Previously in this series…
- Dylan cover of the day: Number 1. The song with numbers in the title.
- Dylan cover of the day. No 2: Ain’t Talkin
- Bob Dylan cover of the day No3: All I really want to do
- Dylan cover of the day No4: Angelina
- Dylan covers of the day No 5. Apple Suckling and Are you Ready.
- Cover version of the day No 6: As I went out one morning
- Dylan cover of the day No 7: Ballad for a Friend
- Dylan Cover of the Day No 8: Ballad in Plain D
- Dylan Cover of the Day No 9: Ballad of a thin man
- Dylan cover No. 10: The stunning reworking of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
- Dylan cover of the day No 11: The ballad of Hollis Brown
Now if I were still in a band, I suspect we would be called The Ol’ Timers, and I would urge my fellow geriatrics to introduce into our repertoire a version of “Beyond here lies nothing”, which I really think is an utterly gorgeous song. Most certainly not a song that deserved the official video that it got. (Incidentally Nash Edgerton the director of the video said, “it seems people either really love it or really fucking hate it,” but he was quite wrong if trying to talk about all people. I neither like nor hate – I criticise it for being irrelevant).
And maybe because of the video or maybe for some other reason, it seems very few people have even tried to work with this song. But there is one standout cover version – and even if you listen to a bit of this and think, well, so what? – please stay with it to the guitar solo, and tell me, who else is playing like this, these days?
This is the sort of cover I really adore… it shows a virtuoso performer at the top of his game, showing off in a way that makes absolute sense within the context of the music. And do remember as you listen, there is no studio artifice here. It is a live performance.
OK the song itself has elements of “Black Magic Woman” in it, but so what – the guitarist doesn’t have to go there, and indeed in this record he doesn’t.
I wonder why no one else seems to want to have a go.
Mixing in videos of any kind draw the eye and take the music and lyrics away from the ear ….
The choreographed violence in the Dylan video can be said to show how film can be manipulated to make that which is not real look as if it is …..
Postmodern manufactured nihilism with Dylan’s face hidden in the scene …..
Beyond this lies nothing but new technology…..
That is, ‘videos’ beyond footage of performers playing and singing ….
You can put me in the “really hate it” column on the video. I agree that it’s irrelevant, but I think it’s worse than that when it starts adding violent sounds over the top of the music. The song is chilling enough, and it certainly doesn’t need any help. Let the words speak for themselves. They’ve manged that for 2,000 years.
Beyond here lies nothing but chilliness, hostility, frozen waves of an ice-hard sea.
– Ovid
Yes indeed, but Ovid didn’t have videos….as far as we know (lol)
“Videovus” be a Roman God of the underworld of which little is written….so the Ancients may indeed have had videos but wanted the technology kept secret forever from the upperworld ….
The problem being you have to go to the hellish part of Hades to find out , and it’s very, very unlikely you’ll ever return to tell the tale.
That being the case, how the video eventually made it to the surface is still unknown.