Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (29 page)

For all that, the artist, apparently unable to think of anything better to do with himself, remained undaunted. By the end he was talking to his musicians of concerts in 1979, of touring ever onwards. After all, he was still making a lot of the money he believed he needed. A gross figure of $20 million for the 1978 tour receipts is generally mentioned. As with Rolling Thunder, Dylan was never likely to quit easily when he was doing what he thought he wanted or needed to do. Critical disdain meanwhile had a tendency to make him more stubborn. As the long pilgrimage neared its end, he began to tell stories, bizarre or revealing according to taste, from the stage. In Jacksonville, Florida, on 13 December, his preface to ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ became an elaborate reworking of vintage Dylan hokum. It was that or a comical parable on the relationship between an embattled performing artist and his audience.

The carnivals [they] used to have in the ’50s, every carnival used to have a geek. Do you know what a geek is? A geek is a man that eats a live chicken, right before your eyes. He bites the head off, eats that. Then he goes ahead, eats the heart, drinks up the blood, sweeps up all the feathers with a broom. In them days, it cost a quarter to see him … Anyway. The geek pretty much kept to himself most of the time. Nobody never did get too tight with the geek. But one day I was having breakfast with the bearded lady and she says, ‘Stay away from that man.’ I say, ‘Why?’ She says, ‘Because he looks at everybody else in the world as freaky, except him. He thinks that he’s just earning a living, and what he’s doing is pretty straight …’

The singer then proceeded to claim that being stared at on the streets of Nashville for having long hair in ‘about 1964’ had ‘reminded’ him of the geek and inspired the song. In Lakeland, Florida, two nights later the introduction to ‘Señor’ was stranger still. This artist objected to the myths surrounding Bob Dylan except when he was inventing the best of them.

I was riding on a train one time from Durango, Mexico, to San Diego. I fell asleep on this train. I woke up about midnight and a lot of people were getting off the train. The train was in the station, pulling up to the platform at a place called Monterey. So a bunch of people were getting off the train. On to the platform, the steps, this man gets up to the train. Everybody else gets off. He come down the aisle and took a seat across the aisle from me, wearing nothing but a blanket and a derby hat.

So I was sitting there. I felt a very strange vibration. I was staring into the window, which was like a glass mirror. And I could not help myself any longer, I had to turn around and look right at this man. When I did I could see that his eyes were burning and there was smoke coming out of his nostrils. I immediately knew this was the man I wanted to talk to. So I turned around to the mirror for a while to figure out something to say. And when I had it all together I turned around and he was gone.

By late 1978, for all that, touring and self-doubt were taking a toll. As winter came on, Dylan and most of the band came down with flu. By the time they reached San Diego on 17 November he was still feeling sick, disorientated and exhausted. The performance that night was hard going. Almost exactly a year later, on 27 November 1979, back in the same city, Dylan would tell his audience – a supportive one, on this occasion – of how it had been. This parable was also intended to explain what had become of him and his music in the intervening months. Dylan would relate that it had all happened towards the end of the 1978 concert. Someone in the crowd, he would say, ‘knew I wasn’t feeling too well’.

I think they could sense that. And they threw a silver cross on the stage. Now usually I don’t pick things up in front of the stage. Once in a while I do, but sometimes, most times, I don’t. But I looked down at that cross. I said, ‘I gotta pick that up.’

I picked up that cross and I put it in my pocket. It was a silver cross, I think maybe about so high. And I put it … brought it backstage with me. And I brought it with me to the next town, which was off in Arizona, Phoenix. Anyway, when I got back there I was feeling even worse than I’d felt when I was in San Diego. And I said, ‘Well I really need something tonight.’

I didn’t know what it was, I was using all kinds of things, and I said, ‘I need something tonight that I never really had before.’

And I looked in my pocket and I had this cross that someone threw before when I was in San Diego. So if that person is here tonight, I want to thank them for that cross.
³⁰

The audience in San Diego’s Golden Hall in 1979 would exult when Dylan mentioned the cross. They would be unusual witnesses to his performances that year, rare examples of a crowd being as one with the singer and the statements he had begun to make from the concert stage. His story of the silver cross would be part of his introduction to a song called ‘Slow Train’.

The San Diego crowd would not flinch, unlike other spectators, when Dylan then discoursed on newspaper stories about ‘people in Turkey revolting’, ‘Russians don’t have any food’, ‘all that trouble in Ireland’, and the Islamic revolution that had just destroyed the Shah’s regime in Iran. This audience would not shake their heads in bewilderment when Dylan said, ‘They got a funny bunch of people over in Iran. They have a religion called “Muslims”, you know?’ The artist would remind this crowd that ‘the Bible says, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” … We know this world as we see it is going to be destroyed. Christ will set up his kingdom in Jerusalem for a thousand years. We know that’s true.’ In San Diego, where some in the audience had become personally acquainted with the artist by the end of 1979, they would only shout a loud ‘Amen!’ to all of that.

I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou has tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars …

Revelation, 2:2

LATE IN 1978, SO THE STORY GOES, GOD FOUND BOB DYLAN IN A
hotel room in Tucson, Arizona. Stranger things have happened. The deity had hovered in the haunted wings from the beginnings of the singer’s career, but the relationship, ebbing and flowing, was always tricky. Sometimes in the early days it had seemed that the songs mocked belief; sometimes that only the hypocrisies of institutions were held culpable. At other moments, particularly in his apprentice work, Dylan had appeared to adopt the tropes of the old hellfire blues without a second thought, as many did. Nevertheless, to the sort of people who understood the
sort
of thing being said in the songs they liked best, it was unthinkable – beyond belief, in fact – that an artist without an ounce of deference in him, one who took nothing at face value, one who saw the masters of war conscripting God to their side, could simply and sincerely believe all the old Bible crap. In the late 1970s, unbelievers formed a devout majority of the artist’s fans.

By the time he got to Tucson, it made no difference. On or around 19 November, Dylan sensed ‘a presence in the room that couldn’t have been anybody but Jesus’. Then the artist felt a hand placed physically upon him: ‘I felt it. I felt it all over me.’ Then his ‘whole body’ began to tremble. The room itself seemed to move. ‘The glory of the Lord,’ as he would later testify, ‘knocked me down and picked me up.’ Describing the experience two years later, Dylan would deny that he had been ‘down and out’ or miserable at the time. Supposedly he had been ‘doing fine’ and was ‘relatively content’. But he had been hearing a lot about Jesus. Later, perhaps a month or so later, he would indicate to ‘a very close friend’ that he was ‘willing to listen’ to the Christian message.
¹

That’s the tale, at any rate. As with so many Dylan stories, it requires the suspension of doubt, if not of disbelief. He turned to evangelical Christianity: this much we know. But he had been making God-noises for years before that silver cross flew from the darkness to lie glittering, presumably, in the radiance of the San Diego spotlight.
Desire
’s ‘Oh, Sister’, if it was not Jacques Levy’s doing, was hardly the work of an artist oblivious to the deity. It was one example among many.

The sequence of supernatural events is also as neat as a movie plot: first the cross appearing amid Dylan’s gloom, then the Pauline moment in a hotel suite. The anecdote involving the little silver cruciform trinket is an interpolation, in any case, of statements gleaned from a single concert bootleg, not from any of Dylan’s statements-for-the-record of what led him to become a Christian. When he felt like talking on stage he came up with a lot of strange stuff. There are no witnesses to say that the story of the cross was any more true, or any less metaphorical, than the story of the geek.

You needn’t question that Dylan experienced
something
profound, meanwhile, to wonder why he never actually identified the time or place of his transformation. Tucson? Judging by his 1978 concert schedule, it’s close enough. Dylan would certainly say, and later regret saying it, that he ‘truly had a born-again experience’.
²
The last tiny mystery is this, however: if Jesus made personal, room-rocking contact on a winter’s night, why was there any need for evangelical tutelage? That, nevertheless, was what Dylan sought and what he got.

*

In its edition of Saturday, 3 November 1979, the
San Francisco Chronicle
carried a review by Joel Selvin of the opening night of Dylan’s latest concert tour. As soon became clear, the rock critic – as certain showbiz writers were then styled – was not entirely impressed. One clue was in the headline above the piece. It read: ‘Bob Dylan’s God-Awful Gospel’. The artist was about to suffer for his new-found faith.

‘These are strange times,’ Selvin began. ‘Gas costs a dollar a gallon. Someone built a pyramid in San Francisco. And Bob Dylan converted to Christianity.’ Clearly, the last sentence was taken to be a self-explanatory illustration of how peculiar some portents can be. Dylan had come to God and God had emerged with a celebrity scalp. Amid weird events, this was the weirdest. The reviewer continued:

The ironies flew thick and fast Thursday at the Warfield Theater, where Dylan took the capacity crowd by surprise with an opening-night performance composed exclusively of his singing praises to the Lord.

He never touched the likes of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘Don’t Think Twice’, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, ‘I Shall Be Released’, ‘Just Like a Rolling Stone’ [
sic
] or any of the many other songs that secured his fame and allowed him to sell out each of his 14 Warfield shows far in advance, with tickets scaled sky-high at $15 and $12.50 apiece.

Having warmed up, Selvin described an audience behaving ‘with admirable restraint’. Catcalls and boos certainly ‘echoed throughout the 2,200-seat former vaudeville palace’, but for the most part the audience sat through a two-hour concert in ‘stunned silence’, granting only ‘modest, polite applause’ to Dylan’s 17 songs.

The review thereafter was quietly murderous. First Selvin noted, as an odd but interesting truth, that Dylan ‘displayed no joy in singing the gospel according to Bob’. While he gave ‘humble thanks for his own deliverance’, he was ‘short of convincing’, the writer decided, in his humility. There was no ‘beatific aura’. His hatchet well whetted, the journalist then went seriously to work. The observations were brutal, given the topic at hand, but not necessarily inaccurate.

‘Anesthetized by his new-found beliefs,’ wrote Selvin, ‘Dylan has written some of the most banal, uninspired and inventionless songs of his career for his Jesus phase.’ The lyrics were founded on ‘ridiculous rhymes and images’, the message was neither uplifting nor joyous, and Dylan was content merely to repeat that temporal existence suffers a ‘dearth of meaning’. Then Selvin headed for the big finish.

Dylan … once wrote songs that expressed the outrage and alienation felt by an entire generation. His desertion of those ideals in favor of fundamentalist Christian theology symbolizes the confusion and chaos that generation found in its search for answers.

Years from now, when social historians look back over these years, Dylan’s conversion will serve as a concise metaphor for the vast emptiness of the era. Dylan is no longer asking hard questions. Instead, he turned to the most prosaic source of truth on Earth, so aptly dubbed ‘opium of the masses’ by Karl Marx.

All those years from then, it is possible to look back and say that, in fact, Dylan was asking hard questions indeed. For one thing, his choice was not a metaphor for anyone’s emptiness but his own. Nevertheless, you could also say, as Selvin said, that as pieces of writing the ‘gospel’ songs from the album
Slow Train Coming
were simplistic, even banal. This most complicated of writers had surrendered complexity for the sake of personal salvation and composed doggerel to express his gratitude. He had elected to subordinate himself. Worse, the bounty of song he had gained in return was pitiful. He was saved, but his art, the art that counted for so much to so many, seemed all but lost. Whatever else is still believed of Dylan’s encounter with the triune God, it need not involve poetry.

Christ didn’t make a Gerard Manley Hopkins of the artist when He interceded. Jerry Wexler, the best studio producer then available, a Jewish atheist unimpressed by news of Jesus, could not alter the fact. Many who bought the album, Christian or otherwise, would disagree sincerely, but those were some dull, ill-written songs. Worst of all, they floated on fervent waves of righteous cliché. ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ could have been written by any one of a host of godly, ghastly Californian hacks trading rock and roll’s sins against future redemption at the end of the ’70s when all the drugs began to wear off.
That
was our chief objection, back then.