It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry part 15: It blew my little 12-year-old mind

by Jochen Markhorst

XV       It blew my little 12-year-old mind

 No shortage of female candidates. In the 21st century, too, one tribute album after another is being released. Maybe even more so. Joan Osborne’s Songs Of Bob Dylan (2017); Emma Swift’s wonderful album Blonde on the Tracks (2020); Barb Jungr fills Every Grain Of Sand (2001) and Man in the Long Black Coat (2011) with mostly very successful Dylan covers (plus handfuls of Dylan songs on her “regular” albums); Bettye LaVette releases Things Have Changed (2018); Chrissie Hynde helps us get through corona with Standing in the Doorway (2021, with wonderful versions of deep cuts like “In The Summertime” and “Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight”); Cat Power Sings Dylan (2023, on which Cat reconstructs the complete 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert); and then there are the dozens of female contributions to compilation albums like the unsurpassed Subterranean Home Sick Blues: A Tribute to Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home (2010, with highlights “She Belongs to Me” by Ane Brun and Julie Doiron’s “On the Road Again”). That’s 86 Dylan titles in this incomplete listing alone… but none of the ladies dare to attack “It Takes A Lot To Laugh”.

The exception is Lucinda Williams. The veteran is getting a second life in the 21st century and is more prolific than ever; since 2014, the year she turns 61, she has already released four Grammy-winning albums, she tours tirelessly, endures a horrific stroke in 2020, publishes an autobiography, and in the meantime fills seven albums with her hobby project Lu’s Jukebox. Which is a particularly likeable, largely highly attractive series, originally created to get through the corona wasteland.

In that lost year 2020, Lucinda decides on an on-line concert to honour Tom Petty. The world is in lockdown, concert halls remain closed and concertgoers all sit at home at their computers. And watch and listen to Lucinda Williams in the tiny Ray Kennedys Room & Board Studio in Nashville with accomplished die-hard mercenaries as backing band. It is a success, and so is the subsequently released recording Runnin’ Down A Dream: A Tribute to Tom Petty. The idea for a series is obvious. And after Volume 2 – Southern Soul: From Memphis To Muscle Shoals, it’s Dylan’s turn: Bob’s Back Pages: A Night Of Bob Dylan Songs (2021), the only tribute album with a cover of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh”.

Dylan is under Lucinda’s skin. Almost literally, if we are to believe her:

“The whole experience, like when I saw Highway 61 studying the cover and reading all the credits and the liner notes. It was like being inside the music.”
(interview with Roger Catlin for The Vinyl District, December 2024)

Lucinda is 12 when one of her father’s students visits his professor at home with Highway 61 Revisited under his arm: “Everyone needs to hear this album right now! This is amazing!” Just the picture on the cover, this lanky young man with tousled hair and a Triumph motorbike T-shirt, makes her fall in love instantly. Then she puts the record on.

“It blew my little 12-year-old mind. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know what some of the words were about. There was something that connected with something in my brain or in my soul. I was hooked after that.”

More than fifty years later, her Bob’s Back Pages is an emotional, tasteful processing of that first mind-blowing experience. Eleven Dylan songs, crisp, sheer mercurial sound, great musicianship and a few goose-bumps inducing interpretations. “Meet Me In The Morning”, “Everything Is Broken”, “Man Of Peace”, “Political World”… exciting, steamy, macabre readings. But the very two songs from H61, from the album that unleashed the first hormonal storms in bobby-soxer Lucinda, disappoint. Well alright, “Queen Jane Approximately” may be unadventurous, but is otherwise not annoying either (and has a great organ part). “It Takes A Lot”, however, doesn’t make the Top 5 Best It Takes A Lot covers – and that’s down to Lucinda, unfortunately. The band is superb. Lugubrious swelling intro, like a train approaching, the bass and drum part of Grand Funk Railroads’ “Some Kind Of Wonderful” (but with the tempo halved, of course), scruffy guitars… but on this song in particular, Lucinda’s usual elocution skills let her down. Über-affected groaning, exaggeratedly crunchy Southern accent, misplaced accentuations (“dommai gal look fine wenn she… comin’ AFTER me”, or “windohs ah filled wid fro-ho-ost” – to cite just two examples)… no, we really shouldn’t say a bad word about the wonderful Mrs Lucinda Williams, but in this case the usual, justified admiration is hard to muster.

(The sound of the album is superior, but the video recording is more entertaining)

In the competition for the last two remaining spots in the Top 5 some outsider from unexpected quarters then shows up: Ygdrassil, two girls from Groningen, the northernmost north from the north country Netherlands, release their fourth album Nice Days Under Darkest Skies in 2002 and score with their crushing, Kate & Ann McGarrigle reminiscent harmony vocals and Nick Drake reminiscent songs. Fourteen beautiful, sober and mostly moody songs, songs that reviewers then usually call “fragile”, and somewhere halfway through Side 2 “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” shines. Dylan’s song is completely swung around, reduced to an intimate folk song. Just a lone guitar in support – but more would indeed be less; the magic of harmonising Annemarieke Coenders and Linde Nijland suffices.

More extreme is possible still. Yo La Tengo may by now consider themselves among the elite of Dylan interpreters. Dylan songs have been in their repertoire since Day One, since the 1980s, and are always at least enjoyable, and often enough overwhelming. In 2007, their Dylan status is more or less officially recognised, when they contribute two songs to the I’m Not There soundtrack; a rousing restoration of the ignored cuckoo “I Wanna Be Your Lover” with remarkable love for the sound – the sound of the early Rolling Stones (including Brian Jones licks and Mick Jagger’s snarling stabs), a copy of an Al Kooper organ and Dylanesque honking on a harmonica; smashing, all of it. And even better is the second contribution: a modest, dreamy, sultry version of “Fourth Time Around”. Rather close to the original, but that’s how one of the bands strongholds comes out best: Georgia Hubley’s shrouded, utterly mesmerising vocals.

Which is one of the great strengths of Yo La Tengo’s “It Takes A Lot” as well. BBC’s John Peel loves it and promotes the song in 1999. “Here’s another track from my birthday CD,” he says on BBC Radio One on 30 September, referring to the present he received for his 60th birthday: a CD filled with his favourite songs, covered by his favourite artists. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy opens with Elvis’ “Crying In The Chapel”, we hear wonderful covers of “And Your Bird Can Sing”, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Interstellar Overdrive” and, of course, Peel’s all-time favourite “Teenage Kicks”, and then the bouncer is “It Takes A Lot To Laugh”. “One of my favourite songs,” says Peel, “and a gorgeous performance by Yo La Tengo.”

The trio from Hoboken tilts the song further than any cover. Gone are the groove and the licks and the rock’n’roll. The background is an industrial drone, the base a minimalist bass and the colour comes from metallic accents on a restrained guitar, that’s it. No percussion or keys. The soundtrack to a psychological horror. And then Georgia Hubley’s vocals: spectral, otherworldly. It’s Susie Salmon (played by then-15-year-old Saoirse Ronan) in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, the girl who, from an afterlife, tries to come to terms with her horrific death and wants to prevent the serial sex killer from making another victim. “My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was 14 years old when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. I was here for a moment and then I was gone. I wish you all a long and happy life.”

With the rock’n’roll, Yo La Tengo also removes the sex from Dylan’s song. In this arrangement and with these vocals it becomes a totally different song with a totally different connotation. Verse lines like

Now the wintertime is coming
The windows are filled with frost
I went to tell everybody
But I could not get across

… and, for example, the closing line Don’t say I never warned you when your train gets lost now have lurid, otherworldly connotations. “I was here for a moment and then I was gone.”

“Reinterpretation” might be a more appropriate stamp than “cover”, but either way: a place in the Top 5 of Best It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry Covers. So concluding, in no particular order:

• Bloomfield, Kooper, Stills – Super Session
• Chris Smither – Time Stands Still
• Fairport Convention – Festival Cropredy 2002
• Ygdrassil – Nice Days Under Darkest Skies
• Yo La Tengo – Sleepless Night

Five beautiful covers, each fanning out into a different direction. Very similar to how Dylan lets the song fan out in all directions in the weeks, years and decades after the song’s premiere in Newport…

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 16: “Repeat anyone else you like, only not yourself!”

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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 2^nd 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