42. Trouble in Mind

There’s a rough sketch of this song—the first take—on Trouble No More. It’s interesting as a historical document (Trouble in Mind was the first track attempted at the Slow Train Coming sessions) and in a “Let’s see, how’d this get worked up?” kind of way, but the main thing it does for me is emphasize how inspired a performance the one version we have of Ye Shall Be Changed was, since like Ye Shall Be Changed, Take 1 of Trouble in Mind is missing the overdubs that Wexler and Beckett laid so deliciously thick on the tracks chosen for the album, but unlike Ye Shall Be Changed, there’s not much fire in the performance. Fortunately (for those of us who love this period), Dylan selected a later take of Trouble in Mind for release as the B-side of the Gotta Serve Somebody single, and that take—available officially on the attractively strange Pure Dylan compilation from 2011—has an infinitely better vocal, and gets the full overdub treatment.

Clinton Heylin says of Trouble in Mind that it “defines an essential part of Dylan’s conversion experience, a chilling fear of his own damnation”—an essential part and a lasting one, too: Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody was a year away, and hellish imagery would be transplanted over to our temporal, orbiting earth in (to name a few) 1983’s Death Is Not the End, 1985’s When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky, and all over 2012’s Tempest.

Here on Trouble in Mind, the fear is balanced by the excitement of having found the right path to walk down, and maybe also by the relief the narrator feels now that he understands exactly what he’s up against. The narrator knows he is not invulnerable, and he seems a long way away from achieving the equanimity in the hymns of gratitude and strength that would appear on Saved, but even so, we find him busy clawing his way out of the pit. There’s enough conflict around him and inside him, in any case, that he prays six times for his Lord to “please take away this trouble in mind,” with equal vehemence each time, and no sense, by song’s end, of the prayer having been answered. Instead the narrator cries out, in what Heylin points out is language akin to King David’s Psalms, “How long must I suffer? / How (Lord, ah!) long must I be provoked?”

The full tension of the song is illustrated in the next lines: “Satan will give you a little taste / And he’ll move in with rapid speed / Lord, keep my blind side covered / And see that I don’t bleed!” That “little taste” has, if all the song’s other verses are any indication (with the usual you/I inversion of this era), already been tasted, so that the narrator must flee, and must run faster than the devil at his heels. But he has faith that God is in his corner, and suspects that if God keeps the look-out for the one who’s coming to claim the narrator as his own (“Lord, keep my blind side covered”), this refugee from the kingdom of the Prince of the Power of the Air may find safety yet.

But Trouble in Mind is also a catalogue of “the most underrated pains,” the afflictions of the spirit that the narrator has most closely experienced. It’s no big jump from the agonies of Street-Legal to the narrator here reporting on Satan’s temptation: “Satan whispers to you, ‘Look, I don’t wanna bore you / But when you get tired of that Miss So-and-So, I’ve got another woman for you” (wonderful sustained “you” rhyme here, which I never registered until looking over the lyrics just now). So, too, the unrelenting fourth verse: “Your true love has caught you where you don’t belong / You say, ‘Everybody’s doing it, so I guess it can’t be wrong’ / The truth is far from you, so you know you got to lie / Then you’re all the time defending what you can never justify.” One of my favorite moments in the song is the way Dylan’s voice falters on “guess it can’t,” the feebleness of the excuse making itself apparent even before the sentence is all the way out of the speaker’s mouth. And who among us hasn’t thought that way?—if rarely, perhaps, admitted it outright.

Whenever I haven’t listened to Trouble in Mind for a while, the ending of the second verse replenishes its comedic power. It made me burst out laughing the first time I heard it, and so it still can: “You think you can hide, but you’re never alone / Ask Lot what he thought when his wife turned to stone.” Don’t overlook the delightful Lot/thought internal rhyme, or the vowel link between “hide” and “wife,” but of course the finest part is the flagrant error, snuck in at the very last moment, just as the backing singers are ready to usher in the refrain. Since by this point in the song the rhyme structure has been established, “alone” prepares the mind for what it feels should be impossible as Dylan begins to sing of Lot and his wife, but—sure enough—there it comes… Christopher Ricks calls the move “comically preposterous” and adds, “Take this with a pinch of salt, or a column of it.” But he emphasizes, too, that it’s probably not an accidental error. Given how far along the writer must have been in his Biblical studies by then (just look at “you’ll be serving strangers in a strange and forsaken land,” which echoes the epic curses of “the book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy”—not to mention how steeped in stories of the Hebrew Bible John Wesley Harding already seemed to be, twelve years earlier), I don’t suppose it was. “[T]he words insist that either Dylan is a sloven or he is up to something, something unexpected, diverting … [He] has a great ear for those swerves and shifts that keep a mind—and a language—not only alive but up to the mark.”

There’s a notion often brought up among aficionados that Dylan became a mind-numbingly lazy songwriter in 1979, who did no more in his Gospel songs than rewrite Bible passages. A couplet like the one discussed above is, I think, enough to give the lie to that. A listener predisposed to hostility may not recognize or appreciate the ingenuities at work in Dylan’s songs from the era, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.

Another great moment comes in the lines that close the fifth verse. I love the whole verse, and each line strengthens the engine that makes the final words so powerful, so I’ll just quote it in full: “So many of my brothers, they still want to be the boss / They can’t relate to the Lord’s kingdom, they can’t relate to the cross / They self-inflict punishment on their own broken lives / Put their faith in their possessions, in their jobs or their wives.” That’s how it’s written; but sung it’s more fluid, something like “in their jobs, or, or uhh, in their wives,” giving the impression that the narrator is casting about carelessly and scornfully for further examples of unreliable idols—but only seemingly in scorn, because I get the sense that, to make for a moment a biographical link between Dylan and his narrator, both cited examples (the work of being a songwriter, musician, and performing artist on tour, on the one hand, and a marriage that had lasted twelve years on the other) are things that the songwriter had a lot of experience committing his faith and energies to.

The song lingers five minutes on a single riff, and it’s a catchy riff, but as usual it’s primarily to Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett that I owe the excellence and inexhaustible fascination of the recording. The backing singers are fantastic; all they sing is “trouble in mind—ooh—trouble in mind,” the same words sung in approximately the same way in every refrain, but there is great force in that steadiness, and I love how their curtailed words embrace Dylan’s embellished ones. Mark Knopfler gets four (!) guitar solos, though perhaps two might be better designated as licks with ambitions. The piano and organ are near-constant highlights, but not actually constant, because Wexler and Beckett are too good and subtle for that (which is not to say that unwavering repetition of a riff or hook need in any way be a bad thing; see Fire on Fire's Haystack and Big Blood's Thank You for the Path). Listen to the organ break between the third and fourth verses, the piano and organ laid over the fourth verse, the piano trills in the fifth and sixth (which remind me of the notes that open Neil Young’s Tonight the Night), the organ that swoops in like some bird of prey in the final verse, and the quiet but significant bed laid by the organ for Knopfler’s solo over the fade-out.