Covers we missed: Beyond Here Lies Nothin’

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 Beyond Here Lies Nothin’

By Jürg Lehmann

Beyond the horizon is Peter Parcek territory: no one has immersed himself in the song as intensely as the virtuoso Boston blues guitarist.  Parcek discovered Dylan as a teenager in a small town in Connecticut when he caught one of Dylan’s concerts at the Bushnell Auditorium in Hartford in 1966, as the folk artist was becoming a rocker.

I’ll never forget that concert at the Bushnell,” says Parcek. People were booing him in that concert. I thought he was fantastic…I really felt a connection to this music, and I wanted to try something that hadn’t been done. Hopefully Bob won’t come after me, and really, I hope he’d like it. You have to be true to who you are, so I did not try and imitate his versions. I figured Dylan, of all people, proved it’s OK to personalize music, so my versions are very different from his. His songs all tell stories in very distinct ways, and I think his later work, the most recent stuff, definitely feels like it has some Chess Records, classic blues influences.

Parcek’s earliest version of Beyond Here Lies Nothin comes from his 2011 Pledging My Time. The EP also includes  Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat,  It Takes a Lot to Laugh and She Belongs to Me. The songs can be found at Parcek’s website www.peterparcekband.com or at bandcamp (in case you have a spotify subscription you can also find it there).

In 2013 Parcek (pronounce: Par:check) uploaded a live performance on youtube which prompted Tony Attwood to an enthusiastic review: Now if I were still in a band, 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. (For whatever reason) 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.

A live Peter Parcek experience is second to none, writes Judd Marcelloc in the liner notes to the 2011 EP. Having logged many live gigs, I was also very interested in hearing recorded music from Peter. I was always asking Peter if he was going to release an album. Each time I asked, “I’m not ready, yet” was Peter’s reply. In 2010 Peter finally released his national album debut, The Mathematics of Love, to much critical acclaim…It says a lot about the integrity of a musician – one that is already playing at a level most never reach – that after four-plus decades of live gigs and honing his self-taught style, he finally felt he was “ready” to make his statement.

Today Peter Parcek is no longer an insider tip, he is regularly being praised by critics for his exceptional guitar skills. Next time Dylan needs a guitar player for his Never Ending Tour band, he should give Parcek a call, one says. And he was honoured by Buddy Guy during a backstage visit, when Parcek grabbed a guitar lying around and started playing, with the sentence ‘You’re as bad as Eric Clapton, and I know Eric Clapton’.

In 2020 Parcek released his latest album Mississippi Suitcase, yet again with a cover of Beyond Here Lies Nothin’, this time with a moodier version compared to the one in 2011.

Luckily, Parcek has been working so intensively on Dylan, because apart from him, nobody else has tackled the song on a comparable level. The closest to him come Clas Yngström & Big Tex Three. Yngström is considered one of Sweden’s best blues guitarists and singers. In 2012 Yngström and his band recorded the album Mr. Bob’s Blue Devils. They have selected twelve songs from different periods in Dylan’s career. From the early Outlaw Blues (Bringin’ It All Back Home 1965) and Pledging My Time (Blonde on Blonde 1966) to Jolene (Together Through Life 2009). It’s worth listening to the entire album, but the definitive highlights are Meet Me in the Morning (one of the best covers of this song) and Beyond Here Lies Nothin’.

Norwegian jazz singer Gina Aspenes (2015) and the Honeyboys (2016), a band of older gentlemen based in New Brunswick, round off the “official” interpreters.

 

If Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ meets with little interest from established professionals, then this does not apply to the legions of semi-professionals or amateurs who stage themselves on youTube. You can easily find 20 to 30 performances, including several remarkable ones, for example….

And there are more….

Megakukl from Iceland (2012), and Tyylilaji Tuntematon from Finland (2013)

Footnote from the editor.  Jürg also included New Pony-The Dylan Sessions (2012) but I can’t get that link to work in the UK where I am based.   You might have more luck.

 

Previously in the “Covers we missed” series…

•  2×2; Saturday Night Fry
• Abandoned Love
• Ain’t Talkin
• All along the Watchtower
• All I really want to do
• All the Tired Horses
• As I went out one morning
• Baby Stop Crying
• Ballad of a Thin Man
• Beyond the horizon
• Hollis Brown