Various Artists
I'm Not There
Columbia Records
By Jose Fritz
Jesus fucking Christ on rubber crutches, I hate hippies. Those goddamned tree hugging idealistic failures. If you hippies had been less stoned and more organized, Richard Nixon wouldn’t have been president or at least Squeaky would have managed to pop Ford. I’d be living in a different fucking world today. In some ways the part that pains me the most is how little of that cultural ideology penetrates all the way through to my generation.
Hunter S. Thompson described the failure of that generation best in this oft-quoted passage: “…We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
It was a set of ideas that fully permeated Dylan, both its rise and its fall. His music was anathema to the era of disposable pop music that preceded it. Everything from the placid pop of Nat King Cole to the intellectual jazz of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” was undone. He’d seen the land where the Mississippi river floods; where it laid down even coats of mephitic, tan-colored mud too thick to drink and too thin to plow. It was everything he needed to know. Dylan was maybe even more cynical about it. “People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.”
The most painful thing about great songwriters is that they can still be bad musicians. It’s a brutal anachronism but it’s the truth of the beast. Bob Dylan was a bad singer, and a mediocre guitarist. But he truly was a great songwriter. The proof is in the covers. When Jimi Hendrix covered “All Along the Watchtower” it was epic.
Q: So how do you cover the material of an iconic multi-generational legend?
A: The same way porcupines fuck.
Most of these songs have been covered dozens of times. Some even by bands that have become legendary in their own right: the Grateful Dead, David Bowie, Solomon Burke, Rage Against the Machine, U2, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash. The list goes on crossing every nation, creed and genre. It makes it all the more surprising that the substance of this collection centers around the bands that got rocking decades after Dylan first plugged in. It keeps the limelight away from his few included contemporaries. In this context of this track listing Willie Nelson, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot don’t seem to matter.
Admittedly a few songs feel incongruous. Los Lobos covering “Billy 1” sounds just like Los Lobos on any other day. The Black Keys sound like they’re covering Junior Kimbrough again. Then Jimmy James and Calexico get caught doing a Bobby Bare Jr. impression instead of actually covering Dylan.
But the bulk of the record is solid. Karen O belts out one in a surprisingly soulful way. Stephen Malkmus reinterprets the songs like a feverish Jimmy Smith. The players and backing bands repeat and trade places like a rotating square dance making for interesting combinations. The Million Dollar Bashers play not just with Karen O, but also with Vedder, Tom Verlane and of course Malkmus. Calexico are on five tracks and Yo La Tengo contribute two; Sonic Youth only gets one but Lee Renaldo sneaks off on his own to do another. The record is as Dylan himself once said “A song is anything that can walk by itself.”
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