christian Bob, 1980s maximalist Bob and so on. All sounding wildly different, especially as his voice changed drastically over the years, a fan of one Bob moment might not be a fan of the next.
For Newman, he admires Dylan, even if he’s not so much of a fan of his later stuff. “Dylan at his best is the best,” he said, but added, “I don’t know whether he’s been at his best for a while”. To him, the musician’s glory days were right back at the start when he kept things simple and let what he had to say lead the way. “I loved ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’, ‘Girl from the North Country’–that period,” he said, picking out two tracks in particular that he holds up as the gold standard of Dylan songs.
With ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again’ being plucked from the 1966 record Blonde on Blonde and ‘Girl From North Country’ being an early 1963 track from The Freewheelin Bob Dylan, Newman clearly liked the early works. Both tracks are coloured with the distinctive style of his own take on folk, slowing a slight evolution between the two from more traditional melodies into more experiential ones.
On ‘Girl From North Country’, Dylan made a folk song through and through. With the simple guitar-plucked instrumental and a harmonica break, it’s the type of song heard around a campfire or on the road. It’s the kind of poetic working man music that Dylan made when he started, representing hoards of guitar-slinging men everywhere with awe-inspiring but accessible tracks. That’s what made it so effective and made him so quickly be adopted as the new leader of folk, as he was able to boil big messages or vivid emotions into simple and understandable words and onto a catchy song. Thanks to their universal and relatable energy, Dylan’s biggest and best-known tracks come from these early days.
There is still some of that on ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again’, but by Blonde On Blonde, his sound was beginning to expand. The Electric Dylan controversy had just happened when he arrived at the Newport Folk Festival with a Fender Telecaster strapped to him. But the 1966 record feels like the end of his breakout era and the final goodbye to that original Dylan the world loved. As his fame and success only soared, there’s a sense of the end of innocence on the album, as from then on, he would become a reclusive, tricky star and cast off the folk scene for bigger things.
But while Newman might only have loved Dylan’s early works, Dylan loved Newman right back. He doesn’t hand out praise often, but he offered a fair amount to his fellow musician, stating, “He’s gonna write a better song than most people who can do it. You know, he’s got that down to an art. Now Randy knows music. He knows music”.