Zimmerman
It's Bob Dylan's birthday. Happy 69th, you old bastard. He's been at it for 50 years, and even at his worst was pretty good.
Early in his career, he got more attention as a songwriter than a performer. So someone came up with "no one sings Dylan like Dylan." It's a rare artist (say, Jimi Hendrix) whose cover eclipses Dylan.
Still, let's view a few.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:11 AM
2 Comments:
Let me recommend Johnny Cash's "Wanted Man" from the Live at San Quentin album. I've never heard Dylan's version of the song. I would have never guessed it as a Dylan song just from hearing Johnny sing it.
Here is one that I love, even though it's ridiculous. The Nice (Keith Emerson's first band) doing "My Back Pages".
Dylan's fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, was the first of many "about-face" Dylan albums. In this case, he rejected the overtly politcal songs that had made up half of his second album and all of his third. "My Back Pages" seems to be a condemnation of all his earlier political songs. "The Chimes of Freedom Flashing" gave a taste of how he would deal with politics in the future, when he dealt with it at all: with surreal or mysterious lyrics instead of anything explicit. That song was covered by Springsteen in the late 1980s on the Amnesty International concert tour, even though there are only a couple lines in it that actually seem to relate to politics or political prisoners.
But the problem with Another Side is that his singing is so often half-hearted. "Chimes" and "Back Pages" are ruined by the lack of effort he puts into them. I think that Dylan live did them much better. But the album versions of these two tracks are inferior to their covers. That's why I like the Nice's version of BP and Bruce's version of "Chimes" better than Dylan's.
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