Safka's Dylan

While most of the luminaries of the the '60s and '70s pop music scene were represented in my parents' record collection, conspicuous by his absence was the inimitable Bob Dylan, for whom they both professed (and still profess!) an especial dislike. (My father liked to tell a story about how his college roommate had put up a big poster of Dylan on his side of the room, and how he had retaliated by putting up an even bigger poster of the Ideal Beef Steer on his, which I guess showed him!) Like acorns that have to be boiled and drained and reboiled before they begin to approach edibility, Dylan songs were deemed to be fit for human consumption only after they had been processed and reconstituted by the likes of Peter, Paul, and Mary -- and that was the only way I ever heard them throughout my childhood. (I remember the frisson of discovering a tune called "It's a-hard, and it's hard" in one of my banjo books and realizing it might be the mysterious and much-maligned "Eets-a harrd" song of Dylan's, but it turned out to be some unrelated Woody Guthrie thing.)

So naturally, as soon as I was old enough to start acquiring my own music collection, I began cultivating a taste for Dylan -- perhaps the only teenager in history to choose that particular way of rebelling against his Boomer parents! -- and a concomitant disdain for easy-listening covers, which increasingly struck me as vaguely gauche, like fruit-flavored beer. No Byrds, no Peters, no Pauls, and no Marys, thank you, and may God forgive Ritchie Blackmore!

The first crack in my zero tolerance for Dylan covers appeared in 2004 when I discovered a reworking of the Dylan fragment "Wagon Wheel" by the old-timey LARP group Old Crow Medicine Show -- which happened to be playing on the radio as I was packing my suitcases at the start of my Wanderjahre, and which became a sort of private theme song for a good long time.

But for a long time that remained an isolated exception, made for sentimental reasons, to an otherwise ironclad preference for the Man Himself.

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It wasn't until years later that I became aware of the existence of one Melanie Safka, who was apparently known as plain Melanie back in the day. I first encountered her through her version of “Ruby Tuesday,” which I love and hate at the same time, that voice almost — almost — being enough to persuade me to forgive the nonchalant vandalization of Keef’s perfect lyrics. Such other pieces of hers as I happened upon left me similarly ambivalent. "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" for example, is undeniably a work of talent but can, I think, only be fully appreciated by a genuine member of the Woodschlock generation -- which I, for all my anachronistic listening habits, am not.

The first Safka piece that really got my attention and won her my full respect was her heartbreaking rendition of James Taylor's "Carolina in My Mind" (ain't it just like a friend of mine to knife me in the gut?).

After hearing that, I was willing to take a deep breath and give her Dylan remakes a try -- and, well, all is forgiven. She demonstrates an undeniable right to reinterpret the master, making each song her own and creating pieces that are as beautiful in their way as the originals are in theirs. (I had originally written "perfect" instead of "beautiful," but of course that would be a singularly inappropriate adjective to apply to the rough-edged, organic, imperfect genius of either Safka or Dylan.)