Album: Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
Year: 1966
. . .
How do you deal with a problem such as Bob Dylan?
That’s gotta be a question that all of the other major 60’s songwriters had to be asking themselves as he put out one mindblowing album after another in the mid-1960s. Some, like Brian Wilson & Pete Townshend, totally ignored him. Others, like Lou Reed and Neil Young & even Ray Davies, leaned into the freedom he suddenly provided.
And the Beatles and Stones stole from him a bit and then went on to do their own things.
And Paul Simon? Perhaps because Dylan might have been one of the Greenwich Village folkies who made fun of Simon & Garfunkel in the early days, he wrote one of the biggest, broadest Dylan parodies ever recorded, 1967’s “A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara’d into Submission)”, which starts the satire with the title and never lets up.
