Bob Dylan – Saved: Live Review

If listeners manage their way through Saved, and if you can it’s worth doing, then there’s a sweet collection of bootlegs to pull from. It takes some real legwork to get to a point where your enjoyment of Saved is enough to warrant listening to Saved: Live, but there are spots of glory from Bob Dylan on the second of his religious trilogy releases, which didn’t so much kickstart the 1980s as they did set a questionable tone for the decade. Not because of the saintly fervour Dylan had detailed on Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love, but because of the lacklustre response he gave to material that followed, and the failure to adapt his hits into this rock and roll style, which plagued his output around this time. Saved: Live is as literal as the title would suggest. A live collection of Dylan on stage, taking his religious inclinations to audiences across the globe. It works, and these songs fare better in modern times than they did at the time, fresh off the back of an all-time great decade of touring and releases.  

Returning to Saved material means putting up with a few dud choices which plagued Dylan during the 1980s. His sound is a bit spotty, not because of the material, but the instrumental choices. Some piano work from the opening, title track, isn’t all that convincing. What he captures is a genuinely moved spirit, and that makes up for the more questionable, or even dated, instrumental choices. Solid backing vocal work from time to time sees these songs through, but the clunky piano and gospel feeling don’t translate all too brilliantly. That piano work is fun, to be fair, though it leaves much to be desired in the context of the song itself. A bit too out there, but channelling that thrill of on-stage energy is hard to do when Dylan has ditched his guitar for God. Not all that bad, though, and to Dylan’s credit, this period of his career is filled with the suddenness, the excitement, of hearing some new direction from him and his on-stage personnel.  

Is it better than what precedes it? Absolutely not. But Dylan is ever the innovator and pursues a new sound all the same. Hearing the likes of Covenant Garden and Solid Rock in contemporary context is a sweet draw and is of at least some interest to those who want to learn more about Dylan’s instrumental choices around this time. A direct contrast between Saved and Saved: Live highlights an ongoing truth to Dylan’s musical style. He is always a step or two ahead of what he has just released, because by the time it’s ready for public consumption, Dylan has already found a new angle to work with. It means the Saved sound is thrown into a whole new style so soon after release, but that feels relatively suitable given the ever-changing experience of Dylan’s religiously oriented material. In the Garden is marvellous work, one of the many tracks captured during a three-night residency at Massey Hall. Much of the compilation comes from those three shows, though Saved and Covenant Woman are both pulled from shows in the United States.  

Those three Ontario shows are of incredible tape quality, borderline professionally recorded. Likely a soundboard, to be fair, but it’s always a nice surprise to hear these live renditions without the crackles and clippings sometimes heard during this period of Dylan’s performances. Saved: Live is worth a listen for those who are infatuated with the early 1980s of Dylan’s career. Nothing much more to it than solid songs, which struggled to be the meat in the sandwich of a three-album run of religious materials. Saved does at least make the translation to live shows well, however brief it may have been to hear the bulk of this material featured. Like Every Grain of Sand on the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, a few Saved tracks showed up from time to time in the years to follow, but not as much, perhaps, as they should have.