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.