“Old Crow Medicine Show” have been around for awhile and their mastery of the country, folk, bluegrass in all forms and guises has earned them enough respect to be produced by the likes of Don Was, and to open Grand Ole Opry shows for Merle Haggard and Dolly Parton. They are also old enough, well maybe at least some of them, to not only guess what impact Dylan’s “Blonde Om Blonde” album had (and still has, actually) 50 ago when it first hit the ears of unsuspecting listeners but really feel what that music means. And it has its profound meaning not only for the rock music it originated in but musical forms it also originated from, like the blues, country and what not else Dylan was inspired by when he created it. Let alone the slew of the fantastic crew of session musicians, from rockers like Al Cooper to a whole gamut of Nashville’s best. That is why “Old Crow Medicine Show’s” idea to cover “Blonde On Blonde” in its entirety wasn’t such a far removed or strange idea. The only problem was, how do you tackle such legendary music and at least come close enough to show your respect towards it?
So the band actually took all the logical steps to make this project right. First of all, they decided to do the album live. The thing is, there is always at least that slight change in tempo that live performances have that give songs that you revere so much and don’t want to mess up that slight change that gives them your take on them. So ‘the Crows’ did two shows in a row last year and culled their favorite performances from the to make a complete “Blonde On Blonde” set. So instead of trying to mess up the songs or make any radical changes (how do you better those anyway?), they give them a country/folk/bluegrass/blues brush-up they excel at. After all, Dylan himself was heading in that direction anyway, and the original “Blonde On Blonde” showed it. Some songs get just a slight brush up in tempo and instrumentation (Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, for example), others get a more detailed treatment (“Pledging My Time” is turned into a true bluegrass hoedown), while others are more or less left intact - for example, how do you better a song like “I Want You”?
The interpretation that does stand out is a song that was probably the hardest to tackle, the long winding “Sad Eyed Lady of The Lowlands”, and “Old Crow Medicine Show” do two things with it, give this classic another possible dimension and definitely remind you to take out your copy of “Blond On Blonde” and spin it again. After all, that is one of the key purposes of tributes anyway.
