Dylan and Stratocasters: completely random thought

For me, I don’t think Dylan has ever been a great player, not like say Stephen Stills or Neil Young to name two.

Also he is a roots guy and electric guitars and playing with a band came after his success at other things and he had to work at that a lot.

He has been proud of “Don’t Think Twice…” for the fingerpicking. I like Hard Rain because of the open strings and full sound with only him and his guitar.

His great guitaristic talent was in his arrangements for a solo folksinger with a voice that many found laughable at the time, but that he turned into the voice of the age, and a template for a million others that came after. You have to have created a guitar/voice synthesis at a very rarefied level to do that. I think the movie Don’t Look Back illustrates the best of him as a guitarist.

Yes I like the folk singing Dylan best.

Dylan is playing the rhythm guitar on electric on “Like a Rolling Stone,” but generally speaking, the flashy electric stuff is his sidemen. He’s an expressive guitar player but not a technically advanced one — the arrangements on his nineties “folk cover” albums are often catchy (Google a song called “Broke Down Engine”) while not being all that difficult. Historically, if you hear an acoustic on a Dylan track, it’s him; the one exception that leaps to mind is “Blind Willie McTell,” which is Mark Knopfler (the recording was more or less a demo anyway). Since his arthritis has gotten worse, Dylan doesn’t play much guitar, so I think the guitar on his last few releases are probably the work of his band members.