Happy Birthday, Bob

All this week I've been hearing stuff on Radio 4 building up to the 80th birthday of Bob Dylan on May 24th.* Now, and I'm sure I've said this on here before, I love a lot of Dylan songs, but I'm not always that keen on his own versions of them.

So, I started trying to come up with my Top 10 Dylan covers. And here they are, in no particular order, although I suspect I'll remember loads of stuff that should have made it in there over the next few days. 

1 Mama You Been On My Mind - Rod Stewart

2 When I Paint My Masterpiece - The Band

3 Absolutely Sweet Marie - Jason and the Scorchers

4 You Ain't Goin Nowhere - The Byrds

5 I'll Keep It With Mine - Bettie Serveert

6 All Along The Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix

7 Fourth Time Around - Yo La Tengo

8 Wanted Man - Johnny Cash

9 A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall - Bryan Ferry

10 Si Tu Dois Partir - Fairport Convention

I'll have to see if I come up with my 10 favourite originals, too. 

* His name also came up yesterday because His Royal Bobness is the honorary patron of a prostate cancer charity set up in memory of England cricket great Bob Willis. Rather strange, on the face of it, but as any England fan from 1970 to 1990 can tell you, Willis was such a Dylan fan that his full name was Robert George Dylan Willis. 

Transtromer enNobeled

I was just starting to pull together a few thoughts on last night's announcement of the Forward Prize winners when Twitter started, er... twittering with speculation about who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I'd completely forgotten that the announcement was due.

There seemed to be a strong rumour that Bob Dylan might be in line for it. Now, I'm a big fan (I spent the drive to work this morning listening to Blood On The Tracks, funnily enough), but I can't help feeling this would have been a bad thing. It's not so much that I'd see it as a slap in the face to novelists and poets, as a bit of a half-hearted recognition of his Royal Bobness. After all, if he'd intended his songs to be read purely as poems, he wouldn't have bothered writing the music for them, then playing and arranging it, in the first place, would he?

Anyhow, turns out that Twitter was barking up the wrong tree entirely, as it's Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer who has scooped the prize (how appropriate, on National Poetry Day). I'm highly delighted about this, although what the evil Decepticons think about it is anyone's guess (oh come on! Everyone is making at least one Transformers joke about this).

My copy of his New and Collected Poems (the New Directions edition from 2006, translated by Robin Fulton), is extremely well-thumbed, being one of those books I find myself going back to on a very regular basis. So, hats off to the judges for recognising a consistently fine body of work.

Going back to the Forward Prizes, John Burnside took Best Collection for Black Cat Bone, Rachael Boast took Best First Collection for Sidereal, and RF Langley, who sadly died earlier this year, took Best Poem for To A Nightingale.

I was a bit underwhelmed by the shortlists at the time they came out, although without having read much of what was nominated. I have rectified that partly now, and I'm pretty glad that Burnside won. I do wonder if there's an element of 'lifetime achievement' in it, because I don't think this is anything like his best work, but still, I can't grumble.

I can't really comment on Rachael Boast's book, because I haven't read it yet - Ahren Warner's the only one on that list I have read thoroughly (and enjoyed, incidentally). In the Best Poem category, I like Langley's poems a lot, so it's good to see him win. I hope it doesn't sound too bitter to say that it would have been nice to see him get more recognition while he was alive.

Still scorching

After that post about Jason Ringenberg the other day, I trawled You Tube for videos of Jason and the Scorchers in their heyday. I'm reluctant to say that this, their cover of Dylan's Absolutely Sweet Marie,  was their finest moment - there were plenty of great originals on their first two-and-a-half albums - but it was certainly their big attention-grabber, and remains one of my favourite Dylan covers. Warner Hodges' guitar solo still sounds, as Ringenberg put it himself the other night, thermonuclear.

Anyway, I was glad I made the effort to get along to The Musician. It was sauna-like, as you'd expect, but the support act, The Breakdowns, were pretty good in a Wildhearts sort of way, and Jason Ringenberg didn't disappoint at all. He's aged well - there's a bit less hair under the stetson, but he's still positively lanky and has the energy and enthusiasm of an 18-year-old.

A lot of his set was drawn from those early albums - White Lies, Lost Highway, Broken Whisky Glass, Blanket Of Sorrow, Shop It Around and Harvest Moon all made appearances - but there was more recent material too, from his solo albums and from last year's Scorchers reunion album, with Twang Town Blues a highlight. He even played a couple of his Farmer Jason songs - Honky Tonk Maniac From Mars and Moose On The Loose - which left you wondering what on earth the good farmer's primary school-age audience make of it (although, if it means they grow up to be Jason and the Scorchers fans, how can that be a bad thing?).

Throughout it all, he maintained the difficult-to-perfect combination of boundless energy and wry wit that made the Scorchers such a great live act all those years ago, and closed with the afore-mentioned Dylan cover (I'd never seen him do it before).

I bought the recent Scorchers (Halcyon Times) album on the way out, and it's really pretty good, far more in the proto-alt country vein of the early records than the country-metal they got stuck on in the late 80s. A gentleman, as ever, Jason chatted modestly and signed CDs, a true pioneer of what now gets called Americana. I hope he's back soon.

Dylan & Dylan

There was no getting away from Dylan Thomas this weekend, with all the papers carrying reviews of The Edge Of Love, the new film about his complicated love life. I wouldn't have high hopes for it anyway, because as Simon Armitage says in All Points North, films about poets are generally pretty wretched, but this one has the additional handicap of Keira Knightley's acting.

But I have a bit of a problem with the whole concept, anyway. To me, it encourages people to treat the poetry itself as autobiography. It's the same sort of uncomfortable feeling I had with Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, or Carol Ann Duffy's Rapture. Not that they weren't both fine books, but I did feel that too much of the interest in both was down to prurient interest in the poets' lives, and indeed the other poets in their lives.

But enough complaining. Saturday's Guardian also contained the first in their latest series of giveaway booklets (chapbooks, in fact). They're all about great lyricists, and perhaps not surprisingly they started off with Bob Dylan. A small selection of lyrics (including Desolation Row, Visions of Joanna and Tangled Up In Blue) presented as poetry, plus an intro by Greil Marcus and two 1965 articles about the great man. We've talked before on here about whether lyrics are ever true poetry - this little book made a good case for, I think.