Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan stand as a triptych beacon, a holy trinity of 20th-century songwriting. These three poetic songwriters are also bound by leathery vocals that give the effect of timelessness and cultural poignancy. If one were to be crowned as the master, it would have to be Dylan, mainly because his eminence predated that of Cohen and Waits, whom his work inspired profoundly.
As it transpires, no rivalry was tangible between these gifted singer-songwriters, with each showing admiration for the others across various interviews over the years. For instance, Dylan once honoured Cohen, describing the late singer’s poetic genius, and on another occasion, Waits revealed his undying love for Dylan.
Never a man do dish his words out in half measures, whether in praise or scorn, Waits waxed lyrical in a 2005 conversation with The Guardian. “Suffice it to say Dylan is a planet to be explored,” Waits said, revealing The Basement Tapes as one of his favourite Dylan albums. “For a songwriter, Dylan is as essential as a hammer and nails and a saw are to a carpenter… His journey as a songwriter is the stuff of myth because he lives within the ether of the songs.”
Paying tribute to Dylan following his reception of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, Waits described him as a “master”. Detailing further, he said: “It’s a great day for Literature and for Bob when a Master of its original form is celebrated. Before epic tales and poems were ever written down, they migrated on the winds of the human voice, and no voice is greater than Dylan’s.”
Throughout his catalogue, Waits has spanned a broad range of styles, displaying his instrumental dexterity and passion for blues, jazz, vaudeville and avant-garde music. From his stripped-back roots through Rain Dogs and Mule Variations, the one constant has been a scratchy voicing of intensely poetic verse.
Dylan has generally been less eclectic and sonically adventurous in his catalogue but fosters a touching bond with Waits through his lyrical tongue. While Waits appreciates his friend’s work with The Band on The Basement Tapes, many of his favourite songs hail from Dylan’s zenith through the mid-’60s with albums like Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde.
Speaking to The Los Angeles Times in 1991, Waits listed several of his Dylan highlights. “All of Bob Dylan’s songs are carved from the bones of ghosts and have myth and vision,” he said. The ‘Martha’ singer then listed: “‘Desolation Row’, ‘From a Buick 6’, ‘Ballad in Plain D’, ‘Restless Farewell’, ‘Visions of Johanna’, ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’, ‘Dark Eyes’.”
Waits then picked out a song that has stuck in his mind most prominently through the years as a favourite. “For me, ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ is a grand song,” he said. “It is like Beowulf, and it ‘takes me out to the meadow.’ This song can make you leave home, work on the railroad or marry a Gypsy. I think of a drifter around a fire with a tin cup under a bridge, remembering a woman’s hair. The song is a dream, a riddle and a prayer.” Like most of what Waits loves, that’s a very Kerouacian appraisal.
‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ appeared on Dylan’s 1966 masterpiece double album, Blonde on Blonde, as the epic closer on side four. The song cascades in a manner similar to the previous year’s ‘Desolation Row’ for 11 minutes and 23 seconds. While some suggest that Dylan wrote the elusive song about his one-time muse Joan Baez, a majority seems to agree that the title refers to Dylan’s first wife, Sara Lownds. Alas, the result is a lovelorn masterpiece all the same.
