Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan

by Bell, Ian

  One simple fact needs to be borne in mind: Slow Train Coming, the work of the long-derided born-again Bob Dylan, would be a big success, his last truly successful album in America for a very long time to come. In its first year on release it would sell more quickly than Blood on the Tracks. The evangelical album would be certified platinum – one million copies sold in the US – within only nine months. Blood, the masterpiece ‘everyone bought’, supposedly, would not achieve that status until the end of the ’80s.

  Given the usual depiction of Dylan’s conversion to Christianity as a three-act tragedy for his reputation, the initial commercial success of that ‘mean-spirited spirituality’ counts as puzzling. It cannot be argued, for one thing, that Slow Train Coming owed its popularity to America’s religious revival. Conservative church-goers remained to be convinced, at the very least, that music so long synonymous with sin could have redeeming qualities. The words might be fine and well – if you could make them out – but temptation lurked down in the grooves and in the inflaming coital rhythm. Dylan, the Jewish convert so recently identified with left-wing causes, could not count on those believers. Besides, the success of Slow Train Coming would not be confined to America. The album would reach number three in the US, but number two in the UK, where the Christian evangelical market was never, to put it kindly, the biggest in all creation.

  When Slow Train Coming entered the US album charts in September, those who were dismayed or disgusted by its unforgiving preaching could take their pick. Either people liked the record and accepted the sentiments, or they liked the noise and, sadly for the Christian Dylan and his critics alike, didn’t give a damn about what was being said. In any event it is a mistake to allow the reactions of a few disdainful reviewers, then or now, to obscure the facts. We should not be distracted either by subsequent events in Dylan’s born-again career. On its release Slow Train Coming was more popular by far than a lot of his albums.

  He had reason to be optimistic, then, as he began tour rehearsals at the end of August. If the mood took him, he was entitled to believe that he was, of all things, the voice of a generation once more and the leading shining light of a genuine movement. Just not that generation, or that movement. Whether he understood that he was accepting the kind of spokesman’s role he had rejected back in the ’60s is a still unanswered question. Perhaps, instead, Dylan knew he was about to be tested sorely. Such was a true believer’s lot, after all. Whatever happened, he meant to put out the Word.

  His second decade as a writer and performer was drawing to a close. You can only wonder if he could still recognise himself. Or rather, you wonder which self he still recognised. Whatever else it signified, the first, hot flush of Christian belief amounted to a willed amnesia in an individual whose habit of selective recall had become ingrained in his youth. Forget all the glib talk, still persistent, of masks, ‘reinvention’, superstar games and role-playing. By 1979, Dylan had set aside at least half a dozen complete identities. The acceptance of Christ, accomplished with relief and little hesitation after the busted marriage, the bad recreational habits, the endless womanising, the creative confusion, the relentless pressure of impossible expectations and the sheer ennui that is the default state of genius, was an attempt at absolute eradication. What else could it be? By definition, you had to be extinguished as a person in order to be born again.

  The religious experience required to achieve that state might have been as old as humankind, but in 1979 the phrase was of recent origin. Jimmy Carter had attracted a lot of media attention just by describing himself as ‘born again’ while running for the presidency in 1976. Dylan, you suspect, grasped the idea instantly. It was, after all, a sanctified version of what he had always done. Clearly, the question he did not ask himself when he underwent baptism was whether it was truly possible to erase a person and start again. The faith of his forefathers said that it was impossible for anyone born Jewish to cease to be a Jew. Typically, Dylan would not be deterred from making the attempt, whatever the critics or anyone else said about his new songs.

  What the critics actually said was more or less predictable. The reviewer for Britain’s Melody Maker commenced as he meant to go on by announcing, as though passing sentence, ‘Dylan has switched roles once too often.’8 This time around, ‘Dylan as a Bible-puncher is just too much to swallow.’ Several other writers found the views expressed on the album as unpleasant as the splenetic manner of their expression. The contrast between sheer intolerance and professions of faith in a religion founded on love was mentioned more than once. The artist’s newly conservative politics – from one who had supposedly turned his back on political causes – did not go unnoticed. In New York, John Lennon caught ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ on local radio in the first week of September. The domesticated former Beatle sneered at Dylan serving as Christ’s flunkey. Lennon, in those days talking mostly to himself, called the track’s production mediocre, the vocal performance pathetic and the words ‘just embarrassing’.

  Writing in the magazine New West, Greil Marcus gave some initial credit to the professionalism behind the album’s music and to Dylan’s singing, but observed, ‘What we’re faced with here is really very ugly.’ There was nothing new about the use of religious imagery in the artist’s work, Marcus explained, but here it was being employed just to sell a received and ‘pre-packaged doctrine’. In Slow Train Coming the mysteries of revealed religion were reduced to a brutish proposition: ‘Jesus is the answer and if you don’t believe it, you’re fucked.’ Inadvertently or not, the critic confirmed Dylan’s declaration in ‘Precious Angel’: ‘there ain’t no neutral ground’. Marcus retorted that the artist was ‘falsely settling all questions’ by claiming ‘that redemption is a simple affair’. The review concluded:

  American piety is a deep mine and, in the past, without following any maps, Dylan has gone into it and returned with real treasures: John Wesley Harding is the best example, but there are many others. Slow Train Coming strips the earth and what it leaves behind is wreckage.9

  Perhaps surprisingly, Dylan was not entirely friendless. Rolling Stone’s editor, Jann Wenner – who was not necessarily the best critic Jann Wenner ever hired – decided that Slow Train Coming qualified for the ‘best since’ laurel, that honour granted traditionally by any reviewer who can’t quite decide how to evaluate a disconcerting Dylan album. On this occasion Wenner concluded, for reasons he neglected to explain, that Slow Train Coming was the very best thing Dylan had managed since The Basement Tapes. The editor had listened to the new album ‘at least 50 times’ and failed to cure himself of the conviction ‘that it might even be considered his greatest’. Dylan’s work was at risk of being damned with loud praise. This was the ‘overwhelming’ record ‘that’s been a long time coming, with an awesome, sudden stroke of transcendent and cohesive visions’. Wenner ended his two-page review with the immortal sentence ‘I am hearing a voice.’10 The editor liked it, then. On the other hand, he was far from alone. Few of those who hated the born-again maker of the million-selling Slow Train Coming would ever ponder that mystery, far less explain it.

  The band selected to join the artist on tour was composed of safe choices and, in the main, stout Christians. Jim Keltner was a reliable if predictable drummer, so reliable he turned up on every other superstar session (former Beatles a speciality) during the 1970s. Dewey ‘Spooner’ Oldham was a Muscles Shoals keyboard player and songwriter with an impressive pedigree who was hired on Jerry Wexler’s recommendation. Tim Drummond, the bassist and sole non-believer in the group, was another of the producer’s choices, one who had helped to give Slow Training Coming its rhythmic solidity. Fred Tackett, already a contributor to Little Feat’s music, was no Mark Knopfler as a guitarist, but he was no slouch. In essence, this was a band of session players, trustworthy pros, but Dylan was sticking with the belief that nothing musical would be left to chance. On this occasion the artist’s requirements as to ‘gospel’ would be fulfilled by the singers Regina Havis, Helena Springs
and Monalisa Young. Next to faith, professionalism was Dylan’s new favourite word.

  After five or so weeks of sometimes chaotic rehearsals, the ensemble’s first performance, bizarrely, was on the tiresome TV comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live on 18 October. With Bill Murray pulling his knowing faces, strange Andy Kaufman challenging women in the audience to wrestling matches and Monty Python’s Eric Idle acting in the vague role of ‘host’, Dylan and his band performed ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’, ‘I Believe in You’ and ‘When You Gonna Wake Up?’ Perhaps in an effort to kill off the ‘Vegas’ jokes once and for all, the artist appeared in a short pale-blue jerkin so inoffensive he could have been taken for a janitor. Judging by the tape, his New York audience were not exactly roused to a revivalist fervour by the new songs. That, however, was the real puzzle of born-again Dylan. What did he expect? Asking people to heed nine religious songs on a single album was one thing. Insisting that they listen to nothing but his brand of ‘gospel’ through entire concerts when he had a back catalogue overflowing with vastly better work was either brave, deluded, or presumptuous. Nevertheless, that was to be the deal when the tour opened at the Warfield on Market and 6th streets in San Francisco on 1 November.

  Contrary to certain legends, there were some good nights on the first of Dylan’s ‘gospel tours’. Four shows in Santa Monica after the Warfield run went down very well indeed. Even in San Francisco, it stretched credulity to suggest that every last person paying $12.50 for a ticket to the old theatre was outraged, or even disappointed. The concerts had sold out quickly and completely. After Joel Selvin’s review in the San Francisco Chronicle on 3 November locals preparing to attend the 12 remaining shows could have been under no illusions about what to expect. Slow Train Coming was a bestseller; ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ had been given a lot of airplay. Those who can take the lumbering songs argue further, rightly, that the artist and his band performed immaculately in these winter concerts. Just as in 1966, when every last stop on a world tour was depicted fancifully as a blood-curdling confrontation between artist and audience, most of those who would afterwards claim to have been affronted by Dylan’s god-awful gospel had paid good money for the privilege. People are strange, but not entirely, collectively perverse. The artist and his musicians were certainly put to trial by ordeal by some audiences, but Dylan would have a point – up to a point – when in 1985 he blamed Selvin’s review and others like it as the badmouthing that ‘hurt us at the box office’.

  In 1979 I went out on tour and played no song that I had ever played before live. It was a whole different show, and I thought that was a pretty amazing thing to do. I don’t know any other artist who has done that, has not played whatever they’re known for … Yet it got all kinds of negative publicity. The negative publicity was so hateful it turned a lot of people off from making up their own minds.11

  Clearly, group prayers before performances and the ministrations of Larry Myers did not quite have the desired effect. The Vineyard’s point man had been assigned to Dylan as a kind of personal chaplain or spiritual chaperone for the tour. If you believe one version of events, the artist himself had requested the pastor’s company. Like Gulliksen, Myers would ever afterwards deny having interfered with the singer’s decisions and claim, in fact, to have given all the pre-conversion hits a clean bill of health on Christ’s behalf. In fact, Dylan seems to have needed no reassurances on that score. He had no intention of performing any of the songs he was ‘known for’. To all appearances, the art he had made in his old life held no interest for him. With Slow Train Coming barely arrived in the stores, he had begun to write still more songs affirming his relationship with the deity. The new work was being ‘shared’ with Myers as it came to fruition, but there is no evidence that the pastor aspired to become God’s answer to Jacques Levy. Whether he kept an absolute vow of silence in all things is another matter. What does a spiritual adviser do if not advise? The songs would not amount to much, in any case, in the great scheme of Dylan, but such bursts of creativity were always sure signs that he was preoccupied with the task at hand.

  He didn’t say a great deal to audiences during the first few shows in San Francisco. The catcalls and booing reported by Joel Selvin brought no response until the fourth night, when Dylan announced through the fug of dope hanging over the crowd that ‘we all know we’re living in the end of the end of times. So you’ll need something strong to hang on to.’ Much the same line was repeated on the next two nights, but Dylan said little else. On 10 November he stated: ‘The rabble says the preaching of the cross is foolishness. To those who perish [it is], but to those who are saved it is the power of God.’

  It was proof that the artist had changed somewhat, but it hardly amounted to a full-scale, thundering sermon. If it had been on Dylan’s mind to preach, he took a while to warm up. In reality, the apocalyptic little speeches that would overshadow the music on this tour, the ‘gospel raps’ or ‘Jesus raps’ as aficionados describe them, were in many cases the artist’s righteous responses to what he took to be provocation. When it came to spreading true religion, he was no rock and roll John Donne, no amplified Jonathan Edwards. He wasn’t even a poor man’s Billy Graham. To begin with, a declaration that the End of Days is upon us and the occasional assurance that ‘God don’t make promises He don’t keep’ were about the extent of Dylan’s excursions into theology. Only on the 14th did it become clear that the former topical singer had revived one of his old Greenwich Village writing tricks and begun to delve into the daily papers for inspiration. Fifty-two Americans had been taken hostage in their country’s Iranian embassy on 4 November. The fact, shocking enough in itself, became a part of Dylan’s text for the remainder of the tour, but only as the basis for an injunction to audiences to ignore the trivia of this world. Once again, compassion went missing.

  We read about all the trouble, you know Iran, Great Britain, Russia, Red China and the United States. But we’re not going to be bothered by all that because we know the world is going to be destroyed and we look forward to the approach of the Second Coming. And if the gospel is hid it is hidden to those that are lost. So anyway, we’re hanging on now to a stronger rock. One made before the foundation of the world. That real, that true …’

  On the next night, Dylan elaborated just a little with ‘Christ will set his kingdom up for a thousand years; we know that it’s true. So it’s a slow train coming, but it’s picking up speed.’ The train, set rolling nightly with real gospel songs from the backing vocalists, would never truly leave North America. In fact, it would not be until April of 1980 and the third of the born-again tours that Dylan would risk performances in Canada and his old stamping-grounds on the Eastern Seaboard. Europe would not be considered until the summer of 1981, but the concerts that year would illustrate the kind of reception Dylan might have faced had he turned up at Earls Court with just hot gospel and ‘played no song that I had ever played before live’. Only nine of the twenty-five songs he would perform in London on the first night – 26 June 1981 – would be drawn from the ‘gospel trilogy’. There would be lots of old favourites in the set. But there would still be a great many empty seats in the godforsaken Earls Court barn after slow ticket sales and rumours of cancellations.

  On the last night in San Francisco, nevertheless, there was evidence that even in that bastion of sinful American liberalism not every customer was alienated by the Religious Right’s singing preacher. The shock among the first-night audience when it became clear that God was all they were going to get had dissipated. On one bootleg from 16 November, the cry ‘God loves you, Bobby!’ can be heard from the crowd. An artist who is clearly at ease is interrupted three times over by applause as he introduces ‘Slow Train’ and chats about ‘what a horrible situation this world is in’ and how ‘God chooses the foolish things in this world to confound the wise’. Then it’s back to global destruction and Christ establishing His thousand-year kingdom, lion bedding down with lamb, slow train coming. Pace the San Francisco Chronic
le, Dylan is delighted with this night’s audience. ‘Have you heard that before?’ he asks of the millennial prophecy. Applause is his response. ‘Have you heard that before?’ More applause. ‘I’m just curious to know: how many believe that?’ The last question is greeted with still more applause. Later in the show, Dylan can be heard thanking ‘all you people for all the letters and all the cards and all the encouragement’. He even declares that he loves San Francisco, despite there being ‘a lot of things wrong with it’.

  Interviewed 20 years later, the band’s organist, Spooner Oldham, would confirm that the roughest nights in San Francisco were at the very start of the run. He would reckon that for the first three nights half the audience had been perfectly willing to applaud while the other half did their booing. Oldham, though he failed to notice the walkouts that certainly took place, would also mention protests outside the theatre, ‘folks out in the parking lot with placards’. After the opening nights, however, things calmed down: ‘all the rebels didn’t come back, or accepted it’.12

  In addition to the songs from Slow Train Coming, Dylan had been giving the Warfield audiences the largest part of a whole new album during these shows. Titles such as ‘Saved’, ‘Solid Rock’, ‘Saving Grace’, ‘Covenant Woman’, ‘In the Garden’, ‘What Can I Do for You?’ and ‘Pressing On’ didn’t require much elucidation. Whatever they meant to San Francisco’s paying customers, they were patently what the Vineyard crowd, clustered backstage nightly like virtuous groupies, had ordered. Or so you might assume. Their consistent claim would be that they played no part in deciding the nature of the concerts. Given that they were an energetically evangelical bunch whose avowed purpose was to save souls for Christ, not least the souls of dope-smoking Californians, that doesn’t seem to make much sense. But even if the godly didn’t try to tell Dylan his business, at least one witness believed the Vineyard’s ‘Jesus-type people’ were ‘pressuring him about a lot of things’. As Helena Springs would remember, ‘They were not allowing him to live. I remember one time he said to me, “God, it’s awfully tight. It’s so tight, you know?” He found a lot of hypocrisy in those Jesus people that he had gotten involved with.’13