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Saturday 21 January 2017

Dylan Covered - A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall


A very convincing win for Bob over Neko Case with Buckets of Rain last week with even the dogs in the Portuguese streets casting their two escudos worth for Mr Zimmerman.
The score is now Bob 8  Cover Artists 5. Is he home and hosed or can this week's contender stop the rot?

A first visit in this series to 1963's  The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan with  A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.
An apt song to "celebrate" the inauguration of President Chump.(America, what have you done?)

Not the Robert Plant verion or the Jimmy Cliff version nor the one by Dunfermline's finest Barbara Dickson. Not even Patti Smith's version at the Nobel Prize Ceremony when she stumbled with the words.
No it is the old lounge lizard himself Bryan Ferry with the song that was his first solo hit single in 1973.

A pretty obvious choice you would have thought except that I couldn't find a version on the shelves. I found him doing It Ain't My Babe but it had to be this one and I ended up parting with hard cash for a version of it.

I'm going for Bryan Ferry as it was the one that introduced me to the song although I think that the single version is much better (seeing as how I was paying for it I forked out for the extra minute or so - which was somewhat foolish of me).
Others, of course, may choose to disagree


Bob Dylan - A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall

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

13 comments:

  1. It's Bryan Ferry, streets ahead of Dylan. It's a magnificent overblown epic of a cover. (Did you know that The Staple Singers have covered this? There version too is magnificent).

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  2. Estou Shaggy. I nao viva na rua, I vivo em una quinta, eu fui resgatado por un bom homem. Eu vota por Bryan Ferry

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  3. Scooobie doobie doooo!

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  4. Like you, I knew this cover long before the original and that weighs heavily on my decision. Mr. Ferry it is.

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  5. I love everything about 'A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall', apart from Bob's original studio version of it, which sounds a little hurried and under-prepared to these ears. I can think of a dozen superior performances from across the years, not least this majestic interpretation from 1994 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCGoOPM2_x0
    So, perhaps controversially, I'm going for Bryan, who took the bones of a great song and rocked the foundations with it. If only Mr Ferry himself were quite so inspired these days.

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  6. Bob, but Ferry's version is a good one indeed.

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  7. Dylan, hate that pish Ferry version

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  8. Btw are you going to feature 13 Floor Elevators version of Baby Blue? As I was going to feature that in the next couple of weeks.

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  9. Brian Ferry because he made something special of a simple protest song.

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  10. Has to be Mr Ferry for me too.

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  11. Sort of pains me to say it as I really don't like what Bryan Ferry turned into over the years after the originally arty days of Roxy Music - but he gets my vote for this one too.

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