"But Nobody Can Sing The Blues Like Blind Willie McTell"

Some musicians have a difficult time recognizing their best songs. Of the songs I have on my computer by the band Wilco, only about four of them are songs I've seen on their available CDs. Dave Matthews (though I'm almost embarrassed to even admit I listen to him) shelved a highly anticipated album helmed by uber-producer Steve Lillywhite in favor of the mediocre material on Everyday. Throughout rock music's history, some guys just don't recognize when they've got a great song on their hands.

The most notorious of these musicians, though, is Bob Dylan. He's one of the most prolific songwriters ever, churning out song after song and album after album. Admittedly, some of these songs (and even albums--especially most anything from the late seventies and early eighties) are sub-par and sound like Zimmy was just going through the motions. But if you dig deeper into Dylan's catalogue, you start coming across songs you've never heard, but that are at least as good as anything he did put on his actual albums, if not better.

The best example of Dylan's apparent inability to recognize a brilliant song when he writes it is the tune "Blind Willie McTell," which can be found on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3. It's a simple song--Dylan does vocals and plays piano, and Mark Knopfler (of Dire Straits fame) accompanies him on a softly strummed acoustic guitar. But the simplicity of the arrangement--based on an old blues standard, "St. James Infirmary"--belies the song's purity and deceptive beauty. Dylan turns in one of his absolute best vocal performances ever (I know, to some, that's not saying a whole lot, but trust me), and is evocative and emotive and stirring. In the lyric, Dylan laments that there are no great blues singers--no Blind Willie McTell or Leadbelly or Blind Lemon--to sing about the woes and troubles the world is currently in. There is no bluesman capable of expressing the pain of today's society, or of coming to terms with it. "Blind Willie McTell" is a breathtaking, heartbreaking song, and Dylan wasn't happy with his performance and thought the song wouldn't fit on his album Infidels, for which it was recorded.

A few listens to the song, though, make you scratch your head and wonder what Dylan was thinking. He's done this to us several times, though, relegating absolutely marvelous tunes to relative obscurity by not placing them on proper albums, but rather leaving them to collect dust until someone finds them and collects them on a work such as The Bootleg Series or a rarities compliation. Two other perfect examples spring to mind, both of which are found on Dylan's Greatest Hits, Volume Two (the only Dylan CD where either song appears)--"Tomorrow is Such a Long Time" and "When I Paint My Masterpiece."

Admittedly, "When I Paint My Masterpiece" isn't an obscure song by any means, nor is "Tomorrow is Such a Long Time," actually. Both have been covered heavily by other bands. But neither has ever appeared on a regular album, and "Masterpiece" is at least equal to the songs Dylan was putting on albums at the time (early '70s), and "Tomorrow" is a beautiful, simple acoustic song from very early in his career ('62 or '63, I think) that happened to be recorded live at one of his shows. It seems, given the number of covers of both of these songs, that other musicians are better able to spot superior Dylan songs than Dylan himself sometimes.

My Dylan obsession is fairly obvious, as it has been for a while now. I started really listening to his stuff only about four years ago, and his visuals and stories struck me in a way that few other musicians have ever done. When I started really listening to his work, getting beyond his voice or even the instrumentation, and looked at what he was saying and how he was saying it, I suddenly realized I, like Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows, "want to be Bob Dylan." If I were to ever become a musician, I'd want to be a musician like Dylan, someone who played and wrote the music he wanted to, who defied understanding in many cases, and who wrote amazing songs. I want to write amazing songs. I want to be able to write something like "Blind Willie McTell," and be such a good songwriter that I barely even recognize that a song I consider a throwaway is actually absolutely brilliant. I want to be Bob Dylan.

~chaos cricket

Song of the Moment: Bob Dlyan, "Blind Willie McTell" (who didn't see that coming?)