“I didn’t like folk”: the song that made Bryan Ferry realise Bob Dylan was a genius
Roxy Music emerged in 1972, joining the glam-rock wave with a striking leopard print and eyeliner visage. Underneath the makeup and glitter, the band distinguished itself with instrumental nuance, initially fuelled by Brian Eno’s synth stylings and the unique songwriting whim of Bryan Ferry.
Ferry’s awe-inspiring vocal range and sensual vibrato could often distract the listener from the beauty of some of his lyrics. Like his glam-era peers David Bowie and Marc Bolan, Ferry liked to focus on the bizarre, often emblazoning his imagery with salacious flourishes and macabre fantasy.
‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’ springs to mind as one of Ferry’s early highlights. The song creeps along with an eerie croon as Ferry’s narrator dotes on a sex doll under a prevalent theme of materialism. “Inflatable doll / Lover ungrateful / I blew up your body / But you blew my mind,” Ferry sings at the start of the fourth minute before Phil Manzanara’s killer solo riff.
By the time we reached Ferry and Bowie’s golden eras, the musical vanguard seemed so distant from Bob Dylan’s significant heaves in the mid-1960s, but the troubadour’s lyrical command is timeless. Bowie famously honoured his enduring influence in 1971 in his Hunky Dory track ‘Song for Bob Dylan’. Similarly, Ferry made numerous musical tributes to Dylan throughout his career as a solo artist.
In 1973, Ferry recorded a popular cover of ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ as the lead single and opening track for his debut solo album, These Foolish Things. Subsequently, he recorded ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ for Another Time, Another Place, but could never seem to get enough when it came to Dylan covers.
Consequently, Ferry decided to release an entire album dedicated to Dylan’s songwriting in 2007, Dylanesque. Discussing why he chose to take the project on, Ferry explained that he felt Dylan’s songs suited his ageing vocal range. “You might be able to hit higher notes when you’re younger, but when you’re older, you can hit fewer and lower notes with more conviction,” he told Magnet Magazine in 2007.
Ferry noted that most of the album was simple to record, apart from “‘All I Really Want To Do’ because there you’re covering two people – not only Dylan but the Byrds’ version. I wanted to nod both ways.” Primarily, Ferry chose to record Dylanesque because he’s one of the songwriter’s biggest fans. “The material is so strong,” he concluded. “How can it not work?”
Indeed, Dylanesque “worked” very well. The album received predominantly warm reviews as a discerning collection of covers that celebrate a lifetime of songwriting influence. Ferry remained faithful to the emotional rhetoric of the original versions while impressing his own vision.
Ferry chose songs from several chapters of Dylan’s career but focussed primarily on the 1960s material, from ‘The Times They Are a-Changin” to ‘All Along the Watchtower’. As a university student in the early ’60s when Dylan was yet to “go electric,” Ferry recalled not being particularly phased by the Dylan hysteria. “You had all these students wandering around with a Dylan album as an accessory,” the Roxy Music singer told The Guardian in 2007. “I was into black American music and I wanted everything to be electric, and I didn’t like folk – a bit tame for me.”
Ferry’s covers of ‘The Times They Are a-Changin” and ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ suggest that he eventually embraced Dylan’s early acoustic phase in retrospect, and we may have one song to thank for that. “I heard ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, and it made an incredible impact, not just on me but on the music itself,” Ferry remembered, “and I realised how clever Dylan was to bring Greenwich Village Beat poetry into rock ‘n’ roll.”
Listen to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, the 1965 song that finally turned Bryan Ferry onto Bob Dylan.