Take Five: Five takes on Dylan
A handful of favorite albums by single artists covering the songs of Bob Dylan
“Take Five” is posted each Friday, and offers five things I spent some time with over the course of the previous week. No criticism, no in-depth analysis, just a few things I think you might be interested in checking out. When the spirit moves me, I’ll post other things at other times.
I had other ideas this week, but I found myself going down a rabbit hole of listening to single-artist albums of Bob Dylan covers. There is a surprising number of them in general, and several that hold up remarkably well. It started with a recent Substack post by rock critic Robert Christgau about one album in particular: 1972’s Lo and Behold from the group Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, Flint. More on that below. I hadn’t listened to it in a few years, and while doing so, I kept thinking of other Dylan covers to cue up next. I finally realized I could easily compile an interesting list of five, and here we are.
1. Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, Flint — Lo and Behold
Christgau’s piece about this album dealt with the fact that he — however improbably — named it the best album of 1973. The album was recorded by Manfred Mann sidemen Dennis Coulson (vocals), Dixie Dean (bass), Tom McGuiness (guitar) and Hughie Flint (drums). I discovered this during one of my many Dylan-centric phases (assuming they ever wane enough to count as separate instances). It was a revelation, filling the same role as the Byrds a decade before: What would these songs sound like with a crack band and great vocal harmonies? Many had already been performed by a crack band, or should I say Band, as they come from the then-still unreleased Basement Tapes, but those ramshackle takes were sketches compared to some of these well-realized recordings. The best actually muddles all of this, as it is a take of “Lay Down Your Weary Tune,” which the Byrds tackled on 1965’s Turn, Turn, Turn LP. This bests that, finding all the majesty hiding inside 22-year-old Dylan’s composition. Elsewhere they try “Lo and Behold,” “Don’t You Tell Henry,” “Open the Door Homer,” “Odds and Ends” and “Tiny Montgomery” from the Basement Tapes. (They also covered “Sign of the Cross” and “Get Your Rocks Off” from those sessions, the originals of which appeared on Dylan’s later Bootleg Series box set).
2. Bryan Ferry — Dylanesque
Ferry began his solo career with a polarizing cover of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” in 1973 and made a habit of dipping into the catalog now and again over the years. So it wasn’t a surprise that he decided to tackle an album’s worth with 2007’s Dylanesque. Not everything here works (Pitchfork hated it), but when it works, it’s a sprightly collection that doesn’t let arrangement bells and whistles get in the way of Dylan’s indelible melodies and lyrics. There are more “hits” here than on any of the others -- “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, “The Times They Are a Changin’” and “All Along the Watchtower” among them. But the album is most interesting when Ferry takes a risk. His take on “Positively Fourth Street” replaces the original’s youthful vitriol with a sort of weary gravitas. My favorite is “Simple Twist of Fate,” with an arrangement that sounds like All Shook Down-era Replacements (a reference with an audience of what, three?). Dylan’s lope gives way to a driving beat that lets the story sneak up on you as you try to keep pace with the lines as they stack up.
3. Ben Sidran — Dylan Different
The Wikipedia description of this album begins, “Dylan Different is a smooth jazz album…” That would usually be enough to keep it off my radar. But back in 2009, it caught my attention, not for its genre, but for its subject: Bob Dylan. Like the Ferry album, not everything works here. But it succeeds often enough that I keep it in my every-other-year-or-so rotation. Sidran’s speak singing fits the arrangements well, though there is a sort of hipster quality here that could grate. It runs the risk at every moment of lapsing into kitsch, but it somehow stays on the right side of that line for me. The opener, “Everything is Broken,” works well. It’s a list song, and Dylan himself speaks as much as sings on the 1989 original. Sidran’s keyboard sits nicely in the small combo of guitar, bass, and drums, everything given a cool, late-night vibe. Consider it jazz adjacent. At the time, it was certainly an ear-opener, offering a new way to hear familiar songs. He doesn’t take many chances with the tracklist, sticking with the well-worn favorites. But his take on things keeps it fresh.
4. Bettye LaVette — Things Have Changed
Sometimes it takes having lived a life to find the resources necessary to properly cover Dylan. Bettye LaVette more than qualifies. Her voice has a gravelly, world-weary quality that lends depth and heft to anything she sings, and when she unleashes it on some of Dylan’s best, it’s a perfect match. Her 2018 album, Things Have Changed, finds her tackling a dozen Dylan tunes. It’s a tracklist for fans, largely avoiding the obvious picks to really mine the catalog. The best track is the relentless title tune, the “Wonder Boys” soundtrack standout from 2000, It’s a propulsive take on the song, with LaVette absolutely inhabiting the lyric. Elsewhere she tackles plenty of ‘80s material: A couple from Oh Mercy (”Political World” in a take featuring Keith Richards, and “What Was It You Wanted?”),a couple from Empire Burlesque (”Seeing the Real You at Last” and “Emotionally Yours”), and Infidels’ “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight.” Producer Steve Jordan, former house band drummer for David Letterman, assembled a crack band featuring Dylan’s long-time guitarist Larry Campbell, bassist Pino Palladino, and keyboardist Leon Pendarvis, and they offer no nonsense performances that support LaVette perfectly.1
5. Emma Swift — Blonde on the Tracks
Nashville by way of Australian singer-songwriter Swift appeared out of nowhere in August 2020 with this beautiful album of Dylan covers. Most striking was her strong take on “I Contain Multitudes,” a new Dylan song that first appeared that April as a single and then two months later (and just two months before Swift’s version) on Rough and Rowdy Ways. It’s an audacious feat, and it’s not even the highlight of the album. That, to these ears, is “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” a smoky rendition that feels on par with the work of Bobby Gentry or Dusty Springfield. Swift’s breathy voice is an expressive instrument, and she uses it to plumb every depth here. She’s joined by a sympathetic band where the secret weapon is Thayer Serrano’s pedal steel guitar, which lends an atmospheric counterpoint to the vocals. She takes “Simple Twist of Fate” in the opposite direction from Ferry, slowing it down from the original for a wistful recounting by a third party. A run through all 12 minutes of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” holds the attention as well as the original, and her version of “Going, Going, Gone,” in contrast to Lavette’s defiant stance, renders the whole thing a foregone conclusion.
LaVette was apparently upset with one review she did not receive for the album. She told The Telegraph that Dylan never said he liked the album, something that could have helped sales. She said they had met a few years earlier: “He ran over to me. He put my face in his hands and kissed me square in the mouth. I didn’t offer Bob Dylan a kiss and I’m not a f—ing fan. I was not looking to be kissed. If he thinks I’m good enough to put his mouth on then he should have opened it to say just one good word about my record.”