Bob Dylan – "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" (1973)

It’s getting dark

Too dark to see

Bob Dylan wrote “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” – the last of this year’s 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME inductees – for Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 Western movie, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

Dylan mumbled his way through his role in the movie – I swear I can’t understand a word his character said.

Bob Dylan in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

He did better as the composer of the movie’s soundtrack.  “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” is used to great effect in a scene depicting a shootout between members of Billy the Kid’s gang and Garrett and his allies – one of whom is an old sheriff who is mortally wounded during the gunfight.

The old sheriff was played by Slim Pickens, a veteran actor who is mostly remembered for his comic roles.  After his character was wounded, he walks slowly to a small pond, sits down on a rock, and gazes off into the distance – clearly aware that he is near death.  His wife, who had accompanied him to the shootout (where she dispatched one of the outlaws with two irrefutable blasts from her double-barreled shotgun), watches him from a distance.  Neither one speaks.

Pickens’s performance as the dying sheriff is understated but utterly convincing.  Click here to see for yourself.  

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The two brief verses of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” would have been appropriate words for the sheriff to have said to his wife if he had spoken to her – which he didn’t:

Mama, take this badge off of me

I can’t use it anymore

It’s getting dark, too dark to see

I feel I’m knockin’ upon heaven’s door

Mama, put my guns in the ground

I can’t shoot them anymore

That long black cloud is coming down

I feel I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door

Dylan’s biographer called the song “an exercise in splendid simplicity,” and he was right.  Like Slim Pickens’s depiction of the dying sheriff, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” is proof that less is often more.

(Why did the album title used an ampersand
when the movie title didn’t?) 

Unfortunately, Guns ’N’ Roses didn’t realize that when they covered “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” in 1990.  I give them credit for recognizing what a great song it was, but their version is full of Sturm und Drang that signifieth nothing.  (I understand that there’s no point in covering a song if you’re just going to replicate the original.  But if Guns ’N’ Roses thought their cover of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” was what the song all about, they just plain didn’t get it.)

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Click here to listen to Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

Click here to learn more about “Heaven’s Door” whiskey – which is co-owned by Bob Dylan.