By Jürg Lehmann
Part one of this series can be found here.
The 70s and 80s offered another endless parade of minor and major artists, without anyone standing out with a particularly captivating performance. Perhaps Etta James (1983) can be seen as a late successor to Sam Cooke and Stevie Wonder, regarding the acceptance and fascination of Dylan’s song among black artists.
Towards the end of the 80s, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ saw a bit of a revival as a protest song with a political message. On 18 June 1988, SOS Racisme organised a concert in Paris to protest against apartheid in South Africa. Bruce Springsteen’s surprise appearance was greeted with thunderous applause and his Blowin’ in the Wind was sung by the audience of around 150,000 in unison. One month later Springsteen performed the biggest concert of his career – and the biggest concert ever to take place in the former German Democratic Republic GDR. 300,000 to 500,000 people, depending on the source, saw Springsteen performing Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom and they got the message.
For Neil Young Blowin’ in the Wind became a standard during the 1991 tour with Crazy Horse which he started as the Persian Gulf War began. Apparently, the band watched CNN every night before taking the stage. “It blew my head off during that tour” Young later said in an interview. “When we were playing that stuff, it was intense. It was real. I could see people dying in my mind. I could see bombs falling, buildings collapsing on families.”
The nasty images and violent news spurred Young to play some of his roughest including an angry version of Blowin’ in the Wind, accompanied by the sound of a blaring air raid siren and gunfire.
“Entertainment, all by itself, is great; it’s a great thing to do, he points out. But when something like [the war] is happening, certain songs just seem trite. Why bother doing ’em? It’s just natural that the songs reflect what was happening in the country. You’d see it in people’s faces as they came in and out of the concert – the slogans they had on the signs they were holding.”
Neil Young has sung ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ live on many occasions, but his performance at the 2013 Farm Aid Concert is particularly well known.
The remainder of the 1990s was a relatively slow period with few notable developments. Artists who made their mark on the song included.
Low (2000) with their typical minimalist approach, Mountain (2007) with their typical powerful attitude; sister-act Liz Callaway & Ann Hampton Callaway (2012) dive into the song with lots of soul and passion, British folksinger Seth Lakeman (2011) brings in a Celtic touch while Ziggy Marley (2012) puts a reggae twist to “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
If you lived in the German-speaking part of Europe in the 80s and 90s, Nena was your constant musical companion. Nena started her career at the beginning of the 80s, when the band’s second single, 99 Luftballons (99 Red Balloons), was released in January 1983. The song caught the attention of a DJ in Los Angeles and spread throughout the U.S. 99 Red Balloons was an international success, selling millions of copies. And Nena became one of the most famous pop singers in Germany for many years.
It comes as a surprise that she has a different artistic side too. The double album Cover Me (side 1 in German, side 2 in English) was released in 2007, she interprets national and international hits and personal favourite songs. The album reviews were mostly mixed or bad: Adding electronic beats to ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ and singing it with a distorted voice is song rape, a German critic wrote. I don’t agree, I think Nena brought something new to the covers of Blowin’ in the Wind that no one had imagined before.
The series continues….