The Best Bob Dylan Road Trips Songs According To A Bob Dylan Expert

Maybe you’ve noticed. Bob Dylan is having a moment. A Complete Unknown, the film starring Timothée Chalamet as the songwriter, debuted on Christmas Day prompting rave reviews, eight Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture), more than $62.3 million (and still counting) at the box office and a gig for its star as host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live. Author, music journalist, historian and folk-blues guitarist Elijah Wald wrote Dylan Goes Electric!, the book the James Mangold-directed film is based on. It’s one of more than a dozen books he has authored including his latest, Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories. For the November / December issue of Wildsam Magazine, we asked Wald, the brightest Dylan historian we know, to give us a playlist of Dylan’s best road trip songs. Here’s what he came up with. 

"I've got an odd five," Wald says of his Dylan list. "My book was really about who he was and the decisions he made as a singer, guitarist and performer. There are things I would listen to on a road trip, and that's much more about the feel and the propulsiveness of his guitar playing and energy than about the lyrics."

"It's actually one that Dylan didn't write. It’s one he adapted for his first album. His source was a Mississippi Delta guitar player named Tommy McClennan. It's based on the guitar lick from The Everly Brothers' “Wake Up Little Susie.” He's already doing that fusion of folk, blues and rockabilly that people talk about as special later."

"WICHITA," (UNRELEASED)

"He's leaving Wichita hitchhiking. It's vaguely based on, I think, some Muddy Waters stuff. But basically it's his own blues and has a great guitar part."

"There's just a power to the band, to the singing, an energy. The police siren and the whole thing. I love that."

"It's in the title, the traveling thing. I think he has always said that that record sounded more like what he heard in his head than any other record he ever made. And it's just amazing. If that song is on the jukebox someplace, I punch it up."

"He's creating this world where he's down South. It's the flowers and fishing on the pond, the whole thing. It's his most place-conscious, most evocative song in that sense for me."