94. If I Don't Be There by Morning

It’s not easy to write an excellent laid-back song. You can’t push it too hard either musically or lyrically, lest it begin to turn awesome instead of kinda forgettable (as in, for instance, Have Moicy!, a record in which the vibe and certain pieces of the collective would lead you to expect ‘laid-back as all-get-out’ but which in fact, with everyone involved on a creative high and flaunting it, ends up a brazen masterpiece; as Mark Deming jokes in his Allmusic review, “Had these people been… practicing?”). On the other hand, if you hold back too much, you come out with something dull.

Not everyone knows how to hit that exact right sweet spot, and of course not everyone wants to, but there’s a unique flavor to something excellently laid-back. I believe Tom Petty to be the king of that sort of feel-good, undemanding but rewarding, simple but not simplistic number. Take a look at this great tribute to his work by someone you wouldn’t really expect to treasure it—Michael Gira:

“I’m often grateful for Tom Petty when I’m doing a long drive and one of his songs comes on mainstream or ‘classic rock’ radio. I don’t own one of his albums and probably wouldn’t get one, but I enjoy and admire his concise and pithy songwriting and the pristine quality of the productions and the smart and evocative arrangements. It’s a real gift to be able to evoke a world of associations and images with just a few lines. God Bless him!”

Another place I go when I want that sort of vibe is what folks call the “tea and slippers” era of Eric Clapton, 1975-1983. In the middle of this stretch appears a wonderful, warm, and (naturally) unassuming album called Backless, which features, as the opener of either LP side, two Bob Dylan/Helena Springs compositions. (Bob and Helena's was an under-the-radar collaboration dating to the period between Street-Legal and the set of pure-Dylan originals-in-progress that got scrapped in favor of Slow Train Coming.)

If I Don’t Be There by Morning opens Side B. It’s an undemanding song, but exactly the kind that could lift your spirits in the middle of a long drive. A simple riff dominates its four and a half minutes, while two short refrains provide just the right amount of melodic contrast to keep the riff-based verses sounding good. The hook is the descending “I” of the “And if I” at the end of each verse, which Clapton’s voice leans into marvelously. Clapton likes to mix his vocals low, and emphasize guitar or bass or keys or a backing singer instead; here, too, he is quiet but double-tracked, creating a great roomy effect where his vocals seem to come at you from all sides; but you’ve got to work a little if you want to make out the words.

The words, as in other Dylan/Springs compositions, are nothing too elaborate. The verses, in which the narrator seems to be trying to keep a step ahead of some unpleasant fate, echo the Garcia/Hunter tune Friend of the Devil (famous for its American Beauty version; I prefer the slow arrangement the Grateful Dead worked up in the late 1970s and stuck to thereafter). The final verse even has a twenty dollar bill, which the devil in the Dead song loans the narrator for a spell. I’m sure this is all intentional. Dylan often covered Friend of the Devil live in the ’90s.

If I Don’t Be There by Morning is as warm and inviting as it is not only because it’s lavished with the “tea and slippers” 1978 Clapton treatment, and not only because it appears on a fine, assured album in the company of other charming and warm-hearted tracks. I also think that the song itself, plain and unambitious as it may be, holds in its core the warmth of the easygoing collaboration that gave it birth. Bob and Helena wouldn’t have written upwards of fifteen songs together if they weren’t having a great time doing so. It’s only a pity that Eric wasn’t gifted the whole lot.