All the way from Folk to Electric

Faced with a choice on election night of staying in to watch the results coming in on the box or heading out to The Anvil, Basingstoke, to catch a live show by The Manfreds — featuring my old school contemporary Michael d’Abo on vocals, as well as his apparently ageless predecessor, Paul Jones — it was, as Homer Simpson sometimes says, ‘a no-brainer’. In spite of a single, seemingly slighting reference (from Elvis Costello) to Manfred Mann in this stimulating study of Bob Dylan, I still believe the group to have been among the best interpreters of his songs and I’m sure I have read somewhere that Dylan himself has endorsed this view. The story goes that the relationship got off to a sticky start when Mann, after hearing some demo-tapes, observed that it was a pity Dylan couldn’t find a better vocalist. The singer was, of course, none other than the song-writer.

‘Everyone remembers where they were when they heard that Kennedy was shot,’ Greil Marcus quotes a friend saying. ‘I wonder how many people remember where they were when they first heard Bob Dylan’s voice. It’s so unexpected.’ In my own case, I remember being astounded when Dylan, as ‘a complete unknown’ (to cite a line from the chorus of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’) in the role of a vagabond troubadour, suddenly emerged as an extraordinary apparition on the screen at the end of a run-of-the-mill television play in the early 1960s. As Marcus writes of his own first sighting of this phenomenon, in 1963:

Something in his demeanor dared you to pin him down, to sum him up and write him off, and you couldn’t do it. From the way he sang and the way he moved, you couldn’t tell where he was from, where he’d been, or where he was going — though the way he moved and sang made you want to know all of those things.