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.