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.