Rocktober with THEM covering Dylan

I drove home to my parents house this past weekend in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  It was a beautiful drive as the colors of the leaves on the trees seemed to intensify and quadruple as I drove south from the late fall color and barer trees around my hilltown home.  As I pulled off the crowded New Jersey highway onto a beautiful country road in Clinton, NJ, I tuned in to one of my favorite radio stations of all time, Princeton's student run college station, 103.3 wprb.  The young woman was playing an eclectic assortment of music...an Indian raga sounding song from the 60's with a psychedelic electric guitar solo, followed by a discordant and synchopated Indonesian song sung by male and female voices, then the song that really captured my attention and fit my mood and the scenery perfectly.

Here's a little history before I continue on about that moment.  Since high school I always had a thing for listening to Bob Dylan in the fall.  My best friend and I would call October "Rocktober" and put Dylan and Neil Young on heavy rotation as we took long drives around the Pennsylvania countryside.  The feel of the music, the sound and the lyrics pulled at our melancholy, pensive, soul searching heart strings.  Hearing Bob Dylan songs in the fall still does this to me.

Back in my car last Thursday, the sound of a sparse, rhythmic electric bass with a 1960's tamborine shaking slowly filled my car's speakers and pulled me into some hypnotic trance.  Then a twirling, spinning sounding keyboard/organ/electric guitar came in adding a lovely layer of sound.  "What song is this!" I thought.

"You must leave now take what you need you think will last..." sang a male voice.  It was, It's All Over Now Baby Blue, but a version I had never heard before.  I listened for a few seconds... "Ah, that's Van Morrison!"  Wow, what a great rendition of this song!  Van Morrison breathed a whole new life into it and sang the song with such feeling.  Turns out this song was recorded in 1966 by a Belfast band called Them featuring Van Morrison.  Driving over the hills and valleys of New Jersey horse country on that late afternoon/early twilight in a full moon rising moment with this song filling my car and head with it's sound, I was in autumn heaven.  Here's the song for you to enjoy: