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.