When Bob Dylan started his career, music was about to evolve in a surreal way, breaking free from restraints such as the need for songs to be short or to focus mainly on love in order to reach a wide audience. The Folk Rock musician himself played a major role in that revolution, which later gave rise to many other movements that had a huge impact on both music and culture.
Active in the music business since the late 1950s, Dylan witnessed the rise of many incredible bands and spoke about some of them, including Pink Floyd, the most successful Progressive Rock group of all time.
What is Bob Dylan’s opinion on Pink Floyd
Bob Dylan likes Pink Floyd and already praised their song “Dogs” during a meeting with the band’s guitarist David Gilmour. This happened during the era of Floyd’s “The Delicate Sound of Thunder”,”Concert film released in 1989.
“The second time we met was around the time of ‘The Delicate Sound Of Thunder’. He said (Imitates Bob Dylan perfectly) ‘Hey, I love your record, ‘The Dogs’, man’. I was so thrilled. Not many Pink Floyd fans like this track. But Bob does. So it was OK with me,” David Gilmour told Record Collector magazine in 2003. He had the opportunity to meet Dylan a few times during his career and was happy when he praised Floyd.
The track mentioned by Dylan is one of the most praised from Pink Floyd’s 1977 album “Animals”. The concept was inspired by George Orwell’s classic book “Animal Farm” and remains as one of the greatest Pink Floyd albums.
Bob Dylan was a huge inspiration for Pink Floyd
When his first albums were released in the early 60s, Bob Dylan showed songwriters all over the world that they could write about anything they wanted to. That changed the way musicians wrote their songs and was a huge inspiration to Pink Floyd as well. David Gilmour and Roger Waters have praised Dylan’s career multiple times over the decades. Talking with Howard Stern in 2012, Roger Waters, Pink Floyd main lyricist, said that Dylan’s song “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” changed his life.
“(Bob Dylan’s) ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ changed my life. When I heard that I thought ‘If Bob can do it I can do it’. It’s 20 minutes long, it’s a whole hour and in no way gets dull or boring or anything. You just get more and more and more and grow. It becomes more and more hypnotic the longer it goes on,” Roger Waters said (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage). The musician has already paid tribute to Dylan a couple of times. He played live “Forever Young” and did a studio version for “Knocking On Heaven’s Door”. That version was included on his compilation album “Flickering Flame”, released in 2002.
David Gilmour was also deeply influenced by Dylan when growing up and he was really happy when the American musician started to play the electric guitar. “To me, I was never one of the people who thought Dylan was a monster for going electric. I liked the change. But I must say the power of the young Dylan as the acoustic-playing protest singer- which he’s always denied. But sorry Bob, you were a protest singer.”
David Gilmour continued:
“Just to get his guitar and play to a crowd of people and it’s like an arrow. His words come out and the music. People underestimate his actual musical abilities. And the melodies and the words just shoot out like an arrow. I think he was unbelievable. And is,” David Gilmour said in an interview with The Guardian in 2006. One of his favorite songs by Dylan is “Ballad in Plain D”, released on the 1964 album “Another Side of Bob Dylan”. When talking with BBC Radio 4 in 2003, he chose that track as one of the songs he would take to a desert island. “I’ve lived through a lot of his heavy protest stuff. But this was another side I’m very keen on. This sort of love song approach. He is wonderful,” David Gilmour said.
The song mentioned by Gilmour is 8 minutes and 18 seconds long, making it the longest track on the album. That album also had the songs ‘All I Really Want to Do,’ ‘My Back Pages,’ and ‘It Ain’t Me Babe.
Syd Barrett wrote a song about Bob Dylan
The original Pink Floyd guitarist and singer Syd Barrett, who was sadly fired by the band in the late 1960s after his decline due to mental health issues, was also inspired by Dylan. He even wrote in 1965, the track ‘Bob Dylan Blues,’ which was later recorded in 1970 during his short-lived solo career. But the song didn’t make it to his two albums The Madcap Laughs (1970) and
Barrett (1970), being released only in 2001. The track was included on the compilation “The Best of Syd Barrett: Wouldn’t You Miss Me?”.
The story goes that Barrett wrote the track after attending a Bob Dylan concert in 1964. The chorus of the track “Cause’ I’m a poet, don’t you know it’, and the wind, you can blow it”, is a reference to lyrics from Dylan’s song “I Shall Be Free No. 10”. It was Gilmour who recovered the song from his personal collection at the time. He helped to make those Barrett solo albums as a way to help the musician after being fired by Pink Floyd.
I'm a Brazilian journalist who always loved Classic Rock and Heavy Metal music. That passion inspired me to create Rock and Roll Garage over 6 years ago.
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