‘Sit Down On This Bank Of Sand . . .’

by whiteray

As I may have noted here before one time or another, Bob Dylan has been one of the five biggest trees in the forest of my musical life for a long, long, time. (The other four? The Beatles, The Band, Richie Havens and Bruce Springsteen.) And I remember the day I first began to listen seriously to the Bard of Hibbing. It was in January 1972. 

I’d heard Dylan plenty of times before, certainly: Just in the couple of years since I’d started listening to the radio, he’d had a Top Ten hit with “Lay, Lady, Lay” during the summer of 1969 and then reached the Top 40 in late 1971 with “George Jackson.” And I’d likely heard the albums John Wesley Harding or Self Portrait on one evening or another hanging out at my pal Rick’s place. And that doesn’t count the other times I heard his songs just as part of the music around me before I really started paying attention. 

But on a January day, I bought Dylan’s music for the first time. I actually bought two albums that day. Rick’s birthday was coming up soon, and he wanted Nashville Skyline. So, I grabbed that at Musicland and then pawed through the rest of the Dylan records. I found a copy of the recently released Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. II and scanned the jacket. I didn’t know all the tracks, but it seemed to be a pretty good mix of stuff, so I brought it home with me, and as I wrapped Rick’s gift, I dropped my new record on the stereo. 

And the first track was happily familiar: A rolling roadhouse piano accompanied by a twanging guitar announced the presence of “Watching The River Flow,” a song that had been released as a single during 1971. (It just missed the Top 40, peaking at No. 41.) The rolling piano made it clear that the record had been recorded under the influence of Leon Russell, who in the first years of the Seventies was about as hot any performer ever was, sitting in on God knows how many major recording sessions, spearheading Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour in early 1970, playing at George Harrison’s Concert for Bangla Desh during the summer of 1971 and seeing two of his own albums – Leon Russell & The Shelter People and Carney – hit the Top 40. 

So, the first sounds I heard from the first Dylan album I owned were and still are tasty ones. The track – which Russell co-produced with Bob Johnston – pops up now and then on the iPod or on the computer as I wander through my days, and the guitar and piano introduction almost always captures my attention just as quickly and fully as it did fifty years ago. Not long ago, as I nodded along through Dylan’s tale of countryside ennui and laziness, I wondered, as I frequently do, who had covered the song and if I had any of those covers. 

Well, the website Second Hand Songs lists twenty-seven covers of the song, five of them instrumental, including versions by the Earl Scruggs Review, Seatrain, Steve Gibbons, the Heart of Gold Band, Chris Farlowe, Bobby Darin, Deep Purple, Back to Basic, Steve Wynne, Colin James and more. The earliest cover was an instrumental by John Schroeder for an album of Dylan covers in 1971. The earliest vocal cover came from Graham Bell in 1972, and the most recent cover was the one by Deep Purple in 2001. 

I know only some of those artists, and I’ve heard only a few of those covers. But it turns out that I have four covers of the tune in my digital files, versions by Joe Cocker, Leon Russell, the Lamont Cranston Band, and Steve Forbert. None of the four really quite get to the level of the original.

Russell recorded his version for a 1999 project called Tangled Up In Blues: Songs Of Bob Dylan that’s actually pretty good, but Russell’s track is one of the few on the CD that doesn’t seem to work; it’s just a little too relaxed. 

Joe Cocker’s version was part of his 1978 album Luxury You Can Afford, and bears witness to Cocker’s difficulties at the time. Like the rest of the album – and like a few other albums through the mid- to late 1970s and beyond – the recording seems to lack focus. It’s not awful, just not as striking as Cocker’s earlier work was. 

The Lamont Cranston Band’s cover of “Watchin’ The River Flow” is a live version recorded in December 1980 at the Cabooze bar in Minneapolis. It was included on a 1981 LP titled Bar Wars that was released mostly in the Twin Cities area, I assume. While I like some of what the band does with the song, I think it’s just a little too fast. But that’s me. 

Forbert recorded his version as “Watchin’ The River Flow” for a project titled I-10 Chronicles/2: One More For The Road. The CD and its predecessor were collections of Americana-tinged recordings put together for their association – or potential association, as seems to be the case with Forbert’s contribution – with Interstate 10, which crosses the United States’ southern tier. (The highway begins in Jacksonville, Florida, then parallels the coast of the Gulf of Mexico before crossing Texas and the desert southwest and ending in Los Angeles, California.) Forbert’s version is pretty good; I like it best of the four covers I have. Here it is: