by Bell, Ian
Slow Train Coming would be treated ever afterwards as the first in Dylan’s ‘gospel trilogy’. The assumption would be made that within a few brief years, the spiritual breezes having shifted, he simply turned his attention back to the garden of earthly delights and deliriums. That’s not remotely true. ‘Trilogy’, equally, is stretching things where the third nominated album, Shot of Love, is concerned. ‘Gospel’ is meanwhile just a lazy way of saying religious, or of making vague reference to a stream of biblical quotations and allusions. Dylan’s music, his ‘gospel sound’, bears only the faintest resemblance to the genre as it was understood in 1979. Gospel is and always was a broad church, but Slow Train Coming is a Christian rock album with inflections and affectations.
How would Dylan have proceeded in the years ahead if his allegiance to the Vineyard had endured? Slow Train Coming and its successor, Saved, would cover all the angles where his monosemous preaching was concerned. There were, after all, few enough angles to begin with. In this manifestation, religion – his version of religion – offered slim pickings for a writer. After Slow Train Coming, the Saved album would strike a great many listeners, Christian or otherwise, as redundant. You can only suspect that Dylan made a quick return to ‘secular’ music simply because he had nothing left to say about the meaning of religion. Any new and dramatic spiritual upheavals were incidental. ‘Get saved or be damned’ is not, in fact, a theme you can develop until kingdom come.
It points to a problem with what Dylan was choosing to believe in 1979. A great many religious writers in every era have managed to say plenty about the mysteries, problems and rewards of faith. This artist, fresh from his ‘three and one half months’ of study, was wrapping up the arguments in short order with pontifical authority. The question arose: who did he think he was, exactly? That question probably helped to explain several uncharitable reactions to the album. Many would not care for Dylan’s ‘Bible-thumping’: so much was inevitable. But even those who were prepared to sympathise, prepared to understand that the artist was attempting to testify to a life-changing experience, couldn’t help but be struck by his lack of humility. Some people spend their lives wrestling with the secrets of Scripture; study consumes their existence. Dylan considered himself learned enough to preach and lay down the law after just 14 weeks. Only a mail-order diploma would have been quicker.
No one had paid much serious attention to the religious allusions in his work before this album. Some of the references had been obvious enough, but they had failed to alter perceptions of the counter-culture’s prophet. Few had heard his mother’s anecdote about the big Bible kept open on the lectern at the Woodstock house throughout the writing of John Wesley Harding. Among those who cared before 1979 the religious motifs and borrowings had been regarded as just more leavening in the lyrical dough. But even if such details had been widely noticed or known, even if Dylan’s interest in religion had been common knowledge, none of it would have qualified him to preach. Barely five months had passed between the commotion in an Arizona hotel room and the first day’s attempts in the Muscle Shoals studio to nail an acceptable version of a song entitled ‘Trouble in Mind’. In those few weeks Dylan had gone from being the naive soul asking about the meaning of the crucifixion to one dealing out the fundamentalist cards. He had, even by his standards, a lot of nerve and it would not go unnoticed when the album was released in August. He had set about the mysteries of religion much as he had set about mastering the folk tradition: Bob Dylan had to know, or appear to know, everything. In reality, either he had acquired a lot of scriptural knowledge on his own time – so why bother with discipleship school? – or the teachings he had absorbed in a few classes were utterly simplistic. Listen to the album.
‘Trouble in Mind’, the product of the first, failed Muscles Shoals session, a song assembled from biblical quotations by way of Vineyard pamphlets and Hal Lindsey’s fantasy literature, is as good an example as any of Dylan’s method in the writing of Slow Train Coming. Genesis, Jeremiah, 1 John, Luke, Matthew and the (possibly) Pauline Epistle to the Ephesians are pulled apart for lyrics. Satan as the ‘prince of the power of the air’, soon to be a recurring figure in Dylan’s rhetoric, puts in an early appearance. The title is meanwhile lifted from a blues song that was at least half a century old by the time it suited the writer’s purpose, a song covered by everyone from Victoria Spivey to Janis Joplin to Sam Cooke. It had also been recorded by Big Bill Broonzy – Dylan’s most likely inspiration – for Folkways in the mid-1950s.
So far, so Dylan. Half the songs on John Wesley Harding could be deconstructed according to the same crude principles. But what is achieved here? ‘Trouble in Mind’ would wind up, in some countries, as a B-side to the hit ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’, but it was neither worse nor better than most of the things on Slow Train Coming. All that ancient wisdom for this?
So many of my brothers, they still want to be the boss
They can’t relate to the Lord’s kingdom, they can’t relate to the cross
They self-inflict punishment on their own broken lives
Put their faith in their possessions, in their jobs or their wives
Set aside the proposed equivalence between wives and possessions. Even Luke 12:15 doesn’t make the connection, though it should be remembered that by Dylan’s time fundamentalists were beginning to reject the nineteenth-century belief in families and marriages enduring eternally (and blessed they were) in the afterlife. Some among the born-again were doing away with gender, too, as a feature of the world to come. That possibility might not have been to Dylan’s taste. Nevertheless, his kind of Christians were strangely silent on the subject of heaven.4 You could excuse them for failing to describe the unknowable and indescribable. You could also suspect that they were much more interested in apocalyptic fantasies. If so, they had found their singer. Even for a non-believer, it is faintly startling to realise that in all of Slow Train Coming there is but one solitary mention of the promised life hereafter. In ‘Gonna Change My Way of Thinking’, heaven is described simply as ‘A place where there is no pain of birth’. That, existentially speaking, is it. And when Dylan got the chance to rewrite the failed song decades later for Mavis Staples he expunged all mention of this paradise.
In 1979, in a musically dismal piece such as ‘Trouble in Mind’ and throughout the album, his concerns were narrow and contemporary, his writing grisly. ‘They self-inflict punishment on their own broken lives’ is a metrical abomination even by the standards of Dylan’s personalised poetics. ‘Broken lives’ is a Vineyard-by-numbers phrase: for the church, everything in this world is ‘broken’. But such is the nature of the album: lumps of Scripture go into the stew alongside desiccated fragments of an old Bob Dylan persona, shavings from evangelical tracts, a few dashes of conservative pepper and the cheaper cuts from the Lamb. It doesn’t matter what you believe. The result is indigestible when it is not tasteless. Slow Train Coming became a hit album, but had it not been for the skills of Jerry Wexler, Beckett, Knopfler and the rest, Dylan’s career would never have risen again. As it was, he had to be denied thrice by fans and critics before he began to get the message. The problem was not faith, as such, but the horrifying spectre of Bob Dylan the fanatic.
‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ would become the hit, Grammy-winning single. Since Dylan has elected to believe that biblical data are not to be doubted, a ponderous melody resolves itself around a single dialectic in the verses. You serve the Lord or the Devil: there is no alternative. No one would call this sermon too complex. ‘Precious Angel’, the best track on the album, might sound like a love song to Mary Alice Artes in thanks for her part in the artist’s conversion. In fact, it turns out to be a report from the front line in the ‘spiritual warfare’ favoured by those who espouse kingdom theology. This Dylan, unlike every previous version, does not risk ambiguity: ‘Ya either got faith or ya got unbelief and there ain’t no neutral ground.’ ‘I Believe in You’, a lachrymose affair, sets Bob the Believer in the evangelical
Christian’s favourite pose as the victim of ignorance and scorn. Those hoping for the best would later attempt to reimagine the item as a set of verses with a dual meaning, personal and spiritual. The interpretation would fail.
I believe in you when winter turn to summer
I believe in you when white turn to black
I believe in you though I be outnumbered
Oh, though the earth may shake me
Oh, though my friends forsake me
Oh, even that couldn’t make me go back
Self-pity, an abiding if occasional weakness in this artist, never makes for a good noise. In ‘I Believe in You’, as elsewhere on Slow Train Coming, Dylan’s writing wilts under the pressure of his determination to be right with God in all things save syntax, imagery and metaphor. In ‘When You Gonna Wake Up?’ and ‘Slow Train’, meanwhile, the old ruses of the protest singer are revived shamelessly for the sake of reductive arguments that would have gratified candidate Reagan. Dylan was as entitled to his opinions as he was to deploy cheap politics, that ‘instrument of the Devil’. Still, the purely Christian justification for ‘Slow Train’ remains difficult to state.
All that foreign oil controlling American soil
Look around you, it’s just bound to make you embarrassed
Sheiks walkin’ around like kings
Wearing fancy jewels and nose rings
Deciding America’s future from Amsterdam and to Paris
‘When You Gonna Wake Up?’ is explicit. The state of the nation – dire, of course – is here described as a direct consequence of the failure to understand why the ‘Man up on a cross’ died. Reagan and most of those who had created Reagan, the Religious Right, the Moral Majority and the entire conservative insurgency, would not have demurred from any of it. Such was their default argument in every policy debate. Lack of faith, in Dylan’s song, means
You got men who can’t hold their peace and women who can’t control their tongues
The rich seduce the poor and the old are seduced by the young
Thanks to America’s failure to wake up and heed the Word, a noted adulterer then sings histrionically of
Adulterers in churches and pornography in the schools
You got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making rules
In several senses save the important one, Slow Train Coming remains a breathtaking piece of work. Dylan even elects to frighten the children and encourage a few Creationists with ‘Man Gave Names to All the Animals’, an Edenic little comic song whose sole purpose, it seems, is to get the serpent into paradise and invite infants to guess the name of the creature blighting their born-sinful little lives. For some, Sunday school is eternal punishment. It is not a track you would want on your conscience, far less on your CV. As an attempt to lighten the mood of the album it feels like what it is, a contrivance with a preconceived purpose.
Nothing daunted, Dylan decides to end the set with a personal challenge to the Antichrist. Who can stand, after all, against a vengeful Bob? In fact, the pilgrim gives a fine and heartfelt performance on ‘When He Returns’. The song also involves the best-written set of verses on Slow Train Coming, though that isn’t saying a great deal. The track does make a real connection, however, between Christ’s Dylan and all the Dylans who went before. The argument, as in so many earlier and better works, is between truth and deceit.
How long can you falsify and deny what is real?
How long can you hate yourself for the weakness you conceal?
All will be resolved – cue that refrain – when He returns. Somehow, nevertheless, even familiar Dylan questions are enfeebled by the purpose to which here they are put. They are no longer his questions. Slow Train Coming sees an artist abdicate art’s duty to truth in deference to a higher power. Such was the baptismal transaction, freely accepted. At times on the album, when he is not snarling theatrically in a calculated simulation of old performances, Dylan seems almost relieved to be handing over the job of deciding what is false and what is real. There is an irony in that. Christianity had indeed relieved him of many burdens. It had stilled the buzzing noise of perplexity and human variety. What is missing from the nine songs chosen for Slow Train Coming is any sense whatever of life’s complexity, any evidence of doubt or difficulty, any suggestion that faith can be perplexing. Once you see what Dylan is about – after 30 seconds or so – everything that follows on the album is predictable. Those who wrestle with faith tend to tell you that the struggle is never simple. The writer of Slow Train Coming disagrees. In consequence, there is nothing surprising or challenging in the songs. His God, set in His ways, was not the best writing partner Bob Dylan ever came across.
*
Bob Dylan at Budokan had been released just a week before the first of the Slow Train Coming sessions. Recorded over two nights near the start of the 1978 world tour, it had captured only the faintest hints of the music Dylan and his band would achieve once they hit their stride on that expedition, but neither he nor the record company had worried about misrepresentation. The double album had appeared in Japan and Australasia, the markets for which it had been conceived, fully eight months before Dylan arrived in the Muscle Shoals studio, but a flood of imports and a couple of bootlegs had concentrated Columbia’s finest minds. No one had paused to wonder if another live album was justified barely a year and a half after Hard Rain. It would not be the last time that Dylan’s reputation would suffer thanks to a casual attitude towards concert souvenirs.
Several reviewers had been dumbfounded by what seemed to be – and in certain cases were – Budokan’s wilfully kitsch arrangements. Few had given Dylan credit for adopting an audacious approach to what was, in essence, another greatest-hits package. In Britain, where the 1978 tour had been welcomed as revelatory, there had been mystification (the album still reached number four in the charts) followed by unease. In America, all the ‘Vegas lounge act’ jibes had been heard again, helped along by photographs that appeared to show Dylan honouring the dress sense, if not the spirit, of late Elvis. Almost alone, Rolling Stone’s Janet Maslin had been brave enough to say that, overall, she liked the thing. She had called the double album ‘a shock, a sacrilege and an unexpectedly playful bonanza’. At Budokan was ‘spotty’, Maslin had conceded, but liberating for artist and audience alike. Then the journalist had picked exactly the wrong words to explain this latest ‘new Dylan’. Given the story that was about to unfold, she could not have been more mistaken. ‘The fire and brimstone are behind Dylan,’ Maslin had written, ‘if only because his adolescence, and that of his principal audience, are things of the past.’5 Brimstone and fire were about to become gluts on the Dylan market. The artist was aflame with his new beliefs. By the second week in May, the tedium of overdubs behind him, he had a record to prove it. Finally he would be telling the world nothing but God’s honest truth.
A couple of cruciform images – a pickaxe, a telegraph pole – would dominate the finished album’s sleeve. Dylan paid close attention to the design. The record’s title was meanwhile a straightforward evocation of numerous holy rolling trains in the American musical landscape, from Curtis Mayfield’s 1965 hit ‘People Get Ready’ – a song Dylan and The Band had attempted back in the Woodstock basement – to the old standard ‘This Train’. A spiritual entitled ‘The Gospel Train’ had made the salvation express a key part of American revivalist iconography as far back as the 1870s, though the idea was older: Nathaniel Hawthorne had published his parodic short story ‘The Celestial Railroad’ in 1843. A century later, Woody Guthrie had borrowed from ‘This Train’ for his semi-autobiographical Bound for Glory (1943), while Sister Rosetta Tharpe had set about the song with her electric guitar in the early ’50s, helping rock and roll, the devil’s latest music, on its way. Dylan would broadcast that version on his Theme Time Radio Hour show in the middle of the twenty-first century’s first decade, when he and the world were older.
The nearest ancestor to his own ‘Slow Train’ was probably Guthrie’s adapted/borr
owed ‘Little Black Train’, a tune Woody had recorded for the pioneering folk promoter Moses ‘Moe’ Asch in 1944.6 That song warns bar-room gamblers against trying to cheat their way through life and tells ‘silken bar-room ladies’ that ‘worldly pride’ will do them no good when the time comes for the ‘final ride’. All that can be done, as Dylan’s song also argues, is to ‘get ready for your savior’. In one of the sometimes-sung variant verses of ‘Little Black Train’ we hear of a young man ‘who cared not for the gospel light, until suddenly the whistle blew from the little black train in sight’. The train-as-metaphor had exercised a fascination for many nineteenth-century Americans as they contemplated their place amid the vastness of a newly claimed country. The railroad was an obvious symbol of the ‘straight and narrow path’ as passengers were carried inexorably along thanks to an all-powerful engineer and a benign conductor.7
In the summer of 1979 there was nothing even slightly ironic about Dylan’s album, its title, or the drawing on its sleeve of an antique train arriving in a frontier landscape while the track is still being prepared by a pioneering evangel with a cross-shaped pickaxe. Dylan was immune to doubt. Rumours of his conversion were beginning to emerge, but disclosure had only ever been a matter of time. His choice would be believe-it-or-not news far beyond the little world of rock music. At the end of May, while the artist was dealing with the lawsuit brought by Ms Patty Valentine over her appearance in ‘Hurricane’ – and dropping Satan’s name into his deposition before the hearing – Kenn Gulliksen felt able to share the glad tidings with the Washington Post. Whether the pastor had been authorised to do so is an interesting question, but at the time it hardly mattered. Dylan had already begun to make plans to take his new songs out on the road. He had no intention of trying to hide. Gulliksen would soon be among the first of the Vineyarders to deny that pressure had been applied on the singer to perform only religious material in his concerts. That was, they would say, entirely his own idea.