78. Man of Peace

I think Man of Peace is better enjoyed as track 5 (or B1) of Infidels than as a stand-alone listen. On the album, its inconsistent approach to vocal melody is nicely sponged up by the lusciously melodic ballad License to Kill behind it and the melodic rocker Union Sundown ahead. It’s understandable that Dylan gets too excited to keep the melody steady and often just shouts away instead. I mean, “He can be fascinating, he can be dull / He can ride down Niagara Falls in the barrels of your skull”—when words like these are coming out of your mouth, who has time for melodies? Besides, you can get your fill of melody if you hone in on Mark Knopfler, whose bouncy, poppy, lead-guitar-as-rhythm-guitar line (or riff? Eyolf Østrem calls it a riff, and he would know) is the buoyant surface upon which the whole song floats.

Barring Dylan himself, Mark Knopfler is my favorite of Dylan’s lead guitarists. It’s too bad that the Dylan-Knopfler partnership only lasted two albums (like the Dylan-Lanois partnership, come to think of it), but it’s marvelous to me that those two albums exist.

I used to find it perverse that Dylan and Knopfler, having brought Robbie Shakespeare and Sly Dunbar on board, didn’t give them a bunch of reggae songs to play (Infidels only has two, although Clinton Heylin mentions that a reggae arrangement of Foot of Pride is in the vaults somewhere). Instead, the two were handed rockers in 4/4 ala Neighborhood Bully, Union Sundown, and Man of Peace. “You just don’t get the best rhythm section in reggae,” Björn Waller mourns, “and tell them to play a straight blues shuffle any 18-year-old kids could play.”

That said, I’ve learned to appreciate what resulted from that perversity. While I would surely enjoy Infidels more if it had an album’s worth of reggae arrangements, the slinky touch that years of playing reggae gave the rhythm section does color the rockers uniquely, and not only on the sticky pile of mud that is Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight. Here on Man of Peace, too, I’ve figured out that the heavyhandedness of the rhythm section can be pretty cool in its own right.

The solos in the instrumental breaks (Mick Taylor’s, Alan Clark’s, and Dylan’s on harmonica) might seem to blend into the arrangement at first, but note how well they complement Dylan’s vocals and also how good they turn out to be if you give them your attention.

Dylan sings Man of Peace as if he were staring Lucifer in the face. The lyrics are witty, baffling, and haunting all at once. The opening verse is so cinematic that it could have been written with Jacques Levy. None of the rhymes with “peace” is a bland or predictable one. “Nobody can see through him / No, not even the Chief of Police” has the wonderful anti- or pseudo-logic of “It ain’t even safe no more in the palace of the Pope” or the songs on Under the Red Sky.

Both of my favorite lyrical moments on Infidels are on Man of Peace. The first follows the Niagara Falls image: “I can smell something cooking / I can tell there’s going to be a feast,” sung while the band goes on celebrating. The lines are delivered with the knowing, superior eye-glint of someone who will not be fooled by appearances. They’re deliciously ambiguous. Is the fire actually hellfire? Is the food that's being cooked actually the flesh of sinners? And are those partaking actually the ranks of Satan’s army? Or is this a reference to the Antichrist in his glory as a ruler on earth, leading the happy human populace in rites of joy, and only presaging the depradations to come?

My other favorite is a full verse, sung in a tone half scornful and half solicitous, but in any case extremely urgent: “The howling wolf will howl tonight / The king snake will crawl / Trees that have stood for a thousand years suddenly will fall / Want to get married? Do it now / Tomorrow all activity will cease.” (Admirers of the song will no doubt be recreating Dylan’s delivery in their heads as they read the lines; Man of Peace, despite its lack of melody, is among the great showcases of Dylan’s phrasing.) This is the self-assured righteous prophet of Slow Train Coming back again, so spookily certain of what he’s saying that a listener attuned to the singer’s voice might well start feeling nervous. It’s a marvelous evocation of natural worldwide catastrophe, cast in the language of fables: wolves, snakes, thousand-year-old trees, and marriage.

The final verse shifts the perspective to the grieving mother of the earth’s charismatic destroyer, the images of “them little white shoes and that little broken toy” hearkening back in tone and color to Jokerman. The final verse also provides the finest of Dylan’s inventive phrasing, as he sputters out, with a slight delay to every word, “the same one the three men followed from the east.”

Man of Peace is excellent live on August 31^st, 1990, in Lincoln, Nebraska. It opens with a catchy guitar riff that the bass also soon takes up. Bob sings the first verse hesitantly, thoughtfully: “Might be the Fuhrer / Might be … / …might be the local priest,” as if he’s looking out the window and weighing the possibilities aloud. There’s a great guitar solo courtesy of G.E. Smith (another of Bob’s standout lead guitarists) and an ending over which Bob adlibs variations on the song’s final line, tugging the melody in various directions: still weighing the possibilities.

In the song’s final live appearance a decade later, on September 19^th, 2000, in Newcastle, there’s superlative singing and another different, catchy, descending riff that marks the end of each verse.

It’s curious: years ago, in the glow of my discovery of Dylan—in that first long obsession—I downloaded a variety of shows and selections of live performances from 1988 and onwards, but barely listened to any of them. For some reason, despite having listened to plenty of concert-boots from 1975 to 1987 (including everything then available from ’75 to ’80), I didn’t feel eager to test the waters of the later live Dylan. Maybe the sheer volume of material was daunting. As I listen now to the late live versions I found back then of the songs that I’m writing about, I’m finding so much more to love than I expected! And now I’m beginning to suspect that by the time I’ve written up my #1, I will have unwittingly plunged myself into the deep and dark, in fact what amounts to bottomless, hole that some people call the Never Ending Tour. But we’ll see. As yet, it’s too soon to tell.