Jeff Slate is a New York City-based songwriter and
journalist. His writing can be found in the Wall Street Journal, Esquire and
Rolling Stone, among others. He wrote
the liner notes for the Dylan Boxed Set More Blood More Tracks. At the World of Bob Dylan Symposium in May
2019 which I attended his interview of Roger McGuinn. He recently
raised controversy by stating that Paul Simon will
only be a historical footnote to Bob Dylan.
I will list here two comments that I found about this:
Sean
Ross is a longtime journalist covering the radio industry for Billboard,
R&R and others. He is Edison Research’s Vice President of Music and
Programming. He wrote a column
comparing the radio airplay of Bob Dylan with Paul Simon (with or without Art
Garfunkel). He also states “Paul
Simon/Simon & Garfunkel had more and bigger hit singles than Bob Dylan.
Simon had 11 songs that made the year-end top 100; Dylan had three. “Knockin’
on Heaven’s Door” didn’t make 1973’s year-end chart.” Please read the entire column for his
insights.
Dan
Epstein is an award winning journalist, pop culture historian, and avid
baseball fan who has written for Rolling Stone, SPIN, Men’s Journal, the Los
Angeles Times, USA Today, MOJO, Guitar World, Revolver, LA Weekly and dozens of
other publications. He wrote an
excellent essay in The
Forward about this controversy. I
leave it up to my readers to evaluate the details. He states “Bob Dylan doesn’t need to have his
already-vast achievements further burnished by a writer envisioning him as the
last man standing amid the fragrant ashes of late 20th century music history.
What I find most unpalatable here is the framing of popular music as some kind
of zero-sum game, in which there are only winners and losers and only a tiny
handful of said winners will ever mean anything in the long run.”
Here is my take on the issue:
I have enjoyed Bob Dylan and Paul Simon (with or without Art
Garfunkel) immensely since the 1960s. I
have tons of records, tapes, and CDs by them.
Bob Dylan’s strength is as a song writer which is reflected in his
winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. I surmise that many Dylan fans are not
interested in him as a musician and do not listen to him on commercial
radio. Paul Simon has had many more 45
RPM hits than Dylan, but Dylan’s albums have had a much greater impact whether
or not they hit the charts. I don’t like
the way the Dylan is incommunicative with his fans. He will rarely talk to his audience at
concerts. Paul Simon, on the other hand,
spoke to his audience after every number as his did at Madison
Square Garden in September 2018.
Dylan and Simon have great respect for each other as they
toured together in 1999. I enjoyed their
concert at Jones Beach that summer.
Decades and even centuries from now there will be writings
on the popular music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Only wonderful things will be written about Paul
Simon and Bob Dylan. They have both
contributed immensely to our popular culture.
There is no need to quantify their achievements.
