Tag Archives: The Best Dylan Covers

Bob Dylan, Cover versions, Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant

The Best Dylan Covers: Robert Plant – One More Cup of Coffee

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One More Cup of Coffee is a song from Dylan’s seventeenth studio album, Desire (Jan 5th, 1976). Desire is one of Dylan’s most collaborative efforts, featuring the same caravan of musicians as the acclaimed Rolling Thunder Revue tours the previous year (later documented on The Bootleg Series Vol. 5); many of the songs also featured backing vocals by Emmylou Harris and Ronee Blakley. Most of the album was co-written by Jacques Levy, and is composed of lengthy story-songs.

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“One More Cup of Coffee” tells the tale of a girl whose family are gypsies and drifters, and of the man who must leave her to enter the “valley below”. The narrator describes a character who is beautiful: “your eyes are like two jewels in the sky” but for whom the narrator’s love and admiration are not reciprocated (“but I don’t sense affection no gratitude or love, your loyalty is not to me but to the stars above”). Dylan wrote the song at a corner table at The Other End nightclub in Greenwich Village in the summer of 1975.

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Bob Dylan, Cover versions

The Best Dylan Covers: Indigo Girls – Tangled Up In Blue

Indigo-Girls

Tangled Up in Blue is a song by Bob Dylan. It appeared on his album Blood on the Tracks in 1975. Released as a single, it reached #31 on the Billboard Hot 100. Rolling Stone ranked it #68 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

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The Telegraph has described the song as “The most dazzling lyric ever written, an abstract narrative of relationships told in an amorphous blend of first and third person, rolling past, present and future together, spilling out in tripping cadences and audacious internal rhymes, ripe with sharply turned images and observations and filled with a painfully desperate longing.

Indigo Girls are an American folk rock music duo consisting of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers. They met in elementary school and began performing together as high school students in Decatur, Georgia, part of the Atlanta metropolitan area. They started performing with the name Indigo Girls as students at Emory University, performing weekly at The Dugout, a bar in Emory Village.

They performed Tangled up in Blue live and released it on their live album 1200 Curfews in 1995. They also released the song together with the band, Drag The River on a Dylan tribute album, “A Tribute to Bob Dylan, vol1” back in 1991.

1200 curfews

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Bob Dylan, Cover versions, Punk, Ramones

The Best Dylan Covers: The Ramones – My Back Pages

acid_eaters

No sacred cows in rock ’n’ roll!

“My Back Pages” written by Bob Dylan and included on his 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan. It is stylistically similar to his earlier folk protest songs and features Dylan’s voice with an acoustic guitar accompaniment. However, its lyrics—in particular the refrain”Ah, but I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now”—have been interpreted as a rejection of Dylan’s earlier personal and political idealism, illustrating his growing disillusionment with the 1960’s folk protest movement with which he was associated, and his desire to move in a new direction. Although Dylan wrote the song in 1964, he did not perform it live until 1978.

“…But this sped-up Ramones cover of one of Dylan’s finest is delivered without a hint of irony. Every bit as simultaneously nostalgic and forward-looking as the original, it does what most punk covers of non-punk songs fail to do—it pays genuine heartfelt tribute to the original.”
– Paste Magazine

The Ramones recorded My Back Pages for the album Acid Eaters:

“Tearing through a bunch of psychedelic and garage rock classics from the 1960s, the Ramones regain much of the fun and abandon of earlier records, making Acid Eaters easily their best record in a decade; the guest appearances of Pete Townshend (“Substitute”) and ex-porn star Traci Lords (“Somebody to Love”) help make the record a blast.”
– Allmusic

Punk and Bob Dylan is a match made in heaven, angry music to angry words!

Album version:

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Bob Dylan, Cover versions

The Best Dylan Covers: Cowboy Junkies – If You Gotta Go, Go Now

Cowboy junkies

You know I’d have nightmares
And a guilty conscience, too
If I kept you from anything
That you really wanted to do
– Bob Dylan

The Best Dylan Covers: Cowboy Junkies – If You Gotta Go, Go Now

Dylan began the recording for If You Gotta Go, Go Now on January 13, 1965, during the first session for Bringing It All Back Home.[1] Of the two acoustic takes completed, neither was used. He recorded the song again on January 15, producing four takes. On May 21, 1965, producer Tom Wilson brought in several unidentified musicians to overdub various parts onto the takes recorded on January 15. From these overdubbing sessions, two takes were eventually released: take 5, released as a single in The Netherlands in 1967, and take 7, released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991 in 1991.

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Cowboy Junkies version:

Cowboy Junkies are a Canadian alternative country/blues/folk rock band. The group was formed in Toronto in 1985 by Margo Timmins (vocalist), Michael Timmins (songwriter, guitarist), Peter Timmins (drummer) and Alan Anton (bassist)

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Bob Dylan, Cover versions

The Best Dylan Covers: 16 Horsepower – Nobody ‘Cept You

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sixteen-horsepower

There’s a hymn I used to hear
In the churches all the time
Make me feel so good inside
So peaceful, so sublime
And there’s nothing to remind me of that
Old familiar chime
’Cept you, uh huh you

The Best Dylan Covers: 16 Horsepower – Nobody ‘cept You

Dylan left for New York in October, 1973 to compose new material for album sessions scheduled in November. Dylan already had three songs (“Forever Young,” “Nobody ‘Cept You,” and “Never Say Goodbye”) which he had demoed in June, and when he returned to Malibu after twenty days in New York, he had six more.

A session (Nov 2nd)  was devoted to all three songs demoed in June, and Dylan and The Band succeeded in recording complete takes of “Forever Young” and “Nobody ‘Cept You” as well as the master take for “Never Say Goodbye.”

When Dylan and The Band reconvened at Village Recorder the following Monday, November 5, with Levon Helm now present, they made another attempt at “Nobody ‘Cept You.”

The last song recorded on the 9th was a new composition titled “Wedding Song,” which Dylan had completed over the course of the sessions. “Nobody ‘Cept You” was originally planned as the album’s closing number, but without a satisfactory performance, it would be omitted and replaced by “Wedding Song.” (The November 2 recording of “Nobody ‘Cept You” was eventually released in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991.) Both Wedding Song and Nobody ‘Cept You are wonderful songs and the one that surfaced on the Bootleg series is a very good take.

Secret South is 16 Horsepower’s third full-length studio album. Released in 2000, the album marked a distinct change in direction compared to previous efforts as it focuses more on storytelling over a more laid back soundscape. It had two cover songs, Wayfaring Stranger and Nobody ‘cept you.  The Dylan song is so immersed into the feel and concept of the album that you will think it was written for this record. Fantastic choice of song from David Eugene Edwards and 16 Horsepower.

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