Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  Dylan had entered his Christian phase in 1979, when he experienced what he called a profound spiritual awakening in Jesus Christ with the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in California. His marriage with Sara had finally ended in divorce two years earlier, although a nasty legal fight over custody of their children continued. One of Dylan’s girlfriends, the black actress Mary Alice Artes, was drawn to the New Age evangelical sect, and having rededicated herself to the Lord, she arranged for a pair of Vineyard pastors to pay Dylan a visit at his home in Malibu. (Earlier, the former Rolling Thunder Revue band members T Bone Burnett, Steven Soles, and David Mansfield had also entered the Vineyard’s orbit.) Dylan told the pastors that, yes, he wanted Christ in his life. He privately received the Christian Messiah in his heart at some point over the next few days.

  Dylan’s conversion hardly marked his first adult contact with religion or religious themes. Some of his earlier songs about justice and morality evinced clear and sometimes strong biblical influence. “When the Ship Comes In,” although obviously inspired by “Pirate Jenny,” also contained unmistakable scriptural elements of apocalypse, whether borrowed from the Bible or folk-song prosody. So did “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” and, in a very different way, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Some of the songs on John Wesley Harding sounded like a fresh take on Woody Guthrie’s ballads; others (especially “As I Went Out One Morning”) had overtones of William Blake; but still others—“All Along the Watchtower,” “The Wicked Messenger,” “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” (Dylan’s revision of “Joe Hill”), and even the riddle “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest”—were reworkings of scriptural parable, in style and substance. The religious sentiments in songs such as “Oh, Sister” from Desire were surprising only because they suggested that Dylan might be taking religious injunction, or the spirit of injunction, more seriously than anyone had thought.

  Dylan’s turn to Christ after 1979 at once reinforced his religious seeking and style and transformed it utterly. The Vineyard fellowship, like every evangelical Christian sect, emphasized universal access to redemption in Christ from original sin through intense prayer leading to spiritual rebirth. Like other evangelicals, Vineyard Christians fortified their discipleship with concentrated Bible study, then devoted themselves to spreading the Gospel and winning new converts to the Lord. But the Vineyard fellowship also had its particularities, above all an attachment to the premillennial view that Christ’s second coming was imminent. After the battle of Armageddon, which was about to start, the wicked would be damned, the godly saved, and a thousand-year reign of peace would commence.

  In Dylan’s case, the Vineyard’s premillennialism came heavily inflected by the best-selling book by the Christian Zionist and former Vineyard devotee Hal Lindsey (The Late Great Planet Earth, published in 1970). The fellowship had a joyous side, expressed chiefly in musical performances in church services. But it made no room for the do-gooder reformism associated with most postmillennial sects and denominations, which held that Christ would return only after the redeemed had created a heavenly millennium on earth. Taking as their essential biblical scripture the New Testament book of Revelation (which many of them connected to contemporary political and cultural events, as decoded by Hal Lindsey), the New Age premillennialists believed that doomsday truly was impending, that Christ was almost certainly among us now, and that His final judgment would be upon the world before we knew it.

  The apocalyptic themes in Dylan’s early songs had appeared chiefly as metaphors of social redemption, depicting the revolutionary moment when the oppressors would be undone and the oppressed would take their place.* Now the theme appeared as foretold by the eschatological prophets of the Old Testament, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and as described by Saint John of Patmos in Revelation—earth’s ruin in the great tribulation, which would bring Satan’s destruction and engulf unbelievers in eternal fire, while the paradise of the New Jerusalem opened to the Christ’s saints and servants. Faith was the only way to redemption; neither mere goodness, nor wretchedness, nor unearned suffering saved any souls. And there was nothing metaphorical about it. “I told you ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ ’ and they did,” Dylan preached to a concert audience in 1979, in one of what became known as his gospel raps.2 “I said the answer was ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ and it was. I’m telling you now Jesus is coming back, and He is! And there is no other way of salvation … There’s only one way to believe, there’s only one way—the Truth and the Life.”

  These were frightening things to hear at first, and they even frightened Dylan, not least in the lyrics to “When He Returns,” the final song on the first of his three Christian albums, Slow Train Coming: “Truth is an arrow and the gate is narrow that it passes through / He unleashed His power at an unknown hour that no one knew.” It was no wonder that many of Dylan’s fans, having caught up long ago with his emergence as a rock and roller, felt betrayed all over again. Not only had a secular Jew committed the ultimate apostasy; a poet of quicksilver ambiguity was now expounding absolute doctrine that came wholly received from others. The author of “My Back Pages,” who sang of becoming his own enemy “in the instant that I preach,” had become a preacher. All of Dylan’s old questions—“How many years can a mountain exist?” “Should I leave them by your gate?” “How does it feel?”—now had simple answers, and every answer was the same. The music did flash, sometimes, and the songs sounded much better in concert than they did on record; in fact, onstage, they were overpowering, as the bootleg recordings of the shows attest. But with a few outstanding exceptions, Dylan’s songs came to have two predictable themes: warning the unrepentant of imminent apocalypse and the Second Coming; and affirming his personal redemption and gratitude to the Lord. By 1981, the sheer repetitiveness of his piety had drained away the sense of dread.

  The Third Gospel Tour: Bob Dylan, Jim Keltner (drums), Tim Drummond (bass), Regina Havis, Mary Elizabeth Bridges, and Mona Lisa Young, Massey Hall, Toronto, April 1980. (photo credit 6.3)

  There were, though, those exceptions. On Slow Train Coming, “Gotta Serve Somebody” attacked the sins of envy and pride and blasted through dozens of pasteboard masks, including Dylan’s own. “Do Right to Me Baby (Do unto Others)” was an interesting revision, lyrically and musically, of sentiments about sincerity in early Dylan songs such as “All I Really Want to Do,” but now rendered in light of the book of Luke 6:31. The title track of the uneven but badly underrated Shot of Love opened with a two-note guitar burst followed by a three-part a cappella gospel line lightly augmented by studio reverb, and then it slipped into glorious rock and roll about suffering and redemptive love. Two songs recorded for Shot of Love but omitted from the original release blended presentiment of doomsday with confusion about love affairs gone bad. The first, “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar”—inserted on the LP’s second pressing and then the compact disc version, after it received heavy airplay on independent radio stations as the B side of the 45 made of “Heart of Mine”—was another rocker, its sound recalling that of Highway 61 Revisited. The other, “Caribbean Wind,” composed while Dylan was sailing through the islands, described the destructive tangle of desire and liberty as well as anything he had written since Blood on the Tracks.

  Above all, there was “Every Grain of Sand,” a beautifully wrought composition, tenderly performed as the final track on Shot of Love, a summary of Dylan’s search for redemption. With no desire “to look back on any mistake,” the singer still beheld the events that had caused ruin—“the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear.” Yet the singer also saw the hand of the Master in every trembling leaf and had come to understand the power and necessity of faith—faith not in fame, influence, a woman’s love, or anything other than God. At one level, the song and its images came directly from passages in Matthew and Luke where Jesus speaks of the salvation of the faithful—but its wording, as well as its odd, steady, seven-beat meter lines, also echoed certain of William Blake’
s poems, including “Auguries of Innocence.” In a compact, sharply crafted, unbombastic song, graced, on the record, with a moving harmonica solo, Dylan described a gentle vision of heavenly order and earthly responsibility that he had wrenched out of the chaos.

  By the time he had completed Shot of Love in 1981, Dylan’s writing had begun to turn again, becoming much less preachy than on the preceding two albums. He had hardly abandoned his apocalyptic faith: the thunder of the coming doom is there in “Caribbean Wind” and “Groom,” and in later interviews he would affirm his belief in the literal truth of Revelation. Yet clearly something else was growing. There were reports that he had turned his back on Christianity, returned to Judaism, and even taken up studies with the Hasidim Lubavitch, some of which was true: Dylan’s evolving spirituality was proving broad enough to embrace the Torah and the New Testament. More important, he had assimilated spirituality to imagination, using faith, and the testing of faith, as a frame or template but no longer as the chief subject of his art. Shot of Love included an endearing, completely secular song with a lovely melody (“Lenny Bruce”), driven by Dylan in fine voice and playing a clutching, churchy piano, and it included a booming sacred song (“Property of Jesus”) with a put-down, “how dare you?” verve more reminiscent of “Positively 4th Street” than of anything on Saved. Once again, Dylan was moving on.

  Still, Dylan’s Christian phase—his latest explosive confrontation with himself as well as his listeners—had deeply affected his art, and in ways that reached above and beyond the lyrics and melodies. By choosing to record the first two Christian albums with the legendary soul music producer Jerry Wexler, and at Wexler’s favored Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, Dylan returned to the sounds and surroundings of the South as he had not since Nashville Skyline—and this time, he journeyed to the Deep South, the South of black gospel and rhythm and blues. (Shot of Love was recorded mainly at Clover Recorders in Los Angeles, but the lead track was coproduced by Little Richard’s former producer, Bumps Blackwell.) Dylan’s links to black spirituals and gospel—evident in his early recording of “Gospel Plow” and his transformation of “No More Auction Block” into “Blowin’ in the Wind”—went back far, at least as far as Odetta, and then the Freedom Singers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and then, maybe most of all, to the Staple Singers, the first African-American group to record Dylan’s songs. (The group’s lead singer, Mavis Staples, who, on her own testimony, had a long and intense romantic involvement with Dylan, had been a continuing influence, with a voice, Dylan once remarked, that “just made my hair stand up.”)3* Now those links were amplified and obvious to everyone, especially on songs like “Saved” and “When You Gonna Wake Up?”

  The Saved sessions with Mona Lisa Young, Regina Havis, Bob Dylan, Clydie King, and Terry Young at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, Sheffield, Alabama, 1980. (photo credit 6.4)

  The gospel period also led Dylan to revamp completely his stage show, featuring a revolving cast of black female singers who would open the concert and then provide backup for a set list that, from the autumn of 1979 until the autumn of 1980, consisted entirely of Christian songs. (Dylan would become romantically linked with at least two of the singers, Helena Springs and Clydie King, and would eventually marry a third, Carolyn Dennis, who bore him a daughter, Desiree, in 1986.) As performance, the gospel concerts were as defiantly provocative as the raucous second-half rock shows of late 1965 and early 1966, when frenzied disgust caused one British fan in Manchester to scream “Judas”—odd premonition!—at Dylan from the audience. The format was as unconventional for a mainline rock concert in 1979 and 1980 as the Rolling Thunder Revue had been in 1975. Yet the gospel concerts, like the revue, were very much in the American grain—not a traveling medicine show, but another kind of spectacle beneath the big top. Dylan reinvented the southern tent-show revival, starring himself as the singer and hellfire preacher.

  During the quiet, concertless year that followed the end of the Shot of Love promotion tour late in 1981, Dylan recorded some duets with Clydie King at the Rundown Studios that went unreleased because, according to Dylan, they didn’t “fall into any category that the record company knows how to deal with.”4 By the end of 1982, Dylan was asking various musical notables, ranging from Frank Zappa to Ric Ocasek, about possibly producing his next record. (Dylan himself, along with Mark Knopfler, ended up doing the job.) The changes were now dramatic: the gospel backup singers were gone, and Dylan’s thinking had turned to such issues as economic globalization as well as to the modern state of Israel. Dylan told an interviewer he had originally wanted to call the new album Surviving in a Ruthless World, but he eventually named it, with his old ambiguity, Infidels. Yet there would also be undeniable continuities that connected the gospel records to the new one. Knopfler, who had performed on Slow Train Coming, would appear once again. Biblical allusions still filled Dylan’s head. Although the lyrics were much more concerned with exposing false prophecy than with chastising nonbelievers, the Bible and Satan were very much there, and a religious feeling suffused the songs. Yet the very best song of all, one that marked a leap in Dylan’s American art, would, strangely, not appear on the album—the song he had carried with him into the very first Infidels recording session, named after the dead blues singer Willie McTell.

  McTell was in his late thirties, and had not recorded a song for four years, when John and Ruby Lomax found him at the Pig ’n’ Whistle. Dating back to 1927, though, he had made more than twenty 78 rpm records that were released commercially either under his own name or under various pseudonyms, including Blind Sammie and Georgia Bill. He had also played backup guitar on sessions with the husband-and-wife vaudeville duo Alfoncy and Bethenea Harris and the vocalist Mary Willis, and he had recorded four 78s (three of which were released) with his wife, Kate, backed by his Atlanta guitarist friend Curley Weaver. Although McTell never achieved a major hit in the race-record market, his recordings usually enjoyed respectable sales, which allowed him to command an impressive fee of a hundred dollars per recorded side at the height of the Great Depression in the mid-1930s—nearly eight times the average weekly wage for a black workingman in Atlanta. He had a special knack for persuading different recording companies to sign him up, which led to four days of sessions in New York for the Vocalion label in 1933 and two days recording in Chicago for Decca in 1935.* He was also highly resourceful at booking his own appearances around the South—where he performed in every sort of venue, from vaudeville halls to medicine show tents, as well as for private parties and dances—and then picked up extra money playing in the bus stations as he rode from town to town. All of this recording and touring merely supplemented his chief source of income, which came from his regular stands at hotels and eateries in his home base of Atlanta.

  Atlanta’s popular black music, from the 1920s through the 1940s, should not be confused with the heavy and sometimes blistering styles of the Mississippi Delta and Chicago that have become the best-known versions of the blues. By the mid-1920s, a new generation of musicians dominated the Atlanta scene, playing idiosyncratic variants of the gleaming, bouncier style common to the southeastern seaboard and Piedmont regions. They included Curley Weaver and two of Weaver’s friends, the brothers Robert and Charley Hicks from nearby Walton County. Around 1918, the trio, all of them still in their teens, gained a good deal of attention at fish fries and country balls playing bottleneck-slide style on open-tuned guitars and featuring rapid bass runs fretted with the thumb—thereby concocting a sound much larger than that of most country combos. They duly relocated to Atlanta in search of regular music work; Bob Hicks switched to playing a twelve-string guitar, which created a still larger sound; and in 1927, after a talent scout spotted him performing at Tidwell’s Barbecue in the northern Atlanta suburb of Buckhead, Hicks signed a recording contract with Columbia Records.

  Under the name Barbecue Bob, Hicks had a big hit with his very first record, “Barbecue Blues,” and then enjoyed an un
precedented success with “Mississippi Heavy Water Blues,” recorded in June 1927—one of the biggest sellers in a string of quick releases about the floods which had devastated Mississippi and Louisiana that spring. The new, clanging Atlanta sound had broken through, and record companies instantly dispatched scouts and record producers to Georgia. On October 21, 1927, their most talented new discovery, Blind Willie McTell, recorded four songs for the Victor company in Atlanta, two of which became his first 78, “Stole Rider Blues,” backed with “Mr. McTell Got the Blues.” McTell linked up with the Hicks brothers and in time became Curley Weaver’s close friend and collaborator, but his virtuosity, cleverness, and peculiarly melodic style made him special.

  McTell had emerged out of a southern tangle of history, speculation, and innovation. One of his great-grandfathers on his father’s side, Reddick McTyeir, was a white man, born in 1826, the owner of a small farm outside Augusta, who conceived a son with his slave girl Essie on the eve of the Civil War and then saw heavy combat serving the Confederate cause. McTyeir survived the war and would live until August 1905—about two years after Minnie Dorsey, the teenage lover of his no-account black grandson, Ed McTier, gave birth to a boy in Happy Valley, nine and a half miles outside the town of Thomson.* (The McTyeir spelling had changed two generations earlier.) Named William Samuel McTier, the child was blind from early babyhood if not from birth, possibly as a result (his biographer, Michael Gray, conjectures) of contracting neonatal gonorrhea from his mother while still in her womb—an affliction disproportionally common in the early-twentieth-century rural South and, at the time, by far the chief cause of infant blindness nationwide. Ed McTier, a common field laborer, gambler, and roustabout, drifted off before his boy was seven; Minnie moved with Willie, first to the town of Spread (now Stapleton), with her stepfather and his wife, and then, when Willie was about eight, to Statesboro, the seat of Bulloch County, where she found work as a cook and domestic.