Going his own way …

… About Last Night | Missing link. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I’m surprised in retrospect that Bob Dylan didn’t make a deeper mark on me back then, but it wasn’t until after I became an adult that I grasped his significance. He was, as Donald Fagen has rightly said, the most influential songwriter of his time: “Before Bob, no one in the pop medium had ever used that breadth of subject matter or surrealistic and dream language.” Perhaps I simply found him too late: the bomb had already gone off. By 1968 everybody was loud, and all of the best songwriters had long since learned Dylan’s elliptical lessons. And because I approached rock both as an eager listener and as a budding young executant who put a premium on vocal and instrumental polish, his rough-hewn style didn’t speak to me.