In February, there will be a DVD follow-up to the 2003 album Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan, where various artists, mostly known gospel performers, recorded their own versions of some of Dylan’s gospel songs. It looks like the DVD will also give a peek back to that 1979-’81 era, with some archival footage and interviews with people who performed with Dylan during that time. Something to look forward to.

On a not altogether unrelated note, I was just listening to that Gotta Serve Somebody CD again, and to the version of When You Gonna Wake Up performed by Lee Williams and the Spiritual QC’s. I think it’s the only track where the performers significantly altered the lyrics of the song. (Dylan did re-write Gotta Serve Somebody slightly for Shirley Caesar, but that’s different.) I can’t say why Williams and the Spiritual QC’s didn’t stick to the original lyric; the song is a little bare-knuckled, maybe. Verses like:

Counterfeit philosophies have polluted all of your
thoughts.
Karl Marx has got ya by the throat, Henry
Kissinger’s got you tied up in knots.

become:

Counterfeit philosophies have polluted all of our
thoughts
Life has got us by the throat
Conditions have got us tied in knots

Well, performers have always taken license with songs. No big deal. But in one particular instance, it seems to me, Willams alters one of Dylan’s couplets in a way that perfectly illustrates the relative power of Dylan’s words, versus the more obvious and predictable way people might tend to prefer to hear them.

Williams sings this:

You got men who just can’t hold their peace, women can’t control their tongues,
The rich oppress the poor and the old oppress the young.

Nothin’ but the same old story, huh? Those rich people oppressing the poor people, and those powerful old people oppressing the young ones. The same old lines of class and authority.

Except Dylan’s original is a little different. It goes like this:

You got men who can’t hold their peace and women who can’t control their tongues,
The rich seduce the poor and the old are seduced by the young.

The rich seduce the poor. A little more depth there, no? In Biblical terms, you might look at it as the poor being led into the sin of covetousness by the rich, whose pleasure in being rich is to be able to flaunt their wealth to those who have less, and to assure them that this is what they also need to be happy. Both sides in the equation have fallen into sin, and fallen asleep. When you gonna wake up?

And the old are not oppressing the young, in Dylan’s version, but being seduced by the young. That’s sort of the same thing as is happening with the rich and poor in the previous half of the line. The beauty of the young—magnified and held up for worship everyday on billboards, in magazines and on television—tells the old that this is what they should desire. The young revel in their beauty and the power it gives them while the old instead pursue that false god of becoming young again. Both are bound for a certain and soon decay and yet are somehow oblivious to it. When you gonna wake up?

All in all, a little more to chew on in Dylan’s original lines, I do believe.

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