De-emphasizing Dylan’s words is not the usual way to improve his songs, but here it’s the perfect way. Except to say that Merry Clayton, best known for her performance on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” does a great version of it, giving it a funky sound that draws attention away from the lyrics and gives her great voice room to work. It’s a children’s song for grownups, and arguably the weakest on the album – but on the other hand, it got to number two on the charts, so there’s no accounting for taste.
“Rainy Day Women” gives little indication of what’s to follow the drunken Salvation Army-esque band whoops it up behind Dylan as he rattles off a list of times when they’ll stone you.
AMAZON BOB DYLAN BLONDE ON BLONDE ALBUM FULL
(Thanks as well to reader JoeLer for suggesting that Blonde on Blonde receive the Cover Me Full Album treatment.) Merry Clayton – Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (Bob Dylan cover) So, rather than dwell on all the stories surrounding the songs, let’s move right on to hearing those songs again for the first time, thanks to the (re)creative abilities of the following fourteen performers. Millions of words, if not tens of millions, have been written about Bob Dylan‘s Blonde on Blonde since its 1966 release – how “the quintessential New York hipster” (as Al Kooper called him) met the cream of the Nashville session musician crop and the alchemy that resulted how the album, Dylan’s third in fourteen months, saw him at the pinnacle of his songwriting powers, marrying surreal imagery to wrenching emotion with lyrics that can truly be called poetry how critics from that day to this recognize it as less an album than a great artistic achievement of the 20th century how it inspired so many who heard it (to name just one, Robyn Hitchcock called “Visions of Johanna” “the reason I started writing songs” on his all-Dylan cover album Robyn Sings).
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