You have to hand it to Old Crow Medicine Show, the mountain music revivalists best known for infusing traditional rags, hollers, and old-timey tunes with good old-fashioned rock’n’roll attitude—not many bands could summon up the chutzpah to take on Bob Dylan’s brilliant 1966 double LP in its entirety, and live at that. The quintet, who come from everywhere but settled in Nashville, serve up Blonde on Blonde mountain style, and the results are well worth a listen.
Let me get my quibble out of the way first. Dylan may have famously—and surprisingly—chosen to record Blonde on Blonde in the home of the Grand Ole Opry with Nashville session musicians along with such non-natives as Robbie Robertson and Al Kooper, but Blonde on Blonde is anything but a country album. On it Dylan achieved that “wild mercury sound” he’d long been hearing in his head, and that sound is the result of a head-on collision between New York City and Nashville. It’s a haunting admixture of urban amphetamine energy and laid-back country cool, and Dylan would never find it again. And if I have any caveat about Old Crow Medicine Show’s 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde it’s this—you can take Dylan out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of Dylan. (Personally, I don’t think even Dylan could do it, although he came close on The Basement Tapes.)
This simple truth knocks some of the steam out of the knocking steam pipe in the very New Yawk “Visions of Johanna” and leads to the LP’s only flat-out failure, “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.” And the band’s penchant for galloping fiddle does serious structural damage to the Chicago blues-inspired “Pledging My Time,” which they take at triple time. As for “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” Old Crow Medicine Show handles it less than reverently by adding some swing (as well as some fancy banjo picking), but I’ve come to love everything about their take but the chorus.
That said, Old Crow Medicine Show acquit themselves quite nicely, and several of the covers on 50 Years of Blonde and Blonde are flat out triumphs. The LP features lots of confident singing, great harmonica, and everything else you’d expect from Dylan-loving crew of top-notch mountain musicians, and this is in true in spades on such songs as the slow and lovely “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” the jaunty and banjo-fueled “I Want You,” and the cock-sure “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” The quintet also captures the quiet and lovely vein of pure quicksilver that runs through “4th Time Around,” which is a city song if ever I’ve heard one.
True, “Obviously Five Believers” doesn’t stand up on its hind legs and bay at the moon minus Robertson’s raunchy guitar and Ken Buttrey’s dead-on drumming; it’s an R&B tune and the transition to the country is nearly killing. Similarly, “Temporary Like Achilles” loses something in the translation—most likely the bluesy barrelhouse piano of Hargus “Pig” Robbins. As for “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine),” I think the tempo is a bit too fast, but the band kicks like a mule and the singing, especially when a few of the boys jump in on the chorus, is just swell. Ditto the only urban touch on the LP, a rollicking organ.
There may be no reproducing whatever strange alchemy produced Blonde on Blonde. As I said before, not even Dylan himself came close to recapturing it, and he went on to record some of his very worst music (see: 1970’s Self Portrait) with producer Bob Johnston and many of the same Nashville players. But Old Crow Medicine Show recaptures the wild and infectious spirit that inspired all of Dylan’s best work. 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde is a bona fide labor of love, and it tells in every note the band plays. Call it hillbilly hep, and turn it up!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
