40. When You Gonna Wake Up

It isn’t necessary to share the faith that Dylan preached from the stage between 1979 and 1981 to appreciate the songs he wrote then. Look to Christopher Ricks: “I am not myself a Christian believer, being an atheist. One delight of Dylan’s Christian songs can arise from finding (to your surprise and not chagrin) that your own system of beliefs doesn’t have a monopoly of intuition, sensitivity, scruple, and concern … it is inspiriting to meet a heartfelt expression of faith that would constitute—if, say, you were ever to find yourself converted—so true an example as to become a reason. If I were ever to become a Christian, it would be because of the humane substantiation that is to be heard in many a poem by George Herbert. And in many a song by Dylan.”

Not being Muslim, or atheist, or orthodox Jewish, or whatever the heck Van Morrison considered himself in 1982, certainly doesn’t keep me from heartfelt admiration of, and love and gratitude for, Richard & Linda Thompson’s Pour Down Like Silver, Vic Chesnutt’s At the Cut, Matisyahu’s shake off the dust … ARISE, or Van’s Beautiful Vision.

But it is good to love Slow Train Coming and also be a Christian believer. This way, it needn’t be only the musical flare and polish that draw me in, or the fervor and timber of Dylan’s voice; the lyrics can mean something important, too.

When You Gonna Wake Up is one of those Slow Train Coming songs in which I interpret most of the apparently outward-directed injunctions as really being aimed at the narrator himself. That’s how I hear the refrain, and the latter four of the eight verses. The fifth, knowing the little we do about Dylan’s biography, seems especially pertinent as a reminder from the singer to himself: “Spiritual advisors and gurus to guide your every move / Instant inner peace and every step you take has got to be approved.” I imagine that the writer, committed long-term to his faith but only temporarily to those who were teaching him that faith, was eager to be out of the shadow of the teachers and finding his own way. The verses that follow also seem to take the shape of reminders: the kinds of things that the new believer would want to tell himself again and again, night after night after night.

“Do you ever wonder just what God requires? / You think he’s just an errand boy to satisfy your wandering desires?”

“You can’t take it with you and you know it’s too worthless to be sold / They tell you ‘Time is money’ as if your life was worth its weight in gold.”

And, altered slightly in live versions, “There’s a man on the cross and He been crucified / You know who He is, and you know why He died.”

Powerful reminders.

I love Slow Train Coming for its music, for its depth and darkness, and for Dylan’s being in such incredible voice, but I also love it for the way it’s an outstretched hand to somebody trying to live life as a believer. I can’t remember a single listen to this song when I wasn’t glad to hear the refrain repeated so many times. “When you gonna wake up? / When you gonna wake up? / When you gonna wake up and strengthen the things that remain?”

That needn’t even be a very religious image, by the way. Does anybody who’s trying to live carefully, and to appreciate that “time is short and the days are sweet,” not have an entire category of “things that remain” that they know they would be better off strengthening instead of idly neglecting?

It’s a humble image, too. “Never assume that you’re awake,” it seems to say, “or that you’re not about to fall asleep again.” The Jesus of the Gospels urges vigilance, and so does When You Gonna Wake Up. And I do believe that the song urges it, most of all, for the narrator himself. Otherwise it would sound like Property of Jesus or Dead Man, Dead Man, agitated songs whose narrators are giving others more attention than they’re dedicating to their own spiritual life. If all the narrator of When You Gonna Wake Up were doing were preaching, without a sense of his own culpability, the song wouldn’t carry the force it does.

The second, third, and fourth verses are addressed not to any individual but to the nation, to America, which a year later would be giving Dylan cause to write Making a Liar out of Me. And the first verse is there to make an impression, to set the tone. “God don’t make promises that He don’t keep” (so, be warned; waking up is worth the effort), “You got some big dreams, baby, but in order to dream you gotta still be asleep.” That’s a line that I find both clever and badass (or, more formally, “formidably impressive,” as the Oxford Dictionary defines ‘badass’). It wouldn’t be Slow Train Coming without that sweet-talking, cajoling, and halfway patronizing tone. But the tone is compassionate and caring, too, because the things the narrator is on about are really very important to him, and he thinks they may be important to “you” too, and if there’s a chance of that, well, he’s going to take it. “Baby” is, after all, a term of endearment: the narrator likes the person he’s talking to. And that makes a lot of difference in a verse that’s trying to get a message across.

Musically, I find When You Gonna Wake Up irresistible, and that in every incarnation that I’m familiar with. When I first got to know the album, and started listening to the Gospel concert recordings, it puzzled me that the Dylan community at large didn’t count When You Gonna Wake Up among the big highlights of the period. To each their own; me, I’m gripped from the first commanding seconds of the intro bars (which came to mind later in a different context, when I discovered Van Morrison's You Gotta Make It through the World, the great A Period of Transition song, which sounds like those few seconds of introduction extended into a whole song—though as the dates go, Van’s came first). I stay gripped through the body of the song (with the organ pyrotechnics, Muscle Shoals horns, and Mark Knopfler rhythm on the album, or the Jim Keltner powerhouse drumming and the backing singers joining Dylan for every refrain live), and remain in the song’s grip straight up to the dramatic end.

The ending has my favorite moment in the song’s studio version, namely the fantastic horn riff after “There’s a man on a cross and He’s been crucified for you.” Similarly, in the song’s live performances, my favorite bit is the backing singers joining Dylan for the closing verse. The performers had to make up for the missing horns somehow, and did.

Live in the all-Gospel shows, When You Gonna Wake Up always preceded When He Returns. It may not have been a matter only of putting the two “When”-songs together. I think of it as another of Dylan’s “notes to self (and, if anyone happens to care, others)” : When am I gonna wake up? When He returns? No, that’d be too late. I’d better wake up sooner than that.

By 1981, with a second lead guitarist and a second drummer, and a slow, bluesy, soulful delivery of the first verse, the full band not kicking in until “remain,” the song was at its tightest. The Trouble No More curators apparently concur, because on the regular (curtailed) release, they represented When You Gonna Wake Up with a tremendous performance from July 9^th in Drammen, Norway. And it’s the track they led the Trouble No More announcement with.

I remember the day of that announcement. I remember going to listen to the song on the top floor of one of the libraries in the university where I teach, in the open-air walkways facing onto the quadrangle and all its lovingly tended plants and trees. The thrill of a Gospel era Bootleg Series (eight audio discs plus another full-concert digital download!) materializing at last must have seared that first listen right into the circuits of my brain. It was a warm September day and there were only a few clouds overhead. There was nobody to see me and I danced as I pleased.