May 2011 sees the 70th birthday of Bob Dylan. To celebrate, we're taking you on a journey through the lesser celebrated avenues of his back catalogue. A journey down Highway 61 that won't stop off at 'Blowin' In The Wind', 'All Along The Watchtower' or 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' but will call by...
If Not For You (1970)
May 2011 sees the 70th birthday of Bob Dylan. To celebrate, we're taking you on a journey through the lesser celebrated avenues of his back catalogue. A journey down Highway 61 that won't stop off at 'Blowin' In The Wind', 'All Along The Watchtower' or 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' but will call by...I Believe In You (1979)
There are plenty of hardcore Dylan fans around who stayed with him through thick and thin for nearly two decades. No matter what point they got on board in the ‘60s or ‘70s, their loyalty stood unspoiled even by 1970’s baffling ‘Self Portrait’, helped considerably by the abundance of classic releases that came along in the mid-seventies. And as for the electricity-fearing-folkies who once booed at the very sight of an amp, given time you’d be hard pushed to find many that would deny the reactionary foolishness they’d displayed. But there do remain plenty of Bob-loyalists who believe that ‘Street Legal’ was his last good album and that he never really recovered from the Christian conversion announced in 1979 with ‘Slow Train Coming’.
The ironic thing is he actually made a very strong album, seeking for the first time really a commercial touch with the sound and production which lead to the involvement of Mark Knopfler. And as for inspiration, it could be argued that ‘Street Legal’ was showing signs of a burn out; it was overall weaker than the previous three studio albums and with his fortieth birthday approaching why wouldn’t Bob be looking for a new angle with his writing; a new perspective for tackling some bigger questions perhaps? If God really needed to be confronted head on then it’s so typical of the Dylan character to position himself as the newly-converted evangelist and stir up some reaction that way. But many didn’t go along for the ride; past works like ‘Gates Of Eden’ were such strong pillars that he’d never stand convincingly shoulder to shoulder with a Johnny Cash when dealing in spiritual matters. Such a shame because from a songwriters perspective he generally hit the mark, indisputably so when you hear an act like The Staples Singers take on ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’.
Armed with the prior knowledge that Bob had ‘got religion’ and taking a glance down at some of the titles, it’s likely that those who did still show allegiance and buy the album only gave the songs a cursory listen. The idea of a song called ‘I Believe In You’ on a Christian rock record, to be fair, is off putting enough for all but the most devoted. But that’s not what you get here, there’s a sweet gospel inflection for sure yet taken out of context ‘I Believe In You’ comes across as a straight forward song of undying faith in someone, possibly a living person even albeit one of debateable popularity. When Cat Power sings it below she revs up the soul and turns the whole thing in on itself as if trumpeting support to the composer himself (a touch that’s stapled in on her ‘Juke Box’ album as she follows it up with her own superb ‘Song To Bobby’). I’m not denying the spiritual message that’s easily read into this of course, it’s there for all to see. But as with all the great Bob work, the potential for a variety of interpretation is ripe. Now listen to Cat Power, a singer-songwriter whose version of ‘Paths Of Victory’ is also well worth digging out.
May 2011 sees the 70th birthday of Bob Dylan. To celebrate, we're taking you on a journey through the lesser celebrated avenues of his back catalogue. A journey down Highway 61 that won't stop off at 'Blowin' In The Wind', 'All Along The Watchtower' or 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' but will call by...Nobody ‘Cept You (1974)
A simply gorgeous devotional love song, another buried treasure that had to wait for ‘The Bootleg Series’ before it could surface, this time recorded around the time of ‘Planet Waves’. Again that old Dylan argument crops up, how could he leave something this good off? Well whilst nobody can rationally explain the abundance of classic songs left off of ‘Infidels’, ‘Planet Waves’ works pretty effectively as a sequence of songs and even the weaker tracks on the album serve their purpose surrounding heavy duty fare like ‘Dirge’ and ‘Wedding Song’. Vinyl albums used to struggle to fit much more than 50 minutes of music across both sides so time constraints may have been a factor. The original recording is a fine take with The Band’s backing lending the song a haunted edge, a must hear. There aren’t too many cover versions either but here’s a faithful rendition by a singer called Connor O’Brien.
May 2011 sees the 70th birthday of Bob Dylan. To celebrate, we're taking you on a journey through the lesser celebrated avenues of his back catalogue. A journey down Highway 61 that won't stop off at 'Blowin' In The Wind', 'All Along The Watchtower' or 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' but will call by... Can’t Wait (1997)
There was a firmly held belief around the start of the 1990s that Bob Dylan’s voice was shot. It’s not hard to hear why; one listen to the 1992 ‘Good As I Been To You’ album suggests he’s struggling to overcome a permanent death-rattle in a throat ravaged by years of smoke and a general refusal to sing from the diaphragm. At times this handicap would lead to a phenomenon that seasoned Dylan watchers referred to as up-singing (where he’d sing the whole of a previously melodious song line on a single note with the only concession to a tuneful flourish being a sudden octave leap right at the end...repeatedly...song after song).
So in 1997 ‘Time Out Of Mind’ comes out and it’s awash with that deep, muddy Daniel Lanois production which fills out the aural scenery around an apparently unchanged Dylan voice. And again years pass before it is revealed that a track, which appeared on the album but in a vastly altered almost distorted form, was also cut with another version on which Dylan sang with a vocal clarity that people had given up for dead. It’s a soulful, bluesy kind of performance that would have been a breathtaking centrepiece on any record he’d released in over 20 years (if it had gone on). And whilst no one would expect a return to the ‘Nashville Skyline’ croon of ’68 it does make you wonder just why he’s almost always stuck with that smokey, huskey, semi-spoken rasp? Maybe he just found a really good packet of throat lozenges that day and knew revealing the effects hastily would raise his audiences’ expectations too high? Instead they had to wait until the bootleg series’ next instalment ‘Tell Tale Signs’ in 2008. Make no mistake, there’s no confusion about who you’re listening to, just a touch of awe at how much he keeps up his sleeve and how liberally and unexpectedly he reveals his musical arsenal. For this one, we can play you the Bob Dylan version we’re writing about too:
May 2011 sees the 70th birthday of Bob Dylan. To celebrate, we're taking you on a journey through the lesser celebrated avenues of his back catalogue. A journey down Highway 61 that won't stop off at 'Blowin' In The Wind', 'All Along The Watchtower' or 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' but will call by...As I Went Out One Morning (1967)
So Bob Dylan has a motorbike crash in the summer of 1966 and retires from live performance, other than the odd festival or benefit here and there, for eight years and from releasing records for 18 months. That period up to the end of 1967 is one of the most fascinating of his career, for the dedication to song-writing and song-craft went into overdrive whilst hanging out with The Band at Big Pink. ‘The Basement Tapes’ material was pointedly cherry picked for titles with commercial potential then hawked out to rock & pop acts such as Manfred Mann and The Byrds. But alongside that, the country-tinged moralistic tales and fables that turned up on ‘John Wesley Harding’ were clearly honed with exquisite care. This song, like so many on the album - most notably ‘All Along The Watchtower’, appears to relate a minor incident of little consequence. The genius is in the depth, as layer upon layer of possible or improbably meanings are suggested with each successive analysis. In this encounter Tom Paine is anxious to apologise for something the damsel has done but exactly what is unclear; it could be that she’s skewered the protagonists ability to think for himself, maybe she represents temptation but equally she may stand victim of nothing more than the suspicions of those around her as she longs for escape. Equally plausible is the idea that Dylan realised that putting out these minutely detailed, open ended little stories that offered more questions than answers was enough in itself; you don’t need a correct or incorrect meaning because everything’s correct? Even the moral of the story stated at the end of ‘The Ballad Of Frankie Lee & Judas Priest’ is a bit of a red herring, not actually answering any of the specifics in a song where a character admits “nothing is revealed”. 44 years have passed since ‘As I Went Out One Morning’ first appeared and no 100% solid theory has stuck to it yet. The genius is in the fact that no one can definitively state there’s no solid meaning; Dylan always puts just enough information in to make that seem utterly improbable.
Mira Billotte is a member of Brooklyn indie-folk duo White Magic whose version of the tune appeared in 2007 on the soundtrack to abstract Dylan Biopic ‘I’m Not There’. Their version is in no way a re-interpretation, more an exactingly faithful and honest reproduction. That’s no slight either, it has to be written that on occasion Dylan did, just like the Beatles almost always did, manage to nail a definitive version of his songs that left nothing to be improved on. That’s especially true of ‘As I Went Out One Morning’, there isn't anything you can add to or subtract from the original ‘John Wesley Harding’ version that will improve it and kudos to Mira Billotte for understanding that.
May 2011 sees the 70th birthday of Bob Dylan. To celebrate, we're taking you on a journey through the lesser celebrated avenues of his back catalogue. A journey down Highway 61 that won't stop off at 'Blowin' In The Wind', 'All Along The Watchtower' or 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' but will call by...John Brown (1963)
Here’s one of the genuine lost treasures in the back catalogue, a song that was attributed in its day to the Dylan alias Blind Boy Grunt through the pages of Broadside Magazine and the 1963 Folkways LP ‘Broadside Ballads Vol.1’. It’s a testament to Bob’s prolific output in the early 60s that songs like this could fall by the wayside, never to end up on an album proper. It did eventually surface in 1995 on the ‘Unplugged’ album but the version that’s really worth the effort in finding is the one recorded for Broadside when the song was freshly written. That too became more easily obtainable in 2000 with the release of the superb box-set ‘Best of Broadside 1962-1988’. That’s the recording where the sarcastic slap of the medals dropping into Brown’s mother’s hand is most venomously delivered by the songwriter, letting off an agonised primal howl at the end in a manner that Dylan only turns to occasionally. Admittedly as Dylan tales go it’s straightforward, possibly explaining why he never rated it as top drawer himself. But a great story is no lesser beast just because it’s told with frank clarity. In fact that’s exactly what makes this so gripping, the zoning in on the relationship between John Brown and his misguided Mother who sought satisfaction and pride in him going off and fighting “a good old fashioned war”.
This version of ‘John Brown’ is performed by James Luther Dickinson. It is of course a shame that the ‘Columbia Recording Artist Bob Dylan’ has put such large restraints on his own records being streamed over various internet sites but we can work within those limits. Indeed Dylan has never lost sight of the ideal that a great songwriter welcomes interpretation of his work by other performers and he’s contributed to that trade off regularly with a never ending flow of covers in both live and recorded settings. Luckily, we’ve found enough audio of the man himself for anyone craving those trademark vacuum-cleaner vocals in amongst the many cover versions over 30 days. Dickinson’s track comes from the 1972 album ‘Dixie Fried’; he was an Atlantic Records associate more recognised as a producer and session man. Listen carefully for you might be able to pick up the sound of Dr John and an un-credited Eric Clapton on guitar.
May 2011 sees the 70th birthday of one of our greatest living songwriters, Bob Dylan. To celebrate, we're going to take you on a journey through the slightly lesser celebrated avenues of his back catalogue. A journey down Highway 61 that won't stop off at 'Blowin' In The Wind', 'All Along The Watchtower' or 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' but will drop in on...