9. Precious Angel

At the present stage in our lives, my wife and I are fortunate in that we rarely need to, and don’t find ourselves wanting to, ever spend more than a few hours apart. Exceptions occur once a year at most, and rarely for more than 48 hours. Maybe it’s because the separations are so infrequent that my memories of them—dreary affairs that I just want to be done with as soon as possible (for a fuller description, see Jeffrey Lewis’s wonderful Outta Town)—tend to stay clear as time passes.

One such separation was in late August 2017, when we had just moved to Xiamen. I needed to fly out to the island of Aomen, also known as Macau, to get my working visa renewed. I took John Crowley’s Little, Big with me and began it on the (45-minute) flight out. Also with me was a durian pizza to serve as dinner (I couldn’t afford a meal in Aomen), a phone that could connect to WiFi so that my wife and I could let each other know we we were fine, and my portable mp3 player and headphones. I flew out in the evening, had an appointment at the visa office early the next morning, spent another night in town, went to the visa office again the next day, and flew back to Xiamen that evening. About 48 hours, in all.

I don’t sleep well during these separations, so I had approximately 44 hours to kill. Subtract a few for staying in touch with my wife. The rest were for walking, reading, and music. I probably made it through 200 pages of the Crowley, though rather joylessly; not Crowley’s fault. As for albums, I plunged into some recent releases by beloved artists, albums that I hadn’t yet given the proper attention. In the summer of 2017, that meant Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker (which I fell in love with during that trip), Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie’s Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie (which I fell in love with during that trip), and Neil Young’s Peace Trail (which I fell in love with during that trip). The rest of the time I listened to Orphans & Vandals’ incendiary, VU/Van Morrison-inflected tear in the fabric of our cosmos, in other words their debut album I Am Alive and You Are Dead (the best [true] debut since The Piper at the Gates of Dawn?—“true” in the sense that The Angry Young Them is Van Morrison’s true debut album, not Astral Weeks, or that Tesco Value rather than Debiut is Czesław Mozil’s) (I Am Alive and You Are Dead is Orphans & Vandals’ first and also their only album, but the songwriter Al Joshua released exquisite new music in 2018 and 2020, God bless him), and Slow Train Coming.

To this day, when I listen to the Cohen, Buckingham/McVie, Neil Young, or Orphans & Vandals records, Aomen appears before me. I suppose I’d already had too long a history with Slow Train Coming for similar impressions to form in its case. But for some reason, Precious Angel merged with the scene, and now whenever I hear the studio version, I’m there again walking up and down the narrow winding streets, checking out the Chinese/Portuguese dual-language street signs, passing the casinos and the advertisements for casinos, walking to the shore and watching the ships, seeing scores of fish leaping out of the sunlit afternoon water of a bay, crossing an overpass over a busy avenue to go buy bread instead of lunch. Maybe it was all that sunlight. “Shine your light, shine your light on me.” And maybe it’s because Precious Angel is the only love song on the album that’s to a woman and not just to God, and while God was near me in that stretch of hours, my true love was not.

Whatever the case may have been, when I listen to Precious Angel now there is southern sunlight upon me, and a wind from off shore, and the memory of a loneliness that, though real and sharp enough, was tenuous and thin, since, even as I experienced it, I couldn’t but be aware that it would very likely soon be over. And so, if that was the case, why not give the majority of my spirit over to the music coursing through my ears? And so why not lose myself in Precious Angel?

Slow Train Coming is not an ordinary album, but I think Precious Angel is the strangest song on it. Slow Train and Gonna Change My Way of Thinking (and, if we look outwards to the outtakes, Trouble in Mind) have their terrific lyrical swerves, but Precious Angel trumps them all. When I haven’t heard it for a while and I listen again, I do so with astonishment and delight and with my ears fixed on Dylan’s voice, because the lyrics in the verses surprise me as much as if I’d never heard them before.

In a grand long 2007 interview with Allan MacInnis, Peter Stampfel talked about his acquaintance with Phil Ochs: “Another reason I didn’t like Phil Ochs was, he was always (adopts covetous resentful tone), ‘This year I’m going to be better than Dylan!’, and I was going, ‘Oh come on, man!’ For one thing, ‘In your dreams, kid,’ and for another thing, that wasn’t the point, the point was for Phil Ochs to be the best Phil Ochs he could be.”

Right. That’s the task of any songwriter, any artist. And on Precious Angel, Bob Dylan is being the best Bob Dylan he can. I can’t think of a single other writer in the music world, be it English or (granted limited knowledge of these latter two universes of song) Polish or Chinese, who would follow up a couplet like “Can [my friends] imagine the darkness that will fall from on high / When men will beg God to kill them and they won’t be able to die?” with “Sister, let me tell you about a vision that I saw,” or who after saying “Let us hope [our ancestors] have found mercy in their bone-filled graves” will, in the next breath, pronounce, “You’re the queen of my flesh, girl, you’re my woman, you’re my delight” (although, come to think of it, there might be a certain alarmed worldliness in the narrator thinking joyfully of flesh a mere moment after he’d been speaking of graves filled with fleshless bones), or who would set all these rather dark images and notions to an arrangement that’s half-soul, half-island pop, and all scooter (to use the term as Antonia might), so much so, in fact, that in 1980 the band would regularly play Precious Angel even faster than it is on record…

I love the way that in Precious Angel and Slow Train, the wordy verses are balanced by a spare refrain: “And there’s a slow, a slow train coming up around the bend” there, “Shine your light / Shine your light on me” here, albeit with a beautiful, humble flourish out of the chorus: “You know, I just couldn’t make it by myself / I’m a little too blind to see.” As these latter lines go, I’ll repeat what I said about the refrain of When You Gonna Wake Up and the opening verse of Gonna Change My Way of Thinking: I don’t think such words ever stop being true. Not for me.

As for the magnificent thing that Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett made of Precious Angel in the studio, what can I tell you but “Listen and be glad” ? I think this track (fittingly the second on the album; the opening sally over, the band unfurls its wings) features everything great about every player involved with the record: Dylan singing his heart out, Barry Beckett on organ, Mark Knopfler laying down gorgeous lead after gorgeous lead, Pick Withers kicking ass with that soulful and precise touch of his, the horn riffs, the beautiful backing vocals, the rhythm changes—and the sheer length of the thing! Six and a half minutes that sound like half that!

My series has a great reader from Expecting Rain, alias twistedfloyd, who some twenty-five entries ago expressed hope that I wouldn’t neglect Precious Angel. He commented also on his love for the November 16th, 1979 performance at the Warfield, as heard on Disc 1 of Trouble No More. My feeling about Slow Train Coming songs in 1979 tends to be that they don’t match the studio versions (as opposed to 1980, in which year I think many of the live arrangements come into their own), but floyd got me to listen again and more carefully, and man! Talk about an impeccable performance. There’s a lot to like about the rawer, less fancy live arrangement. The vocals are thrilling (don’t sleep on the way Dylan delivers the final two lines), the musicians are on fire, and the song is irresistible. That a performance of such outstanding quality was merely par for the course in the autumn of 1979 boggles my mind.