Mutiny! ‘World’s Worst Singer’ at his greatest!

What’s all this about? Bob can’t sing?

DYLAN, THE MAN WITH A VOICE THAT IS A-CHANGIN’ STILL…

As the man with the blues-iest rasp ever – the mad bad beautiful Jim Morrison – would have said today: “Shut up and give the ol’ singer some man…”

For 60 years now I have listened to family, friends, foes, colleagues, pundits and the plain musically bereft saying: “I like his songs but he can’t sing can he?”

And for all of those decades I have gone to war over the mastery of his vocals … and I say here and now Bob Dylan is the true minister of sound!

For one of those decades I presented a radio show called The Trip (The Trip is about to find a new home on this site soon).

In it we had a section called The World’s Worst Singer … and we played ol’ Grandpa Bob’s best vocals ever, like the beautiful high croon of Pretty Saro, the metered passion of The Man in Me and Sign on the Window, the magnificently soaring live version of I Believe in You from the 70s… the heartbreaking soul-searching of Blood on the Tracks and the old croaking riverboat captain of Tempest.

Then of course there are the songs on Triplicate where he crackles like a cool breeze in the night… and then some of the greatest live rock performances ever.

Bob himself said this at an award ceremony a few years ago:

“Critics have been giving me a hard time since Day One. Critics say I can’t sing. I croak. Sound like a frog.

“Why don’t critics say that same thing about Tom Waits? Critics say my voice is shot. That I have no voice. Why don’t they say those things about Leonard Cohen? Why do “I get special treatment? Critics say I can’t carry a tune and I talk my way through a song. Really? I’ve never heard that said about Lou Reed. Why does he get to go scot-free? … Slur my words, got no diction.

“Have you people ever listened to Charley Patton or Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters? … “Why me, Lord?”

Well, I believe there have been three leading lights in the grand influencers of modern music … Elvis, Frank and Bob.

Here he performs Warren Zevon’s Mutineers in a beautifully nuanced live performance from 2002 …

Tell us what you think in the box below!

Can Dylan sing? I say yes – and more than that, he is unique!

#bobdylan #worldsworst #worldsbest #warrenzevon #elvis #frank #leonardcohen #tomwaits #loureed #prettysaro