Is it true that Bob Dylan is 70? I would never have guessed: there has been so little about it in the newspapers. No doubt he is out on the road right now, on his never-ending tour, murdering his old tunes with a relentless indifference, unbothered by what his fans might think. But you have met a Dylan fan. You might well be a Dylan fan. They are not like the rest of us. It is 20 years or so since I saw Dylan live but I have never forgotten the experience. The most serious trainspotters were down at the front, making sheaves of notes. Others cheered a song they knew Dylan hadn’t played for seven years, four months and 18 days. Someone who had missed the fourth night in the run of seven was ostracised by his fellows. Up on the stage, the man himself, dead-eyed with boredom and contempt, sang ‘Maggie’s Farm’ for the 98,773rd time, possibly as a lilting reggae number, or maybe backwards, to catch everyone out.
If I sound a little bitter at the memory of two hours wasted two decades ago, it’s because my own adolescence was blighted by Dylan. A couple of my best friends of the time played nothing else, and as a consequence I developed a loathing of that voice I have never been able to overcome. I have tried, believe me. I have probably bought half a dozen of his albums over the years. But the deep psychological wounds of childhood are the hardest to heal, and I fear my Dylanphobia may now be hard-wired.
And yet, what’s a voice? Only a means of conveying the songs, and the songs are the essence. I had always loved Bryan Ferry’s version of ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ on These Foolish Things (1973), and on 2002’s Frantic there’s a no less magnificent reading of ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’. Ferry then went mad and recorded a whole album of Dylan covers, 2007’s Dylanesque, which has its moments, particularly a beautiful, spectral version of ‘Make You Feel My Love’. Then I heard Adele’s go at this on the radio. Whoever arranged this may have nailed it for all time, although I still find her vocals callow and self-conscious.
At around the same time I became obsessed with an album by the Irish firebrand Christy Moore, Burning Times (2005), the centrepiece of which is a storming take on ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’. And so it goes on. You may not be able to bear Dylan, but the songs won’t let you go. His own recordings and live performances sometimes only hint at the beauty of his melodies. It occurs to me now that his more deranged fans may actually like this, which is why they are so dismissive when someone like Ferry goes directly for the tune. Such blatant attempts at popularisation are a betrayal of the master’s intent.
Anyone, of course, can cover a Dylan song and almost everyone does. (There’s a particularly strong ‘Girl From the North Country’ on Rosanne Cash’s The List, in 2009.) Increasingly, though, people are emulating Ferry and recording whole albums of the stuff. I found one in a charity shop recently by Yes’s professorial guitarist Steve Howe. Portraits of Bob Dylan (1999) doesn’t add a vast amount to the legend, but there’s a rather lovely version of ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’, sung by Jon Anderson and building up to a typically deft Howe guitar solo.
The jazz pianist Ben Sidran, who I see now lectures at universities on ‘Jews, Music and the American Dream’, released Dylan Different a couple of years ago, and different it is: I had never realised that what ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ lacked was a slinky electric piano solo. Now Thea Gilmore has done her own complete version of John Wesley Harding, which I haven’t yet heard but am looking forward to almost manically.
And none of this would be possible if Dylan were not often his own worst interpreter. (My Dylan-adoring friends will now have steam coming out of their ears.) When the rest of the world hears Dylan singing, singers hear a demo they think they can improve upon. The beauty of it is that he clearly doesn’t give a monkey’s what anyone thinks about any of it: the true mark of an artist. Happy birthday indeed.
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