Cat Power Sings Bob Dylan: Interpretation as Transformation
REVIEW BY Nora Bonner
Inside the auditorium at the Chevalier Theater in Medford, Massachusetts, a crowd anticipates Cat Power Sings Bob Dylan: the 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert. Houselights loop across a gray ceiling and make the place feel like a temple. As these lights dim, a ring of industrial lights rises faintly on stage behind an empty microphone in the center of two musicians – an acoustic guitar player on the left and harmonica player on the right – who will accompany Cat Power, aka Chan Marshall for the acoustic portion. This is our first clue that the show we’ll hear tonight is not an exact replica of the 1966 concert, as Dylan accompanied himself solo for this portion of his show. The lights change and Marshall clacks across the stage in the highest of heels. A long tie hangs over the corset beneath her pant suit, all in black, including her plastered down pixie cut. She looks amazing, but also very nervous.
Regardless, her look invites us to consider these Dylan reinterpretations alongside concepts of gender. The Royal Albert Hall Concert, which we recognize from volume four of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series, includes “Visions of Johanna” and “Just Like a Woman,” songs that will inevitably transform in context and meaning once paired with Marshall’s fierce and smooth female voice. She has a reputation as a “gifted interpreter of songs,” to borrow a phrase from Laura Tenschert, host of the Definitely Dylan podcast. As she welcomes Marshall on a November 2023 episode, Tenschert cites the singer’s version of “Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” as an example of impressive reinterpretation, which fans of both Dylan and Marshall might recognize from the I’m Not There soundtrack. Before the interview, Tenschert also reminds us that the concert at Royal Albert Hall exists as a key myth in Dylan’s career, the one where a disgruntled fan shouts “Judas!” at Dylan for going electric. The Cat Power Sings Bob Dylan tour, based on the 1966 Royal Albert Hall recording, is therefore an interpretation of this transformation myth.
As a myth, Dylan’s concert condenses his prolific output from 1965-1966 into one night, two years which also mark his transformation from folk kid to rock god. But when it comes to putting together a mythology, for Dylan or for anyone else, facts hardly matter. That way, we can excuse the fact that the aforementioned “Judas!” incident actually occurred in Manchester, not London. Clinton Heylin’s 2016 Judas! offers a thorough account of that night and the events leading up to it, including the infamous Newport show when Dylan had already struck his FolkFest fanbase with an electric bolt the previous year. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Dylan’s 1966 tour is his decision to continue playing acoustic sets. Another musician might let the transformation happen behind the scenes and let the fans figure it out. They’d bust up a folk appearance, release Bringing It All Back Home, and go full electric for the tour. Dylan, on the contrary, performed this transformation night after night in front of a live audience.
The mythological performance at Royal Albert Hall, later released in 1998 as The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert, is legendary because it represents the product of what had been refined during the two years Dylan yielded Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. What had been refined is the transformation itself, demonstrated by the show’s two sets: solo acoustic, then full band electric. It’s the same myth Pennebaker retold in his Dont Look Back documentary of Dylan’s 1965 tour: a myth that shows the process of transformation, how not just Dylan, but perhaps American music itself evolved into rock ‘n’ roll. The UK tour might be understood then as the next chapter in an Alan Lomax study – how Bob Dylan brought Woody Guthrie’s and Lead Belly’s porch blues ballads to Greenwich Village, where he turned them into rock ‘n’ roll hits. It’s a myth Dylan – whether intentionally or by accident – presented for British audiences, as if to give them a musicology lesson on where the Beatles’ music came from.
So why Cat Power?
Tenschert attempts to answer this question when she points out that Marshall’s career, like Dylan’s, “has also been a constant evolution of moods and styles” (2:58), as evidenced in the singer’s prolific output of eleven studio albums since 1994, the year she first opened for Liz Fair and signed with Matador Records that same night. Her earliest records Dear Sir (1995) and Myra Lee (1996), fuse punk’s fast power chords with blues progressions. What Would the Community Think (1996) opens with electric arpeggios accented by a tinkling glockenspiel as she sings, “In this hole we have fixed we get further and further from the world,” before she launches into a much grungier track, “Good Clean Fun.” Ten years later, she released what might be her most well-known song, “The Greatest,” which is the title track on an album with a hot pink cover and glitzy gold letters. That song features a prominent jazz piano and syncopated drum riffs over haunting strings.
Marshall’s repertoire also includes three cover albums, which include a masterfully stripped down version of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.” Her cover of John Philip Baptiste’s 1959 hit, “Sea of Love,” ended up on the soundtrack to the 2007 film, Juno. Her latest album is a live recording of the “Royal Albert Hall Concert,” which she, unlike Dylan’s misnamed release, actually performed at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Tenschert reports that, after attending this performance in November 2023, Marshall’s “voice breathed her own spirit into the songs while effortlessly capturing the essence of Dylan’s 1966 concert.” After listening to Cat Power’s live recording of this same concert, it’s hard to disagree. Her smoky voice swirls around Dylan’s lyrics, offering a dynamic lens forged from life experiences through which we can understand these songs in new ways. At 52, Marshall has weathered nearly three more decades of experience – personal and professional – than Dylan had when he originally performed the show at 24. These differences count toward layers of interpretation to draw from when covering Dylan’s music.
Marshall’s not one to change the gender in any of the lyrics, something that might have been more noticeable twenty years ago, but this simple decision unlocks a corridor of new meanings. Her version of the set’s opening, “She Belongs to Me,” comes across like a mantra or pep talk instead of a (male) singer celebrating his lover. And yet, perhaps Marshall’s first noticeable detour from the songs’ original context is that she’s not playing any instruments. She’s just singing, which makes her appear vulnerable in front of a microphone, without the safety of a guitar for a breastplate and harmonica headgear for a helmet. We can’t help fixating on what she’s doing with her hands, and for this part of the concert, she directs most of her gestures to the sound engineer to fix the levels.
Fans may recognize the set’s next song by its original context, as a friendly jab to John Lennon, who named Dylan as an inspiration for “Norwegian Wood.” Dylan’s “Fourth Time Around” echoes some of Lennon’s tune and subject matter. On the 1966 live record, Dylan delivers it as though he’s anxious to get through the number and, frankly, the whole first half of the show. The result is a slightly rushed, accusatory diatribe, at times taunting. Tonight, Marshall slows this taunt to a bless your-heart, condescendingly Southern pace as she concludes, “I never asked for your crutch, now don’t ask for mine.”
Perhaps what elevates Marshall’s performance over others’ attempts at Dylan covers is that she is not afraid to speak some lines. Reminiscent of Dylan’s spoken phrases, these feel a tad more deliberate than the ones she sings. Her acoustic set versions are generally much slower and more contemplative. And while she navigates the sound-balance adjustments that interrupt “Visions of Johanna,” these too feel deliberate. She wails silkily through these “visions” in what comes off as a plea to rid herself from the distractions, which at this point could be the sound problems as much as the lyrics’ memories of a woman she’s trying to forget.
If the show started with sound-level problems, we’ve forgotten them by the time Marshall gets to “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Her aching wails flood the room as she croons, “the sky too is folding under you,” from what could be the perspective of a parent ousting a child, or from this same mother forging boundaries to protect from the toxic person she’s addressing when she sings, “strike another match, go start anew.” Marshall’s ability to evoke these perspectives widens the songs’ range of interpretations, each sung with different versions of intensity.
Throughout the first set, Marshall’s best moments occur when she pulls back, beckoning us to lean closer if we want to experience her level of intimacy. For instance, in her interview with Tenschert, Marshall describes harrowing scenes of growing up in the rough parts of Atlanta. In a 2006 interview for New York Magazine, Marshall divulges dropping out of high school during her senior year. These experiences give her the authority to pull off a version of “Desolation Row” that rejects what’s “intellectual,” like debates about T.S. Eliot against Ezra Pound, for the desolate experiences one must suffer to understand the origins of rock music. Her steady and direct delivery of the song’s many verses invites us to abandon the academy’s brightly lit halls and follow her to the lowdown alleyways where we’ll find the authentic sounds at the music’s roots. At the song’s conclusion, Marshall rejects this litany of allusions when she sings: “Right now I can’t read too good / Don’t send me no more letters no / Not unless you mail them / from Desolation Row.” If you want to be in her crowd, you’re going to have to prove you’ve been through it, too.
Having gotten through the song with no sound interruptions, Marshall’s fierce voice approaches the rest of the set with a newfound confidence, beginning with “Just Like a Woman.” Hers is a salty retort as she lingers tauntingly on notes to accentuate the first verse’s rhymes: “Everybody knows baby’s got new clothes, but lately I’ve seen her ribbons and her bows,” before concluding the phrase with a spoken, “have fallen from her curls.”
She concludes the acoustic set with a convincing performance of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which Marshall names as one of her favorites to cover, if not the most difficult. She describes the song to Variety magazine’s Jem Aswad as “a sort of fuzzy memory of childhood, where you were free in your imagination. But it also is the hardest song and most emotional song for me to sing because it is a testament to having faith in a fucked-up world.” Tonight’s version comes off like a hazy lullaby begging for another hit, of drugs or artistic inspiration.
The transition between sets happens with little fanfare, as the additional musicians take to the instruments already onstage, in the shadows behind the first set’s trio of Marshall, her guitarist Arsun Sorrenti, and Aaron Embry, her harmonica player. The lights brighten and, as if responding to the previous song’s demands, the full band injects the audience with “Tell Me Momma,” the concert’s first electric number.
If Dylan’s real-time transition delivered us from folk music’s intimacy to rock ‘n’ roll’s sound large enough to fill arenas, Marshall’s version transports us from an intimate jazz lounge in New York to what now feels like a full-blown crowded New Orleans jamboree. Compared to Dylan, who stays more or less at one high energetic frequency throughout his second set preserved on Bootleg Series Volume 4, Marshall plays around more with levels, drawing in a bit during some of the numbers, including “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “One Too Many Mornings.” Dylan’s 1966 London fans would have recognized the latter as a song which draws heavily on traditional British balladeering, now repurposed for demonstrating the power of rock ‘n’ roll, while Marshall’s tamer version offers a reprieve before she breaks into what may be her best song of the night: “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.” Marshall’s cover is so atmospherically transporting, we might start to think that Dylan wrote the song especially for her.
Nearing the end of the show, she pulls off “Ballad of a Thin Man” in another standout performance, taking full advantage of her wide ranging register, especially when she slides from note to note singing, “How does it feel to be such a freak?” She’s having a good time, and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to hear the cover’s potential as the opening on a soundtrack to another gritty HBO series. By the time she sashays into her “Like a Rolling Stone” finale, most of the audience is on their feet, some dancing in the aisles – a phenomenon that prompts Marshall to acknowledge her niece is one of these dancers and she “doesn’t get out much.” If the performance started in what felt like a sacred jazz temple, it’s ending with a dance party in somebody’s backyard revival tent.
In bringing us Dylan’s Royal Albert Hall sets, Marshall retells the story of a musician who accepts his responsibility to morph alongside his talent, trying new things, always on his own terms. In fact, the company that produced Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back is named after Janus, the Roman god of transformation. The documentary presents Dylan’s transformation via his performances, perhaps even more so by way of the backstage conversations he doesn’t want to have about his decision to transform the music. The most famous of these might be a scene that takes place near the end of the film, when Dylan skewers a journalist from Time about his magazine’s readership. Although for many this conversation signifies Dylan at his pettiest – evidence of his immaturity – we might also acknowledge the conversation as his breaking point, frustrated with the public’s resistance to his transformation.
Either way, Dylan offers a memorable critique of establishment journalism when he says, “They have no ideas in Time magazine, there’s just these facts.” For our interpretation of tonight’s Cat Power concert, Dylan is clearly more interested in “ideas,” which we might name as the residue of careful storytelling, because it is from ideas, not simple facts, that one extracts a “truth.” Put another way, truths are more than simple facts; they are ideas left behind not just by “what happens,” but “how” and, more importantly, “why.” These are the “ideas” Dylan’s criticizing the journalist for leaving out in his writing. By choosing to call her tour after the misnamed concert venue, Marshall invites us to pay attention to more creative choices, raising such questions about the songs as “versions.” How will she choose to sing these songs? Which truths will her versions highlight? The answer to all these questions is simple: hers.
These are her versions made up of her choices for pacing, how she sings a line, and which words she’ll choose to emphasize. Each choice reminds us that song cover is in itself an act of transformation. The overall effect is a concert that leaves us with the sense that there are far more meanings to uncover in these songs and that each of these meanings is unique to the experiences and talents of the performer. In this sense, she invites us to transform and be transformed, one Dylan cover at a time.
Works Cited
Aswad, Jem. “Cat Power Talks Her ‘Sings Bob Dylan’ Album, Her History With His Music, and
Meeting the Man Himself.” Variety Magazine. 21 Feb 2024.
Heylin, Clinton. Judas! From Forest Hills to the Free Trade Hall: A Historical Overview of the
Big Boo. Route, 31 Oct 2016.
Pennebaker, D. A., Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Donovan. Dont Look Back Director-approved
two-DVD special edition., The Criterion Collection, 2015.
Power, Cat. Cat Power Sings Bob Dylan: the 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert. Domino
Recordings, 4 Nov 2024.
Tenschert, Laura. “She’s an Artist, She Don’t Look Back”: A Conversation With Cat Power.
Definitely Dylan Podcast. http://www.definitelydylan.com. 11 Nov 2023.
