by Bell, Ian
There’s a new day at dawn and I’ve finally arrived
If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived
I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive
But without you it just doesn’t seem right
Oh, where are you tonight?
*
Dylan was back on the road by the first day of June. Fully seven nights at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles awaited before he and his musicians were due to cross the Atlantic. Soon enough the artist would be praising the wonderful perceptiveness of British audiences as a heartening contrast to the treatment he could expect at home. In Rolling Stone, Cameron Crowe would report that Dylan’s performances had ‘won over many doubters’ by the end of the LA run, but the burden of the piece would be the tale of ‘glibly professional’ shows that ‘left most die-hard fans and reviewers puzzled’.28 The journalist would quote an unnamed ‘prominent musician’ as a surrogate for majority opinion. ‘There were things that killed me and there were things that really pissed me off,’ the bravely anonymous critic would remark. ‘He could take this show to Vegas and not change one note.’
The important fact that Dylan could wear ‘specially tailored’ clothes, switching between ‘a black studded pants outfit or one with a white sequined thunderbolt design’ – both verging on the criminal, it’s true – would go into the Rolling Stone notebook. The drastic rearrangement of many favourite songs would be observed. That Dylan had taken to styling himself ‘an entertainer’ while indulging in ‘earnest between-song patter’ would be added to the charge sheet. Crowe would even remember witnessing the artist shaking hands with members of the audience. An alleged visit by Dylan to (of course) Las Vegas, supposedly to watch a performance by Neil Diamond, was the only explanation given for this new ‘concert stance’. What’s plain is that the short hop to damning conclusions, hard on the heels of the reviews for Street-Legal, had been achieved.
Britain, too, had made up its mind long before the artist arrived. The difference was that the vote had been cast almost unanimously in Dylan’s favour before a note was heard. But then, the perverse islanders liked Street-Legal. Their music press had not stooped to asinine abuse of the record. Instead, music journalists had rummaged in the superlatives drawer for the old folder marked ‘Best Since …’ In the UK, the album would become his biggest seller since New Morning.
Dylan had not played in Britain since the last day of August 1969 and the Isle of Wight festival. Everyone, artist and audience, had chosen to forget the ‘mixed reception’ given to that show with The Band, irrespective of any virtues captured by bootleggers. One performance aside, Dylan had not toured among the British since 1966. Tickets for his run at Earls Court therefore sold out instantly to people who had queued for days; many more could have been sold. Audiences were warm, forgiving, ready to enjoy themselves and eager for him to succeed. In fairness, he didn’t let them down. He and his band had performed better than pretty well in Los Angeles, but in London there was a meeting of minds between the artist and his public. Quoted – or roughly paraphrased – by Melody Maker after the last Earls Court show, Dylan said:
Doing these concerts here has made me realise about British audiences. They’re really something different – they actually come for the words and the songs. That’s what’s missing back home. There they tend to come for … not so much the music, more the sideshow.29
This was not mere flattery from a gratified artist. The Earls Court audiences were not dissuaded in the slightest by new arrangements of old songs, or dismayed by alleged hints of ‘Vegas’. Veterans of Dylan shows would long afterwards maintain that these were among the best concerts he ever gave in Britain. Melody Maker’s Ray Coleman would write that ‘Different lines of his songs came over with fresh force’, that ‘Rarely, if ever, has the song [‘Just Like a Woman’] been so brilliantly blown apart and knitted together again’, that ‘his harmonica solo was a riveting joy’. The journalist would remember the notes of the solo ‘bringing the ecstatic crowd to its feet with a mighty roar’. Coleman, who did not insist that the last night was necessarily the best of Dylan’s London run, would even give a special mention to a performance of ‘Señor’. The contrast with the reception the artist would receive in his native land in the autumn of the year would count as remarkable. Either the English capital got very lucky, or the tour lost something important when it returned to the States, or Dylan was dead right about prevailing attitudes back home.
What can be said for certain is that an authentic hero’s welcome still awaited him across Europe. He painted his newest masterpiece in Rotterdam, Dortmund, Berlin, Nuremberg, Paris and Gothenburg. As in London, the latest incarnation of Bob Dylan was accepted without reservation by the French over five nights at the 10,000-seat Pavillon de Paris. David Bowie and Bob Marley had managed only a couple of nights apiece there in the preceding weeks. Europe also allowed the artist and his band – between whom there now existed a genuine rapport – to behave like overgrown cultural exchange students. They took in the sights. Dylan even paid a visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
Back in England, he made amends for the Isle of Wight. The ‘Picnic at Blackbushe’, staged on a Hampshire airfield that had once housed the RAF and, later, the US Navy, had been fully expected to draw big weekend crowds. It was supposed to meet part of a huge and lucrative British demand for Dylan after the adulatory reports of the Earls Court shows. A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on ticket sales said that an impressive 100,000 customers could be expected. On Saturday, 15 July, according to predictably cautious police estimates after the event, something like 200,000 turned up; the real figure was undoubtedly greater. Some of the horde might have been eager to see Graham Parker and the Rumour, Eric Clapton or Joan Armatrading, but the day’s headline act and unquestioned star, resplendent in a top hat borrowed from a hotel doorman, was Dylan. As darkness fell and bonfires began to spark into life in every corner of the site, he commenced a near-three-hour performance that would include six of the nine Street-Legal songs. If your taste runs to coincidence, ‘Señor’ was followed, not for the first time on the tour, by ‘Masters of War’. With everything from a solo version of ‘Gates of Eden’ performed in a pool of blue light to ‘Forever Young’ with Clapton playing along, Dylan’s set culminated in what had become his standard encores. Again, the juxtaposition seemed to make a point: first, ‘Changing of the Guards’, then ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’. The reception from the vast tribe on the airfield was, in that word favoured by benign reviewers down the decades, rapturous. All that remained was to persuade America to take the same view.
It didn’t happen. The final American stretch of this world tour would be a very long haul. Dylan would seem to run out of energy or patience as concrete stadium succeeded concrete stadium in the course of 65 shows. He and his musicians would perform in thirty-one states and three Canadian cities before delivering their valedictory encores at the bizarrely named Hollywood Sportatorium in Florida on 16 December. Harmony within the band would be disrupted, meanwhile, when the artist took up with Carolyn Dennis, one of the singers – in what would become a significant relationship for both of them – after already getting himself involved with another of the vocalists, Helena Springs. For better or worse, Dylan could and did please himself in these matters.
It made little useful difference to performances that would cease to be fresh, confident or assured before the last hike of the globe-spanning expedition was far advanced. Instead, Dylan’s singing would too often seem to bear out the criticisms levelled against the vocals on the album by Greil Marcus. The new arrangements would also lose their original poise and conviction. Monstrous world tours are the enemy of art, as any performer who isn’t too busy counting the money comes sooner or later to realise. Dylan was more alert to the problem than most, but with too many minds already made up thanks to reviews of Street-Legal, and with all the cracks about alimony, Elvis and lounge acts, some of h
is shows would fail to sell out.
For all that, the artist, apparently unable to think of anything better to do with himself, remained undaunted. By the end he was talking to his musicians of concerts in 1979, of touring ever onwards. After all, he was still making a lot of the money he believed he needed. A gross figure of $20 million for the 1978 tour receipts is generally mentioned. As with Rolling Thunder, Dylan was never likely to quit easily when he was doing what he thought he wanted or needed to do. Critical disdain meanwhile had a tendency to make him more stubborn. As the long pilgrimage neared its end, he began to tell stories, bizarre or revealing according to taste, from the stage. In Jacksonville, Florida, on 13 December, his preface to ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ became an elaborate reworking of vintage Dylan hokum. It was that or a comical parable on the relationship between an embattled performing artist and his audience.
The carnivals [they] used to have in the ’50s, every carnival used to have a geek. Do you know what a geek is? A geek is a man that eats a live chicken, right before your eyes. He bites the head off, eats that. Then he goes ahead, eats the heart, drinks up the blood, sweeps up all the feathers with a broom. In them days, it cost a quarter to see him … Anyway. The geek pretty much kept to himself most of the time. Nobody never did get too tight with the geek. But one day I was having breakfast with the bearded lady and she says, ‘Stay away from that man.’ I say, ‘Why?’ She says, ‘Because he looks at everybody else in the world as freaky, except him. He thinks that he’s just earning a living, and what he’s doing is pretty straight …’
The singer then proceeded to claim that being stared at on the streets of Nashville for having long hair in ‘about 1964’ had ‘reminded’ him of the geek and inspired the song. In Lakeland, Florida, two nights later the introduction to ‘Señor’ was stranger still. This artist objected to the myths surrounding Bob Dylan except when he was inventing the best of them.
I was riding on a train one time from Durango, Mexico, to San Diego. I fell asleep on this train. I woke up about midnight and a lot of people were getting off the train. The train was in the station, pulling up to the platform at a place called Monterey. So a bunch of people were getting off the train. On to the platform, the steps, this man gets up to the train. Everybody else gets off. He come down the aisle and took a seat across the aisle from me, wearing nothing but a blanket and a derby hat.
So I was sitting there. I felt a very strange vibration. I was staring into the window, which was like a glass mirror. And I could not help myself any longer, I had to turn around and look right at this man. When I did I could see that his eyes were burning and there was smoke coming out of his nostrils. I immediately knew this was the man I wanted to talk to. So I turned around to the mirror for a while to figure out something to say. And when I had it all together I turned around and he was gone.
By late 1978, for all that, touring and self-doubt were taking a toll. As winter came on, Dylan and most of the band came down with flu. By the time they reached San Diego on 17 November he was still feeling sick, disorientated and exhausted. The performance that night was hard going. Almost exactly a year later, on 27 November 1979, back in the same city, Dylan would tell his audience – a supportive one, on this occasion – of how it had been. This parable was also intended to explain what had become of him and his music in the intervening months. Dylan would relate that it had all happened towards the end of the 1978 concert. Someone in the crowd, he would say, ‘knew I wasn’t feeling too well’.
I think they could sense that. And they threw a silver cross on the stage. Now usually I don’t pick things up in front of the stage. Once in a while I do, but sometimes, most times, I don’t. But I looked down at that cross. I said, ‘I gotta pick that up.’
I picked up that cross and I put it in my pocket. It was a silver cross, I think maybe about so high. And I put it … brought it backstage with me. And I brought it with me to the next town, which was off in Arizona, Phoenix. Anyway, when I got back there I was feeling even worse than I’d felt when I was in San Diego. And I said, ‘Well I really need something tonight.’
I didn’t know what it was, I was using all kinds of things, and I said, ‘I need something tonight that I never really had before.’
And I looked in my pocket and I had this cross that someone threw before when I was in San Diego. So if that person is here tonight, I want to thank them for that cross.30
The audience in San Diego’s Golden Hall in 1979 would exult when Dylan mentioned the cross. They would be unusual witnesses to his performances that year, rare examples of a crowd being as one with the singer and the statements he had begun to make from the concert stage. His story of the silver cross would be part of his introduction to a song called ‘Slow Train’.
The San Diego crowd would not flinch, unlike other spectators, when Dylan then discoursed on newspaper stories about ‘people in Turkey revolting’, ‘Russians don’t have any food’, ‘all that trouble in Ireland’, and the Islamic revolution that had just destroyed the Shah’s regime in Iran. This audience would not shake their heads in bewilderment when Dylan said, ‘They got a funny bunch of people over in Iran. They have a religion called “Muslims”, you know?’ The artist would remind this crowd that ‘the Bible says, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” … We know this world as we see it is going to be destroyed. Christ will set up his kingdom in Jerusalem for a thousand years. We know that’s true.’ In San Diego, where some in the audience had become personally acquainted with the artist by the end of 1979, they would only shout a loud ‘Amen!’ to all of that.
CHAPTER SIX
God Said to Abraham …
I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou has tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars …
Revelation, 2:2
LATE IN 1978, SO THE STORY GOES, GOD FOUND BOB DYLAN IN A hotel room in Tucson, Arizona. Stranger things have happened. The deity had hovered in the haunted wings from the beginnings of the singer’s career, but the relationship, ebbing and flowing, was always tricky. Sometimes in the early days it had seemed that the songs mocked belief; sometimes that only the hypocrisies of institutions were held culpable. At other moments, particularly in his apprentice work, Dylan had appeared to adopt the tropes of the old hellfire blues without a second thought, as many did. Nevertheless, to the sort of people who understood the sort of thing being said in the songs they liked best, it was unthinkable – beyond belief, in fact – that an artist without an ounce of deference in him, one who took nothing at face value, one who saw the masters of war conscripting God to their side, could simply and sincerely believe all the old Bible crap. In the late 1970s, unbelievers formed a devout majority of the artist’s fans.
By the time he got to Tucson, it made no difference. On or around 19 November, Dylan sensed ‘a presence in the room that couldn’t have been anybody but Jesus’. Then the artist felt a hand placed physically upon him: ‘I felt it. I felt it all over me.’ Then his ‘whole body’ began to tremble. The room itself seemed to move. ‘The glory of the Lord,’ as he would later testify, ‘knocked me down and picked me up.’ Describing the experience two years later, Dylan would deny that he had been ‘down and out’ or miserable at the time. Supposedly he had been ‘doing fine’ and was ‘relatively content’. But he had been hearing a lot about Jesus. Later, perhaps a month or so later, he would indicate to ‘a very close friend’ that he was ‘willing to listen’ to the Christian message.1
That’s the tale, at any rate. As with so many Dylan stories, it requires the suspension of doubt, if not of disbelief. He turned to evangelical Christianity: this much we know. But he had been making God-noises for years before that silver cross flew from the darkness to lie glittering, presumably, in the radiance of the San Diego spotlight. Desire’s ‘Oh, Sister’, if it was not Jacques Levy’s doing, was hardly the work of an artist oblivious to the deity. It was one example among many
.
The sequence of supernatural events is also as neat as a movie plot: first the cross appearing amid Dylan’s gloom, then the Pauline moment in a hotel suite. The anecdote involving the little silver cruciform trinket is an interpolation, in any case, of statements gleaned from a single concert bootleg, not from any of Dylan’s statements-for-the-record of what led him to become a Christian. When he felt like talking on stage he came up with a lot of strange stuff. There are no witnesses to say that the story of the cross was any more true, or any less metaphorical, than the story of the geek.
You needn’t question that Dylan experienced something profound, meanwhile, to wonder why he never actually identified the time or place of his transformation. Tucson? Judging by his 1978 concert schedule, it’s close enough. Dylan would certainly say, and later regret saying it, that he ‘truly had a born-again experience’.2 The last tiny mystery is this, however: if Jesus made personal, room-rocking contact on a winter’s night, why was there any need for evangelical tutelage? That, nevertheless, was what Dylan sought and what he got.
*
In its edition of Saturday, 3 November 1979, the San Francisco Chronicle carried a review by Joel Selvin of the opening night of Dylan’s latest concert tour. As soon became clear, the rock critic – as certain showbiz writers were then styled – was not entirely impressed. One clue was in the headline above the piece. It read: ‘Bob Dylan’s God-Awful Gospel’. The artist was about to suffer for his new-found faith.
‘These are strange times,’ Selvin began. ‘Gas costs a dollar a gallon. Someone built a pyramid in San Francisco. And Bob Dylan converted to Christianity.’ Clearly, the last sentence was taken to be a self-explanatory illustration of how peculiar some portents can be. Dylan had come to God and God had emerged with a celebrity scalp. Amid weird events, this was the weirdest. The reviewer continued: