The Covers We Missed: Blind Willie McTell part 2

 

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

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A list of all the cover reviews from the original series of articles on covers of Dylan songs, can be found at the end of the final article in that series.   Details of the articles from this series (“The Covers We Missed”)  are given at the end of this article.

By Jurg Lehmann

Back in the early 90s, soul singer Barrence Whitfield and singer-songwriter Tom Russell were among the first to jump on the Blind Willie bandwagon on their Hillbilly Voodoo album (1993). Barrence and Tom were an unlikely team: Whitfield holds the spotlight, as Jeff Burger says, Russell joins in the fun, but his main role seemed to be as producer. Boston-based soul screamer Whitfield was known for his high-energy shows and was seeking to expand his reputation. “Tom Russell brought the voice out of me to do the other styles of music,” Whitfield explained at the time. “Let’s face it: how long can you scream your guts out before you say, I’ve got to slow down?” In my opinion, the slowing down didn’t quite work out, their hard-driving version still contains a lot of screaming.

In the early noughties, a growing number of artists took on Blind Willie – with more or less interesting results.

American blues singer Beth Scalet (2001) covered Blind Willie on her album with the somewhat quirky title Beth Loves Bob –Scalet is an able singer, but the arrangement lacks tension and depth.

British rock vocalist Roger Chapman is now 82, and if you listen to his latest albums, it seems that he no longer sings the songs into the ground. “Chappo’s” voice sounds nicely weathered now, with less of the exaggerated tremolo that divided opinion back in the days when he recorded Blind Willie – in 2002 for the album Live – Opera House, Newcastle and in 2011 for Maybe the Last Time. Chapman has an excellent band, but his roaring, always somewhat hoarse-sounding organ didn’t do Blind Willie any good.

Dublin singer George Murphy‘s voice is very different from Chapman’s: loud too, but otherwise pressed and strained. A nice first half; unfortunately, the song doesn’t hold out.

The Respatexans were a Norwegian country rock band; they disbanded a few years ago. Their  Blind Willie is on the album Shine On (2005).

According to those who should know it was Garth Hudson who created the sound of The BandKeyboard Magazine called him the “most brilliant organist in the rock world”.

After the death of Rick Danko in 1999 The Band definitely disbanded. Hudson released his first solo album The Sea to the North in 2001. In the fall of 2002 Garth Hudson and his wife Maud were asked to perform a concert as part of the inaugural weekend at the Wolf Performance Hall in Garth’s hometown of London, Ontario, Canada.

The album “Live at the Wolf”, released in 2005, captures the fun, warmth and magic of that night. It was Garth’s and Maud’s first duo live concert, the album also celebrates their 25th wedding anniversary. “We did rehearse, but it was spontaneous. It came up in a hurry because we had a short time to prepare, Garth recalls. We wanted to do something like this for years. Every time I play a song it’s different. It seems similar, you can hear the same sound, but I never played a song the same way with The Band as I did with Maud.”

Live at the Wolf is a fine display of Garth Hudson’s masterful piano playing and Maud is stepping fully out of the shadows. Their “Blind Willie McTell” has a hauntingly unique pace and feel with Maud both insistently whispering and dramatically singing. “Personally I just listen in awe to what Garth Hudson does, writes Tony Attwood, and this one just knocked me out. If one is going to have a re-working of the song as far away from McTell’s music as Bob’s version then yes, this is it.  It is stunning because it is beautifully performed and because it takes me into the song in ways I have not been taken before. It is beyond Indigo Girls performing “Tangled up in Blue” and beyond even Old Crowe doing “Visions of Johanna”. With Robbie Robertson’s death in 2023, Garth Hudson is the last surviving member of The Band. If you would like to delve into his world: Let Me Tell You About Garth Hudson, the recently released video documentary by Kody Kava (18’) is a nice hommage to the last man standing.

Swedish Mikael Wiehe & Ebba Forsberg have both had a long history with Dylan covers. Their Blind Willie comes from the album Dylan på svenska (2007) which contains some wonderful songs, including an outstanding Farewell, Angelina. Blind Willie can’t keep up with that and you might wonder, why multi-instrumentalist Mikael Wiehe takes on the vocal parts when he has an excellent singer like Ebba Forsberg at his side.

The Wanee Festival was an annual event held 2005 – 2018 and hosted by the Allman Brothers Band until 2014. Allman and Dylan: this immediately evokes Gregg Allman’s powerful reading of “Going Going Gone” on his final album, 2017’s Southern Blood, as he was dying of liver cancer. When he sings “I’m closing the book on pages and texts/And I don’t really care what happens next,” it’s almost too real to take. At the Wanee Festival 2010 The Allman Brothers (featuring Derek Trucks on guitar) took on Blind Willie.

When Totta Näslund died in 2005 (also from liver cancer), Sweden lost not only a great musician but also a remarkable personality, who enchanted audiences with his intense stage presence. You can guess that when you listen to his albums, most of which are live recordings. Four of them are partly or fully focused on Dylan: Turnén (2004), Dylan (with Mikael Wiehe), an album which was posthumously released (2006), Totta’s Basement Tapes – Down in the Flood: Songs by Bob Dylan (2010) and En Dubbel Dylan (with Mikael Wiehe), a compilation released in 2015, where you find Totta’s Blind Willie (unfortunately, only available on Spotify).

Bob Dylan was the great revelation of my life“, says Francis Cabrel and he has made it one of his missions to tirelessly promote Dylan in France. “Vise le Ciel” (Aim for the Sky) from 2012 is a studio album, which is composed solely of covers of Bob Dylan songs, Blind Willie McTell being the last track on the album.

Clas Yngström had a momentous event early in his career: a Hendrix interpreter he played with his band Sky High in Amsterdam in 1980, where they literally stole the show, prompting the Experience’s drummer Mitch Mitchell to leap on stage to jam and play drums behind Yngström. Since then, Yngström has toured for almost 50 years and has become one of Scandinavia’s most acclaimed blues guitarists. This spring the Swedish blues icon announced that he is retiring. I don’t want to become a zombie, says Yngström. As for Dylan, he leaves behind the tribute album Mr. Bob’s Blue Devils (2012) with some great covers (Meet me in the Morning, Beyond Here Lies Nothing). However, Yngström and Blind Willie  don’t go together very well. The band plays excellently as always, but the spirit of the song remains somehow distant to them.

“I was born in the south of Sweden, it seems like a long, long time ago. Above all, I was born with an old soul. While all my friends were listening to heavy metal, I was drawn to Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, and that was quite strange where I grew up. I started playing guitar and piano as a self-taught musician by listening to songs on records and looking up the chords myself. Richard Lindgren is known as one of Sweden’s best and most productive songwriters. Since the mid-90s, he has released fifteen albums, the last of which, ‘Grand Jubilee’ (2024), received rave reviews in the international press. Richard has also toured extensively for many years. I have spent almost all my life on the road, playing alone or with a band and other times supporting artists like Ryan Adams, Dr John, John Hiatt and Mary Gauthier,.

“Richard Lindgren’s songs touch my heart deeply, he is a kindred spirit to me, writes Mary Gauthier in the liner notes to Grand Jubilee: The sorrow, the longing, the anger, the humor, the always reaching for something more. He has given us an honest gift, the best gift any artist can give. He has given us himself.” Blind Willie McTell is from the 3 CD compilation album Memento, released in 2011. Lindgren plays like someone exploring unknown territory, approaching the song cautiously, carefully, at his side the piano as companion. It is well arranged, well sung, with decent instrumentation. You don’t have to worry about an unmotivated climax, both because of the way the vocalist approaches the lyrics, and the use of the saxophone behind. It would have been easy to overuse it and yet it is restrained and so much more poignant.

Previously in the “Covers we missed” series…

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