Before I commenced study in 2010, I hadn’t known a thing about Dylan’s Gospel songs or albums. It took me aback to learn that there existed a (largely critically reviled; Shot of Love and Saved regularly appeared right near the bottom of the ranked album lists I found online, alongside Self Portrait (!), Empire Burlesque (!!), Knocked Out Loaded (!!!), Down in the Groove, and Good as I Been to You (!)) pocket of the discography in which the lyrical themes were explicitly Christian. I remember that I loved the album cover and title of Slow Train Coming right away—long before I would permit myself to listen to it—and that I thought Gotta Serve Somebody was a brilliant song title. I could hear the badass tone of voice the title implied: “You gotta serve somebody!”
I remember meeting up with my friend Kareem Nelson when I had only got as far as Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde. He took me to his favorite Manhattan record store, where I picked up the secondhand LP of Infidels that now presides on my living room wall. I think I had read a little about Infidels by then in Clinton Heylin’s Recording Sessions book, and was expecting to like it—and though eventually I did, in fact, turn into something of a diehard Infidels fanatic, it took me at least fifty full listens to begin to hear the album’s glory…
I’ve always been drawn to the corners of an artist’s discography that get the worst rep. I think it’s because, as a kid, I loved A Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Division Bell as much as, say, A Saucerful of Secrets or Animals, and it confused me to discover later that the post-Waters era, and especially Momentary Lapse (the sound on which did come to wear on me as I got older, until its miraculous restoration—with new Nick Mason drum tracks!—last year), was considered second- or third-tier Floyd. In this way, I learned early not to trust critical consensus. I’m not sure that, in terms of my interest in rock and roll (& related) music, any other lesson has served me equally well.
But wasn’t I talking about Kareem just now? His favorite Dylan was Nashville Skyline, because of the oddball country singing voice Dylan uses there. But he also expressed appreciation for the Gospel era, and we both laughed aloud at the badassery of Gotta Serve Somebody, the title and the phrase. I think he quoted the full refrain line to me that day.
Many months later, I shut the curtains in my room, switched off the lights, put on my good headphones, and listened to Slow Train Coming for the first time. The opening song, so long admired in theory, disappointed me. I may have hyped the record up so much for myself that (as also happened later with Infidels) a first listen couldn’t match the stellar expectations my imagination had created, a phenomenon akin to how the greatest work an artist might make will no doubt and nevertheless fall short of what they had actually intended or hoped to make, or of the dream-impulse with which the work began.
It took the live recordings to make me love Gotta Serve Somebody. Nowadays I think the studio version is excellent, too (regarding which Steven Rineer: “Dylan doesn’t push away any introduced ambiguity… maybe that’s why Serve Somebody grooves like one of the coke-snortinness-let’s-fuck gospel songs of all time… I mean that’s what I think when it first kicks in… ‘honey, where is our cocaine and lube? I’m listening to Dylan’s first gospel record…’”) but remain partial to it live in 1979, 1980… a little less so in 1981 but it’s still great, just kind of fast, whereas I like my Gotta Serve Somebody slow; seven minutes long, ideally, if the band can get there.
It’s one of only a few Slow Train Coming tracks that, to my ears, found its footing live right away, rather than (like Slow Train or When You Gonna Wake Up) improving slowly and peaking in 1980 or 1981. It helps that the studio Gotta Serve Somebody had no horns. (Cool unintended pun there.)
Also significant is its position in the setlist. The all-Gospel shows would open with Regina McCrary’s story about a woman trying to board a train without a ticket, then a six-song set by the backing singers accompanied only by Terry Young on piano, a set that began with the always stunning If I’ve Got My Ticket, Lord and ended with This Train (Is Bound for Glory). At that point, the rest of the nine-person band would get onstage, and all together they’d kick right into the percussion-heavy, gravelly groove of Gotta Serve Somebody. It made for an interesting narrative early on, before the papers announced ticket buyers just what they had gotten themselves in for. A few instrumental bars would go by as the Warfield crowd went wild for Bob Dylan, and then the singer would intone, in a matter-of-fact, almost monotone voice, “You may be an ambassador to England or France / You may like to gambol, you may like to dance.” More cheers, since after all the song was a hit single. But as Slow Train Coming song followed Slow Train Coming song, the audience began to feel puzzled (a few songs into the recording of the November 1st Warfield show, the first of this all Gospel period, you can hear somebody say, “Wow, you think he’s going to play the whole new album?”), and once all the Slow Train material was done (with Covenant Woman, a new song, in the mix), Bob and the band blasted right on through to the songs that would appear on Saved—songs no one in the audience would have heard before! In the Garden closed the main set off, there was an encore break, then the band came back for Blessed Be the Name, and ended the night with Pressing On.
“When we first went out and were playing only those songs, it was definitely passionate,” Fred Tackett said in a 2017 interview, “and dangerous. People got upset…”
Gotta Serve Somebody, then, was the first stab of the dagger—a feint, to some degree, because the concertgoer could think, “Yeah, it makes sense to open with the new hit,” but deadly earnest in another. On the album as in the live set, Gotta Serve Somebody is our introduction to the unfamiliar world of the new batch of songs. It’s as if Dylan wanted to say, in both cases, “All right, listen: this is where I’m at. Take it or leave it.” And live, you can’t get away from that chugging groove, from the drums and tambourines and bass rhythm and the backing singers who lend their voices to the refrains even when Fred Tackett is soloing through an entire verse-and-refrain sequence. And then there’s Dylan’s rhythm guitar. The Gospel era as a whole was a highpoint for Bob the rhythm guitar player. It’s as if, between ’79 and ’81, Bob wanted to give his all in every department he had control over, from the lyrics to the singing to the guitar and harmonica parts to the way the studio recordings were done, all the way to the setlist and the sound and make-up of the live band.
In one sense, as I said, the song is deadly earnest, and in another it’s playful. Dylan was changing the lyrics around from Day One, dropping the Terry/Timmy/Bobby/Zimmy verse. By 1980 there was a whole great new verse: “May like to drink whiskey, might like to blow smoke / You may have money-power or you may be broke / You may think you’re living, you may think you’re dead / May be sleeping on nails, may be sleeping in a featherbed, but…” Variations became the norm. In 1987 you had (maybe accidentally, but when you’re a musician a lot of brilliance is born out of accidents), “May be naked / May be living in France / Might be wearing a dress / Might be wearing pants,” as if the mere fact of a person living in France were enough to pinpoint some particular wardrobe calamity. Come the boogied-up 2019 revival, there’s (among much else that’s new): “You may be in Las Vegas having lots of fun / You may be hiding in the bushes, holding a smoking gun.” The lyrical pattern is one that can be endlessly expanded and reworked, and so it has been, because no matter what, no matter who or where you are or where you think you’re going, “you’re gonna have to serve somebody / Yes you are, you’re gonna have to serve somebody / It may be the devil and it may be the Lord… but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”
Incidentally, with the “you/I” inversion frequently employed on Slow Train Coming, the early lyrics fit in a dig at the songwriter: “You may be living in a dome” apparently refers to an ostentatious dome-roofed structure Dylan himself had recently moved into.
I think the 1979 and 1980 live versions were the most powerful, but almost every live rendition I’ve heard that postdates 1980 has been awesome, too. The performance that opens Dylan & The Dead isn’t going to make any Dylan fans into Grateful Dead lovers, but for those of us who are already attuned to what the Dead are up to—especially us Deadheads with a taste for their ’80s—it’s a great performance. It’s worth honing in on Brent Mydland’s organ (when isn’t it? Mydland was king). But I also really like the “call and response” vocal ending, with Dylan leading and the Dead singers following.
My favorite of the small collection I’ve built up of post-Gospel era live performances is the one that opens Dylan’s April 3rd, 2011 concert in Taipei. It starts like It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) from At Budokan but then veers off in its own direction, and culminates in a glorious Dylan solo on the “circus organ.” Second favorite falls to July 1st, 1988 in Wantaugh, NY, with G.E. Smith playing lead, but near the end switching to a riff and letting Dylan’s electric take over.
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