by Jochen Markhorst
XII You don’t whistle in church
On Dutch radio, the 2020 single receives airplay to this day, “Gypsy Woman (She Is Homeless)” the cover of Crystal Waters’ ultimate dance hit from the summer of 1991, performed by Mell & Vintage Future from Volendam. It is a version that fits into a long-running, successful trend that has persisted for more than 20 years now: stripping down, dragging out and depressing up-tempo songs. Debatable, but the most likely main culprit for setting the trend seems to be Michael Andrews. Commissioned to provide the soundtrack for the cult film Donnie Darko (2001), Andrews delivers a brilliant score with 16 instrumental tracks. Plus a cover, which he has his mate Gary Jules sing: “Mad World” – a chilling, minimalist interpretation of the rhythmic, highly danceable 1983 Tears For Fears hit. After the late release of the soundtrack (2004), it became a deserved global hit. Which, apart from for financial reasons, is also particularly artistically pleasing to both spiritual fathers Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal:
“It was actually quite amazing to hear when it first came along. We both think it’s truer to the lyrics than our version, in the sense that the recording is very dark. I think we became popular because of the sort of juxtaposition of quite serious and intense lyrics with actually a kind of pop sound. So our versions of songs tended to be a bit more upbeat whereas that is really the emotion of the lyric.”
(Curt Smith in Top 2000 a gogo, 2023)
Gary Jules – Mad World
It inspires. Ane Brun, the girl from the north country Norway whom Dylan fans have come to appreciate through her stunning covers of “Girl From The North Country”, “Make You Feel My Love” and especially “She Belongs To Me” scores in 2008 with a hushed version of Alphaville’s old synth hit “Big In Japan”, Dave Lichens astounds with a nigh on gregorian arrangement for piano and choir of Blind Melon’s indie classic “No Rain”, Sleeping at Last lays a chillingly bleak veil over the very happiest song of the 1980s, The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)”… and so, in the 21st century, since Gary Jules, the charts of the 1980s and 1990s have been plundered by solemn weeping willows, who remarkably often stare ponderously over misty expanses of water in the accompanying music videos.
Sleeping at Last – I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles):
The covers are often enough beautiful, and often enough expose unexpected beauty by credibly tipping the whole song (such as “Mad World” and T.V Carpio’s “I Want To Hold Your Hand”), but at least as often fail to meet the quality requirement implicitly articulated by Curt Smith: “That is really the emotion of the lyric.” “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” is a truly marvellous song, but the cover’s sort of juxtaposition, as Smith calls it, is disturbingly bizarre. Cary Brothers transforms Level 42’s “Something About You” into an ethereal, magical and, above all, sad gem. Thus seemingly to mock the grateful joy that oozes from the lyrics, now suggesting – unintentionally, we may assume – sarcasm.
The trend approximates what Al Kooper initiates that Thursday afternoon, 29 July. Since 15 June, they have played the song a dozen times in the studio, four days ago they rehearsed and performed it in Newport, this morning three more times… “Phantom Engineer” is under the skin of mainstays Bloomfield, Kooper and Dylan by now. Solid enough at least to vary, to improvise a cover of the song, as it were. But: still within the framework, within “the emotion of the lyric”. Until now, “Phantom Engineer” was a hi-speed bullet train racing from St. Louis to Chicago without stops. The afternoon version is still a train, but now more of a slow train coming, departing from the Mississippi Delta, shaking and jolting and tumbling to New Orleans via Clarksdale, Vicksburg and Jackson – the band is replacing one train ride for another.
This loyalty to the “emotion of the lyric” is maintained in the first well-known cover of the song, the one from Super Session (1968). “I pulled out the fast arrangement,” says Al Kooper – the mail train picks up steam again, racing away from country, back to the urban blues again. Elevating the song to the canon en passant, thanks to the record’s impressive sales figures.
The floodgates then really open after Super Session. Blue Cheer, Martha Vélez, Marianne Faithfull, Leon Russell… all fine covers, all pretty much keeping the stomp of the original while adding their own touches. The first real deviation is recorded in 1970 by The Lyman Family, the cult-like hippie group around Mel Lyman. The cover is a slow, folky, acoustic reinterpretation from which the melancholy drips, and is thus a first, early exercise of the reconstruction form that is becoming so popular in the 21st century. Not exactly fitting, but still piquant: Mel Lyman is the guy who at the time in Newport calmed the excited tempers after Dylan’s electric earthquake with a 20-minute wordless harmonica rendition of “Rock Of Ages”. Excruciatingly drawn-out and equally one-dimensional, but folk purists could appreciate it still, if only as an antidote after Dylan’s betrayal:
“And from a lone mike on stage, the thin plaintive cry of a harp sobbed “Rock of Ages!” Rock of ages, cleft for me… it sang, over and over, the same simple chorus, the same refrain, and the audience fell in step. It was a plea, a hymn, a dirge, a lullaby. Twenty times, thirty, more, and always the same beseeching, stroking, praying, pleading; then slower, softer, and, as the supplication trailed away, the park was empty and people were on their way home.”
… says Robert J. Lurtsema in The Broadside of 18 August 1965. Irwin Silber, the publisher of Sing Out! and Dylan’s most disappointed, embittered fan puts it a bit less poetic, but still with a superlative: “The most optimistic note of the evening.” And in the August ‘65 issue of his magazine, so right after Newport, he gladly gives all space to opposing forces. To Theodore Bickel’s highly quotable sneer, for example: “You don’t whistle in church — you don’t play rock and roll at a folk festival.”
What Irwin thought five years later about Mel Lyman recording the festival catastrophe “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” for his LP Avatar, history does not record. Lyman sucks all the rock ‘n’roll out of the song – which Irwin probably appreciated very much.
To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 12: You don’t whistle in church
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:
- Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
- Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
- Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
- Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
- Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
- Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
- Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
- John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
- Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
- Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
- Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2nd Big Bang
- Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
- Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
- Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
- Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
- I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
- Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
- Bob Dylan’s 1971
- Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door