Heart of Mine circulates in two exquisite studio recordings, one evidently long labored over but only available on bootleg, and the later Shot of Love take, from a curious spur-of-the-moment superstar session, in which Ringo Starr confines himself to auxiliary percussion while Ronnie Wood delivers the kind of electric guitar magic that fans know to expect of him.
The earlier outtake is, in ordinary terms, the better version. Dylan put the same opinion on public record in 1984. But I think he was right to put the ramshackle superstar recording on Shot of Love, since Shot of Love is, in large part, an album-length exploration of the fruits of sustained musical disintegration. Producer Chuck Plotkin, whose view of which sections of the drumkit to hit and at which time are rather unorthodox (he says it was one of his first ever times trying to playing drums), worked the hi-hat, snare, and kick, while Ringo (who liked the ramshackle beat Plotkin came up with by accident more than he liked his own) took care of the toms and cymbal, yielding a performance in which, as the song progresses, the drums teeter further and further to the side. Dylan conflates two verses from the original version into one, extends the instrumental breaks, and plays the piano as if Plotkin weren’t drumming.
All grist for the Shot of Love mill. That the recording which came out of this mess became the second song on the album, a sort of alternate opener to go alongside the gloriously recorded and mixed ka-boom that is the title track, and that it was released as a single, no less (and reached #8 in Norway; I tip my wide-brimmed hat to you, Norwegian listeners of ’81) shows how committed Dylan was to his vision that year.
When I’m listening to Shot of Love, then, I’m really happy to hear the superstar recording. I love that it’s followed by Property of Jesus, another song that bursts out from its own center like fireworks. And I love that only on the fourth track of the album, Lenny Bruce, do we get a breather. Had the Starr-Wood-Plotkin session not happened, and the album sequencing remained the same, then we would already have had a breather in track two, and the momentum of the album would have weakened.
When, however, I’m hankering to indulge in the lovely melodies, bright colors, and uneasy spirit of Heart of Mine the song, and want to hear these features at their best, I go to the outtake. Questions of sequencing and momentum aside, had the outtake been the version that appeared on Shot of Love, it would certainly have stood as one of the album’s most accomplished performances, and Heart of Mine one of its prettiest songs. It would also have become, where Dylan singing in the studio is concerned, one of his studio discography’s absolute peaks. I mean, how on earth did he make his voice sound so mesmerisingly, so pristinely, so irresistibly sweet?
Writing about the otherworldly Colleen Kinsella (one of my three favorite vocalists), Ran Prieur says, “The hardest thing for a singer to do is come up with an interesting original voice, and Colleen almost tries to do it again on every song.” Like Colleen, Bob Dylan has made that wild feat look easy. I have never heard anybody else sing like Dylan does on the Heart of Mine outtake; nor have I heard Dylan himself sing like he does on the Heart of Mine outtake, except on the Heart of Mine outtake! The tones he eases out of his forty-year-old vocal cords are the aural equivalent of honey eaten straight out of the comb. Add to that sound the quiet pleading (a pleading that might be taken for resignation) of “Be still” and the other exhortations the narrator addresses to his eager and rebellious heart, and you’ve got something truly extraordinary. To quote Ran Prieur again, this time from his comments about Big Blood’s cover of the Troggs’ Our Love Will Still Be There, “If I could sing like this, I would sing like this all the time.”
The vocals are not the outtake’s only appeal. The entire arrangement is a success, a special band accomplishment to match a special vocal one, with each player seeming to contribute all the sensitivity and versatility they have on offer, to make the song sound gentle, pretty, full, and yet not lose its rhythmic edge. The guitars are wonderful (dig that little lead melody at the end of each verse, especially when around the four-minute mark the guitar melody is answered by the piano), the bass active and clean, the organ and drums always interesting, and the piano tinkling sparingly but stealing attention from everything else when it makes itself heard.
On Biograph you can find a live version of Heart of Mine from November 10th, 1981 in New Orleans: yet another superb performance. Even granted that 1981 is one of Dylan’s best years for singing live, the vocals are stunning—just listen to that waver! And the organ solo is excellent.
Heart of Mine is one of the Shot of Love songs most distantly related to the concerns of Slow Train Coming and Saved. There might be a link, if we imagine that the narrator would rather have his heart set on Jesus than on a mortal woman, a woman who (like himself) is prone to all the failings that come along with being mortal, but it’s beside the point. This is a fantastic love song, looking at love from one of the less common angles. It pinpoints the time when you’ve lost your heart to someone (if it weren’t lost yet, you wouldn’t need to argue with it so hard), but you don’t want that to be the case, because you know that there’s going to be danger and trouble if your heart gives in as far as it indeed already has, and so you see the trouble coming, and you wish you could avoid it, but you know by now that you can’t, and so you just tell yourself uselessly, “Heart of mine, be still… go back home… don’t put yourself over the line…” But no use, brother, it’s no use. Plunge in and drink the pain down.
In the autumn of 2013, this song was a mantra for me. I played it daily, over and over, and sang it to myself when I wandered the tree-lined streets and lakesides of the neighborhood I lived in then. What’s that I hear you ask—did it help? Don’t make me laugh, answers Sigismund Sludig, and sighs.
No comments:
Post a Comment