89. Walk Out in the Rain

More easygoing goodness from the team of Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, and Helena Springs. Where If I Don’t Be There by Morning was warm and grooving, Walk Out in the Rain is warm and melodic. I love the barely-there rhythm guitar in the verses, gently complementing the piano, which here is the primary rhythm instrument. The lead organ gives the song breadth. But what gives me the most pleasure is Clapton’s vocals.

Eric sings Walk Out in the Rain tenderly, as if it were Promises. Leave it to him to take a lyric as aggressive as this one and make it sound like the forgiving lament of a wronged lover. I mean that as praise: part of the beauty of the “tea and slippers” period is that no matter what material Eric is working with, he can make it sound sweet, moving, and innocent. When you’re handling the braggadocio of old blues songs or, well, Walk Out in the Rain, that’s a remarkable achievement.

The lyrics here remind me more of the deliberate wrongheadedness of the love songs on Street-Legal than of all the other, more lighthearted Dylan/Springs compositions; and if you just listen to Eric croon it, without attending to the lyrics, it’s easy to mistake Walk Out in the Rain for more fun, breezy fluff. Actually, even if you listen in close to Eric’s vocals (which make themselves prominent by how unprominent and low in the mix they are), the sweet timber of his voice is likely to distract you, so that the story doesn’t cohere. But read the lyrics off the page, and you can start to imagine that, had Dylan been in a more agitated mood when he and Springs were working on the music, or had Helena not been involved, the song might have gotten an arrangement reminiscent of Idiot Wind or Is Your Love in Vain? rather than of Stop Now or If I Don’t Be There by Morning.

“Oh, darling, walk out in the rain,” goes the last line of each chorus. But that “darling” is not particularly loving; it’s nothing like the “darling young one” in A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, that’s for sure. The situation distantly recalls Diamond Ring. We have a wayward or in any case absent lover seeking out his once-love: “I have come from so far away / Just to put a ring on your finger”—but, considering how the story develops, I sense some accusation in the emphasis, “from so far away.” 

The scene, as I imagine it, goes something like this: the man comes back, expecting the woman to greet him with open arms, but she castigates him for the hurt he caused her, or maybe not even castigates (from the tone of the narrator’s words you’d think he’s been roundly abused, but why should we trust him?), maybe just finds in his arrival a vessel for expression of feelings she’d been keeping hidden. The man is offended: “If you’ve got something better tonight,” that is, if you don’t want me, “then don’t mess up my mind with your crying.” And again in the second verse, now with a dose of self-pity: “If you’ve said all that you’ve got to say / Then please don’t feel the need to linger.” Notice the bad-mannered “please.” And in the third verse he layers on the self-pity and plays the tough guy: “It’s raining outside of the city / My poor feet have walked till they’re sore / If you don’t want my love, it’s a pity / I guess I can’t see you no more.”

The refrain, far from being a modest valediction, a sincere if sad “Go ahead, do your own thing, I’ll be okay” (which is what I hear when Eric sings it), seems rather an exasperated wave of the hand. He’s hurrying her, because the outcome of their meeting is not as simple as he predicted and he doesn’t have the patience to deal with the complications. “Just walk out in the rain / Walk out with your dreams / Walk out of my life if you don’t feel right / And catch the next train / Oh, darling, walk out in the rain.” In other words, “Go, go, go! Go already!”

I’m not sure how or whether the song’s opening lines (“Walk out if you don’t feel right / I can tell you’re only lying”) fit into my interpretation. Has she been unfaithful? Given what was likely a troubled parting, did he have any right to expect her to stay true to him? Or maybe the “lie” is in the woman saying that the two of them do have a chance but that it’ll take some work, because there’s been a lot of hurt and you can’t just pack that hurt away as if nothing had ever happened, and start over fresh. But the man, impatient, blows her off, as if saying, “Look, since you weren’t overjoyed at my return, then clearly you don’t want me at all.”

But in Eric Clapton and the Backless band’s hands, it’s all a gentle, beautiful wash. The rhythm, on the slow side of midtempo, even sounds like the falling of rain, not too heavy to walk out in.