On Bob Dylan’s 70th Birthday

By David Ross. Rolling Stone has celebrated Bob Dylan’s seventieth birthday with a lavish spread featuring a list of his seventy best songs and a smaller list of the best Dylan covers (see here). There’s no doubt that Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” is the supreme Dylan cover, turning a gnomic ditty into a sweepingly prophetic desert-vision with the tone quality of an LSD-fueled aurora borealis, but otherwise the list has little – in fact almost nothing – to recommend it.

Let me offer a sounder guide to the greatest Dylan covers:

• Fairport Convention (Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, et al.) were consistently masterful Dylan interpreters. Here they magnificently elevate two minor chestnuts: “I’ll Keep it With Mine” (from their 1969 album What We Did on Our Holidays) and “Percy’s Song” (from Unhalfbricking, also 1969 – they had a very good year). Dylan wrote and recorded the songs in the early sixties, but they saw the light of day only with the 1985 release of the compilation Biograph. Over and over again, Fairport fulfilled the highest function of the Dylan cover: drawing attention to the obscure wonders of the oeuvre.
• Hendrix not only swallowed whole and fully metabolized “All Along the Watchtower,” but nearly gave the same treatment to a far bigger fish, “Like a Rolling Stone,” which he ripped through at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and, as far as I know, never played again.
• Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishman, a gypsy caravan of top-flight session musicians, lends a soulful huskiness to “Girl from the North Country” (from 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan), while Joni Mitchell and Johnny Cash capture the song’s tender and crystalline essence on the Johnny Cash Show. The Cash-Mitchell duet appears on the surprisingly nugget-filled album The Best of the Johnny Cash TV Show: 1969-1971 (2008).
• The Band were not merely Dylan idolaters but Dylan collaborators and bandmates, protégés in the fullest sense. Their version of “This Wheel’s on Fire” – which Dylan co-wrote with Band member Rick Danko – appears on their 1968 masterpiece Music from Big Pink and distills the yodeling, yowling, jingle-jangle dustbowl America that Dylan somehow tapped into. Dylan’s own version of the song appears on The Basement Tapes (1975).
• Gram Parsons of the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers – and brief solo glory before sister morphine escorted him to the next world – brings his particular wistful yearning to the Burrito’s fragmentary version of “I Shall Be Released,” an anthemic concert-closer of a tune that the Band had debuted on Music from Big Pink.
• The Byrds were the greatest and most prolific Dylan interpreters and never more so than on their 1968 country-rock classic Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which features two standout, fully countrified Dylan covers: “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and “Nothing was Delivered.” Dylan himself released versions of the songs on The Basement Tapes.

Posted on May 16th, 2011 at 8:49am.