‘One More Cup of Coffee’: The White Stripes’ defining Bob Dylan cover
The notion of covering a Bob Dylan song is commonplace for any musician who has found themselves waltzing in his footsteps.
No songwriter is as fiercely woven into the fabric of rock ‘n’ roll, certainly in credit to his lyricism. With his distinct talent for capturing the raw intricacies of life, it is no wonder that musicians would resonate with his stories, breathing new life into his words that were vibrant to begin with.
Many artists have taken his words and reinvented them. Joan Baez continually covered Dylan’s work and, in many instances, arguably outshone him, granting a new meaning to her role as interpreter. Jimi Hendrix jolted ‘All Along the Watchtower’ with electricity after it fell by the wayside in Dylan’s catalogue, while The Byrds’ rendition of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ came to define their legacy. Across Dylan’s near-seven-decade worth of discography, his work is continually revived, elongating the folk tradition in the process. One cover of a 1970s Dylan track stands as one of the most captivating, sealing his legacy as a timeless storyteller.
Assembling their arsenal of blues-driven guitar music within Michigan’s underground rock scene, Jack and Meg White were a candy-cane-coloured duo that performed with a mischievous glint in their eyes. Jack was a maniacal guitarist, eerily virtuous and boundlessly creative as he played like he was conjuring spirits, anchored by Meg’s refined embrace on the drums. The pair sought to reinterpret rhythm and blues with a punk edge, and their output was both chaotic and methodical. Their eponymous 1999 debut would make small waves in the underground, but they would not find mainstream success until their third endeavour, 2001’s White Blood Cells, but that was no concern. From the beginning, Jack and Meg were formidable.
On their debut album is a curious cover of Dylan’s ‘One More Cup of Coffee’, from his 1976 album Desire. Frankly, when I heard The White Stripes’ version for the first time, I knew nothing of Dylan’s original, blindly assuming that his tale of death and seduction had come from Jack’s imagination. Learning the song’s backstory added to its intrigue, outside of both Dylan’s and Jack’s mysterious renditions. Dylan was inspired after visiting a Romani celebration at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the south of France for his 34th birthday. Speaking to Rock Express in 1978, he told the story of meeting a “gypsy king” during his time there, explaining, “In the Gypsy way of life, death is a very happy thing.”
Dylan’s song opens with him lying next to a young woman; he is fixated on her beauty, while her mind roams elsewhere: “But I don’t sense affection, no gratitude or love / Your loyalty is not to me but to the stars above,” he laments. He notes how she, like the other women in her family, is psychic, and she, in particular, has a heart like an ocean, “mysterious and dark”. All Dylan asks as he prepares to leave her is for one more cup of coffee, before he ventures into “the valley below” that haunts the song, a preoccupation with death that is both frightening and euphoric.
Once writing of his travels, Dylan explained the symbolism of his chorus. “Things went on, and it was time for me to go,” he writes. “They said, ‘What do you want, Bob, as you’re leaving us?’ I just asked for a cup of coffee for the road…. I was standing there looking out the ocean, and it was like [I was] looking at the valley below where I was standing.”
If ‘One More Cup of Coffee’ came from “someplace else”, as Dylan suggests, The White Stripes boldly travelled there, locating its heart and taking it with them, turning the song into a blues-driven ballad. Jack’s vocals are distorted and blurred, communicating a sheer pain from beginning to end. Meg’s drums float across with the dramatic tinge of her cymbals and the faint shake of a tambourine. The two merge to tell Dylan’s story in a pronounced, enticing way, elevating it from the mythical into a real, imposing danger, like a nightmare that follows every sleep.
Dylan has since become a mentor and friend to Jack, even inviting the young musician to perform a rendition of The White Stripes’ ‘Ball and Biscuit’ in 2004. “I’m lucky to even have one conversation with him,” Jack admitted. “Everything else has been icing on the cake.” Few have completely adopted a Dylan song as one of their own, but, consciously or not, The White Stripes achieved the near-impossible, showing a true prowess for amplifying a classic.
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