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.