Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 60: Bob Dylan & The Band, “Sign on the Cross”

The holy grail is now on sale: price, $107.38, no tax, free shipping, on overstock.com.

I mean Bob Dylan & The Band’s Complete Basement Tapes. Rumored, discussed, passed among musicians, written about, bootlegged, covered in hit records by others, embellished into legend, abbreviated for a double LP, evoked vividly in criticism (Greil Marcus’ The Old, Weird America), the literature of fact (David Hajdu’s Positively 4th Street), and the annals of Dylanology (Sid Griffin’s Million Dollar Bash), the tapes of those sessions in upstate New York in 1967 are now Vol. 11 in Dylan’s “Bootleg Series,” which has run in conjunction with his Never Ending Tour.

At points the holy grail actually touches the holy, and “Sign on the Cross” is one. Describing it – a “devotional,” he calls it – Griffin pulls out all the superlatives:

“… generally considered by Dylan aficionados as not merely one of his best songs from the basement sessions nor merely one of his best unreleased songs from any era but – get ready – one of Dylan’s best songs, period, and one of his best vocals, period and full stop …

“… the first song-length sighting of Dylan’s direct and unmistakable attraction to the power of pure Christianity, as witnessed a decade and a year hence and seen periodically since.

“… with `Sign on the Cross’ he is dealing one-on-one with the Greatest Story Ever Told. He is publicly beginning his quest for Salvation and musically announcing, musically beginning the debate that ultimately will tell him if his arms are too short to box with God.”

Myself, I think that Griffin claims too much for the song and does it too straightforwardly. ”Sign on the Cross” is lushly suggestive of the gospel tradition, but I wouldn’t call it devotional. It has more in common with the Rolling Stones’ “Far Away Eyes” than with Otis Redding’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”: in it religious yearning is treated with a light touch, and the whole church-and-cross business approached as a particularly rich lode of the old, weird America. Listen to Dylan, six minutes in, having fun with devotion, if not making fun of it:

“If that sign on the cross … begins to worry you / Well, that’s all right, you can sing this song / and all your troubles pass right on through …”

In a different superlative, Griffin is absolutely right:

“`Sign on the Cross’ may be the very song where the Hawks audibly complete their mutation into the Band.”