‘Dylan towers over everyone’ Salman Rushdie, Kate Tempest and more pay tribute to Bob Dylan

The last couple of stanzas of Mr Tambourine Man opened my eyes and ears to the idea that music and poetry could exist together: Take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind / Down the foggy ruins of time / Far past the frozen leaves / The haunted frightened trees / Out to the windy bench / Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow. I heard them when I was 14 and they opened my mind to the possibility of pop being something more than background music. I was a Saturday boy in a record shop at the time, and in my lunch hour I would sit in the listening booth with a sticky bun listening to music I was into singer-songwriter stuff like Simon & Garfunkel. One day, the guy who ran the shop decided to spin me Bob Dylans Greatest Hits the original one, with the book on the cover. Mr Tambourine Man blew my mind. Whenever anyone asks me to give an example of poetry not poetry in music, but poetry, period I always go back to that. He introduces Blakean imagery into rock music and becomes in one bold step the psychedelic Woody Guthrie, which is how people still think of him. To hear that was like uncovering a lost parchment it opened so many doors for me at the time as someone who was writing poetry and wanted to be a songwriter.

Emmy the Great: Dylans lyrics were a new world, with windows constantly opening

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In my early 20s I had a group of friends I would see every weekend. They used to sing Tangled Up in Blue around a piano, and I used to try and keep up with the lyrics. Whenever we got to the line written by an Italian poet in the 13th century, I knew where I was. Dylans lyrics were a new world, with windows constantly opening inside it. I keep all his stories with me and they remind me of my own:

Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the 13th century
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
Tangled up in blue

Billy F Gibbons of ZZ Top: Theres something in the air that brings Dylans words to mind

Theres something in the air that seems to permeate the atmosphere far and wide which brings a couple of Dylans lines to mind namely, Dont Think Twice, Its All Right.

Well, it aint no use to sit and wonder why, babe|
Even you dont know by now
And it aint no use to sit and wonder why, babe
Itll never do somehow
But I wish there was somethin you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
But we never did too much talking anyway
But dont think twice, its all right.

Guy Garvey: To finish a song with I said that is so cheeky

My favourite lyric has to be: Some of the people can be all right part of the time / But all of the people cant be all right all of the time / I think Abraham Lincoln said that Ill let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours / I said that from Talkin World War III Blues. To finish a song with I said that is so cheeky and clever and confident and present and full of youthful rancour. It lodged in my heart the first time I heard it. And at that moment so did Bob.

Andrew OHagan: Workingmans Blues #2 has lines as good as anything in American poetry

The Nobel committee plays a strong game when it comes to subtle political assertion. Seamus Heaney used to call it the Stockholm intervention. From their field of candidates, they have a habit of finding the writer whose sublime virtues are most necessary to the times, and essential to the place. Thus, did Czesaw Miosz win the prize in 1980, after years of being banned in Poland, in the same month as the the trade union Solidarity was founded. It wasnt planned, but it wasnt a coincidence either. The award to Heaney came, too, at a perfect moment, when his grace and tolerance, sifted over a lifetime of beautiful work and ethical depth, was manna to Ireland in 1995. And so, the award to Bob Dylan is a great boon to lovers of fair-minded compassion, fellowship, and common decency, which step forward at the perfect moment to do battle with the egotistical, bigoted, greedy, misogynistic spitefulness of Trumps America. Hes a lyricist of genius and Im off to play Workingmans Blues #2, with lines as good as anything in American poetry:

In the dark I hear the night birds call
I can feel a lovers breath
I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall
Sleep is like a temporary death.

Jonas Mekas, film-maker

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It was about time! Dylans lyrics to his songs for decades now, by poets especially, have been considered as great poetry. Its not only poetry: its poetry that reminds us that poetry is not only whats published in the poetry books. Same as in cinema: some of the most inspiring cinema is outside of the industrial cinema.

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h2>Elijah Wald, author of <a href=”https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/10/dylan-goes-electric-elijah-wald-review-when-bob-took-stratocaster-newport-folk-festival” data-link-name=”in” body link” class=”u-underline”>Dylan Goes Electric!

Ive always had mixed feelings about the people who call Dylan a poet, or call his songs literature, because songs tend to reach far more people, and often touch them more deeply, than poetry or novels. Dylan transformed the role of lyrics in popular music, and it is hard to argue that any writer of the last 50 years, in any form, has been more influential. But millions of people, all around the world, have loved Dylans recordings without understanding the words. So I think the honour is deserved, but I hope he brings his band to Stockholm.