Bob Dylan / 5:25
Musicians
Bob Dylan: vocals
Mark Knopfler: guitar
Barry Beckett: electric piano, organ
Tim Drummond: bass
Pick Withers: drums
Carolyn Dennis, Helena Springs, and Regina Havis: backup vocals
Recording Studio
Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, Sheffield, Alabama: May 4, 1979 (Overdubs May 4 and 11, 1979)
Technical Team
Producers: Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett
Sound Engineer: Gregg Hamm
“Gotta Serve Somebody” is the first song recorded for the album that testifies to Dylan’s conversion to Christianity. The songwriter was inspired by both the Old and New Testaments. In the book of Joshua, it is written: “And if it seem evil unto you to serve the lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD” (24:15). And in the Gospel of Matthew, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (6:24). In the Bible, mammon is the symbol of material wealth and greed. Therefore, Dylan leads his crusade against the possession of wealth as the goal of life on earth. Whoever you may be—ambassador, gambler, heavyweight champion, socialist, businessman, high-class thief, preacher, rich, poor, blind, or lame—who cares! We all must serve God. Although this message is universal, it is intended primarily for Dylan himself. Thus when he sings, “You might be a rock ’n’ roll addict prancing on the stage / You might have drugs at your command, women in a cage,” the lines are about his elevated status as an idol since the early 1960s. All that is called into question. For now, the times have changed again. During an interview with a radio broadcaster in December 1979, Dylan said, “I don’t sing any song which hasn’t been given to me by the Lord to sing.”
Bob Dylan and his musicians recorded “Gotta Serve Somebody” during the fifth session of Slow Train Coming on May 4, 1979. Four takes were recorded, the third being chosen for future overdubs. From the first notes, his direct entrance is striking, almost threatening in manner. The rhythm is heavy, maybe a bit too static. Barry Beckett on the electric piano adds blues color and spirituality to the piece. Rock journalist Phil Sutcliffe explained in Mojo magazine, “But when Jerry Weller’s co-producer, Barry Beckett, met Dylan at Muscle Shoals he searched keyboard and soul to find three glowering, angry notes bleak enough to announce ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’… That day in May, 1979, from Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler and Pick Withers to the black female back-up singers, everybody got Dylan, everybody got the song. No matter what they knew of Dylan’s recent travails—the divorce, the critical pounding he suffered over Renaldo and Clara, how unfathomably hard he took Elvis’s death—they felt to the bone marrow his terror and confusion.”122 Beckett’s excellent electric piano (added as an overdub on May 11) dominates the mix, as if trying to threaten those who do not hear Dylan’s message. And, rare in Dylan’s productions, the overall sound breathes. Even Knopfler on rhythm guitar remains in the background. After the confusion of Street Legal, this new approach allows Dylan to give his greatest studio vocal, one for which he won the Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance in 1979. Accompanied by superb harmony vocals from the chorus, Dylan abandons his own guitar, something extremely rare in his discography.
Yet “Gotta Serve Somebody” was almost excluded from the track listing for Slow Train Coming. When Jerry Wexler started collecting the tapes for the album, Dylan remembers, “I had to fight to get it on the album, it was ridiculous.”12
The song was released as a single on August 20, 1979 (with “Trouble in My Mind” on the B-side). The single reached number 24 on the Billboard charts in October. Since the concert at the Fox Warfield Theater in San Francisco on November 1, 1979, Dylan has sung it over four hundred times.