{"id":4001,"date":"2013-05-24T09:12:35","date_gmt":"2013-05-24T13:12:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=4001"},"modified":"2013-05-24T09:12:35","modified_gmt":"2013-05-24T13:12:35","slug":"bob-by-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2013\/05\/24\/bob-by-others\/","title":{"rendered":"Bob by Others"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s Bob Dylan<\/strong>‘s birthday. I spent part of yesterday afternoon listening to my The Times They Are A-Changin’<\/em> LP, and I’m reminded yet again that the man is (or at least was) a peerless lyricist. That said, generally I still prefer his work when it’s interpreted by others. I know it’s an overly obvious thing to state, but his delivery doesn’t often work for me. The visceral Blood on the Tracks<\/em> is one of the few of his albums to which I often return, but quite a bit of his catalog leaves me col. I recently spent a couple of hours with Before the Flood<\/em>, a live document of his mid-70s tour with The Band<\/strong>. I really enjoyed The Band’s material there, but Dylan’s reinventions of his own songs left me confused, more than anything. I understand an artist’s need to keep things interesintg by changing-it-up, but the radical re-arrangements struck me as a bridge too far. Of course Dylan’s made a career of doing that kind of thing ever since. Good for him, I guess.<\/p>\n

In any event, other artists have made careers of their own through interpreting Dylan’s work, filtering it through their own particular skill set and aesthetic sensibilities. South African keyboardist Manfred Mann<\/strong> has been particularly successful at this: his \u201cQuinn the Eskimo\u201d from the 60s was a good-timin’ hit, and his Earth Band<\/strong> reading of \u201cYou Angel You\u201d is a personal favorite.<\/p>\n

Of course The Byrds and the Hollies are celebrated examples, but as a my own best-loved Dylan tune, I would offer up Wire Train<\/strong>‘s cover of \u201cGod on Our Side.\u201d As is necessary with a Dylan interpretation, the band truly makes the song their own. Dylan’s powerful, gut-wrenching lyrics remain largely intact, but the arrangement is filled with the best elements of 80s \u201ccollege rock\u201d (for lack of a better term). This is, for me, the greatest Dylan cover of all time, though if you ask me tomorrow I might have a different answer. One of my few music-related regrets of the 1980s is that I never saw Wire Train live onstage.<\/p>\n

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