{"id":5746,"date":"2021-06-23T08:05:09","date_gmt":"2021-06-23T07:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=5746"},"modified":"2021-06-23T08:05:50","modified_gmt":"2021-06-23T07:05:50","slug":"picking-their-favourite-dylan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2021\/06\/23\/picking-their-favourite-dylan\/","title":{"rendered":"PICKING THEIR FAVOURITE DYLAN"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

PICKING THEIR FAVOURITE DYLAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Norman Warwick<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Dave Simpson<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

When Dave Simpson recently interviewed a number of top musicians who have covered Dylan tracks and asked them which track of his might be their favourite he not only unsurprisingly collected titles that represented a wide range of Dylan\u00b4s styles but also allowed their choice to reveal something of themselves as artists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mick Jagger      1       Desolation Row (1965)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Rolling Stones front man. Mick Jagger, has often seemed to me a Mr. Tambourine Man in his crowd-leading antics on stage, but his selection, instead, of his favourite Dylan track as being Desolation Row made some sense as he explained for the Guardian writer<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Mick jagger<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4<\/strong>I was playing Bob Dylan records at my parents\u2019 house when he was still an acoustic folk singer, but he was already very important and his lyrics were on point. The delivery isn\u2019t just the words, it\u2019s the accentuation and the moods and twists he puts on them. His greatness lies in the body of work. I was at a session for Blood on the Tracks [1975] and really enjoyed watching him record\u00a0Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts<\/a>, with this incredible depth of storyline, surrounded by all these boring people from the record company who he had sitting in the control room. I couldn\u2019t record like that\u00b4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Desolation Row\u2019s lyrics are just so interesting and diverse. It isn\u2019t a real street so you create your own fantasy. I imagine an unforgiving place, somewhere you don\u2019t want to spend much time, peopled with strange characters. The opening line about the \u201cpostcards of the hanging\u201d sets the tone, but then this awful event is juxtaposed with \u201cthe beauty parlour filled with sailors\u201d and all these circus people. The lines \u201cThe agents and the superhuman crew \/ Come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do \/ Then they bring them to the factory where the heart-attack machine is strapped across their shoulders\u201d are scary and apocalyptic, viciously delivered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My reading is that that\u2019s about governmental, military control, but then there\u2019s the payoff: \u201cWhen you asked me how I was doing, was that some kind of joke? Don\u2019t send me no more letters unless you mail them from Desolation Row.\u201d That sounds like a really personal thing. Musically, he prettifies it. I love the lovely half-Spanish guitar lines from the session guitarist, Charlie McCoy. It\u2019s actually a really lovely song, which shouldn\u2019t work with the imagery but does. You can listen to it all the time and still get something wonderful and new from it.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Judy Collins                          2       Bob Dylan\u2019s Dream (1963)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Judy Collins (left)<\/em><\/strong> knew Dylan so way back when that the sixties had not then been born, so it is perhaps no surprise that her favourite Dylan track comes from his early songbooks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a8I met Bob in Denver in summer 1959, when he was still called Robert Zimmerman. Then he came to see me in Colorado and, as he still reminds me, sat at my feet. Back then, he was always trying to get slots on the hootenannies and sang Woody Guthrie songs very badly. He was a nice guy. We\u2019d get drunk together. He was homeless, so would sleep on people\u2019s floors, devouring their books. Then in 1961 folk bible Sing Out! printed the lyrics to Blowin\u2019 in the Wind, by which time he\u2019d changed his name, and I was astonished. Soon after that I sat outside a blue door in the basement of a party in Woodstock listening to him playing Mr Tambourine Man over and over again. It was a moment I\u2019ll never forget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve sung lots of his songs, but my favourite is Bob Dylan\u2019s Dream. [British folk singer] Martin Carthy had taught him the melody of a traditional song called Lady Franklin\u2019s Lament, the story of the North West Passage, but Bob\u2019s lyrics transform it into something personal and dreamlike that\u2019s always haunted me. [Sings] \u201cWhile riding on a train goin\u2019 west \/ I fell asleep for to take my rest \u2026\u201d By then I was a raging Dylan fan. I once saw him at Madison Square Garden when I was very drunk and when a policeman tried to stop me getting backstage I actually slugged him, but not hard, with my purse\u00b4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marianne Faithfull     3       It\u2019s All Over Now, Baby Blue (1966)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Marianne Faithful (right)<\/em><\/strong> and Mr. Dylan have been friends for 56 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4I really like him. I first met Bob at the Savoy in 1965. There\u2019s a clip of me and Joan Baez singing As Tears Go By<\/a> in the hotel room while Bob is hammering away on a typewriter. Later when I turned him down, he told me that it had been a poem about me, but he\u2019d torn it up. I was so upset, but we got over that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think It\u2019s All Over Now, Baby Blue is about those times in life where you just have to say, \u201cOK, we tried, it didn\u2019t work\u201d, but it\u2019s a much sleeker way of saying it. It\u2019s very loving, but obviously it\u2019s all over. I don\u2019t really know why I love it so much, but I\u2019ve been in many situations where I would have liked to have time stop and have a band playing and sing that song to people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve recorded it twice. The second time<\/a>, I\u2019d had more experiences and really felt it. I love the way his songs change octaves. I\u2019m suffering long Covid and my voice is cracked, but I\u2019m trying to recover it by singing It\u2019s All Over Now, Baby Blue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yola                              4       Corrina, Corrina (1963)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Yolanda Carter<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

photo 5<\/strong> Yolanda<\/strong> Quartey (born 31 July 1983), known professionally as Yola<\/strong> or Yola<\/strong> Carter, is an Englishmusician<\/strong>, singer and songwriter from Bristol, England.Yola<\/strong> received four nominations at the 62nd Grammy Awards, including the all-genre Best New Artist category. She chose Corrina, Corrina, from Dylan\u00b4s second album, The Freewheelin\u2019 Bob Dylan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4It\u2019s his adaptation of a country blues song written in 1928\u00b4, she reminded Mr. Simpson \u00b4but what gets me is his beautiful delivery. He sings it in the same tone he sings Lay Lady Lay [1969], almost a speaking style. It\u2019s a song about someone he wants to come home and there\u2019s real delicacy in his voice. He\u2019s thought of as a folk singer but the blues are another foundation of his career, and you can hear him starting to flex his vocal muscles and finding ways of using his voice so you can hear every word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tom Jones                             5                 Blowin\u2019 In Yhe Wind (1962)\u00b4<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given that Tom Jones has been around the top of the UK album charts for the past few weeks with his excellent album, Surrounded By Time, which we reviewed on these pages on 13th<\/sup> May 2021, I was interested to hear the choice of The Voice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Tom Jones<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4I was on tour in the States in the summer of \u201965,\u00b4 Jones recalled, \u00a0\u00b4with a British act, Peter and Gordon. Gordon Waller was a huge Dylan fan and played his records in the Holiday Inns. I wasn\u2019t struck by Dylan\u2019s voice at first but then I heard Blowin\u2019 In The Wind and I\u2019ve been a fan ever since. The lyrics are fantastic. He\u2019s basically asking, \u201cHow many times do we have to go through all this shit before we realise that we\u2019re fucking up the world?\u201d He paints pictures with his songs so you can see things happening. It\u2019s the same with What Good Am I [1989], which I\u2019ve recorded. What good am I if I just stand by and let things happen that I know I should be changing? He was the first singer-songwriter to make me think\u00b4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Suzanne Vega             6       A Hard Rain\u2019s a-Gonna Fall (1963)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Singer writer, Suzanne Vega, (left)<\/em><\/strong> also extolled the virtue of Dylan\u00b4s lyrics, when explaining her choice of A Hard Rain\u00b4s A-Gonna Fall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4This song is so prophetic that it still speaks to the age we live in today. Lines such as, \u201cI saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children\u201d or \u201cthe pellets of poison are flooding their waters\u201d are now facts found in today\u2019s newspapers. Other lines are the embodiment of mystery. The imagery in \u201cI saw a white ladder all covered with water\u201d will always haunt me, along with \u201cI saw a black branch with blood that kept dripping.\u201d Each image stands alone, a miniature painting, a snapshot in the landscape of the soul. Still filled with power, needing no explanation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gillian Welch               7       Ballad Of A Thin Man (1965)\u00b4<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In announcing her selection of Ballad of A Thin man as her favourite Dylan track American artist Gillian Welch recalled the first Dylan purchase she ever made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Gillian Welch<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4I bought my first Dylan record \u2013 The Times They Are a-Changing [1964] – when I was 17, but to experience those early records in real time as he was releasing them must have been like being around when Shakespeare was creating new plays. Ballad Of A Thin Man typifies the way Dylan\u2019s songs shine a spotlight on the world and human truths. The derision in his finger-pointing at Mr Jones [\u201cSomething is happening and you don\u2019t know what it is, do you?\u201d] instilled in me at a young age that I did not want to be the person that didn\u2019t understand or he\u2019s calling out \u2013 the judge, the man in power. You want to be the person who knows what\u2019s up. This song changed my life\u00b4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wayne Coyne, the Flaming Lips<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                      8       It\u2019s Alright Ma (I\u2019m Only Bleeding)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Simpson also interviewed Wayne Coyne, (left) of Flamin Lips, another artist we have covered on these pages on 19th<\/sup> November 2020, and his response, like all the others, made interesting reading for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of It\u00b4s Alright Ma, I\u00b4m Only Bleeding, he said, \u00a8I heard this in 1971, by which time we\u2019d been through Woodstock, Vietnam and the hippie era and he was already hailed as a genius. My 10-year-old ears agreed. I loved the line, \u201cThey made everything from toy guns that spark to flesh-coloured Christs that glow in the dark.\u201d I had no idea what he was talking about, but I wanted a flesh-coloured Christ. It sounded cool. As I\u2019ve got older the song sounds even better. My favourite Dylan is when he\u2019s pissed off and he knows he\u2019s right. It\u2019s such a remarkable torrent of lyrics. It feels like it could go on for hours and not lose the energy. People didn\u2019t stop war because of Dylan. They all started singing about war being wrong, but his legacy is intact before he\u2019s dead. I think that in 200 years, no one will want to be an Adolf Hitler or a Donald Trump. They\u2019ll want to be a Bob Dylan.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Billy Bragg                  9       Mr Tambourine Man (1965)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1972, BilIy Bragg, the punk folkie form the UK who did so much to perpetuate Guthrie\u00b4s legacy had a Saturday job in a hardware shop that had a record store in the basement. He has fond memories of the place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Billy Bragg<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4One day the guys there put on Dylan\u2019s Greatest Hits. I\u2019d heard the Byrds\u2019 version of Tambourine Man but they only used one verse. Hearing the full four verses aged 14 blew my mind. Dylan gave me the blueprint for my career of a solitary figure on stage, holding a mirror up to the world and the idea that a song can\u2019t change the world but can change someone\u2019s perspective. \u201cTo dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands, with all memory and fate, driven deep beneath the waves, let me forget about today until tomorrow.\u201d I can still recite huge chunks of it, and if I hear that song now, it stops my day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meghan Remy, US Girls<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                      10     Changing of the Guards (1978)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

U.S. Girls is a Toronto-based experimental pop project formed in 2007, consisting solely of American musician and record producer Meghan<\/strong>Remy. She had previously released music on a variety of independent record labels before signing to 4AD in 2015. Half Free, her first record for 4AD, was released the same year. It garnered a Juno Award nomination for Alternative Album of the Year at the Juno Awards of 2016, and was a shortlisted finalist for the 2016 Polaris Music Prize. Remy collaborates with a number of Toronto-based musicians on both song writing and music production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Meghan Remy of US Girls<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4I loved Dylan,\u00b4 she told Dan Simpson, \u00b4but had been put off the Street Legal album by the cover until someone told me to check it out because it was a perfect example of live recording with all the mistakes left in. It\u2019s like the backing singers have never heard the song before. They aren\u2019t on time, the second voice is always late but that\u2019s the charm and spirit of the recording. The lyrics are like a fantasy \u2013 you\u2019d think they\u2019re impossible to sing but he somehow cuts the syllables up so they fit in. It\u2019s an insane skill to have, and meanwhile the hooks just keep on coming\u00b4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dan Bejar, Destroyer 11     The Groom\u2019s Still Waiting at the Altar<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

photo 12 Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, \u00a0Dan Bejar\u00a0(right)<\/em><\/strong> started \u00a0Destroyer\u00a0as a solo home-recording project in the early to mid-nineties. Exploring and overturning genres such as glam, MIDI, yacht rock, & even underground Spanish independent artists,\u00a0Bejar was proclaimed \u201cRock\u2019s Exiled King\u201d by The Fader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4This is on Shot \u00d6f Love from 1985\u00b4, he explained of his choice of The Groom\u00b4s Still Waiting At The Altar. \u00b4It was initially a 1981 B-side single, the last of his Christian albums. It\u2019s a real burner blues number that harks back to Dylan\u00b4s sixties style and has a lot of wild imagery and equally wild singing. He\u2019s older and in some ways more interesting. It\u2019s a doomsday song about a world in need of salvation in a Christian sense. Many of his songs take place on the brink of destruction and there\u2019s a lot of apocalyptic stuff about a world burning, but then there are all these asides about a woman named Claudette. He\u2019s effectively and kinda manically describing a world that\u2019s falling apart, but makes it sound fun. The chaos is infectious. Suddenly all that \u00b4sixties  mumbo-jumbo about Dylan being a prophet started to make sense to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mike Scott, the Waterboys<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                      12     Lonesome Day Blues (2001)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Even before he ever saw The Whole of The Moon, Mike Scott (left)<\/strong> was listening to Bob and wishing he\u2019d go back to rock\u2019n\u2019roll. \u00b4I was thinking that way when I was a kid of 12 or 13 in the 70s and Love And Theft is the album I\u2019d have wanted him to make\u00b4, he says now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4He\u2019d been ill and rallied, and it\u2019s so full of life force. I bought it on tour in America on 9\/11, the day it came out. Lonesome Day Blues won my heart very quickly. It\u2019s about a guy who has lost everything but never loses that sparkle in his eye. When I listen to it, the scenes in the song \u2013 driving a car, \u00b4weather not fit for man nor beast\u00b4, somewhere in the south like Mississippi and seeing \u00b4your lover man, comin\u2019 \u2019cross the barren fields\u00b4\u00a0 play in my mind like a movie. It\u2019s got gravity, power, it\u2019s funny. The relentless minimalism of the repeated, hypnotic riff drives it. It\u2019s punk, too. When I played it at\u00a0the 75th birthday tribute in Greenwich Village<\/a>, I played a one-note guitar solo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eleanor Friedberger  13     I\u2019ve Made Up My Mind<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

It is a female singer writer still only around half Dylan\u00b4s age who brings us up to date with a selection from his most contemporary recording.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eleanor Friedberger\u00a0(right)<\/em><\/strong> is an American singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. She is best known as one half of the\u00a0indie rock<\/a>\u00a0duo\u00a0The Fiery Furnaces<\/a>, alongside her older brother\u00a0Matthew Friedberger<\/a>. \u00a0In the band she contributes the majority of the vocals both on record and during their live performances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2011, The Fiery Furnaces went on hiatus, with both Friedberger siblings embarking upon solo careers. To date, Eleanor has released four solo studio albums all of which have peaked in the top 20 of the Billboard<\/em>  chart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a8Rough and Rowdy Ways came out during the pandemic when we were all trapped at home\u00b4, she recalls \u00b4and this song hit me hardest. Dylan writes super-beautiful, romantic love songs. This one is a travelling song, and he does something that I\u2019ve stolen and mentions specific place names [\u00b4From Salt Lake City to Birmingham, from East LA to San Antone\u00b4], which makes it real and relatable. We don\u2019t think of Dylan as vulnerable, but he lays himself on the line. He\u2019s world-weary, and his delivery is so languid as he stretches out the words. He was almost 80 then, and made an album just as great as the ones he made decades ago\u00b4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of these choices show how Dylan is still revered by his peers and by new and thrusting artists already with success behind them as they embark on careers in which the most unlikely success they might ever achieve would be to match Dylan\u00b4s ability to remain relevant and self-challenging into his eighties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Primary source for this not for profit post was \u00a0the Guardian newspaper, a reliable purveyor of informed and informative coverage of the arts.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dylan gave me the blueprint for my career of a solitary figure on stage, holding a mirror up to the world and the idea that a song can\u2019t change the world but can change someone\u2019s perspective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5761,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5746"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5763,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5746\/revisions\/5763"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}