Springsteen and Dylan in the 80s
The Boss did more with less and Christian Bob deserves an apology
“One Step Up” and two steps simpler
It was only a few years ago that I got into Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love. The reclamation of ‘80s soundscapes via indie and pop music helped open my classic rock-weaned ears to all sorts of great music from the period. Tunnel definitely sounds dated, especially the drum machines and some of the synths, but now that can be part of its charm instead of a disqualifier.
Most of the album is great, but the real gem is “One Step Up,” an all time crushingly sad Springsteen song up there with “The River.” It’s a portrait of someone down on his luck and unable to crawl out of the hole. It’s a cousin of Born to Run’s “Meeting Across the River,” where you know the subject is about to make his situation even worse.
Springsteen started writing as a New Dylan street poet. I have a particular soft spot for his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, where it doesn’t all work but in the best moments he unleashes a torrent of words. He struggles to even fit all of his big ideas and adjectives into the song’s cadence at times, but that is part of its disheveled charm.
Shortly after, The Boss found his theatrical E Street sound and the rest is history. He was able to dial back some of the wordiness and distill more perfect poetry on Born to Run classics like “Thunder Road” or “Jungleland.” On subsequent albums he found a more taut and direct writing style, which I think has reached its maturity by Tunnel of Love in 1987.
You could view the arc from Asbury Park to world-conquering but simpler works like Born in the USA similar to how Jay-Z narrated his own career transition: he dumbed down for his audience and doubled his dollars. But I think that would miss the power of this more direct writing. Few of the lines from that early Springsteen have rolled around my head like “I’m tired of sitting around here trying to write this book” from “Dancing in the Dark.” In some ways, it’s harder to write and perform in this style. Each image needs to say more because it’s not a part of the torrent of wordplay on his earlier albums.
On “One Step Up,” the resigned vocals, spacious arrangement, and distant backing vocals help fill in the details. Compared to “For You,” he’s learned to show instead of tell.
Dylan’s evangelical zeal
Christian Dylan was always framed to me as an all time jump-the-shark moment in pop music history. Because I’m a completionist, I listened to all the ‘70s and ‘80s Dylan albums on a road trip once (it’s nice to have a project when you’re driving from San Diego to Seattle). I liked “Gotta Serve Somebody,” but the other Christian stuff left me pretty cold. Boring songwriting, preachy lyrics, dated ‘80s arrangements. As with any artist this great, there are gems like the crunchy guitar lick on “Saved.”
Tyler Wilcox, writing at Aquarium Drunkard (and at his excellent blog), helped tip me off to the fact that there’s some worthwhile material from this period when the new Dylan box set came out in 2017, Trouble No More. My memory was jogged by the Jokerman podcast covering the same box set. Hat tip to both parties!
Wilcox is right that the correct entry point to this era is the live recordings. Dylan assembled an incredible backing band, including a cadre of gospel back up singers. The vocals are incredible. Dylan usually vocally toys with cynicism and ironic distance, but here he’s exclusively passionate and genuine. Okay, there are some jokey songs, too:
The version of “Precious Angel” at the top is an excellent illustration: compare the stale studio delivery of this verse from Slow Train Coming with the live version. In the studio, he’s lecturing. The live version crackles with enthusiasm and religious conviction. Who even cares what he’s saying when he’s performing like this?
What many casual fans don’t know is that Bob Dylan has a Grateful Dead-like relationship with his own catalog. He’s always re-interpreting his own songbook and twisting it into new shapes. It’s shocking how different the versions of commonly performed songs like “Gotta Serve Somebody” are on Trouble No More. It must have been exciting and exhausting to be in his band on that tour. Pick a song of his you love and check out Youtube live recordings over the years to hear just how diverse the interpretations are.
The box set is full of gems, especially the first version of “Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody.” That one is also interesting because the versions on the box set feature quite different lyrics, and evidently Dylan was never fully satisfied with it because it never appeared on any of the studio albums. For my money, this fiery, self-castigating version is the best.
Unearthing the best version of one of his best songs
One of Dylan’s best songs of his career is also hidden in the Christian era Shot of Love. Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen both extol “Every Grain of Sand” as one of Dylan’s greatest songs, but the studio version on Shot of Love has never done it for me. The diction feels stiff, the arrangement matches the vocal. It’s too long and pads the runtime with an unremarkable harmonica solo.
Dylan re-worked his songs a lot in the studio. Recently they’ve been releasing box sets that cover his recording sessions in depth, like The Cutting Edge (which covers the recording sessions for Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, the most productive and impressive year-and-a-half that any popular musician has ever had). You hear a restless studio experimenter who ultimately arrives at the right conclusion, whether it’s removing the drums from “Mr. Tambourine Man” or adding a goofy train whistle to “Highway 61 Revisited.”
“Every Grain of Sand” is a moment where he settled on the wrong performance. The Trouble No More box set exposed me to two far superior versions that helped me see this as one of Dylan’s all time achievements. First, there’s the beautiful stripped down demo below, complete with a dog barking in the background. There’s an aching quality in Dylan’s voice, a weariness, an awestruck quality in the face of divine power. This version has the intimacy of the best demos – think of the fireplace crackling in Neil Young’s “Will to Love.”
But the best version is this rehearsal. He trims the run time from the studio version but leaves time for a languid, lush coda. The guitar polishes the arpeggios of the demo, but stops short of Shot of Love’s sheen. Most importantly, the vocal! He sings like his life (and afterlife) depends on it. The song does begin with a confession, after all.
Scattered throughout Dylan’s catalog, there are points when he steps out from abstract poetry, twisted (or straight-faced) Americana, or whatever his sound of the moment is and sums up a whole era of his life and career. Like Springsteen, who began by imitating Dylan, he knows when to dial back the poetry and be direct. He bid farewell to the Greenwich Village folk scene and protest music on “My Back Pages,” putting a bow on that era as he hurtled into electric surrealism. After decades of wandering, on “I Contain Multitudes” he linked his legacy to Whitman's panoramic American view.
And right in the middle of it all, Dylan sums up the radical conviction and awestruck humility that came from his Christian conversion. It’s easy to mock the Dylan-Goes-Christian era, but it’s harder after hearing this song.