Bob Dylan

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Under Cover (March 2015) – Bob Dylan

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This is our newly launched Under Cover feature. Every month we will be offering free downloads of two cover songs: one recorded by Cowboy Junkies and another recorded by a Latent artist. We are running this feature off of the Latent Recordings Facebook page. All you need to do is go to the page, click the Under Cover link and follow the prompts

If there is one person that acts as the glue that binds all practisioners of so-called Americana Music, that person is Bob Dylan. It doesn't seem to matter what "version" of Bob that you grew up listening to, he invariably finds his way in to your music. I came of Bob-age during his third rebirth, the one that took place in the early seventies and produced Blood On The Tracks and Desire. Those two albums found their way further in to my soul than any nun or priest that I had the misfortune to come up against in my childhood. I don't now if I could ever attempt to cover one of those songs, they are too special, too sacred in many ways. But it is necessary to express your inner-Bob every now and then and for this recording we took a little known gem, If You Got To Go, Go Now (at least it was little know when we recorded it) from early in his electric period and had some fun with it. 

Jerry Leger would have become of Bob-age during Dylan's fifth, six or seventh rebirth. He was exposed and opened to some of Dylan's work that probably past me by. Shot Of Love was definitely an album that I ignored when it came out (I kind of got in to Slow Train Coming, but that was it for his Christian period for me). But the album found a place in to Jerry's musical DNA and here it is represented by his version of Heart Of Mine. Enjoy.

http://undercover.latentrecordings.com/march/

Happy Birthday Bob

I spent the summer of 1976 in the extremely remote town of Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories. I was sixteen years old. My job was to fuel the small prop-planes that serviced the tiny communities, unreachable by land, which dotted the banks of the Mackenzie River. It was a true frontier town. I was alone, there was virtually no one my age that I could talk to. When I wasn’t working I spent my time running upon the huge boulders piled along the banks of the Mighty Mackenzie or recklessly speeding along the backroads in the company pickup truck. I was told to always check underneath the truck before I moved it because there was a good chance that there would be someone lying there, drunk. I lived in a converted goat shed and I spent the summer in silence: except for Dylan. There was a beat-up portable turntable in the corner of my room and one album, Desire. By the end of the summer the grooves at the beginning of side one were so worn out that the tone arm would skid halfway across the platter and start playing somewhere in the middle of Mozambique. The bass line at beginning of One More Cup Of Coffee still jangles my innards, Emmylou’s harmonies on Oh Sister still make me swoon; Dominique Cortese’s’s accordion buried itself deep in my subconscious only to re-emerge ten years later when Jaro walked in to our life. Desire locks me in a place and time. Desire was my saviour. Happy Birthday Bob and thanks for this one of many, many fabulous memories.

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Happy Birthday Bob

(Here’s something from our friend Ron Wells…)
Robert Allen Zimmerman, born May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota
He was born an enigma wrapped in a cloak of mystery outside the Gates of Eden, outside of time and space, walking in the footsteps of Woody Guthrie, sitting amidst the blues of Blind Willie McTell, kin to Alan Ginsberg  and Jack Kerouac who taught him the Beat, and soulmate to Rimbaud who painted words in lavish strokes of color that defied meaning and spoke volumes. He writes songs that touch eternity and come back to visit earth, only to soar away like shooting stars as he strums his guitar and his soul roams the world looking for stories of sacred love, political lust and enduring life, a song and dance man playing electrified magical musical notes for the gods. And if you want to find him look inside the holy halls of the Chelsea Hotel, but it’s probably too late because he’s already hit the road on his way to some other joint down Highway 61, and if you hear some woman with her hands in her back pockets, Betty Davis style, whispering on the wind, “Happy Birthday, Bob”, well, he probably doesn’t hear her anyways because he’s an artist and he don’t look back as he heads for the Highlands where his spirit is on the water and his heart is traveling slow, onward, forever onward, passing mere mortals on the way to the next show.
“Thinking of a series of dreams
Where the time and the tempo fly
And there’s no exit in any direction
‘Cept the one that you can’t see with your eyes”
——-Bob Dylan
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