My Chemical Romance Covers Dylan: I Have an Opinion About That, and It's Not (Exactly) What You Think

I think it was Monday evening when Katy came home and told me that My Chemical Romance was contributing a cover of Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" to the soundtrack of the upcoming film, Watchmen. Before even hearing the song, I was nonplussed, and remained so afterwards. They tossed some verses, sped it up, applied their traveling circus style of buzzsaw guitar, lifted a riff straight out of Poison's "Talk Dirty to Me," and got it down to 3 minutes. And they missed the boat entirely.

I should probably start by saying that although not my cup of tea, the problem is not that My Chemical Romance is contributing the cover. Katy owns two of their albums, I've listened to them, and I don't hate them as much as I'd expected that I would. At their best, they sort of succeed as a dark-ish party band; in some places they actually sound like a successor to Twisted Sister, not great praise necessarily, but not all bad either. My biggest complaint with them is that it seems to me that their lyrics could benefit from another several drafts before hitting the CD press.

My problem is also not the problem that a Dylan purist might have. That is, I think that most Dylan songs can and should be covered. In fact, off the top of my head I can name several covers of his songs that kick his album versions in the teeth and don't quit.

Anyway, those paragraphs were tangents. My problem is not with My Chemical Romance, and my problem is not that the Dylanography is inherently untouchable. My problem is with the choice of song itself; I propose that "Desolation Row" belongs in a class of songs which I will denote "Uncoverable."

In fairness, it was practically inevitable that any attempt to film Watchmen would involve a cover of "Desolation Row," since the graphic novel actually quotes the song. In that connection, I can't help but be reminded of the making-of previews for Watchmen, in which the director says, more or less, "A lot of people think of Watchmen as the unfilmable graphic novel." It just strikes me as interesting that in order to film the unfilmable graphic novel, you have to cover the uncoverable song. Poetic, kinda.

I've heard the concept of uncoverability floating around before. On Last.fm, I remember someone complaining about Johnny Cash's cover of U2's "One," saying effectively that the song was so personal to Bono that any attempt to cover it becomes automatically crass. That's not precisely what I have in mind. I think that a song is uncoverable when the original recorded performance is so radically idiosyncratic that it forces the potential cover artist into a catch-22: either he copies the idiosyncrasy, in which case it swallows up his own contribution to the project, making the cover redundant, or he ditches the idiosyncrasy, in which case everyone wonders what was the point of performing a song whose most interesting aspect has been extracted.

The best relatively contemporary example that I'm coming up with is Bush's "Glycerine." Uncoverable I say. Why? Because the arrangement is completely anomalous, and yet it works so well that a casual listener could hear the song a hundred times and never notice what it is that makes the music so haunting: no percussion. Only vocals, fuzzed-out electric guitar, and a string section. If you were inclined to cover "Glycerine," what would you do? Jettison the attributes that make it sui generis, by incorporating drums? Or play it straight, omit the percussion, and allow the song itself and its history to overpower your performance of it? (The tragic choice might be avoided through schtick, say, by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, but I have in mind serious covers, and not parodies).

So what is the radical idiosyncrasy of "Desolation Row"? I suggest you download it from iTunes and see for yourself, but failing that, read on:

First, at 11 minutes, 20 seconds, it is a radically long song, even for Dylan. The first 9 minutes or so are comprised of a sequence of verses featuring characters from and allusions to various works of art, literature, fairy tale, mythology, scripture, and history. Cameos are made by Romeo and Juliet, Cain and Abel, Cinderella, Casanova, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and the Phantom of the Opera, among others. Neither the melody nor the arrangement changes appreciably during this section, though changes in diction and emphasis will help to keep you interested. Each verse is essentially self-contained and unrelated to the others.

The other thing worth pointing out is that, while there are emotionally touching standouts (like the Ophelia verse), between one-quarter and one-third of the verses are absolute garbage from the perspective of being well-written or interesting or insightful. In particular I'm thinking of the verses beginning "Einstein disguised as Robin Hood..." and "At midnight, all the agents..." (Interestingly, that latter verse is the one quoted in Watchmen). It's perplexing then, at first, that those verses are there at all, since the song is already too long, and nobody would miss them if they'd been omitted, since they bear no real relation to the other parts.

Then, after all these verses, there is a harmonica interlude, and after it, a final verse, wherein we learn that the foregoing verses were all contained in a letter received by the speaker. The final verse is the speaker's response, and he's having none of it; in fact, he's bored, effectively mocking the audience for any enjoyment it might have derived in the previous ten minutes:

All these people that you mentioned,
Yes I know them—they're quite lame.
I had to rearrange their faces,
And give them all another name.
Right now I can't read too good.
Don't send me no more letters, no,
Not unless you mail them from Desolation Row.

And that's when it hits you that the radical idiosyncrasies at work in this song are the peculiar chutzpah that it must take for an artist to pull this sort of time-wasting, tear-jerking prank on his audience, and the charisma it takes to make them feel satisfied even after the rug has been pulled neatly out from under them. Dylan knows that he can string you along until the end, maybe move you to the brink of tears, or convince you to sing along, just by employing that timeless, nasal/gravel/gargle he calls a voice (maybe the closest we modern English speakers can come to hearing Beowulf sung), sprinkling some good lines and verses in among the bad ones, and mostly by appealing to the audience's ego: "I've heard of Ophelia!" It's Menippean satire meets the Shaggy Dog Story. It's the take that makes you love getting took.

And that's why it can't be covered. Now that "Desolation Row" is a classic, chutzpah and charisma are no longer required in order to get away with it. But it's the chutzpah and charisma that made it a classic in the first place. The reasons that undergird your desire to cover it are the very reasons why you'll never be able to bring anything to it that is new or interesting or relevant or really very good at all. You shouldn't bother trying.