30. The Wicked Messenger

There’s a great anecdote from an Expecting Rain user, alias Flesh-Colored Christ. He writes:

“At dinner parties sometimes, when I’ve had a glass or two more than usual, I have been known to recite the last verse of this song, without attribution, as a kind of party quiz … people have said: wow, is that from the Bible? Or: gosh, did you write that yourself, Flesh? … Or: that’s from Hamlet - right?”

That’s John Wesley Harding for you.

In a certain sense, The Wicked Messenger is the album closer. As has often been observed, the line that ends the song, “If you can’t bring good news, then don’t bring any,” is followed by two songs (and then a whole album) of “good news”—which is to say, (relatively) straightforward love songs, Down Along the Cove and I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight. Then Nashville Skyline.

That’s an interesting mental exercise, come to think of it: albums that, in terms of their thematic structure, end twice. Of Montreal’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? would be one. Neil Young’s gorgeous Prairie Wind is another, with the first and relatively somber eight tracks written and recorded before his life-threatening surgery, and the closing two songs, completely different in outlook, after it.

The Wicked Messenger is the final song to inhabit the landscape into which the title track of John Wesley Harding and As I Went Out One Morning led us, the wasteland or wilderness that sometimes seems to be in the American West, sometimes in ancient Israel, and sometimes under Oedipus’s feet as he wanders around outside Colonus. This track in particular, although (with Eli and all) it feels more biblical than many of its partners, puts me in mind of Greek tragedies, of Sophocles and Euripides. It’s something about the anonymity of the people to whom the title character brings messages, and who chastise him in the final verse; they’re like a more involved Greek chorus. But this is not a tragedy, it’s a happy song. There’s no denying the cheer and energy of that riff, or of Dylan’s singing, or of how the vocal melody interacts with the riff. Kenny Buttrey’s drums clip along like a young horse, delightful hop-capers all over the place. And I sense no sarcasm about the moral at the end.

Actually, the thought just entered my head—can that last line be a partial explanation for the flabbergasting Saved to Empire Burlesque shift I’ve brought up a couple of times before? Once Dylan agreed to let Columbia put a muzzle on his religious material, perhaps he figured exactly this: if you cannot bring Good News, then don’t bring any—and started recording Columbia-stumping covers with Clydie King, quoting the movies, imagining himself a gunslinger, etc.

But back to the Messenger. I love the celebratory mood of the John Wesley Harding version, and the way it exuberantly bridges I Pity the Poor Immigrant and Down Along the Cove. In the last two songs, John Wesley Harding’s fourth musician, Pete Drake on pedal steel, finally arrives, so The Wicked Messenger sounds appropriately like a last hurrah for the three-man core group.

I’ve puzzled over the lyrics a lot but have never reached any satisfying conclusions. The messenger, though called wicked, seems a charming enough guy. On an album like John Wesley Harding, though, where crowds kill St. Augustine and Frankie Lee and almost kill the title character in Drifter’s Escape, sleeping behind the assembly hall (“oftentimes he could be seen returning”) makes the messenger suspect.

A common interpretation is that the messenger is simply a stand-in for Dylan. Again, since The Wicked Messenger is a John Wesley Harding song, that seems a little too easy or simplistic, but it doesn’t seem entirely far-fetched either. In the first verse, we hear that the messenger had “a mind that multiplied the smallest matters.” The tendency toward flattery is definitely not something the Bob Dylan of the 1960s shared. But someone who abandoned protest songs might look back on his early work and, though it’d be an exaggeration, call his youthful outrage the product of a “mind that multiplied the small matters.”

More telling, perhaps, is the second verse, at the end of which the narrator is found carrying a note that says “The soles of my feet: I swear they’re burning!” (when, obviously, anybody could look down at the feet of the messenger and see that it wasn’t so). In the Dylan = Messenger interpretation, this would correspond to Dylan’s surrealist phase of 1965 and 1966. Dylan himself seems to have felt that, via surrealism, he could better come at the truth; but in certain circles this move was not well-received. Hence the criticism heaped on the messenger’s head (“the people that confronted him were many”). And in the third verse comes the famous turning point, the signpost showing the way to Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, and New Morning.

But who knows, really?

Typically, there are cover versions that I enjoy listening to: in this case, three of them.

The earliest is the Legion of Mary’s. Where the studio version of The Wicked Messenger is two minutes long, Jerry Garcia’s group lingered on it so long live that it could reach thirteen minutes. This is done by making that super-memorable riff the centerpiece of the song. Guitar, bass, and saxophone draw it out as long as they can, while Jerry sends ever-metamorphosing tendrils of fire out in all directions from its center.

The next is Patti Smith’s, from her excellent, undersung album Gone Again, recorded in the wake of horrific personal losses, including the passing of her beloved husband Fred (a great songwriter in his own right: see Dream of Life). The album is informed but not dominated by grief. I hear the musicmaking on the record as something Patti used to hold herself up a little while (another way, incidentally, was listening to World Gone Wrong over and over; in her words, “I listened to it 1,000 times, that little CD. I figured that he got me through everything else in my life. Why not this?”—and it was around this time that Bob invited Patti to open for his band in the fall of 1995, and to sing a song—any song she chose!—with him on stage; thus their tender duets on Dark Eyes). Her Wicked Messenger is artful, emphasizing the “wicked” where the Legion of Mary emphasized the riff: a whirlwind of a performance, with unfettered playing from Jay Dee Daugherty on drums and Lenny Kaye and César Diaz on electric guitars, and even wilder singing from Patti. I love her improvised bridge, with its repetitions of “shiver.”

The third cover, and my favorite, comes courtesy of (of course I’m stretching the term here a little) Dylan and his 2005 live band.

I haven’t been shaken by most live Wicked Messengers I’ve heard recordings of, but I’m enamored of the version that opened the April 20^th, 2005 show in Verona, New York. Dylan doesn’t sound like somebody who’s been working at the same job year in, year out for two decades already; on that 2005 Wicked Messenger he and the band sound like early Velvet Underground or like the Holy Modal Rounders. The verses are more than halfway to reggae; the updated chord progression is irresistibly catchy; and there’s a wonderful, completely new instrumental refrain.