On May 20th, 2025, Jawbone Press will release Decade of Dissent – How 1960’s Bob Dylan Changed The World by longtime author and journalist Sean Egan. Having written and edited dozens of books on the subject of The Rolling Stones, The Small Faces, Punk, the lives of songwriters, and more, Egan has also amassed quite a store of interviews over the years, contributing to Billboard, Rolling Stone, Record Collector, Shindig!, and more. Interviews that Egan conducted a number of years ago on the subject of Bob Dylan’s 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited have always remained in his archive waiting for some wider form of publication, and they eventually became the core of his new book.
A lifelong fan of Bob Dylan’s work, and with decades of work in music journalism to add to his perspective, Egan has constructed quite a plausible, perhaps even self-evident thesis that Bob Dylan’s tendency to do things “first” in his early career laid down a pattern for our expectations from popular music, and from celebrities today. But as we move further from that time period of the 1960s, it gets harder for us to see just how groundbreaking Dylan was amid all the trends that seem so normal to us now. I spoke with Sean Egan about his lifelong curiosity about Bob Dylan and how the portrait he uncovers for Decade of Dissent might remind us how complex his musical and cultural legacy has been.
I think a phenomenon we witness is how stories about prominent musicians, like Bob Dylan, get retold over and over and change through time. For that reason, I really appreciated your book, because it takes us back and takes a closer look at his persona in the 60s.
Peoples’ memories are fragmenting, too, of course, as time passes. Sometimes a journalist might be better informed, simply because he’s done the research recently, than the people who actually lived through the experience.
Does your interest in writing about Dylan go back to interviews that you did as a journalist?
I got into Dylan back in the early 80s. I was interested as a fan, first of all. I wasn’t interested in 80s music at all. I was interested in 60s music. I think I was 16 when I first heard Highway 61 Revisited. At that age, you haven’t heard many albums. 40 years later, I’m still of the opinion that it’s the greatest album ever made, and there’s been a lot of albums released in the interim. That was when I first got into Dylan. Then I grew up, and became a journalist, and had the vast privilege of being able to write about Dylan and get paid for the privilege.
When did you become aware of the whole Folk vs. electric drama with Dylan? Were you aware of that as a teenager?
That whole thing had already played out when I was a teenager, and the great controversy that it was, was a decade and a half in the past. It’s something you only discovered by reading the history books. Then, you come to the realization that what you’ve been listening to your entire life, that would never have happened without Bob Dylan, because of the absolute schism that exists between music of intellectual content, which was Folk music, and music which had no intellectual content, but was very exciting, like Rock ‘n Roll. He bridged the gap between the two. It seems unthinkable today that it would ever be controversial that someone would try to do that, but that’s just the way the world was at the time.
For those of us who have been born after that time, it’s so hard to unthink that association between performing musicians and causes. But I was aware, through my parents’ generation, who were a bit too old to like the Beatles, that their music was all made up of love songs, and there wasn’t really a social conscience to it. I wondered if was almost “Dylan versus the love songs”, at that time.
I would say that it’s “Dylan against the cliché”, because Dylan has written some wonderful love songs, even during his Folk period, like “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” On Highway 61 Revisited, there’s a song, “It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry”, which is a beautiful love song. Of course, in 1975, there’s Blood on The Tracks, which is one of the greatest collections of love songs ever written, albeit love songs from the perspective of a failed relationships. So I wouldn’t say that he was against love songs, he was simply against cliché and a simplistic depiction of the emotion that is most important to most human beings.
That’s a great point. I really agree with you about Blood on the Tracks. If I try to put myself in the mindset of people who didn’t like his protest music and what he was doing in the 60s, I wonder if they were thinking, “Why can’t he just write sweet, entertaining, little songs?”
And that included some folkies, by the way. They didn’t all like Protest music, and there was a bit of controversy in the Folk music scene about what they saw as the didacticism of Dylan’s protest. It wasn’t only Pop fans who had a problem with Dylan’s Protest songs.
There’s the context of the recent film that’s come out, A Complete Unknown, that shows the splits in the Folk community and it talks about the electric transition a little bit. Do you think that people are trying to see him a little more clearly as a man of his time by looking back to the 60s?
Maybe. I should confess that I have not seen the film. I will get around to watching it eventually, but films like that have to take liberties with the narrative. Film narratives need the convenient dovetailing of events, and real life is not as tidy as that. I’m not quite sure why that film is happening now, but it is an anniversary year. It is useful and instructive to go back and realize precisely how revolutionary Dylan was at the time.
The film does take a lot of liberties to create an arc. It does more about the relationship between Folk and Rock ‘n Roll than people probably expected.
Well, you have to set that up, in a way. We should point out that Dylan started out as a Rock ‘N Roller back in Minnesota. He was a true child of Rock ‘n Roll. He loved Little Richard, for instance. There does seem to be a certain mercenary motivation to him going to folk, especially when he got to New York. He’s even said that he was motivated, not necessarily by money, but by success, in writing Protest songs. Of course, his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, was left-wing and a very big influence on him. But he also genuinely loved Folk music. You can’t have that much knowledge about Folk and such a vast repertoire without being a true lover of Folk music.
Something that I didn’t realize, but I learned from your book, was that he had interacted with a lot of people back in Minnesota who were impoverished. And that this happened through the job that he had at his father’s store, doing repossession of furniture.
Yes, that’s what he hated most in the world, according to his first girlfriend, Echo Helstrom. His father had a furniture store, and one of the jobs that his dad gave him at the furniture store was, when they couldn’t keep up repayments, Dylan had the grisly task of going along with another employee, knocking on the door, and taking back the furniture. He hated that so much. Echo felt that that’s where a lot of his sympathy for the underprivileged came from.
To see people face-to-face like that, to come into their homes, seems like it would leave an impression.
To see the humiliation of poverty. You can hear it in his songs on the protest albums, like The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and Times They Are a Changin’. They are absolutely infused with that compassion and sympathy. You can’t really fake that.
That was always a question in my mind, how he seemed to authentic on those songs, when the general short-hand public opinion about him was that he really invented himself as a folkie for commercial reasons. That story changes my mind, and I think people have underestimated him.
In a way, he’s got himself to blame for giving comments over the years in which he’s said that he jumped on a bandwagon. The two things are not exclusive, of course. You can be bandwagon-jumping and be genuinely motivated by compassion for the underprivileged.
Your thesis in this book seems to be that, in retrospect, we can see that he was the prototype for a lot of the patterns in our society. And that we’ve now erased that line of connection to the point where we don’t acknowledge that he had that role. Is that a fair assessment?
The thesis of the book is, essentially, that he was the foremost figure in music in the 1960s, which meant a lot more then than it means today. Because music now is just one small part of the entertainment industry, and one small aspect of the socio-political scene. But music was the meeting place for young people in the 1960s, and people in the 60s were desirous of a new world order in the way that no previous generation had been. And he was their figurehead.
He didn’t sell anything like the number of records that The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, or even The Dave Clark Five sold, but he stood head and shoulders above them in terms of the perception of being a figure of wisdom, insight, and social criticism. And he kept doing it, on and on, throughout the 60s, first by pretty much inventing the whole Protest song scene. Joan Baez has spoken about how she wanted to sing Protest songs before Bob Dylan came along, but modern, contemporary ones didn’t exist. Folk ones, maybe, but not ones of the youthful age.
And after the Protest songs, with Another Side of Bob Dylan, he pretty much invented the modern love song. He did a whole album of songs, most of them love songs, and they spoke about relationships in a way that was not banal. They were frank, unlike songs previously. Then, of course, he goes Rock ‘n Roll, and gets a band behind him, and suddenly, you’ve got Rock ‘n Roll songs with socio-political content, and all sorts of things that no one had thought that Rock music could convey before.
Then, after that period, he retreats to the country, and becomes an accidental revolutionary with The Basement Tapes, whereby he writes these incredibly weird, arcane, quite endearing, and quite horny songs, and gets The Band, previously The Hawks, to back him on them. Those were never intended for commercial release, but they circulate among the Rock aristocracy because he wants cover versions from them. Then the Rock aristocracy decides that the Psychedelic route that they’d been taking in 1967 was less valuable than this musty, down-home sound that he’d got on these demos. That created its own revolution, and John Wesley Harding was a variant of that.
When you look back closely at his material during those years, what are you most surprised by?
I think there are stunning lyrics, and something that gets overlooked is that he’s a great singer. A lot of people at the time said that he couldn’t sing, but “Like a Rolling Stone” might be the greatest vocal performance of all time. He’s also a very good harmonica player, which doesn’t get discussed.
Yes! You’re right!
He’s put down some beautiful harmonica work. On “It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry” has some lovely harmonica on that. He doesn’t play in the traditional manner. He blows instead of sucking in, but he manages to wrest pleasing sounds from the instrument, and that’s all that really counts.
Do you think that the respect of his contemporaries and younger peers helped keep him respected up to now? How important was his community in keeping that reputation alive? With The Basement Tapes, he was almost like a songwriter’s songwriter.
There was a slightly awkward period in the early 70s, where he was perceived as a has-been, partly because he wasn’t making any music, and there were about three and a half years where he hadn’t released anything except soundtracks, really. People were beginning to say, in print, “He’s a has-been.” He was also a legend, so in 1974, when he stunned the world by coming back for a tour, when he hadn’t toured since 1966, the tickets sold like hot cakes.
He released the album, Planet Waves, which was nice, but nothing like his 60s work. But his legend assured that the tour sold out. Of course, the next year, he was the very first artist of his generation to prove that he could still do it by releasing Blood on the Tracks, which was as good as anything he’d ever released before.
That was the beginning of the long-lived Rock star.
That was the first time that anyone in his cohort had proven that their glory days were anything but in the past.
