57. Saved

The received knowledge about Saved is that the songs are strong live and worn-out on record. This view has gotten around enough that one of the musicians interviewed about the recording sessions in recent years and asked about this notion—though you’ll need to take my word for it, as it’s MQS again; I think it was one of Bob’s backing singers—responded by saying something like, “What’re you talking about? Everyone had a lot of fun when we recorded Saved. Maybe we were a bit tired the first day, but everyone revived real quick.”

(I don’t know whether I imagined, elaborated, or just still haven’t found that particular quote, but I did locate a 1999 interview with Spooner Oldham in which, asked about the album sessions, he said, “It went pretty smoothly. Everybody had fun.”)

Other commentators have it that the slow songs on Saved were done well and the fast ones came out kind of floppy, lacking the atmosphere they had on stage. I think Clinton Heylin, a great champion of Bob’s Gospel era, would raise his hand here.

I have no idea what it was like to be in the Warfield or wherever else in 1979 or 1980 when the band was tearing through a performance of Saved—and I used to really wish I had been, until I saw Swans touring The Seer and told myself, “All right, that’s it, I’m not gonna moan anymore that I never got to see Dylan at the Warfield in ’79, or the Jerry Garcia Band taking the Cats under the Stars songs on the road in ’78, or George Harrison in ’74—‘cause I’ve seen Swans in 2012!!!”—not to mention 50+ State Radio concerts, which is another story…

Anyway, being there in person could well have been something else entirely. But as far as the recordings we’re left with (even the cleaned-up official ones on Trouble No More) go, and great as each and every live performance of Saved is (and you can really take my word for it this time: I’ve listened to every 1979 and 1980 live Dylan bootleg there is, a lot of them more than once; the song was really cooking by fall 1980, maybe because Dylan had more fervor left for the gospel numbers, so many having been dropped to make room for old songs), no matter, my favorite Saved is on Saved.

It may just be a matter of clarity, the power of getting to hear every instrument doing what it’s doing (and, I should add, I have no idea how Saved could ever have acquired a reputation for being poorly produced), but I don’t think that’s the only factor; I think that even without a crowd to draw energy from (or against), Dylan’s performance on the song’s studio version is as passionate as any that he gave live.

Sequencing also does its part. In the Gospel shows, Saved appeared close to the end of the set, between two slower numbers, Saving Grace and What Can I Do for You? That works as a change of momentum, but Saved is not melodically among the set’s best songs, and the other two both are, so the melodies that Saved does have get, as it were, de-emphasized. On the album, however, the song serves as a kind of second opener. A Satisfied Mind (which, like Eyolf Østrem, I consider “one of Dylan’s crowning achievements as a singer”), loose and soulful, is a prologue, one where it sounds like the band, if not the singer, is warming up; and the way the album is sequenced, A Satisfied Mind seems to flow right into Saved, without much of a pause between them, so that as A Satisfied Mind draws to its end, Saved is already crossing the threshold.

Presented this way, the stream of anything but tentative words with which the song begins (“I was blinded by the devil, born already ruined / Stone cold dead as I stepped out of the womb / By His grace I have been touched, by His word I have been healed / By His hand I’ve been delivered / By His spirit I’ve been sealed / I’ve been SAVED!”), with those amazing notes of gospel piano like stones jutting out of the water, is powerful and striking indeed, just as it was written to be. With the first appearance of the title word, everybody is in, the drummer and bassist and guitarists and backing singers, Fred Tackett giving those engaging line-ending runs of electric lead, the organ rising to ride the Keltner + tambourines beat, and co-writer Tim Drummond (also of that very different outfit, Neil Young’s Stray Gators) providing the friction that lets the whole thing run on and pick up momentum and speed. Best of all are Terry Young’s breakneck piano breaks, as fervent and unfettered as Dylan’s vocals.

On the wonders of Saved’s refrain, see the marvelous Christopher Ricks (whose biography of Tennyson and selection of Tennyson’s poems have, as it happens, been some of the reading material accompanying the weeks in which I’ve worked on these write-ups) : “The gratitude that I feel for the best of Dylan’s Christian songs arises from my finding them among his supreme acts of gratitude … [the] last three words of [of the refrain of Saved] don’t just say something yet again, for the third time, because what had been something I want to do has become my doing it: ‘Thank You, Lord.’ Not a curtailment of what had first been said and then slightly expanded (‘I want to thank You, Lord / I just want to thank You, Lord’), but an expansion of it, though (strangely) in fewer words, an expansion into doing it, a consummation of the two lines that lead into it. ‘Thank You, Lord’ : this, which is lovingly performed by Dylan, is a performative utterance, in the sense of philosopher J. L. Austin. Like ‘I promise,’ the words are not a statement that could be true or false (though the promise might be kept or broken) : the words simply do what they say. ‘I thank you,’ or ‘Thank You, Lord.’”

I can’t match that. I can point. Like to the way the sounds arraign themselves in the second half of the opening announcement-verse, the “h” of “healed” reinforced some milliseconds up by “His hand,” the closing consonant of which leads across “I’ve been” into “delivered,” the “s” from “grace” absent for the middle lines but returning double in the last line for “spirit” and “sealed.” Or to the frightening vision hidden in a joyous song, a vision of the doom to which the narrator had been heading before the rescue: “He bought me with a price / Freed me from the pit / Full of emptiness and wrath / And the fire that burns it,” a sequence of lines that, sung live, was always savored, with the singer seemingly in awe of the fact. Or to the breathless gladness in the rush that is “I was going down for the last time / But by His mercy I’ve been spared.” Or to the only short line in all the verses, unique and prominent and emphasized also by the stress of delivery, by the space that Dylan left for the stress to form: “Not by works.” Or to the final release from tension to relief in the final transition from verse to refrain, “For so long I’ve been hindered / For so long I’ve been stalled,” the identical phrase creating tension and the opening consonant of the last word, “stalled,” easing the way for the great miracle: “I’ve been saved.”

Only now, Dylan decides—only after the two minutes of distant thunder rumbling in A Satisfied Mind and the four minute storm of Saved—are we ready for lush melody. So Covenant Woman begins.

The one thing that 1980 live performances have over the one on Saved is that, at the end, when all the lyrics have been sung, the band cuts into a half-speed blues groove, Dylan and his backing singers relishing the line “saved by the blood of the lamb,” and the instrumentalists building up mountains of sound around them. See the Trouble No More track from Disc 1, a performance from Portland, Oregon on January 12^th—or better yet, find your way to bootlegs from the Warfield residency and Musical Retrospective tour in the fall of ’80.