It's really not that tough to do a good Bob Dylan cover, which is one of the reasons he's been covered so well so often. His lyrics have lots of room for a singer to find a personal angle, and their melodies are durable enough to sound just fine no matter how far they're pushed-- the farther the better, really. "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", which led off Bryan Ferry's 1974 solo debut These Foolish Things, is one of the most awesome Dylan covers ever, the kind of interpretation that leaves its source bruised, hung over and covered in Sharpied taunts. Ferry ripped apart Dylan's apocalyptic tapestry fiber by fiber and reconstructed it in Day-Glo plastic thread; his performance's deliberately affected mannerisms seem to have made an enduring impact on the young David Byrne.
Ferry's returned to the Dylan songbook a few times since then, including two tracks on 2002's Frantic, and the marketing hook for his tedious new record is that it's all Bob: 10 covers of the master, plus "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down", an oldie that Dylan learned from Eric von Schmidt. The chief joke of the album is that Dylanesque isn't particularly Dylanesque, aside from a couple of harmonica solos plunked in for symbolic purposes. Anything resembling a rough edge in the arrangements has been buffed away; Dylan's wicked vocal backspin has been replaced by Ferry's touch-my-velvet-dinner-jacket-baby default croon, sometimes backed up by characterless backup chicks. A Dylanesque choice of repertoire would've been perverse and deep-diving, maybe borderline inscrutable, but Ferry sticks to the hits.
He also hermetically seals the hits off from meaning. Ferry can be a subtle ironist when he feels like it--he's made a career out of blurring the line between romantic and "romantic"-- so maybe it's another joke that he treats the opening song here, the despondent "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues", as if it were just an assemblage of syllables and notes like anything else he could rubber-stamp the "Bryan Ferry" brand onto. But compared to, say, Nina Simone's blood-in-the-bathwater rendition of the same song, it just seems lazy.
When he recycles the same blasé, prefabricated technique for virtually every other song here, it's not just lazy-- it's infuriating. The band isn't much help, either: They play polite, foursquare rock with the occasional "tasty" lick at the end of a line. "All Along the Watchtower" lifts the Jimi Hendrix arrangement, just like the version Dylan plays on stage almost every night, but Ferry and company amble through it as if its central line is "no reason to get excited."
There's something in Dylan that Ferry is attached to, obviously, but it's not clear what. He's talked about how interpreting these songs is like reading Shakespeare. That's true, in a way; bad actors perform Shakespeare as if the text were a jeweler's pillow to display their star presence to best advantage, and that's the way Ferry mostly sings Dylan now. He doesn't really address the songs on their own terms, or even wrestle with them the way he did with "Hard Rain". He just runs them through the Ferry-izer, treating them all like they're "Slave to Love". Which means that, as much as he tries to capitalize on his voice's suaveness and seductiveness and hauntingness, he can't sing "All I Really Want to Do" as suavely as the Byrds, or "If Not For You" as seductively as Olivia Newton-John (no, seriously!), or "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" as hauntingly as just about anyone else who's ever attempted it.
There's only one glimmer here of Ferry's old interpretive wit. He murmurs "Positively 4th Street" in a gently mournful tone, backed up by power-ballad piano and whooshing movie-soundtrack synthesizers. The song is one of the most vindictive, venomous kiss-offs Dylan's ever written; gentle mournfulness wouldn't seem to suit it. But Ferry phrases it as a regretful glance back at a relationship that somehow didn't work out, and keeps a straight face all the way up to the last line, "you'd know what a drag it is to see you"-- whereupon he gives "drag" the bitter snap he's been saving up. Thanks, Bryan; the feeling is mutual.
