My favorite album closers are those that both encapsulate the themes and sound of an album, and vary in some significant way with the songs that came before. Where Are You Tonight? (Journey through Dark Heat) is like that, sounding like Street-Legal: The Song, but making more room for the backing singers and ending with Billy Cross’s meteoric guitar. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands and Desolation Row have their softness and their length, even as the lyric style remains recognizably Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61 Revisited. Lost on the River #20 (Rhiannon Giddens’s and Marcus Mumford’s arrangement), while concerned with the usual themes, is one of the album’s quietest songs, and the only one that has a female narrator. Murder Most Foul returns to the key, tempo, and delivery style of opener I Contain Multitudes, but lays the sound out over a much wider plain, the seventeen-minute length giving Dylan the time to bring all of the album’s themes together into one extraordinary grand narrative. Tempest, so interested in endings of all kinds, is doomy from Duquesne Whistle on down, but Roll On John, while a farewell, is a sad and tender rather than bloodthirsty farewell.
In terms of non-Dylan favorites, Big Blood are masters of the trade. Do You Wanna Have a Skeleton Dream? works through 33 minutes of dark, glimmering, upbeat soul-rock, but concludes with a ten-minute suite that morphs from gentle, heavy-hearted folk into a Schubert cover without disengaging from the spirit of the first nine songs.
Operate Spaceship Earth Properly comes off of the planetary-arena stadium space-metal of penultimate song Queen Day, through a series of bass pulses and waves of distortion, down to the splintered, drifting, catastrophic Wishy Wishy II, which inhabits the same sci-fi sound zone as all the other songs, but sounds lost and wistful, as if the spaceship that had set out boldly into the cosmos on opener When I Was Young went off course and was left to careen into eternal emptiness.
I love the way Radio Valkyrie 1905-1917, with its dark grooves and long near-instrumentals, implodes into the quiet, windswept A Sunny Night.
Dead Songs, an uncharacteristically forthright album for the group, ends with The Archivist & The Archeologist (a top ten Big Blood song for me, and one that Jeffrey Lewis told me is “one of [his] favorite recordings” period), in which Colleen Kinsella seems to roll her heart (“like a wheel,” as per Paul McCartney) right to the listener, across a field of soulful banjo and guitar. The last minutes are lyricless vocalizations, Colleen sing-humming what all the album’s clear and thoughtful words couldn’t, after all, express.
And don’t let me get started on A Watery Down Pt. 2, the explosive psychedelic fifteen-minute closer of my favorite Big Blood album (and second favorite album “of all time”), Unlikely Mothers.
All this relates back to Dylan because When He Returns is my single favorite of Dylan’s own album closers. It does everything that I most love an album closer to do.
For one thing, it’s a great long screed to “you/I,” the character at whom most of the album’s injunctions are aimed: the narrator himself. The pronouns are fluid, with both “you” and “I” appearing, but I think the third verse (all “you”) is as much the narrator upbraiding himself (or, perhaps, the old him, who at this early juncture in the narrator’s journey of faith is still alive and well) as the second verse (all “I”) is.
Second, When He Returns is the song in which the narrator puts his focus most closely on God. In earlier songs, the narrator was busy staking out his own position (Gotta Serve Somebody, I Believe in You, Slow Train), reminding himself of the tenets of his faith and what kind of person he wants to become (Gonna Change My Way of Thinking, Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others), When You Gonna Wake Up), and wondering how his old relationships would change in the light of new faith (I Believe in You, Precious Angel). At the end of Slow Train Coming, the narrator’s gaze begins to turn elsewhere. Man Gave Names to All the Animals is concerned, in its own way, with the beginning of things, and ends with the narrator contemplating Satan. When He Returns looks at the End Times and at God.
In addition to laying out further reminders for himself (“How long can I listen to the lies of prejudice? / How long can I stay drunk on fear out in the wilderness? … How long can you falsify and deny what is real? / How long can you hate yourself for the weakness you conceal?”), it’s like the narrator is telling the listener (and himself), “Put aside all that other stuff, all the conflict and the trouble: let me talk about the Lord that I love. Let me talk a little about what He’s like.” That means beautiful descriptions of the love that God has for us: “He sees your deeds / He knows your needs / Even before you ask.” It also means apocalyptic triumph, which depending on your predilections, can be a read as a metaphor for how God becomes the Lord of every believer’s own soul, or literal or prophetic in a wider sense.
There’s a great quote from Expecting Rain user Kle about his discovery of Dylan’s Gospel era: “In my feeling Slow Train Coming was darker, more earnest. Saved and Shot of Love were the highlights of a summer, when I found them in a second-hand vinyl store. At that time, I did not know much about the religious phase and was very surprised about the cover art. About the lively sound and the ‘happy news’ of the songs, that brought me in a good mood. I do not mean religious. Dylan sounded like someone, who is glad to have found a true life, for that he wants to work. As living in the house of his beliefs, smelling a rose. Slow Train seemed to me more introverted, lonely—and better. Here I became afraid of him. He was like a pilgrim on the street, showing what was wrong.”
That sense of darkness and loneliness is clearest on When He Returns, largely because of the song’s arrangement. After eight ingeniously arranged full-band tracks (and to my mind, no Dylan album has more complex and more interesting arrangements than Slow Train Coming), all we hear on When He Returns is Barry Beckett’s gospel piano and Dylan’s vocals. The two feed back and forth into each other, Dylan pulling Beckett this way, Beckett guiding Dylan that way, each delivering a brilliant performance.
Barry Beckett didn’t go on tour with Dylan, so the live arrangement was altered to feature Dylan on rough piano and Fred Tackett on cool, brittle-sounding guitar, but the power of Dylan’s singing never waned. It was the quietest song of the all-Gospel set, and as such gave the divided audience a chance not only to shout what was on their mind but to definitely be heard; and it was one of the most controversial, which I imagine would have served as encouragement.
On November 2nd, 1979, the second night of the all-Gospel Warfield residency, you can hear angry manly heckling now and then. At the end of one of the lines, someone (only one person) bursts out clapping. In the middle of one of Dylan’s verse-ending wails, another (or the same?) lone attendee lets out a full-throated hoot of approval, and after a couple seconds a large swathe of the crowd joins in the glad shouting and applause. Inbetween cheers and heckles (the latter more frequent), the room is dead silent in a way that I imagine only Leonard Cohen could match, during his grace-filled Grand Tour (2008-2013). A few seconds after Dylan and Tackett finish up, the room positively erupts. It’s not what you’d expect after the strained audience reactions mid-song, but goes to show how persuasive (“undeniable,” as Fred Tackett put it) the Gospel shows really were.
Performances of When He Returns from 1979 and 1980 vary from very good to superb, and include some that I like even more than the studio version, but only if I judge the two as stand-alone performances, since for me nothing compares with the studio When He Returns heard at the end of a full listen to Slow Train Coming. My favorite of the Trouble No More versions is from April 18th, 1980 in Toronto. Fred Tackett’s guitar part is gone, but there’s an organ in its place, and the song sounds just as great that way. Dylan sings as if his brow were crowned with flame.
Returning to the Slow Train Coming version, I was wondering recently whether I’m aware of any songs (or, to be more specific, recordings) that are as intense as this one: and I mean nonstop intense, from the first note to the fading strains of the last. A limitation like this disqualifies the formidable likes of Dogs (Pink Floyd), Cruise (David Gilmour), and Painted Yellow Lines (Dispatch): all three ultimately reach shores where walls of flame tower thirty feet tall, but they sail upon calm seas to get there.
Even Orphans & Vandals’ magnificent Terra Firma, eight minutes long and fierce as a whirlwind, its quiet overture like the wind picking up speed, has a softer stretch near the end in which the intensity lets up and you’re allowed to spend some time floating. The song is not a bad listen for a Dylan admirer, by the way; songwriter and vocalist Al Joshua’s phrasing, as he inhabits the narrator waking up from a nightmare (“Turn on the light. Put on the radio and the TV. Put on the kettle. Put on some clothes, for Christ’s sake. And make a cup of tea”) only to spiral back into a waking one, at the end of which Atlantis sinks and the narrator drowns—is worthy of the Emperor of Phrasing, Bob Dylan himself.
Do I know any song that can compare to When He Returns in concentrated, unrelenting emotional intensity? I’m sure each of you reading this will answer the question in a different way (and if you don’t value When He Returns as I do, you can still play the game using the song you yourself consider the height of intensity). After a good deal of thinking, I came up with three (only three!) songs that could enter the discussion. All happen to be from the 21st century.
Moving chronologically, we have Got Wings? by Big Blood, from their 2007 double album Sew Your Wild Days Tour (a studio album despite the name). It’s a Caleb Mulkerin song, featuring the evillest banjo you’ll ever hear and lyrics that, partly inaudible, are all the scarier for it; “Well, the spirit is a funny thing / It’s almost got wings / It’s almost got wings…”
Next is the nine-minute suite that closes Is This the Life We Really Want?, Roger Waters’ most recent solo album, released only a quarter century after Amused to Death, which, by the way, is an album I hated as a child; I was cool with The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking and loved Radio K.A.O.S., but Amused to Death, for some reason, infuriated me (other than What God Wants; I loved What God Wants). When I was in middle school, I started to like Watching TV. I would come back to Amused to Death every now and again, unable to believe that there was a solo album by a songwriting member of Pink Floyd that I didn’t love. And the album as a whole did finally click with me in my twenty-first year. These days it’s a big favorite, but it sure took its time. But back to the topic at hand: I’m talking about Waiting for Her/Oceans Apart/Part of Me Died, a long song with seamless music that, on the album, is split into three tracks. Waiting for Her, an adaptation of Mahmoud Darwish, begins, “With a glass inlaid with gemstones / On a pool around the evening / Among the perfumed roses / Wait for her,” and moves through a series of similarly lush, poignant, and temporal/spiritual images to the transition point (Oceans Apart), after which comes my pick for the greatest of all Roger’s great list songs: Part of Me Died (“the part that is envious, cold-hearted and devious / Greedy, mischievous, global, colonial / Bloodthirsty, blind, mindless, and cheap / Focused on borders and slaughters and sheep…”).
Third, there’s Al Joshua again, in a song that’s longer than Terra Firma but even tauter and more powerful, so that from the opening strums of the acoustic guitar all the way through the final words (as in When He Returns, the arrangement is nothing but a voice and a single instrument) I am like a small wicker ball between the artist’s hands, helpless, immobile, but safe inside the confines the artist has established. The song is Skinned Alive, and it closes Disc 1 of 2018’s double album Out of the Blue. In a mash-up of dreams, waking life, and half-remembered, half-imagined boys’ adventure stories, the song narrates the birth of the love that fueled the nine years of suffering and silence that separate Orphans & Vandals’ I Am Alive and You Are Dead from Out of the Blue, which latter, as it happens, claims Red River Shore and Nettie Moore as two of its guiding spirits; to quote the press release, they “gave me stars and a moon to row towards. Their voices illuminated the dark waves around me. They filled me with strange joy.”
Three songs, then. I’ve been listening to music consciously for about thirty years, and I’ve found only three songs whose intensity can compare to When He Returns.
In the summer of 2014, I took a bus from Warszawa up to Tallinn, to spend a few days in the company of Ralf Sauter. I arrived late in the evening; he met me at the station. We took a bus to his neighborhood, Ralf pointing out the way everyone on board was enjoying WiFi. He explained that in Estonia, WiFi access, in all places and at all times, is thought of as almost a natural human right. Anyway, we reached his cozy ground-floor apartment, part of a building block that happened to be across the street from a forest (Estonia is amazing, and if work were to be found and my wife didn’t mind the cold, I would move there in a heartbeat). I got myself settled in his living room, and Ralf made some tea. I noticed that he had printed two sets of Dylan lyrics, and framed them, and hung them on his wall. I don’t remember for certain what one of them was—Wedding Song, I think—but the other was When He Returns. No, my eyes weren’t deceiving me: there were the words to When He Returns, hanging on my friend’s wall. And in that moment I felt as much at home, there at Ralf’s, as I have ever felt in my life.
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