Bob Dylan Can't Sing?

I beg to differ

In 1988, a boyish Bruce Springsteen approached the podium at the annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony to induct a man of legendary status, the poet laureate of Rock and Roll, Bob Dylan. In his introduction, he recounts the first time he ever heard Dylan on the radio — while riding in the car with his mother. The punchline of his story is that his mother commented flatly, “He can’t sing”. But perhaps Bruce Springsteen need not mention his mother, for everybody knows Bob Dylan can’t sing — or can he?

To this day, whenever rock and roll fogies hear Dylan mentioned, they inevitably comment “Dylan is a great songwriter, but he just can’t sing”. I have heard this exact phrasing dozens upon dozens of times.

Technically, I believe this is clumsily worded and untrue. To listen to every one of Bob Dylan’s 39 studio albums, 12 live albums, and dozens of bootleg recordings, one would be hard-pressed to find a note that falls flat or sharp. Bob Dylan hits every note he intends to, every time he sings. From a purely academic standpoint, Bob Dylan is not tone-deaf. When people say Dylan can’t sing, what they mean to say is that they do not like the sound of his voice. But why?

It was in March 1962 that Dylan’s first studio album, the eponymously titled Bob Dylan, was released to the public. It was not a commercial success. Looking back, it was clear that Dylan was still quite heavily influenced by the humble styling of singer/songwriters like Pete Seeger, Hank Williams, but, most notably, the folk legend Woody Guthrie. For the most part, folk singers are not necessarily known for having great voices, but instead are known for their authentic vocals. In this way, Dylan’s vocals echoed the sounds of America’s heartland — dusty, nasally, unpretentious, and untrained.

On the album Bob Dylan, he records his take on a folk standard that many had already recorded — “House of the Rising Sun”, which was thrust into pop culture fame when it was recorded by The Animals just two years later. In Dylan’s take of the song, he puts on his best Guthrie impression. His voice wanes in and out of focus in a kind of sheepish talk/whisper. One thinks of moonshine, work boots, cigarettes, faded denim. At just 20 years of age, Dylan sounds a little worn-out already, until the third verse, where his shyness fades and the whispering evolves into howling heroism as he shouts out the cautionary tale that was born out of the dirt roads of Louisiana. He sounds determined in this particular recording, but not necessarily all too confident about it. It wasn’t that Dylan was not a good singer, he was just not very experienced with studio recording or the logistics of singing into a studio microphone. Whatever the case, Bob Dylan’s first studio album was dismissed as a misstep for Columbia Records, and few expected to hear much more from the Woody Guthrie wannabe from Minnesota.

Bob Dylan as Woody Guthrie. Image: Dylanesco

Two years and two albums later, it was evident that Dylan had proved the naysayers dead wrong. It was clear to many that the world would be hearing quite a lot from this young man. While he was still steeped in the acoustic folk tradition, he clearly had grown into himself. No longer would he pose in his photographs like Woody Guthrie. No longer would he wear dusty, humble clothes fit for a chimney sweep. New York looked good on Dylan. He started to wear black. He had lost some baby fat. He became slightly edgier, hipper, more himself, and instead of tired, reworked folk tunes, original recordings would dominate his albums, allowing Dylan’s inventive lyricism to shine — putting him at the forefront of not only the raging civil rights movement but in the collective conscious of political, philosophical and poetic inquiry.

In this way, Dylan’s work not only spoke of calls to justice and truth to power, but his voice also sounded like it. At a time when the recording industry had learned the profitability of beautiful faces, polished voices, and superficial lyricism, Bob Dylan’s voice and overall aura seemed untainted by the trappings of industry success. In 1965, Dylan recorded “Like a Rolling Stone”, widely regarded as his best, if not most popular song. On the recording, the tone of Dylan’s voice is slightly bitter, but not begrudging — ultimately wise, but still youthful. Indeed, a little salty, but still salt of the earth. In the style of many of his recordings, the vocals on “Like a Rolling Stone” seem to be told as the truth should always be told — unstifled, off the cuff, unstressed, and uninhibited by pop culture expectations. Dylan had indeed broken through the industry standard of polished rhetoric and into his very own quintessence — a vocalist that just tells the truth in colorful and abstract lyrics, with a voice that was and is truthful in its bare nakedness.

In 1966, Bob Dylan was not only on fire creatively, but he was in hot water, stylistically. Of course, he was. He betrayed the folk revival movement by plugging in an electric guitar. Ironically, Bob Dylan had played the electric guitar plenty of times before, back in high school band days. But if Woody Guthrie’s acoustic machine kills fascists, what does Bob Dylan’s electric current kill? To many, it spelled the death of the folk revival movement, because its long-standing hero had put down the instrument of rebellion. But nevertheless, in 1966, throughout his European tour with The Band backing him up, Dylan played loudly through howls and outbursts from the crowd that came to see him play. They were not happy with Dylan, but he played the songs anyway. This is a voice of a different kind — one of personal integrity and artistic expression.

Gypsy in rags. Image: adorocinema.com

In the 1970s, Bob Dylan had undergone another change in his demeanor. Once again, he reinvented himself through a stylistic overhaul. During the Rolling Thunder Review tour, he had swapped his black velvet smoking jackets and polka dot shirts and behaved more like a traveling gypsy. Wearing white face paint and a wide-brimmed hat adorned with flowers, Dylan was perhaps more in touch with his folk origins, but in a new and abstract way. His voice was still a bit nasally, but in this iteration, Dylan was more of a barbarian. On tracks like “Isis” and “Sara”, Bob Dylan’s vocalization was gruff, a little smoky, gritty, and as always, Dylan spoke out in his concerts and, even though it was all done behind a white “mask”, he was still speaking directly to his audience. However abstract and strange his masked performances felt, Dylan never gave up his folk roots. Throughout the Rolling Thunder Review, Bob Dylan gave performances in small humble venues, and the song “Hurricane” — a call for justice for the wrongly accused boxer Rubin Carter, showed that Dylan did not completely abandon the main tenants of the civil rights movements and his concerns about racial injustice. Face paint or not, Dylan, after all, was still Dylan.

Like many artists, the 1980s was full of missteps. If you were a popular artist before the eighties, it is likely that your work could seem like it was struggling to keep up and to remain relevant. Bob Dylan was certainly no exception, and many still regard the 1980s as the decade of Dylan’s worst published work. Some, astonishingly, regard it as his best. Similar to Mick Jagger in a sense, Dylan became somewhat of a caricature of himself. His gruff voice of the 1970s had returned to its whiny nasally origin but in an almost cartoonish way. He wore a long earring on one ear, he tucked his tights inside his cowboy boots, he indulged in black eyeliner. His music had turned overtly religious, and the tone of his albums was often compared to Vegas lounge music. Essentially, he had become a gospel singer.

Dylan himself admitted he put out bad albums “on purpose.” From a commercial and creative standpoint, Dylan had seemed to cement himself as a has-been. He was seen as an older rocker of a by-gone era whose work and words were once shot out of a canon, were now shot out of a water pistol. While the hardcore Dylan fan might get a kick out of his collaborations with the Grateful Dead and his contributions to the supergroup the Travelling Wilburys, looking back, it was clear that the current incarnation of Dylan was not producing work that could be realistically held up to his creative output in ’60s or ’70s.

Although albums such as Empire Burlesque and Knocked Out Loaded had noteworthy songs in their track listings, they were not commercially successful and critics were not generally favorable. Oh Mercy, on the other hand, was considered a comeback at the time but is largely forgotten in the bigger picture of Dylan’s career as a whole. In 1985, Columbia Records released Biograph, a comprehensive 53 track box set consisting of Dylan’s most notable hit songs, and some previously unreleased rarities. While the release of Biograph may serve as a reminder of Dylan’s great oeuvre and a testament to his status as a living legend, few could imagine that his strongest work was anywhere but behind him. But once again, these doubters would be proven wrong.

Following the 1980s, Bob Dylan had waged one of the greatest comebacks in rock n roll history in the following decade. But this was not an instantaneous feat. The album Under the Red Sky was deemed by most critics, an even Dylan himself, as a whopping failure. According to Dylan, the production was overworked, the songs were sloppily written, and he himself was very disillusioned with the recording industry as a whole. Following this album, Dylan would record World Gone Wrong and Good As I Been to you, both of which were exclusively comprised of traditional folk songs, or mostly traditional folk songs, respectively. The production and recording of these two albums may have lead many to believe that Dylan was no longer capable of penning lyrics as moving as the ones found in albums of the past.

Perhaps Dylan was suffering from writer’s block, perhaps the ink well in which Dylan dipped his pen had run dry. Whatever the critics thought, whatever assumptions about Dylan’s identity remained, it is no doubt that any reservations about Dylan as a creative giant would soon be hushed following the release of Dylan’s Time Out of Mind in 1997. Earning a mostly favorable reception among the critics, the album was also commercially successful as a whole. Time Out of Mind featured some of Dylan’s greatest lyrical, vocal, and recording work to date. The tracks “Lovesick” and “Cold Irons Bound” featured Dylan’s vocals at their most grizzly, most haunting, and most near death. The song “Lovesick” was performed at the 1998 Grammy awards ceremony and “Cold Irons Bound” earned Dylan a Grammy that year. The album as a whole was hailed by some as his greatest album to date, was listed in the Rolling Stone’s Greatest 500 albums of all time, earned Dylan three Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, and also went Platinum, remaining on the bestseller charts for 29 weeks.

The release of Time Out of Mind put Dylan back in the favor of his most dismissive critics, but would also later be revealed as a necessary, albeit first step, in the remarkable work of Dylan’s later years. To hear Bob Dylan’s gruff voice, almost trembling with heartache, but still stoic in its resilience, is one of the highlights of his live performances to date. It’s still pretty cool, even now.

People say Bob Dylan can’t sing, but it ain’t true. He hits every note he intends to. But alas, sometimes the voice of Dylan is just nails to a chalkboard to some people. In his earlier recordings, perhaps he was just too nasal for some people to bear. In his later years, perhaps too gruff for easy listening. For myself, the voice of Bob Dylan is forever synonymous with authenticity.

To date, Bob Dylan’s songs are some of the most covered in music history.
Entire albums consisting of Dylan’s tunes recorded by artists wanting to sing his truths have been released, and there is not a serious recording artist that has not wanted to be at least a footnote in his catalog. But no matter how hard they try, nobody has been able to out-Dylan Dylan.

Many people say Bob Dylan’s voice is hard to hear — but then again, so is the truth. Bob Dylan can sing, and that’s that.

Thanks for all the hard work, Bobby. Below is my tribute to the man in song.

Judson Vereen sings Dylan’s “John Brown” at the Hotel Utah in San Francisco, 2011. Courtesy of Slim Critchlow.

JSV