Willie Nile
HHH Positively Bob – Willie Nile Sings Bob Dylan RIVER HOUSE. CD/DL/LP Don’t think trite – it’s (more than) all right! Accredited Dylanologists may cringe. For Buffalo’s finest has opted to provide a Dylan’s Greatest Hits album, pretty much unrehearsed and slammed together in just two days. So far, so alarming. But Willie Nile is not your everyday provider of Bob jobs. He reveres Dylan, hails him as the Shakespeare of rock and maintains, “These songs meant the world for me when I was young.” So, when he rocks mightily on A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, Blowing In The Wind and turns Subterranean Homesick Blues into the kind of heated rockabilly jam that Jerry Lee Lewis might have helmed, he does it with admirable panache and understanding. And when he slows for a stroll through You Ain’t Going Nowhere and offers up the obscure Abandoned Lover as a wonderfully interpreted finale, you’re hit by the realisation that Willie has actually pulled off what is unquestionably a daunting challenge. Fred Dellar