Bob Dylan / 4:05
SINGLE
DATE OF RELEASE
Heart of Mine / The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar
September 1981
on Columbia Records
(REFERENCE COLUMBIA 18-02510)
Musicians
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar
Danny Kortchmar: guitar
Fred Tackett: guitar (?)
Benmont Tench: keyboards
Carl Pickhardt: keyboards
Tim Drummond: bass
Jim Keltner: drums (?), maracas (?)
Ringo Starr: drums (?), maracas (?)
Clydie King, Carolyn Dennis, Regina McCrary, and Madelyn Quebec: backup vocals
Recording Studio
Rundown Studios, Santa Monica, California: May 11 or 15, 1981
Technical Team
Producers: Chuck Plotkin and Bob Dylan
Sound engineer: Toby Scott
“The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” was composed during the summer of 1980. It is a blues-rock song that could have found its place on Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde. However, since those recordings Dylan’s voice had changed, as had his relationship with Jesus Christ. The song is imbued with surrealism and a series of successive images unrelated to each other. Biblical prophecies also inspired “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar.” The narrator, who “Prayed in the ghetto with my face in the cement,” sees the “Curtain risin’ on a new age”: in other words, he will be there for the apocalypse. Dylan even mentions the River Jordan, beyond which lies the Promised Land of the Hebrews, led by Moses. As for the groom still waiting at the altar, would that be Dylan?
Uncertainties surround the production of this excellent piece. The studio record sheets mention March 27, 1981, at Rundown Studios, while the Biograph booklet states May 11 and Dylan himself indicates the possible participation of the Beatles’ drummer scheduled for May 15 at Clover Studios: “Danny [Kortchmar] played on this and maybe Ringo Starr, I can’t remember.”12 Listening to the drumming, it is certainly possible that Ringo was playing. But why was the song excluded from the album Shot of Love? Dylan at first thought it was sloppy, having more or less lost the original riff’s idea. But after listening to it again later, he found it rather good, even if it hadn’t turned out the way he wanted it to. It was Chuck Plotkin who reworked the first version, track by track, through a long and tedious process to speed up the tempos without changing the pitch of Dylan’s voice. Plotkin said, “And when it came time to discuss the B-side of the first single I said, ‘How about “Groom?”’ He said, ‘Well, it was too slow.’ And I said, ‘Well, I dunno. It sounds great now!’… So we listened together and he really liked it.” This testimony places the event after the session of March 27, since the producer at that time was still Jimmy Iovine. Chuck Plotkin was only hired at the end of April. “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” was initially the B-side of the “Heart of Mine” single. Only in the mid-1980s did Dylan and Columbia Records decide to insert “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” as the sixth track of subsequent pressings of the LP and the compact disc of Shot of Love.