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.