Part IV - The Gospel According to Joe: Meditations on Joe Pug's Sketch of a Promised Departure

3. Then the Rain

Wondering about the first line of this song convicted me for my failure to watch Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: “Rolling thunder broke the priceless sky.” Mainly, I was curious if watching it would provide any clues about the meaning of this song. The results were inconclusive–either that or I’ve forgotten what I discovered. I still feel a little bad for my failure to listen to much bootleg Dylan in the first place. But for that I might be excused since the guy who taught me to play guitar and got me into Dylan always said live Dylan and late Dylan more or less sucked. We went to a show at the venue formerly known as the Brady Theater once, and Dylan’s singing was so augmented–or the set list consisted of so much “late” Dylan–I didn’t recognize more than one song. Since his band rocked so hard, though, I didn’t mind.

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All that to say, I suspect an allusion to Dylan here. I’m pretty sure this song is in drop C, too, which Pug has demonstrated in at least one livestream. In one performance I watched, he even refers to a Dylan song as another example of the tuning. It might have been “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” which is indeed featured on The Rolling Thunder Revue. Surely drop C in “Shelter from the Storm” or “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” would be too apt, but it’s worth noting that the rainstorms in those songs represent trouble and judgment—not what rain represents in this one.

Either way, let’s try to get into some intentional-fallacy-free interpretation.

Immediately after the first two lines, “Rolling thunder broke the priceless sky / The pieces fell to earth from up on high,” the chorus falls like the weather it describes: “Then the rain came / Then the rain came / Then the rain.” The phenomenon here is obvious enough, but an apparent contrast between the tone of the lyrics and the music’s melody at this moment suggests a complex notion. Rain following thunder is majestic and could be worth writing about in and of itself, but this thunder “breaks” the sky, which is “priceless,” and causes the pieces to fall to the earth. It’s not the most exalted source for an allusion, but I’d guess I’m not alone in thinking of Chicken Little. Beyond expressing the money-transcending worth of the heavens and nature itself, “priceless,” in reference to the sky, could mean a lot of things. Whatever the adjective means, a falling sky is a metaphor for the end of the world in general or for the end of someone’s world in particular. 

The quickly ensuing rain arrives like something welcomed, and indeed its effects are positive. First, “Ancient rivers [fill] back up again.” The implication is that these rivers have been dry, or at least low, and their replenishment is an epochal reversal. The symbolic significance of water, rivers, and rain is too rich to tease out completely (not to mention self-evident), but these rivers are “ancient,” and in their flowing waters, “the children [drink], the old folks [wash] their hands.” After the falling sky, we might expect the ensuing rain to bring a flood–as is perhaps the case in Pug’s song “The Flood in Color.” Instead it brings widespread cleansing and refreshing. The thunder’s shattering of the priceless sky turns out to presage a good thing.

The bridge reinforces this interpretation through its two lines of lyrics and the musical interlude. Pug sings, “And not a moment too soon, outside my window / It all came barrelling down.” A drum beat undergirds a rolling guitar hook. In all my music listening and guitar playing, I’ve never heard anyone else pick chords with the pattern Pug uses at this moment. He uses it in other songs (“After Curfew” on The Flood in Color, for instance), but here it seems to have achieved a peculiar aptness. Though I’m not a completely worthless guitar player myself, I can’t really visualize how he’s doing it. It seems syncopated, and I don’t think it counts as an arpeggio, but he’s playing the high strings and tripping down to the bass strings, whereas most picking patterns seem to travel in the opposite direction. However he does it, he succeeds in integrating the riff into a satisfying refrain, and the addition of a pop trope, falsetto vocals, does the moment no damage. 

Like the notes in the tripping guitar riff, the drum beat and the falsetto notes, the rain comes barrelling down “not a moment too soon.” There’s a lot of it, it’s falling hard, and it is sorely needed. In the final verse, the simplicity of Pug’s word choice strikes some powerful, not to say biblical, notes that further specify the rain’s effects. Pug sings, “I was thirsty, who would fill my cup? / A single taste, a sip, was not enough.” Like the rain and the rivers, the cup here is no original metaphor. But that is for the best–it’s simultaneously a specific biblical image, an archetype, and part of a motif in the album. 

In light of the previous two songs, the word cup connotes the one Christ requested not to drink, which in track 1 is the undesired song the speaker sings. Christianity teaches that this is the cup of God’s wrath containing the foaming wine of God’s judgment against sin and idolatry. You can find references to it throughout the Old Testament, as well as in the New–both from the mouth of Christ himself as well as in The Book of Revelation. But since Jesus himself drank the cup of God’s wrath so that we wouldn’t have to, it’s also the cup of communion wine. The word therefore also conjures the Holy Grail.

In Pug’s song, the cup primarily indicates thirst. He sings, “I was thirsty, who would fill my cup?” The speaker wants a drink and wonders who might provide him some refreshment.  Moreover, his thirst seems unquenchable–perhaps because it’s spiritual: “ A single taste, a sip, was not enough.” The suggestion is understated, but one of the lines in a later song, the beautiful “Treasury of Prayers,” makes the listener think about this as a reference to drinking too much or of seeking satisfaction from any source that does not deliver what it promises. 

*At this point, I’m going to break off into a longish exploration of the cup/thirst metaphor in scripture. If you’re just here to read about the song, you might want to skip to the last paragraph–even though I’ll refer to the lyrics a time or two before that. 

The Bible is no stranger to the thirst metaphor. One of its most beautiful manifestations occurs in Isaiah, when the prophet invites:

“Ho! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters;

And you who have no money, come, buy and eat.

Come, buy wine and milk

Without money and without cost.

Why do you spend money for what is not bread,

And your wages for what does not satisfy?

Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good,

And delight yourself in abundance.” Isaiah 55:1-2, NASB

This indicates a solution to the human race’ spiritual problem, described in Jeremiah 2:13:

“For my people have committed two evils:

They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters,

To hew for themselves cisterns,

Broken cisterns

That can hold no water.”

Isaiah diagnoses and denounces Israel for worshiping other gods and seeking satisfaction in sources other than the only source of satisfaction we were made for. St. Augustine (possibly alluded to in track 5) famously describes this condition in his Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.” The implication is that in our turning away from God, we become addicts who go searching around for life, strength, security, love, and joy anywhere and everywhere–but everything we source for this purpose is an idol. Our relationship with that source is like the relationship of an addict to a substance. The wells won’t hold water. 

So how does this work, this returning to the waters to drink without money, to buy sustenance and refreshment without cost? Jesus claims to answer the question. In John 7, he goes up to Jerusalem during the Feast of Booths, and a few times during the festival, he goes into the temple and teaches. In a sermon my friend Jay once preached on this passage, I learned that on the last day of the Feast of Booths, a priest would ascend to the altar and pour water from a vessel into a bowl while the congregation recited part of Isaiah 55: “Come to the waters, all who are thirsty…” I’ll never forget when Jay read the dialog portion of John 7:37-38: “Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.’” This would have been disruptive and shocking, but surely that would be appropriate if the words were true. Jay is not the only Christian who believes Christ shouted these words at the precise moment when the priest poured the water and as the people recited the verses in Isaiah. 

In John 4, Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob during the hot part of a long day. Jesus breaks racial and gender taboos by asking her for a drink of water. She responds by giving him grief: “How is it that you, being a Jew, ask me for a drink since I am a Samaritan woman?”(v. 9). He replies that if she knew who He was, she could have asked Him and He could have given her living water (v. 10). She gives him more grief: “Sir, You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep… You are not greater than our father Jacob, are You, who gave us the well, and drank of it himself and his sons and his cattle?” (11-12). Jesus replies, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life” (13-14). She finally seems interested in His offer, but when she asks for him to oblige her, Jesus, already knowing everything about her, tells her to get her husband. Her reply, that she has no husband, and Christ’s affirmation that she has no husband, has indeed had five, and that the man she’s not living with now is not her husband, suggests that her spiritual thirst was of the romantic-erotic kind. Love, romance, even marriage, good as they are, often function as addictive idols, broken cisterns we keep digging. The Samaritan woman receives Christ’s invitation and drinks the living water He offers, without cost. Scripture doesn’t tell us how she lived the rest of her life, but we do know what she did that day. At the very least, you might say she doesn’t keep Christ a secret for long. 

 Here and elsewhere, Jesus promises to fill our cups, so we can say with David in Psalm 23:5, “My cup overflows.” This song doesn’t really suggest Pug has drunk these particular waters, but the speaker in the song holds out his cup, having been disappointed and dissatisfied with sips, and not a moment too soon, it all comes barrelling down. The repeated chorus line falls again and again. And granted that the rain falls outside the speaker’s window, this water isn't flooding his basement.

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