Bob Dylan: "Trouble No More 1979 - 1981" - The Bootleg Series Vol. 13

It's the same performance, because (sadly) "When He Returns" was dropped from the set list for the spring leg. It appears to have been done as a one-off on 4-20 so it could be filmed/recorded. He only ever performed the song two more times after that night. Once near the end of the leg (in Akron in May), and in a one-off full-band arrangement in Cincy in 1981 that didn't come together very well.

 

I suspected, should have held back from that post. Happy Black Friday! (I'm doing NO shopping).

 

"Why did you say that?"


(This could go on a long time....)

 

This is good stuff! I’m ready to get right on your #1, using the Heylin Still on the Road and the new book as excellent guides to order of the writing. I also love the challenge of your #4 (the ongoing career spanning). That seems a really cool one to have and keep updating. Though I tremble at the task of starting now—13 BS in ;-). Are you ready? I’m ready. And that #2 is a great idea (property of Jesus). Heylin and others have mentioned there’s songs in this vein going back to the first album!

 

I'm slowly working my way through this set, and reading "Trouble in Mind." I've listened to the first four discs several times each and am on my second time through the Toronto set. And I've listened to San Diego once so far.

An excellent set. I'm still not the hugest fan of this period, in fact I'd say everything from Before the Flood through Shot of Love gets probably the least rotation in my Dylan listing, but I have a growing fascination with the evangelical Dylan and how it transformed his performances and this set really delivers on that front. Great job from Sony/Columbia and the Dylan camp.

 

Did anyone happen to watch the Redskins-Giants game on NBC last night? I ask because the music used underneath one of the graphic presentations was "Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat"! It zipped by, but to my ears it was an alternate take from the big box. Either that or someone looped one of the instrumental passages of the standard version.

 

I've been thinking about the arc of the Gospel period - at least what we as an audience can determine about the arc through Dylan's lyrics.

It's no great revelation on my part to say that we have the new-believer phase, marked by songs written in the old "finger pointing" style. Then we have the more introspective and humbler songs of "Saved". And finally, as many recent posts have pointed out, the last part of the arc is often marked by bitterness, battles with lust, judgmental attitudes towards former female companions, and general unhappiness for someone who was "so glad" to be "saved" just a short time before. Needless to say, selfishly, this is the most interesting part of the arc for me as a listener. (Yes, I enjoyed that type of pain on "Blood on the Tracks" as well.)

Contemplating this unhappy fellow, who needs a woman, and a shot of love, I thought of two other songs that have long intrigued me. The first is "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" from Bono & U2. It lacks the in-your-face bitterness of Dylan's 1980-1981 output (a few more positive or contemplative songs aside, I'll grant you), but reflects some similar notions, I think.

I believe in Kingdom Come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one.
But yes, I'm still running.

You broke the bonds
And loosed the chains
Carried the cross and all my shame
All my shame, you know I believe it.

But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for.
But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for.

So what happens when you find religion, feel that it has taken deep root, yet wake up to find that you STILL have "an emptiness that can't be filled"?

It's still unclear to me how much input Dylan had into "Love Rescue Me", the lyrics of which he co-wrote with Bono. Bono started writing it himself and Bob helped finish it. Bono described the song as "about a man people keep turning to as a savior but his own life is getting messed up and he could use a bit of salvation himself." Hmmmm.

Many strangers have I met
On the road to my regret
Many lost who seek to find themselves in me
They ask me to reveal
The very thoughts they would conceal
Love rescue me

No wonder Bono thought he might simply have dreamed a song that Dylan had already written.

 

Wow, what an odd choice for a football game!

 

Loved your whole post, but this question gets right to the heart of it for me -- and for anyone who ever thought they found "the answer" only to realize they were left with more questions. In 1985 Bob took a song that had been pretty secular a couple of uears earlier and inserted the lament, "I never did learn to drink that blood and call it wine." That line has puzzled and haunted me (as a lapsed Catholic) for thirty years. What did he mean there? Was he just being clever and swapping the positions of "blood" and "wine" in the lyric? Or was he so deadly serious about the cup containing Christ's blood that he found it almost offensive -- four years after his supposed return to secular life, mind you -- to call it "wine"? Or was he confused and let down by the whole thing? Any insights would be welcomed...

 

Ha! I haven't watched it yet, but it's on my DVR. Do you have any memory of approximately when in the game it was (even something as vague as "late")?

 

I'm going to go with closer to the middle - 2nd or 3rd quarter. The game did not have my full attention - I was creating essay prompts with one eye on the TV at the time. I needed some semi-football-withdrawal after the Cowboys debacle. The graphic was about old-timer Ernie Nevers, if I remember correctly.

 

While waiting in line for Black Friday RSD this morning (as I needed to guarantee I snagged a particular item for my wife as a Christmas present, I headed out at *gulp* 5 AM), I found listening to discs 3-6 of TNM passed the time quite nicely before they opened their doors at 9.

 

On a purely sonic level, Toronto may very well be the most beautifully recorded live Dylan I've ever heard (official live albums included, of course).

 

The music ain t bad either. Listening to it is an almost religious experience.

 

The blood/wine lines are in both iterations of the song.

I'd disagree with the notion that "Someone's Got a Hold of My Heart" is pretty secular. I think he largely secularized the lyrics when he did the re-write. Apart from apparently wanting to see how many cliches he could cram into one verse, the opening verse reflects the advice of those with Earthly concerns - Hedonism ("eat, drink and be merry") and living for today ("take the bull by the horns") instead of keeping an eye on the prize in the sky. But the precious angel knows better - she's a flower among these thorns. He's struggling with the traps that Earthly desires present - but she already shared the real truth with him (and it's just like she said it would be). There's a storm rising, and the sky is red. Like the Red Sky the little boy and little girl would be under years later. Like the Blood Red Sky Bono would write about. "And in the morning, it will be foul weather today; for the sky is red and lowering" (Book of Matthew). The city of red sky sounds like a modern day Sodom & Gomorah - people "think with their stomachs" (they lack ethics and morals), even the streets are crooked (revealing the corruption). There's a mention of Madame Butterfly (who converts to Christianity to please her husband, who abandons her anyway), Babylon (which, in Dylan's 1983 worldview, could be the entire physical world, a la Bob Marley's Rasta view), confession ... and then we get to the wine and the blood. For my two cents here, it's important to notice the other little switcheroo Dylan does. "What looks large from a distance, close up ain't never that big". Logic and life experience would certainly suggest that the opposite is true. Large objects look SMALLER in the distance. I don't pretend to know what Dylan means here, but what I take from it (with my Atheistic bias surely at work), is that sometimes when you inspect initially-impressive things up close, they wind up disappointing you. And that ties it to the blood-wine reversal line. He tried but he didn't quite "get it" the way he thought he had figured it all out.

And maybe it's just a slip when he sings "I never could learn to look at your face and call it mine", or maybe it's just an awkward lyric that he cleaned up in the rewrite (where he couldn't call "YOU" mine). But for me, it conjures up "I And I". No man sees my face and lives. As in a few Gospel era songs, the precious angel and the spiritual figure become blurred. Or not.

 

There's an example from my own life: someone to share the religion with and build a life. My Dad found the calling, also found love with my Mom, they married and he went to seminary (Union Seminary, NYC, started a month after I was born), became a minister, and later a Peace Corps administrator, then a minister again, and had my Mom at his side to both share in the belief, and the work of the ministry, and live a life of love and family, a marriage and partnership that lasted 62 years.

From that I would surmise: If you have that faith and don't have those to share it with in love and dedication, you're going to be looking still.

 

There’s an obscure co-write on Greg Lake’s s/t 1981 album, a song called Love You Too Much, attributed to Bob Dylan, Helena Springs, and Greg Lake, that may fit into your third period:

“I stand convicted, behind the bars of love
For me there is no escape
Not even mercy from Heaven above
You've got me falling this way and that way
Anyway you just ain't here
And I love you too much (love you too much)”

 

"Love You Too Much" predates the Born Again period (despite it's delayed appearance in 1981). Dylan performed it twice during the '78 tour. Lake's contribution/revision came later.

 

It is right before halftime. A bit hard to hear under the announcer chatter, but there it is.

 

Ah, good to know.

 

I'm guessing someone has been all over this already, but AFTER "Love You Too Much" was performed in concert in '78, a song perhaps called "This Way, That Way" or "This A-Way, That A-Way" begins to show up in soundcheck performances. It is performed in the same Nashville soundcheck that produced the much-discussed (but still not released) early version of "Slow Train". Are the two songs related beyond that piece of lyric? I'm guessing "no" or our favorite infallible Dylan scholar would surely have caught it, right?

 

Right you are -- that's what I get for "winging it" when I can't double-check the lyrics and think it through. I've now done what I should have done before posting, and lined up both sets of lyrics side by side -- and I'm surprised at how structurally similar the two versions of the song are. The breath of the storm, Madame Bbutterfly, "Memphis In June," the voice crying in the wilderness -- they all appear in the same spots. But of course the songs are very different in the end. The "lily among thorns" is now a weight "around [his] neck" right at the top of the song -- and yet, he desires her in both. She may have his heart in the earlier song, but two years later, he's lost her and is asking for "anybody" to help him find her.

All your points are excellent -- hell, Ray, can you just come over to my house and explain ALL Bob's songs to me? It would be easier for both of us! In my defense, after 1979-81 -- when the religious content was obvious and often heavy-handed -- the divide between "secular" and "spiritual" gets a whole lot blurrier. Your absolutely right that "Someone's Got A Hold Of My Heart" is soaked in religious allusions, with just a couple of more obvious references (like the water/wine) -- but to me the songs are both primarily about affairs of the heart, rather than spiritual concerns. Yeah, yeah, the world is doomed and everyone is damned -- but what about that WOMAN who bewitches me?! Whereas in "When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky," female troubles and the End Times are also present -- but this is DEFINITELY a song about the Apocalypse, and not love, because:

It won’t matter who loves who
Either you’ll love me or I’ll love you
When the night comes falling from the sky​

I always took that line ("What looks large from a distance...") to represent his disillusionment -- not with Christianity necessarily, but with organized religion of all kinds. It looked "large" and powerful when he first converted, but the more he incorporated it into his life, the "closer" he got to it (and the less he felt "saved"), he realized it was "never that big." I believe (as I think a lot of us do) that Bob never stopped being "religious" but rather stopped being a born-again Christian; he's made the journey, he's got his beliefs, and (as with most areas of his life) they don't fit neatly into any one box. As he sang in 2006 -- 25 years AFTER his so-called "religious phase" ended:

All my loyal and much-loved companions
They approve of me and share my code
I practice a faith that's been long abandoned
Ain't no altars on this long and lonesome road​

 

I enjoy thinking about the songs (I'm hard-wired that way, apparently) so I'm happy if my ideas help you shed your own light on them. I don't think is a case to the "Caribbean Wind" extreme, but I think he did cut the heart out of the song when he rewrote it. It "sounds" better rewritten, production aside, (IMO) - it is more ear-appealing and it has the facade of Dylan ambiguity and wit (hidden behind lines gathered willy nilly from sitting in front of a TV), but I think it lacks the emotional gravitas. You hit the nail on the head - she's gone from being a source of inspiration to him to being a pain in his ass. He appears to be in love with a woman that don't even appeal to him. For me, it's bit, well ... it's a divorced man in his middle 40s sounding like the put-down artist of 24 (She just happened to be there, that's all). I prefer the grown-up of the first iteration.

I'm quite the fan of both "When the Night"s - yes, even the bombastically over-produced one. The production sounds like the end of the world. I think that's a song Dylan was successful in presenting "outside of time". They're really NOT meeting on the last night of the world's existence, but the two events (the apocalypse, and their romantic "showdown") run in parallel with all sorts of similarities. Kind of like "Synchronicity II" for the End Times crowd.

Regarding Dylan's disillusionment, I'm reminded of my all-time favorite quote from any TV program. It's from "Six Feet Under", and I won't get it exactly right, but here goes: "You think life is like a vending machine. You insert virtuous living in one side and happiness just comes out the other. Well that's not how life works." So Dylan might have believed in a great many things (I'm guessing that even if Jesus remains his "hero" to this day, he's not expecting the End Times, at least not on the timetable he once did), but all that belief failed to bring him happiness (apparently not by a LONG shot, judging by his song lyrics alone). I can say for myself, personally, that if I was firmly convinced that we as a species possessed no collective ability to change ANYTHING, I'd be depressed too.

 

I actually wasn't kidding - . I think I was trying to (too quickly) say that the lyrics are not so clearly grabbed from scripture (as far as I know), like many phrases and images on STC and Saved. Anyway, now I have to go investigate that thread.

 

I give you credit for professing love for the album version of "When The Night" -- one of the few Dylan tracks that I would label with Heylin-esque adjectives like "abomination" or "sabotaged." Once I heard the BS1-3 version, I never looked back. Extra credit for the "Synchronicity II" reference -- surely a first in a Dylan thread!

I'm with you on everything else -- and I also loved "Six Feet Under," and I think you got that quote pretty close. I do think that Bob lives in a constant state of low-level despair that the world is crashing and burning, and no one can save it. Kind of like his old friend George, who had seemed to have mellowed on the religious front in his later years, but still jokingly predicted in 1999 that his next album would be called "Your Planet Is Doomed, Vol. 1." (Pointedly YOUR and not OUR.)