It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry 14: I ride on a million train baby

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

by Jochen Markhorst

XIV      I ride on a million train baby

The Top 5 Best Covers of any Dylan song is dominated by the ladies. Who are also more often than not at Number 1. Indigo Girls’ “Tangled Up In Blue”, the “I Believe In You” from Sinéad, Dixie Chicks’ “Mississippi”, Severa Gjurin’s “Not Dark Yet”, Emma Swift’s “I Contain Multitudes”, the “Is Your Love In Vain?” by Barb Jungr, and let’s not forget The Roches’ brilliant “Clothes Line Saga” cover… “There’s a density and a gravity to a Dylan song that you can’t find anywhere else,” as Nick Hornby writes (31 Songs, 2003), and for reasons that remain unexplained, female colleagues in particular manage to maintain or even extrapolate those exceptional qualities of a Dylan song (as The Roches do).

But “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” is one of those rare songs where the ladies struggle to make it into the Top 5. The Top 3 seems fairly undisputed: the Super Session cover by Al Kooper and Stephen Stills, the irresistible Chris Smither and Richard Thompson’s Fairport Convention.

Fairport Convention has had a Dylan reputation to uphold since the 1960s – the British folk rockers’ many renditions are usually great. On the first LP (Fairport Convention, 1968), Richard Thompson still only indirectly pays tribute to his hero by incorporating Dylan texts into songs (“Jack O’Diamonds” and “It’s Alright Ma, It’s Only Witchcraft”), but after that, Dylan is unequivocally honoured on every 60s LP (and on stage too). “I’ll Keep It with Mine” (What We Did On Our Holidays, 1968); “Si Tu Dois Partir” (a version unmotivated translated into French of “If You Gotta Go, Go Now”), “Percy’s Song” and “Million Dollar Bash” on Unhalfbricking in 1969 (plus the outtake “Dear Landlord” later appearing on the CD reissue); and the outtake “The Ballad of Easy Rider” on the Deluxe Edition of 1969’s Liege & Lief.

In the decades that follow, Richard Thompson and company remain faithful to Dylan. We hear a compelling “George Jackson”, a funky “Down in the Flood”, “Country Pie” as an explosive country rocker and a homely “Open the Door Richard”, just to name a few. The seventeen Dylan covers on the 2018 compilation A Tree With Roots – Fairport Convention And The Songs Of Bob Dylan offer a fine sampling and a wonderful folk-rock record.

For a good recording of Thompson’s interpretation of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” we have to wait until the 21st century: Cropredy 2002. The Friday session on 9 August of the annual, now three-day August festival Fairport’s Cropredy Convention is nostalgic; original members Ashley Hutchings and Simon Nicol and even short-lived primal member vocalist Iain Matthews (1967-69) join Thompson and play a nostalgic set – i.e. lots of Dylan. “I’ll Keep It With Mine”, “Jack O’Diamonds”, “Million Dollar Bash”… and in between:

“We’re gonna do a song – if you were lucky enough to see us way back then: we did this song quite a lot live. Never recorded it. See if you remember this one,”

… says bassist Ashley Hutchings announcing that Top 3 performance of “It Takes A Lot”. It’s a perfect exercise. As in the original, tempo and groove are set by the guitar, in this case Thompson’s Stratocaster, but Thompson-style: with a whimsical, cool swinging, quirky pattern. Master George Galt’s harmonica flutters hesitantly around it, and then Hutchings lays the concrete foundation. More than thirty years the song has been in the Fairporters’ system, and it pays off. That, and the men’s superior craftsmanship, of course. And that’s without mentioning the lived Dylan love.  A love that Dylan already reciprocates as DJ on his Theme Time Radio Hour three times (playing three Richard & Linda Thompson songs), and in 2013 wholeheartedly when he plays Richard’s pièce de résistance “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” on stage. Which Richard takes in with appropriate pride, some self-mockery and English understatement:

“I didn’t really believe Bob Dylan covered one of my songs… why would he? When it sank in, I thought, ‘Well, that’s fantastic. I’ve covered 75 of his; he’s covered one of mine.’ I think that’s the right ratio.”
.                                                                                       (Ray Padgett’s Pledging My Time, 2023)

It Takes A Lot To Laugh – Fairport Convention:

Little room at the top, all things considered, for the ladies. The usual suspects forego the song anyway: neither the 21st-century prima donna of Dylan covers, Babr Jungr, nor the Dylan torchbearers of the 20th century, Joan Baez and Cher, have “It Takes A Lot” in their repertoire. A prime candidate from the premier league is Dylan disciple Marianne Faithfull, but she chooses the song at an awkward moment in her life and career: 1971, in the years she spent mostly sitting on a wall in Soho under marmalade skies, looking with kaleidoscope eyes at all the clean white sheets stained red. She is quite literally plucked from the wall by Decca producer Mike Leander, who miraculously manages to get full-time junkie Marianne to sing an entire album;

The picture of me on the album cover shows how I actually looked then. Pale, thin and sickly. I looked like death. My voice is so weak on Rich Kid Blues, I can’t bear to listen to it. It’s the voice of somebody incredibly high, probably on the edge of death, making a record. It’s always like that. Johnny Thunders sounds like that. There’s no energy. Anybody who heard that record would have just said, “Well that’s that. We’ll never hear from her again.”
.                                                                                            (Faithfull; An Autobiography, 1994)

“Strange and ghostly,” Marianne calls the recording, and that’s about right. Three Dylan covers: “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” on Side A, Side B opens with “Visions of Johanna” and then comes “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”. Her self-criticism makes sense. Decca and Mike Leander hear that too, so the recordings are put on a shelf, Marianne receives a firm handshake and is back on her wall two days later. Only after Broken English revives her career in 1978, reviving Marianne herself as well in the years that follow, being clean and popular, does Decca finally dare to toss the record onto the market (in 1985).

As it turns out, it’s not so bad. “Incredibly high”, “weak voice”, “on the edge of death”… all true, but nevertheless (or rather: precisely because of this) the record has a strange, somewhat perverse appeal. Her detachment works superbly on “Visions of Johanna”, for instance, in which she still manages to lay down nuance, flickers of emotion and chilling resignation from beginning to end – which is also true for “Sad Lisa”. The hollow, lugubrious overtones, by the way, are partly artificially staged by producer Leander. Most of the songs have sparse, stripped-down arrangements; in “Corrine Corrina” and in “Long Black Veil”, the tempo is scaled back even further and the reverb slider is opened a touch more; and song titles like “Beware Of Darkness” and “Crazy Lady Blues” are, of course, not chosen by chance either.

“It Takes a Lot to Laugh” brings a light note, surprisingly. Fairly up-tempo, a cheeky, sharp solo guitarist (Chris Spedding, would be an educated guess), a cheerfully thrumming bass, skilful piano and ditto drums – all of which contrasts pleasantly with Marianne’s flat, disinterested delivery.

However, she does not make the Top 5. If only because she, stoned and all, immediately messes up the opening line: “Well, I ride on a million train baby”.

It Takes a Lot to Laugh – Marianne Faithfull:

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 15: It blew my little 12-year-old mind

 

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:

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