The Covers We Missed: Blind Willie McTell – Part 3

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.

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By Jurg Lehmann

Tom Morello is best known for his tenure with the bands Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave and the supergroup Prophets of Rage.

Under the moniker The Nightwatchman Morello began performing as the Nightwatchman in 2005 as an outlet for his political views while he was playing apolitical music with Audioslave. Morello, who is a nephew of Jomo Kenyatta, the first Kenyan president, is a hard-boiled political activist, he has championed causes ranging from immigration reform and ending war to abolishing torture and the death penalty.

He also transposes his world view onto music consistently, for example, he believes that it was a crying shame when Dylan got on board with the zeitgeist and plugged in: “I may be the last person alive who still believes that Dylan sold out at Newport in 1965 when he went electric,” Morello opines. “I think he missed an opportunity to see if there was a ceiling to what music could do to push forward radical politics.” Needless to say, Dylan would disagree…

Before Morello recorded Blind Willie McTell for the Amnesty International project Chimes of Freedom, he had already had an experience with covering Dylan, when Rage Against the Machine released an impressive version of Maggie’s Farm on their cover album Renegade in 2000.

It was probably a matter of principle for Morello to join the Amnesty project in 2012, or, as the Uncut Magazine puts it: Fifty years since he first whined “Song To Woody” into a microphone at the Columbia Recording Studio in New York, Dylan has become to any politically engaged musician what Shakespeare is to actors: something you feel you have to step up to at some point. In the case of both bards, the greatest rewards are frequently reaped by those who can summon the nerve to take liberties…The cuts which stand out ­(on the Amnesty album) are the ones unafraid of what they’re dealing with like Tom Morello’s contribution who turns “Blind Willie McTell” into a electrified trip-hop nightmare.

Paperhead, a band about which virtually no information is available, has reduced Blind Willie with minimal means to the bare bones. Probably the whole thing is a bit too minimalistic; the longer the song lasts, the more it loses its tension. Apparently it is only available on spotify (2014).

Danish Jens Stage tirelessly covers Dylan songs, even those that no one else tackles (which is, in principle, an excellent idea). Blind Willie is from his Bob Dylan Jam album (2014).

The album La Terre Commune is a collaboration stemming from longtime mutual admiration: Iain Matthews, founding member of Fairport Convention, and Elliott Murphy find common ground on La Terre Commune. If you are aware of the musical careers of Elliot Murphy & Iain Matthews, it would seem the pairing of both these artists is a bit strange. But the two succeed in creating a seamlessly cohesive song cycle, as a critic writes. Allowing each other to stake out his own territory in the recording process, Murphy and Matthews complement each other extremely well, not just vocally, but stylistically. Blind Willie is one of four covers on the album – I not sure whether Matthews and Murphy really do justice to the original.

One of the most interesting songs on Map & No Direction by Beth Bombara (2017) is a brooding, sultry reworking of “Blind Willie McTell,” marked by lush string arrangements. “You have so much time to pass while on the road and we were listening to some Dylan B cuts and this was one of them,” she explains. “It just struck me. It was the lyrics, which still seemed relevant to things I was thinking about going on today. I knew I’ve got to sing this song, but interpret it in my own way.”

With songs as raw as they are haunting, grumpy German blues bard Bad Temper Joe has gained attention in the international blues scene over the last few years. His Blind Wille comes from the album Bad Temper Joe and His Band (2017) where you can find more Dylan covers.

 

In February 2018, Austrian Oliver Mally and his German partner Peter Schneider performed in a small blues club in Bavaria. And although it was not planned, this acoustic concert was recorded and then released under the title ‘Folk Blues Adventures’. Both Mally and Schneider have long been well-established in the European blues and folk scene. And at least Mally has a great affinity for Dylan: in 2019 he released the tribute album Mally Plays Dylan. Unfortunately, it is no longer available, so we have to make do with the Blind Willie version from the 2018 album.

Like almost half of the Blind Willie cover artist Georga also comes from Scandinavia. He is a member of a Swedish punk act which seems not obvious when you listen to his cover (2018).

Guitarist and bassist Richard James was a founding member of the Welsh psychedelic folk band Gorky’s Zygotic Myncic, who split up in 2006. Since that time he mostly performs as a solo artist. His Blind Willie comes from the 2018 album Covered.

Dylan.pl is a Polish group founded in playing Bob Dylan’s songs in their own unplugged arrangements. The basis for the Polish versions are translations by Dylan’s tireless promoter Filip Łobodziński. The double album Niepotrzebna pogodynka, żeby znać kierunek wiatru (literally translated “You don’t need a weather forecaster to know the wind direction”) contains 29 songs, Łobodziński describes the Blind Willie cover as a “New Orleans meets Tom Waits”.

[An additional note from Tony – Filip Łobodziński has been an important contributor to this site – just type the word Filip into the search box top right and you’ll find his articles]

Speaking of Tom Waits: Dutch band Bad Liver & The Broken Hearts took their name from a Tom Waits song. They play songs that you loved in the nineties but never hear on the radio anymore. (2019)

Between painting and poetry, English enfant terrible Billy Childish has released over 170 albums and many singles. The beginning of The William Loveday Intention Group in 2020 was ‘the intention’ to revisit some songs from the past, which Billy had imagined could be orchestrated. This was also the starting signal of a ‘career in a year’ when he accidentally recorded over 14 LPs during the lockdown including one entitled The New And Improved Bob Dylan, where Childish took also on Blind Willie.

The Covid-19 pandemic has inspired the release of a number of albums with writers and musicians seemingly galvanised by what they are witnessing, and recordings being produced in novel ways. All I Got Left by New York City guitarist and singer Chris Bergson is an example of this. Blind Willie McTell, which closes the album, is slowed to a hauntingly funereal pace that only adds more depth to the foreboding lyrics, writes Rhys Williams. Its words are startlingly apposite given the empty streets of NYC during the lockdown: “Seen the arrow on the doorpost saying, ‘This land is condemned, all the way from New Orleans To Jerusalem.’”

There’s no denying it, American singer-songwriter and guitarist Dylan LeBlanc has a spellbinding, haunting singing voice. His producers place that voice prominently in the foreground, sometimes – as you can read – despite hesitation from the singer himself. In my opinion, LeBlanc’s concerns are unfounded, at least as far as his Blind Willie cover (2021) is concerned.

The latest notable covers come from Belgium (2021) and Norway (2022).

Guy Verlinde is Belgium’s pride and joy when it comes to blues music. Dylan has had a huge influence on Guy Verlinde’s musical path. The singer-songwriter from Gent honors his hero with a nice version of Blind Willie McTell, his favorite Dylan song.

Verlinde also published a live studio recording

Knockin’ On Dylan’s Door, a tribute band from Norway, plays exclusively music from Dylan’s catalog, everything from the strong protest songs with acoustic guitar and harmonica, to newer songs with a full band. Their Blind Willie is not outstanding, but it is still interesting.

Lu’s Jukebox is a six-volume series of mostly full-band performances by Lucina Williams recorded live at a studio in Nashville. Each volume features a themed set of songs by other artists, Vol. 3 is dedicated to Bob Dylan (Bob’s Back Pages). The six concerts were livestreamed from the studio at the end of 2020 and most of the songs are available on YouTube.

William’s versions follow the melody structures set out by Dylan, but they take on a character all of their own through the arrangements, the excellent band line-up and, above all, Lucinda’s performance. Some people find her voice affected. To enjoy the performance, you do indeed have to be immune to her increasingly mumbled Southern drawl. Letting the words curl off her tongue and blurring syllables around the edges, Lucinda “wraps the songs in slow, murky, slur and swampy arrangements”, a critic noted. If you look at it favourably, you can, like singer-songwriter Steve Earle, who met Williams in Texas in the early seventies, recognise that “her voice was the most original thing of anybody that I knew. She wasn’t trying to be Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell; she was trying to be Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf.”

When Williams first heard Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” in 1965, the year she started playing guitar, she knew: “That was it for me. I had somehow found the combination, the link of heavy, intense, brave lyrics -he’d obviously listened to a lot of blues – great melodies, and a voice that wasn’t perfect.”

She could have been describing her own music. “I’ve always had an awareness of my voice being distinct,” Williams says. “A lot of the time I feel kind of limited vocally. I’m restricted because of my range. Eventually, though, you have to come to terms with your limitations, which, in turn, become your trademark.”

Lucinda William’s Blind Willie McTell with its scratchy staccato guitar notes is not the most memorable song on Bob’s Back Pages (these would rather be the bluesy takes such as It Takes a Lot to Laugh and Meet Me in the Morning), but it deserves a mention in the cover history of Blind Willie.

The release into a world in lockdown of Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, the first original album in almost a decade, caught everyone by surprise. Its coming was heralded by the single, “Murder Most Foul“. When Pretenders guitarist James Walbourne sent it to Chrissie Hynde, she was immediately hooked. “Listening to that song completely changed everything for me. I was lifted out of this morose mood that I’d been in…That’s when I called James and said, ‘let’s do some Dylan covers’ and that’s what started this whole thing”. “This thing” was released as the album Standing in the Doorway: Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan in May 2021.

Christine Hand Jones (The Dylan Review) is in agreement with almost all critics when she claims that “Blind Willie McTell” is the stand-out track of the album: Hynde’s spooky, folk version of ‘Blind Willie McTell’ fulfils the song’s vision with a recording that stays true both to the folk-blues roots of Dylan’s youth and the bluesman to whom the song pays homage. In keeping with the style of the rest of the album, Hynde begins ‘Blind Willie McTell’ with simple piano and acoustic guitar. On the second verse, a low drone fades in beneath it all, elevating the tension, as every crack in Hynde’s voice contributes to the song’s chilling images. In verse three, a high, keening organ demonstrates the ‘tribes a-moanin’ on the slave ships. Ghostly mandolin and percussive bass pulses create the sounds of the song’s ‘chain gang’ and yelling ‘rebels.’ Then the song bursts into a glorious organ and mandolin duet before the denouement in the final verse. As we gaze with Hynde out of ‘the window of the St. James Hotel’ and ponder the corruption of mankind, she returns to simple piano and guitar, only to build the whole thing back up again, ending with the wails of eerie mandolin. Hynde’s rendition of ‘Blind Willie McTell’ is a revelation. She’s not just lingering in the doorway of someone else’s genius; she’s taking her own part in the retelling and interpretation and rewriting these songs in the process.”

In 2009, Georgia based Drive-By Truckers recorded a version of Like a Rolling Stone for their album The Fine Print. And in 2011, they opened a couple of concerts for Dylan in the US. Apart from that, there was nothing to suggest that band members Patterson Hood & Jay Gonzalez would be chosen to take part in Uncut Magazine’s Dylan Revisited project ten years later. To celebrate Dylan’s 80th birthday the June 2021 issue of the UK magazine came with a free CD featuring  artists like The Flaming Lips, Low, Richard Thompson, Courtney Marie Andrews, Cowboy Junkies, Weyes Blood.

Some of the contributions are among the best covers of Dylan songs (mentioning just Low with Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door or Weyes Blood’s Sad-Eyed Lady). I don’t think that applies to Hood and Gonzalez. The song starts off interestingly and I’m excited to see where it’s going to take me. The song progresses at a slightly faster pace with Patterson singing and Gonzalez building the sonic structure around him. But the longer the song lasts, the more monotonous Patterson’s singing and the more technical Gonzalez’ accompaniment seem to me. It doesn’t capture me any longer and and don’t get emotionally involved at all. But this is only me. Tony Attwood sees it quite differently: Patterson Hood and Jay Gonzalez don’t disappoint because although they have the same sort of vision as Chrissie Hynde they go elsewhere – and that’s really what I want. The integrity of the song remains but the notion of what we have within the song changes. This is exquisite.

Blind Willie McTell also has a few fine jazz covers:

Marty Ehrlich is one of the most celebrated jazz musicians of his generation, critically acclaimed as a composer and player (saxophones, clarinets, flutes). Ehrlich has released two Dylan covers in his career, Blind Willie McTell in 1999 and I Pity the Poor Immigrant in 2001. The latter is, in my opinion, more interesting. I will therefore go into more detail about Marty Ehrlich in the Poor Immigrant review.

Same procedure concerning Jewels&Binoculars: Amsterdam-based clarinettist Michael Moore, Lindsey Horner (bass) and Michael Vatcher (drums) began their trilogy when Dylan turned 60 in 2003 with the album The Music of Bob Dylan, followed by Floater (2004) and Ships With Tattoed Sails (2007). These albums contain some of the most outstanding Dylan interpretations and I fully agree with critic James Hale, who says: “Bob Dylan should be flattered, as his music here is imaginatively interpreted with gorgeous instrumentation, while treated with obliging respect.” Jewels&Binoculars need more attention, but Blind Willie is not the best example, other covers are more impressive. To be continued…

Jef Lee Johnson’s masterful cover album The Zimmerman Shadow (2009) has 12 songs, each of them is indispensable when it comes to Dylan covers, and that goes for Blind Willie McTell too.

Finally, two instrumental versions: the frist is by Italian Luigi Catuogno (2017), who since more than 20 years has devoted himself almost exclusively to Dylan’s music. He calls his project Dylan Suite. Dylan Suite, he explains, is my musical universe. Not just a tribute to the great American songwriter, but a journey into the styles, rhythms and ways I’ve greeted in my life. Mexican Waltz (To Ramona), Argentine chacarera (Sara), Tarantella (Just Like a Woman) Kletzmer (Man Gave Names To All the Animals) and so many other styles of folk guitar together with the melodic thread of Bob Dylan.

The second is from the juke box musical Girl From the North Country, the artists are Scarecrow Hat (2017).

Previously in the “Covers we missed” series…

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