Bob Dylan – Not Dark Yet

Bob Dylan is arguably the greatest living songwriter on the planet, only Paul McCartney could have a shout at being as culturally significant, and this week marks Bob’s 84th birthday so this weeks half dozen older song selection is a Dylan celebration in honour of his enduring career. This tired, forlorn and reflective song is a real beauty from an LP, 1997’s ‘Time Out Of Mind’, that I frequently conclude and fight a corner for being the greatest of Dylan’s entire back catalogue. It maybe lacks the cultural impact of his famous mid sixties releases but as a collection of songs it is thematically and sonically extremely satisfying and pulls you in for a rewarding return visit again and again…

Jeff Tweedy – Simple Twist Of Fate

Jeff is one of the great US songwriters of our time too, particularly for his timeless music as the lead singer of Americana lynchpins Wilco, and he approaches his version of this Dylan with understanding and emotiveness as if the song were his own. He digs deep and gets lost inside this lyric originally from a Dylan album, ‘Blood On The Tracks’, that mediated on the subject of relationships, divorce, heartbreak and separation with a depth and 20/20 eye that few have equalled before or since…

Joan Baez – Love Is Just A Four Letter Word

Ever since Joan played this song to camera in the extensive Dylan documentary ‘No Direction Home’ it has been associated with her romantic connection to Bob that briefly bloomed in the sixties and evolved into legend when she wrote about it on her own ‘Diamonds And Rust’ in the seventies. The brilliant story around this song is that Joan was around Bob when he spontaneously made it up then, playing it back to him at a later date, he enquired “that’s pretty good, who wrote it?”. “You did, you dope” she replied before claiming it as part of her own repertoire from there on in…

Old Crow Medicine Show – Wagon Wheel

There is a similar story to the Joan Baez tune with this one, the connection being it is an act picking up on one of Dylan’s discarded scraps and turning it into one of the most popular tunes in their own catalogue. This time Old Crow Medicine Show picked up on a fragment of a tune called ‘Wagon Wheel’ that surfaced on a bootleg record taken from studio sessions around 1973. They wrote to Bob and asked for permission to finish the tune off, although if you manage to hear the source material it is clear the song was pretty much all there already, to which they received a positive reply and away they went, delighting crowds with their wagon wheeling ever since…

Lou Reed – Foot Of Pride

Lou Reed and Bob Dylan today seem a natural fit as writers and performers thanks to their masterful capacity for poetic lyrics and the strong individualistic personality of their singing styles. Their paths rarely crossed though, but Dylan did go through a period in the 1980s when he was very vocal about his admiration for Lou, especially in the liner notes for his 1985 ‘Biograph’ box set when he set Reed was one of very few modern artists he had any time for. Lou returned the compliment here, at Dylan’s 1992 Madison Square Garden all star tribute concert, with a spinning rock mass rendition of a song that had first appeared the previous year on Dylan’s very first Bootleg Series box set release…

Timothee Chalamet – Outlaw Blues / Three Angels

The grand service Chalamet has done to promote the Dylan legend with his incredible biopic portrayal of the great mans early years cannot be understated. However, even more delight should be derived from the way he has played Bob Dylan material, not only in the film ‘A Complete Unknown’ but when promoting it as he did here live on US TV. Timothee played a brace of deep cuts too, no mere imitation, no stars in their eyes karaoke, nothing played with a knowing nod and a wink to the audience; no Chalamet did exactly what Bob himself would have done, he played the songs exactly how he felt them and in doing so made them his own.