I’m glad I found this one! This is Bob Dylan in 1980 during his spiritual period performing a powerful version of one of my favorites – In the Garden.
I started getting into Bob in about 2001 and it took me until last year to find that his Christian work is the most compelling he has done – in my opinion anyway. There is no doubt that Bob Dylan was very high off Christianity, possessed by God and on a mission to sing these songs. I’m sure these songs would have easily come to Bob Dylan after the overload of information he received during Bible School. This was clearly a very important part of Dylan’s life.
Great quality 2 shot filming, a good mix and a great ensemble of musicians to capture as a part of history. The only bad thing is the song is cut short at the end, but it didn’t have that long to go anyway. This song took me a while to get into and seemed complicated to my ears at first. Now it is one of my favorites and it comes across like a simple biblical song for children or something.
Lot’s of people my parent’s age cringe and curse when the religious period is brought up in conversation but I think their minds are manipulated by the stories in the press at the time. The albums were Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love. Many of them were just story type songs and weren’t just in your face preaching. I don’t find it unusual at all.
One of my old bands: 69 For Pa, we wrote a whole bunch of songs about Mini Golf. The property in the bush where I live was cattle ground before my parents built so the ground is hard, dry, dusty clay. For some reason we made a 9-hole mini golf course with rakes, brooms, picks and shovels. The band and I played the course everyday and eventually started coming up with ideas for songs about the many facets of our Mini Golf course.
It felt completely natural to write those songs at the time because Mini Golf was such a big slice of our lives. When you can’t think of anything but one thing, you often end up writing a song related to it in some way. I can relate to Bob when he wrote them songs way back when.
