“It was an amazing take,” the guitarist wrote in his autobiography of the searing lead break. Yet neither Dylan nor Clapton could touch the factor that elevated the GN’R take on 1991’s U se Your Illusion II: a molten Slash solo played on instinct. The magnanimous Harrison would never have claimed as much, but by comparison his old friend’s skin-and-bones forerunner suddenly sounded brittle and stunted.ĭylan’s catalogue was not such virgin territory by the time Guns N’ Roses rose from the fleshpits of mid-80s LA, and his gospel-draped Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door had already been retooled with a reggae chop by Eric Clapton in 1975. Lennon claimed his own songs like I’m A Loser and You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away were open tributes the unravelling Beatles jammed on Dylan songs such as Like A Rolling Stone and I Want You during their Let It Be sessions in January ’69.īut it’s surely the blissful swoop of If Not For You, on George Harrison’s 1970 solo album All Things Must Pass – taught to the Harrison just days earlier by Dylan – that stands as the sweetest recorded cover mustered between the four Beatles. Tambourine Man in the studio, it sounded really wonderful, like: ‘Wow, did we do that?’”Īcross the pond in the same period, The Beatles were likewise unabashed Dylan acolytes.
So we changed the time signature to four/ four and shortened it down to one verse… Then I picked that little intro on the front with my Rickenbacker, and the same figure at the end. It was about four minutes long in its original form – too long for radio – and it was also in two/four time. Tambourine Man was probably the first electric folk. “To take a Dylan song and put electric guitars on it was not heard of at that point,” McGuinn told this writer. Even today, that opening flourish evokes the flower-fresh rising of the sixties counter-culture, perhaps better than any other instrumental break. Tambourine Man that gave McGuinn his jump-off: just a month after Dylan’s release, The Byrds added a jingle-jangle intro riff and a tumble of harmonies to their version that instantly eclipsed the original’s prosaic strum. Roger McGuinn of The Byrds had bought a 12-string Rickenbacker electric after seeing George Harrison play one in the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night. Most would agree that the first stone-cold-classic Dylan cover arrived in April 1965. But it’s remarkable, too, how regularly Dylan has been bested by the covers that followed, twisting his templates and putting the heat under his raw materials. It should be noted that the majority of Dylan covers are fodder: a means of bulking up a live set, conferring credibility (for younger artists), or putting product on shelves during a songwriting drought (for older ones). “A lot of the older songs were just blueprints for what I’d play later on the stage… There have been other artists who have recorded my songs and shown me the way the song should go.” “I can’t say that I’ve made any great-sounding records,” he reflected to USA Today in 1997.
Nor is Dylan such a vocal or instrumental force that his originals feel unassailable – as they might with a Robert Plant or Eddie Van Halen – with Dylan admitting the germ of the song matters more than its execution. “The riffs on Maggie’s Farm were written as a cool Rage Against the Machine riff or jam, and it later had the Dylan lyrics applied to it,” Tom Morello said in Speakeasy (the guitarist also told Forbes magazine that he considered Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ “the heaviest record I’d ever heard in my life”).Īnother argument is that Dylan’s originals often feel more like roadmaps than final productions half-daubed canvasses that leave cover artists a room for manoeuvre that, say, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody or Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir would not.
To drill deeper, though, what is it that brings pan-generational, genre-crossing musicians to Dylan’s catalogue? One theory is that the veteran songwriter has amassed such a vast oeuvre, offering such shifting moods of material – and lyrics that can be waspish, lovelorn, satirical or sweet – that there’s something for every stripe of band or artist to bite off and chew.Īs such, metallers Ministry were able to transform the cowpoke country-lilt seduction of Lay Lady Lay into a caustic industrial crunk, while polemicists Rage Against The Machine forged fat funk-metal rom the anti-commodification diatribe of Maggie’s Farm. “He’s Bob Dylan,” shrugged the Pretenders leader, simply, of her rationale for the project, as if covering the master was a formality that every artist must someday address.
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