43. I Shall Be Released

My personal Dylan history began in earnest near the end of 2010 when one of my closest friends, the poet and novelist Steven Rineer, to whom I dedicate this write-up with renewed thanks, sent me a video (this video: https://youtu.be/KfxTL-vLF3s ) of The Band performing I Shall Be Released, heart streaming out of every pore of Richard Manuel’s closely-filmed face.

I was a nut for chronology in those years, so my instant passion for the song and its writer sent me to Wikipedia, researching how to listen to the work of Bob Dylan in order from first available recording to most recent, as thoroughly as possible. I got the relevant Bootleg Series. The first album outtake of He Was a Friend of Mine hooked me. I did some further research, asked my beloved mother (later to become a Dylan fan as well) to buy me Clinton Heylin’s Behind the Shades Revisited, Recording Sessions, and Revolution in the Air for my twenty-first birthday, which was a week or two away, and I laced up my boots and set off; and completed my journey through the available studio-recorded material three years later, at the end of 2013.

During those three years I hung around a lot on last.fm and online forums, and read a lot of Dylan books. The most penetrating and eye-opening insights I found were, consistently, Ralf Sauter’s; the best book Christopher Ricks’.

My three favorite Dylan albums are… oh yeah, I won’t tell you :P

But hold on a second, this isn’t the preface page of my project! This is my write-up for I Shall Be Released! Back on track, now, Sigismund Sludig, back on track.

Right then. I Shall Be Released: the song that opened the floodgates. There was no “warning that was before the flood;” the music of Bob Dylan just suddenly came bursting into my ears and heart and head, where it promptly took up residence. I’ve been grateful for its presence in all those places ever since.

Curiously, the song that got me started wouldn’t, if Dylan’s own renditions were all I had to go on, be anywhere near this high. It might have climbed into this list’s bottom ten on the strength of live versions from 1994; but that would have been something of a false move, or at least a hasty one, as I only really started listening to post-1987 live recordings (and man, oh man, what a fruitful journey that’s been so far) when I started working on the write-ups for this list.

Other than the original two takes released on the complete Basement Tapes Bootleg Series, Dylan, it seems to me, has always either taken this song too seriously (1975, 1978, 1984) or not seriously enough (basically ever since). Of the two, I prefer the rough, not-so-serious versions: live in 1988, or in 1991, and definitely in 1994, or in 2005 when the song is arranged as something of a country barroom sing-along. I’d be curious to hear the January 20^th, 1986 performance, for which Dylan rewrote the lyrics (see Eyolf Østrem’s Dylanchords site) in a way that embraces the spirit I’ve always heard in it, emphasizing the metaphysical rather than the physical. By contrast, preceding a great roughhouse performance on May 11^th, 1991, Dylan introduced I Shall Be Released as “one of my prison songs,” and indeed that’s what I generally hear in his vocal approaches to it: a song about being unjustly imprisoned and hoping for release. (This calls to mind Björn Waller's interpretation of Side B of John Wesley Harding as Dylan's personal take on All-American Boy.)

When Jerry Garcia sings I Shall Be Released, however, in his and Melvin Seals’ terrific live renditions, and especially when Richard Manuel sings it, what I hear is a song about the longing of the spirit to be free of the body, a song that doesn’t look to suicide as an answer, but that, as it were, awaits the mercy of God’s liberating hand (“any day now, any day now”). It is in this spirit that the song spoke to me and took up residence within the inner chambers of my heart.

The Band did well to sequence their I Shall Be Released as the closer of Music from Big Pink. The piano comes in all pretty, sad, yearning, and then Richard Manuel starts singing in that chilling falsetto of his, and he’s prettier, sadder, and yearning harder than the piano. The Band’s other singers, Rick Danko and Levon Helm, add the weight of their voices to the refrain. Levon Helm does something crazy with his snare (“John Simon’s idea,” Rob Bowman writes, “as Helm turned his snare drum upside down and rippled his fingers through the actual snares”). Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson, who do the most to give Music from Big Pink its characteristic instrumental sound, are sparing with their contributions. All is so arranged as to give the narrator’s hurting, longing, ageless soul—given life so lovingly by Richard Manuel’s incredible voice—a spiral staircase to the heavens, which his feet couldn’t yet ascend, but which his words and desire could, and do.

There’s not much in music quite as spine-tingling as Richard Manuel singing “Yet I swear I see my reflection / Somewhere so high abve this wall.” Even the words that cleave closest to the “prison song” Dylan may or may not have originally envisioned—“All day long, I hear him shouting so loud / Just crying out that he was framed”—take on a spookier character when Richard delivers them, bringing to mind, again, not so much a literal prison made of bricks as “the chains of the skyway,” so that I think of “I was born here and I’ll die here, against my will,” from Not Dark Yet.

I remember how disappointed I felt to discover that, in an age when solo careers (or at least occasional solo albums!) by musicians who started out in famous bands were so common—a tradition carried on in distinguished fashion, in our day, by Radiohead, and moreso still by Cerberus Shoal/Fire on Fire—no Richard Manuel solo album existed. How could it be, I thought—wasn’t Richard involved in the writing of as many as four songs on Music from Big Pink? And of three on The Band? And of two on my favorite, Stage Fright… well, so, a pattern emerges. Substance addiction can eat up creativity as it can eat up life, and so someone who should have been among the greatest songwriters (as he was one of the greatest singers) of our time, didn’t leave a whole lot behind.

There’s a song I cherish that probably not enough people (especially of the kind who are into The Band) have heard. It’s called Beautiful Thing, a Richard Manuel/Rick Danko composition, and it opens Eric Clapton’s extraordinary No Reason to Cry. “For me [Richard] was the true light of the Band,” Clapton has said. “The other guys were fantastic talents, of course, but there was something of the holy madman about Richard. He was raw.”

I also recommend Clapton’s song Holy Mother from the album August, written upon Richard Manuel’s passing. It’s glossily arranged but modestly written, and touching, and ends with a glorious minute-and-a-half long guitar solo that, the first time I heard it, sent chills continually down my back.