13. Under the Red Sky

Dylan plays the accordion here, and it sounds amazing. Don Was was a strange producer: genius despite himself? He continues to be unsure of whether he did a good job, though I think the most recent interview to bring up Under the Red Sky has him realizing what a great album it is. He’s on record as saying he should never have allowed Dylan to slather the record with accordion at the last minute, but me, I think that’s one of the best touches. Dylan knew what he was doing. I think he almost always does. 

Also, if not for Don Was, Dylan’s interpretation of this song wouldn’t be on public record, so I tip my wide-brimmed hat to the producer for that reason as well. The story is well-documented online, and I won’t repeat it here. I’ll just quote the most relevant words: “[Under the Red Sky] is about people who got trapped in [Dylan's] hometown.”

As with what Masked and Anonymous has to say about Drifter’s Escape, I never would have thought of that interpretation myself. Of course the writer has no monopoly on a song’s meaning, but I think that what Dylan told Was deepens and beautifies the song. And it suggests, by extension, that the other songs on Under the Red Sky, however obscure their lyrical content may be, probably came from equally meaningful places. The “key to the kingdom” may be hidden from us, but that doesn’t mean the locked door doesn’t lead to paradise.

Jim Beviglia’s #1 (Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands) got a lot of fascinating comments (now lost, unfortunately; Jim wiped the old blog when his Dylan countdown was published) from fans all over the spectrum about what their #1 was. Being the sort of person who likes poking around in the dustiest catacombs of artists’ discographies, eager to find buried treasure, I was fascinated to see that one commenter said his favorite was a song that, at that point, I hadn’t heard yet, and that I had heard no acclaim for either: this very one, Under the Red Sky. I remember that he gave a compelling explanation why, or at least put across his passion well. I wish I could quote him. And I wish he were reading this series of mine: a #13 placement certainly cleaves a lot closer to his tastes than Jim Beviglia’s ranking, in which the song didn’t make the top two hundred.

I always found Under the Red Sky beautiful. I love the way its feast of melody follows the shakedown of Wiggle Wiggle and the way the ending of the feast is marked by the hard, distorted riff that opens Unbelievable. I’ve never heard Al Kooper play better alongside Dylan; for me, not even his legendary organ part in Like a Rolling Stone matches what he does here. And George Harrison’s slide guitar solos are just perfect. They’re as evocative as Dylan’s singing—and I think Under the Red Sky is one of Dylan’s best-sung studio recordings, so that’s saying something.

I don’t think there’s another Under the Red Sky number in which the fairy tale element is brought so far forward, and in which the tenor of the tale is not complicated by turns or digressions. Dylan has a mournful story to tell, and he tells it with John Wesley Harding-esque economy and Slow Train Coming-esque intensity. Even if we set aside what he told Was about the lyrics, I think that the sadness of the song would, like its sweetness, be undeniable; it’s in Dylan’s voice, in the chord progression, in Harrison’s solos. The narrator feels affection for the characters in the song, and sorrows over their fate.

Back in 2014, something happened that shot this song from a ranking in what would have been the 20s or 30s to its ultimate seat at #13. About that:

I spent the first six years of my life in picturesque Warszawa, the capital of Poland. It’s been four hundred years since, at the behest of my namesake King Sigismund III, the capital moved from Kraków to Warszawa, but the joke still circulates: “Why did the king change the capital city? Because he wanted to breathe some country air.”

When my family moved, I was compelled to trade my hometown for crowded, grimy New York (which in turn, seventeen years later, I traded by my own choice for the even grimier and more crowded Zhengzhou—the courses of a life!). I’ve been back to Warszawa four times, by my blurry count: a mere four times. The most recent was six years ago, in the summer of 2014 (when I also stopped by Tallinn to visit Ralf Sauter and then Stockholm to visit Björn Waller). The trees in Ursynów, where my family still kept the old apartment in which I had learned to crawl and walk (and to feel joy, and to know love, and to be overcome by stories and music), were taller than ever, and grander, and the narrow, winding streets of the neighborhood were bright with blossoming flowers.

But Warszawa had ceased to be Home long before. It’s been my lot (or blessing) throughout this life to feel like a stranger wherever I go. For all that I now see ways in which growing up in America shaped me, I spent my youth feeling like a proud and confirmed outsider in the USA (I remember thinking, at six years old, “I don’t like this place. Warszawa was better,” a thought I would’ve of course had in Polish) and—with my English accent, hesitant grammar, and complete cluelessness as regarded the ever-morphing colloquial speech of people my age—I was as much an outsider in Poland. And there’s no escaping how alien a figure a person with a western face is in the average mid-sized Chinese city.

One afternoon that 2014 summer (“One summer’s day he came passing by”), I was riding Warszawa’s spotless and impeccably punctual metro, from downtown back to the Stokłosy station, a ten minute walk from our family's apartment. That metro station opened just a few months before my family relocated, and revives vivid and poignant old memories anytime I see it. Anyway, I was riding the metro. No seats were available, so I stood by the door and put headphones on and hit play on Under the Red Sky.

Wiggle Wiggle sounded awesome, as always. So did the title track. But, as Under the Red Sky played, it got a piece of its clothes, a sleeve or pant cuff maybe, caught on a hook in my soul, and all at once there were tears streaming down my face. For the several minutes left of the song, I couldn’t stop crying.

Sometimes it’s difficult to explicate moments that shake us deeply, even six years after they occur. But I’ll attempt a gloss. I was in my hometown; I had left it, others hadn’t; I had been a little boy there, and now I was 24, and it seemed to me the world was lonely and beautiful and frightening wherever you went. But there in Warszawa, for the moment, it was summer and the flowers were blooming, the trees arcing heavenward, and some of the most beloved people in my life were dead or dying. And the little boy and the little girl were baked in a pie; and the man in the moon went home, and the river went dry; and George Harrison played his solos, to the tune of Dylan on accordion.

To this day, Under the Red Sky is (as you see for yourself) one of my favorite Dylan songs of all time; natch; one of my favorite songs of all time, period, and Under the Red Sky one of the Dylan albums I love best. My third favorite Dylan album, in fact.

I’ll close with a personal postscript for a dear friend: Caleb, if you’re reading along, I hope you’ve fallen in love with this album by now! As I hope Colleen has too, if she didn’t love it already. I think of it as revisiting the John Wesley Harding spirit, twenty-three years on; it’s different in many respects of course, but in certain respects even finer. If there’s a latter-day Dylan album that might have a smooth, straight road into your heart, I imagine that Under the Red Sky is the one.

14. Caribbean Wind

The sole live performance of Caribbean Wind, on November 12th, 1980 at the Warfield Theatre, courtesy of Paul Williams’s backstage request, is the Dylan track that I’ve listened to more than any other. Back in my final years of schooling, I would walk two and a half hours to university and then two and a half hours back. When I was near home, I’d often veer off and go on wandering other parts of the town.

This left a lot of time for music, and it was in those years, on those walks, that I made my way through the Beatles’ solo careers (great memories, especially as I happen to prefer Wings to the Beatles; Red Rose Speedway forever!), a lot of Neil Young, Van Morrison’s first two decades, and most of Dylan. On some of these walks, I would put the live Caribbean Wind on repeat and listen to it twenty, thirty times in a row. The performance is ramshackle and unpracticed; Dylan’s singing as if from a hillside while his band play at the foot; no one knows when the song is supposed to end; and yet, and yet! I’ve always loved the spirit that can bloom when a band emphasizes raw delivery over sheen.

Although I find the live version superb and addictive, it’s not the performance in which I think Caribbean Wind surrenders the most light. Granted, there is no performance that’s perfect; we have a rehearsal from September 1980, the live Warfield take, and two studio outtakes from 1981 (one on Biograph, which I don’t value, and one circulating unofficially, which I don’t turn to often either, but in which I like the elaborate arrangement and attention to melodies). The live version has the majority of the lyrics I best, including refrains in which the locations through which the Wind blows are ever-changing. But my favorite version musically and overall is the slowest and saddest, from the autumn 1980 rehearsal with the original Gospel band. I like the rattlesnake metaphor and the “ugly gargoyles,” and while some of the lines I like best aren’t present in the rehearsal, I love the morose, thoughtful way Dylan sings all that remains. I like the way the live Warfield version captures the passion and urgency of the song (“the ship will sail at dawn!”), but what strikes me more about Caribbean Wind is the sorrow, the half-regret, and the sense of high-stakes risk (“Those distant ships of liberty / On the iron waves so bold and free / Bringing everything that’s near to me / Nearer to the fire”), and all of these are well accounted for in the rehearsal performance. Working through it slowly, Dylan and the band can better embrace Caribbean Wind’s pathos.

I’ve never been positive what the song is about. Björn Waller sees it as the middle part of a trilogy, with Shelter from the Storm before and Brownsville Girl after. I remember admiring and enjoying his interpretation, but I’ve forgotten its gist. I like what Dylan himself had to say about Caribbean Wind, a concise and evocative gloss: “I started it in St. Vincent [in the Caribbean] when I woke up from a strange dream in the hot sun. There was a bunch of women working in a tobacco field on a high rolling hill. A lot of them were smoking pipes. I was thinking about living with somebody for all the wrong reasons.”

Hence, I take it, the wonderful lines, “And I felt it come over me, some kind of gloom / I wanted to say ‘Come on with me girl, I got plenty of room!’ / But I knew I’d be lying, and besides, she had already gone.” I likewise love the equivocation (or is it just honesty?) of “Would I have married her? / I don’t know. I suppose… / She had bells in her braids and they hung to her toes…” The song, which spends most of its time flitting from scene to scene, encounter to encounter, the pronouns haphazard, culminates in an ending that is too painful to obfuscate. It’s more or less the narrator’s decision (and definitely the decision of the one he loves: “She said, ‘I know what you’re thinking, but there ain’t a thing / We can do about it, so we might as well let it be”) not to pursue her, but as he lets her go, he thinks he might be letting a really precious possibility slip, and the chance of that being the case is pulling on his nerves. The narrator is experiencing regret in one of its fiercest stages: the moments when you might still, only just might, be able to change your fate, but you have to think fast, because time is short—though in fact, your heart has already made the decision to let the opportunity pass by, only your mind hasn’t caught up. That, ultimately, is why I love the September ’80 rehearsal best: in his singing, Dylan catches the miserable resignation that propels the narrator’s reflections, and nowhere better than in the final chorus.

But all this sorrow seems to be balanced with a sense of purpose, a sense of salvation, offered by the narrator’s young faith (“I told her about Jesus” in the fourth line). Caribbean Wind is 1980 vintage, after all. And so we have the apocalyptic stirrings in the background (“Every new messenger bringing evil reports”) and, most poignantly, an old longing that’s overlapping with this new one, “arisen from the ashes and abiding in [the] memory”—memories of the woman he once loved, and memories of the family that she and he made together: “Atlantic City by the cruel gray sea / I hear a voice crying ‘Daddy!’ , I always think it’s for me / But it’s only the silence in the buttermilk hills that calls.”

In Idiot Wind, the narrator blames the angry spirit of the title for turning lovers into enemies. In Caribbean Wind, the narrator accuses this warm and lulling but demonic force of “fanning the flames in the furnace of desire.” That wind “still blows” and “still howls” because, as the narrator is realizing, he won’t be purified of his old self quite as quickly as he might have thought (“I gaze into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame / And every time I pass that way, I always hear my name”). First he must pass through a furnace made especially for him; or, more accurately, for the things that he once loved but that will serve him no longer. I think that’s what accounts for the sadness and the jubilation that are present in different versions of Caribbean Wind. It’s a song of purification, of transformation; and such stages, though they set you on a brighter and surer road in the end, are painful.

As the incomparable Al Joshua (once of Orphans & Vandals) puts it in Mysterious Skin, a similarly joyful/sorrowing song, “A lot of things get abandoned along the way, don’t they?”

I’ll end with a digression. It seems to me that sometimes a songwriter can be gifted with a fellow musician who brings out the absolute best in their work. I started thinking about this in the summer of 2013, in the days when I was often stopping in Manhattan bookstores to read selections from Neil Young’s first memoir, Waging Heavy Peace:

“So I spoke to my old friend Bruce and told him I was feeling it, his loss of Clarence. We talked for quite a while, and there is no need to go into what two old friends had to say to each other at this point, except to say that two old friends spoke to each other about their music, their muses, their partners in crime, their proof, their friendship, their souls, and their lives. Ben Keith was my Clarence Clemons. Clarence was Bruce’s Ben Keith. When [Ben] died last year, it touched me to the core. I don’t want to ever think of anyone else playing his parts or occupying his space. No one could.”

I don’t know enough about Bruce Springsteen’s music (as yet; but between Ralf Sauter, Antonia, and Peter Stampfel, I think I’m headed for a thoroughgoing exploration), but I do think that for Neil Young, Ben Keith was that musician. Neil has had a lot of fantastic collaborators (Bruce Palmer in Buffalo Springfield, Danny Whitten of the early Crazy Horse, Rusty Kershaw in On the Beach, Steve Jordan in Landing on Water, Booker T. Jones in Are You Passionate?, Jim Keltner in Peace Trail, and certainly David Briggs as long-time producer), but in terms of someone who, via instrumental parts, consistently shined the most beautiful kind of light on Neil’s compositions, surely that was Ben Keith. Daniel Lanois’s Ben Keith is probably Brian Blade; Nick Cave’s Warren Ellis; Ned Collette’s Joe Talia; Leonard Cohen’s Roscoe Beck, maybe, or Sharon Robinson; Bruce Cockburn’s Hugh Marsh; Antonia’s Peter Stampfel; Ian Anderson’s Martin Barre; Patti Smith’s Lenny Kaye; Caleb Mulkerin’s Colleen Kinsella, and Colleen Kinsella’s Caleb Mulkerin. My own (fortunate songwriter that I am) is Kryštof Ludvik, so I can personally attest to the wonder of having that kind of musician in one’s life.

Who was Bob Dylan’s Ben Keith? Was anyone? It definitely wasn’t Ben Keith himself; he’s playing pedal steel on the September 1980 rehearsal of Caribbean Wind, but I don’t think anyone who knows and loves Ben’s work with Neil Young could have guessed that it’s him; he didn’t find that same pocket in Dylan’s music as he did in Young’s. Nowhere close.

Who, then? I think the fact that I need to pose the question is proof that Dylan never found one, and that the notion left for us to play around with is who might have fulfilled that role in different circumstances. Some would say Mike Bloomfield (and this “some” could include Dylan himself; in a 2009 interview, he said, “The guy that I always miss, and I think he’d still be around if he stayed with me, actually, was Mike Bloomfield”), others Robbie Robertson (a view I’m sympathetic to), others still Freddy Koella. My own vote is for Mark Knopfler, as guitarist rather than producer. I adore his lead guitar work on Slow Train Coming, and Mark’s reprise on Infidels suggests to me that they’d sound great together under any circumstances, not just those masterminded by Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett. (Incidentally, I love that whereas in the west Knopfler doesn’t often enter the conversation of “most wonderful guitarists ever,” he’s recognized as such among the North African rock community. As the great Bombino put it, discussing the early years of his musicianship, “I became obsessed with videos of Western rock stars and we would watch and imitate all the videos we could find. For me, Jimi Hendrix and Dire Straits were the best. Mark Knopfler had such a smooth way of playing, like he was in total control of the guitar. Jimi had this too, but in a different way. For Knopfler it was more subtle. I think my style is more subtle, like Knopfler’s.”)

Whatever our answer to the Ben Keith query, in the end it comes down to “It was not to be.” For better or for worse, Dylan stands alone.

15. Are You Ready

This song must have one of the strangest origin stories in Dylan’s catalogue. Long before it was a song, the riff and groove of Are You Ready were what the Gospel band vamped on while Dylan introduced each member by name. This was how the 1979 and winter 1980 encores would begin. When the introductions were done, the band would stop, and then start over with Blessed Is the Name. At some point, during the winter ’80 tour I suppose, Dylan must have realized that he really liked that groove, and taken it into the workshop, and out came Are You Ready, just in time for the last two shows of the tour, in time to be recorded for Saved.

In line with what I mentioned in the Solid Rock write-up about Saved not being nearly as judgmental as the cover makes it look to some (and might I add that I think that cover looks incredible? Tony Wright is a wonderful painter, and from what I know about him, a really good guy too) (and the main point of the cover, I think, is that God’s hand is reaching down in rescue, which fits with the album’s turn towards gratitude), here’s the ever-observant, ever-insightful Christopher Ricks:

“Take the heightened dramatic effect of the soul-searching question ‘Are you ready?’ You risk your soul if you answer this simply or solely yes, for that way the wrong kind of pride lies; but you had better not answer it simply no, for such simple soleness has a way of settling into the other complacency that is hopelessness. There are pincer-jaws you start to feel. As in the double admonition that Samuel Beckett attributed to St Augustine, although no one seems ever to have found the exact words there (I dreamed I saw in St Augustine . . .): ‘Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved; do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.’

“‘Are you ready?’: you might answer this, escaping both despair and presumption, as Dylan does in Are You Ready, ‘I hope I’m ready.’”

In the Toronto performance found on Disc 6 of Trouble No More, you can hear Dylan add “Be ready!” as a refrain response. It’s an injunction, and it’s a reminder, in the usual style: for the singer as much as for the listener.

Eyolf Østrem lists Are You Ready (together with Saved, Solid Rock, and Pressing On) among the songs he thinks are, by nature, stronger live than they could be on record; speaking of Pressing On and Are You Ready in particular, he cites “the intensity that grows out of the slow-build” onstage. That’s certainly fair. But as with the song Saved, and for all my love of the Gospel tours, I like Are You Ready best in its studio guise. I love the way it closes Side B, which is otherwise filled with slow, dramatic, and melodic material; but all that shimmering reflection descends, ultimately, to the dust of the road, the dust of repentance, preparedness, and attention in Are You Ready.

As in the case of the title track, I cherish the crystal clear sound that producers Wexler & Beckett achieved on Saved. Fred Tackett’s guitar solo sounds like his instrument is draped in billowing flames. I love the way that the steady, unhurried rhythm of the song is fought against in the guitar and organ solos, which seem to shoot straight for the heavens of night. By contrast, Dylan’s harmonica at the end stays tame, but it’s filled with assurance and strength, and the sound is unreal. The best mouth harp sounds I’ve ever heard on a record are the “heavy metal harmonica” on Neil Young’s Peace Trail (a top five or six Neil album for me) and Dylan’s on Saved. It may only be employed in two of the nine tracks, but oh, when it is…

I love that Are You Ready fades out. It makes the way Saved ends almost as powerful as the emphatic NOT fade-out at the conclusion of Under the Red Sky. Thanks to the fade-out, the image we’re left with is that of Dylan and company walking away, “pressing on to the higher calling of [their] Lord,” not in fact certain that they’re ready (at least in Dylan’s case; at one point, one of the backing singers offers a passionate “Yes, I am”—by the way, I haven’t mentioned the backing singers on this track, have I? But they’re phenomenal; they seem ever-present, harsh and unswerving in their gritty repetitions: “Are you ready? Get ready. Are you ready? Get ready”) but humbly intending to be.

The lyrics speak for themselves, but I can’t end this write-up without noting how much I admire their concentrated intensity. They are like the harmonica break at the end, seemingly calm but extremely focused, as if at their center there were a raging storm rolled up into a small gleaming marble. The early questions (in verses one through three) are elaborate and carefully formulated, blowing past deceit, demanding quietly that you answer with the utmost precision: “Am I ready to lay down my life for my brethren / And to take up my cross? … When destruction cometh swiftly / And there’s no time to say a fare-thee-well / Have you decided whether you want to be / In heaven or in hell? Are you ready?” Come the fourth verse, the questions are like four successive strikes from the great fist that the characters in Franz Kafka’s story The City Coat of Arms hope will appear one day to reduce their city to rubble. “Are you ready for the judgment? / Are you ready for that terrible swift sword? / Are you ready for Armageddon? / Are you ready for the day of the Lord?”

The narrator is talking about “Armageddon,” “the day of the Lord,” which will come when it will, if it does. But the whole song works just as well if we pivot the words a little bit and think of them as referring to the “day of the Lord” that comes to us all, soon enough, often sooner than we’d like, or than we expect. And readiness for that day is something that everyone who is alive on earth—whatever your conjectures about death and its possible afterparty—needs to reckon with. And for a lot of us, at most times, someone starkly posing the question “Are you ready?” might well elicit a “Well—no, to be honest. No.” And so this song of Dylan’s is beautiful, I think, and important, no matter what your personal beliefs.

Dylan delivers that final verse with his heart in his throat and beating fast, but he doesn’t let himself sing with total abandon; that wouldn’t be right for the questions Are You Ready poses, questions which, as Ricks explains so articulately, require prudence and a mind that knows what it’s thinking, and what it’s really saying when it responds.

16. Knockin' on Heaven's Door

At times a song will not awaken until you use your own hands and voice to give it life. Once, when I was walking alone and singing Antonia’s Going to See the King to myself, just to check whether I’d memorized all the words right, I found the lyrics (as delivered through my own voice) so beautiful and personally resonant that I broke down crying. I’ve written about how All the Tired Horses blossomed in front of me when I learned to play it on guitar. And here’s an apposite quote from a 2019 interview with Taylor Goldsmith (co-writer, in case you’ve forgotten, of Diamond Ring (my #84) and Florida Key (my #24)): 

“I do think that … when you pick a guitar up and you sing a Bob Dylan song, and you get into the feel of that song—in most cases, you just realize the power of it. The other night, we were at a little party thing at a friend’s house, and someone started singing Joey. They knew all the words to Joey. So we all started singing the choruses together. And it was just out of control how good it was. It was just so epic and so ambitious in terms of what he was trying to get after with this song … [there’s] so much poetry, so much lyricism to it.”

Jim Keltner, a sensitive soul (who, by the way, if anyone reading this is a fan, did insanely great work on Neil Young’s Peace Trail; Jim is so much a part of that album that it could well have been co-credited, Neil Young & Jim Keltner), has gone on record saying that, when he was recording the studio version of Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door with Dylan & band for Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, he found the song so touching that he had to play drums while weeping. This became something of a pattern with him and Dylan: he’s said that the songs he drummed to throughout the Gospel tours in 1979 and 1980 would fill his spirit at unexpected times, so that different songs from night to night would bring tears to his eyes, mid-performance; and if I don’t misremember, it also happened when the band was recording Every Grain of Sand for Shot of Love (and again a decade later, when Jim Keltner was Bruce Cockburn’s drummer for the remarkable Nothing But a Burning Light; the catalyst was Cry of a Tiny Babe, written “in modern terms” about the birth of Jesus. Says Cockburn (who later duetted with Lou Reed on this same track), “At one point, during the song Cry of a Tiny Babe, Jim Keltner broke down in tears. Well, he didn’t break down—he kept playing but he was fighting it off throughout the song because he was so moved…”).

Now here’s Eyolf Østrem, writing in August 2011:

“I played [Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door] recently, with a band who turned out to be great, and somehow I came to think of the Utøya massacre and the disastrous senselessness of violence, and the song suddenly took off. Must have been my most inspired performance ever. Or maybe I was just a little drunk.”

I think there’s a rare class of songs to which Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door belongs: songs so elemental that it feels their building blocks are the same ones our very consciousness, sense of empathy, and yearning are made of. A few other such songs that come to mind for me (though their moods and themes may be different) are Blowin’ in the Wind, Paul McCartney’s Man We Was Lonely and Ram On, Marek Grechuta’s Świece nasz (alas for you who don’t know Polish), Кино’s Печаль and Следи за собой (alas for us who don’t know Russian), Devendra Banhart’s A Sight to Behold, and Leonard Cohen’s Show Me the Place and If I Didn’t Have Your Love. And of course many a song that has survived to this day from ages bygone, author(s) unknown (though that upstart, Trad, keeps taking all the credit). The Polish/Ukrainian tune Hej sokoły comes to mind. Mary and the Soldier too. And no doubt you can fill in the rest of the blanks yourself. Songs like these seem to hold the entire world within them, sometimes. And they are open to anyone to inhabit.

Perhaps that’s why, out of the hundred songs on this list, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door is the only one in which my favorite versions are not by Dylan. Note the plural! There are two versions that I love more than any of Dylan’s renditions, and since I’m aware of glorious Dylan renditions, that’s saying something. But before I tell you what the covers that I so treasure are, in honor of the songwriter allow me to mention a few of the Dylan performances I really like:

1. The two-minute, nothing-but-the-essentials original on Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, with Jim Keltner. Everything is in the right place: the acoustic and electric guitars, the backing vocals, the drums, Dylan’s weathered voice.

2. The reggae version from 1978. It’s Dylan playing reggae, so how can I resist? My favorite ’78 Knockin’ is not from any concert, though, but from the bootlegged Rundown Rehearsals. It’s a rough performance—the band is still figuring out the vocals and the transitions—but I love that about it. The sound quality is crisp and clear. Listen for the backing singers’ laughter.

3. The calypso arrangement performed throughout 1981. Curiously, the only one officially available (from the June 27th London show, on Disc 8 of Trouble No More) has almost nothing of the magic the song had on most other nights. Pick a 1981 bootleg at random and you’ll probably find a more inspired version; I tried this a few times, and it always worked. Anyway, uptempo calypso suits this song beautifully, and naturally the Gospel band wears it well. Throughout the year Dylan was at work on a new/never-to-be-finished verse, one instance of which you can find written out on Eyolf’s site: “Mama, tow my barge down to sea / Pull it down from shore to shore / Two brown eyes are looking at me / Feel like I’m knocking on heaven’s door.”

4. Live on June 25th, 1991, in Stockholm. Where in 1981 the song was lushly arranged, in 1991 it’s nerve-raw. The full band (Dylan on electric, Tony Garnier, and my beloved Ian Wallace) doesn’t come in until the second minute; the first minute is just J. J. Jackson strumming his electric and Bob’s marvelous, soft-spoken vocals. Dylan’s singing is beautiful throughout, and when the words stop, a guitar duet begins (I remember laughing with Steven Rineer about that term; I had asked him, “Guitar solos are so popular; why aren’t guitar duets?” to which Steven, “Guitar duets, huh… don’t some people call those double solos? Or are double solos like On the Beach, where you can’t choose which you like more, Neil’s first solo or his second?”), and it’s mesmerizing and tender and haunted.

5. Live on October 5th, 2001, in Spokane. I don’t usually like straightforward, anthemic renditions of Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (which is why, though I adore the Grateful Dead, I don’t care for their version) but the vocals in this performance are amazing. Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton take the “oooh”s and the refrains, and they sound like ghosts wandering the earth in the guise of soldiers (think the fourth episode of Kurosawa Akira’s Dreams, one of my favorite films ever), and they get Dylan to lay the gravel their bootheels tread on.

Now for the two impeccable covers.

First is the one that the Jerry Garcia Band performed from about 1979 or ’80 on. In 1976 Jerry liked doing the song luxuriously slow (see Garcia Plays Dylan, where it’s seventeen minutes long) and in 1977/8, maybe inspired by Clapton’s hit cover (of which I personally prefer the B-side, Someone Like You), he switched to a tighter all-reggae arrangement. A year or two after the release of Cats Under the Stars, which despite Jerry & co.’s legendary trouble with the studio is a desert island disc of mine, and which owes a lot to gospel music (see Palm Sunday, Rain, Down Home, and Gomorrah), the bandleader settled on a half-gospel, half-reggae arrangement of Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door that he stuck to thereafter. The verses are slow and soulful, while for the refrains the band switches to reggae. Jerry’s long guitar solos cover verse, refrain, verse, refrain, and then maybe there’ll be another sung verse, or a keyboard solo...

Such versions sounded great in the midst of the Cats material at the turn of the decade, but only became better over time, and once David Kemper (drums) and Melvin Seals (organ) got involved, Jerry’s Heaven’s Door turned otherworldly-good. It was always dark, always sad, and usually around ten minutes long, so that the heavy moods had the time and space to make themselves felt.

The other cover I treasure is Warren Zevon’s. It’s best heard as track three of The Wind, coming off of Dirty Life and Times and Disorder in the House, and with the rest of the album still ahead. The arrangement isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s smooth and clean, the better to emphasize how lonesome, sharp, and pained Warren’s singing is. The entreaties at song’s end are hard to hear for one who loves him (and can you get more than a few songs deep into Warren’s work and not love him? Many thanks to Ralf Sauter for getting me to listen to the 1976 self-titled, back in 2012 or so). I don’t know where but on Warren’s record you can hear Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door performed by someone who actually was, and knew he was. It’s not the kind of performance you can replicate.

17. Cat's in the Well

Let’s commence with the obvious: the inside of a well is no place for a cat (or human; see Murakami Haruki’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or, better yet, Killing Commendatore). Even less so if a “wolf is looking down.” That means every verse of this song begins with an image of the proper state of things out of order, of dread and danger and no place to go to get away from either. Don’t let what Clinton Heylin calls the “jump blues” arrangement fool you. Gloom abounds.

Well, it does and it doesn’t. Cat’s in the Well (the last song on Under the Red Sky) is a party, much like Wiggle Wiggle (the first song on Under the Red Sky) is. What the backdrop to these two cousins of Saturnalia might be is another matter, maybe settled by the album title.

Or by the way the song ends. And here I have a chance to go off on one of my flights of fancy. Not that fanciful, actually; all I intend to do is expand slightly on an insight of Clinton Heylin’s (who, like Robert Christgau, thinks this album is, all in all, pretty awesome). In the Recording Sessions, Heylin notes the way that, as soon as the song’s last words are out of Dylan’s mouth, the band grinds to a halt. He had observed earlier that Side A ends with chaos (the mob overcoming the anti-TV preacher), an apocalypse in miniature (which, in an earlier lyric draft, featured the preacher being hung for his views), and that Side B ends with apocalypse supreme: “Cat’s in the well, leaves are starting to fall / Good night, my love; may the Lord have mercy on us all”—a couplet at once beautiful, tender, and chilling.

I’m on board with all of this, and a fact that I think only strengthens Heylin’s insight is that each of the first nine songs on Under the Red Sky ends with a fade-out, as if to imply that there’s still time to burn: things seem to roll on endlessly—you can imagine the band playing on and on and on, beyond your hearing. Only Cat’s in the Well, the closer, doesn’t fade out. On the contrary, it ends much more quickly than you’d think. And when it ends, it ends totally. There’s nothing pretty about that ending. It’s the wolf’s jaws crunching shut. “Something’s burning, baby.” Time’s up.

Wiggle Wiggle, the album-opening hoedown, ends with a creepy, off-hinged electric guitar solo, but cool as that “kick against the fade-out” ending is, it’s got nothing on the way Cat’s in the Well collapses suddenly to its knees. Every time I listen to Under the Red Sky all the way through, these last seconds make my skin crawl.

For a while I thought that I was the only person who’d noticed this—at least I never saw it mentioned online—but when I started dipping into Michael Gray at the outset of this writing project of mine, it turned out that, of course, he caught it too, though without linking it to Heylin’s understanding of why the album is so structured: “…the device of coming to a ‘live’ finish on the last track of an album on which every other song fades out also dramatises the outrageous last-minute call across another such divide that is, in the lyric, the album’s final end … That ‘Goodnight my love’ is so personal it leaps out at you, cutting not only clean through the recording but jumping right out of the song itself” (a strategy also employed, to similar effect, on 10,000 Men). “It is the most inspired, simple leave-taking on any of the albums of the artist who has always been incomparable at such leave-takings.”

Above all, what I love about Cat’s in the Well is the imagery. Dylan has long had a knack for good juxtapositions, and continues to (“Twelve years old, they put me in a suit / Forced me to marry a prostitute / There were gold fringes on her wedding dress… / That’s my story, but not where it ends / She’s still cute, and we’re still friends”) ; “Love And Theft” is built largely of the excellent off-setting of one line or couplet against another, and it’s stunning how that album, via the art of careful juxtaposition, reinvents songwriting itself (to these enamored ears, anyway). Cat’s in the Well, and Under the Red Sky as a whole, do this on the level of image. The language of nursery rhymes, which are guided by what to our twenty-first century minds can seem bizarre logic, make a terrific template, and Dylan makes good and noble use of his source material. Hence we get wonders like “The wolf is looking down / He got his big bushy tail dragging all over the ground,” and “Cat’s in the well and the barn is full of the bull / The night is so long and the table is oh so full.” But every line and couplet is fantastic: bright, imaginative, surprising, unique.

Add to this the way the song comes dancing out of the speakers after God Knows’ easeful fade-out (“God knows you can get from here to there if you have to walk a million miles by candlelight”), Dylan’s joyous singing, the heightened drama of the B-sections or refrains (“grief is showing its face,” etc.), the slide guitar, the “jump blues” rhythm (it always feels to me like the song is in 5/4, but it isn’t), and what you get is a modest masterpiece. Or maybe not that modest; Dylan, at least, never seems to have felt that Cat’s in the Well was out of place beside his most legendary songs. Throughout the fall of 2003 and the spring of 2004, it was a nightly fixture of the encore, right next to Like a Rolling Stone, All Along the Watchtower, and the occasional Forever Young. When most people quote this fact, they treat it as something grotesque, but it makes perfect sense to me.

18. Abandoned Love

Quinnisa Rose Kinsella-Mulkerin of Big Blood made her official debut as a songwriter on 2015’s Double Days. Around the time of that album’s release, Colleen Kinsella took part in a music/philosophy podcast and spoke appreciatively of Quinnisa’s impatience with how so much of popular music is about break-ups. “Aren’t there other things to sing about?” Quinnisa had said. Sure enough, on her own debut songs, You’re Crushing My Heart (“I play video games twice a day”) and Golden Heart (“He’s got that spectacular energy in his eyes and his nose”), she steered away from the conventions.

A further reason to think twice before penning yet another platitudinal song about break-ups is that the songwriters who have gone before us have set certain standards. If you don’t attempt to meet these standards, or if you don’t at least keep the mountains your forebears have scaled in sight, the result is unlikely to be interesting. True, there are the wunderkinds who get somewhere amazing just by instinct, but for most of us—or for all of us, at certain times—the great successes of old (and the new successes of any given year) are there to remind us of what can be done, and just how well it can be done. “Don’t settle for less than this,” Abandoned Love tells us other practitioners of the art (the older Dylan, I would think, in our number), “because what happens in me is proof that it’s possible. My richness is within human reach.”

The only comparably stirring break-up songs I can bring to mind (though I feel there must be more) are Radiohead’s The Present Tense (much of the force of which is in the music and the singing, rather than the lyrics per se), Ned Collette’s How to Change a City, and Keinan Abdi Warsame’s 70 Excuses, and (granted, not a song but a whole album; a song cycle) David Sylvian's Blemish. Abandoned Love is so unabashedly full of conflict, and so lovely besides (WalterNeff from last.fm: “One of the very best Bob Dylan being a selfish asshole but sounding beautiful song EVER……and there’s ALOTT”), that almost nothing else is quite in its zone. The song is bold, sweet, aggressive, defiant, vulnerable, proud, defeated, and it contradicts itself right and left. It has both verisimilitude and the sting of a personal and unique pain. It had sadness, it has strength, it has weariness, and even glimmers (if only in imagery) of vague hope.

It has, besides, some of my favorite Dylan couplets and verses. But as with other songs in these echelons, I’d have to quote 85% of the song to tell you which.

Abandoned Love circulates in two Dylan versions, live (solo acoustic) on July 3rd,  1975, and a studio take recorded four weeks later. I love both of them, but prefer the former. I love Dylan most when he’s playing with a band, but in the case of the famed Other End performance of Abandoned Love, that lone guitar and lone bootheel were all Dylan needed to cast a spell as heavy as any exquisite group performance from the autumn of 1975, or the spring of  1980, or the spring of 1995, or the autumn of 2009. The live version has excellent lines that were replaced by slightly less excellent ones in the studio. What I miss most of all is “Send out for St. John the Evangelist / All my friends are drunk. They can be dismissed,” a couplet that perfectly captures, in miniature, the mood of the whole.

When I got into the Desire outtake, I disliked that the just-quoted lines were missing, but I liked the new one Dylan set in its place. In the century’s early teens I liked to walk around the streets of my town and sing the songs that were on my mind. In order to have an Abandoned Love that incorporated both versions of the penultimate verse, I wrote a new ending to the “we sat in a theater” lines myself. A decade has passed and I still remember what I came up with; be merciful and keep the melody in mind as you read, since the words work better set to Dylan’s rhythm than on the page: “We sat in an empty beater and we kissed / I asked you please to cross me off your list / But still I wouldn’t let go of your hand / Guess I’ll have to ask you again before you finally understand.” It isn’t Dylan, but for a songwriter of only one year’s standing, like Sigismund Sludig was in 2012, it isn’t terrible; the spirit of the original does seem to be within. (Why “beater” instead of what Dylan actually sings, “theater” ? First because Dylan’s phrasing makes “theater” sound like “beater,” and second because I happened to like that image more: the couple sitting in the front seats of an old beat-up car, parked on the side of some highway or country road, with sunrise pouring in through the windows, the scene like a more rundown edition of the front cover of Together through Life. But how a beater can be called empty when there are two people inside is something that didn’t occur to me at the time.)

Dylan’s delivery of Abandoned Love live has to be heard to be believed. Much as in Michael Hurley’s incredible Growlin’ Bobo (a 1980 show that Byron Coley calls “a live Greatest Hits package” and “the homecoming of a conquering hero”), or the recording of Dylan’s 1994 concert in Kraków, the responses of the crowd (a tiny one, in this case) help make the experience as good as it is. I think it’s because the live performance is so accomplished (sample comments: “the single greatest moment of Dylan’s entire career—no arguments please,” “easily one of the best things ever recorded… ever,” “as far as recorded sound goes, this is the very top”) that Dylan lovers tend to slag the version recorded for (and left off of) Desire, but I’m really happy that we have both. I love the new intro in the studio version, with one of the (I want to say “most,” but honestly should just say) many charming lines getting featured in advance, and Scarlet Rivera’s melodic playing on violin, and the way Howie Wyeth incorporates the rim of the snare drum into his typically inventive drumbeat, and Dylan’s grand vocals.

The final verse received a curious edit sometime in July 1975. “Put on your heavy make-up and your shawl” became “Take off your heavy make-up and your shawl.” Since the following line in both versions is “Won’t you descend from the throne, from where you sit?” I can understand why Dylan changed it; removing the make-up would, like the descent from the throne, make the woman the narrator’s addressing more approachable. But I prefer the earlier command. I love the way it suggests the narrator is encouraging the woman he loves to distance herself from him even as he asks her to approach; after all, he’s already begun to distance himself from her, and it’d only be fair. In the earlier version, the feeling is something like, “Come down to me, please, but put your make-up on first, and drape yourself in your shawl; I want you to draw near—but not too near.” (As a three-year-old neighbor of mine in Bailey, Colorado used to say, when she and her siblings and I all gathered at the local swingset, “Swing me higher! But not too higher.”) “Let me feel your love one more time, before I abandon it”—but let me feel it distantly, distantly, lest I falter.

19. Every Grain of Sand

Read around, and you’ll find a myriad of voices proclaiming that Every Grain of Sand is the crown jewel of Bob Dylan’s Gospel era, that it’s the religious song that even non-believers can love, that it’s like Keats or Blake, etc. All well and good, but when I made my way through Dylan’s catalogue, Every Grain of Sand didn’t leave much of an impression on me. I liked the melodies in the refrain. I liked a few lines of lyrics. I liked that Steve Douglas (of Street-Legal) got a reprise on the Shot of Love recording (although he’s hardly audible). And that’s about all I could honestly say in the song’s favor.

Of the versions we had to choose from, I thought both the piano/guitar demo with the barking dog (see Bootleg Series) and the cleaned-up, polished-smooth version that closes Shot of Love were okay, but I didn’t love either one, and the live sphere didn’t seem to yield much either. I figured, well, Every Grain of Sand isn’t the only widely beloved Dylan song that I’m not crazy about. Onwards to Infidels.

But, in 2017, there was Trouble No More.

The lore goes that Paul Williams talked with Dylan backstage at the 1980 Warfield shows and was curious what kind of new songs Bob was writing. Bob told him about Every Grain of Sand and Caribbean Wind. Williams asked to hear Caribbean Wind, and that night Dylan dedicated it to him and the band struggled their way through it, beautifully. So the question always went: how would Every Grain of Sand had sounded live on November 12th, 1980, if that was the song Paul Williams had requested instead?

Trouble No More doesn’t exactly answer that question, but it comes close. Disc 4 ends with a rehearsal from September 26th, 1980. The first time I heard it, as one of the advance tracks from the release, I sat up and took notice. Ten or so listens later I became, belatedly but definitely, an admirer of Every Grain of Sand. And now, having lived with that rehearsal recording for about three years, here the song is at #19.

For what are no doubt reasons of delivery, on both Dylan’s parts and the band’s, the words of the song—which are no different from what they had been in the summertime, when the barking-dog demo was made—only connect with me when I listen to the Trouble No More rehearsal. Lines that had always struck me as poetic in too loose a way, unmoored from actual experience, now seemed concrete, truthful, profound, and moving. When I turn to other versions, the lyrics sound bland once more. When I go back to the rehearsal, again they stop me in my tracks.

A few comments on the words, then:

“Don’t have the inclination to look back on any mistakes / Like Cain, I now behold the chain of events that I must break”—for someone like Dylan in 1980, who has adopted or committed to a set of values that differs in major ways with those that had guided his life before, a “look back” would present plenty of “mistakes.” But “lost time is not found again,” as Dylan sang in 1967, and no matter how appalling the view, you cannot go back and change what you’ve done. The only thing you can possibly change is the thing you’re going to do next. So there the narrator of Every Grain of Sand is, beholding the chain (and it really is like a chain: one act leads to another, and every unkind act makes the next unkind act easier), feeling himself a murderer like the primeval Cain, and understanding that the only thing to do is break that chain apart and live differently from now on.

“The flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear / Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer.” This couplet used to seem to me particularly egregious in terms of being lackluster poetry. Now I find it a lovely encapsulation of the narrator’s “before” and “after.” The essence of his old life was indulgence, whether in drugs, money, women, a certain destructive lifestyle, whatever—but in his life now, what’s prominent is “conscience” (an awareness of the consequence of his own behavior, of his thoughts and words and deeds) and “good cheer,” which is after all what the Good News of Christ is supposed to bring.

“I gaze into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame / And every time I pass that way, I always hear my name.” These lines I always liked.

“I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night.” Again, this seems so beautiful to me when I listen to the September 1980 rehearsal. “Rags to riches” is a cliché, but in this context it’s an apt image for what the narrator feels he held dear before (nothing but “rags”—he had worshipped “a god with the body of a woman well-endowed and the head of hyena,” “at the altar of a stagnant pool”) and what he feels faith has given him to hold dear now.

“In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space…” To borrow the words Paul Nelson used to describe the harmonica playing on the Shot of Love recording, this is another line that “pierces the heart and moistens the eye.” When I hear “bitter dance of loneliness” I think of Dylan’s 1977/8 as chronicled so brutally and vulnerably on Street-Legal, and when I think of all that agony “fading into space” in the post-Slow Train Coming, post-Saved era that gave birth to Every Grain of Sand, I am grateful on the songwriter’s behalf that, as the narrator in What Can I Do for You? puts it, “I don’t deserve it, but I sure did make it through.”

Also on Trouble No More, as the closer of Disc 2, is a 1981 live performance from the final Gospel tour’s final show in Lakeland, Florida. I remember the initial public response to the inclusion of this performance being, “Why in the world would the curators choose a version in which Dylan flubs the lyrics?!” And a few weeks later, “Oh. Because it’s awesome.” I took to it quickly myself, but then I’ve listened to something like a hundred different live versions of the Grateful Dead’s Althea and loved them all, so what’s a lyric flub…

And, unexpectedly, I’ve come across a post-’81 live performance that moves me: June 26th, 2007 in Florence, Massachusetts. Even though I don’t usually care for piano as the lead rhythmic instrument in folk or rock (with plenty of prominent exceptions, like Neil Young’s Till the Morning Comes, Warren Zevon’s Frank and Jesse James, Pain of Salvation’s Silent Gold, or anything by Big Blood: see especially A Message Sent from Deep Maine and their cover of Archangel Thunderbird), I think Every Grain of Sand loses something important without one; but though there’s no piano in this 2007 version, Dylan’s contented and sensitive delivery bridges the gap.