Robyn Hitchcock – Robyn Sings / Mary Lee’s Corvette – Blood On The Tracks

Over the last 40 years, Bob Dylan has been lauded and lionized, while his songs have been covered, copied and caricatured. Some artists have devoted entire albums to his songs, such as the recently reissued (and expanded) The Byrds Play Dylan. Robyn Hitchcock and Mary Lee Corvette have taken the theme a step further, choosing to honor the man by paying tribute to specific Dylan records.

Hitchcock’s self-released Robyn Sings might also be called Royal Albert Hall Approximately, as it’s his variation on Dylan’s infamous 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert. Like Dylan’s 1999 CD of that show, Hitchcock offers both an acoustic and electric disc. The electric side, recorded in 1996 and released at the time on a Warner Bros. promo, precisely re-creates Dylan’s set list. The less reverent, more recently recorded acoustic set subs in three post-’66 tunes (“Dignity”, “Tangled Up In Blue” and “Not Dark Yet”), plus two takes of “Visions Of Johanna” (one solo, one with a band).

That an adolescent Hitchcock fell under the spell of mid-’60s Dylan is easy to hear in his own work, which is similarly populated with baroque wordplay. “Visions Of Johanna”, Hitchcock’s self-described “favorite song,” contains the line: “When the jelly-faced women all sneeze/Hear the one with the moustache say ‘Jeeze/I can’t find my knees,” which would fit perfectly in one of Robyn’s own tunes.

The respectful, if sometimes ragged-voiced Hitchcock doesn’t mess around too much with Dylan’s material, but he still can’t suppress his own mercurial wit. In “Tangled Up In Blue”, he ad-libs, “She was working in a topless place/And stopped in for a top/I said I was missing half of my face/She said you came to the wrong shop.”

“Tangled Up In Blue” also leads off Mary Lee Corvette’s track-by-track live recording of Dylan’s 1975 classic Blood On The Tracks. Frontwoman Mary Lee Kortes reveals some nervousness on her rendition but gets more comfortable by the second song (“Simple Twist Of Fate”), and she (and her album) takes off from there.

While Mary Lee’s Corvette don’t really do anything really radical with the arrangements, what elevates their renditions from basic bar-band versions are the musicians’ knowing but relaxed performances and Kortes’ passionate, slightly sultry vocals. She imbues “Idiot Wind” with a fierceness that’s less sarcastic than Dylan’s, but no less powerful. Her gentle, lovely versions of “Bucket Of Rain” and “If You See Her, Say Hello” project an earthy soulfulness. Kortes’ strength here is tapping into the album’s dark romanticism, which fits her own style extremely well.

Mary Lee’s Corvette gets the slight edge here. While Hitchcock delivers everything you expect from him (displaying much Dylan love as well as a sense of fun), Kortes, at her best, brings a fresh perspective to these well-known tunes. Neither disc, however, does anything particularly revelatory with the material. Listen to The Byrds Play Dylan, and you’ll hear a band innovatively placing Dylan’s songs into folk-rock and country-rock settings. Hitchcock and Kortes haven’t attempted to do anything so grand; their discs are simply labor-of-love offerings from devoted pupils playing the master’s songs with great affection.