Joan Baez has recorded many Dylan songs. Her unique and beautiful voice carries some of them to different places. For many Dylan enthusiasts, Joan Baez’s interpretations are the only tolerable ones, besides Dylan’s own 🙂
Baez first met Dylan in 1961 at Gerde’s Folk City in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
Here are my chosen 5:
Farewell Angelina:
Check out this full post about the song.
Continue reading January 9: Joan Baez was born in 1941 – here singing Bob Dylan songs
“His albums have a great class to them, even those albums where he is actually playing songs of long-dead blues singers. His writing, his song texts, leave me speechless. “
– David Bowie (about Bob Dylan, 1997)
David Bowie always talked about Dylan with great respect. Bob Dylan was maybe not the biggest influence on his music, but he did sing some of his songs both live and in studio. I found some fine versions of, Like a Rolling Stone, Maggie’s Farm and Trying to get to heaven. Mick Ronson a long-time Bowie friend and collaborator was also a part of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour.
Bowie also played Don’t think twice it’s all right and She belongs to me (I’ve read somewhere) but I could not find an upload of them anywhere.
Trying to get to heaven
Recorded during the mixing sessions for Earthling in 1998.
Bowie’s version of “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” (which, at least in its circulating edit, cuts Dylan’s second verse and squeezes the fourth and fifth into one incoherent lump) is, essentially, a first draft of what would become Hours. The take begins somber and ashen enough. Yet the circularity of Dylan’s singing on “Tryin’”, conveying a journey undertaken but never in danger of ending, seemed to frustrate Bowie: he needed a narrative.
So in the “people on platforms” verse, Bowie builds to a manic desperation, as if he has to make an eleventh-hour sale or he’ll be sacked by his proprietor. We get a rattled “cha-hay-hay-hain,” a squeaked-out “looose,” the creaking onomatopoeia of “cloowwoose the door,” and a gargle. Having made a hash of Dylan’s last verses, Bowie latches onto a line as if he’d drawn it by lot to torture: “I’ve beeen! to Sugar Town-I shook! the su!gar down!” Dylan sang those words with an earned swagger, like a spendthrift man recalling a spent-out life. Bowie sang them as if he was just passingly familiar with the English language.
– Pushing ahead of the Dame
Shadows are falling and I been here all day
It’s too hot to sleep and time is running away
Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t let me heal
Continue reading Bob Dylan performing “Not Dark Yet” @ Hallenstadion, Zürich in 1999
If you had not have fallen
Then I would not have found you
Angel flying too close to the ground
And I patched up your broken wing and hung around a while
Trying to keep your spirits up and your fever down
Continue reading Bob Dylan: Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground (Willie Nelson)
Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks
When you’re tryin’ to be so quiet
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind
Continue reading Bob Dylan performing “Visions of Johanna” @ Manchester, England in 2002 (video)