Bob Dylan - Shot of Love
#356
By Paul Zickler
August 10 1981
Bob Dylan
Shot of Love
Genre: Gospel Dylan
Allen’s rating: 2.5 out of 5
Paul’s rating: 3.5 out of 5
Highlights:
Every Grain of Sand
Heart of Mine
The cover seems pre-made to go right into the cutout bins. Exploding 80’s pop art backdrop design, blown straight into your face.
Bob Dylan is tired of waiting for us to catch up. He’s figured it all out, see, and he’d hoped we’d get it too. He made two straightforward, no punches pulled Gospel records, accompanied by the most heartfelt and solidly rocking tours he’d ever done. No masks like Rolling Thunder. No big stadium shows like with the Band. No folk festivals. Just a crackerjack band, some holy rolling backup singers, and one clear-as-day message: Jesus is the answer.
But people didn’t get it. To Bob, it was so obvious. Just listen to the words, go read the Bible, and get your life straight. Seems simple.
So on this album, the third in the Gospel trilogy (Bob’s albums always end up being trilogies, at least that’s what the smart critics tell us later on), Dylan is going to either clinch the deal or die trying.
(Narrator Voice: he did neither.)
I need a shot of LOVE. The rest of you fools are taking shots of whiskey and heroin. This heart of mine can’t risk reaching out to people who don’t want real love. I’m the property of Jesus, and you all hate me for it. Look what you did to Lenny Bruce. You don’t want a love that’s real, you want to drown love, you want a watered down love.
And that’s just side one.
So is it any good? Yeah, sometimes it is. And sometimes it’s not.
Rolling Stone hated it, which is saying a lot, since Rolling Stone would give a recording of Bob reading the phone book 3 ½ stars. It didn’t sell, but none of Bob’s albums really ever sold as well as you’d think. His first number one album didn’t come until the 21st century.
I bought it right away. It came out at the height of my Christian Youth period. I remember letting a couple of guys borrow it to use “Every Grain of Sand” as their “devotional song” for some youth group meeting. They asked me if I had a Jesus-sounding track that was really long so they wouldn’t have to talk. As I recall, it worked perfectly.
Lots of ink has been spilled about Bob Dylan’s tragic decade, the 80’s. Bleh. He made some good music and some bad music, often on the same record. That’s certainly true here. I still love Every Grain of Sand. Heart of Mine is a sneakily fun bit of fluff (with Ringo on tom toms). Lenny Bruce became a truly beautiful thing when Dylan brought it back to his live shows in 2019. Depending on what mood I’m in, I can enjoy most of it. Almost all of it.
The back cover is Bob sniffing a rose. Find the beauty in life, stop worrying, get with the program. This was his last obviously “Christian” album. The one after it, Infidels, was pretty darn good. It could have been a true classic if he hadn’t left two of his best songs of the decade off the record for whatever reason. Who knows why? It’s Dylan. You just take what he gives and move on.
He surely does.
https://open.spotify.com/album/14cScWsd0lPdSlNFfr9AmA?si=hubrwhY_RxecC-ZV0NfanQ
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