Old Crow Medicine Show: 50 Years Of Blonde On Blonde
28 April 2017 – Old Crow Medicine Show / Columbia Nashville
Here’s a double celebration – both to commemorate 50 years since the release of the iconic Bob Dylan double album Blonde On Blonde and to celebrate the signing of Old Crow Medicine Show to Dylan’s record label. The original album was partly recorded in Nashville, so it’s doubly fitting that OCMS should record their tribute performance live at the CMA Theater located in Nashville’s Country Music Hall Of Fame & Museum. While readily acknowledging the amount of water that’s flown under the bridges of the muddy Cumberland River (so to speak), and the enormous amount of change that has taken place in the city since Bob Dylan first surveyed the Nashville skyline, OCMS’ main vocalist Ketch Secor and his cohorts (who’d come to play on its street corners back in the late-’90s) cemented their long-term love-affair with the album by performing it in all its glorious entirety.
Ketch owns up: “It never entered our minds that we would try and play the record like Bob did. Instead we would try to do it like 50 years of Bob did.” That meant playing it in honour of Bob’s legacy as the nation’s premier shape-shifter/performer – to play it “country, folk and rock’n’roll … acoustic and electric; hillbilly and hokum; at once Gospel-fired and Hava Nagila blues”, to celebrate the truly seminal, cross-fertilising nature of the original record. So – who better to take this show on the road than America’s premier touring old-time string band? Hence this storming live recording, which fully justifies that tag – and then some! OCMS sure is a crack outfit, one that’s able to turn its hand to any of the above-named roots genres and place them at the service of this stellar bunch of songs.
This is no tiresome, slavish rehash of the time-honoured material, no throwaway copycat crowd-pleasing gambit; and no one item is done in anything like a predictable (by which I mean easily predict-able) manner. OK, so it’s impossible to avoid hearing subliminal temporal echoes of Dylan’s own house band – but then, think on that outfit’s mighty onward influence! And anyway, the tapestry of musical inspirations is both genre-bending and (still) mind-bending half a century later. And that’s not to underplay the intense, blinding poetry of those unforgettable (if occasionally impenetrable) lyrics.
Ketch admits that the band’s celebratory reinterpretations of these important songs have, in the process of making them OCMS’ own, borrowed, begged and stole from Bob – this involved listening to every one of his own recordings they could lay their hands on, then recasting and sometimes rewriting, remaking and remodelling as felt right by the master.
The mardi-gras of Rainy Day Women kicks off the night like a wake-up call, a battering and cacophonous street parade. The ensuing Pledging My Time, and later Obviously Five Believers, are taken in high-octane uptempo hoedown mode, while it doesn’t take much to transform I Want You into a more gently rollin’, chugalong bluegrass-spirited number. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat takes on a cheeky, laconic old-style-jugband demeanour; Just Like A Woman retains its aching, delicate grandeur with an impassioned vocal reading; 4th Time Around is revealed as a lonesome, somewhat Beatle-esque recollection; rockin’ banjos and fiddles and harmonica charge full-pelt into Most Likely You Go Your Way… , while pedal steel and electrics steam into Absolutely Sweet Marie – and the whole band comes out breathless and blazing the other side. Finally, we come to the magnum opus Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, which is taken at a tempo more akin to Like A Rolling Stone yet loses none of its expansive majesty even though it clocks in at a comparatively nifty nine minutes as against the side-length 14 of the Dylan original.
I fully expect there to be claims that this set is destined to take its place amongst the great live sets of rock history – albeit those which take the form of a “special occasion menu” rather than a “regular” gig. It definitely triumphs both as an outstanding and deeply felt tribute from a bunch of guys who’re right inside the music (and its unique poetry) and as an outfit that’s totally on fire and acutely ALIVE – as demonstrated by the exceptional recording.
50 Years of Blonde on Blonde is Out Now
Order it via Amazon