The Covers We Missed: Hollis Brown

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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Covers of Hollis Brown

By Jürg Lehmann

It has now and then been stated that Hollis Brown is problematic for the cover artist in that it consists of just one chord and two lines a verse (one of which is repeated.)

Many cover artists are tempted, precisely because the song is so ‘monotonous’ and ‘simple’, to ‘get something out of it’ to make it more ‘interesting’. But this is like trying to improve a black cube by Malevich with a few colours. It certainly goes wrong, which happens to more than a few songs that are way over the top by unnecessarily overdramatising an already dramatic song.

So how do you get the intensity of the song with restraint? For example with a clever, creative arrangement, but also with the charisma of the artist – or with both.

Shortly after the release of the original song, Nina Simone showed how it can be done.

That she was recording my songs validated everything that I was about. Nina Simone was the kind of artist that I loved and admired, said Dylan.

Some artists are destined to be forever entwined, writes Jack Whatley. Usually, such entanglement can be traced back to a mutual kinship or a shared musical passage to greatness. Sometimes the way two artists become connected can be simple and, frankly, a little boring. But if there was ever a word that represented the antithesis of Bob Dylan and Nina Simone, boring would be a solid front-runner. These two giants of America’s surging 1960s represent the heart and mind of the counter-culture revolution.

… Bob Dylan represents one of the keenest lyrical minds the world has ever known…His songwriting skills have been used outside of his own remit by countless impressive artists. From Jimi Hendrix to David Bowie, the world of the freewheelin’ troubadour rarely hit the ear without evoking the mind’s eye. One such lover of Dylan’s work was Nina Simone.

Sincere advocates for the Civil Rights Movement, both artists can be seen as pivotal members of the arts division of the general push for racial equality. While Dylan would appear at the critical MLK March, Simone would devote much of her life in the limelight to sharing the spotlight with the myriad of issues she saw imposed on regular folks. It’s a kinship that would unite the two artists and see one another’s greatness…

Bob Dylan hasn’t offered many covers in his time, instead preferring to pen his own work for his audiences. Nina Simone, however, would have happily held her hands up to being much more a performer or singer than a songwriter and so used the work of others to express herself.

Dylan was one of her most favoured and covered songwriters. In 1966, her version of ‘The Ballad Of Hollis Brown’ appeared on the album ‘Let It All Out’. Her album ‘To Love Somebody’ from 1969 contained her interpretations of ‘Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues’, ‘I Shall Be Released’ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’. Two years later she recorded ‘Just Like a Woman’.

Since her death in 2003 Nina Simone’s catalogue has been revisited on several occasions, and each time a greater portion of her legacy has been restored. Released nearly in conjunction with To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story – the career-spanning overview – Jazz Icons: Live in ’65 and ’68 presented Nina Simone from two different European television performances: The Holland 1965 session and the England 1968 session.

On her album Let It All Out in 1966, Simone uses an acoustic guitar as the main instrument, her live performance the year before would be more piano heavy and much more forceful. With her energy and earthy vocals, Simone makes every song her own. This is particularly evident in her version of Hollis Brown. “A masterful performer, particularly in a live setting, Simone clearly knew how to reach her audience most effectively at any given point in time, writes John Metzger . With the two shows that are featured on Jazz Icons she demonstrated that there is more than one way to frame a message…This is how many remember her, and although it is, at times, a raw, edgy, and uncomfortable performance, it also is impossible to turn away from her mesmerizing presence. Simone had a knack for luring her followers into her tales of hardship and struggle, though she also had a habit of challenging them to keep pace with her point of view…(She played) Bob Dylan’s Hollis Brown like a miniature symphony that was adorned with jazz instrumentation. The circular, rhythmic progressions she spun on piano did more than simply form a trance-like cadence that mirrored the cyclical nature of life and poverty depicted in the latter track; it also captured the manner in which the music consumed her, controlled her, and ultimately spilled forth with unstoppable force.”

Let it All Out (66)

Holland Session (65)

Unfairly forgotten by many nowadays, Stone The Crows (featuring the brilliant vocals of Maggie Bell) were a highly respected Scottish blues-influenced rock band back in the early 1970s. “With musical talent to spare and Led Zeppelin’s manager behind them, Stone The Crows should have been a success story. Instead it’s one of tragic death and unfulfilled potential”, deplores Martin Kielty.

Stone The Crows came to a premature end following the tragic onstage death of guitarist Les Harvey, electrocuted by a live microphone. The band continued for a while, but some of the spirit was irreplaceably gone.

The band has had something of a reappraisal of late, not least thanks to the release of four remastered albums of the legendary BBC sessions.

If you’re a fan of Stone The Crows or indeed the criminally underappreciated Maggie Bell, you will wonder how your record collection has coped without this all your life (Steve Pilkington). The biggest revelation on these albums is the version of Bob Dylan’s Hollis Brown…Stone The Crows are extending the five-minute 1964 original to over 13 minutes, Bell inhabiting the words with deep anguish and suffering while an extended instrumental break has the band stretching out for a lengthy and powerful workout. It is hard to imagine this not having been heard by Nazareth before they recorded their own take of Hollis Brown 3 years later, yet in 2021 it is the first time the Stone The Crows take has ever appeared on an official release. It’s practically worth the price of admission by itself.

Yes, this is great music with a great singer, however, I tend to agree with Tony Attwood, who, while emphasising the qualities of the cover, also has a problem with the vocalist putting too much into the song as it builds up. It’s too easy to do that; the horrific silent scene of Hollis Brown committing suicide is lost. Dylan gets it by telling the tale in the same voice all the way through, so the deaths become matter-of-fact. Moreover the organist going on a little jaunt around the 5^th minute took me totally away from the scene of five children, a man and a woman lying dead at an isolated house. This is the band having fun, each musician doing his or her stuff. Keeping this in mind you still should not miss the Stone The Crows cover version – or better still the whole album.

Stone the Crows (1970)

After putting themselves on the hard rock map with the album Razamanaz in 1973, Nazareth took their new, forceful style even further the next year on Loud & Proud. The album’s definitive moment of heaviness is the extended reworking of Hollis Brown and it is certainly one of the most unusual songs Nazareth has ever recorded. The Dylan original is hardly recognisable as such – which in itself does not mean anything wrong –, but the song escalates into a psychedelic ecstasy with roars and shoutings coming from the hell of desperation, but without gaining any intensity.

While some critics call it a nine minutes of electrocution of horrific distortion, Nazareth’s Hollis Brown is one of the fan’s favourites. It will certainly entertain anyone with a passion for 1970s hard rock.

Nazareth – Loud ‘N Proud (1974)

Leon Russell, on his 1974 album Stop All That Jazz delivers a deep, uptempo, heavy bass and drum led funk version of Hollis Brown. The entire album is stylistically all over the place, Russell making use of the tech of the time. Some critics praise how far-reaching Leon Russel’s vision was – a combo of ominous sequenced sounding synth, stereo field effects, drummer/drum machine syncing, and gospel moans. It seems to prefigure Euro-disco and electro, but with organic elements. The repetitions, the formal monotony of the song are Russell’s undoing; in my opinion he does not succeed in making the monotony interesting, it simply remains – monotonous.

In 1989 and 1991, two other heavyweights took on Hollis Brown: The Neville Brothers (Yellow Moon,1989) and Stephen Stills (Stills Alone, 1991).

Aaron Neville and Stephen Stills are both great singers and performers, Stills also an excellent guitarist, and they turn in perfectly nice renditions without varying Dylan’s song too much from the original take. In fact the covers are more Dylan than Neville or Stills – but without the sense of menace and bitterness.

With Iggy Pop & The Stooges (1987) and Swedish Entombed (1997) Hollis Brown went hard rock respectively Death Metal before returning to calmer ground with Old Blind Dogs (1995), Kevn Kinney (2000), Julie Felix (2002), Tony Joe White (2006), The Pretty Things (2007), Barb Jungr (2008), Totta Näslund (2010).

These are all very pleasant, interesting contributions by mostly excellent artists, but none of them is extraordinary. It’s the sort of music you would be happy to hear on a winter afternoon when you find yourself listening to an unexpectedly good cover band. It is definitely worth a listen, but there’s no reason to book the artists’s next concert.

One who stands out a bit is Rocco DeLuca (2009): his rendition has something more compelling, more haunting, perhaps because he doesn’t just sing, but actually tell the story.

I’m kind of a born-again Bob Dylan fan, I’ll be honest, says Rise Against frontman Tim McIlrath.

I grew up in a punk rock/hardcore world where it wasn’t cool to listen to folk music, so I’m just now (2012) discovering a lot of amazing artists. Bob Dylan was one I passed on in the past, but now I’m digging into his catalogue and really appreciate his stuff…It’s kind of beginning to sink in. Especially as I’m really getting into the lyrics…This song, and his words, I felt this real affinity to and this sounds like something that if I was trying to tell a story, I would write it like this. It’s the first time I sang lyrics like the kind of the same way I sing my own.” Hollis Brown was Rise Against’s contribution to Chimes of Freedom: Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International. The US punk/hardcore band is known for its political commitment, it is therefore not surprising they decided on Hollis Brown. It’s a theme, McIlrath says, Rise Against can relate to.“I think that punk music has always kind of had an obligation to speak up for the underdog. Punk itself is people who feel like the black sheep of society. Rise Against’s cover is a forceful, insistent song that breaks out into an angry outcry when things get more urgent and desperate. The band also released a Making of Hollis Brown.

David Lynch, best known as the mastermind behind the series ‘Twin Peaks’ and as the director of films such as ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Mulholland Drive’, seems to be at home in all corners of the arts. After school, he studied painting, which led him to film. This in turn led him to music. He eventually built his own studio and released his first album ‘Crazy Clown Time’ at the age of 65. The follow-up album ‘The Big Dream’, with a Hollis Brown cover, was released two years later (2013).

Lynch is known for his disturbing and mind-bending visual work. Is the same true of his music? On his Hollis Brown David Lynch’s voice can only be heard in an alienated form. Noises waft in front of and behind it – sometimes produced by an electric guitar, sometimes by a source that is difficult to determine. Percussion or computer beats give the whole thing a few points of orientation, but the result of Lynch’s version sounds somewhat spooky.

The introduction of the vocal was a disappointment to me, but they do change the instrumentation as we progress and that works, writes Tony Attwood before continuing with an interesting general observation: It does strike me that many of these musicians and producers, talented as they are, are not considering one particular point: most of the people listening to their rendition are going to know this song off by heart. The really, really good re-interpreters of Dylan do consider this – they know we know the song by heart, and so they start from that point of familiarity and take us on a new journey, making a well-known road somehow different.

That is why Hendrix’ “Watchtower” worked – he just totally shocked us by taking the music to a new place, while still keeping it as a Dylan song.

This version by David Lynch does that in part, but still can’t deal with the fact that every verse is musically the same. Dylan didn’t have to worry because when he sang it, it was new to us. But now…

If you’ve never heard of Bill Sims Jr., you’re like me before I started my first research on Dylan covers some years ago. I came across Sims, who released an entire album of Dylan covers in 2016 (including the only existing cover of My Wife’s Hometown), pretty much by accident. There is little information about Sims on the internet (here are two articles: Remembering the Life of Bill Sims; Bill Sims: Composer Extraordinaire), he passed away in 2019 and it seems nearly impossible to find out who is looking after his legacy. His Dylan cover album Bill On Bob is currently available on iTunes, where you can pre-listen and download the song or the entire album, if you like it.

Bill Sims’ great contribution has everything you’d expect from a Hollis Brown cover: a simple, but clever arrangement that creates an intrusiveness from the outset, an intensity of performance that builds as the song progresses and the drama unfolds, a singer who pushes the boundaries vocally, but not beyond.

Over the last ten years, we once again come across a series of pleasing and skilful interpretations (which also include a remarkable contribution from a Polish artist): Hans Theessink (2013), Doolin’ (2016, Karen Casey (2018), Martyna Jacubowicz (2018, Polish), The Vengeful Cousins (2023).

If you’ve never heard of Bill Sims Jr., you’re like me before I started my first research on Dylan covers covers some years ago. I came across Sims, who released an entire album of Dylan covers in 2016 (including the only existing cover of My Wife’s Hometown), pretty much by accident. There is little information about Sims on the internet (here are two articles: Remembering the Life of Bill Sims; Bill Sims: Composer Extraordinaire), he passed away in 2019 and it seems nearly impossible to find out who is looking after his legacy. His Dylan cover album Bill On Bob is currently available on iTunes, where you can pre-listen and download the song or the entire album, if you like it.

Renowned US jazz singer Paula Cole tackled Hollis Brown on her eighth studio album Ballads in 2017. Besides Hollis Brown the release also includes her take on Dylan’s The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, both tunes which she says she sings with reverence: I was really moved by Bob Dylan’s period in the ‘60s when he would sit at his typewriter and weave his social commentary into these beautiful poems and songs. Cole’s cover offers an interesting jazzy arrangement and a singer who is emotionally involved, but that doesn’t really carry over to me.

The latest cover version from 2023 comes from another prominent jazz vocalist: Emma Smith is recognised as one of the most exciting voices of her generation, spanning many genres, scenes and stages, she has performed from the O2 to the top jazz clubs of NYC. Being immersed in a musical environment from a young age she began her singing career at 14, and the year after joined NYJO as featured vocalist. She has also appeared with Sir John Dankworth’s band, the Jazz Vocal Project alongside Bobby McFerrin, and at the 2015 BBC Proms. Emma Smith’s rendition brings us back to the beginning of this article: the formal monotony of Hollis Brown tempts artists to artificially pump up the performance and confuse the drama and intensity of the song with loudness and vocal flamboyance. In my opinion, this also seems to have happened to Emma Smith – despite her undisputed talent and the excellent accompaniment by her quartet.

Previously in the “Covers we missed” series…

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