2020 Music Talk: "Knockin On Heaven's Door, Just Like So Many Times Before"

I first heard of Bob Dylan in a children’s book called Dogs Don’t Tell Jokes by Louis Sachar. In the book, a girl enters a talent show dressed in a brand new leopard skin pillbox hat and tells everyone that Bob Dylan is one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived. I thought I recognized the name, and figured maybe I should look that guy up.  I met Sachar a couple of weeks ago and thanked him for sending me down that rabbit hole. A few years after I read the book, I saw my first Dylan concert. A few months ago, I saw my 50th. 

Now, the early 90s were not the best time to be getting into Dylan. His concerts at the time were, at best, an acquired taste, and the same could be said of his output for the previous fifteen years. I think he wrote a lot of great songs in the 80s and early 90s, but he spent most of those days struggling to find a place in the modern music scene. None of his songs would have broken through to a kid listening to top 40 songs on Q102 Des Moines, and I don’t think they ever played him KLYF, the oldies station. 

But there was one song my friends and I all knew in middle school: “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Of course, we had no idea it was by Bob Dylan - as far as we knew, it was a Guns n Roses song. We were incredulous when a substitute music teacher told us it was by Bob Dylan. (That same year, my friend was shocked when we rented the Bond film Live and Let Die and found out that the GNR track was a Paul McCartney song). 

I’ve seen people say that GNR’s version introduced Dylan to the wrong crowd at the wrong time, which is probably fair, but it’s not GNR’s fault. Their version is really very solid hard rock version (except that, in a show of typical early 90s GNR excess, there’s a phone message skit in the middle, and then a gospel choir shows up very briefly for no particular reason). It’s easy to go overboard on the song, though: it's a song so simple it can be sung a million ways. In fact, Dylan has sung it about million ways himself - sometimes totally rewriting it, and sometimes completely changing the meaning with a single added line. 

The song was originally written for the soundtrack of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), in the same sessions that yielded the half-written demo that eventually became “Wagon Wheel.” On the soundtrack album it’s a two minute country song - two simple verses and a simple chorus sung over a few simple chords, an uncomplicated tune in the classic country tradition of songs about dying cowboys. Within a few years of Dylan’s release came Arthour Louis and Eric Clapton’s reggae versions, and pretty soon it became a standard, both on records and at open mic nights in any bar (it's super easy to play, even for beginners)

Dylan himself started playing it on the 1974 tour with The Band, with some rewritten lyrics and extra verses. The next year he appeared at a benefit with Neil Young and played a version completely written as “Knockin on the Dragon’s Door,” then used it as a group showpiece on the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour, in which all the various singers in the band would trade verses, seemingly making them up as they went along. 

It was around 1981 that he made the most significant addition, the one that make the song unexpectedly powerful for me when I saw him play it live in 2001: he added a line to the chorus.

While it normally goes:

Knock knock knock on heaven's door

Knock knock knock on heaven's door

Knock knock knock on heaven's door

Knock knock knock on heaven's door

It now went:

Knock knock knock on heaven's door

Knock knock knock on heaven's door

Knock knock knock on heaven's door

Just like so many times before

 I’m not sure if someone else added that line before Dylan did. For him to adapt other peoples’ covers of his songs into his own performances isn’t uncommon. (Most famously, he’s pretty much played “All Along the Watchtower” as a Hendrix cover since he started performing it, his late 70s arrangement of “I Want You” bore more than a passing resemblance to Springsteen’s version, and the 1994 version, recorded but unused for “Unplugged," sounded a lot like the Sophie B. Hawkins version). But it became common in Dylan's version for twenty years. 

Anyway, “Knockin On Heaven’s Door” is a song about being at death’s door (come to think of it, given the subject matter it’s an odd song to turn into a big group singalong). It’s all about lying there, blood in your eyes, and resigned to your fate.  But by adding in “Just like so many times before” at the end of the chorus, the tone of the song changes completely, and it becomes powerful and uplifting. The singer is still at death’s door, but it’s not the first time he’s been here.  He’s knocked on heaven’s door before. So many times. 

And if he’s here and singing now, it stands to reason that he cheated death in the end every other time. And now he can probably do it again. Hell - he’s got this. It may be a song about death, but now death is something you can still talk your way out of.