5. What Can I Do for You?

The way the chord progression of What Can I Do for You? is carried forward through guitar riffing, picked-out notes, and start-stop motions puts me in mind of certain techniques more commonly heard in progressive rock. So let’s call Dylan’s song gospel prog, or progospel. Not an oft-mined genre, as far as I’m aware—but out in the world there are artists like Yelawolf, SuperHeavy, the Bottlecaps (Impossible Groove!), Fear, and Loathing in Las Vegas (that’s one band name, from Fear to Vegas), and the Fear Nuttin Band. So one never knows.

The body of the song was intact and gorgeous from the first Warfield show. For the studio version on Saved, the band worked up an intro that was never to be played live. I like the sudden way the live versions begin, but I also love the mood-setting intro on Saved. It opens sadly, with an Am, unlike the C major chord that heralded the beginning of live performances. I love Jim Keltner’s drumming, and the way the dreamy-toned guitar and the organ meld together as they play the intro progression through, while the bass is left to carry the melody. I love the burst of starshine that marks the C with which the song proper begins. And right there, as the instruments rise from the Am to the C, right there is Bob Dylan’s voice, in all its softness and assurance, quiet but firm: “You have given everything to me…” then the band drops out, leaving the guitar to do its cool little run of notes before Bob and his backing singers lead the band back in with the song’s recurring (but sometimes significantly altered) question, “What can I do for You?” How wondrous, all thirty-eight seconds thus far. Right: only thirty-eight seconds. And the Saved recording is five minutes and fifty-five seconds long.

Turning to live versions, What Can I Do for You? is, in a sense, the most precious of all the songs in the Gospel set, because Dylan’s harmonica solos varied so much from night to night (in make-up, not in quality)—and the song has not one but two solos, the second really blooming into wonder when Dylan started to extend the outro in 1980.

Regarding that outro, lead guitarist Fred Tackett commented (in a 2017 interview, regarding the video portion of the Trouble No More package) : “I was amazed, man, it was so good. Everything was just so good. They picked the best songs for it. [Bob] and Spooner Oldham playing this harmonica and Hammond organ together at the end of What Can I Do for You? Spooner would play these chord substitutions under Bob’s harmonica, and it was just so cool and hip, and Bob is playing so great. They found the best stuff of all that and put it in this movie. Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell is in there, all kinds of great stuff. It really is impressive sounding.”

The outro is perfect on the album, the studio clarity again being the key feature that Saved has over the celebrated live incarnations of its songs. Eyolf Østrem calls Saved’s harmonica solo over the outro “Dylan’s most glorious moment as a harpist.” I see no reason to disagree.

Whenever I listen carefully to a live version of What Can I Do for You?, I am dazzled, even in 1981, when Bob sacrificed the song’s melody to his bizarre, but unique and exciting, ’81 singing style. (Even the harmonica solos tend to be subjected to that curious, blocky 1981 rhythm; to these ears, such an approach makes What Can I Do for You? less glorious than it was in the previous two years, but it’s a strong reinvention anyway, giving the interested listener new things to love.) It’d be impossible to pick a favorite live version from the 1979 and 1980 performances, because each has so much to offer, but I can say which one I listen to the most: November 26th, 1979, in Tempe, Arizona. Half a minute into the first harp solo, Dylan stumbles on a little four-note melody that’s so right, so disarmingly lovely, that he thereafter uses it, or a transposed version, to end every line of the solo. In the second solo he occasionally returns to it again.

I fell for that melody so hard when I was first listening through the Gospel shows that it surprised me that it wasn’t revisited the next night, and that it wasn’t revived for Saved. But of course that’s not how Dylan operates. Fred Tackett again: “That’s always the thing Bob tried to avoid. He wanted to stop people getting a part that they’ll play every night, which tends to happen. You find something that works and you stick with it and the next thing you know you have this set- in-stone arrangement ... He never said anything about it, but I always thought he didn’t want us to have these set-in-stone arrangements down.”

What Can I Do for You?’s harmonica solos are one of the most incredible things in Dylan’s entire body of work; but don’t be misled. Like the best jams of the Grateful Dead, ultimately played in service of an exquisite Garcia/Hunter or Weir/Barlow or Phil Lesh tune, the harmonica solos on What Can I Do for You? adorn a well-written song. Christopher Ricks goes into much detail about it in Visions of Sin, which means that I don’t have to. But I’ll mention a few things that mean a lot to me:

—“You have given everything to me.” “You have given me eyes to see.” “Pulled me out of bondage…” (as in one of Leonard Cohen’s best-ever songs: “I was born in chains, but I was lifted out of Egypt / I was tied to a burden, but the burden it was raised / Lord, I can no longer keep this secret: / Blessed be the Name, the Name be praised”). The narrator wastes no time before making these pronouncements. His gratitude is urgent. (Ricks hears this in Saving Grace, too: “The voice enters immediately (less common than you might think in a Dylan song), with the words of admission, ‘If You . . .’, immediately, a beat or so ahead of the music, as though not wishing to miss a beat when it comes to expressing contrition, gratitude, and faith.”)

In a 1984 interview, Bono asked whether Dylan had ever written songs that’d frightened their own maker: “Oh yeah, I’ve written some songs that did that. The songs that I wrote for the Slow Train album did that. I wrote those songs. I didn’t plan to write them, but I wrote them anyway. I didn’t like writing them, I didn’t want to write them. I didn’t figure… I just didn’t want to write them songs at that period of time. But I found myself writing these songs … ” The Saved material, by contrast, seems to be the songwriter reasserting himself, and singing out the exact things that he wanted to tell his Savior. (That calls Cohen to mind again: I can imagine God looking at Dylan in late 1978 and early 1979, and noticing the songs of gratitude that were stirring, and saying to Himself, in the words of the divine narrator of [the verses of] Cohen’s Going Home: “He wants to write a love song, an anthem of forgiving … [T]hat isn’t what I need him to complete … But he does say what I tell him / Even though it isn’t welcome / He just doesn’t have the freedom to refuse.” Yet, a little later, the anthems of forgiving did arrive; the time must have been right.)

—Anthem of forgiving, all right, but (like Saving Grace, the opening verses of which speak of death and a body in a pine box) not one that turns a blind eye to the darkness. It acknowledges the darkness, and then turns with love and gratitude to light: “Soon as a man is born, you know the sparks begin to fly / He gets wise in his own eyes and he’s made to believe a lie / Who can deliver him from the death he’s bound to die? / Well, You’ve done it all and there’s no more anyone can pretend to do”—and yet, and yet, though the narrator has just said that nothing can be done, “What can I do for You?”

—I love the sense of readiness in “I don’t care how rough the road is. Show me where it starts.” (“I hope I’m ready.”) It reminds me of the “left town at dawn” line in the closer of Street-Legal, but the air is crisper and colder here, the mountain peaks sharper, the clouds above them thicker. And the narrator is alone. Not in a spiritual sense, that is; but the road is his soul’s own road and though he may receive aid, in the end he has to walk it by himself, without any companions, even such as are “belittled by doubt.”

—“Whatever pleases You, tell it to my heart” seems to me a prayer of eternal worth. It’s a matter of orienting yourself toward the source of all that a believer holds dearest and considers of highest worth, certainly over any strictly earthly recipient. In my experience, it’s precisely in the figurative heart, in the quiet thoughtful center of yourself, that these things need to be figured out, or that these messages are received, depending on how you choose to think of it. And it’s hard work. The door that God has opened for the narrator in What Can I Do for You? can never be shut again, but that doesn’t mean the narrator will always be happy or excited about having walked into the country on the other side. “Don’t let me drift too far,” prays the narrator in I Believe in You. “Whatever pleases You, tell it to my heart,” prays the one here. Remind me. Help me.

—Christopher Ricks goes into this at terrific detail, but I can’t help mentioning the way the song answers its own question, or rather, reconfigures the question: from “What can I do for You?” to “What can I give to You?” to, at last, the central issue: “How can I live for You?”

On last.fm, The Fat Chocobo commented: “I don’t think a more beautiful song has ever been written, or a sweeter song ever performed. Those live harmonica breaks are like being scooped up out of the wilderness by the very Hand of God.” To which MyMediaMusic answers, with disarming enthusiasm, “Amen! Was going to say the same thing!”