There are important reasons Bob Dylan is remembered as the guy who changed the game. Not Phil Ochs, not Paul Simon.

I think, like relativity and calculus, the job would have gotten done by somebody sooner or later, but Bob is the guy who got it done. Again, not Phil Ochs, not Paul Simon.

You dismiss my interpretation of “Mr. Jones.” But if I’m wrong what are those verses about? The alternative is to say they were wacko surrealism that didn’t mean anything. I think Dylan was a more thoughtful writer than that.

We’ll have to agree to disagree.

I don’t really see your point in terms of influence. They were all writing personal “freed up” songs at that time—almost at exactly the same time—and it is not at all clear to me that Dylan was the leader and they the followers in terms of influence. Each of them was unique in style, and Dylan was certainly unique (and remains unique).

Also, I really don’t get your point about “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” I know that song well—heard it quite early in time—and to me at the time it sounded like a traditional song in the question-and-response folk ballad genre, just a bit more surreal in its lyrics. I saw nothing especially ground-breaking in it at the time. It has the Dylan stamp, for sure, and a lot of images, but it reminded me of old folk songs and still does, particularly “Lord Randall.” And the rain imagery was very much like “What Have They Done to the Rain,” an antiwar song that came out in 1962 and was extremely popular.

Who influenced whom? Who copied whom? Each person was idiosyncratic, and no one sounded like Dylan then OR now. In fact, although Hard Rain was like ballads, etc., it was certainly different, and no one but Dylan could have written it, then or later. His style is very distinctive, of course. Phil Ochs wasn’t just writing nothing like it in 1962, he was never writing anything like it, nor was anyone else. Ochs always wrote lyrics in a more traditional style.

For that matter, take the lyrics of “The Sounds of Silence” by Paul Simon, which he apparently began in 1963. It was quite ground-breaking and derivative of no one, including Dylan, who had written nothing like it at the time. Was Simon the leader, influencing Dylan? As I said, I think the changes in popular music were all happening simultaneously, with various innovations going on at once.

One more thing that was going on at the time with most of these musicians, and which was responsible in part for some of these more freed-up and surreal lyrics: drugs, particularly drugs like pot and LSD but also many others. Far out, “mind-blowing” lyrics became more and more acceptable in general, and even required in order to be cool. This wasn’t Dylan’s doing, of course—it was the atmosphere and the times. And the audiences were receptive to it, because they were using drugs, too (or at least more of them were).

neo: Not really. Cohen’s poetry was hardly experimental. It was rebellious in that Cohen refused to join the avant-garde, the academics or the Beats. It harkened back to the plain speech of William Carlos Williams and the surrealism of Lorca plus Cohen’s own romanticism.

However, Cohen did write his great experimental novel, “Beautiful Losers” which was far more radical than any of his poetry. But “Beautiful Losers” wasn’t published until 1966, after Dylan had already made his key breakthroughs — which isn’t to say Cohen needed Dylan to write “Beautiful Losers.”

When Leonard Cohen left Hydra in Greece because his poetry and novels couldn’t pay the bills, his idea was to become a country-and-western singer to make money. He had had a C&W band in high school. He did not plan on morphing his poetry into the sort of songs Dylan had been writing for years.

Leonard Cohen became Leonard Cohen the songwriter we know and love because he landed in the musical environment of New York City in which Bob Dylan had already done the spadework for visionary poetic songs. Leonard Cohen became a tenant of the Chelsea Hotel about the time Bob Dylan left.

In any event, I use words carefully — as you do. I said Dylan’s breakthrough was to bring artistic freedom to songwriting. That freedom had already been won for poets, painters and novelists.

Dylan raised the bar and most of the important sixties artists responded, including Phil Ochs.

Ochs and Dylan were neck and neck for maybe a year, But find anything like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” in Ochs’s early repertoire .

Dylan wrote “Hard Rain” in 1962. It was his anguish over the Cuban Missile Crisis expressed in charged, biblical/Blakean language. It was one of many signals that Dylan was a songwriter who had broken through to an entirely new level of depth.

Ochs approached that level five years later with “The Crucifixion” in which Ochs merged JFK’s assassination with Christ’s crucifixion.

It’s nothing I can prove like Pythagoras’s Theorem, but I say Phil Ochs would never have written anything like “The Crucifixion” unless Dylan had blazed that trail years before.

Ochs followed Dylan’s lead. He did not copy Dylan’s style.

And Phil Ochs never copied him, he wrote a very different kind of song, even after that.

Although I think your interpretation of the Mr. Jones lyric is a bit far-fetched. But poetry and lyrics that are ambiguous and mysterious lend themselves to that sort of thing, and who knows? Not me.

However, Leonard Cohen was writing poetry of a fairly experimental type years before Dylan was writing lyrics like that, and when Cohen turned to music it was natural for him to write wonderful (and somewhat mysterious and obscure, in many cases) poetry as lyrics. (He had already gained fame in Canada as a poet during the very early 60s.) I happen to prefer his lyrics to Dylan’s, but I don’t expect most people to share that preference.

But something is happening and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.

And it is that, however…

Dylan is such a tricky multilevel guy pushing the limits of song that “Thin Man” can also be read as the horror of a straight guy who blunders into a gay orgy.

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you and then he kneels
He crosses himself and then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice, he asks you how it feels
And he says, “Here is your throat back, thanks for the loan”

And you know something’s happening but you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

For me that’s the best pop music joke I know.

Dylan wrote that in 1965. No one else was writing songs at that level then. Not Phil Ochs, not Lou Reed, not Lennon/McCartney, not Jagger/Richards, not Leonard Cohen.

parker: Yep! VoJ is incredible.

In 1999, Sir Andrew Motion, poet laureate of the UK, listed [Visions of Johanna] as his candidate for the greatest song lyric ever written.

I don’t think Dylan could sustain that intensity and he knew it. Otherwise he would be doing harp music with Jimi and Janis.

Ochs was a wonderful talent, but he was no Picasso. Dylan was.

I didn’t say that Ochs heard and was influenced by “Tambourine Man” and “Gates of Eden” before he wrote “Changes”. I was pointing out how far Dylan had surged ahead of Ochs, who didn’t reach that level complexity until “Pleasures of the Harbor” in 1967.

Ochs was still standing on stage with an acoustic guitar singing protest songs and sensitive guy songs while Dylan was burning it down with an electric guitar, getting booed, and singing, “LIke a Rolling Stone.”

Ochs was a friend and rival of Dylan. Ochs, like the rest of the music world, paid attention to Dylan and Dylan’s progress and, I am saying, generally nfluenced to raise his standards.

I can’t imagine Ochs would ever have gotten to “Crucifiction” on

My point (which I will try to make crystal clear now) is that in their earlier protest songs, the two men were neck and neck, doing approximately the same thing. In their later, non-political songs, no one influenced anyone because their songs were very very different from each other. For example, “Changes” is nothing like “Mr Tambourine Man,” and I certainly don’t see the latter as having influenced the former.

Nor could it have, unless Ochs was privy to “Mr. Tambourine Man” significantly before it was released. Dylan’s song was released in late March of 1965 and recorded the previous January, 1965. Ochs’s song was actually written before that, because Gordon Lightfoot recorded a cover version of “Changes” in November of 1964, although Lightfoot’s album with the Ochs song wasn’t released till 1966. But obviously Ochs’ “Changes” was written earlier than “Mr. Tambourine Man” was recorded and released (although of course we don’t know when Tambourine Man was actually written).

My point is that all these songwriters (and that includes Lightfoot, by the way, who also began writing that sort of personal song in 1964) were writing personal stuff at around the same time, and that none of them were really writing songs that resembled Dylan’s.

Who started it? It was an idea, a movement, whose time had come.