8. Man Gave Names to All the Animals

Man Gave Names to All the Animals, as heard on Slow Train Coming and then live between 1979 and 1981, is my personal pinnacle for the meeting of reggae and rock. I say this having heard and adored a fair amount of rock-style reggae or reggae-style rock: Bob Marley, Ijahman, Majek Fashek (Josiah King of Kings!), Wings (C Moon! So Glad to See You Here!), Led Zeppelin (D’yer Mak’er!), Bruce Cockburn, Eric Clapton, The Band (Twilight!), The Clash, Dżem, David Gilmour (About Face’s Cruise!!! One of the best songs of all time!), the Red Hot Chili Peppers (Joe! Funny Face!), System of a Down (Radio/Video!), Dispatch, State Radio, The Casual Fiasco, Babyshambles, Gov’t Mule (Unring the Bell!), Devendra Banhart (Foolin’!), Lao Che (Sen a’la tren!), Matisyahu, SOJA (so much great music from this soulful Virginia band), Among Criminals, Charlie Messing, Micah Blue Smaldone, Japan’s mighty Fishmans… all in all, a fair amount… And Man Gave Names to All the Animals is really the most wonderful song I’ve heard in the genre.

Years ago, when I was first falling for Slow Train Coming, and was an active lurker on various online forums, somebody happened to ask the populous online community of the Steve Hoffman Music Corner whether anyone was aware of an album that sounded anything like Slow Train. There were a couple of interesting recommendations in the belated responses (the first took several days), like Isaac Freeman’s Beautiful Stars, but none that really sounded close, neither in sound nor in vibe. (Incidentally, that is one of my top criteria for what constitutes a Truly Great Album: that when I have a craving for the mood/feeling/sound of some album, no other album I know can come anywhere near to satisfying that craving.)

The nearest thing I’ve found to Slow Train Coming only musically is Dire Straits’ Communiqué, which figures, since it was recorded by Wexler & Beckett only a few months earlier, and since two Straiters went on to join the Slow Train Coming band. As I hear it, the best instrumental parts in Dylan’s album always fall either to Mark Knopfler or to Pick Withers, unless (1) it’s When He Returns and they’re not playing, or (2) you count the sporadic horn licks (who wrote them, I wonder? Barry Beckett?).

I mention Communiqué because, for one thing, it’s worth your time (the band’s finest, I’d say, if not Knopfler’s, which for me is Privateering), but mostly to emphasize what makes the album version of Man Gave Names to All the Animals so marvelous. The opener of Communiqué, Once Upon a Time in the West, is reggae too, and it sounds great, but it doesn’t absorb me in anything like the same way. Dylan’s song is sparer, and it’s got that amazing eerie keyboard, and the ethereal vocals from earthy backing singers, and of course Bob Dylan Himself as lead vocalist, he who’s “got the blood of the land in [his] voice.” Buttressing the musical elements is the lyrical content, which looks far, far beyond the stuff of the world we know. I love reggae when the words set to it are political (State Radio, The Clash, Gilmour’s Cruise), and often even more when the words are spiritual (Cockburn, Ijahman, Matisyahu), but most of all I love reggae when the words conjure up a world of their own, and that’s what Man Gave Names to All the Animals does, set as it is “in the beginning, long time ago.” As Expecting Rain user Two Timing Slim says, “The [vocal] melody seems ancient, somewhere from deep within the hills of Hebron.” (For another example of what I have in mind, see Micah Blue Smaldone’s song The Mule.)

Man Gave Names to All the Animals is not a favorite among online commentators on Dylan, but I’ve heard that the good people of France, Belgium, and Russia stand with me; apparently, in those countries, this is one of Dylan’s best-known and best-loved songs. Perhaps, like me, they recognize the wisdom set forth in Peter Stampfel’s ode to not taking yourself too seriously, Ass in the Air: “Stick your ass in the air in the late afternoon / When the sun goes down, you can moon the moon / Stick your ass in the air in the midnight hour / Like the moon was the sun and your ass was a flower … Stick your ass in the air, wave it wild and free / And you will bring confusion to the enemy.”

I love that on an album as hard-edged and intense as Slow Train Coming, Dylan found room for lighter songs like Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others) and this one. The musical mood of Man Gave Names to All the Animals is dark, the better to fit its album context, but lyrically and where Dylan’s phrasing goes, we are offered sheer delight. This is a funny, charming, oddball song. The bear, we’re told, “liked to howl” (?) and had not only a “furry back” (true enough) but “furry hair” (!) (which reminds me, the Chinese for “yak” translates literally to furry-cow cow). In live versions, the cow is often “smoking up so much grass” instead of eating it. On the final night of the 1979 Warfield residency, after thirteen shows of relatively stable lyrics, Dylan sings, “He saw an animal leaving a muddy trail / Real dirty face and a curly tail / He wasn’t too small and he wasn’t too big / Ohhh, I think I’ll call it a giraffe,” which makes Regina McCrary, Helena Springs, and Monalisa Young crack up so hard that they can barely sing the refrain. Last.fm’s GreatChupon also quotes an unidentified performance in which Dylan supposedly sang, “It wasn’t too small and it wasn’t too big and it wasn’t too small! HM! Think I’ll call it a, uhh [mumble mumble].”

But Man Gave Names to All the Animals ends with a dose of darkness. That moment, right in the last line, is my favorite pivot in a Dylan song. The end comes so seemingly out of nowhere yet rings so true, and calls to mind a sequence of events with import far heavier and gloomier than the nursery-rhyme naming of the first five verses; after all, the “tree near a lake” is no ordinary tree. I remember how, on my first listen to the album, the band’s sudden drop-out gave me chills that lasted well into the opening minute of When He Returns.

Live, the band dropped out in the usual place, but instead of the song ending, one of the backing singers hissed into the silence, and the band came back in for one last long refrain, in which the backing singers linger on the phrase “in the beginning” until Dylan joins them for a final, dramatic “long—time—agooooooooo…”

If you like the song, it’s impossible to go wrong with live versions, even through the not-always-wholehearted 1989-91 revival (in which Dylan experimented with full-fledged “duck,” “dog,” “cat,” and “giraffe” verses … “It looked like it goes on for a mile and a half / Ahh, I think I’ll call it a giraffe”). My personal favorites are from very early in the 1979 Warfield residency. In the all-Gospel concert arrangement, the third, fourth, and fifth refrains are played with drums and vocals only, the other instruments silent for a spell. This approach highlights the excellent singing, which is probably why Dylan eventually asked Jim Keltner (or was it that the drummer himself decided?) to keep the beat real simple. But in those first Warfield performances, Keltner used the break to go nuts, laying awesome reggae fill over awesome reggae fill while Bob and the girls sang.

Man Gave Names to All the Animals happens to be part of a great and fruitful tradition in that it’s an artwork based on, or retelling, or elaborating a story from the Hebrew Bible. There are tales in those old books that have tremendous power whether the reader (or songwriter) is a believer or not. Keeping good company with Man Gave Names to All the Animals are Antonia and Peter Stampfel’s New Adam in the Garden, the Jerry Garcia Band’s Gomorrah, Robert Hunter’s Book of Daniel (from his great Garcia-produced Jack o’ Roses record, which also happens to be the only place you can hear the title track, a top-notch yet all-but-forgotten Garcia/Hunter composition), the first lines of Dylan’s Cover Down, Pray Through, mewithoutYou’s The Angel of Death Came to David’s Room (stunning if you know the story it’s based on), and—turning from music to prose fiction—Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, which spends 1,492 pages exploring and retelling the story of Genesis’s Jacob and Joseph. Alongside Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and John Cowper Powys’s Owen Glendower, it’s my favorite novel.

Speaking of Cover Down, Pray Through, there’s something I mentioned in the When He Return write-up that bears repeating. There’s a great couplet in Cover Down that goes, “He’s the hammer of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness / From Genesis to Revelation, repent and confess.” The way Slow Train Coming ends is an exact illustration of the beginning of the second line. Man Gave Names to All the Animals is Genesis, with Adam in the garden (busy “pinning leaves,” as per the refrain of the old traditional tune that Peter Stampfel and Antonia adapted into New Adam in the Garden; but as Peter glossed this refrain, “Oh no, we’re naked!” which means the pinning happens in the myth-evening of Man Gave Names to All the Animals’s myth-afternoon). When He Returns (“He’s got plans of his own to set up his throne”) is Revelation.