by Bell, Ian
There is no way to prove that the artist would have held different opinions in the ’60s and ’70s, but plenty of evidence to suggest that gun-happy anti-abortionists had never been exactly his kind of people. Suze Rotolo, his first serious lover in Greenwich Village, seems to have endured a termination towards the end of their relationship, an event that had upset him greatly, but Dylan had made no attempt to prevent the procedure. His 1963 song ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’, the one telling of ‘seven people dead / On a South Dakota farm’ thanks to a shotgun wielded by a father driven to kill his family and himself by hellish poverty, had meanwhile evinced no obvious sympathy for ‘people who need to be protected’ by firearms in the home. Dylan’s ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’, composed after the assassination of the civil-rights worker Medgar Evers in Mississippi, could have been written to promote gun control. The author might have decided he was blind to political differences, but by 1981 it was a selective blindness.
Talking to Herman, he had complained about ‘a whole world full of sickness’, a sickness he had blamed on film, TV, the print media and his own music industry. Each, he had said, ‘caters to people’s sickness’. Dylan had been talking, as was by then his habit, about ailments of the moral and spiritual kind and how they affected behaviour: about sin, in short. He had not offered specific examples. If the whole world was sick because it lacked faith and the blessings of God’s truth, there was no need to give details.
On 30 March in Washington, Reagan had been shot by a character called John Hinckley with a revolver bought in a Dallas pawnshop. Three others had been wounded that day, including the presidential press secretary James Brady, who had been left paralysed by his injuries. Such was the context for a disc jockey’s questions about gun control and the context, equally, for Dylan’s answers. He could remember the 1963 Kennedy killing clearly enough. He might even have remembered the poetry he had tried to compose in the aftermath of the Dallas murder, writing of Jackie Kennedy crawling on all fours to escape the stricken presidential limousine, of the endless news bulletins, of how ‘I am sick t my soul an my stomach’. By 1981, Dylan could say only that ‘I don’t think gun control is making any difference at all’. In one sense, he made an elementary point: in that year firearms were owned by around 49 per cent of households.10 But the belief that guns were intrinsic to the American way of life was part and parcel of the new conservatism – ‘sweeping across the world’, as Herman put it – that Dylan had said he could not even detect. Instead, he had argued: ‘Guns have been a great part of America’s past. So, there’s nothing you can do about it. The gun is just something which America has got, lives with.’
When his interviewer had mentioned that ‘the abortion question is becoming one of the major political controversies at home’, Dylan had replied that the issue was ‘just a diversion’, that it distracted people from ‘the bigger things’. When Herman had said that this all sounded a little ‘conspiratorial’, the artist had agreed. Then he had expressed surprise because Herman doubted that the fearsome arguments boiling up everywhere in America over reproductive rights were ‘calculated’.
It had been a clever, not to say chilling, attempt to give an opinion while dismissing the entire issue of human rights and wrongs as irrelevant to God’s ‘bigger things’. In fact, while Dylan was trying to extricate himself from the risk of controversy, abortion was dividing communities across his country. A clinic was about to open in Fargo, North Dakota, for example, amid picket lines and bomb scares. Dylan had once known the small city pretty well. It was just across the state line from Minnesota and only 200 miles from Hibbing, his home town. In Fargo, as a classic study would describe, something close to civic warfare would break out in the autumn of 1981 between those bitterly opposed to ‘the intrusion of secularism, narcissism, and materialism’ and those confronting ‘the forces of narrow-minded intolerance who would deny women access to a choice that they see as fundamental to women’s freedom’.11 Dylan could construct his exotic conspiracy theories, but at a time when ‘theocons’ were working hard for the recriminalisation of abortion he would pick his side. Thus: ‘I personally don’t believe in it.’
Faith had changed him in many more ways than one. There was nothing new about his habit of confounding expectations. It could even be argued that the fault lay with all the fans and critics who had long taken too much for granted and projected too many of their own precious assumptions across the opaque screen of his personality and his songs. Abortion and gun control were real, contemporary issues, however, and in the end there was nothing ambiguous about the opinions the artist was prepared to articulate.
*
For a while, nevertheless, silence seemed to descend upon him. In 1982, not for the first time, he made himself scarce. Dylan created no albums on his own behalf that year, contenting himself in June with the vague idea of recording a set of duets with Clydie King, his heart’s companion of the moment, before deciding that Columbia was not an outfit equipped to deal sympathetically with the results. (The company didn’t much care for the project, in other words.) In January, he played bass, for whatever reason, on an Allen Ginsberg session. In March, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In June, just after the King session, he turned up for a brief performance with Joan Baez at a ‘Peace Sunday’ anti-nuclear rally in Pasadena without offering public comment for or against the cause. Beyond that, there was nothing much to report. In any usual sense, Dylan stopped working. To all appearances, in fact, he even stopped writing. Sailing in the Caribbean on Water Pearl that summer he might just have come up with the beginnings of a song, but the world would not hear the marvellous thing called ‘Jokerman’ until November 1983.
Dylan paused, it seems, to contemplate a few things. One was religion. Based on no real evidence other than two failed albums in a row, there was media speculation that he must, surely, have begun to reconsider his position as an evangelical Christian. In its gossip column for the issue of 15 March 1982, New York magazine ran with a slight story from an unnamed ‘source’ claiming that Dylan would not be presenting the National Music Publishers Gospel Song of the Year during the following week, either because he wouldn’t ‘have time to do it’, or because the ‘evidence is that is over’. The ‘interpretation’ offered by this anonymous spy in the camp was that ‘the New Testament and Jesus were a message he thought he got, but that he was still testing’. Nevertheless, if the New York Daily News got its dates straight in June 1986 with the claim that Dylan had by then been studying among the Chabad-Lubavitch community for four years, the 1982 rumours were part-right guesses.
The Vineyard folk could hardly argue. Such was the play they had made of their infinite respect for Judaism and their claim that Jewish and Christian traditions could be reconciled like strayed siblings, the artist’s study of the Torah was not a habit to which they could object, even if – a proposition always to be doubted – Dylan had been prepared to listen. Paul Emond, one of the Vineyard first responders sent to minister to the artist early in 1979, put the best complexion possible on the state of spiritual play as far as the evangelicals were concerned when he was quoted in a 1984 Christianity Today article.12 Emond said:
I don’t think he ever left his Jewish roots. I think he was one of those fortunate ones who realised that Judaism and Christianity can work very well together, because Christ is just Yeshua ha’Meshiah (Jesus the Messiah). And so he doesn’t have any problems about putting on a yarmulke and going to a bar mitzvah, because he can respect that. And he recognises that maybe those people themselves will recognise who Yeshua ha’Meshiah is one of these days.
As a statement, Emond’s apparently definitive comment was as carefully worded as a press release. Mere ‘Jewish roots’ – as though Dylan could have possessed any other kind of roots – were preferred to ancestral Jewish faith. The artist was meanwhile ‘one of those fortunate ones’, a Jew who realised he had been in error, rather than a Jew who had taken a detour via Christianity. In this descript
ion, Dylan only donned traditional dress and attended ceremonies to indulge those he respected, not because he gave credence to what was going on during the rituals.
Warming to his theme, Emond ceased to be entirely generous to everyone with ‘Jewish roots’. Denying that Dylan had any desire to return to Judaism, the pastor maintained that meetings with Chabad-Lubavitch had taken place only at the movement’s request. In this telling, the Vineyard’s special relationship with Jews seemed a little less warm than the church liked to claim. Emond said: ‘They can’t take the fact that he was able to come to the discovery of his messiah as being Jesus. Jews always look at their own people as traitors when they come to that kind of faith … When one of their important figures is “led astray”, they’re going to do everything they can to get him back again.’
There was some truth in that. It is also true to say that in Dylan’s shoes Emond would not have hesitated to ‘really capitalise’ on his reputation for the church’s sake, at least according to what Christianity Today was told. So how did the Vineyard feel about the possibility that their prize convert was slipping away? Chabad had indeed put in a lot of work to win Dylan back for Judaism. In a neat, near-comical contrast with Emond, Rabbi Kasriel Kastel of the Brooklyn Lubavitch centre denied that the artist had ever forsaken his Jewish faith. ‘As far as we’re concerned,’ Kastel said, ‘he was a confused Jew. We feel he’s coming back.’ The rabbi explained matters by adding that Dylan had been ‘going in and out of a lot of things, trying to find himself’. To that end, the Hasidic sect had ‘just been making ourselves available’. No pressure, of course.
Dylan had never said that in accepting the Christian Messiah he had ceased to be a Jew. It’s a small detail, but easily forgotten. First, he knew that Judaism was not something he could renounce in any manner recognisable to other Jews. Second, his embrace of Christ had been based, almost from the start, on the difficult idea of messianic Judaism. The balance of his allegiances might have shifted, but Dylan remained a Jew whose understanding of faith depended, at least in part, on Christianity, especially on the Book of Revelation, that Christian text with its roots in Jewish apocalyptic literature. He would spend a lot of time with members of the Chabad movement in the years ahead, and join his former wife Sara in Los Angeles in March 1982 on the occasion of their son Samuel becoming a bar mitzvah, but Dylan would acknowledge no contradiction.13 In the early ’80s he would drift away from the Vineyard, yet cling to aspects of Christianity and fail to declare himself – perhaps because he believed there was no need for a declaration – as Jewish. What’s most striking is the single consistent feature in all of Dylan’s dealings with religion. At no point has he felt bound to give absolute allegiance to a single creed, church or sect. These too are the things of man, peripheral to faith and the search for meaning. Nevertheless, if his interest in Judaism was revived at the start of 1982 it meant that unadulterated ‘gospel’ music was behind him.
That moment had passed, in any case. You can take the cynical view and judge that he had made a hard-headed commercial decision. Purely evangelical music was losing Dylan audiences, sales and a lot of critical respect. Whether he was being persecuted for his beliefs is open to doubt, despite all his complaints, but he was certainly being mocked. On this accounting, given the choice between Christian preaching and a career, he chose the career.
A more generous judgement might be that Dylan had recognised and begun to address a real artistic problem. The fundamental issues of faith were few in number. He had stated them repeatedly in three – or two and a half – albums. A broader and deeper kind of discourse needed a different kind of songwriting. There is no doubt that he was under pressure to relent, not least from his record company, but he had his own thoughts on the matter. For all that, God would never be far, ever after, from Dylan’s words and music.
*
In 19 days and nights in 1983, between 11 April and 17 May, he made an album that was both the best and the most troubling thing he had done since Street-Legal. Infidels would involve one of the finest studio bands he had worked with in many a year. Thanks to Mark Knopfler, it would be better produced, for whatever the fact is worth, than a great many of his records. There would be only a couple of real duds among its eight songs and only a modest amount of controversy over what the artist had to say in those songs. The album would seem, for a while at least, to have restored Dylan’s critical and commercial fortunes and to have earned its success. There would be nothing terribly wrong with what was offered on Infidels. The problem would lie with what was withheld.
Once you know what this piece of work could have been and should have been, the album becomes maddening. When you begin to consider the choices made and the reasons why those choices were made, the puzzle called Bob Dylan grows ever deeper. If you pause to attend to the works absent from the finished product, the temptation to drop the artist a stiff note of protest, even 30 years too late, grows strong. If ever a Dylan album cried out for the restoration and refurbishment services of the people involved in his archival Bootleg Series, it is Infidels. The self-doubt evident on Shot of Love here becomes pathological.
With Infidels a pattern was established that would influence critical reactions to the artist’s work through all the decades to come. Thanks to countless bootleg releases, legal and otherwise, two Dylans would seem to co-exist, one actual and one potential, one the author of the albums as they were set before the public, the other an artist reconstructed from the counterfactual history of what might have been. When countless concert recordings began to be thrown into the mix, dozens of them preferable to the albums sanctioned by Dylan, arguments over his reputation and worth would grow ever more tortuous. Certain fans and students would enjoy the never-ending archaeological effort for its own sake. For some, the collecting of illicit tapes and the ensuing Jesuitical debates over this or that outtake would become a consuming hobby, even a career. To have knowledge denied to the common herd was part of the fun, it seems. For others of us, it would all become just a bit tedious. Why couldn’t Dylan stop screwing around with his work? The fact would remain, nevertheless: without a knowledge of certain bootlegs – not, God help us, all of them – an understanding of the art and the artist would become hard to achieve. That truth would be as relevant to the worst of his albums, ironically enough, as it would be to the best. Infidels was far from the worst, but it could have been a lot better.
No such thoughts arose when the vinyl disc appeared at the start of November 1983, of course. Only a few, led by Knopfler, knew what Dylan had done and what he had refused to do. To anyone who lacked that insight it was simply the best album he had released in at least five years. Some still contend that Infidels is superior to anything he had managed since 1976’s Desire. When the album appeared a couple of reviewers, befuddled by cask-strength hyperbole, called it his best since – a pair of words that surely deserve to become a compound adjective – Blood on the Tracks. The man in the vinyl mine at Rolling Stone got his mention of the 1975 masterpiece into his first sentence, then wrote of Dylan’s ‘stunning recovery of the lyric and melodic powers that seemed to have all but deserted him’.14 Not everyone agreed. Some reviewers continued to be dismissive, less of the music or the production than of certain sentiments expressed, but the American record-buying public was more forgiving than it had been towards any Dylan release since Street-Legal. That was fair. All in all, Infidels is not a bad piece of work.
There was a degree of sheer relief evident in the album’s reception. Many critics gave it the benefit of all sorts of doubts simply because at first it seemed – an important word – that Dylan had been cured at last of his religious delirium. One song, ‘Neighborhood Bully’, struck a few listeners as an alarmingly right-wing piece of Zionist rhetoric, but most put aside their concerns. Another track, ‘Union Sundown’, sounded a little strident in its analysis of America’s labour relations and economic misfortunes, but at least the writer was taking an interest in the world around him. There wer
e odd, even eccentric touches. Did Dylan truly believe that ‘man has invented his doom’ just by landing on the moon? Could it have been him or a character in a song declaring, ‘a woman like you should be at home / That’s where you belong / Taking care of somebody nice’?15 Neither question was treated as a big deal. Even when a bit of sustained attention proved that the artist had not in any sense left religion behind, Infidels was exempted from scorn.
Perhaps it had something to do with the set’s teasing title. Perhaps it was because Dylan was no longer brandishing a religious affiliation like an all-areas backstage pass. Perhaps he had been right all along about prejudice and born-again belief. For whatever reason, the album was granted an acceptance that had not been available to its immediate predecessors. Even when it was made explicitly obvious that the artist was still gripped by his Antichrist fixation – ‘sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace’ – Infidels was deemed ‘secular’.
‘Jokerman’, the opening track, helped matters somewhat. This was, unambiguously, one of Dylan’s great songs, recognised as such from the moment the album was released. It was also one of those great Dylan songs that did not yield its meaning instantly, if at all. Most who liked it didn’t quite know what the hell (and so forth) it was supposed to be about specifically, but that didn’t matter. The evangelical Dylan had forgotten the art of writing in this manner, in this meshing of melody and images to create something that seemed to make a sense of its own even when the sense could not be defined. He did not perform the trick to perfection with each of the Infidels songs, but in ‘Jokerman’ and in a few other places hope was restored.
Dylan, conscious of his deficiencies as a technician, had considered a number of people for co-production duties before inviting Knopfler to return to the combat zone. A couple of the big names who would be mentioned as rival contenders for the honour still boggle minds. Asking what Frank Zappa or David Bowie would have done with or to the artist’s work is like asking what might happen if the laws of physics could be suspended. Knopfler, clearly the best candidate, recommended his own keyboard player, Alan Clark, and the sound engineer Neil Dorfsman. The latter had handled the recording of Bruce Springsteen’s The River and the 1982 Dire Straits album Love Over Gold. Both of those vastly successful collections had been recorded at the Power Station studio on West 53rd Street in New York; Dylan followed suit. If the former ConEdison plant and its miraculous acoustic properties had generated millions of sales for Knopfler and the usurper Springsteen, the artist wanted all the benefits they had enjoyed.