‘Every Dylan song could be improved’: is perfection possible, or even desirable?

Much art, from Bob Dylan to Robert Frank, derives its greatness from its flaws. But sporting perfection is a whole different ball game

I’m not one to boast but on a recent Sunday morning I achieved perfection. To be precise – and there is no perfection without precision – I was half of something perfectly achieved. On the second version of the song Love Sick – which only saw the light of day last year as part of the continuing series of official Bootleg releases – Bob Dylan says he’s “struggling, striving / For perfection”. Proof of the struggle and strife is the way that this declaration was absent from the first take and deleted from the subsequent version selected for the album Time Out of Mind (1997). Despite what he claims, Dylan is not – and never has been – interested in perfection. He’s always been plunging on to the next line, the next verse, the next song. Yes, he looks forward, in another song, to the day when he’ll paint his masterpiece but on several occasions potential masterpieces were abandoned – She’s Your Lover Now, I’m Not There – because other imperfect masterpieces were soon jostling for attention.

Dylan has written more great songs than anyone in history but a condition of that greatness is that he was not hung up on perfecting any of them. Every version of every Dylan song could be improved. For each enhancement made to a song’s lyrics there’s a corresponding loss. He throws in wonderful lines, chucks out great lines and leaves terrible ones intact. His constant tampering with the lyrics is evidence not of perfectionism but of a restless hunger that is in some ways its opposite. In this respect he’s similar to the photographer Robert Frank, who said that a book of photographs by Hermann Eidenbenz (in whose studio he worked) “put me off perfection for life”.