There’s a terrific live performance of In the Summertime on Trouble No More (October 21st, 1981, in Boston: dig that gorgeous guitar solo, and Dylan’s “ohh yeah” at 2:55), but my favorite version is the studio take. Dylan might have recorded a handful of vocal tracks more soulful than In the Summertime’s, but taking the recording as a whole, band and all, I don’t think he’s ever done a more soulful song. On any other album it might not have reached this level of soul, but Shot of Love is the most liquid record in Dylan’s catalogue, the leader and the band both playing at their loosest, so if you pour a song like In the Summertime into a crucible like Shot of Love, what you end up with can stand alongside Van Morrison’s most transcendent [shorter] work.
I’ve found that in both my prose fiction and my songwriting, I fixate easily on seasons. Sometimes, when an artist discovers a topic, theme, set of images, chord progressions, etc. that they turn to over and over again, it means it’s time to be more careful, if not to excise it from your future work completely. At other times, after you notice, you think: “Well, yeah—that’s right—that’s me. It’s just how I see things, how I think, how my mind organizes feelings and experiences.” In my own case, I think that, on the one hand, those first six years of life spent in Poland, and on the other, the Polish-language bedtime reading of Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll books, with their seasonal orientations, left such a strong mark that even now, when I live in Xiamen (literally “summer’s gate”), with its two seasons (“very hot” and “hot”), my heart can’t (and wouldn’t want to) break out from its old moldings. We’re surrounded by tropical trees, and the only resemblance our autumns and springs have to the kind I remember living through in Poland is that in the autumn months, temperatures slowly tend lower, and in the spring months the reverse is true; but the world looks the same. And the same again in winter. And yet when “autumn” comes, and my body begins to feel the difference between a high of 35 Celsius and a high of 34, my heart sings out: “Autumn! Autumn at last!”
In the Summertime belongs in the category of “songs that beautifully evoke the season they’re about,” a category in which you’ll also find George Harrison’s Here Comes the Sun, Marek Grechuta’s Wiosna, ach to ty, Van Morrison’s Snow in San Anselmo, Czesław Mozil and Czesław Miłosz’s Postój zimowy, and Drive-By Truckers’ First Air of Autumn. As Dylan put it, “In my hometown walking down dark streets on quiet summer nights you would sometimes hear parlor tunes coming out of doorways and open windows. Somebody’s mother or sister playing ‘A Bird in a Guilded Cage’ off of sheet music. I actually tried to conjure up that feeling once in a song I did called In the Summertime.”
At least half of the song’s power over me, then, comes from the feeling alone. In the Summertime is a happy song instead of a dark one, but it’s got the Briggsian spook. It sounds like the “soft and shining sea” Dylan sings of. I love the way Jim Keltner’s drum part is like the tide, the gentle but steady swell and fall of waves, while all the other instruments—the bass, the piano, the guitars, the backing vocals, the harmonica (the harmonica breaks, by the way, are among my favorite ever on a Dylan recording)—are like the sun speckled on the water, flaring briefly and vanishing. If you’re someone who hasn’t heard the song hundreds of times, listen carefully to the way the instruments are arranged: the bassline is all quiet quarter notes, with the result that, often, the only instrument you hear backing Bob’s lead vocals is the drums, with the guitars and piano all playing with magnificent taste around and to each other, and often holding back altogether. The instruments are like birds calling to each other from the branches of seaside trees.
The refrain is just incredible. If Slow Train Coming tends to a bluesy and rootsy sound, and Saved goes the gospel way, Shot of Love has a pop edge, an indulgence for its own sake in the joy of crisp, bright arrangements and big, catchy melodies. I think that Shot of Love, on the whole (and its outtakes: Yonder Comes Sin, Caribbean Wind, You Changed My Life, Need a Woman, Angelina), is the best collection of strong and catchy refrains since the Basement Tapes: see the title track, Property of Jesus, Watered-Down Love, Dead Man, Dead Man, and In the Summertime: Dylan’s vocals complement the refrain’s main melody, which is carried by the piano and guitar. The backing singers join him. Dylan’s “aaahhh” between the repetitions of the title phrase is so heartfelt it can raise the hairs on the back of my neck. And the way all those waves of feeling collect in “when—you were—with me…”
The refrain lyrics remind me of Sara, in that Sara was filled with references to specific times and places that meant the world to the narrator but nothing to us, so that the onus was on Dylan and the band (by way of melodies, performance, and soul) to convey the strong feelings across the divide. That’s true again in In the Summertime. The verses give us hints of what took place between the narrator and the person (or divinity; the lyrics seem to shift inconclusively from a human addressee to a divine one, and I think any attempt to interpret the song as being written wholly to a girl, or wholly to God, winds up unconvincing), but only hints. It’s not even that the narrator leaves us to put the pieces together by ourselves; there aren’t enough pieces. What there is plenty of is feeling. And so though we listeners don’t know exactly what happened that fateful summer, we do know precisely how it felt.
Long ago I stopped trying to get the lyrics to cohere in my mind, but I still enjoy thinking about the sections I can’t grasp—like “Did you respect me for what I did / Or for what I didn’t do? Or for keeping it hid? / Did I lose my mind when I tried to get rid / Of everything you see?” And of course I love revisiting the lines that I do feel I grasp. “I was in your presence for an hour or so / Or was it a day? I truly don’t know” works beautifully whether the lines are about a mystical experience or about falling in love.
I remember that Ralf Sauter (who loves this song much as I do, and for whom Shot of Love was the entryway to an appreciation of the Gospel years) believed “You were closer to me than my next of kin” goes too far. Because Ralf’s thoughts are worth taking seriously, whether they happen to align with mine or not, I’ve given his claim a lot of thought. My conclusion at present—a personal conclusion—is that the line is apt, whether addressed to God or to a woman. If the narrator is talking to God, then I think there’s no doubt of the truthfulness of the line. But even if the narrator is talking to a woman, I think it’s justifiable. Given the (album-appropriate) confrontational stance of In the Summertime (“Fools they made a mock of sin … Strangers they meddled in our affairs”), I imagine the narrator as someone who, in turning to his new faith, had to leave his family behind. And if that’s so, then the woman who brought him to the Lord (if the relationship between the first-person narrator and “you” in In the Summertime is comparable to those in Precious Angel and Covenant Woman) surely would feel “closer to me than my next of kin.”
“Strangers they meddled in our affairs / Poverty and shame were theirs / But all that suffering was not to be compared / With the glory that is to be” is like a more intense update of the attitude to romantic love expressed back in 1966 or ’67 in Quick Like a Flash: “We don’t need your opinions! Take a look at us: / When we find something good, we’re true to it.”
As for the final lines—“And I’m still carrying the gift you gave / It’s a part of me now, it’s been cherished and saved / It’ll be with me unto the grave / And then unto eternity”—these are among the lines not only in the song, and not only on Shot of Love, but in Dylan’s entire body of work that I feel the strongest personal resonance with. I hear these words as a prayer of gratitude and commitment, with the “you” being God. In light of that interpretation, I identify with those words wholly. They are holy words to me.
In the late ’90s, Dylan made some comments about “me and the religious thing.” “This is the flat-out truth,” he said in an interview, “I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like ‘Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain’ or ‘I Saw the Light’—that’s my religion. I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.” And in another interview, “Those old songs are my lexicon and prayer book. All my beliefs come out of those old songs, literally, anything from ‘Let Me Rest on that Peaceful Mountain’ to ‘Keep on the Sunny Side’ [“Let us trust in our Savior always / To keep us, every one, in His care”]. You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. I believe in a God of time and space, but if people ask me about that, my impulse is to point them back toward those songs. I believe in Hank Williams singing ‘I Saw the Light.’ I’ve seen the light, too.”
What Bob Dylan’s personal religious/spiritual beliefs are is his private business, or (from a believer’s point of view) his and God’s. I don’t mean to comment on that. But I do want to say how much I appreciate those quotes of Dylan’s, as they were a guide for me. Having used a frail human organization of believers to support him in the early years of his Christianity, as I did too, I think it only figures that Dylan quickly realized the deceit and (often purposeful) impurities that an organization of that sort can’t help but be driven by. For me, too, faith comes not from a church with a particular set of tenets, but from living examples of faith: people I know whose lives have seemed true and beautiful to me, and songs I’ve heard whose truth and beauty seemed similarly strong.
Throughout the Hebrew Bible, there is talk of “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” which I (in my readily admitted ignorance of the actual workings of Judaism) take to mean that the stories passed down about the patriarchs were where the believers of old found refuge for their own living faith. Even when my Christianity was young, I liked thinking of my faith that way; I would say, quoting the formula, that I believed in the God of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Endō Shūsaku. Abraham and Isaac seem distant from me sometimes, but the God of Jacob less so, and the God of Joseph very close indeed. And some of the most powerful examples I have of the kind of faith that I seek to weave my own life around are in songs: in In the Summertime, say, and When He Returns, and I Believe in You, and Are You Ready, and Every Grain of Sand, and When You Gonna Wake Up…
And not only in Dylan. Leonard Cohen has written many songs that have become touchstones and foundations of my faith: Lover Lover Lover, Coming Back to You, Hallelujah, Heart with No Companion, If It Be Your Will, Going Home, Show Me the Place, Born in Chains, You Got Me Singing, and If I Didn’t Have Your Love.
I treasure Richard Thompson’s hymns of surrender: A Heart Needs a Home (“The world’s no place when you’re on your own” really means a lot when it comes after I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight), Beat the Retreat, Night Comes On, Dimming of the Day.
I believe that the vision of the “slipstream / Between the viaducts of your dream / Where immobile steel rims crack / And the ditch in the back roads stop” is a true vision. I’ve drunk the water that “stoned me to my soul,” and I’ve been to the “haunts of ancient peace … beside the garden walls,” and I know what it is to “change like a flower softly opening … when heart is open.”
I recognize the abject longing in the refrain of Keinan Abdi Warsame’s People Like Me, and I think God answers that prayer in the refrain of On the Other Side.
I believe the lived experience that ultimately resulted in songs like these. I believe the suffering, the love, the insistence, the humility, the trust, the hope. I believe what the songs say more than I necessarily would a preacher or teacher of the faith. What I hear in and through the songs, I find reliable. And I suppose (while acknowledging how wrong I might of course be) that that’s what Dylan had in mind in those turn-of-the-century interviews. It’s not that the songs have replaced God in his heart; it’s not that he puts the songs themselves on an altar and prostrates himself before them. Rather, it’s that in those songs, he finds the truest expression of the faith in God that he himself shares. “I believe in Hank Williams singing ‘I Saw the Light.’ I’ve seen the light, too.” And me, I’m still carrying the gift He gave. I believe in Dylan singing In the Summertime.
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