Religious fervour in the live songbook from Bob Dylan is, at this point in his career, no surprise. He brings an interest in benevolence and the divine to the stage in a generally accepted manner. No fans of his are causing a commotion because of what he says or how he sings it. Pass Me Not, O Gentle Saviour is a song of love for a higher power. A hymn passed from generation to generation. An optimistic call for Idiot Wind can be heard in the moments leading up to a light guitar strum signalling this traditional cover. What a bold shout it was, what a calm song it is. Pass Me Not, O Gentle Saviour is a chance to hear Dylan at a vulnerable, youthful moment in a Buffalo-based show.
There is a rigid belief necessary to the fundamental purpose of Pass Me Not, O Gentle Saviour. No preachiness in sight, just a genuine belief held and kindled by Dylan across a left-field live performance. Those cries of the heart being answered by some intervention from the man upstairs are as good a reason to believe in something as anything. Pass Me Not, O Gentle Saviour gets to grips with that. Anything Dylan performs during this period is bound to be received with thunderous applause. He plays with the very delivery of these songs, and knows how far he can push the louder choices of his live setlists. Not every artist can pull a traditional hymn from the clear blue and play it out to rapturous applause, preceded by the silent contemplation only a few veterans of the stage hold.
Even now those hopes of hearing some new facet of the live experience, of holding out hopes for a flutter of rarities from the gigs of the past, remain. Dylan will likely never play Pass Me Not, O Gentle Saviour again. There is more of a chance we join those cries for Idiot Wind and get what we want than hearing this traditional hymn again, more because it feels like a rush of the moment, a last-minute decision to fool around with a classic of definitive influence on Dylan. Humble words are the aim here and they travel well, drowned out somewhat by the instrumental fury heard elsewhere on stage. Pass Me Not, O Gentle Saviour has a flourish of care to it which, if anything, marks it as a fine cover of a traditional.
Dylan has many of those to his name but what makes Pass Me Not, O Gentle Saviour so special is how out of the blue it sounds. There is nothing on either side of this performance in Buffalo to suggest Dylan needed playing a divinely guided track. But there it is, and a welcome appearance at that. Neat and religiously founded material has a charm in the right hands and that is certainly the case for Dylan here, who guides the band through a slow crawl of religious intertextuality, stunning an audience expecting Blood on the Tracks deep cuts into silence. Somebody had to do that to them. What better way to do so than play out traditional hymns with the whining voice which would scupper live performances from Dylan a decade later?
