MARY LEE'S CORVETTE
Blood on the Tracks
BAR/NONE

A cover of Dylan's Blood on the Tracks? By a woman, yet? Chutzpah beyond the pale! An endeavor with the potential to be the biggest musical train wreck since ... well, since Pat Boone covered Little Richard. And yet ... and yet ... this live note-for-note performance by Mary Lee Kortes, recorded at Arlene Grocery in New York City in 2001 (and not originally intended for release), surprises and seduces despite every instinct to want to bludgeon it upon impact. Kortes, whose pluck and lack of guile undoubtedly has its roots in her native Whitefish, Mont., performs Dylan's 1975 anguishing marriage-breakup tour de force with straightforward deference--fronting the Corvette band with equal measures of passion and gutbucket femininity. There is no toying with the lyrics, no attempt by Kortes--who plays harmonica with equal justice to the original--to transform the master's words into either a feminist screed or personal anthem. It is this respect, in evidence from the opening notes of "Tangled up in Blue," in this simple and unadorned rendering, that sends one scurrying to the archives for the original masterpiece, while making sure to keep this principled tribute disc very close at hand.