The Covers We Missed: Ballad of a Thin Man

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I don’t know what it means either: an index to the current series appearing on this website.

For more details on this new series on cover versions of Dylan songs that were not considered in the last series, please see the intro to the first article in this series.  An index to this series is at the end of the article.  A list of all the cover reviews from the previous series can be found at the end of the final article in that series.

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by Jürg Lehmann.

Ballad Of a Thin Man / The Covers

If you systematically go through Dylan cover songs, you inevitably discover that the well-known and frequently covered original songs in particular have a very different impact: some – such as Blowin’ In the Wind – provoke a flood of musically highly questionable, boring campfire kitsch, others inspire cover musicians to highly varied, interesting and colourful experiments. Ballad of a Thin Man belongs rather to the latter type.

The history of Ballad covers begins just a few weeks after the first release on Highway 61 Revisited  with a correct, but not very exciting contribution by The Grass Roots  (in 2000 the band released a more interesting live version.)

Then there is a break until 1981, when The Sports take on the song. In the years that followed several musicians tried their hand at Ballad: Top Jimmy & The Rhythm Pigs (1987), Grateful Dead (April 1988, released in 2002), The Whitlams (1996), Robyn Hitchcock (2002), Big Brass Bed (2003).

Two respectable contributions come from the Dutch band Golden Earring (1995) (perhaps you remember their hit Radar Love) and from James Solberg (1998) on Tangled Up In Blues, a fine collection of Dylan covers by various artists (depending on the source, the musician on the album is not James Solberg but John Hammond).

From the turn of the century, the covers are a more risk-taking and try to find out what the song has to offer. The result is some very fine covers:

Kula Shaker (2002)

Ben Weaver (2005)

Willard Grant Conspiracy (2005)

The Dylan Project (2005)

Andy Santana (2007)

Arlen Roth (2008, instrumental)  

“There oughtta be a law against you coming around,” Dylan snarls in its final verse. Something is happening in the room that the thin man of the song’s title has just walked into. But he doesn’t know what it is: “Do you, Mr Jones?” While speculations remain rampant as to who “Mr. Jones” is and what exactly this song is supposed to mean, there is no definitive answer at this time. Todd Haynes’ 2007 surrealist Dylan biopic I’m Not There includes a music video which paints an image of what Mr. Jones may be like. Actor Bruce Greenwood plays “Keenan Jones“, a journalist who doesn’t understand the meaning behind the songwriting of Jude Quinn alias Bob Dylan. In the film, Jones is sent through a hallucinatory nightmare sequence while Stephen Malkmus’ cover of “Ballad of a Thin Man” plays in the background.

 

Stephen Malkmus, best known as the lead singer of the influential 90’s alternative band Pavement, was hired to record three songs for the soundtrack of Todd Haynes’ Dylan biopic. On an instrumental front, the stars of the soundtrack are The Million Dollar Bashers, a supergroup comprised of guitarists Tom Verlaine (Television), Nels Cline (Wilco) and Smokey Hormel, Dylan band bassist Tony Garnier, keyboardist John Medeski and Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth.

On 21 September 2011, an extraordinary concert took place in Ljubliana, the capital of Slovenia. To commemorate Dylan’s 70th birthday the U.S. Embassy invited several well-known Slovenian musicians to each cover a different Dylan song. Among the artists was Severa Gjurin who performed one of the best cover versions of Not Dark Yet, and also the band Laibach, who did an interpretation of Ballad Of a Thin Man (you can watch a compilation of song excerpts from the CD here).

Laibach is a Slovenian respectively Yugoslav avant-garde music group formed in the mining town of Trbovlje in 1980. From the early days, the band was subject to controversies and bans due to their use of iconography with parodies and pastiches of elements from totalitarism, nationalism and militarism. Censored and banned in Socialist Yugoslavia and receiving a dissident status and a cult following in their home country, the band embarked on international tours and gradually acquired international fame. After Slovenia became independent in 1991, Laibach’s status in the country has turned from rejection by a part of the public to promotion into a national cultural icon.

Early Laibach albums were pure industrial, with heavy rhythms and roaring vocals. Later in the mid-1980s, the sound became more richly layered, featuring samples from pop and classical music. The band’s lyrics, variously written in Slovene, German and English, are usually delivered by the deep bass vocals of the singer Milan Fras. Initially the lyrics handled war and military themes; later, the focus turned to any highly charged political issue of the moment, sending intentionally ambiguous messages. The band has seen numerous line-up changes. During their career, Laibach have also recorded film and theatre music and produced works of visual arts, while the band members have embarked on a number of side projects.

Laibach’s version of Ballad can be quite disturbing. You hear SS trademark vocals and firing squad drums, and the treatment turns the song inside out. “Dylan’s version mocks the uncool outsider Mr. Jones,” writes Tom Bolton in his review, “who just isn’t hip enough to get ‘it’: Laibach turn the mockery into threats, sarcastically growling “You don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr Jones”, and make it very clear how easily victimisation emerges from group ideals of what’s cool and what’s not. It’s a concise and persuasive comment on the 60s, once heard hard to forget.

If you search the internet for Laibach and Ballad, you will almost certainly come across a site with a comic strip.

This is not an official production of Laibach, the video was created by a youtuber by the name of Tadej Oslovnik, who in turn used a short animated movie called Skhizien (directed by Jérémy Clapin) as a template. It’s worth watching the video either way…

Over the last decade, numerous other Ballad covers have come out, none have reinvented the song or opened up new insights: Sfuzzi East/West (2010), Colossus (2013), Theo Hakola (2014), Red Rabbit (2016), Last Fair Deal (2018), Vanguart (2019), Hollin Kings (2021), Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band (2022), B.B.M. (2022), Mike Hagan & The Distant Conspirators (2023), Cat Power (2023).

Two songs that stand out are the contributions of Claus Hempler (2010)

and Karina Deniké (2012)

Deniké’s cover is from the album UnderCover Presents a Tribute to

Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, an album on which there are other songs worth listening to, such as Tombstone Blues by Beth Lisick or Queen Jane Approximately by Carletta Sue Kay. Claus Hempler was part of the performance “Teaterkoncert” in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2010 (to find out more about Teaterkoncert check the article about All Along the Watchtower).

But in saying that many artists have only recycled the familiar, then this does not apply to the jazz musicians (with jazz understood in a broad sense). The song is an invitation to musical experiments, there is a lot of artistic freedom that jazz musicians in particular can explore. As a result there are several outstanding covers, for example by Ben Sidran, who did two pioneering albums with Dylan covers.

Or Jef Lee Johnson’s free jazz inspired version of Ballad Of a Thin Man. He passed away in 2013 from complications following a bout of pneumonia at the age of 54. AllAboutJazz honous him as a “true American original and a true American gift to the musical world. Guys like Jef are the embodiment of every reason to use the phrase, “He’s got more talent in his pinkie than so and so has in his entire body!” Jef Lee has played since he was a young boy growing up and playing up in the church his grandfather built in Germantown, Philadelphia, PA. He plays everything- including guitar, bass, keyboards, sax, drums and drum machines, and is a potent vocalist of broad and powerful range as well. But it’s on guitar that he burns most incandescent, conjuring jawdroppingly brilliant, careening stylistic collisions of legato-laden fusion, angular outness, and state-of-the-art acid-funk. Jef’s concept, while wholly and truly original, justly deserves mention alongside such profound, formidable masters as Hendrix and Holdsworth.”

Or Dawn, who in 2009 covered Ballad of a Thin Man in association with Grand Panda on Béatrice Ardisson’s compilation, “Dylan Mania”. Besides a short video, Aurore Imbert, Dawn’s real name, has left virtually no trace on the Internet and it is not clear whether she is still active today.

All the covers listed below are excellent, you should listen to all of them.

No wonder Ballad Of a Thin Man was used for the finale of the crime drama Peaky Blinders. It perfectly encapsulates the schadenfreude of watching an arrogant egotist having the rug pulled from under them, as happens to protagonist Tommy Shelby in the show’s last episode.

The musician behind the cover version on Peaky Blinders is English singer-songwriter, guitarist and producer Richard Hawley (2019)

“Possibly the definitive Dylan cover,” writes Ewan Gleadow in his review: The tempo of this cover, a fundamental understanding of the flow and beat of Dylan’s lyrics, “is a credit to Hawley as an artist…Hawley’s range of quality comes through in the playing style, the adaptation to the lyrics of Dylan and the pace he is more than capable of creating throughout this single. It holds within it the same scope, but a different style, the same lyrics, but a different tone. It “is sincerely one of the greatest covers put to tape, not just of Dylan, but in general.” This is perhaps a little exaggerated, because there are numerous extraordinary covers, as I hope I have shown in this series. But if you want to get a – very special – introduction to Richard Hawley, watch the video where Richard and Shez Sheridan perform an acoustic show at The Grapes in Sheffield with tracks taken from the Best Of collection Now Then.

Previously in the “Covers we missed” series…

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