Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 13: The songs find their way to me one way or another

by Jochen Markhorst

XIII       The songs find their way to me one way or another

“I never use the word “cover”. No one ever thinks that Ella Fitzgerald “covered” Berlin or Porter. She sang their songs. The songs were re-arranged and she sang them. I sing the songs of Bob Dylan and in this case, Leonard Cohen, because the songs came to me and demanded to be sung. That’s always the way it happens. I keep my ears and being open and wait. The songs find their way to me one way or another. My joy in Dylan’s work knows no bounds. He is Shakespearean to me.”
– Barb Jungr, interview with David Falconer for Female First, 2014

In the fictional Best Dylan Cover Competition, the ladies more often than not finish on top. The Roches‘ unsurpassed “Clothes Line Saga”, Emmylou Harris’ magical “Every Grain Of Sand”, Severa Gjurin’s breathtaking “Not Dark Yet”, Sinead O’Connor’s otherworldly “I Believe In You”, the Dixie Chicks with their irresistible “Mississippi” (okay, ex aequo with Rab Noakes), and we could go on and on. “Tangled Up In Blue” by the Indigo Girls, not to forget.

But in the “Like A Rolling Stone” subdivision, no lady even makes it to the Top 5, strangely enough. Brave attempts enough. The first is Cher, in 1966. The Goddess Of Pop is something like Dylan’s ambassador in the pop world, much the way Baez and Odetta are in the folk world. Cher’s successful debut album All I Really Want To Do already features three Dylan songs (apart from the title track, Cher’s first hit, also “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice”) and the success inspires husband Sonny Bono to repeat the same trick. And again and again; within a year, Sonny has his wife chirping two more complete albums (The Sonny Side of Chér and Chér, both released in 1966), With Love, Chér follows in 1967, and the fifth and last record the couple records is Backstage – five records in two and a half years, in other words, and four Sonny & Cher albums in between.

Broadly speaking, each of Cher’s solo records follows the pattern of the debut album: a couple of covers, one or two songs written by Sonny Bono, and always at least one Dylan cover. And all recorded in the same studio (Gold Star Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood) with the same producer Sonny Bono and largely the same session musicians – there are not too many differences between the five LPs. Cher’s “Like A Rolling Stone” is on the second one, on The Sonny Side of Chér and so it does indeed sound like “I Got You Babe” or “Little Man” or any of those many other Sonny & Cher songs, with or without Sonny: like Phil Spector on a diet. The cover is pretty redundant, Cher’s vocal qualities, which are not too dizzying anyway, really fall short, and the only lasting value are the unleashed drums and their sound – so really only a nostalgic, dated quality.

Cher remains loyal to Dylan for a little while longer. The first record she makes without Sonny, the underrated 1969 gem 3614 Jackson Highway under the direction of Jerry Wexler at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, features no less than three Dylan covers. And again, Cher is quick off the mark; she is the first to cover “I Threw It All Away”, and the shared first to record “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” (at about the same time as Esther Phillips, both in April 1969, i.e. the same month Nashville Skyline is released). It’s true love, as we can distil from her autobiography The Memoir, Part One (2024):

“I was a huge Dylan fan and loved his writing, as did Sonny, although he never thought much of his voice, which was a bit rich coming from him.”

… but nevertheless, after 3614 Jackson Highway, that love is only consumed platonically; Cher has not recorded a single Dylan song since 1969.

The next lady up is Maxine Weldon in 1971, who has the great good fortune to be dealt The Jazz Crusaders as session musicians, making two wonderful soul albums. “Like A Rolling Stone” is on the second, Right On, the record that opens with a surprisingly successful soul interpretation of “It Ain’t Me, Babe”. Equally catchy are her versions of Creedence’s “Lodi” and especially Traffic’s “Feelin’ Alright”, but on “Like A Rolling Stone” it chafes: not being able to choose between rock and soul really only works out well if you’re Blood, Sweat & Tears. Magisterial organ, though. And, of course, The Jazz Crusaders always sound great.

And that’s how it is, for more than fifty years hereafter. “Like A Rolling Stone” seems immune to the je-ne-sais-quoi that female artists often manage to inject into a Dylan song. Judy Collins, Sara K. (still a brave, intimate, acoustic, jazzy attempt), Nancy Sinatra… none of the ladies are Top 5 candidates re this particular Dylan song. Not even La Jungr.

Veteran and Dylan expert Barb Jungr can be regarded as the Dylan interpreter of the 21st century and can tick off dozens of highly successful Dylan covers, but every now and then she misses the mark – like unfortunately (or maybe: precisely) with the monument “Like A Rolling Stone”. Her tribute album Every Grain Of Sand (2002) with fifteen mostly wonderful Dylan covers was rightly acclaimed at the time, catapulting her name into the thin heights where Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone dwell. Understandably, it gave her the courage to continue building on her Dylan catalogue, culminating in a second tribute album in 2011 with 13 covers: Man In The Long Black Coat. Fairly consistently, the English lady keeps embellishing the albums in between and after with yet another Dylan cover, as she does on Waterloo Sunset in 2003. Track 2 is a particularly idiosyncratic, dramatic, very European jazz interpretation of Dylan’s twenty-first-century masterpiece “High Water”, carried by a compelling lick on the double bass, expressionistic keys from the piano and soundtrack-like guitar commentary. Comparably quirky is Track 8, her approach to “Like A Rolling Stone”.

This approach seems to have been: Chet Baker Sings. “My Funny Valentine”, “How Long Has This Been Going On?”, those regions. The upright bass as the driving force, the piano for accents, the vocals in the centre. It works well enough in the bridge and pre-chorus, and chorus is alright, but strangely it does not work in the verses – Barb “cannot keep up,” as it were, seems to have to sprint after the syllables. Strange; usually, Jungr is actually as much a master of phrasing as Dylan is. Anyway, it’s her choice. Although… the choice, if we are to believe her, is more or less forced on Jungr:

I never go into arranging thinking, “What I want this song to do is…” I go into an arrangement thinking, “What could happen with this song if we listen to it differently?” We ask questions. We try things and we ask questions of the song. We sit the song down at the piano and we go [to the song], “How do you feel if we do this? How do you feel if we moved that section about?” And the song is very clear. The song will go, “Yeah, I like that,” or, “What are you thinking? Don’t be an idiot.”
(Don Gibson interviews Jungr for Write On Music, March 2014)

An intelligent professional woman, La Jungr talks about Dylan’s songs and her methods with appealing poetry and philosophical depth. In which she shows herself to be a kindred spirit of Dylan, by the way – Dylan can communicate with the same mystical poetry that he is just a guiding vessel, that songs “come to him”, and that “the song knows what it wants.” As Jungr says: “It’s always about what the song asks for. What does the song want? What questions do the lyrics pose that the arrangements can help answer?” (PopMatters inteview with Alex Ramon, 2014). To what extent Barb has found that answer in the case of “Like A Rolling Stone” is debatable. In any case, the men of the wonderful podcast Is It Rolling Bob? do enthuse and ask Jungr about it, October 2018. “It took my breath away,” confesses host Lucas Hare, and then classifies Jungr’s interpretation as “a sort of psycho-drama. A quiet, understated psycho-drama up to a point.” “I know some people hated it,” says Jungr dryly.

Subjective, of course. And still: Jungr often enough makes the Top 5 of the fictional Best Dylan Cover Competition. The No. 1 position even – with “Is Your Love In Vain?” anyway. With “I Want You” perhaps, and her eerie “Man In The Long Black Coat” also comes very close. Songs that have found their way to Barb, one way or another.

 

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 14: What was I to say? Hurry up, asshole?

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

One comment

  1. It’s a big statement to claim the ‘ladies more often than not finish on top’. As good as the covers you cite are, Jimi’s Watchtower usually finishes on top in my straw polls. Elvis’s ‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time’ is Bob’s own favourite. Personally, I’d also always have the Byrds ‘My Back Pages’ in the argument, given that its change has received, like Jimi’s Watchtower, the ultimate compliment in being adopted by Bob.

    Big statement, big argument, barely started.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *