It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (1965) part 13
by Jochen Markhorst
XIII Just a basic whack thud
Chris Smither has many qualities for which we admire him, and one of those many qualities is: his footwork. There are few artists who so hypnotically and purposefully use both feet as a percussive metronome. J.J. Cale comes to mind – though he only used one foot. The Americana-UK interviewer asks about it at the end of an on-point and enjoyable interview for the October 2010 issue. Is it just a random wooden board under your feet or do you bring it specially yourself? Does it have to be a certain size, does it have to be a certain type of wood?
“Interestingly enough, what you really want, or what I want, is a lack of tonality. That’s why I don’t use actual wood. I use particleboard, which is non-resonant, has a very dull uniform sound. Use a nice piece of oak, or maple, it has an inherent tone itself and it will often conflict with the key that you’re playing in. So what I’m really looking for is something which is just a basic whack thud which won’t interfere.”
It’s a Smither signature thing, and happens to fall very well with one of the very best “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” covers at all, Smithers’ 2009 studio recording of the song for one of his very best LPs, Time Stands Still. Chris tilts the song from melancholy to sadness and actually slows the tempo down too far – the shuffle dictating the mood in the original and in almost every cover is gone. But then there is that footwork: the continuous cadence of the wagon over the rails, unobtrusive but unrelenting. The academic dogmatiser might argue that it is more of an adaptation than a cover, and Chris does recognise that:
“The Dylan song has been with me forever. I did play it in public once at a Dylan workshop, but it’s just one that stuck with me from the early days. It just seemed right, you know. And a lot of people are surprised by it and say that’s a different take on it. I didn’t go back to the original; I just did it the way I remembered it, and of course it is different! I didn’t realize how much it had shifted in my mind. It’s kind of sadder the way I do it, but it’s just a testimony to how strong his songs are that you can change ’em that much. And they still hold together. Of course he does that all the time — changes them.”
(interview with Martin Bandyke for Ann Arbor News, 25 October 2009)
But despite the “changes” and the “shift” surely one of the most beautiful covers of the song. Or more likely: thanks to it. With which Chris Smither completes a trilogy, by the way. His “Visions Of Johanna” (Leave the Light On, 2006) and his “Desolation Row” (Train Home, 2003, featuring Bonnie Raitt) are also already in the respective Top 5 of Most Beautiful Covers Ever. You can’t ignore Dylan, Smither explains, although Blonde On Blonde did manage to make him a little unhappy at the time;
“I got to New York the same week that Blonde On Blonde came out and I was meeting all these people and we used to listen to that record, we’d listen to “Visions Of Johanna” and I just… it was depressing. Because you kept thinking to yourself: how am I ever going to do something that approaches that.”
. (interview with Otis Gibbs for Otis’ YouTube channel, 2024)
Forty years later, he has then developed enough courage and self-confidence to attack even the “unapproachable” “Visions Of Johanna”, and has also found the “how to do”. To producer David “Goody” Goodrich and his powers of persuasion (Smither: “He knows how to manipulate me”) we owe the brilliant finds in terms of instrumentation. Smither himself is more of a man of more-is-less, but Goodrich has mastered the paradoxical art of trickling in more instruments verse after verse – mandolin, accordion, bass, mandocello, second voice, karimba – but nonetheless retaining its heartfelt, minimalist charm. Into the stratosphere his cover then comes thanks to a find Smithers attributes to friend and colleague Steve Tilston:
“I sort of shifted the signature on it. I do it in 6/4, you know, that has a sort of a three-feel to it instead of the 4/4 that Dylan’s in. I still like to play that song. I play it fairly often.”
… an subdued waltz rhythm, in other words. To a significant extent responsible for the irresistible melancholy dripping out of the loudspeaker boxes.
As an aside, it is the only Dylan cover where Smither sticks neatly to the lyrics. Well apart then from a few insignificant shortcuts to stay in the metre. On “It Takes A Lot”, he swaps verses and affords minor variations (“Don’t the brakeman look fine” instead of good, for instance), and on “Desolation Row” he goes completely his own way and shuffles words, word combinations and complete sentences to his heart’s content. Interviewer Otis Gibbs tries to compliment him. How do you remember all those lyrics, he asks;
“I cheat. I don’t do them all actually – I compressed it. You know, I combined some verses and rewrote it. I thought rather cleverly. But the funny thing is that there’s so many words to that song that hardly anybody notices that I was messing around with them.”
Which is true. The mesmerising guitar playing, the hypnotic foot tapping, Bonnie Raitt’s misty second voice and über-sad slide guitar, the unearthly horns, the haunting organ and Smither’s vocals suggesting even more convincingly than Dylan’s that he, in fact, is really on Desolation Row… Smither does weave a dream in which you lose sense of reality. And then indeed you no longer notice that to Cinderella “death is quite romantic”, rather than to Ophelia, who takes Romeo away from her as well, and moreover now gets to play the pennywhistles of Dr Filth and the nurse with him; that Einstein makes his appearance already in the second verse (and not until the fifth); that in the last verse he sighs Right now I don’t feel too good instead of Right now I can’t read too good – just to name a few examples of Smither’s carefree “messing around”.
With Smither’s own songs, as we know, things also worked out well. The least we can say of Smither is that he approaches Dylan’s oeuvre and status. Premier League names like Emmylou Harris, Dr John, Bonnie Raitt and Diana Krall cover his songs on their albums, recognition is worldwide and in 2014, record label Signature Sounds even released an all-star tribute album with contributions from illustrious names like Tim O’Brien, Loudon Wainwright and Josh Ritter: Link of Chain: A Songwriters’ Tribute to Chris Smither.
Very nice, but even nicer would be a Dylan tribute album by Smither, and then please produced by David “Goody” Goodrich. Four songs we already have. Apart from the ones mentioned above, a wonderful, Little Feat-like “Down In The Flood” from 1972 – with input from Bonnie Raitt as well as assistance from Dylan veterans Ben Keith, Maria Muldaur and Happy Traum.
Smither’s only Dylan cover without foot tapping, though.
To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 14: I ride on a million train baby
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