DYLAN: "ROLL ON JOHN" A TRIBUTE TO JOHN

AP

The most intriguing song on Tempest, Bob Dylan's 35th studio album, isn't the 14-minute title track about the sinking of the Titanic. It's the album's closer, "Roll on John," a tribute to John Lennon. "Shine your light, move it on," goes Dylan's refrain. "You burned so bright / Roll on, John". Whether critics are deriding the song for being "maudlin" or rhapsodizing about Dylan's "elegy for a dead friend," the relationship between the two rock icons has been taken for granted, as if the song was the inevitable result of a straight-forward friendship. In fact, Lennon and Dylan only met a handful of times from 1964 to 1969 and, when examined, their complex relationship suggests that in fact the song isn't about John Lennon—or at least not about the Lennon that Dylan knew.

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