48. Ain't Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody

Lava-spewing volcano of sound and transcendent singing in service of a “tremendous song” (Eyolf Østrem). It’s the spring of 1980. What else would you expect?

The versions from the final all-Gospel tour begin with one of the backing singers singing the title a capella, and the other backing singers joining in one by one, layering the harmonies, while Fred Tackett makes a bed of ringing notes for their heavenly/earthly voices to rise above. It seems like every element of Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody is directed upwards, including the smoke that “rises forever on a one-way ticket to burn.” The verses are a catalogue of the wrongs that the narrator is capable of committing, while the pre-chorus rejects the notion of committing them (“It don’t suit my purposes, it ain’t my goal / To gain the whole world and give up my soul”), and the refrain (and title) explains why. For good measure, the bridge goes into some detail about the destination the narrator is eager to turn his back on: “A place reserved for the devil and for all those that love evil / A place of darkness and shame, you can never return.”

For a song that’s almost all negative formulations (either the unpleasant things the narrator can do, or the things the narrator won’t or doesn’t want to do), the music is all positivity, celebration, delight. Listen to the little guitar-bass-organ riff that closes out the refrain. Listen to the lovely melody the song starts with, and which gets repeated every refrain by the backing singers while Dylan testifies with variations. And listen to the way, as the chorus is ending (the chord progression reverting to the Am / Bm / C that begins the pre-chorus, but then veering to a cathartic D and the G of the verses—and there’s the riff), Dylan speeds ahead of the backing singers to emphasize, at the peak of the blooming of the spirit, “No! Never! No way!”

It’s also one of the great examples of what I call the Gospel era Wall of Percussion, the backing singers armed with tambourines that, before video footage made me realize what was going on, made me hear Jim Keltner as some kind of eight-armed deity. Never underestimate the power of the tambourine—Big Blood, my favorite studio band, recorded several brilliant albums in which (I think) the only percussive instrument is a foot tambourine. I’m a nut for great and busy drumming (favorite drummers including Mike Najarian of State Radio, Barriemore Barlow of Jethro Tull, and Brian Blade of Black Dub) but I’ve never felt that those Big Blood albums lack anything in terms of propulsion or kick. And what do you get when you arm a band boasting a drummer as able as Jim Keltner (see, by the way, Neil Young's exquisite Peace Trail) with three or four tambourines shaken in unison? You get the gigantic, incomparable sound of Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody and its barnstorming older siblings (Gotta Serve Somebody, Solid Rock, Saved, etc.).

Trouble No More gives us three high quality versions of Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody (not that the song was really hurt by the warm hiss and din of the 1980 AUD tapes that I got to know it on, but it’s still a treat to hear Bob form and play with the lyrics so clearly, and to listen in to the separation between instruments, and thus experience the song in a way that approximates (or, rather, differently approximates) what people standing in those small concert halls forty years ago would have heard). The April 28^th Albany performance on Disc 2 has a great Fred Tackett solo that the April 18^th Toronto performance doesn’t, but it’s far tamer than Toronto, and the Toronto version has a fantastic organ solo instead (courtesy of who exactly? Spooner Oldham or Terry Young?). Toronto on the 18^th is my favorite of the officially released Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybodys. It blazes out in all directions.

That said, if I reviewed all 46 or so spring ’80 performances of the song, I’d probably be able to find something (or many things) to say in favor of each. After finishing the first draft of this write-up I went to listen to the May 20^th version, from Columbus, Ohio, and sure enough, it’s even better than the April 18^th, Dylan singing it with a voice that’s 85% of the way to my single favorite recorded Dylan singing voice ever (from the 1981 studio outtake of Heart of Mine).

Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody was rewritten for the Warfield residency and Musical Retrospective tour in the fall of 1980. The lyrics in the refrain and bridge remain the same, but the verses transform from personal ruminations into streams of strange, mystical, romantic, and anti-romantic imagery that sit well in the set alongside The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar (and, in soundchecks, alongside Caribbean Wind) and that look a little forward to Angelina and all the way ahead to the folkloric spell of Jokerman. The fall arrangement is a lesser thing—no intro from the backing singers, and the end-of-chorus lines less intense—but the new words are engaging even in their not-quite-finished state, and Dylan sings them with invective. It doesn’t top the spring 1980 original, but it’s a worthy reimagination. And (as an additional point in its favor) it’s even got that wonderful, haughty “weeeeeell” that also features so memorably in live versions of The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar—“you can’t get bit by that same snake twice, well…”