> Well, you know, some people speak of Dylan as if he were the kind of
musician that Johnson was -- the sort that you could listen to a million
times and still feel like you could hear it a million times more, like
you could never get to the bottom of it. And Dylan, evokes that
greatness but doesn't fulfill it -- that's why words like "poseur" and
"simulation" come up for me when I think of Dylan.
Well, Dylan has some "disadvantages" compared to Johnson. We know a lot about Dylan, but only a little about Johnson. Dylan is still continuing a long career full of studio and live recordings, but Johnson only had a brief studio career and no known live recordings. Dylan was famous in his time, but Johnson wasn't. Dylan has recorded with a wide variety of musicians and in a wide variety of arrangements, but Johnson had only himself.
Johnson, being fixed in a distant time and place and a limited output, is a blank slate into which we can project ourselves, while Dylan, despite all his changeability, is more a Rorschach blot than a mirror.
(It's not just Johnson's musicianship that makes him great--his songwriting plays at least as large a part. Listening to John Hammond, Jr. do Johnson is one of the few public performances that has made me cry.)
> He most certainly did brilliantly encapsulate a great deal of fabulous sixties angst. True.
He's got nearly as much great work post-sixties--Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks, Desire, Love and Theft are all solid beginning to end, and I've yet to give Time Out of Mind a truly good listening--as he does great sixties work. I've come to prefer the later material to those classic sixties angst records. I came late to Blonde on Blonde, and I'm still playing it a lot, but the others are not so much in my ears any more.