"Song for Bob Dylan" is a song written by David Bowie for his 1971 album Hunky Dory. The song parodies Bob Dylan's 1962 homage to Woody Guthrie, "Song to Woody". Yet while Dylan opens with "Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song," Bowie addresses Dylan by his real name saying, "Hear this, Robert Zimmerman, I wrote a song for you."
In the song, Bowie also describes Bob Dylan's voice "like sand and glue" which is similar to how Joyce Carol Oates described it upon first hearing Dylan: "When we first heard this raw, very young, and seemingly untrained voice, frankly nasal, as if sandpaper could sing, the effect was dramatic and electrifying."
Read more about Song For Bob Dylan: History and Recording, Composition and Analysis, Other Releases
Famous quotes containing the words bob dylan, song, bob and/or dylan:
“Don’t matter how much money you got, there’s only two kinds of people: there’s saved people and there’s lost people.”
—Bob Dylan [Robert Allen Zimmerman] (b. 1941)
“Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.”
—Unknown. Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song (l. 11–12)
“It was because of me. Rumors reached Inman that I had made a deal with Bob Dole whereby Dole would fill a paper sack full of doggie poo, set it on fire, put it on Inman’s porch, ring the doorbell, and then we would hide in the bushes and giggle when Inman came to stamp out the fire. I am not proud of this. But this is what we do in journalism.”
—Roger Simon, U.S. syndicated columnist. Quoted in Newsweek, p. 15 (January 31, 1990)
“You don’t need a weatherman
To know which way the wind blows.”
—Bob Dylan [Robert Allen Zimmerman] (b. 1941)