by Bell, Ian
If that’s the case – and who knows? – perhaps it is worth thinking twice about the claim by Larry Myers and others from his church that Dylan alone was responsible for the decision to perform only religious songs on the tour. Let’s say the assertion is as honest as you would expect from a pastor. The implication is, therefore, that the Vineyard, a church well versed in the use of pop-type music, was more than happy for Dylan to sing all the big hits. If that is the case, the church’s leadership might not have been wholly delighted to see their most famous convert refusing to perform his most famous songs, the ones that caught and held all those millions of fans. The dire ‘negative publicity’ for god-awful gospel of which Dylan would complain was no aid to a church on a recruitment mission from God and a church, moreover, that had no desire to be perceived as odd, sectarian or extreme by mainstream America.
The artist was valuable to the Vineyard because of his immortal soul – what could have counted for more? – but his fame and the songs that had made him famous were worth something too. You can only pause to wonder about the enthusiasm these LA evangelicals might have summoned if a homeless hobo Dylan had wandered in off the street with a beat-up old guitar and begun to sing about his precious angel. Such, though, was the nature of celebrity Christianity and religion’s dalliance with rock music at the end of the 1970s. What you were mattered to the Lord, but who you were counted for a lot among those engaged on a membership drive for the Jesus lifestyle choice. The situation was not beneficial, necessarily, to either party.
After San Francisco, Santa Monica was easy. The four shows there were staged as benefits for the evangelical Christian relief charity World Vision International. The audiences were therefore predisposed, to put no fine points on the matter, to welcome the songs and anything else the star might have to say. After all, some of them inclined to the notion that anything popping into the head of a true believer was liable to be divinely inspired. The Vineyard types, led by Kenn Gulliksen, were out in force to provide impeccably moral support. Dylan seemed to be buoyed by the atmosphere generated by those he took to be of his kind and mind. His statements, those ‘Jesus raps’, thus began to pass beyond the outer fringes of common Christian discourse.
On the first night, 18 November, he said: ‘I don’t know what kind of God you believe in, but I believe in a God that can raise the dead. Will raise the dead, does raise the dead, all the time.’ On the second night, he became garrulous, not to say delirious, as though each piece of his new esoteric wisdom was swirling brightly if confusedly in his head. Dylan wasn’t quite talking in tongues – he had already written ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ – but there was a strange, ecstatic quality to the way he spoke about the world’s coming end. In part, he said:
All these sad stories that are floating around. We’re not worried about any of that. We don’t care about the atom bomb, any of that, ’cause we know this world is going to be destroyed and Christ will set up His Kingdom in Jerusalem for a thousand years, where the lion will lie down with the lamb.
You know, the lion will eat straw that day. Also, if a man doesn’t live to a hundred years old he will be called accursed. That’s interesting, isn’t it? And we don’t mind, we know that’s coming. And if any man have not the spirit of Christ in him, he is a slave to bondage. So you need something just a little bit tough to hang on to.
This song’s called ‘Hanging On to a Solid Rock Made Before the Foundation of the World’. And if you don’t have that to hang on to, you better look into it.
The tour as it unfolded had this much in common with ’66: the star did not take kindly to being heckled. His sense of Christian charity had its limits; his humility was never his distinguishing feature; his temper was not always mastered easily. Whatever he liked to pretend, years of stardom had left Dylan with one near-unconscious habit of mind: he was accustomed to people hanging on his every word. When he spoke, they listened. They listened to anything and everything he had to say. By 1979 he had spent years rebuffing their demands for his words of wisdom. He could handle that pressure. What he could not handle were jibes, jeers and the impertinent souls who refused to heed him or his tidings. Bob Dylan himself, to whom all attended, was bringing news of Jesus: who could be deaf to that? Who could abuse the messenger or the message? Quite a few, as it turned out. In 1966, stoned (but not in that sense) and embattled, the artist had developed some well-honed put-downs, often comical, for dealing with those who rejected the electric heresy. In 1979, he was often at a loss when Scripture failed to do the trick. Sometimes he got furious. Whether he was angry on his own or on Christ’s behalf it is hard to say.
By the recorded sound of things, Tempe in Arizona was the worst. Once again you wonder what possessed – in the mundane sense – a bunch of college students to fork over their cash when by then every fan or casual listener knew all about Dylan and his God. By the last week in November the artist’s determination to devote his concerts to religious music was no longer news. At the University of Arizona’s Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium they bought their tickets regardless and made a den for Daniel.
As before, there were some happy enough to applaud Dylan’s preaching. The noise generated by the rest – hooting, bellowing, calling repeatedly for ‘rock and roll!’ – in the end caused the star attraction to have the house lights turned up. ‘I wanna see these people,’ he said with a familiar sneer. On the second night, the reception was deemed to be so unrelentingly hostile Dylan refused to play his usual encores. Instead, he gave the crowd a good five minutes of a ‘rap’ involving the Antichrist and a false (but unnamed) guru before ‘When You Gonna Wake Up?’. The sin of this ‘false deceiver’ from the Far East (or thereabouts) was to tell his followers that ‘what life’s all about is life is to have fun’. Not in Dylan’s book it wasn’t. When his audience shouted for rock and roll, he replied: ‘You wanna rock ’n’ roll, you can go down and rock ’n’ roll! You can go see Kiss! You rock ’n’ roll all your way down to the pit!’
An introduction to ‘Solid Rock’ (still being called ‘Hanging On to a Solid Rock Made Before the Foundation of the World’) became a still longer disquisition on, variously, the woman taken in adultery, the Devil’s status as ‘the God of this world’ and the state of the American nation as judgement approached. Viewed dispassionately, statement by statement, Dylan was raving. He delivered himself of his thoughts in even tones, but the thoughts were tangential to known reality, a stream of higher consciousness, an interior monologue that somehow had escaped into the world. At one point he said:
Every time God comes against a nation, first of all he comes against their economy. If that doesn’t work, he comes against their ecology. It ain’t nothing new that’s happening. He did it with Egypt. He did it with Persia. He did it with Babylon. He did it with the whole Middle East. It’s desert now; it used to be flourishing gardens. All right. If that don’t work, if that don’t work, he just brings up another nation against them. So one of those three things has got to work.
Now, Jesus Christ is that solid rock. He’s supposed to come two times. He came once already. See, that’s the thing. He’s been here already. Now, He’s coming back again. You gotta be prepared for this. Because, no matter what you read in the newspapers, that’s all deceit. The real truth is that He’s coming back already.
And you just watch your newspapers. You’re gonna see, maybe two years, maybe three years, five years from now, you just watch and see. Russia will come down and attack in the Middle East. China’s got an army of 200 million people. They’re gonna come down in the Middle East. There’s gonna be a war called the Battle of Armageddon which is like some war you never even dreamed about. And Christ will set up His kingdom. He will set up his kingdom and He’ll rule it from Jerusalem. I know, as far out as that might seem, this is what the Bible says.
‘Five years from now’ have come and gone, of course. The Russia of which Dylan spoke, meaning the Soviet Union, has also expired, replaced by a disobliging Orthodox Christian oli
garch state. The Middle East remains in desperately bad shape, as ever, but the evangelical prophecies tacked on to the historical fact of modern Israel’s founding are utterly threadbare. Dire pulp fictions such as the interminable Left Behind series have made their millions and had their moment. Trusting and devout readers are still waiting to be raptured. Dylan, like the world, has moved on, in his case thanks mostly to Chabad-Lubavitch. If he has learned anything as a messianic Jew it is that time-limited predictions – two years, three years, five years – are a very bad idea. In 1979, obedient to the spirit moving within him, he was shooting his mouth off with the best of the prophetic evangelicals and trying to put the fear of a wrathful God into students who didn’t want to know. They might have been what he called ‘a rude bunch’, but they were a bunch who knew the difference between his great songs and his religious songs. He preached on regardless, his voice a self-satisfied drone that would not be stilled.
Despite all this – indeed, because of it – the audience kept up its racket. Several people had the temerity to shout, more than once, that Dylan – Bob Dylan – should just shut up. At one point a born wit called out ‘Praise the Lord with puke!’ Again and again, they demanded rock and roll. One way or another, the sermons were pointless. The artist was talking to himself.
It could be argued, fairly, that Tempe was an exceptional case, that even during these shows the hecklers were noisy but not necessarily a majority. As had happened with the protesters at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966, the vociferous students of Arizona U probably drew attention to themselves and earned a hellish reputation for the entire tour. When evangelicals or open-minded fans turned out – as they did on the next two nights at the Golden Hall in San Diego – Dylan often found welcome support. It remained the case, nevertheless, that the Tempe audiences spoke and scoffed for many as the decade drew to a close. Either they had no interest in what the artist was peddling, or they despised it. Dylan was transgressing the unwritten rule that said ‘rock and roll’ – he rarely played any such thing – must come first and last. Music for its own sake was the shared article of faith, and religion wasn’t necessarily the offending issue. If he had devoted his songs and speeches to a purely political cause Dylan would probably have received much the same treatment in Tempe as he got for sermonising. Religion, his unforgiving brand of religion, didn’t help, however.
He was planning to make still another album in a break between concerts. It was not a good idea. A worse idea was to set about recording and releasing another set of born-again songs less than a year after Slow Train Coming. On the one hand, Dylan could tell himself that the first of his Christian works had achieved impressive sales. On the other hand, the concerts in Tempe and elsewhere should have shown him that the market for his evangelical goods was strictly limited. What good would he be to Christ – or to the Vineyard, as his pastors no doubt calculated – if he alienated his core audience? The last thing he needed, in either event, was a lousy album. Saved would be beyond saving.
Ten studio albums had been released in his name in the 1970s along with ten vinyl sides of concert recordings and two ‘greatest-hits’ packages (though Masterpieces, it is true, had only been released officially in Japan and Australasia). In under five years seven pieces of Bob Dylan product had found their way to market. You could say he had been hearteningly prolific. You could also say that he and his record company were testing the theory that the public’s appetite for Dylan was unlimited. They were also putting to the test the proposition that an artist famous for never repeating himself could inflict as many startling transformations as he liked on record-buyers without suffering any sort of adverse reaction. The 1970s had begun with the baffling shock of Self Portrait. The decade had encompassed the luminous art of Blood on the Tracks, the radical experiments of Rolling Thunder and the blurred visions of Street-Legal. It was ending with Dylan in the role of a prophetic Christian evangelist. So package that oeuvre as a branded back catalogue. One way or another, it was a lot for the dedicated fan, far less the average record-buyer, to take in.
By the decade’s end, in any case, the music industry had changed, but Dylan had not been responsible for those changes. In that fact lay the clear distinction between his 1960s and his 1970s. In the latter decade he had simply gone his own way. He had achieved number-one albums in his homeland, three of them, for the first time in his career. His inimitable music and his perplexing reputation still fascinated his contemporaries. Yet by 1979 it was difficult, even impossible, to claim that Dylan’s work still lay at the heart – or anywhere close to the heart – of contemporary music. Religion and the controversies over religion had made it plain: he was no longer vital to what was going on in wider society. Who was selling records out there? America had got the hang, finally, of punk, but the acts shifting units in conspicuous quantities were the likes of Supertramp, Dire Straits, Van Halen, Elvis Costello, The Police, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and the purveyors of disco. Several of those acts and artists owed a great deal to Dylan, but by the decade’s end he was detached utterly from them and, increasingly, from the audiences they served. Even the singer-songwriters he had helped to create, for better or worse, were lost to self-regard and introspection. Dylan did not partake of their kind of solipsistic pop. He had long been indefinable. The risk, real and present, was that he would become irrelevant.
The point was approaching when a new Dylan record would cease to be an event. That point was closer, in fact, than he could have realised. The derisive reviews he could expect by the decade’s end, even from the once loyal Rolling Stone, were a sign of the times. Dylan was no longer indulged. It was no longer taken for granted, eccentric though the notion had been to begin with, that his every word and deed was of lasting import. If anything, thanks to the ‘Vegas’ slurs on the reputation of the ’78 tour and the relentless sermons in Slow Train Coming and his new songs, he was distrusted. Reviewers did not so much criticise his work but, increasingly, dismiss artist and work alike. Bit by bit in the 1970s, Dylan had lost the loyalty of ‘his generation’. If they were not always older and wiser, they behaved, invariably, as though they were wise to him.
He would never be truly pre-eminent again, never again bend popular culture to his will, never be quite the same source of fascination for a mass audience. With the album he would begin to record in Muscle Shoals on 11 February 1980, Dylan would cease truly to matter for years to come. But then, Saved would be a very bad album indeed.
*
How bad? When the tally in 2013 amounts to thirty-five studio-made albums contained in one large, mixed bag, anyone inclined to cut the legend of Bob Dylan down to size is spoiled for choice. In a career of such longevity, stinkers are inevitable. When it was released in the last week of June 1980 Saved had the singular distinction of looking like a terrible album even before a note was heard. It was as though someone had commissioned a very public announcement: this one’s a horror. Honesty in advertising is always to be welcomed, of course.
Tony Wright was and is a very fine cover artist. His work before and after his assignment for Dylan in the designs for Marianne Faithfull’s album Broken English and Steve Winwood’s Arc of a Diver, elegant and imaginative in each case, are proof enough of that. With Saved, Wright did his job, as directed, and gave the world a glimpse into the songwriter’s mind. The painter could not be held to blame for what lay within. There was no error, no interference: buyers were given the singer’s message precisely. As the illustrator’s website has explained things, ‘Dylan had searched for an artist to interpret a dream or vision he’d had. He described exactly what he’d seen and knew exactly what he wanted to see.’14
So one gigantic, bloodied hand of Christ with a finger pointing down to a small forest of supplicating hands in a lurid blaze of red, yellow, black and green was Dylan’s image of what his album’s title was supposed to signify. God was in his dreams. God might even have been causing religious visions. According to
taste, the suggestion is either inspiring or disturbing. It does not alter the fact that the original cover for Saved – Columbia would later replace it with a generic image of the artist – looks like the kind of crass, overbearing poster favoured by noisy fundamentalist churches struggling to win congregations. It is God propaganda, evangelical literalism, born-again banality. You could not call it dishonest, however. This was Dylan’s idea of the deepest secrets of existence.
A pity about the album, then. Some still try to make a case for it, now and then. One argument runs that there is nothing wrong with songs that sound well enough on tour bootlegs. The problem must be, surely, that Dylan rushed things – another four-day raid on the studio, plus a day for tinkering and revisions – with a band that was road-weary. A better conclusion might be that the songs are simply not up to the task they are supposed to perform. It is not a small task. It has challenged religious artists for centuries, after all. How do you convey the radiance of faith, the actual illumination of belief, to anyone who has not shared the experience? No one save the already devout truly claims that Dylan succeeded with the nine songs (eight his own) on Saved, an album that sounds as if it was made by musicians filling a quota. There is sacred music from around the world, from spirituals to oratorios to the pizmonin of Judaism, that allows glimpses of religion’s meaning even to non-believers. Dylan himself would in time come close to creating work worthy of such company. But not on this record. Saved is just a poor, rushed and, indeed, uninspired rock album. What’s telling is that Dylan seemed not to be able to hear what was going on even while the project faltered and died.