by Bell, Ian
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand
One coincidence is worth observing. When Dylan made an attempt to record ‘Every Grain of Sand’ at Rundown at the end of September he asked Jennifer Warnes to sing it with him. She was at that time involved with Leonard Cohen, another friend and fellow Jew who was perplexed by Dylan’s embrace of Christianity’s alleged Messiah. What’s striking is that when ‘Every Grain of Sand’ was being written in ‘that area where Keats is’, in ‘like 12 seconds, or that’s how it felt’, Cohen was slaving, in his usual painstaking way, over the dozens of verses that would be condensed finally in 1984 to form the song ‘Hallelujah’.15 The Canadian was another who had toyed often enough with Christian imagery, most famously in the evocation of Jesus-the-sailor in ‘Suzanne’, but his act of worship in ‘Hallelujah’ was contemporaneous with Dylan’s ‘Every Grain of Sand’ and a counterpoint to it, Judaism answering to Christianity.
Cohen’s famous song is an injunction to praise in the face of all doubt, a ‘broken hallelujah’ from a man who allows only that ‘maybe’ there is a God, a man who doesn’t know the name he is supposed to have taken in vain, but who still finds a blazing light in every word no matter how the words are understood. The parallels with Dylan’s song are as striking as the differences. Dylan seemed to know it, too. When the so-called Never-Ending Tour was barely a month old in July of 1988, he would give the first of two performances on the road of ‘Hallelujah’ at the Forum de Montréal in Quebec. The experience would seem to stir something deep within him. In seventy-one concerts that year, two renditions of Cohen’s work would be answered by just two performances of ‘Every Grain of Sand’. Dylan and his friend in the tower of song understood one another.
That didn’t ease the artist’s plight in 1980. The radiant version of ‘Every Grain of Sand’ recorded with Jennifer Warnes would not appear until 1991 and the release of The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3. The album on which the song could first be heard would in the meantime turn out to be even more of a flop than Saved. Dylan was entering a period in which his great songs would fail, time and again, to save the albums for which they were written. For most of that time he would only have himself to blame. Sometimes, too often, he would refuse even to allow the greatest songs to appear on those albums. Most of the catastrophes would have nothing to do with his religious beliefs, whatever the beliefs happened to be in any given year. It is beyond question, however, that Dylan’s precipitous decline in popularity began when he was born again.
*
At the beginning of November, he took his band back to the Warfield Theater in San Francisco for another long run of concerts. Spooner Oldham had withdrawn from the troupe and Willie Smith had arrived to take care of keyboards. The platoon of backing vocalists, swollen to five members during the last of the spring concerts, had been reduced to a trio: Clydie King, Carolyn Dennis and Regina Havis. The first of these women had by then joined the long list of those who were important to Dylan for reasons that were not simply professional. There were other changes. First, this short tour, just 19 concerts, was advertised, somewhat disingenuously, as ‘A Musical Retrospective’. Second, the artist no longer felt moved to preach to his audience. Third, though plenty of the religious songs were performed, these would be the first Dylan shows since December 1978 which did not depend entirely on ‘gospel’. The shows, by no accident, were the better for it.
On the first night in San Francisco, Dylan’s third number was – lo and behold – ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. During the last show almost a fortnight later ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, complete with the voice of Roger McGuinn, and ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ were raised from the crypt. As though another bout of willed amnesia had passed, ‘Girl From the North Country’, ‘Just Like a Woman’ and ‘Señor’ were also heard. Either Dylan had accepted the fact that he could not disown his entire career, or he had given up the unequal struggle to force purely religious music on his audiences. He still took time during the final concert to attack the reviewers who had, he said, misrepresented and defamed the previous year’s Warfield shows, but he was coming to terms with reality. He might be able to extinguish all the Bob Dylans who had gone before; history and public memory would not be denied. There was also a career to be considered. He had given unadulterated evangelism his best shot, but it was no longer sustainable. His spirit was willing, but his sales figures were weak. Perhaps more significantly, on the fourth night of the Warfield run Dylan slipped in a song that he would perform on 16 occasions in the months ahead. Another kind of faith was being restored.
All right, we’re gonna try something new tonight. Don’t know how it’s gonna come off, but we’ll try it anyway. A lot of people ask me, they want to know about old songs, and new songs and stuff like that. This is a song I used to sing before I even wrote any songs. But this is a real old song, as old as I know … So this is how I guess you call one of them old folk songs I used to sing. I used to sing a lot of these things. Well, I hope it brings you back, I know it brings me back. This is ‘Mary and the Wild Moor’. I guess it’s about 200 years old.
The English broadside ballad goes back at least to the early nineteenth century and probably emigrated from the London stage to America in the 1820s. Dylan wasn’t entirely accurate in claiming that he was doing something new by singing it – he had performed the old song ‘The Water Is Wide’ as a duet with Joan Baez during some of the Rolling Thunder shows – but he was close enough. His recourse to the folk tradition would become fundamental to his practice in the years ahead. As he said in San Francisco, ‘I hope it brings you back, I know it brings me back.’ That would not happen overnight. There were tough times ahead.
*
Why did Dylan turn to fundamentalist religion so suddenly, as it seemed, and with such absolute conviction? Because he was predisposed towards superstitious faith from childhood? Because, bloody and bowed, he had worn out one Bob Dylan and stood in need of another? In this argument, two schools of wholly unsystematic thought can be identified. One says, with the support of numerous lines and verses from a host of songs, that Dylan had always inclined towards religion. It was the biggest of his open secrets and there was nothing sudden about his embrace. In this version, all that truly happened when he encountered the Vineyard people was the decision finally to reveal his deepest convictions and express them, temporarily, through a particular creed. The trigger was the addictive idea of the Messiah and what that idea seemed to explain. The argument holds, essentially, that while the experience of conversion might have been shattering, Dylan had always been ripe for faith.
The parallel view says simply that religion was the prop with which he tried to shore up his fragmenting identity. ‘Bob Dylan’ needed to be refurbished and he had tried most other things. In the summer of 1978 he had undergone a difficult, multimillion-dollar divorce and a deeply unpleasant fight over the custody of his children. Sara and his family had been at the centre of his world and suddenly, thanks to him, they were gone. Relentless hedonism, in its several guises, had proved no substitute. Art being pitiless and greedy, these traumas did his music a power of good, for a while, but Dylan was left as an aimless and profoundly vulnerable individual, so the argument goes, and easy prey for those peddling supernatural answers. It was simple for the Vineyard, offering order amidst the chaos of his life, to take advantage of his weakness.
But was that really all it took? Was he no smarter in the end than all the unhappy teenagers busy being reborn all across the western world? It sounds too simple and it does Dylan no credit. It makes him sound, for one thing, like just another unhappy sucker taken in by the latest fad. Embracing faith, he also rejected a great deal. He was not wholly passive during the process. Only he could attempt to rid himself of every previous Bob Dylan and only he could decide what to do with a born-again identity. It is clear, too, that he had thought often enough about religion. No one was spinning him a line he had not heard before. Interviewers had been asking Bob Dylan for his deepest thoughts
on God for years. One way or another, he had read a great deal of Scripture long before the Vineyard’s special-forces team were summoned. The history of his public utterances on the subject is a fascinating study in its own right.
In October 1975, long before his decision to embrace Christ, People magazine had already been informed of where the artist thought he stood. ‘I don’t care what people expect of me,’ Dylan had said. ‘Doesn’t concern me. I’m doin’ God’s work. That’s all I know.’ In September 1976, interrogated by that noted theological journal the American TV Guide, Dylan had become lyrical – had anticipated the lyrics of ‘Every Grain of Sand’, in fact – in describing his ability to detect the presence of God ‘in a daisy … in the wind and rain’. ‘I see creation just about everywhere,’ he had said. ‘The highest form of song is prayer. King David’s, Solomon’s, the wailing of a coyote, the rumble of the earth.’
He felt no obligation to be consistent in his statements, however, before or after he converted to Christianity. By March 1978, amid an interview in Brisbane, Australia, destined for Britain’s New Musical Express, Dylan had explained to Craig McGregor that he harboured ‘no dedicated religion’. He had not, he said, ‘gotten into that’. Barely ten months before his apparently whole-hearted embrace of evangelical Christianity, Dylan had added: ‘No dogma. I don’t usually do that; I usually play my guitar. I don’t know why, I’ve never gone on any of them guru trips. I’ve never felt that lost.’
By the time 1979 was almost at an end, nevertheless, the selfsame artist had been able to tell the Tucson radio station KMEX that he had been lost and found. Moreover, he had said: ‘I don’t sing any song which hasn’t been given to me by the Lord to sing.’ In May of 1980, Dylan had explained the theocratic world to a journalist from New Zealand’s The Star, saying, ‘God will stay with America as long as America stays with God.’ To the same interviewer the artist had granted the knowledge that ‘There’s a difference between knowing who Christ is and being a disciple of Christ and recognising Christ as a personality and being of God. I’m more aware of that than anything and it dictates my very being.’ As his concert tour reached Syracuse, New York, in that same month, the artist had preached to his audience:
I know a lot of you never heard of Jesus before. I know I hadn’t up till a couple of years ago. Jesus tapped me on the shoulder, said: ‘Bob, why are you resisting me?’ I said, ‘I’m not resisting you!’ He said, ‘You gonna follow me?’ I said, ‘Well, I never thought about this before!’ He said, ‘When you’re not following me, you’re resisting me.’ John the Baptist baptised with water; Jesus baptises with fire. Fire and the Holy Spirit. Oh, so yes: there’s been a change in me. I wonder what it is?
In the middle of November 1980, amid the concerts in San Francisco, the Los Angeles Times was being given the hitherto private explanation for what had become a public truth:
I truly had a born-again experience, if you want to call it that. It’s an over-used term, but it’s something that people can relate to. It happened in 1978. I always knew there was a God or a creator of the universe and a creator of the mountains and the sea and all that kind of thing, but I wasn’t conscious of Jesus and what that had to do with the supreme creator.16
In some narratives, the performances of songs such as ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ during the Musical Retrospective tour and the decision to allow a few non-religious songs to appear on the follow-up to Saved is taken as evidence that by early 1981 the evangelising fever had begun to break. Reduced to the barest essentials, the story goes that the born-again Dylan would begin steadily to disappear within a couple of years. By the time his album Infidels appeared in October 1983 it would be presumed that he had returned to secular music and to a secular, albeit ‘culturally Jewish’, existence. The description doesn’t quite fit the facts. Dylan would be photographed praying at Jerusalem’s Western Wall in the summer of 1983, for example, dressed in tallith (prayer shawl) and tefillin (phylacteries) on the occasion of a son’s bar mitzvah. That would not be the behaviour of a Christian, obviously enough. Nor would it resemble the behaviour of a man who had turned his back on organised religion or on the Abrahamic God.
The evidence for a return to old secular ways would be at best circumstantial, based partly on altered habits of worship, partly on the fact that his songs would cease to contain – or so it would be said – overtly biblical themes, and partly on the fact that Dylan would become less eager than before to talk theology in interviews. Yet even if you don’t buy the story of a previous visit to the Western Wall as it is told in Dylan’s book Chronicles – a trick, in his telling, to throw off the press by posing as a Zionist – prayers to mark a son’s coming of age are hardly the mark of a suddenly irreligious man. The conclusions that would be reached in the early 1980s, still prevalent, remain flimsy. Too often they would be achieved by misreading or ignoring the contents of too many of the later songs. Wishful thinking would be involved.
As the years passed, Dylan would take pains, playful or resentful, to avoid being pinned down. The experience of identifying himself publicly and completely with a creed during his association with the Vineyard left its mark. Belief is, in any case, by definition, a private matter. Why should he be picked out? Nevertheless, in the autumn of 1993 the Reuters news agency would be told that ‘A person without faith is like a walking corpse’. Soon afterwards Dylan would begin to say, in apparent contrast, that he placed his only real faith in music. In September 1997, he would declare to the New York Times: ‘I believe in a God of time and space, but if people ask me about that, my impulse is to point them back towards those songs. I believe in Hank Williams singing “I Saw the Light”. I’ve seen the light, too.’
In the selfsame round of promotional interviews, David Gates of Newsweek would be granted ‘the flat-out truth’. Dylan would say: ‘I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like “Let Me Rest On a Peaceful Mountain” or “I Saw the Light” – that’s my religion. I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity.’ Nevertheless, during a press conference in Rome in 2001 he would be asked if he looked to religion for comfort. Dylan’s answer: ‘I try. Who would I be if I didn’t try?’ Eleven years later he would talk about an experience he would choose to call transfiguration and claim that every last word was true. And he would still be nominating the Book of Revelation as one of the most important texts in his life.
The gulf in understanding between those who fail to believe and those who claim to have been born again is impossible to bridge. You cannot argue rationally with revealed truth, or with someone who claims that a rowdy Jesus turned up in his hotel room. You can run the pop-science tests of plausibility, wonder about Dylan’s susceptibility to weak magnetic fields, remember that he had disordered his senses more than once in the usual Rimbaldien style, and then bear in mind that religious experience is sometimes associated with profound depression. In the end, it’s all guesswork. William Blake said that as a child he saw angels hanging from the trees, that as an adult he talked to ‘friends in Eternity’. Most other people said – for what else could they say? – that he was mad. Yet Dylan chose to believe things that did not seem crazy to millions of his fellow Americans, or to millions of fellow believers around the world. All you can offer as an opinion is that most of his religious writing was not his best writing. Doubt mattered to his art.
What can be said with certainty is that Dylan’s embrace of evangelical Christianity was no momentary aberration. Irrational as he often sounded in this period, he was perfectly serious, perfectly attuned to his impulses and feelings. After all, he almost threw away a career for the sake of religion. The need for belief can and should be seen, moreover, as part of a pattern in his life and art, as the necessary polar opposite to the spark of doubt. What truly matters where religion and Bob Dylan are concerned is that the search for faith has endured through each and
every one of his fragile, transitory identities. It might be the biggest fact of them all.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jokerman
IN 1974, THE YEAR OF RICHARD NIXON’S RESIGNATION, ONLY ONE American in every five was prepared to be recognised as a Republican.1 By January of 1981, Ronald Reagan was secure in the White House, sustained by the rhetoric of neo-conservatism and fomenting what his admirers would call a revolution. The reversal of fortune for liberalism was, as it remains, startling. To all outward appearances the era in which Dylan had grown to maturity and flourished as an artist was eradicated. All the brave, impetuous rhetoric of the counter-culture had come to nothing. To watch Reagan exercise his folksy magic on TV was to imagine that the ’60s had never happened. Sometimes it seemed that the memory of the decade was only being kept alive by conservatives who blamed it for all of society’s woes. Reagan was an adept teller of that tale.
While governor of California this president had sent in the National Guard to suppress Berkeley’s protesting students in 1969. Justifying himself, he had later made a famous statement: ‘If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.’ That was not the crafted persona of the former movie star – kindly, smiling, slow to anger but ever righteous in defence of liberty – who took the oath of office on the 20th day of 1981. But who could gainsay Reagan? Though the turnout had fallen short of 53 per cent, he had wiped the floor with Jimmy Carter in the November general election, taking 44 states and 50.8 per cent of the popular vote against the Democratic leader’s 41 per cent. Whatever Dylan had meant when he sang of times changing, it surely wasn’t the 69-year-old Reagan he had in mind.
Nevertheless, middle America had spoken, loud and clear, while the artist was getting ready to return to the Warfield in November 1980. Among other things, those fabled average Americans had lost patience with the ’60s, their perceived excesses and their presumed legacy. That part of the nation was heeding the call, as the religious revival had made plain, of patriotism and God. At around the time of the presidential election ‘after more than a century of rising divorce rates in the United States, the rates abruptly stopped going up’.2 As another study recalls: ‘Beginning roughly in the first year of the decade of the 1980s, public tolerance of illegal drug use declined, belief that the use of illegal drugs is harmful increased, belief that use, possession and sale of the currently illegal drugs should be decriminalised or legalised declined, and the use of these illegal drugs declined.’3 The General Social Survey found no falling off in the ‘permissive disposition toward premarital sex’, but the phrase ‘permissive society’ was becoming a term of abuse. Second-wave feminism was in difficulties and support for gay marriage struggled to reach double figures in the polls that bothered to enquire after opinions. Opposition to Roe v. Wade was growing. Progressive hopes had disappeared with Carter’s campaign.