If you’re going to interpret Bob Dylan’s songs, the worst mistake you can make is to assume he isn’t a very good singer. He has a rather mediocre voice, cramped in range and scratchy in tone. But the quality of one’s instrument is no measure of one’s skill in using it, and Dylan is one of the most skillful blues singers of his generation.
Anyone who tries to correct the “flaws” in Dylan’s singing will only succeed in smoothing over the tension that make the songs so interesting in the first place. And yet that was precisely the mistake made by many of earliest interpreters — Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Odetta, Dion and the Brothers Four. The Four Seasons even devoted an album to the songs of Dylan and Burt Bacharach, as if there were no difference between them.
The two most successful interpreters of Dylan’s music, the Byrds and the Band, found a way to amplify that his roughness and harmonize it. Roger McGuinn used the buzzing overtones of Dylan’s nasal voice as the inspiration for the Byrds’ jangly guitar sound. Robbie Robertson used the percussive attack of Dylan’s singing as the model for his short, stabbing guitar phrases with the Band. Both groups invented three-part vocals that managed to fit together harmonically without losing the braying twang of Dylan’s voice.
The Byrds honor Dylan
Columbia/Legacy Records recently released a 20-song version of “The Byrds Play Dylan,” undoubtedly the best Dylan tribute album that will ever be assembled. Here are the legendary folk-rock versions of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Chimes of Freedom” and “Lay Down Your Weary Tune”; the psychedelic spin on “My Back Pages” and the country-rock treatments of “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and “Nothing Was Delivered.”
That album is merely the high point of one of the busiest years ever for Dylan tribute albums and cover versions. In addition to the Byrds’ anthology, this year has seen the release of “Postcards of the Hanging: Grateful Dead Perform the Songs of Bob Dylan” (Arista). Robyn Hitchcock has released “Robyn Sings” (Editions PAF), a two-CD set of Dylan songs. On “Songs of Bob Dylan All Blues’d Up” (Compendia), a dozen artists, ranging from bluesmen Taj Mahal and the Holmes Brothers to soul stars Isaac Hayes and Mavis Staples, tackle Dylan tunes. On Mary Lee’s Corvette’s “Blood on the Tracks” (Bar None), the New York garage band performs all of Dylan’s 1975 album in order. Individual Dylan songs have shown up on albums by everyone from Cassandra Wilson and Solomon Burke to Doc Watson and Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry.
Most of these artists have learned the lessons taught by the Byrds and the Band: Don’t remove the so-called “imperfections” from Dylan’s songs; seize upon them and make them bigger and better. You don’t want to make the mistake that Cher did with her 1965 hit-single version of “All I Really Want To Do.” She polished the melody so much that she missed the song’s main point — the singer’s refusal to play the expected roles in a romantic relationship. By contrast, the Byrds turned Dylan’s Appalachian whine into a guitar drone and thus captured the tension between the singer’s genuine love and his resentment toward expectations.
No one has assembled a single-disc anthology of the Band interpreting Dylan’s songs, as labels have for the Byrds and the Dead, but someone should. In addition to the three Dylan songs that helped make the Band’s 1969 debut album, “Music From Big Pink,” such a triumph, the group provided the definitive treatments of songs such as “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and “Long Distance Operator.” When the group reunited in the ’90s without Robbie Robertson, they tackled several more Dylan songs, including the best-ever interpretation of “Blind Willie McTell” and the version of “One Too Many Mornings” that appears on “Songs of Bob Dylan All Blues’d Up.”
As the Band once had been, the Grateful Dead were Dylan’s backing group for a 1987 tour. The experience boosted the Dead’s longstanding interest in Dylan’s songs, which became an increasingly prominent part of the group’s set lists. “Postcard of the Hanging” takes eight of its 11 tracks from that 1987-90 period.
As is often the case with the Dead’s live recordings, the quality is erratic — the tempos sometimes drag and the vocals often go awry. But when everything clicks, the results are illuminating. After all, who is better equipped to handle Dylan’s multiverse epics than this group known for its long, drawn-out arrangements?
For some artists, it’s not enough to cover a Dylan song; they have to cover a whole Dylan album, every song in order. That’s what Mary Lee’s Corvette did with “Blood on the Tracks” at Arlene’s Grocery in Manhattan last year. Lead singer Mary Lee Kortes’ vocals put a different spin on the lyrics, and the versions of “Buckets of Rain” and “You’re a Big Girl Now” have an infectious romantic optimism. The more aggressive songs such as “Idiot Wind” and “Meet Me in the Morning” are less successful.
The second disc of Robyn Hitchcock’s two-CD tribute to Dylan (available from his Web site, www.robynhitchcock.com) not only repeats the songs that Dylan and the Band performed at the legendary “Judas” concert in Manchester, England, on May 17, 1966, but also Dylan’s banter between songs. It’s a nice gesture but it doesn’t come close to the original (available on Dylan’s “Live 1966”) or add anything new.
One of Hitch’s favorites
The first disc is a collection of live performances from his 1999-2001 tours. Hitchcock introduces “Visions of Johanna” by declaring, “This is my favorite song; it’s why I started writing songs.” But the most interesting track is the version of “Not Dark Yet,” which is even slower and raspier than the original on “Time Out of Mind.””Million Miles,” another song from “Time Out of Mind,” becomes a finger-snapping, B-3 organ-fueled blues in the hands of Alvin “Youngblood” Hart on “Song of Bob Dylan All Blues’d Up.”
Other artists are just now figuring out how to put their own stamp on the material from “Time Out of Mind” and “Love and Theft,” so some of the best interpretations of Dylan songs may be yet to come.
Dylan, as done by . . .
Here is one man’s pick for the five best interpretations of Bob Dylan songs:
1. The Byrds: “Mr. Tambourine Man” (1965). Boasting one of the best bass lines of the ’60s (played by Phil Spector’s Larry Knechtel), McGuinn’s chiming electric 12-string and some of Dylan’s most evocative lyrics, this is the song that invented folk-rock. Only one of the four verses from Dylan’s acoustic version on “Bringing It All Back Home” wound up on the Byrds’ version, but McGuinn later sang all the verses (with some help from Dylan himself) for a live version on “The Byrds: Box Set.”
2. The Band: “I Shall Be Released” (1969). As Dylan recuperated from his motorcycle accident in 1967, he spent his days in the basement of a bright pink house in West Saugerties, N.Y. There he and the Band recorded rough versions of his new songs, and none was better than this secular hymn of yearning for liberation.
3. The Jimi Hendrix Experience: “All Along the Watchtower” (1968). Dylan’s version of this fable about two rebel riders approaching a walled fortress was understated in its string-band arrangement on “John Wesley Harding.” Hendrix transformed the fable from a campfire story to an apocalyptic movie by having the horsemen ride through a storm of raging, churning guitar. Hendrix, a great admirer of the songwriter, also recorded Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Drifter’s Escape” and “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window.”
4. Fairport Convention: “I’ll Keep It With Mine” (1968). This is one of Dylan’s smartest (and most obscure) love songs, and it received its definitive treatment by Fairport Convention, the band that launched British folk-rock as decisively as the Byrds founded American folk-rock. Sandy Denny holds out the words in long, strong syllables till the irony seeps in, while Richard Thompson’s guitar skips all around her. Fairport also recorded Dylan’s “Country Pie,” “Percy’s Song,” “Million Dollar Bash” and “If You’ve Got To Go” (redone in tongue-in-cheek French as “Si Tu Dois Partir”).
5. Elvis Presley: “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” (1966). Dylan once said that his favorite cover version of one of his songs was this one. A bonus track on the “Spinout” soundtrack, this lament over a departed lover is given a lyrical, heartfelt reading over an understated country arrangement. Whatever else he was, Presley was one of the finest singers of the 20th Century.
— Geoffrey Himes
