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Dylan's Gospel

  • Light in the Attic
  • Light in the Attic

Over two days in July, 1969, a group recruited by Lou Adler from the L.A. backup-singer circuit recorded churchified versions of 10 familiar Bob Dylan tunes, and the results are way better than they have a right to be. This remastered reissue features liner notes interviewing Adler and vocalists Merry Clayton and Edna Wright.

Sometimes exploitative impulses yield good art. Despite the way it's presented, Dylan's Gospel, the sole album by the Brothers and Sisters (aka the Brothers & Sisters of Los Angeles, aka the Los Angeles Gospel Choir—it's been reissued a few times), did not arise from a group of L.A. area gospel singers deciding what they really wanted to do was record some Bob Dylan songs. The idea came from producer and Ode Records chief Lou Adler, who can't help but have noticed that the Edwin Hawkins Singers' "Oh Happy Day" had recently become the first full-on black gospel choir recording to hit the Pop Top Five.

Adler's choir and soloists had, indeed, mostly learned to sing in church. But the "Brothers and Sisters" were recruited from the L.A. backup-singer circuit—if you've seen 20 Feet from Stardom, you've seen a lot of their names, and if you've ever listened to classic-rock radio, you've heard their voices on other people's records. Over two days in July, 1969, the group recorded churchified versions of 10 familiar Dylan tunes, including his then-current single "Lay Lady Lay", a song that's about as secular as Bob has ever gotten. This is formally the same kind of record as, say, a set of Imagine Dragons songs arranged as lullabies, rather than a direct antecedent to the terrific 2003 tribute-with-the-honoree's-input Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan.

That said, it's way better than it has a right to be: it's always at least interesting, and often pretty delightful. If you didn't catch the words, Dylan's Gospel could pass as a solidly played, splendidly sung "contemporary gospel" record, and if you can overlook the choir keeping a straight face as they raise the roof about "her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls", it can pass as that even if you do catch the words. By the time Adler's choir assembled, Dylan was still a decade away from writing overtly Christian songs, but he'd internalized the whole gospel songbook by the time he started writing his own stuff: the language of "Chimes of Freedom" and "The Times They Are A-Changin'" makes the stylistic transition beautifully. His lyrics were also open wide enough to interpretation that it wasn't hard to come up with a reading of, say, "The Mighty Quinn" as an impassioned if slightly eccentric parable about Christ's return, which is exactly how the great Merry Clayton delivers it here.

A few iffy aspects of the project reveal its origins as a cash-in. The vocalists are credited in a list, but the lead singers weren't initially identified as such—"because of contractual obligations," Adler claimed to Rolling Stone at the time. (The new reissue's liner notes indicate that it's definitely Gloria Jones on "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight", for what that's worth, and Honey Cone's Edna Wright on "Lay Lady Lay".) Master session bassist Jerry Scheff, who would play on Dylan's Street-Legal nine years later, was identified on the original sleeve as "Jerry O. Scheft." Some of the singers also don't seem to have been too familiar with Dylan's material: whoever sings the "My Back Pages" verse containing "mutiny from stern to bow" makes that line rhyme with "slow," a mistake you'd only make if you were reading it off a lyric sheet and hadn't noticed how every verse ends.

Still, sometimes exploitative impulses eventually yield things nobody anticipates. One of the Sisters on Dylan's Gospel was Clydie King, who'd been recording hither and thither since she'd made her first single as Little Clydie as a 12- or 13-year-old in 1956. (If that's not her ripping it up on "Mr. Tambourine Man" here, it's somebody with a very similar voice.) King spent most of the 70s as a top-flight backup singer for rock bands: 11 years after she sang with Adler's ad-hoc group, she started dating Dylan, and became his creative collaborator for the next few years, often singing solo during his gospel-era concerts and duetting with him on stage and on record. "Clydie's one of the greatest singers ever," Dylan said. "I get chills when I hear her just breathe."

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