by Bell, Ian
Saved’s fans, and there are a stout-hearted few, point out that this is a kinder, gentler, more personal group of songs than the stern Slow Train Coming set. The best that can be said in reply is that the second of the religious albums is at least true to its title. This is the story, over and over, of one man’s gratitude for salvation, one man’s conviction that anyone who is not saved is in deep, eternal trouble. The album’s lyrics are constructed from a personal biblical concordance that might well resonate with fellow believers, but the use to which the source material is put is clumsy. Crudely, Dylan lets his Bible do the talking when what we seek, presumably, are verses which are distinctively his. Once again, the writing, as writing, is poor. The fact might even explain why Dylan had pillaged Scripture so often for so many years. On this evidence, he found authentically original religious language hard to summon. When he did achieve the feat the results would bear no useful resemblance to the songs of Saved. Christ might have raised him up to make the album, but the effect on his art was not miraculous. The younger, devilish Dylan still had all the best tunes.
On Saved only ‘Pressing On’, honestly fervent, is worth the bother. Some of the harmonica elsewhere is nice enough and Dylan is, for the most part, in decent voice. To say more is to take a very minor album seriously simply because of the name on the label. Saved would fully earn its reputation as one of the worst things Dylan had done. Only the British, saintly in their tolerance for anything the artist chose to throw at them, would pay the album much attention by granting it a brief stay at number three in their album chart.
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Shortly after the labours on Saved were complete, Dylan and his band flew to Los Angeles for the Grammy Awards. Quite why he was named as best ‘rock’ vocalist of the year on the strength of the moderate success of ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ is a mystery that only those who hand out music-industry trinkets could explain. The honour could be accounted as some sort of compensation, perhaps, for the fact that, barring a couple of unsuccessful nominations in the folk and country music categories, Dylan’s revolutionary work of the 1960s had been ignored completely while it was being achieved. Granting him an award to mark his decline was a kind of poetic injustice offered to a poet who was ceasing to function. Dylan would emerge, in time, as a religious writer of real distinction. The punishing irony in 1980 was that religion had done his writing no good at all.
That didn’t stop him from taking his songs from God back out on the road, or from preaching at the audiences he encountered along the way when they seemed to object to his message. Again, however, reactions were not uniform. Far from the sinks of iniquity on the coasts, in the heartland the reception given to Dylan’s ‘gospel’ was often respectful and sometimes enthusiastic. It was one small sign, perhaps, of the coming culture wars, so called, in what was soon to become 50–50 America, a nation split evenly and neatly – or so the cliché goes – over issues of faith, morality and politics. As with all clichés, there is some truth in the description. Dylan was already on one side of the divide, but he struggled to express the fact coherently. On 20 May, at the Franklin County Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Columbus, Ohio, he spoke to the audience like a man trying to bond dire daily reality to his mystical eternal truths. The result was weird. For him, everything that happened in the world was a sign of some sort. The trouble was that he couldn’t say, as he rambled aimlessly, how the signs connected with the things he claimed were signified.
You see all the race riots and things that have been going on? Well, let me tell you the ’80s are gonna be worse than the ’60s. Anyway, if you want the word of God in you, I don’t know about making it grow … I don’t know too much about farming, but when the Bible talks about planting seeds on the wayside … And I know some of you out there are on the wayside. You hear the word of God, you gonna know you’re saved, you’re gonna receive all the gladness and joy …
Saved was released just after the last of the preaching shows had drawn to a weary close in Dayton, Ohio, on 21 May. Towards the end, potential audiences had been arriving at an unforgiving judgement: one final concert had been cancelled. Dylan had used up most of the available goodwill. Clearly, this shepherd had mislaid his flock. Contrary to anything the Religious Right chose to believe, the majority, moral or not, did not possess an infinity of patience for pietistic hectoring. In that regard, the majority were wise. Dylan’s most devoted fans can overpraise the gospel bootlegs all they like – the subset of Christians among them are predictably enthusiastic – but the songs from Slow Train Coming and Saved, unvarying in their intent, grew pretty old pretty quickly. These were songs about religion. Specifically, relentlessly, they were about Bob Dylan and religion. They did not enlarge or illuminate the religious experience for anyone else.
In 2003, Sony/Columbia would sanction an attempt to rehabilitate Dylan’s music for his God with a tribute album entitled Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan. As a genre collection, it would be well received. An admiring Billboard would report that the five songs from Slow Train Coming and the half dozen from Saved ‘seem like gospel standards now’. For his contribution, Dylan would record an entirely rewritten ‘Gonna Change My Way of Thinking’ (complete with zany dialogue) with his old flame Mavis Staples, but the album would remain of minority interest. That was the fundamental problem, after all, in 1979 and 1980. Paying customers knew there was more to the finest songwriter of his generation than he had been willing or able to offer for the sake of the Lord. In the end, audiences were not prepared to be toyed with, harangued, lectured, or bored into rigidity. There were not enough hip evangelicals in the world, far less in Dylan’s own Christian country, to even up the odds on his side.
In America, Saved failed to penetrate the top 20, sticking fast at 24. It was probably lucky to rise so high. Even the 1973 ragbag collection Dylan, a set thrown together by a vengeful Columbia from the artist’s discards when he took up with a rival company, had done better than that. The corporate suits in New York, never enamoured of their trophy artist’s decision to walk the paths of righteousness so publicly, were confirmed in their dark suspicions when the album’s gaudy sleeve began to set the discount bins aglow. That giant celestial finger was pointing the direction for Dylan’s sales figures. But no one yet knew that Saved’s fate was the merest bitter taste of things to come.
Columbia made it clear, however, that there would be no rush to release another evangelising album. They could not prevent Dylan from making such a thing – his contract guaranteed complete artistic control – but there was more than one way to crucify a music-industry heretic. Ostentatious corporate apathy generally did the trick. Had the company men realised what lay ahead, they might have attempted a little gentle diplomacy instead. History shows, in any case, that for the next 17 years no Dylan album would trouble the higher reaches of the US charts. Four of his works would fail even to reach the top 50. For much of that time most observers would deem it impossible for his fortunes ever to be restored. Saved was a bigger disaster than any of those involved in its making realised.
It would become clear soon enough that the 1970s had been Dylan’s commercial peak. As the decade ended, his luck had run out even as his piety had increased. Suddenly God and artistic self-doubt together had pitched him into a deep trough. If the experience did not destroy his faith in Christ, not to begin with at least, it tore apart his faith in his own abilities.
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Ronald Reagan was about to sweep to a decisive victory in the New Hampshire Republican primary just as Saved was being recorded. The coincidence was neat. Time magazine, publishing on 10 March, would report the relieved candidate’s triumph as ‘Ronnie’s Romp!’ Despite appearances, no hyperbole would be involved. The result would amount to a startling turning of the tide. Reagan had lost to George Bush (the elder, as we should say) in the Iowa caucus in January. In that poll the belief among Republican Party patriarchs that the former California governor was unelectable had seemed to be confirmed. New Hampshir
e, with the reliably right-wing Manchester Union Leader newspaper leading the charge, would say otherwise.
Whether Reagan could beat Jimmy Carter, with opinion polls giving the incumbent a comfortable advantage, would remain a big question for most of the rest of the year. The landslide in New Hampshire, generally explained by a nationally televised debate staged just a week after Saved was recorded, would show clearly that something important was going on. Reagan would proceed to win the primary with 50 per cent of the Republican vote in the Granite State against his main rival’s 23 per cent, while the Iranian hostage crisis corroded belief in the Democratic president. Just as Dylan was pressing on with his evangelical faith in a mighty, world-ending conflict, Cold War conservatism was preparing to claim its decade and settle the argument with the evil Soviet empire.
Vietnam was already being consigned to a rapidly rewritten history. Americans who could afford to uproot themselves were on the move from the old rust-belt conurbations to states where the sun shone all the year round, heating bills were manageable, self-reliance was prized, jobs were plentiful, government was distrusted, ethnic tensions were easier to ignore and politics, like religion, was reduced to its convenient fundamentals. The electoral map was being transformed. In the conservative think-tanks the first order of business was to prove, as often as it took, that Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programmes and the rest of the bleeding-heart ’60s guff had failed. In office, Reagan would put the last of those programmes to the sword. In their place a faith in unfettered markets as deep as any of Dylan’s messianic beliefs would sustain governments for the rest of the century and beyond. Meanwhile, the symbionts who styled themselves neo-conservatives, disillusioned Democrats prominent among them, were identifying Reagan as the candidate best able to restore American pride and end concessions to the Soviet tyranny. Such people were spoiling for a fight. Vietnam veterans were not conspicuous among them. The deep thinkers of the right did not attend wars in person.
So what if Dylan had not ‘turned his back on politics’? What if, to be precise, he had adhered to early-’60s radicalism and therefore declined to shoulder the political baggage of conservative Christianity, Levantine Armageddon and all? Even as an exercise in counter-factual fantasy history, these questions are not idle. Dylan had made his own choices at every step of the way. Sticking with the Left, old or new, he could have gone on playing the folk clubs and small halls for half a century, enduring the periodic humiliation of ‘rediscovery’ while turning out righteous secular anthems for those who still cared. Instead, Dylan in the 1980s would become the perfect echo of his age: fitfully creative, decadent, ‘famous for being famous’, flitting from style to vapid style, with a surface assurance that hid a world of doubts.
The summary is almost a travesty, but not quite. The point is that this of all artists would simply reflect the decade in which he wound up becalmed. If that was a coincidence, it counts as an odd one. Creativity would not desert Dylan entirely; far from it. Art was about to reappear, in fact, even as the dismal reception for Saved was despoiling his reputation. Henceforth, nevertheless, the art would be hard won.
*
After a summer spent on the Minnesota farm and on his new 70-foot schooner, Water Pearl, in the Windward Islands, Dylan recalled his band and returned to the Rundown space in Santa Monica. He had a new group of songs to hand. Several of them suggested that he had begun to think hard, perhaps for the first time, about the real meaning of religion. It was as though reactions to his tour and his album had thrown him back on himself. Hitherto he had responded viscerally and emotionally to the experience of being born again. He had expressed his gratitude and his relief. He had become the Christian triumphalist scorning and denouncing those who would not accept the truth. In a righteous fever, he had testified and raved. But Dylan had not paused to contemplate seriously the truths he had accepted.
A couple of his new songs approached greatness. One in particular seemed to arise from, rather than for, the faith he had accepted. It was the song of a man on the ropes, one exhausted by the struggle to recognise himself after the dislocations and upheavals of two decades. In one sense, it was classically religious art. The singer asks who he is and what he is worth; he finds his answer in Christ. But the genius of this piece, the breakthrough after the charmless, overweening certainties of Slow Train Coming and Saved, was in showing that such faith is not an infallible panacea. Saved or not, an individual could remain flawed, trivial in the scheme of things, despairing and profoundly lonely. The truth conveyed was in the idea of acceptance. For the first time since his conversion, a song had come from the kind of writing that first got the singer known as a poet. Anyone wondering how Dylan could sound so desolate while believing himself saved should meanwhile note a relevant detail. The song is in the present tense. It was written, as the listener is meant to understand, after the author was born again.
In 1985, when Christianity was supposed to be behind him, Dylan would say the song was ‘inspired’. Talking to the journalist Cameron Crowe for the booklet designed to accompany the Biograph box set, the artist would claim that writing ‘Every Grain of Sand’ ‘wasn’t really too difficult. I felt like I was just putting words down that were coming from somewhere else, and I just stuck it out.’ The Dylan who was alleged to have returned to the secular world would then turn his remarks into something that sounded very like a sermon.
Make something religious and people don’t have to deal with it, they can say it’s irrelevant. ‘Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand.’ That scares the shit out of people. They’d like to avoid that. Tell that to someone and you become their enemy. There does come a time, though, when you have to face facts and the truth is true whether you wanna believe it or not. It doesn’t need you to make it true …
‘Every Grain of Sand’ is often tracked back to William Blake. In fact, that’s a little unfair to Dylan. The Blake of the Pickering Manuscript, a believer with a unique theology – deism without the Deists, more or less – begins his paradoxical ‘Auguries of Innocence’ with a pair of images intended to contain the universal within the particular. Dylan reverses the idea. Blake’s opening, the only relevant verse, runs:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
Dylan’s song, in contrast, describes the discovery of the presence of Jesus, ‘the Master’, in every grain of sand. Blake sees his heaven contained in a single flower; Dylan perceives God ‘in every leaf that trembles’. It is a fine distinction, but essential to grasping a song in which the writer is locating himself within infinite creation. Blake is observing infinity in the palm of his hand; Dylan is placing his afflicted, penitent self amid the minutiae of existence at every level. He is no more (or less) important than any leaf or ‘every hair … numbered like every grain of sand’.
Blake has provided an image of multiplicity. Dylan’s net is cast wider. There are echoes in ‘Every Grain of Sand’ of that other Dylan, the God-driven Welsh atheist Dylan Marlais Thomas, and of his ‘Jesus poems’ above all. There are also cadences and metaphysical fragments oddly reminiscent of John Donne. There is biblical quotation: the numbered hairs are from Matthew 10:30. There are, equally, those seemingly effortless bits of borrowing and conflation that had gone missing during Slow Train Coming and Saved. Thus:
Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear
Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer
The injunction to be ‘of good cheer’ turns up time and again in the New Testament like some apostolic catchphrase. Conscience, equally, is held out repeatedly, in gospel after gospel, as the essential key to virtue. There is an allusion too, no doubt, to Matthew 4:13–20 (‘the sower soweth the Word’) and the parable of seed falling on stony and noxious ground. Quite how flowers and weeds can behave like criminals isn’t obvious, but Dylan’s poetry-reading
habits in his youth, that era when fashionable opinion held him to be first cousin to Arthur Rimbaud, might provide one explanation. He knew his way around the works of Charles Baudelaire. The jump from Les Fleurs du Mal/Flowers of Evil to the song’s ‘flowers of indulgence’ is not so great. In his youth, Dylan certainly knew and invoked François Villon’s fifteenth-century ballads. The ‘Ballade des dames du temps jadis’ is the best remembered of them all. Its refrain, ‘Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?’ has long been translated as ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ Dylan at his best doesn’t use a word like yesteryear accidentally. So Villon’s snows become weeds, those flowers of former sins reduced to spiritual waste by passing time, by wasted time.
It’s brilliantly done. It is not brilliant, however, because the writer reminds us that he reads a lot. ‘Every Grain of Sand’ is authentically human, both as writing and as an expression of faith, in a way that so many of Dylan’s ‘gospel’ songs are not. The lovely harmonica solo on the Shot of Love track is a finer testament to belief than all the merciless, browbeating evangelical verses. Nothing on Slow Train Coming or Saved approaches poetry like this song’s last verse.
I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man