Can one get tired of Dylan? That would be like getting tired of America. It would be like getting to the point where no passage in Kerouac brings a tingle to the spine or a tear to the eye, or getting to the point where the earthly road ends and forever young must give way to knocking on heaven’s door.
The scrawny Jewish kid from Hibbing Minnesota, son of an appliance salesman, was an unlikely bard, but bard he became. He’s been at it a long, long time, and his body of work is as vast and as variegated as America herself. We old fans from way back who were with him from the beginning are still finding gems unheard as we ourselves enter the twilight where it’s not dark yet, but getting there. But it is a beautiful fade-out from a world that cannot last.
Our boy’s been covered, and covered some more. Here are some outstanding specimens:
Johnny Rivers, Positively Fourth Street.
Of all the versions of my recorded songs, the Johnny Rivers one was my favorite. It was obvious that we were from the same side of town, had been read the same citations, came from the same musical family and were cut from the same cloth. When I listened to Johnny’s version of “Positively 4th Street,” I liked his version better than mine. I listened to it over and over again. Most of the cover versions of my songs seemed to take them out into left field somewhere, but Rivers’s version had the mandate down — the attitude and melodic sense to complete and surpass even the feeling that I had put into it. It shouldn’t have surprised me, though. He had done the same thing with “Maybellene” and “Memphis,” two Chuck Berry songs. When I heard Johnny sing my song, it was obvious that life had the same external grip on him as it did on me. Bob Dylan, Chronicles
Mary Travers interviews Bob Dylan. Not a cover but interesting to the true Dylan aficionado.
Joan Baez, Hard Rain
Gary U.S. Bonds, From a Buick Six
Peter, Paul, and Mary, Too Much of Nothing
Arlo Guthrie, Percy’s Song
Byrds, Chimes of Freedom
Jimi Hendrix, All Along the Watchtower
Stephen Stills, Ballad of Hollis Brown
McGuinn, Harrison, Clapton, Petty et al., My Back Pages
Marianne Faithful, Visions of Johanna
But nothing touches the original. This is the bard at his incandescent mid-’60s best. From Blonde on Blonde.
My oldest is fortunate enough to share a birthday with Dylan. This year, by Roman Catholic reckoning anyway, they both share it with the Church. There is plenty of Biblical imagery in Dylan. Do you know of any songs that allude to Pentecost? Or to the Holy Spirit more generally? (One could, I suppose, stretch “Blowin’ in the Wind” in that direction).
For what it’s worth, here on “Pentecost at the Oldies”, I have always admired Don McLean’s second-to-last verse of American Pie. He uses Biblical imagery and allusion to paint the Altamont Free Concert as a ruinous, failed Pentecost; an event that was intended to bring disparate people together and inaugurate a new age, but that ended in division and violence. The opening, “there we were all in one place…” (cf. Acts 2:1) introduces the Pentecost setting and is immediately followed by allusions to fire, all of which turn dark. It is very well done.