I was listening to the Essential Heart last night, when Ring Them Bells popped up. The first thing that occurred to me was that they were covering someone else's song. This isn't unusual - Ann and Nancy regularly cover other people's songs, presumably as an acknowledgement of the work that influenced them. They also had a man singing a duet who had a very distinctive voice that I recognized, but couldn't quite place. That part bugged me, so I checked wikipedia and find out it was Layne Staley doing the male vocals. I thought that was kind of cool, considering it's a radical departure from his work with Alice In Chains.
I also noticed that the song was originally a Bob Dylan song, which suddenly made a lot of sense. The lyrics were a lot like the stuff of of Slow Train Coming and Saved, right after he found Jesus. Now I've gotta find the Bob Dylan version. This has just become an exercise in music appreciation and the history of rock and roll. Time for good old Youtube, right? Wrong!
Man, **** Youtube. I do a search for "ring them bells" and get Heart's cover twice in the top five links (not unreasonable, they did a bang-up job), and then a list full of some schmuck sitting in his basement with a guitar. Now, fair enough, that's what Youtube is for, and Bob Dylan's music is more widely covered than anybody else, but not one of these goddamn links is Bob doing his own damn song. I add "Bob Dylan" to the search, and get the exact same list. Finally I do "bob dylan ring them bells original version" and get THE SAME **** LIST. After fifteen to twenty minutes, I finally manage to find this:
Youtube, you have failed me.
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Joined: Thu Sep 03, 2009 9:11 am Posts: 9449 Location: Your Dreams
Youtube is very much about popularity. And the problem with Dylan, is while he is an exceptional songwriter and musician, he can't sing for ****. The demand ain't there.
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He'll always be a better songwriter than a singer, but I rather enjoy his voice on his more recent albums, like Together Through Life and Modern Times, to be honest. The aged, gravelly blues thing suits him.
I noticed that recently (in the last month or so), Youtube has pulled just about every Bob Dylan video they had, at least one of them had a copyright thinger on there from "Web Sheriff".
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