Bob Dylan

Once, Bob Dylan wrote a greeting card. In his own way, of course: a poem titled “Advice For Geraldine On Her Miscellaneous Birthday”. “People are scared of those who aren’t in step,” he warned. “It might even cross their minds that they’re the ones out of step.” On May 24th Bob Dylan turns 70, and one thing is certain: on his long road, he’s never been in step with anyone. We asked fifteen artists who, over the course of their careers, have taken on the challenge of interpreting Dylan songs to write an exclusive birthday card for OndaRock addressed to Mr. Zimmerman. What we present here is at once a tribute to Dylan and a listening guide to some of the covers that best capture the tireless vitality of his songs.

Howe Gelb

May he always wander

walk the earth endlessly

be just this angry

                             be just this joyful

                             grant us one more year

                             every year

                             so his songs make us take sides

                             and go back to the “Poco Cosa” restaurant here in Tucson…

                             “Por mas frijoles y arroz, por favor”.

 Giant Sand – Every Grain Of Sand

       from “Swerve” (Restless, 1992)

Stan Ridgway

Dylan changed the way everyone thinks about songs and songwriting with an “authentic” voice. Sometimes it's the voice inside each of us. He's still changing the nature of the song with every piece he writes. Ambiguous, poetic, abstract, precise and associative. A scholar of the song and its undisputed champion, pointing the way for the rest of us. Happy birthday, Bob Dylan!

 Stan Ridgway – Lenny Bruce

       from “Neon Mirage” (A440, 2010)

Micah P. Hinson

He's a man who certainly knew what not to say.

 Micah P. Hinson – The Times They Are A-Changin’

       da “All Dressed Up And Smelling Of Strangers” (Full Time Hobby, 2009)

Marissa Nadler

I'm certainly neither the first nor the last to admit I learned to play guitar and sing using a Bob Dylan songbook (which I still have and still use). At fourteen I was gawky and gangly, a real “Wallflower”. I'd sit in my room singing, clumsily learning to play songs like “Visions Of Johanna” and “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”. I was obsessed with his use of melody, his nerve, and his ability to reinvent himself stylistically. I wanted to reinvent myself from a young age the way he had, and his skill at self-mythologizing has always inspired me. To me, his chameleon-like approach forces the listener to focus on the work itself rather than on the man.

Bob Dylan's work ethic toward his songwriting has deeply inspired me to always give it everything I've got. I believe he has the “gift”, but I also think it's the application, the endless years of writing, touring and honing his craft, that made him one of the finest artists of modern times. I obsessively watched the documentary “Don't Look Back”, marveling at how he typed away in the midst of the chaos surrounding him. I understood what a song is through Bob Dylan. I know it's a strange thing to say, but I learned that Bob can make a three-chord song sound huge, if it has a catchy melody and a good lyric. I also learned the art of the song-as-poem through pieces like “Desolation Row” and its painterly surrealism. He's a true living legend, a person whose very existence has genuinely changed my life. Happy birthday, Bobby!

 Marissa Nadler – You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go

       from “Covers” (self released, 2010)

Cowboy Junkies

I spent the summer of 1976 in the remote town of Fort Simpson, in Canada's Northwest Territories. I was sixteen. My job was refueling the small planes that served the tiny communities dotting the banks of the Mackenzie River, unreachable by land. It was a real frontier town. I was alone, with practically no one my own age to talk to. When I wasn't working, I spent my time running over the huge boulders piled along the banks of the Mighty Mackenzie or driving recklessly fast down back roads in the company pick-up truck. I'd been told to always check underneath the pick-up before starting it, because there was a good chance someone was lying under there, drunk. I lived in a converted goat shed and spent the summer in silence: except for Dylan.

There was a portable turntable in the corner of my room, and just one album, “Desire”. By the end of summer, the grooves at the start of side one were so worn that the tonearm would skip halfway across the record and start playing somewhere in the middle of “Mozambique”. The bassline at the start of “One More Cup Of Coffee” still makes my gut resonate, Emmylou's [Harris, ed.] harmonies on “Oh Sister” still send me into raptures; Dominique Cortese's accordion stayed buried in my subconscious, only to resurface ten years later when Jaro [Czerwinec, ed.] came into our lives. “Desire” locks me into one specific place and time. “Desire” was my salvation. Happy birthday, Bob, and thank you for so many, many wonderful memories.

Michael Timmins

 Cowboy Junkies – If You Gotta Go, Go Now

       da “Rarities, B-Sides And Slow, Sad Waltzes” (Latent, 1999)

Willard Grant Conspiracy

I obviously knew Dylan long before the release of “Blood On The Tracks” in 1975, but that album coming out in the latter half of my senior year of high school provided an angry, disillusioned, melancholy soundtrack for a period that matched those feelings perfectly. There must have been something in the air that year, because a few months later Neil Young's “Tonight's The Night” came out too, even though it had actually been recorded a few years earlier.

We all have favorite records that matter to us in ways we can't always fully understand. They enter our world in some infallible, perfect way exactly when we're most receptive to hearing them. The subject, the timing, the place and the sound all conspire to open a perfect window onto a world that reflects our own perceptions while also illuminating us. Art speaks to us through the universal and helps us see the particular, shining a light on our awareness or lack thereof. Great artists find themselves connected to inspiration at various moments in their lives, and if they're disciplined, they manage to capture that inspiration in works that, if we're lucky, enter the collective consciousness. If we're open and aware, we can be blessed and shaped by these consecrations of inspiration. There are really very few artists in the history of the modern world who have had, and continue to have, this effect on us. Bob Dylan has to be at the top of any list.

Robert Fisher

 Willard Grant Conspiracy – Ballad Of A Thin Man

       from “Let It Roll” (Glitterhouse / Venus, 2006)

Tom Brosseau

Dylan's seventy years are no small feat. But perhaps his most extraordinary achievement is having survived himself. His songs from the Sixties have outlived his releases from the Eighties. Like Bowie and Jagger, Dylan has outlived his own legend and aged like a healthy human being. His lyrics still hold their meaning: “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”.

To me, Dylan remained a vague black-and-white icon until “Jokerman”; not the black-and-white icon of photographs of his hair, his lean frame in tight jeans, his dark sunglasses. Dylan is a collection of memories of other people's memories.

And then there's his voice, a joke parodied everywhere on TV, imitated by both fake and genuine folk enthusiasts. It's impossible to pay tribute to him without it sounding a bit like mockery. He's one of those figures. Like Howard Cosell [famous American sports commentator, ed.]. Or Bing Crosby. Or Frank Sinatra.

Tom Brosseau (with Kathy MacPherson)

 Les Shelleys (Tom Brosseau & Angela Correa) – Billy

       from “Les Shelleys” (FatCat, 2010)

William Fitzsimmons

Bob Dylan is at once an artist who inspires you to want to create something and who, with his superb talent, constantly reminds you that you'll never come close to him. There's no one else like him.

 William Fitzsimmons – Farewell Angelina

       from VV. AA. – “Subterranean Homesick Blues: A Tribute To Bob Dylan’s

       Bringing It All Back Home” (Reimagine, 2010)

Vandaveer

Dear Uncle Bob,

can we call you Uncle Bob? Ring those bells, sir. What bells? The bells of your seventieth birthday. They'll make quite a racket. Rosie [Guerin, ed.] says hi. Happy birthday, friend.

                            Kisses and hugs.

 Vandaveer – The Man In Me

       from VV. AA. – “Dylan Mania” (Naive, 2009)

Dog Is Blue

When I was in high school, I paid way too much for terrible seats at a U2 concert. Unbeknownst to me, that night was also Bob Dylan's sixtieth birthday. At some point, between songs, Bono shouted “Happy birthday, Bob Dylan!” and the crowd went wild. A 15,000-strong ovation for the birthday of someone they'd never met and who wasn't even there listening to them. Now that's what you call a legacy.

Paul Watson

 Dog Is Blue – Don't Think Twice It's All Right

       (unreleased, 2005)

Steve Adey

Well, I remember the first time I heard Bob Dylan – I never loved his voice… but I never knew a better one. I've pored over every detail of Dylan's albums. I'd say my favorite period is the one from 1968 to 1975, though I also appreciate many of his later releases and some of the reissues – especially “The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3” (as seen in the photo).

Bob Dylan's music has been a constant throughout most of my life.

Truth be told, I recorded my own (unreleased) album of Dylan covers. I haven't listened to it in a while – I really should get that DAT recorder fixed.

 Steve Adey – Shelter From The Storm

from "All Things Real" (Grand Harmonium, 2006)

Songdog

Bob Dylan is the ultimate rock'n'roll icon, and over the years he's meant more to me than any other musician. The first Dylan song I ever heard was "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and I was floored, I held my breath for the whole two and a half minutes it lasted. I'd never heard anything like it, that extraordinary voice spitting out rhymes over that rattling rhythm like a runaway train...!

With the lyrics he wrote in the mid-Sixties he turned popular music from light entertainment into Art, and even the Beatles had to fall in line... There has never been a braver artist than Dylan: when his music swerved toward country at the end of the '60s, he went against the psychedelia that dominated the era in a way that seemed like either madness or revolution, but just look at how influential that turn proved to be...! "Blood On The Tracks" was one of the greatest albums of the '70s, and "Time Out Of Mind" towered over most of the music made in the '90s. What he's done since then has been gorgeous, sincere and worthy of respect... He's a genius, only an idiot could deny it...

Happy birthday, Mr. Zimmerman, may you stay forever young.

Lyndon Morgans

 Songdog – Desolation Row

from VV. AA. – "Highway 61 Revisited Revisited" (Uncut, 2006)

These United States

Hey Bob, it's Jesse. I was walking around Hennepin the other night and I stopped by this place I'd heard a lot about but had never seen with my own eyes. "Nye's Polonaise" – you know it? A really strange spot, up front a piano lounge that looks like it walked straight out of 1920s Las Vegas, in back a plunge into dusty rock'n'roll, run by big, burly, mustachioed Polish gentlemen in tuxedos – I think they were born in there, honestly. John Waters was sighing along with the ghost of Bing Crosby somewhere in the side room, on one of those big shiny red vinyl couches, I'm sure of it! There were local legends, The World's Most Dangerous Polka Band, who'd been playing there every Friday and Saturday night for the last 35 years. Thirty-five years running. Unreal. I'd never seen them. Ruth had died not long before – Ruth was the heart and voice of the group – just a week before I went there. She was nearly 80, still explosive to the end, they told me. Almost everything passes or changes, I think. Just a moment before you can realize, sometimes, how beautiful it was. But she's still there, you know? Koskinen and Frankie Lee did one of her songs in her honor, with Noah, Paul and Molly all squeezed in beside them on that little corner stage, lit up with Christmas lights. They barely fit. It was perfect.

It made me think of you. You'd love those guys, like shadows cast by a streetlamp – true angels of the city, all of them, right here on the Mississippi, Bob. It's good to still hear your voice around like this. I wish we could have known Ruth. We've got to love every Ruth we come across out there, man, damn it. Anyway, I just wanted to say hey. I'll look you up next time we're both back in Minneapolis – we should take a day, drive up to Duluth, play a few songs with Dave and all the guys. Nothing's changed here, man. Beautiful forests and minerals. Pour a drink for Ruth, if you think of it. Oh, right – and happy birthday too, man! I almost forgot the reason I called. Ha. Talk soon, Bob.

Jesse Elliott

 These United States – To Ramona

       from VV. AA. – “Dylan Mania” (Naive, 2009)

Denison Witmer

Happy 70th birthday, Bob Dylan! I've always admired your consistency and your lifelong dedication to music as a career. Thank you for never apologizing for your creative journey, and thank you for always making the music you wanted to make. I can't wait to hear what you do next. Keep getting better!

 Denison Witmer – I’ll Keep It With Mine

       from VV. AA. – “Subterranean Homesick Blues: A Tribute To Bob Dylan’s

       Bringing It All Back Home” (Reimagine, 2010)

The Handsome Family

A bouquet of mountain carnations for Bob on his birthday.

Rennie Sparks

 The Handsome Family – Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

from "Scattered" (self released, 2010)

Vic Chesnutt (in memoriam)

We wish he could be here too: he never made a secret of his love for Dylan's songs. And he left us some unforgettable interpretations of them. Listening once more to his tormented voice is the best way to remember him.

 Vic Chesnutt – Buckets Of Rain

       da VV. AA. – “Crossing Jordan. Music from the NBC television series” (Sony,

2001)

We'd like to offer our wishes to Bob Dylan on his seventieth birthday with the very words murmured by Vic Chesnutt in his version of "Buckets Of Rain":

Happy birthday, Bob!

Ride the wave of great music

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