He may never have strayed far from the minds of many music fans, but with his biopic A Complete Unknown hitting UK cinemas on January 17 and heartthrob Timothée Chalamet in the lead role, Bob Dylan may be about to gain an entirely new audience, writes Glenn Fosbraey, Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Considered by many to be the , Dylan’s influence on music can’t be understated. His voice, however, has divided listeners over the decades. Some find it and others have likened it to that of .
Despite having, as a researcher of songwriting, something of a penchant for Dylan’s idiosyncratic and character-filled style, here are six covers of his songs which I believe outperform his versions.
Girl from the North Country first appeared on Dylan’s 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. But it featured again on in 1969 as a duet with Johnny Cash. That version has been praised for the and how Dylan and Cash’s vocals are .
Another view would be that the guitars are out of time and the vocals are under-rehearsed – and the same shortcomings are on display during the song’s performance on the . Far superior in my humble opinion is the 2005 version by alt-rock band Eels.
The band performed the song for their DVD and album. Band leader Mark Everett switched it from acoustic guitar to piano. His gentle arpeggiated playing complemented his vocals and drew every drop of emotion out of the lyrics and melody. He keeps in time, too.
A masterclass in lyric writing, Mr Tambourine Man (1965) saw Dylan to reel off dozens of intricate internal and end rhymes, including my personal favourite:
Though I know that evening’s empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand, but still not sleeping.
The Byrds’ version, released in the same year and hitting number one in both the US and the UK, isn’t better than the brilliant original (how could it be?) but it is brilliantly different.
Abridging Dylan’s version in order to make for a more palatable running time for the singles market, what it lacks in lyrics it more than makes up for in melody. The harmonies in the chorus add to Dylan’s main vocal line. It was an era-defining moment that launched the folk-rock genre.
Dylan may have released the of All Along The Watchtower on his John Wesley Harding album in 1967, but it was , released just six months later, which has largely been accepted as the definitive recording.
Taking Dylan’s gentle acoustic guitar and harmonica number and feeding it through his legendary white Strat, Hendrix rocks seven shades of summer out of the song until it takes on a completely new life.
So great was his reinterpretation (it seems derisive to merely label it a “cover”) that as well as being ranked at number 40 in Rolling Stone’s list, Dylan amended the song’s structure for in order for it to be more like Hendrix’s.
Granted, I only heard Dylan’s recording of after already being familiar with George Harrison’s version included on his 1970 album for several years, so it was always going to feel slightly foreign to me.
What I wasn’t expecting, though, was how unimpressive and it seems compared to Harrison’s recording. Dylan’s run-together vocal lines were backed by oddly jaunty and accented side-stick drumming (with the snare struck on the second beat but then a quaver before the fourth instead of on the fourth itself) and punctuated with glockenspiel. It all adds up to a slightly confused and messy arrangement, which takes attention away from the sincerity of the lyrics.
When Olivia Newton-John issued her own cover of If Not For You in 1971, she wisely opted for the as Harrison’s, thankfully, minus Phil Spector’s muddy over-production – and scored an international hit with it in the process.
To my mind If Not For You remains one of Dylan’s most simplistic, beautiful songs – so long as he’s not singing it.
Appearing on The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964), Dylan presents the five-minute as its title suggests, as a . His voice is backed by a lone acoustic guitar, minus even his ever-present harmonica.
Nearly half a century later, director David Lynch took time out from his day job to as drum-heavy claustrophobia, twisting the original until it would have been unrecognisable if not for its title and lyrics. Dylan diehards may want to give this one a miss, but for those of us who enjoyed the music from the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks series three, this is a winner.
This article was first published in The Conversation. See more 黑料社 contributions at
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