Bob Dylan / 5:18
Musicians
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar
Daniel Lanois: guitar
Robert Britt: guitar
Augie Meyers: organ
Jim Dickinson: keyboards
Tony Garnier: bass
Brian Blade and Jim Keltner: drums
Recording Studio
Criteria Recording Studios, Miami: January 1997
Technical Team
Producer: Daniel Lanois (in association with Jack Frost Productions)
Sound Engineer: Mark Howard
The narrator says of himself, “I feel like I’m coming to the end of my way.” He confesses that all was going well until he fell in love and “nothing can heal [him] now, but your touch.” He continues to love this woman until his last breath. The worst is to be aware that all “attempts to please you were all in vain.”
If he is the protagonist of Time Out of Mind, Dylan here picks a Delta blues song to bare his soul. Again there is a heavy atmosphere, with a strong Wurlitzer presence, a guitar buried in the reverb, another guitar with a pronounced vibrato, shuffle rhythm, and Dylan’s hoarse voice with the “Elvis echo,” now ever present on the album. His performance is excellent; his malaise is contagious, and the musicians are there to support him.
On the production side, Lanois does not favor any particular technique. Compare the beginning and end of the song: the tempo fluctuates. This time there is no loop or click track to guide the musicians. They play without restriction, just expressing their feeling at their own pace. There may be two drummers, but it is the groove that counts.
Between October 24, 1997, the date of Dylan’s first performance of this song onstage at the Humphrey Coliseum in Starkville, Mississippi, and June 22, 2011, at Alcatraz in Milan, Italy, he performed it 192 times.