59. I Will Love Him

Had Dylan wanted to make a Muscle Shoals trilogy—or (more significantly) had his record company allowed him to, which, after Saved, they didn’t, limiting Dylan to one religious album a year (!) before forbidding religious records altogether—he would have been well-equipped. He could have taken the break between the summer and fall tours in 1980, or after the autumn shows, and gone down to Wexler and Beckett again with an album’s worth of excellence, and still’ve had plenty left over the following year for Shot of Love. 

The songs Dylan had on hand by fall 1980 (not even counting the three left off Slow Train Coming, or the performance pieces, Blessed Be the Name and Stand by Faith) included Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody, Cover Down Pray Through, I Will Love Him, an unidentified soundcheck song Clinton Heylin suggests could have been called They Talk About Me, as well as City of Gold, Property of Jesus, Let’s Keep It Between Us, The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar, Making a Liar out of Me, Caribbean Wind, and Every Grain of Sand—possibly You Changed My Life, too. Let alone whatever unknowns Bob wrote at home that never made it to rehearsal or the stage, the way Man Gave Names to All the Animals almost didn’t. And since, unlike the Saved material, most of these songs had not been road-tested, the Wexler/Beckett/Dylan team could no doubt have come up with a new and interesting angle with which to interpret the songs in the studio. It’s the great lost Bob Dylan album.

Of course, the fact that I can wax poetic about it means that the songs are available elsewhere, and often in some really stirring arrangements. I Will Love Him is a case in point. Leaving out the runthroughs on some very murky outside-the-venue recordings of the band’s 1980 soundchecks, posterity has I Will Love Him in two forms. One is the concert-closing performance from April 19^th that’s featured on Trouble No More; the other, a bootlegged audience recording of the April 23^rd mid-set performance. On April 19^th the band doesn’t have the bridge quite together yet (and we can cut them a break, since it was the song’s debut). By the 23^rd it’s holding together somewhat better but still not all the way there. Had it kept its place in the setlist it probably would have been perfect within a few shows, but it never reappeared.

Even with the flaws, though, it’s such a stormer of a song, so interesting in its unfolding and sung with such chilling power and tender devotion that no amount of clumsy transitions or flubbed chords (or lyrics—Dylan gets the couplet about Mary wrong on the 19^th, accidentally repeating the “knew not what she carried” line; it’s correct on the 23^rd, “and she wasn’t even married” rhyming with “she knew not what she carried,” and followed by that whirlwind emphasis, the vocals rising, “carried for all mankind!”) can possibly keep it down.

The song begins with its calmest section, some bright gospel piano and the refrain taken up by Bob’s backing singers: “I will love Him / I will praise Him / I will glorify His name”—then soon that enormous front of Gospel era percussion hits you, all those tambourines alongside Jim Keltner’s drums like the high walls of an ancient walled town, awesome, imposing, commanding—and Dylan is singing, with (as usual, for ’79/’80) his heart leaking through his skin, burning up his throat.

His singing on the refrains outshines the backing vocalists, who themselves are passionate, inviting, and warm. On both the official and the unofficial performances, Bob gives it his all, and the vocals are unbelievably good. They are one fire with the fire of the performance, with the percussive attack, and the result recalls Eyolf Østrem’s descriptions of other songs performed in these years that have an “intensity that … can make even the hardest of heart jump to his feet and rejoice: ‘Yes! I’m ready! Take me, Bob! Take me with you!’” There’s no denying that the singers are serious about what they’re saying, and that with the best and sincerest intentions they do want to love, serve, and praise their Lord.

The verses of I Will Love Him are windows of storytelling, important moments from the Gospels: Jesus preaching in Galilee, an end-times parable, the Annunciation, Peter denying he knew Jesus, the trial, the crucifixion, Herod’s decree to slay the Hebrew children—in exactly that order, which means all out of order, as if this were the Gospel-via-the temporal logic of Blood on the Tracks.

I absolutely love the lift of the line that links each verse to each refrain, the band climbing from G to A and Bob’s voice with them, for some words that elevate or turn those just sung. In the opening verse, Dylan sings of how “He came down onto his own / His own knew Him not,” and then the chord changes and the band and the singer climb, and Dylan shouts out, “but as for me—I will love him / I will serve Him / I will glorify His name!”

It’s been said by many nonbelieving afficionados of this period of Bob’s music that you don’t need to be a Christian to love it or to hear its worth. Similarly, you don’t need to agree with the jump from storytelling to interpretation in the second verse of I Will Love Him—“He said that when the fig tree was blooming / He would be at the gate / He was talking about the State of Israel / From 1948 / And the time is near!” to be shaken by it. Me, it sends a chill right down my spine.