72. Gonna Change My Way of Thinking

Eyolf Østrem points out that the riff here is “just a 12-bar blues riff.” But whether it’s this precise run of notes, or the way the riff gets built up in stages, or the way it blends with the singing and the words and the instruments, something makes it my favorite riff in all of Bob Dylan’s work.

Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett cook up such a fine and varied brew on Slow Train Coming as to make the album sound, fittingly, like something at the crossroads of the mortal and divine realms. The arrangements aim partly towards the dusty and earthy, and partly towards the glowing and transcendent. Mark Knopfler and Pick Withers are transplanted from Dire Straits to Dylan’s band, where they can let their youthful exuberance and talents thrive in an unfamiliar atmosphere that brings out the best in both. There are piano, organ, guitars, horns (!!), and gospel-style singers. The 1979 studio recording of Gonna Change My Way of Thinking is as much of a platform of expression for Dylan and his new singing voice and persona as it is for the whole band (minus, in this case, the backing singers), and the two producers who guide the gang.

Since the band was reduced for the stage shows in the autumn of ’79, Gonna Change My Way of Thinking live had to rely more on the energy of the performers than on their subtlety, and by 1980 Fred Tackett, Tim Drummond, and Jim Keltner were guiding it along so fast and forcefully that they regularly stole the spotlight from Dylan (see track 9 on the first disc of Trouble No More, from January 31^st, 1980). Live, the song never sounds less than great. But on Slow Train Coming it sounds immaculate. Had Gonna Change My Way of Thinking been an instrumental, it would still be fascinating because of the way there are constantly little shifts and nudges among the instruments as they develop and embellish the central riff. Pay attention to how the riff, which starts out sounding roomy and somewhat stiff, gets teased loose by the additions over time of the horns, a second piano hand, the organ, and Knopfler’s lead guitar.

Dylan, meanwhile, pours himself into the vocals entire. It’s on Slow Train, When You Gonna Wake Up, and here on Gonna Change My Way of Thinking that the desert prophet figure who presides over Slow Train Coming gets furthest unfurled. You get a sense of the narrator being a preacher to some pretty rough characters, out in the pioneer wilderness of the album cover, but undaunted by this because he’s actually rougher than them all. The unrelenting attitude in the words is magnified by the vocals, by the way Dylan often uses the last line of a verse to descend towards the final note/word, which is lower than any of the others in the verse, a sort of punctuation mark made by the knuckle of a stern God.

Listen to the way the vocals at the beginning of the verses sound high and frantic, but work their way down to the emphatic and assured delivery of the closing sentiments. We move from the high-pitched criticism of “You can mislead a man” to the broaching-no-dispute claim that the only authority is “the authority on high.” Elsewhere, we go from warning—“Jesus said ‘Be ready!’—to threat—“just so’s you know where He’s coming from”—the narrator smirking as if to say, “Now I’ve warned you, so don’t come complaining to me down the line.” Smug? Smug. This is not a humble prophet. This is the voice in the wilderness.

But is Gonna Change My Way of Thinking’s message, if a message we can call it, all that hard a message to hear? Despite the uncompromising riff and the resolute vocals, it still seems to me a song written from the heart by somebody finding his way in a theretofore foreign landscape. The opening lines—sung twice because that’s how Bob structured the song, but also because they bear repeating—are beautiful. “Gonna change my way of thinking / Make myself a different set of rules” culminating in “Gonna put my good foot forward / Stop being influenced by fools.”

Is there ever a time in anybody’s adult life when this isn’t something you ought to be busy doing? Is there ever a time when doing this wouldn’t open the door to things becoming better? It’s so obvious that humans aren’t perfect that to say so is a platitude. But if that’s the case, then—if you have the energy for it, and the vision, and aren’t the poor immigrant, who destroys in the name of progress and wealth, “who fills his mouth with laughing / and who fills his town with blood”—why not “change [your] way of thinking” ? Why not “put [your] good foot forward” ? And for all the talk about Bob between 1979 and 1981 behaving like a fire and brimstone, holier-than-thou preacher, note that I just needed to use brackets to change the pronoun. In the first place, the narrator is addressing himself.

Although I’ve suggested a softer way of looking at what looks like a hard song, it’s definitely the maker’s intent for the song to feel hard. But the song is also funny, and clever, and creative, and hurting. Yes, even hurting: “So much oppression / I can’t keep track of it no more.” Repeated twice. And there’s leftover pain from the Street-Legal era in the half-appreciative, half-defeated “I got a God-fearing woman / One I can easily afford”—afford not like you might be able to afford paying for sex, obviously, but afford mentally, because the narrator is someone with low emotional reserves, someone who can’t imagine himself going wrong in love again without suffering for it more than the situation would call for; remember, we’re not far removed in time from Is Your Love in Vain?

As for humor, I can’t hear the afore-discussed “Just so’s you know where He’s coming from,” or “She can do the Georgia crawl / She can walk in the spirit of the Lord,” or the finger-wagging conclusion, “Well, the Lord created it, mister / About the same time that He made the earth” without smiling—the attitude is so bold, so forward, and so playful with its own position.

Then you’ve got the turns which are thrilling because they proffer images so distant from where the narrator was a moment ago that you, or I at least, can’t help being startled and impressed. From “[gonna] stop being influenced by fools” we move to the violent imagery of “Stripes on your back,” of “Swords piercing your side / Blood and water flowing through the land,” as if we’ve suddenly been tossed into the war-torn landscapes of Numbers, Joshua, or Kings. And later we go from the love verse, such as it is, right to a stark reminder of the end of times: “Jesus said ‘Be ready / For you know not the hour in which I come.’”

And the whole time, under all the dance of words and attitudes, flows the ever-changing riff like a spring of living water.