1. Pressing On

And here we are. The cat is out of the well. My favorite Bob Dylan song is Pressing On, as it has been since the evening I first heard it, listening to the boot of the November 1st, 1979 concert that opened the Warfield residency. And Saved is not only my favorite Dylan studio album, but for several years now, it’s been my favorite album by anybody: my favorite album “of all time,” as the phrase (impossibly) goes.

Bob Dylan is (with Colleen Kinsella and Peter Stampfel) one of my three favorite vocalists in music. I concur with Eyolf Østrem that “Dylan’s best singing happened ... during the Gospel period.” And within that Gospel period, I think the best vocal performances tended to happen when Dylan was singing Pressing On. This extends partly to its studio recording; Saving Grace is my favorite Dylan vocal on Saved (and in his entire discography) but, if you still remember Ralf Sauter’s parlor game, my favorite sung word on Saved is “rein” (as in, “Adam given the devil...”).

It’s definitely true of Pressing On live. Dylan would do this extraordinary thing in most refrains, where his voice would leap high up to sing the words “pressing on” the third time, as high as his backing singers, but as the line unfurled, Dylan would drop suddenly and thrillingly back down, so that “Lord” (the last word of the line) would be as low as the first “pressing on” he had sung, even as the backing singers’ voices stayed up high.

The 1980 song I Will Love Him has Dylan singing every chorus with unbelievable passion, but in any live Pressing On you’d choose to name, Dylan turns each phrase and each line into a dazzling tongue of flame. I love the Trouble No More curators’ pick of the November 6th, 1979 Warfield performance (on Disc 2). It’s representative of how good the vocals usually are. It doesn’t capture the versatility, as no one performance can, but dive into any other show with a Pressing On closer, especially those that preceded the recording of Saved (since the arrangement was slower then and Dylan more exclusively focused on nuance), and you’ll see.

One might think that the shows from January and February 1980 would have lost some of the autumn 1979 intensity, since though a few months had passed, the setlist was completely the same, but if anything, the band was warming up. I love to imagine that as the fire in the hearts and hands of the performers grew brighter and stronger, the world outside was wrapped in winter. Spooner Oldham relates: “[We had very bad weather] several days running. We were on a bus and it was like a storm system was just hours ahead of us, each town we went. One town in particular I remember—I think, Portland, Oregon—as we were driving into the city that evening to our hotel, the power was out on that side of the town. It was total darkness, there was a lot of snow and the wind was howling. My thoughts as I went to bed that evening were, ‘Well, I might as well gear myself for not playing the show tomorrow night because there’s no way it can happen.’ But the next evening we were there and everybody else seemed to be there. They had chains on their cars and four-wheelers, and everybody just gathered in there. Of course the power was on by then. But there were several days of just bad weather, but that didn’t seem to deter folks any. I was pretty amazed at that.”

And all these concerts on all these cold, windy, snow-buffeted nights ended with Pressing On.

Although Dylan chose to let the song open Side B of Saved (adding evidence to the notion I got in my days of traveling around the USA from State Radio concert to State Radio concert, that album closers make amazing set openers, and vice versa—Calvado’s Chopper and Fall of the American Empire as the opening song of a concert, aw man—and in Dylan’s case, Changing of the Guards live in 1978!), Pressing On was a perfect way to end the live show, and a textbook case of saving the best for last. Naturally, not everyone who’s into Dylan, or even who thinks the Gospel era was his peak, will point to Pressing On as the crown jewel, but I think it would be hard to argue that any other single song in the Gospel was as strong melodically; as Clinton Heylin put it, Pressing On left concertgoers with a “second encore that even agnostics could hum.” I remember reading an attendee's account of a very early Warfield show, at which (the story went) one particularly disgruntled and disappointed listener was on his way out the door, the encore having offered only Blessed Is the Name, but then rushed back ecstatically as the first words of Pressing On left Dylan’s mouth. When the performance was over, his applause was heartfelt.

The arrangement helped. Live in 1979 and early 1980, the song began with Dylan playing piano in that unique, unsteady way of his, and then beginning to sing. The backing singers joined him. And that was all, for a while—just them and him, through the first verse and on into repetitions of the refrain. As yet another refrain began, Dylan would rise suddenly from the piano, so that the only music in the hall was the singers’ voices. To this day, whenever I hear a Pressing On from that era, I get chills all over. The crowd goes absolutely nuts. Those at the show in person would watch as Dylan, microphone in hand, walked from the side-stage piano up front and center. The intensity peaking, the band would take up the song, and it would be time for the second verse, and then another few refrains, before Dylan finally—with a “Thank you,” or a “Good night,” or just silently—left the stage for good. But the band would play on. The other singers would keep singing. And the audience’s enthusiasm erupted.

Unreal-good.

The sound of the live band as it plays the second half of Pressing On is, alongside Fire on Fire playing Haystack (the closer of The Orchard, their full-length album) the apotheosis of a certain rootsy folk sound that has a precious and apparently permanent place in my heart. There are certain blends of sounds that hit the spot in a way that’s difficult to account for. Reggae with a touch of rock is the band sound I am most vulnerable to; the sound of the Gospel band illuminating Pressing On is the runner-up.

Since the dramatic live arrangement was obviously not going to work on record, Dylan and the band (in one of the few large-scale creative acts at the Saved sessions; most of the songs had perfect arrangements already) came up with an ingenious reworking. Take 1 (on Trouble No More, Disc 3) shows them trying to figure it out. It seems that Dylan liked the new version so much that he used it as the basis for the interesting fast and fiery version that (with Are You Ready? replacing Blessed Is the Name) ended the concerts of the Third Gospel Tour in April and May 1980.

On or offstage, the song was a powerhouse, and I love that Dylan chose it to mark the opening of the three-song run (Pressing On, In the Garden, Saving Grace) that I consider the emotional and musical pinnacle of my favorite album of all time. Its passion is of such a different sort from Solid Rock, the closer of Side A. In Solid Rock, the narrator is hanging on to Jesus in the midst of the endless raging storm that is life on earth. In Pressing On, the world is quiet (relatively speaking), but the narrator’s heart in motion. With his own wavering human steps, on his own frail feet, he is walking forward into the half-light of the mountains, carrying his cross. He is not only relying on his God for protection and salvation, as he did in Solid Rock. Here he is girding up his loins, shaking the dust off his feet, and moving of his own volition in the direction he wants to go. “It’s discouraging at times,” as Saving Grace has it, and “Temptation’s not an easy thing,” as more local lyrics emphasize, but the narrator is ready: “Nothing now can hold you down—nothing that you lack.” 

I love the first verse as well; it’s like I Believe in You with wings, or the meeting ground of I Believe in You and Saving Grace. “Many try to stop me, try to shake me up in my mind / They say, ‘Prove to me that He is Lord. Show me a sign.’” And with a wondering, amazed assurance, the narrator says—not to them, but to himself, and indirectly to us, who are privileged to listen in to his thoughts—“What kind of sign they need when it all comes from within, / When what’s lost has been found, what’s to come has already been?”

I’ll emphasize one final time that Saved is an inward-looking record, or if outward-looking then only to God, the one figure to whom the songs’ narrators feel they need to account for themselves to. The rest of the world (so prominent in Slow Train Coming, and soon to return to prominence in Shot of Love) falls away. The narrator confronts his Lord. The songs are animated alternately by gratitude, joy, serenity, “indefatigable” commitment (thanks, C. Ricks), and always by honesty, vulnerability, precision, and care.

And then there’s the refrain line. Clinton Heylin identifies it as a gloss on a verse in the Epistle to the Philippians, but Dylan makes it his own. I remember talking in 2013 with a man—the father of my Precious Angel—who has always been one of my foremost spiritual mentors, and telling him about Dylan’s Gospel songs, and about how much Pressing On meant to me. He smiled  appreciatively, and said, “Yeah, that’s right. ‘Pressing on to the higher calling of my Lord’—that’s exactly it. It’s a journey we’ll never complete, since there’s no way for us to get all the way there. But it’s what you want God to find you doing when your time comes to die.”

I’ve written of the songs that form touchstones of my faith: Dylan’s, Cohen’s, Morrison’s, Thompson’s. Saved is bursting with them. At this point in my life, Pressing On is my favorite Dylan song not only because it’s excellent, but because it has been a real guiding force in my life. As Christopher Ricks wrote, it is “so true an example as to become a reason” for me to keep walking down the path I have chosen. I’m not certain whether it’s a common phenomenon for the belief, or intention, that a person holds dearest and most profound to find its expression in a song—a song, moreover, whose torrents of meaning (musical, lyrical, spiritual) drop like a waterfall into the innermost recesses of that person’s heart. But I do know for sure that it happens sometimes, since for me, it happens here.

Often, in online discussions of music, with all their accustomed hyperbole, you’ll come across the question: what albums have changed your life? That shouldn’t be an easy question to answer, and unless you cleave to the flighty, casual spirit in which the question is asked, the correct answer might be “none.” I do find myself thinking the matter over now and again, though, and have realized that there are two albums I can offer as a sincere answer: Slow Train Coming and Saved. Not only did these two albums change my life, but they have done so again and again, and continue to do so. They are integral pieces of my life. They brim with lessons, reminders,  inspiration, strength, and love. In the words of a much younger Dylan, they say to the believer, “Good luck. I hope you make it,” and offer themselves up as walking sticks.

Earlier this week, on November 3rd, in the late evening, I went out to our eight-floor balcony. I looked at the hills, the trees, the courtyard, the building across from ours, and the lights of the town, and I listened to the November 6th, 1979 Pressing On. I was immediately captivated by the performance, which fact came as no surprise; still, every time the song (or any song) catches me like that, I feel happy and grateful. At the point when Bob rose from his seat at the piano, my heart swelled; the music seemed to lift me up whole, and to transport me. As Bob Dylan, Regina McCrary, Helena Springs, and Monalisa Young sang out their prayer of hope and fortitude and praise, and as Jim Keltner, Tim Drummond, Fred Tackett, Spooner Oldham, and Terry Young began to weave that immaculate Pressing On sound around the others’ voices, the whole world in which I stood seemed to melt into light and peace.

I stayed there in the softness of the evening, breathing slowly and deeply, overcome by gladness, and thought that in certain moments of insight—at the right time, glimpsed from the right angle—the world was beautiful beyond belief, and did not hide that beauty. To accept that beauty for what it is, or for what it may be, and to believe in the fullness and truth of that beauty and peace, and to use one’s own existence to try and help that peace and fullness be revealed, as I think Bob Dylan the artist has, is something of what I understand pressing on to the higher calling of the Lord to mean.

2. Covenant Woman

This write-up is dedicated to Hannah Lewis.

I’m not sure what to make of Dylan slipping Covenant Woman in among the Slow Train Coming songs at the all-Gospel live shows. Was it brought some fifteen minutes forward because Slow Train didn’t have enough ballads, or because Saved had too many? Was it so that it could better work with its companion-piece Precious Angel, which was but a Slow Train behind? Was its advance appearance evidence of a special affection for the song, akin to mine?

Well, who’s to know? But one thing I will say, on the off-chance that you’re finding yourself appalled by all these Gospel songs sweeping the top of my list. My affection for the compositions of 1979 is in good company; if we’re to believe Fred Tackett (and my sense is that Dylan loves Tackett, certainly as a guitarist and maybe also as an enduring friend; in the late-era interview in which Dylan spoke with great affection of Mike Bloomfield, he used his next breath to bring up Fred and Steve Ripley of the 1981 band), this affection is at least partly shared by their creator. In a video interview from back in 2007, Tackett said, “[Dylan’s] gospel songs that he wrote were excellent, I mean, they were great. He still says some of the best music he made was that period.”—an intriguing “still,” borne out in 2017 by Dylan’s mention of In the Garden. So while Dylan’s list of his own favorites would surely feature way more 1960s songs than mine has, an undying love for the Gospel era would, if Tackett speaks the truth, be in evidence too.

Of course, what Dylan thinks of his own work is neither here nor there, for our purposes. This is Sigismund Ashlay Sludig’s unrepentantly personal list, and Covenant Woman (hand in hand with my #1) stands way up high on the mountaintop, with a view to all the mountain chains and valleys below and roundabout, as well as, off in the foggy horizon, to an outline of the ocean.

But such imagery is just to describe the song’s stature in my heart. It isn’t the image I see when I listen to Covenant Woman. As presented on Saved, it’s like a follow-up to I Believe in You; with all those chiming acoustic guitars, it’s got something of the Blood on the Tracks Minneapolis sound, and its landscape is the dusty desolation of the roads down which I Believe in You’s narrator must wander.

Over the months that I spent composing this series, I wasn’t positive about the order in which my #1 and #2 should appear. Though I kept Covenant Woman tentatively at #2 on my work-list, every time I listened to it, I would think, “Well, no... come on... this is my favorite Dylan song. It’s perfect. How could anything top it?” And I’d trundle off to listen to my selection for #1, and each time I would have to concede that, yeah, okay, Covenant Woman should stay put at #2.

Clinton Heylin has unpleasant things to say about the Saved version, but me, I think it’s beautiful. It is shorn of some of the melodic flourishes that adorned Covenant Woman live, but I think Dylan’s vocal delivery is amazing, the bassline brilliantly catchy (especially during the high refrains—“For making your prayers known...”), the organ accompaniment and solos nigh on incomparable (if In the Garden didn’t exist, I’d strike that “nigh on”), the acoustic guitars a lush bed of soil for the other instruments to twine up from. It’s a terrific contrast to the album’s spirited opening volley, A Satisfied Mind/Saved, and while I would have no complaints if more of the live vocal and piano melodies had stayed intact, I do like the way that the studio Covenant Woman’s modest sense of melody ushers in the full-on melodic wash of What Can I Do for You?

Nevertheless, the performances of Covenant Woman that I love best hail from the first week at the Warfield, with my current picks for “Covenant Woman at its most exceedingly beautiful” settling on November 2nd, 1979 and November 7th, 1979—neither on Trouble No More, unfortunately, but then the curators’ pick, November 20th (Disc 1), is no slouch either (listen to the organ solo from 5:05 to 5:42); and Trouble No More does also give us a remarkable outtake from the Saved sessions, not one that I think can trump the late take that Dylan eventually chose instead, but a good and fascinating one all the same; I love Dylan’s husky vocals, and the way he has the melody fall on the final word of each line of the verses.

Anyway, it seems that in those early November days, Bob was in touch with the spirit of his song to an uncannily deep extent, and the band was right behind him. I can never get enough of the little piano run (six or seven notes) that tended to fall between the first and second, and then between the third and fourth lines of each verse, or of the way Dylan’s voice spirals around certain words (“star,” “cup”). The refrains boast not only passion, but also very particular and surprising melodies, as well as a vocal delivery sensitive enough to allow Dylan to move from whisper-soft singing (“And I just want to tell you that I intend,” “I just want to thank you once again”) up to the wail of “prayers known unto heaven for me” in a way that feels perfectly natural.

That early November arrangement has three stages: two of them are the two sections of the refrain, one tender and one explosive, and the third is the verses, as light and powdery to the touch as fresh-fallen snow. The song is like a fire in the hearth: sometimes the flames lick lazily at the wood, sometimes they climb up around it joyfully and playfully, and sometimes the wood is burnt all the way through and the fire crackles and the flames shoot out and fill the whole furnace.

But between the lyrics and the individual elements of the music—the tempo, the drums, the organ, the piano, the bass—the impression I get is not akin to the darker songs in Planet Waves, where I feel I am safe and warm inside a house, though the house itself is surrounded by night, winter, and snow; in Covenant Woman, I feel like I am standing out in the great rolling prairie, particularly like that of Colorado’s South Park, a high plateau ensconced between even higher mountain chains; and that as I stand in the wind and the night, I see one little house in the distance, the subdued light of its fireplace gleaming out through the house’s windows. The closing lyrics of Devendra Banhart’s beautiful song The Body Breaks come to mind: “But within the dark, there is a shine / One tiny spark that is yours and mine.” A great expanse of cold wind and darkness, and in its midst, a small but disproportionately powerful blaze.

The corresponding aspect of Covenant Woman—the way the narrator’s love and gratitude toward the woman of the title, a selfless love traveling back and forth between two fragile humans, seems like a steady beacon in an overwhelming and hungry black night, a beacon that for all its frailty is pregnant with meaning and holiness (“Each small candle lights a corner of the dark,” as the central line in another of my all-time favorite songs goes)—this aspect is representative of something I love and treasure about Dylan’s Gospel period as a whole: namely, the way that those thirty or so songs (Slow Train Coming and its outtakes, Saved, and the mid-to-late-1980 compositions that either went unrecorded or filtered into the Shot of Love sessions), while basking in the light of salvation, contend with the darkness that stays put both inside and outside the believer. For every What Can I Do for You?, there is a Cover Down, Pray Through or a Yonder Comes Sin. There’s Pressing On, but there’s Trouble in Mind. There’s When He Returns, but there’s Property of Jesus too. Even inside a song that glows as bright as Covenant Woman, there’s the line, “We are strangers in a land we’re passing through.” The backdrop to faith—which is to say, life, with all its doubts, hesitations, injustices, sorrow, and suffering—never falls out of sight.

Faith, in Dylan’s music, is not an escape; it is no plastic film that covers up something cheap and makes it look shiny. Faith is a way of being in the world. Collectively, Dylan’s Gospel songs make for an amazingly rich portrait (though not, of course, an exhaustive one) of the walk of faith—notwithstanding that they were written by someone who was only just setting out upon that road! So it doesn’t surprise me to hear Tackett say that Dylan continues to value his compositions of ’79 and ’80; their power and wisdom do not seem to diminish with the passing of years or the accumulation of experience. I’ve been living with Dylan’s Gospel era for a decade, and through all these years my own faith has been expanding, becoming (in a certain sense) more complicated, and (hopefully) fuller and more fruitful too; but the songs have continued to be my friends and guides, as touching, inspiring, and commanding now as they were on first encounter. I should get back to you when I’m on my deathbed, but at this point, at least, the songs’ power, beauty, and sensitivity seem inexhaustible.

That inexhaustibility is as present in the music as in the lyrics. It’s amazing to me that these songs of Dylan’s, which strike at me so hard with their lyrical and emotional content, also align as closely as they do with my personal standards of musical excellence.

Take my beloved Jim Keltner, for example. I’m a huge fan of complicated, so-called “busy” drumming—drum parts that are full of surprises and dynamics and identifiably different parts—for the best example of what I mean, see Barriemore Barlow’s playing on Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play, or if you don’t have a spare forty-five minutes, Clive Barker on Up to Me, off of Tull’s more famous Aqualung. Like most singer-songwriters, Dylan doesn’t go in much for that kind of drumming (with prominent exceptions, to be sure, like Levon Helm on Planet Waves and Howie Wyeth on Desire and live with the Revue). In the winter months (2012-13) that I spent listening to every available boot from 1979 and 1980, I thought of Keltner as another in a line of competent but ultimately plain drummers. But the more I go back to those concerts, and the more I listen to Saved, the more I come to admire Keltner’s work. It’s subtle, but it’s wild. In those early live Covenant Womans, Jim is all over the place: sometimes tender as a night breeze against sleeping leaves, sometimes like the deep, low, long rumble that shakes the earth when a freight train goes by, and sometimes like thunder on the mountain. He’s never predictable and he never loses focus. (According to interviews with Fred Tackett, it was Jim who would get most of the musicians to dedicate a couple hours every night after the show to reviewing the recording of the concert they had just played, to see where and how they could continue to improve. Little wonder the band sounded better in 1980 than it did in 1979.) And to think that, most likely, one or two of these early live runthroughs of Covenant Woman moved Jim Keltner to tears...

The lyrics of Covenant Woman mean as much to me as Saving Grace, as much as In the Summertime.

Two elements of my becoming a Christian believer are not unlike what we know about Bob Dylan’s tale. For one thing, like Dylan in a Tucson hotel room in November 1978, my coming to faith was precipitated by a mystical experience I had on December 17th, 2005. A couple days later, in a document that’s become a sacred text of my own history, I wrote, “At long last, I have felt a powerful call to the one who offers me a peace ... [a] love that permeates into every fiber of one’s being—a perfect love. An unconditional love, perhaps. A love that requires nothing.” Something deeply elemental shifted that night—fifteen years later, I can see how massive the proportions of the shift were. After that night, I too could (and effectively did, if not so poetically) proclaim, “I’ve been broken and shattered like an empty cup / I’m just waiting on the Lord to rebuild and fill me up / And I know He will do it ’cause He’s faithful and He’s true...”

Precious Angel and Covenant Woman suggest that among the catalysts of Dylan’s surrender to Christ (“on this bloodstained ground / Take off your mask”) was a woman who had talked with him about faith and prayed to her God on his behalf (“Precious angel under the sun / How was I to know you’d be the one / To show me I was blinded, to show me I was gone / How weak was the foundation I was standing upon” ... “And to you, always, so grateful I will forever be”). My vision, too, though (probably like Dylan’s) long in the works, and certainly the culmination of thoughts and experiences that had spent years, or really my whole life, collecting into a single charged mass, transpired as the result of a beloved girl’s intervention. Like Dylan’s Angel, the girl in my life was part of a community of Christian believers (and had, as it were, “a contract with the Lord”). The fact that, as a result of her presence in my life, I had my own meeting with (as Dylan put it) “the King of Kings and Lord of Lords ... [whose] glory ... knocked me down and picked me up,” made sense to her.

That was 2005; now it’s 2020, and that girl is married (not to me) with three children. We live in different countries, on different continents. Yet the link between us, quiet and hidden though it may be, has never snapped, and the words of Covenant Woman have never ceased to be precious or true: “I just got to tell you I do intend / To stay closer than any friend / I just got to thank you once again / For making your prayers known unto heaven for me / And to you, always, so grateful I will forever be.” All the leagues of physical distance between us are powerless, ultimately, to alter what is true and real in the world of prayer and the spirit. “He must have loved me oh so much to send me someone as fine as you ... I’ll always be right by your side, I’ve got a covenant too.”

Here’s Ralf Sauter, by the way: “‘...I’ll always be right by your side, I’ve got a covenant too’ is one of the most assuring things [Dylan has] ever sung. This is a man who after a fire and brimstone battle with his own self and his desires and loss, came out carrying faith, and if there’s any testimony to that, it’s THIS SONG.”

“He must have loved me...”—that line means more to me than I can express. Not only in terms of the Covenant Woman (“shining like a morning star”) who took me by the hand and showed me the way to faith, but with regard to all those whose love has given me life. My experiences lead me to think that, once the idea of a loving personal God has ceased to seem ridiculous or unbelievable, the evidence for its truth becomes fathomless—and mystical experience aside, that evidence is nowhere clearer than in the love that has come my way from other human beings. I have had an amazingly blessed life, an amazing life, full of love—and in my understanding, much of the glory of the joy I’ve felt and of the hope that sustains me hinges on the sentiment captured in that line: “He must have loved me oh so much to send me someone as fine as you.”

I love the tenderness of “Way up yonder, great will be her reward.” The narrator doesn’t know, or finds it hard to accept, that his discovery of Christ and Christ’s love is, for her, already reward enough; the narrator is so grateful that he hopes there will be something even more beautiful in store for her, and having seen firsthand the transformations that followed from the change (see Saving Grace, What Can I Do for You?), he feels that must be the case: “great will be her reward.”

Faith is that bright cabin in the dark prairie. And God’s love can become embodied, can become visible through people. Thus “I know I can trust you to stay the way you are” leads, by the links of the “unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another” in Anton Chekhov’s short story, The Student (“ ‘The past,’ he thought, ‘is linked with the present by that chain’ [and, I Sigismund, insert here: the earth with the heavens, too] ... And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end, the other quivered”), straight on to “I know that He will do it ’cause He’s faithful and He’s true.”

In the faith that guides me, humans are not considered to be perfectly reliable (which is why we have In the Garden, and Judas, and Peter), but sometimes for a moment they appear that way, and in that holy moment they exhibit the character of the Lord. For this reason, I think that no matter what may have happened between the living man who wrote Covenant Woman and the living woman who was his inspiration, the song itself refuses to fade.

3. In the Garden

In the second half of the 1980s, Dylan the live performer kept In the Garden close at hand, but somewhat transformed, with heavy riffs buoying the B-sections and a vocal delivery that tended to the aggressive (in February 24th, 1986, in Sydney, Dylan sounds like he’s spitting venom). In those years, the song seemed fit for a gambling den, which was an apt arrangement, considering the kind of people that the Jesus of the Gospels spent time with. It was a flexible arrangement too, just as impressive in the hands of the Heartbreakers and Queens of Rhythm as it was with only Kenny Aaronson, Christopher Parker, and G. E. Smith backing the leader in 1988.

I also like the song’s final performance in Munich, on April 17th, 2002—that gorgeous instrumental interlude! Nor do I hear anything wrong with the mid-’90s arrangement; Winston Watson sounds great in the Jim Keltner seat. But having mentioned Jim Keltner I will turn to the years that attended In the Garden’s birth and infancy: 1979, 1980, 1981. If you’ve followed my list this far, you know how much I value the Gospel band, the spirit of the concerts (particularly before the return of old songs in autumn 1980), and especially Dylan’s singing. So whatever the strengths of later live rearrangements, it’s still at the heart of the holy turn-of-the-decade cyclone that I find In the Garden most moving and most luxuriant.

Legendary writer James Joyce was a lapsed Catholic. Ulysses, when I read it at 21, was a little more easily navigated for my having, like Joyce, been raised Catholic. At university, I took classes on Joyce with the amazing Edmund Epstein, a Joyce scholar who was also instrumental in the great William Golding gaining financial stability; in 1959 Epstein got Lord of the Flies republished in America, at which time the book started to sell like fresh peas in the North Country. Epstein mentioned that Joyce, in his later years, could often be found at the back of the church, near the door, at the luxuriously long Holy Week evening services: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday. I found this touching and endearing. When I was a little boy, those services were exruciating: Sunday’s 50 minutes of Mass were long enough, but the Holy Week evenings could stretch to two or three hours. As a teenager, though, I began to enjoy them: the ritual was grand, and the ancient emotions weaved into the services were, to say the least, heavy (I know people who cannot read the Gospel accounts of Christ’s Passion without crying). James Joyce, for all his changed or changing beliefs, was drawn back again and again to those great and beautiful spring nights.

There is something of the same vast, charged, and sacred spirit in Dylan’s In the Garden, especially in the arrangement from the Gospel years. As Regina McCrary notes, it even got to “sixty-[three]-year-old confirmed Jewish atheist” Jerry Wexler, of all people. As McCrary noted about the Slow Train Coming and Saved sessions, “I think the roughest thing for Jerry Wexler was, sometimes he would go, ‘All this Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!’ and we would look at him... and, uh, for one particular song—When They Came for Him in the Garden—it brought him to tears.” Bob Dylan, for his part, brought the song up in 2017 when interviewer Bill Flanagan asked him, “Which one of your songs do you think did not get the attention it deserved?” Dylan’s answer: “Brownsville Girl, or maybe In the Garden.”

I think In the Garden was the Gospel set’s most confrontational song. Whereas a lot of the other songs on Slow Train Coming and Saved are, in addition to their devotional elements, strongly personal (Precious Angel, Covenant Woman, What Can I Do for You?), or playful (Gotta Serve Somebody, Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others), Man Gave Names to All the Animals), or bizarre and imaginative (Slow Train, Gonna Change My Way of Thinking, Cover Down, Pray Through), In the Garden focuses squarely on Jesus Christ, the narrator’s savior. The song is about Jesus, not about the narrator (although the way it’s written hearkens to past songs of Dylan’s, those that sympathize and identify with outlaws and outsiders: John Wesley Harding, Drifter’s Escape, George Jackson, Billy, Shelter from the Storm, Hurricane, Joey; and even In the Garden is not the mere Scripture-summarizing that anti-Gospelites state defines Dylan’s 1979 and 1980 writing; Dylan is very much present in the song, the way an editor of an anthology is present in the selections: in the decisions about what to include, what order to put them in, how to set them off against differing material before and after...).

The referent is, for anyone with a basic sense of the culture and lore of Christianity, obvious from the first line: “When they came for Him in the garden, did they know...?” And in case there is anybody in the audience for whom a reference to “Him” (since, after all, you can’t hear the capital letter) and a “garden” does not conjure Gethsemane, Dylan clears up whatever vestiges of confusion may remain in the song’s third line: “Did they know He was the Son of God? Did they know that he was Lord?”

Incidentally, this is the third song on my list that rhymes Lord with sword, but once again, as in Are You Ready and Cover Down, Pray Through, the context of the rhyme is fresh and distinct. Leave it to Dylan.

But back to In the Garden and its idiosyncratic attitude. The song reels the listener in half-aggressively, with a reference to one of the more dramatic moments of the Passion narrative, the betrayal in the garden (which, in the Gospels, follows Jesus’s private prayer that, if it be the Lord’s will, the cup of agony could pass him by—while, out of earshot, his disciples doze, and Judas leads the Roman soldiers to his master), but then (in the disorienting manner Dylan returned to in I Will Love Him) it careens backward into Jesus’s life and ministry. In the second verse, rather than finding Jesus on trial before Pilate, we have him talking to Nicodemus (as Jim Keltner, on drums, makes his entry).

The structure is built out of sharp rhetorical questions, but series of questions is fleshed out or broken up by a vivid flash of narrative: “Did they hear when he told Peter, ‘Peter, put up your sword’?” (I love that audacious, repeated “Peter”) or “The multitude wanted to make him king, put a crown upon his head / Why did He slip away to a quiet place instead?” Only at the end of the song does Dylan return to (more or less) where it opens: it bypasses the Passion, jumping ahead to the Resurrection: “When He rose from the dead, did they believe?” With a “Thank you,” to uproarious applause (from, one imagines, the same people who heckled the opening words), Dylan leaves the stage, while the band plays on and his backing singers carry on heightening the drama: “Did they believe? Did they believe? Did they believe? Did they believe?”

The song can whisk you up in a chariot of fire if you listen to it in isolation, but in its larger contexts, In the Garden’s strength is bolstered by its placement. On Saved, it appears towards the end, with twenty-seven minutes behind it and only nine after. In the Gospel concerts, it closed the main set (and Dylan was often real cheeky about it; he would say, with that classic drawl, “We have time for one more song,” then pause long enough for voices from the audience to shout out their hoarse, desperate requests for pre-Slow Train material; then he might say, all offhand-like, “I guess I’ll go with this one—When they came for Him in the garden...”), the weight and flame of the entire long concert (twenty-one or so songs) behind it.

In the Garden’s position in the set underscores the extent to which Dylan believed in it; not to say that there’s any song in the Gospel set that the Dylan of ’79 and ’80 didn’t throw his full emotive and interpretive powers behind, but it’s normal to want to conclude a set of songs (and begin it: see If I’ve Got My Ticket, Lord and Gotta Serve Somebody) with especially intense, commanding, and memorable material. On that note, then: In the Garden is wild! I mean, listen to that mighty chord progression! Alex Ross, writing for the New Yorker in 1999, called In the Garden a “disturbing gospel number [that] shows the agony of Jesus in Gethsemane by wandering through ten different chords, each like a betrayal.” If you account for little variations, the count goes way above ten: see Eyolf Østrem’s tab (and, for a fuller discussion/appreciation of how the progression works, his theoretical analysis at http://dylanchords.com/node/1805 ).

A cool progression doesn’t mean a cool arrangement will follow from it. Dylan and his band deserve added kudos for how they made what presumably was just a guitar song to start with into a (as per Kurt Loder) “lovely, billowing” creation. Though it has no riff, no prominent guitar figure, and no traditional guitar solo, In the Garden is one of my favorite songs in which to listen for Fred Tackett. Richard Thompson, that great master, has observed that the best kind of chord progression for guitar solos is one that is at least a little strange. Granted (and here a lesser musical practitioner and thinker—myself—takes back over), if it’s too strange, it can be hard (and this is true for vocal melodies as for instrumental parts) to come up with a pattern that can break out of the progression’s restrictions; so it’s either that In the Garden toes the line just right, or that Fred Tackett is a player snaky and fluid enough to shine even in the confines of a progression as strict as this one. He doesn’t do anything too flashy, but listen to the way he regularly makes his instrument felt in the outros of live performances (for example, on April 18th, 1980, as heard on Disc 6 of Trouble No More).

Jim Keltner is a lithe, prowling beast. His beat for In the Garden is constantly shifting its moods and emphases, and in this way is a subtle preview of his career-exploding work on Neil Young’s Peace Trail. In certain performances, his playing has the inflections of reggae. At other times, especially in the B-sections (“The multitude wanted...”), it sounds like proto-heavy metal. Not kidding! Compare Lars Ulrich on Wherever I May Roam.

And then there are the organ solos. These vary enough from night to night that an In the Garden fan could happily prance from Gospel era performance to Gospel era performance—all ~150 of them—and not get bored. Exploring In the Garden organ solos is like following a river through the wooded part of a mountain; here you have a little waterfall, here a wide pool, here a swiftly rolling stream; always different, always beautiful, and always rewarding of attention. The autumn 1980 introduction of Willie Smith on the organ brought huge changes to the arrangement—not to its form, which remained the same as in the Oldham/Young tours, but to its spirit. Listen to the June 27th, 1981 performance on Disc 8 of Trouble No More, and then go on to listen to any/every other Willie Smith In the Garden. Amazing stuff.

Another of my favorite elements of the arrangement is Bob Dylan’s rhythm electric guitar. In live performances, it’s wonderful to hear his little frills and adornments in the spaces between lyrics. In the studio version, his playing (in the right channel) is just exquisite. Wexler and Beckett came up with a miracle of a guitar tone, and Dylan puts it to great use.

Gospel-era live versions of In the Garden are rich and fascinating, but usually one element or another shines brighter than the others: Dylan’s singing, or Keltner, or Tackett, or the organ solos. The Saved version, while not featuring the best vocals ever, or the best drumming ever, etc., is impeccably balanced. In no concert recording, not even those on Trouble No More, have I heard the song sound as full and whole as it does on Saved. Listen to the tonal separation between the organ and the piano, or between the rhythm and lead guitars, or between Dylan and the backing singers. The recording is a feast of details and emotive playing, and it’s six minutes long, and it sits between Pressing On and Saving Grace in the middle of the album’s emotional high point. Who knows how many, many times I’ve listened to Saved—no matter, the studio In the Garden still stops me in my tracks.

4. Saving Grace

In an Expecting Rain thread about Dylan’s favorite lyrical themes, Ralf Sauter noted that he sees “apocalyptic imagery in a lot of his songs virtually from every decade. I would also add manhood, and being a man, especially in the ’70s. Street-Legal, to me, is essentially a backlash against the sensation of feeling emasculated.” 

Then, after a line break, Ralf added, “And salvation. Pure salvation.”

In composition and tone as well as lyrical matter, I think Saving Grace is the closest Bob Dylan has come to writing a traditional hymn, like Amazing Grace or Charles Wesley’s Idumea. But listen to Jim Keltner’s rolls on the snare, or Tim Drummond’s bassline, or Dylan’s guitar solos, and you’ll know it for what it is: a rock and roll hymn! Air and earth, spirit and matter, all muddied together in the shape of a hurting man, astounded at his rescue, ragged but breathing. “By this time I should’ve been sleeping in a pine box for all eternity…”

Saving Grace boasts a strange chord progression and a strange tune. For this listener, strange (or, in the words of Eyolf Østrem, “harmonically interesting”) is good: it may have taken Saving Grace longer than some of its Gospel set brethren to sink its roots into my heart, but once they made it down, they grabbed hold firmly and found themselves well-nourished.

My favorite of Dylan’s vocal performances in a recording studio is here on Saving Grace. Last I heard, Ralf Sauter shared this view, though it took both of us a long time to realize just how good what we were hearing was. In my first many listens to Saved, I took the studio incarnation of Saving Grace for merely a solid rendition of a song that (like another seven on the album) I had first learned to appreciate live, at the Warfield and beyond. Dylan tended to sing Saving Grace more dramatically in concert, throwing himself into particular words at unexpected moments in a way that, when I listen, forces me to stop whatever I’m doing and listen hard, then take a deep breath and shake my head in wonder. That level of vocal excellence is typical Gospel show fare, but on Saving Grace the strain of fire is especially raw and explosive. On record, the spark-chains don’t fly up quite so high or bright, but to make up for it, the entire vocal is nuanced and sensitive, tenderness and passion lying up one against another like cats curled together for warmth.

Seeing as my favorite Dylan studio vocal is an unconventional choice, I sat down with a notebook and hit play on Saving Grace, intending to note down my favorite vocal moments and list them here. By the time I got to the third verse, I had to put the notebook aside, because there’s no point posting a barely abridged version of the lyrics. The song doesn’t have a great many words, and they’re almost all sung brilliantly, with the tension growing as the verses are rolled out.

Saving Grace is a prayer, a confession, a dedication, a travelogue, a paean, a cry of pain, an outpouring of gratitude, and, in a manner of speaking, a landscape painting.

A prayer : the “You” in the first verse (versus the general “you” in the last) is, of course, the narrator’s God. And while the song soon veers away from the direct address that characterizes sister-song What Can I Do for You?, it never loses the character of a prayer. The opening words frame the whole. In a sense, the four verses that follow the first are the “apology” taking shape: for a real apology—especially one made to one’s own savior—is not empty words, not an offhand “sorry,” but the redirection of a life.

A confession : in the terms of Leonard Cohen’s Steer Your Way, “Say the mea culpa which you’ve probably forgot.” The words are meant for God to hear: “If you find it in Your heart, can I be forgiven?” I can see the devastation I’ve left in my wake, and without Your forgiveness, how am I to gather the courage to turn my back on it and keep walking, hopefully down a better road, and to a better place, and with a better, holier heart animating my steps and my thoughts?

A dedication : as in, I (the narrator) dedicate myself to You (the Lord). It’s not only that one single event has shaken me and now I look back upon it with awe, hoping that it’ll inspire me as I go forward (“Don’t let me drift too far”) : no, “My faith keeps me alive and I still be weeping / For the saving grace that’s over me.” I know that You are beside me. And henceforth I am Yours. “Wherever I am welcome is where I’ll be / I put all my confidence in Him, my sole protection.”

A travelogue : “There’s only road and it leads to Calvary.” That’s the road I’ll be walking down, “into eternity” (to appropriate In the Summertime) : “It gets discouraging at times, but I know I’ll make it.” Though the “saving grace” of the title is all around and all within, the narrator (like the one in What Can I Do for You?) doesn’t write off the darkness, the pain, and the hardship that will hound him (think Trouble in Mind) as he travels through “this world of sin” (to appropriate a phrase from a very, very different kind of song—Antonia and Paul Presti’s Jealous Daddy’s Death Song).

A paean : which is to say, a song expressing triumph—but because the victory is the Lord’s rather than his own, the triumph (over death, over hopelessness, over despair) takes the form of praise. I think that, as a whole, Dylan’s musical work throughout 1979 and 1980 was intended, in large part, as praise: and I think that’s part of the reason he worked so hard to make it great and beautiful. A believer’s praise oughtn’t be cheap, considering where, or to Whom, it’s directed. So Dylan gave it his all, foremost in his singing, which (I’d argue) was God’s greatest gift to this particular artist (although considering the absurd quality and variety of the live work since 1987/8, I’m beginning to think “perseverance” may well be tied with “voice” where such gifts and their fruitfulness are concerned. As the famous 2004 exchange with Ed Bradley goes, “BD: It goes back to that destiny thing. I made a bargain with it a long time ago, and I’m holding up my end.” “EB: What was your bargain?” “BD: To get where I am now.” “EB: Should I ask who you made the bargain with?” “BD: With the chief commander.” “EB: On this earth?” “BD: (laughing) On this earth and the world we can’t see.”). But if singing was where Dylan centered his praise, he had plenty left over to fill his writing, his arranging, his rhythm playing, and (momentously) his lead harmonica (What Can I Do for You?) and lead guitar (Saving Grace).

An outpouring of gratitude : well, just listen to the singing. And then look at the lines in which the narrator is amazed to find himself, after so many near-misses, upright with his heels on the earth instead of lying supine in a pinewood coffin. It’s “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive” again, but in a different, and perhaps more lasting and meaningful context. And of course there’s great gratitude every time the refrain-phrase ends another verse.

A cry of pain : of gratitude, certainly, but also of pain. Again, listen to the singing: whether live or in the studio, tenderness is balanced with passion, and the passion is a mix of joy (for what has transpired) and sorrow (now that the narrator sees what exactly was missing in his old life). “The devil’s shining light, it can be most blinding / But to search for love,” (see Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks, Desire, Street-Legal) “that ain’t no more than vanity.” Sorrow, joy, and also awe: “By this time, I’d have thought that I would be sleeping / In a pine box, for all eternity.”

A landscape painting : because where the narrator is standing, the world looks different. Thus we come to the idiosyncratic point that lends a hand in making Saving Grace my choice for #4 favorite Dylan song. Simply put, the landscape Dylan describes here, in which “As I look around this world, all that I’m finding / Is the saving grace that’s over me,” is the one I live in, too. I won’t account for it, since I’m not here to write about my faith. But my lived experience is that for all the evil and cruelty and sorrow at large in the world, nonetheless, everywhere I happen to turn, I find the same “saving grace” that Dylan wrote this song about. The image is not an exaggeration, not religious hyperbole. It’s just how it is: to the man in the song, at least, and to me.

Since Dylan was aware that the Warfield audiences would not be familiar with at least half of the songs in his Gospel set, I think he intentionally worked up the arrangements in such a way as to make sure each new song would have at least one undeniably captivating feature. So Covenant Woman had its melodies, Solid Rock its riffs, Saved its gospel fire (that piano!!), What Can I Do for You? the harmonica solos, In the Garden its epic “harmonic meandering” (Eyolf Østrem), Blessed Be the Name its singalong structure, and Pressing On its arrangement: Dylan on piano to begin with, playing solo, then dramatically getting up, leaving the piano behind, coming front-of-stage, and performing the second half of the song with the band behind him.

In Saving Grace, that stand-out element was Dylan’s raw and soulful lead guitar breaks. These cleaved to a pre-written form more closely than the harmonica solos in What Can I Do for You?, but nonetheless varied from night to night; and like the other song’s harmonica breaks, which pierced through the desolate cracked ground the narrator stood on (“How weak was the foundation I was standing upon”) to the molten foundation-waters beneath, the guitar solos in Saving Grace shook the ramparts of the castle in which the narrator had once thought to take his defense. There is no posturing in Saving Grace’s lyrics, but if anything, there is even less in the guitar breaks.