Now here's a website to luxuriate in, proudly sticking to its 1995 design values: dylancoveralbums.com. I count myself as having a bit of thing about Dylan cover albums (1, 2, 3, 4) but when I look at this site I console myself that it's far short of an obsession.
It doesn't have much on this album, not even pausing to note that the "dots" disc is a recreation of the electric half of Bob's 1966 "Albert Hall" set.
Robyn's done this nice twist on the gaudy Don't Look Back series a few times by playing other people's albums in their entirety. While I was living just a ten-minute walk from Clerkenwell's Three Kings pub, he played The White Album and Piper at the Gates of Dawn there — both benefits for Médecins Sans Frontières — but the venue is so tiny that certified Robyn-stalkers had (rightfully) snapped up all tickets before casuals like me could get a look-in.
I don't know if the "dots" CD was his first attempt at this kind of thing, but Robyn's intro to the first Visions of Johanna on the "stripes" CD — to the effect that it was that song that made him want to write songs in the first place — suggests it's probably the closest to his heart. He faithfully (kinda) recreates details down to the mumbling monologue that ends with "…if you only just wouldn't clap so hard" before One Too Many Mornings. The more-intimate-than-Albert-Hall crowd oblige with slow handclaps, but also with more shouts of "Judas!" than you can shake a fist at, cramming the yell into every pause. The Judas thing now has a life of its own, a kind of photocopied behaviour as irritating as anything on Twitter. At Cecil Sharp House in 2005, Alasdair Roberts got a Judas heckle he got when he announced he was going to switch from finger-picking to using a plectrum, which he put down by resignedly observing how even he got Judased all the time.
Robyn's long-form Bob-duplication is of a different order, though: more reconstruction than photocopy. It reminds me of Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho, using the same shots and the same music as (Alfred, not Robyn) Hitchcock's original. Lots of people shrugged at that and said it was pointless. I disagree. I don't think I could tell you for sure what the point was, but I might wave my arms a bit and drop names like Borges, Benjamin and (whenever in doubt) Barthes; hell, let's chuck in Baudrillard, too. I saw Van Sant's film, and, sure, it wasn't very good. Isn't that interesting? That you can fastidously replicate a 'great film', and have it turn out to be not very good. Why and how? What does that tell you about greatness and where it inheres?
Meanwhile, like Pierre Menard's Don Quixote, I'm inclined to think Robyn's Bob is better than the original.
For an entirely different set of reasons, Robyn's readings of Not Dark Yet and Dignity on the "stripes" CD — like Barb Jungr's Sugar Baby — highlight better than the originals just how great some of Bob's later songs are.
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