When he was first learning to play guitar at 14 or 15, Dave Stewart dived into the Delta blues, and the likes of Robert Johnson, and the British invasions flooded the radio—the Beatles, the Kinks, the Who—before becoming transfixed by The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Another Side of Bob Dylan. After discovering Bob Dylan, from the albums his college-bound brother left behind, Stewart was determined to play local folk clubs in his hometown of Sunderland, England, but was rejected for his adolescent appearance.
“I looked about 12,” says Stewart, “so they wouldn’t let me in the door.” Eventually, Mike Elliott, who ran the George and Dragon, a folk hub in the area during the early 1960s, took pity on the young Stewart strumming his guitar on the streets and let him in for a two-song set.
Inside the smoke-filled pub in the upstairs room was “like stepping into a sacred room where visionaries and rebels converged,” says Stewart. Local folk musicians mostly performed songs hanging on to stories of the coal mines and shipyards, so the older patrons were shocked to see a young kid step on stage, belting out Dylan’s lyrics.
During his two-song set, Stewart remembers performing Dylan’s “To Ramona,” an experience that left him with a lasting musical connection to Dylan. From there, he began singing and playing Dylan wherever he could.
“I’ve always had this ongoing passion for his songwriting,” says Stewart. “He was always musically and lyrically mind-blowing. I love words, and I love the way that they tumble out of Dylan’s mouth, and in his phrasing, where the rhyming scheme is skewed sometimes.”He adds, “When you read them [the lyrics], you may think, ‘Oh, that’s strange,’ because one of his classic things is that there’s no chorous.
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Dave Does Dylan Tracklist:
Simple Twist Of Fate
I Want You
Emotionally Yours
Forever Young
To Ramona
Make You Feel My Love
Lay, Lady, Lay
Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
Spanish Harlem Incident
Shelter From The Storm
She Belongs To Me
Visions Of Johanna
