The random pla feature on my iPod coughed up Warren Zevon’s cover of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” this morning, which got me wondering. I own at least four different versions of that song (Dylan, Clapton, Zevon, G’n’R), and iTunes offers over a hundred different versions (not counting the twenty-odd different takes by Dylan himself). There are also a hundred-ish cover versions of “All Along the Watchtower” listed. Those have to be his two most-covered songs, and they’re probably up there in the race for most-covered song of all time.<\/p>\n
I wonder what Bob Dylan thinks of that, given that they’re so… slight. I mean, as Dylan songs go, they’re short, fairly obvious, and not all that deep. Do you think he shakes his head in bemusement over that (“I wrote this in twenty minutes in line at the grocery store…”), or does he just laugh on his way to cash the royalty check?<\/p>\n
(A tangentially related question, that I’m not going to spin off into its own post, though I could: What is<\/strong> the most-covered song of all time? Let’s restrict it to songs with identifiable authors, so no “Whisky in the Jar” or other traditional tunes, otherwise it just gets silly. “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” has to be up there, but I’m sure there are other songs that everybody with a guitar has recorded at some point…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The random pla feature on my iPod coughed up Warren Zevon’s cover of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” this morning, which got me wondering. I own at least four different versions of that song (Dylan, Clapton, Zevon, G’n’R), and iTunes offers over a hundred different versions (not counting the twenty-odd different takes by Dylan himself). There… Continue reading Idle Dylan Question<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}