Shot of Love (1981)

1. Shot of Love
2. Heart of Mine
3. Property of Jesus
4. Lenny Bruce
5. Watered-Down Love
6. The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar
7. Dead Man, Dead Man
8. In the Summertime
9. Trouble
10. Every Grain of Sand

Notes and Reviews

The musicians: Bob Dylan (guitar, vocals, piano, harmonica, percussion), Jim Keltner (drums), Tim Drummond (bass), Fred Tackett (guitar), Clydie King, Regina McCrary, Carolyn Dennis, Madelyn Quebec (all backup vocals).

Listed on the CD as "WITH": Steve Ripley (guitar), Benmont Tench (keyboards), Steve Douglas (saxophone), Danny Kortchmae (electric guitar), Listed as "AND": Wm "Smitty" Smith (organ), Ringo Starr (TomTom), Donald "Duck" Dunn (bass), Ron Wood (guitar) on "Heart of Mine."

Reviews: The final album in the Gospel trilogy. If 'Slow Train Coming' was Dylan's John the Baptist record, calling sinners to repent, and 'Saved' - in conception if not sketchy execution - was literally his Gospel/Good News album, with song after song declaring his gratitude for redemption, then 'Shot of Love' was his Acts of the Apostles and Letters of Paul. The songs Dylan wrote between summer 1980 and recording the following spring occupy a world After the Cross. In one of the central songs from the sessions the symbolic geography of Paul's mission is invoked: "West of the Jordan, East of the Rock Of Gibraltar!" Paul's agonies of the spirit - as Jew become Christian - underwrite "Caribbean Wind" ("where the long arm of the Law cannot reach"; "tearing down of the Wall"), and prefigure Dylan's troubled spiritual life in the post-gospel years. Dodgy track selection meant that an album that could have been counted among Dylan's true masterpieces was neutralised, but it remains one of my Flawed Favourites, alongside 'Planet Waves' and 'Under the Red Sky'. -- Kingsley Bray

From The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia by Michael Gray:

"Shot of Love [1981] The first post-evangelising album, a ramshackle collection of generally second-rate
tracks with Dylan’s voice often petulant and querulous, the music tired and the production
thin. It excludes some of the best songs cut at the relevant sessions: a snatching of mediocrity from
the jaws of distinction that Dylan was to manage again and again with his 1980s albums. Even the
cover was careless and tawdry (as those of Saved, Slow Train Coming and Bob Dylan at Budokan had
been before it), whereas before the late 1970s a Dylan cover was rightly used to help define an album’s
distinctive character, and had to be devised with care and imaginative precision. Time has not
transformed Shot of Love into a first-rate collection, but has made more engaging the interest in 1950s
music on Dylan’s part which suffuses its atmosphere. Best of the minor songs on the album is
the shimmering Motownesquerie of ‘Watered- Down Love’. ‘Lenny Bruce’ is an endearing bad
song. The stand-out track, and free of all these vocal, instrumental and production faults, is the
defiantly classic ‘Every Grain of Sand’. Subsequent reissue of the album on CD has added as track 6
one of the good initial rejects, ‘The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar’ (a song interesting for its vibrantly
creative, ferocious words—new Dylan writing—fused to a music that re-uses SONNY BOY
WILLIAMSON II’s 1955 song ‘Don’t Start Me Talking’, which Dylan would perform on US TV three
years later)."

From Folkrockman --
"I love the music! I can see why the critics ripped this album though. I agree with critic Michael Gray that the cover art is “careless and tawdry” but I don’t agree with him about the quality of the sound. "Trouble" is a good rock/blues number. The song “Every Grain of Sand” is a Dylan classic to me (I particularly like the harmonica solos).

Best Song: Let's be controversial and pick the title track - remember Bob himself said it was his most perfect song!

"Every Grain of Sand"!
Really! We don't have to be controversial! The grain of sand song is one of his greatest. A truly spiritual masterpiece! Shot of Love? Bah! I need a shot of a lottery price! And I don't even bother to apply!
According to Alias

I LOVE the song "Every Grain of Sand"! -- Folkrockman

Favorite Lyric: Sometimes a single line perfectly captures the mood ... "And I'm still carrying the gift you gave . . . "

"Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other times it's only me"
According to Alias