“Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” – Mike Ness
(Words/music: Bob Dylan, available on Cheating at Solitaire, Time Bomb / Epitaph 1999)
We’re very quick to declare sacrilege when discussing music, but we forget that we all started somewhere. I try my best not to get angry about ignorance (now ignorance that tries to pass itself off as wisdom, that’s another story) when talking about music, but it’s hard not to think of Jack Black in that scene in High Fidelity where he’s laying into a customer for gaps in his record collection (“that is perverse – don’t tell anyone you don’t own fucking Blonde on Blonde”). Still, I remember times as a teenager eager to explore the entire history of recorded music and not knowing where to start. Thus, a familiar scenario: I knew who Bob Dylan was, I knew a few of his songs from the radio, but I didn’t own a Bob Dylan album. It’s hard to imagine this in the instant gratification internet age, where almost any song is a Youtube link or Bit Torrent download away, but I felt kind of overwhelmed and didn’t really know where to start. Sure, Allmusic was an incredible resource, but I still couldn’t find an album worth putting down $15 of money from watching my neighbors or squirreled away from a holiday. With plenty of other records in my expanding catalog, I let Dylan fall through the cracks.
I can summarize my early years as a music fan fairly well by noting that Social Distortion was on my radar more than Bob Dylan. When Mike Ness covered “Don’t Think Twice” on his solo album, it was one of the first times I came across one of the non-classic rock radio Dylan songs. Naturally, I took to it almost immediately – it’s an excellent song and even to this day (I rediscovered Cheating at Solitaire a little while ago and immediately went to this track) Ness’ take on it makes sense. He turns Dylan’s subdued fingerpicking into a rockabilly romp, but it still stays true to the seething undercurrent in Dylan’s song – one where he wants an amicable split yet the wounds still feel a little too fresh. Maybe because this was my first experience of falling in love with a Bob Dylan song, I’m naturally drawn to the more pointed pieces in his catalog (“Positively 4th Street” perhaps being my favorite), and until tonight I never really considered Ness’ cover the reason why. At least it’s a fairly tangible thread in his catalog (especially after he “went electric”), and even if it took me a little while to come around to all of the different sides of his personality, I had to start somewhere. Without Mike Ness’ album, it would have happened a lot later.
More on Mike Ness: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm
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