68. I'd Have You Anytime

The song begins with two beautiful sounds. One is the wash of acoustic guitars playing Gmaj7 (thanks Eyolf). The other is Eric Clapton’s electric lead, which sounds the way the spell Pearl that you learn from the esper Alexandr in Final Fantasy VI looks. If I don’t misremember, the poet Steven Rineer said, as he was getting into The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, that Clapton always plays best when he’s a guest rather than the feature artist. Certainly I’d Have You Anytime, which opens George Harrison’s majestic All Things Must Pass, bears this out. Clapton’s runs are lovely and piercing, and they get straight to the soul of the song. If I’d Have You Anytime were only its first twenty seconds it might still have qualified for this list, based on sheer sonic beauty alone. That beauty doesn’t let up as the song goes on, though, and George sings with that aching edge of truth in his voice, so here you see it, a third of the way up the list.

Like Nowhere to Go, the words in the refrain are Dylan’s and the words in the verses Harrison’s, while the music is all Harrison’s. I don’t think Phil Spector was the best producer George could have found for all the amazing material left over from his Beatle years, but no matter how heavy his hand, Spector could do songs so wonderful little harm. And in any case, I’d Have You Anytime is among the cleanest and clearest products of those sessions.

The openness and tenderness of Bob’s refrain reminds of the Lost on the River songs. “All I have is yours / All you see is mine / And I’d love to hold you in my arms / I’d have you anytime.” If ever I needed to explain to someone the difference between lyrics on the page and lyrics sung, this refrain would be a great example. The words are simple, but also luminous, though it probably takes hearing the song to perceive the luminosity. If you listen to the song first and look back at the words later, they can take your breath away.

Those first two lines (“All I have is yours / All you see is mine”) sound like a sovereign inviting someone into their kingdom, which is precisely what anybody who opens their heart to another in love is doing: for each of us is a country, and each of us contains riches untold, and it’s no small gesture to bring somebody inside the gates (“or, sad eyed lady, should I wait?”). But the same lines also suggest a potential poverty—after all, there might not be much to see (at least on the surface of things) : a chair here, a rickety bed there, two towels drying on the rack (soon after our marriage, one time when our towels were too damp to use, my wife said, “Note to self for the next time I marry: find a guy who owns at least three towels”).

In the third and fourth lines, the welcoming expands: first with the straightforward, heart-on-sleeve “I’d love to hold you in my arms,” and then with a smile (“I’d have you anytime”) that partly deflates the romantic sentiment just stated. (You’ve gone to visit your neighbor, you drink a cup of tea, you chat. You say, “I’m off,” and your neighbor says, “Come by anytime;” the words are friendly and casual, but no more than that.) Deflated, then, but no less sweet. “I’d love to hold you in my arms,” and I’d love it “anytime”—whenever—you’ll always be welcome, and I’ll always love it if you come to me.

The verses, another take on Behind the Locked Door, turn the song into a conversation. The person who comes knocking is as quietly sincere as the one who opens the door. “Let me in here,” the narrator of the verses says, emphatic, but not too demanding, and softening it right away with “I know I’ve been here.” He’s not asking too much; not trying to force an acquaintance; just hoping for a return to the good that once was. I love the hopeful line “Let me grow upon you,” the narrator assured that he will indeed grow on the other, if only the other lets him in.

I don’t know whether “let me roll it” had some idiomatic meaning in the early ’70s, other than what it sounds like literally—one fellow watching another trying to roll a cigarette or a joint and getting exasperated and reaching over, “Oh come on, let me roll it.” But three years after I’d Have You Anytime (“Let me roll it to you”) there was Paul McCartney not just singing “Let me roll it!” but naming the song Let Me Roll It. There too, the phrase wasn’t referring to a joint but to the narrator’s heart, which in a classic Paul image “is like a wheel,” so right, “Let me roll it to you.” It’s interesting that the Wings song has both an exact quotation from I’d Have You Anytime and a clear reference to John Lennon in the riff. Intentional? Coincidental? I don’t know, and ultimately it doesn’t matter; the point is Paul’s song is so great that even Jerry Garcia covered it live.

Also, if the Traveling Wilburys and George Harrison’s guest slide solo on Under the Red Sky are any indication—and of course they are—then the plea in I’d Have You Anytime worked. There aren’t a lot of great songs about platonic friendship (and I mean about friendship, not just addressed to a friend) (what others are there? Waiting on a Friend, from Tattoo You; Ned Collette’s Song for Louis; Devendra Banhart’s I Love That Man; Van Morrison’s Caravan; Vic Chesnutt’s Unpacking My Suitcase; others?—would A Raft of Penguins by Ian Anderson counts? It’s about bandmates, but at that point, for Ian, they’d been the same dudes for ages), but this is one.