The Life Of A Song, Vol. 3: Bob Dylan Et Al. - "The Mighty Quinn (Quinn The Eskimo)"

When you think of songs that led exciting, dynamic, transformational lives as opposed to the stuffy, conservative existence of so many others, who does your mind turn to automatically? If the answer is "Bob Dylan", give yourself a prize — so many of his classic songs were given expanded or alternative lives both by himself, in live performance, and by other artists, through cover versions, that there’s hardly anyone out there to challenge him on both those accounts simultaneously. But which particular song would constitute a particularly good example of this adapt-and-thrive lifestyle? ‘Like A Rolling Stone’? ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’? ‘Just Like A Woman’? Just about anything that made the transition from the early years to the 1966 tour to the Budokan concerts in 1978 would probably qualify, and then some.

So I thought, hey, instead of worshiping as usual at the altar of some deep, seminal classic or other, why not pick out a trifle instead? God knows we tend to underrate trifles, dismissing them as... uh, trifles, when in reality a trifle born out of a genius mind can often contain a heart of gold. (If you want me to make a case for ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ as the artistic pinnacle of Paul McCartney’s career, I can gladly oblige... just need a year or so to find the right words). And as it so happened, I was just giving myself a retrospective of second-rate old school British bands in the late Sixties, and ended up listening to Manfred Mann and the Hollies on the same day, and that’s how I got me the perfect sample.

As far as I know, Bob never said much about the origins of ‘The Mighty Quinn’ other than "I don’t know what it was about" (liner notes to Biograph), but most experts agree that the title must be a reference to Anthony Quinn’s performance as an actual Eskimo in The Savage Innocents, a Nicholas Ray movie that will most certainly come across as offensive to modern progressive audiences but was probably regarded more like a curious slice of cornball back in 1960. Actually, in an old interview from 1968 Bob claims to have never seen the movie — and although you should never ever directly believe a single word said or written by Bob, in this case it is quite possible that he may be speaking the truth. That the song is connected to the movie can hardly be doubted — «Quinn The Eskimo» is not the kind of a phrase that you randomly coin out of nothing — but it may simply have been the basic knowledge of the weird choice of an Irish-Mexican actor (who of us wouldn’t want to receive the birth name of Manuel Antonio Rodolfo Quinn Oaxaca?) to portray an Inuk hunter that served as a stimulus to write a respectively weird song like this. I mean, if Anthony Quinn is actually an Eskimo, you can be damn sure that when he gets here, all the pigeons are gonna run to him straight away. Right? Damn straight.

The original version (two takes are available on the complete edition of The Basement Tapes; the first time Take 2 was officially released was on the Biograph boxset in 1985) was put down by Dylan and The Band in the summer of 1967 — and as anyone can tell, it aligns pretty well with all the other lightweight, nonsensical songs like ‘Please Mrs. Henry’ or ‘Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread’ that Bob and his pals were brewing for Bob’s «music therapy» sessions after his motorcycle crash. In its primal form, the song feels like good old-fashioned Southern rock — you can suitably fit it into the rhythmic pattern of ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ — but the muffled lo-fi arrangement, in which acoustic guitars and keyboards form drone-like configurations that soak inside each other, feels more like a steady river flow than a well-oiled rock’n’roll train, and that’s the unmistakable sound of The Band for you.

More than that, though, the musical arrangement agrees perfectly well with Dylan’s half-non-sense, half-deep-sense lyrics telling an oh-so-Taoist tale of the True Great Leader rallying people around him by setting up a personal example of effortless action: "Nobody can get no sleep / There’s someone on everyone’s toes / But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here / Everybody’s gonna wanna doze". Come to think of it, the song did summarize Dylan’s inner state of mind at that time pretty well — and you could even argue that for the next few years, as he released all those quiet, complacent, meditative records from John Wesley Harding to New Morning, he was himself faithfully sticking to the principle that "guarding fumes and making haste / it ain’t my cup of meat". It’s almost like relaxation à la Ray Davies, only without all the melancholy and angst and depression; Ray’s heroes sit around doing nothing because life has broken them down, whereas Quinn the Eskimo just ain’t the type to allow himself to be broken down by life.

One thing that the song certainly was not in its original incarnation was a potential hit. Like most of the other songs recorded in Woodstock that summer, it was more of a relaxed, friendly romp around the campfire than a bonafide jukebox earworm, never even intended for official release until years and years later due to the never-ending public craving for the Dylan legend. But it did, together with all those other Woodstock recordings like ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ or ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’ that would be turned into hits by other artists, find its way to Dylan’s publishing company, where, sometime around December 1967, it was discovered by Manfred Mann — and the rest, as they say, is hipstery.

Manfred Mann had taken covers of Bob’s songs up the charts before, including both «serious» stuff like ‘Just Like A Woman’ and more lightweight novelty numbers like ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’, but ‘Mighty Quinn’ ended up being the biggest of them all: the group’s third ever #1 in the UK, first entry into the US Top 10 since ‘Do Wah Diddy’, and, as it would turn out, their last big smash before commercial fortune would return to Manfred Mann’s Earth Band in the 1970s with their bloated Springsteen covers. Ironically, according to lead vocalist Mike D’Abo, he wanted to set his mind on ‘Wheel’s On Fire’ instead, but Mann convinced him that ‘Mighty Quinn’ was really where it’s at, and a not-fully-convinced Mike had to take the ringleader’s word for it, even though he had to struggle with the lyrics, what with Dylan’s singing on the demo being barely comprehensible. Nobody really knew what the song was about anyway.

As an artistic force, Manfred Mann were never among my favorites from the history of the British Invasion — too much of a carefully calculated second-hand project rather than an inspired force of nature — but every once in a while, their cold-heartedly Apollonian processing of other people’s raw musical ideas would produce marvelous results. Certainly if you needed a punchy, cheery, gather-round-the-bar-counter anthem to uplift you on some cold rainy day, you’d go to Dr. Manfred, and it is pretty hard not to admire how impeccably he saw the potential for precisely such an anthem in the lazy rollin’ ramble of the original Woodstock tape for ‘Quinn’.

The funniest thing is that Manfred Mann himself is practically unheard for most of the song, whose key moments of attraction all come courtesy of Klaus Voormann, Mike Hugg, and Mike D’Abo. And the «keyest» of these moments is the introduction — the little woodwind riff pre-mimicking the chorus hookline, played by Voormann in the freshly concocted tradition of British «martial-pop» compositions by the likes of The Kinks or The Small Faces, but so much in your face that he immediately grabs your attention with it, in a Pied Piper kind of way; and that, in turn, agrees perfectly with the "come all without, come all within" chorus, which pulls you onto that village square so amicably, but also oh so firmly that resistance is futile. To solidify the deal, Voormann and Hugg pull off a mighty double-bass attack in the middle of the chorus which totally enslaves your feet and your head if they hadn’t already been; and D’Abo’s vocal delivery is everything that Dylan’s was not — articulate, focused, inspiring and at the same time containing faint traces of irony which can always get him off the hook if anybody complains of having taken the song’s message too seriously.

Because, honestly speaking, the mood of the song has shifted completely, even if the lyrics only underwent minor changes inasmuch as Mike couldn’t make head or tails out of some of Bob’s mumbling. The original Woodstock version was an anti-anthem to the joys of laziness, inactivity and being one with nature, a song that would comfortably sit next to the Beatles’ ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ or the Kinks’ ‘Sitting By The Riverside’ (but with a big evil grin on its face, like most of Bob’s songs do). By tightening and speeding it up, as well as adding group harmonies and a catchy, danceable pop-rock beat, Manfred Mann turned it into a rousing chant of follow-your-leader, totally fucking up the message. "When Quinn the Eskimo gets here, everybody’s gonna want to doze" — yeah right. More like "everybody’s gonna want A DOSE", if you ask me. Hmm, come to think of it, it’s quite possible that that was precisely the way Mike D’Abo heard that line in the first place. Who wouldn’t really want a good dose of Quinn the Eskimo?

Consequently, you can file Manfred Mann’s ‘Mighty Quinn’ away in the same Folder of Big Irony that contains all those disco classics by Sparks that tear apart the disco lifestyle, or all those enticing electronic anthems by Kraftwerk lamenting the age of dehumanization — in this case, here is your classic ode to the joys and wonders of inactivity that totally kicks your ass into high-speed action. Years ago, I might have put on my sternest college professor look and said that Mann’s arrangement cheapens and desecrates the message of the song. Today, I’m younger than that now and say there should always be a place in your life for such a slab of subtle irony. And if you fail to see the irony and just want to dance like all those carefree girls and boys crammed inside the Top of the Pops studio, well, I’ve got too many people to judge for more important matters than to judge you for enjoying a silly old Manfred Mann pop tune.

Anyway, Manfred Mann’s single version was released in January 1968, went to the top of the UK charts, and immediately spawned a rash of further covers by artists ranging from total novelty acts (like The 1910 Fruitgum Company) to old-school class-act entertainers (like Julie London, the femme-fatale avatar of vocal jazz). None of these deserve too much attention, but perhaps a passable mention could be made of this Ian & Sylvia cover:

This was released on the duo’s Nashville album, when, along with the Byrds and other artists, they took part in the «Long-Haired Hippies Conquer Country» movement, bringing the values of Greenwich Village back to Tennessee rather than the other way around. We probably all have different, and often confused, opinions on the history of the whole folk-meets-pop-meets-country phenomenon, but I’m pretty sure that in this case specifically, most people would agree with me that this cover... isn’t too good. What Ian & Sylvia want to do here, with all the fiddles and steel guitars and on-the-verge-of-yodeling vocal deliveries, is turn ‘Quinn’ into Buck Owens, emphasizing how small and insignificant the gap really is between tradition and innovation.

But I don’t think it works at all, and the reason is that ‘Quinn’ is not country — it’s got just a wee bit too much syncopation for that, it’s really bluesy and does not at all fit into the usual rollickin’ Nashville formula, no matter how many fiddles or banjos or lap steels you fit in there. To make matters worse, Ian Tyson, who wouldn’t know «irony» if it did a lap dance on his knees, has decided to portray Quinn The Eskimo as a friendly, naive, open-hearted country bumpkin, which is pretty much the same as deciding that the Stones’ ‘Midnight Rambler’ is about a respectable middle-aged gentleman out on a late night stroll in the park because he’s been suffering from a bit of insomnia lately. One thing Manfred Mann did right was preserve the humor of the piece — wasn’t that hard to do with Mike D’Abo, whose vocal tone was always so quirky-tricksterish it’s no wonder Andrew Lloyd Webber chose him for the part of King Herod — and this is precisely the one thing Ian & Sylvia did wrong. If you don’t understand Dylan, don’t cover him.

That said, I’ve never been much of an Ian & Sylvia fan in the first place, but I do like The Hollies a lot, and this is why this next cover saddens me even more:

This comes off their ill-fated Hollies Sing Dylan record — one of the main reasons why Graham Nash left the band — and while, on the hole, it is nowhere near as bad as conventional pop-rock history might make you believe, ‘Mighty Quinn’ gets a treatment here that is every bit as bizarre as Ian & Sylvia’s. First and foremost, there’s the issue of the Banjo Bummer. While I am not totally sure, I suspect that the Hollies, at the time of recording, were only familiar with the Manfred Mann hit rather than the original demo; so why in the world would they want to recast the Manfreds’ arrangement as a bluegrass-style performance? Enough with that sort of campfire entertainment already. And what precisely is that quote from ‘Oh Susannah’ doing in the song’s opening? One place where Quinn The Eskimo is definitely not coming from is Alabama, with the banjo on his knee. If he were, those pigeons would all still be on the same limb.

And while in terms of sheer power, Allan Clarke unquestionably buries Mike D’Abo six feet under, this is not ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ or ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ we’re talking here: this song absolutely does not require any tremendous amount of vocal power to make its point, on the contrary, emphasis on «powerful» only serves to dissolve the song’s absurdness and irony. Clarke’s delivery of the verse lines, in fact, is so contrived that maybe this is why they prefer to omit the third verse completely. It’s not a total disaster — the song obviously retains the basic catchiness and liveliness of the Manfreds’ version — but it, too, takes the song into a dead-end direction by stupidly trying to make it far more «rootsy» than it needs to be.

In the meantime, while all those funny silly people were trying to build their monuments and jot down their notes, the one and only true Mighty Quinn finally showed his face outside — on August 31, 1969, Bob played a full show with The Band at the Isle of Wight festival, his first ever proper concert since the 1966 motorcycle crash (and also the last one, discounting the brief guest appearance at the Concert For Bangla Desh, until 1974). It was not a particularly long show and it largely consisted of new material culled from John Wesley Harding and the freshly released Nashville Skyline, along with a bunch of new stuff that would eventually find its way onto the critically lambasted (but actually quite adorable) Self-Portrait. It was also a fairly «homely», cozy little show — The Band were certainly plugged in, but played at relatively low volume, and Bob was going for more of a campfire vibe than an arena-rock one; it was almost as if he was, for just this one specific occasion, taking «The Basement Tapes» out on the road — or, more accurately perhaps, letting all of us take a peek inside the Basement in question.

Even so, he did not play any of the actual songs from that summer of ’67 — what lives in the Basement, stays in the Basement, I guess — and I do not think he’d even care about resuscitating ‘Mighty Quinn’ had it not been for Manfred Mann’s popularization of the song. Perhaps it was like a generous gift to his UK audiences, even if something tells me that the chances of there having been a teenybopper or two present at the Festival whose first impression of a Dylan song was through Manfred Mann’s recent hit were quite minuscule. More likely, it was an implicit gesture, interpretable something like: "Hey, you all heard that pretentious South African weirdo take a song of mine and turn it into something it was not intended to be? Let me just show you for a moment here how it was actually supposed to go..."

Actually, it’s pretty obvious that the Manfred Mann version did make an impact — in this live take, ‘Mighty Quinn’ becomes faster, tighter, and even more danceable than the lazy-river-flow feel of the original incarnation. But «tighter» is a relative concept if there ever was one, and next to the Mann hit, this performance is still a rambling, incoherent, sloppy-drunk mess; think of it as «that time the Taoist dude hit the rice wine bottle a bit too hard, tore off all his clothes and danced his way through the village square». The rhythm wobbles and careens, Bob’s vocal lines are struggling to respect the structure of the melody (although somehow manage to remain in touch with it all through the performance), and The Band’s backing vocals are intentionally chaotic and exuberant, as if this were The Beach Boys Party or something.

In the middle of the performance, Bob shouts "WHOAH GUITAR NOW!" (I think it was the only time in his life that he shouted something like that) and Robertson steps in with one of those jagged, stuttering, sloppy, but fierce-as-heck guitar solos that have always been his trademark; sometimes this vision of his for the "rock’n’roll attitude" falls short of the perfect mark, but here it matches the rambling spirit of the song perfectly as he gradually whips himself into a frenzy and starts scattering off angry vibrato blasts into the crowd like he was Eric Clapton or something. There is, in fact, a subtle punkish vibe to this ‘Quinn The Eskimo’, a destructive emotional element that we never saw in any previous versions. You know what can happen when an Inuk gets drunk off his head? It ain’t pretty — ask your local anthropologist — and somehow there’s a bit of that in this performance, too.

On the whole, everybody stays friendly, though, and I always smirk at inexperienced YouTubers curious enough to check this Self-Portrait version while only being familiar with the Manfred Mann cover — "horrible"! "terrible"! "out of tune"! "disaster"! — well, that’s Bob Dylan for you, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the club. The proper thing to understand is that this ship, creaking and leaking as it is, never falls apart and ultimately makes the crossing in one piece — with all the crew members drunk as skunks and having the time of their life. I’ll certainly take this merry ramble against, say, the way the Grateful Dead would later sing the song in concert; moreover, it still remains the definitive version of ‘Quinn’ for me, much as I admire the melodic and harmonic perfection of the Manfreds.

Interestingly, Bob very rarely would return to the song ever again — in fact, he only performed it live again 5 more times in his career, and all of these came as late as 2002-2003 (by which time studying the evolution of his songs in concert had become a rather stiff and unrewarding affair). He probably deemed it too lightweight, after all, although only a diplomated psychologist with a sublimated deathwish would try to seriously figure out the reasons and motives for Dylan doing anything at any particular time. On the other hand, Manfred Mann did not consider the song lightweight at all — or, rather, he believed with all his might in the power of «lightweight» to serve as an alluring foundation for «heavyweight», and it was only a matter of time before ‘Mighty Quinn’ would put that faith to the ultimate test.

As early as during the Manfred Mann Chapter Three stage (1969-1970), Mann’s new band would begin to expand the song in live performance to «progressive» lengths — but the process arguably reached its culmination with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, which ultimately inflated Quinn The Eskimo to Lord And Master Of The Universe At Large, and turned the song about cherring up the local population with laziness and inactivity into a veritable Anthem Of Creation. Truly and verily now there is no God but The Mighty Quinn, and we bear witness that Manfred Mann is the Messenger of God. We, that is, who have heard the band’s new treatment of the song on the Watch album from 1978.

Instead of the friendly little flute from ten years back, the theme is now introduced with a gospel-tinged organ line — this is no longer the Pied Piper signalling his arrival to the children, it’s frickin’ St. Peter pushing open the Heavenly Gate. Once it’s done, Chris Thompson rolls inside with big, fat, triumphant arena-rock riffs and a vocal performance that makes Mike D’Abo feel like a schoolboy in comparison — this here is stadium-level shit, to get 50,000 people join as one, be saved from despair and jump for joy. It’s so utterly ridiculous that I don’t even know if it works or not. It should be in a superhero movie, that much is for certain.

The first two verses are then followed by three minutes of prog-rock jamming with all the usual accessories — sophisticated guitar and synth solos, sectional changes of key and tempo, moody breaks alternating with rocking charges, and symbolic soundscapes ranging from militaristic-martial to cosmic-psychedelic, in other words, the entire Universe laying down its symbols and its secrets at the feet of the Ultimate Being. Some of it sounds like contemporary Yes, some like contemporary Uriah Heep, and there’s at least one fast boogie sub-section that clearly takes its cue from Deep Purple’s ‘Highway Star’, with Mann specifically emulating Jon Lord. How in the hell we got there from "making haste just ain’t my cup of meat", I have no idea, but Quinn the Eskimo sure works in mysterious ways. (In later performances, ‘Smoke On The Water’ was occasionally interpolated into the melody as well, because why not?).

To fully express the absurdity of this transformation, I can only offer the analogy of taking ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ and expanding it to a full-blown Górecki-style symphony with a lengthy middle instrumental part serving as a lament for human cruelty, aggression, and genocide all around the planet. Then going back into the last verse, by which time Maxwell will already be no less than a full-blown Anti-Christ figure.

But as ridiculous as it is, the re-arrangement must have been very popular with Manfred Mann’s fans, as the band retained it for years — it’s just weird how people see no disparity between the mood of the lyrics and the new melodic ideas. Perhaps it’s me who is dumb and there still remains a taste of irony somewhere in the bottom — although I cannot see how anybody without a full knowledge of the song’s history (and a good command of the English language) could detect any signs of it. The way it stands, this is now a bona fide Anthem of Creation: how The Mighty Quinn set the Earth in motion, how He witnessed the forces of evil twist and mutate His beloved creation, how He descended upon the desecrated Earth to save its people from wickedness, corruption, and pigeon droppings, and how He, content with the results of his mission, faded away once more, leaving the people in total awe of the Messiah.

And on this major note we conclude the history of the Mighty Quinn, once a lowly Inuk born out of a ridiculously fateful connection between Manuel Oaxaca and Robert Zimmerman, and now the most powerful being in existence on this side of the Big Bang. His story is but one of many small, but mind-blowing examples of unpredictable musical evolution in the 20th century; and although its main chapters have all been written, faint epiloguish ripples are still occasionally felt even today, as various minor artists have continued to cover both the «rootsy» (original), the «poppy» (1968) and the «proggy» (1978) visions of the song on a regular basis. Soon enough, with all those AI advances, I’m guessing we shall finally witness an authentic rendition by Anthony Quinn himself, lovingly done in the traditional style of Inuit throat singing. But until that blessed day, just feel free to revisit the crumpled history pages.