The rock singer Bob Dylan was disappointed in: “There’s no point”
It’s any musician’s worst nightmare to be stuck playing just one genre for the rest of their lives. Even though a group like AC/DC have spent their career making the exact same song over and over again, even they knew when to make something that sounded a little more dangerous or flirted with the blues now and again. An artist like Bob Dylan would never be told what to do, but when the living legend got around to cutting standards for his albums, he thought Rod Stewart was going in the wrong direction.
Then again, does it really make sense for Dylan to make a covers album full of Frank Sinatra-style songs? While one of the world’s most beloved songwriters, he is far from the most competent singer in the world, and even if everyone loved the idea of him settling into older age, wouldn’t his audience rather hear some of his new material?
After all, it’s not like he’s lost his touch. If Triplicate is any indication, the man is far from uninspired to create new music, and since we were given a late-period masterstroke on ‘Murder Most Foul’, there are bound to be more classic tracks like that in Dylan’s arsenal that he hasn’t given us yet.
While the standards album Shadows in the Night was the result of him mixing things up, Stewart’s decision to cross over to the same markey put him into the Vegas residency stripe of rock acts overnight. Despite not being that bad behind the microphone on classics like ‘Maggie May’, hearing that signature rasp going the way of ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ felt like the equivalent of Stewart settling into early retirement as a rockstar.
Even if he does the songs justice, Stewart’s takes on classic songs don’t always have the right amount of soul behind them. Whereas Dylan was taking stabs at older material because he wanted to, Stewart seemed to be in it to either fulfil a contract or to get that extra paycheck from a whole new audience.
And if there’s one thing that audiences don’t put with, it’s being inauthentic, and Dylan could cut through Stewart’s facade with one look, telling The Independent, “I thought if anybody could bring something different to these songs, Rod certainly could. But the records were disappointing. Rod’s a great singer, but there’s no point putting a 30-piece orchestra behind him. I’m not going to knock anybody’s right to make a living, but you can always tell if somebody’s heart and soul is into something, and I didn’t think Rod was into it in that way.”
Granted, Stewart could probably say the same thing as it applies to Dylan’s takes on old hits, but that’s selling Mr Zimmerman’s record short. Say what you want to about his voice, but Dylan doesn’t pretend to be the greatest standards singer alive, and when he opens his mouth on Shadows in the Night, he seems to be inhabiting the role of that style of frontman the same way that he did on Nashville Skyline with country music.
It’s one thing for Stewart to reinvent himself in a completely different genre, but for Dylan, his move towards easy listening was about as predictably cynical as when he made ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’. Dylan wore his different genres on his sleeve, but the Faces frontman practically wore the style of a costume, as far as he could tell.
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