“To take a Dylan song and put electric guitars on it was not heard of at that point,” McGuinn told this writer. Even today, that opening flourish evokes the flower-fresh rising of the sixties counter-culture, perhaps better than any other instrumental break. Tambourine Man that gave McGuinn his jump-off: just a month after Dylan’s release, The Byrds added a jingle-jangle intro riff and a tumble of harmonies to their version that instantly eclipsed the original’s prosaic strum. Roger McGuinn of The Byrds had bought a 12-string Rickenbacker electric after seeing George Harrison play one in the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night.
Most would agree that the first stone-cold-classic Dylan cover arrived in April 1965. But it’s remarkable, too, how regularly Dylan has been bested by the covers that followed, twisting his templates and putting the heat under his raw materials. It should be noted that the majority of Dylan covers are fodder: a means of bulking up a live set, conferring credibility (for younger artists), or putting product on shelves during a songwriting drought (for older ones). “A lot of the older songs were just blueprints for what I’d play later on the stage… There have been other artists who have recorded my songs and shown me the way the song should go.” “I can’t say that I’ve made any great-sounding records,” he reflected to USA Today in 1997. Nor is Dylan such a vocal or instrumental force that his originals feel unassailable – as they might with a Robert Plant or Eddie Van Halen – with Dylan admitting the germ of the song matters more than its execution.
“The riffs on Maggie’s Farm were written as a cool Rage Against the Machine riff or jam, and it later had the Dylan lyrics applied to it,” Tom Morello said in Speakeasy (the guitarist also told Forbes magazine that he considered Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ “the heaviest record I’d ever heard in my life”).Īnother argument is that Dylan’s originals often feel more like roadmaps than final productions half-daubed canvasses that leave cover artists a room for manoeuvre that, say, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody or Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir would not. To drill deeper, though, what is it that brings pan-generational, genre-crossing musicians to Dylan’s catalogue? One theory is that the veteran songwriter has amassed such a vast oeuvre, offering such shifting moods of material – and lyrics that can be waspish, lovelorn, satirical or sweet – that there’s something for every stripe of band or artist to bite off and chew.Īs such, metallers Ministry were able to transform the cowpoke country-lilt seduction of Lay Lady Lay into a caustic industrial crunk, while polemicists Rage Against The Machine forged fat funk-metal rom the anti-commodification diatribe of Maggie’s Farm. Ironically, the notes themselves allude to the special relationship between the Byrds and Bob Dylan without ever taking a closer look at it over time, and the bizarre nature of the programming results in a broad but very shallow and frustrating look at its subject, compelling though that subject remains, even when presented in this manner.“He’s Bob Dylan,” shrugged the Pretenders leader, simply, of her rationale for the project, as if covering the master was a formality that every artist must someday address. Coupled with the sketchy notes, the result is an entertaining CD that could have been a lot more than that. Tambourine Man," but then jumps between years and different lineups of the group, forward a few years, then back, then to outtakes and live tracks. The problem lies with the fact that the material is assembled in a strangely haphazard order - it starts off with the original lineup's recording of "Mr. The CD uses the latest masterings of each song, as they stood circa the middle of 2001, and so the sound quality is not a problem indeed, hearing all of the early-, mid-, and late-era Dylan-authored cuts by the Byrds juxtaposed in high resolution reveals the band's development and evolution (as well as several colossal wrong turns, such as the chorus-laden version of "Lay Lady Lay") in sharp detail.
The idea is still a good one, though the execution - at least in terms of the packaging - leaves a lot to be desired. It's essentially an updated version of the late-'70s Byrds Play Dylan LP, expanded to 61 minutes to encompass the huge number of outtakes and live tracks that weren't available, or even known to exist, when the original album was assembled. This 20-song European import should be rated a lot higher than this, but there are some good reasons why it's not.
0 kommentar(er)
