With so much time on stage, it is no surprise Bob Dylan has covered all the greats. We should not hold our breath when it comes to Dylan tackling, say LCD Soundsystem or Captain Beefheart, but the veteran songwriter is often keen to share his love for artists of a similar style. His cover of Early Morning Rain, a beautiful song, one of many, from Gordon Lightfoot, is perfect. It captures not just the ability of Dylan as a man who can command the stage with a cover of a peer, but his natural capacity to morph the form and tone of a song with just a few subtle changes. The late 1980s was a period when Dylan was keen to play anything but his own material. Oh Mercy rekindled the fire, only a little, but enough to get Dylan back into the public eye. Not enough to keep him there, sure, that was soon to come. Picking up a Self Portrait feature at this point in his career is nothing short of fascinating.
But in this spot of somewhat relevance, partial obscurity, Dylan can afford the time to some of his favourite musicians. Early Morning Rain is a delightful addition to the set and makes as much sense appearing here as any other Dylan classic. Lightfoot is a legend on par with Dylan as a writer, though without the longevity and acclaim. Dylan must know that much as he performs Early Morning Rain with such a sincere, loving twist on the borderline traditional track. An electric buzz roars through, overwhelming the song and giving it a new twist, a fresh life on stage as a rocked-out and emotionally charged piece of work. Dylan’s love for Lightfoot is clear outside of this performance, with the songwriter saying he never heard a bad song from the If You Could Read My Mind hitmaker. He is not wrong, and with this version of Early Morning Rain, there is a crossover of two essential artists at play.
A fine vocal performance from Dylan here, but the real meat of this cover is in the instrumental additions. Refreshing, exciting, and exhilarating. That is all you could want from a cover song, especially one which pays tribute to an artist who has not yet been paid their dues. Decades on from this cover, and it still feels as though listening to Lightfoot is like uncovering some forbidden, forgotten gem. Dylan pieces together a brilliant cover of a song which has avoided the overplayed tag. Lightfoot has a couple of those, though not as many as he should have. Early Morning Rain feels like an excellent fit for Dylan, though perhaps for his image twenty years before this performance. It is a rambler song, a track of travelling in the modern day.
Freight trains taking people to and from places, the buskers, the hobos, the hopefuls who had taken their hearts on the road with them, are no longer catered for. They are on songs like Early Morning Rain, a song of travelling in the old country. Dylan electrifies it and yet keeps the core of the song, the very desire to head out in search of new opportunities, alive. How he does that is through the miracle of the stage, through the thrill which comes from hearing old topics burst into new generations. You can still travel with the freedom of the road, but even in the late 1980s, it sounded as though doing so would be trickier than first thought. Dylan finds new life in a song of old thoughts, and that is the sign of a brilliant track. Lightfoot has many of those masterpieces, tucked away in a fantastic discography.
