57. The Byrds - Mr. Tambourine Man (1965)

1. Mr Tambourine Man
2. I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better
3. Spanish Harlem Incident
4. You Won't Have To Cry
5. Here Without You
6. Bells Of Rhymney
7. All I Really Want To Do
8. I Knew I'd Want You
9. It's No Use
10. Don't Doubt Yourself Babe
11. Chimes Of Freedom
12. We'll Meet Again

While Bob Dylan was out there blowing everyone's minds by setting intelligent folk lyrics to a rockin' beat, the Byrds were doing the same thing, but with far more pop appeal. They're hardly sterling originals, though. The title of the record alone should warn you that Dylan's presence looms heavy over this record, and the band definitely don't distance themselves from this notion, because they stick in three more Dylan covers. Actually, over half of this album is cover songs, and some of them are just plain weird. 'Don't Doubt Yourself, Babe' has a distinct Bo Diddley beat and even his trademark tremolo-y guitar sound at the end, even though it's a Jackie DeShannon song. The old Pete Seeger song 'The Bells of Rhymney' is given a folk-rock update, giving us an insight into what the bells of Welsh churches think about when they're bored. It's got a guitar riff so apparently catchy that George Harrison would rip it off for 'If I Needed Someone'.

Oh, and they cover 'We'll Meet Again' by Vera Lynn for some weird reason. They must've just watched Dr. Strangelove and then run out of song ideas or something.

The Dylan covers are all fairly good work. You wouldn't expect something as lyrically obtuse as Bob Dylan's late '64-onwards period would make good pop song fodder, but the Byrds do a pretty good job with their harmonies and the ever constant jangling sound of the Rickenbacker 12 string guitar. Interestingly enough, the word 'jangling' is so widely accepted as a good term to describe the sound of a 12 string guitar that if I used any other word, I'd be swamped in hate mail. It's a tough lot, blogging.

'Mr. Tambourine Man' gets all the attention, as you would expect from a trans-Atlantic #1 hit title track. It's definitely a good deal catchier than the Dylan version, but not necessarily better. For one, it leaves only one verse of the original song intact, and doing that to any Dylan song is only gonna hurt you in the long run. The other three Dylan songs, all taken from Another Side of Bob Dylan, interestingly enough, suffer from a bit of sameness. They have a very distinctive sound, but it's not very diverse.

The originals, thankfully, sound a bit different from the rest. They're easy enough to identify because the lyrics, rather than relying on the surrealist imagery of Bob Dylan, cover the tried-and-true topic of the love song. They also all sound like Beatles songs, though I guess that's a given for any newly-formed rock band in 1965. The best original here would have to be 'I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better', which is a crackin' pop song.

A solid debut, all around. Sure, 4 Dylan covers is a bit much, but the idea that deep and intelligent lyrics could work equally well in a pop context as well as in a folk context is perhaps more important than any of the songs on here. 8/10