I love how religious revelation and rootsy American mythmaking meet in the image of a train—a slow train, no less—slow but, as the album title emphasizes, definitely on its way. Taking its time, but arriving.
Two notes about how the song begins.
In the opening verse, the narrator could be Moses in the Book of Exodus, musing to himself about the Israelites, before or just around the time of the Revelation at Sinai: “Sometimes I feel so low-down and disgusted / Can’t help but wonder what’s happening to my companions” (companions is what they were, all refugees from Egypt: Moses too), “Are they lost or are they found? Have they counted the cost it’ll take to bring down / All the earthly principles they’re gonna have to abandon?” All you need to do to complete the comparison is rewrite the refrain a bit. Let’s see, let me take the liberty… “And there’s a slow / Slow flame coming / Coming down from off the peak.” Slow indeed! Moses was so long up there that his companions, in the absence of their leader and, so they thought, his god, made themselves an idol and began to worship that instead.
Second, the second verse calls to my mind the first verse of Idiot Wind. In the latter, Dylan precludes a purely autobiographical reading of his song: “Someone’s got it in for me / They’re planting stories in the press … They say I shot a man named Grey / And took his wife to Italy / She inherited a million bucks / And when she died it came to me”—and the immortal deadpan—“I can’t help it if I’m lucky.” Now that is certainly, verifiably, not true of Bob Dylan the living man. And once Bob Dylan the living man has got a verse like that in place, he also has a smoke screen. Whoever wants to claim that anything encountered later in the song is exactly autobiographical can be guided right back to the first verse, and answered with a sly wink, and an “Are you sure?” When analyzing a work of fiction, or any work with multiple elements that, together, become something whole or complete, I don’t think you can haphazardly pick and choose sections to base an interpretive argument on. If your interpretation of one verse of a song falls apart when a following or preceding verse is considered alongside, then it ceases to be convincing.
Of course, a writer’s state of mind and their collected expriences inform the writing of every piece they create. That said, I do think Slow Train is at least as complex a fictional construction as Idiot Wind. When the narrator tells us in the second verse that “I had a woman down in Alabama / She was a backwoods girl, but she sure was realistic / She said, ‘Boy, without a doubt, you’ve got to quit your mess and straighten out / You could die down here, be just another accident statistic,’” I don’t think we’re supposed to read that—and therefore, any part of the rest of the song—exactly literally or autobiographically. Not every view expressed in the song ahead (the song’s second verse informs us) is necessarily the author’s, not in quite so many words.
When I was first discovering Slow Train Coming, Slow Train was the song that gave me my clearest image of the desert prophet-chieftain that I still, to a certain extent, imagine Dylan’s persona in this album as being. In my imagination, this figure looked a lot like the photo of Dylan in the album art, the one where he’s grinning widely, microphone in hand, eyes in deep shadow. I imagined this figure bejeweled, wild-locked, and proud, but also inviting, eager to give a visitor an accounting of his kingdom of ragged tents and wagons: someone who is not king of all the land yet, but has his eye on the throne, and his mind on the changes he would implement if he could; someone who had come from somewhere rough, maybe with some acts of violence in his history, but with a large store of compassion too.
And the character to whom this guy is talking, the implied listener to the words of Slow Train, is a courier or assistant to some other country or tent kingdom’s ambassador, someone who is trusted enough to go speak with the prophet-chieftain fellow (that is, the narrator), but whose only job is to listen and report back, not to argue. Therefore the prophet-chieftain speaks sincerely to his listener, while also not taking him all that seriously; there’s quite a gap in authority between speaker and listener, and the speaker feels no need to mince his words. He’s someone who, in one breath, can bring up old love stories about the woman in Alabama, and in the next pronounce with total, chilling, and persuasive assurance that “there’s a slow, slow train coming up around the bend.” Someone who lives in a divided land, and who wants to see it re-united under his rule.
Hence, “All that foreign oil controlling American soil / Look around you! It’s just bound to make you embarrassed.” And putting down the competition, “Sheiks walking around like kings / Wearing fancy jewels and nose rings / Controlling America’s future from Amsterdam to Paris.” But they’re fools, the prophet-king says, because it’s here, here! that control will be wrested back…
Not a comfortable sort of guy to be around, if charismatic.
(As a side note—for those like me who imbibe literature more readily than they do history or journalism, and who’re interested in a closer glance than most of us will hopefully ever have into the world of armed religious militancy, charismatic leaders and all, see Uzbek novelist Hamid Ismailov’s brutal and poignant The Road to Death Is Greater than Death, translated into English under the title A Poet and Bin-Laden.)
It isn’t only the lyrics (and Bob’s singing, and the photo Bob chose to include inside the album) that conjure up these characters and this scene for me, it’s also the band, and how Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett get the recording to sound. As in Gonna Change My Way of Thinking, they’re careful about where to use how much of what instrument, so that piano, organ, horns, backing singers, and (because Pick Withers is brilliant) drum fills and stops are all sporadic and exciting adornments to the main Knopfler-Withers-Drummond-Dylan groove. Mark Knopfler’s responsible for both the electric picking rhythm track and the sharp lead breaks, which latter would take on a different and evolving character via the axe of Fred Tackett, Dylan’s live lead guitarist for the next few years.
Like a lot of the Slow Train Coming material, the 1979 live versions of Slow Train needed to make up in spirit and attitude for what Wexler & Beckett had layered in sound. The live band plays it a lot faster, too, and it took some time for this sparer and more upbeat arrangement to catch fire. Once it did, however, there was no stopping it. I treasure the April 18th performance, from Toronto’s storied Massey Hall, which opens Disc 6 of Trouble No More. Fred Tackett’s solos are insane, the band sounds like a sinewy creature with a single consciousness rather than a collective with ten separate heads, and Dylan pulls at and stretches and curtails words and lines, constantly playing with his phrasing, the refrain line in particular changing every time it’s sung, the words delivered in different tones and at different times (sometimes not delivered at all, Dylan content with “and there’s a slow, slow train coming,” with such foreboding in his delivery of “coming” that there isn’t even need for “up around the bend” but since he doesn’t always say “up around the bend” it’s a surprise and a thrill when he does throw it in)… I can’t praise the performance enough. And that’s just one version, from one concert; concert to concert the song kept changing, the emphasis leaning this way or that way, the band hiding the flame, or letting it smolder, or making it burst, or sending streams of fire out for miles and miles, as the mood of the night demanded.
In 1981 Dylan streamlined Slow Train, making it somewhat reminiscent of punk, the instrumental breaks shorter, the words coming fast and strange in Dylan’s uncanny 1981 voice. The gospel singers get a solo feature at the end, mimicing a train whistle: “Sloooow, slow train coming! Hoot hoot!” It may look silly on paper, but it’s terrific to hear. And still the song was a different beast every night, as Trouble No More proves, featuring two ’81 Slow Trains, both incredible.
I’m also an admirer of the song’s revival in 1987, at the shows with the Grateful Dead. An excellent performance is officially avaiable on Dylan and the Dead. The band’s bright prairie groove is a wondrous fit for such a dark and dusty Dylan song. To some degree you might say I’m pre-inclined to like it, since the Grateful Dead are, where live recordings are concerned, my favorite band (whereas for studio material and overall, my favorite is Big Blood) and Dylan likewise among my absolute favorite singers and songwriters, so that a meeting of the two is too good to be true. In fact, not all the 1987 collaborations came out sounding great even to my blissed-out, expectant ears, but certain songs shone, and Slow Train is one of them. Dylan’s attitude is, in part, his patented late-’80s/early-’90s “lyrics be damned,” but he sings both the correctly remembered words and the adlibbed sections as if from under a halo of smoke, beams of light protruding out from his arms… and for a huge fan of both artists there’s a surreal and thorough pleasure in hearing Jerry Garcia and Brent Mydland (and who’s the third singer? Lesh? Weir) joining Bob for the refrain of a Gospel era song! How unlikely…
Finally, while it can’t compare with the 1980, 1981, 1987, or even 1979 performances—and it wasn’t meant to—the autumn 1978 soundcheck of Slow Train available on Disc 3 of Trouble No More is a great listen if you’re curious what the song would’ve sounded like had it appeared not on Slow Train Coming but on Street-Legal.
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