Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (37 page)

Nothing daunted, Dylan decides to end the set with a personal challenge to the Antichrist. Who can stand, after all, against a vengeful Bob? In fact, the pilgrim gives a fine and heartfelt performance on ‘When He Returns’. The song also involves the best-written set of verses on
Slow Train Coming
, though that isn’t saying a great deal. The track does make a real connection, however, between Christ’s Dylan and all the Dylans who went before. The argument, as in so many earlier and better works, is between truth and deceit.

All will be resolved – cue that refrain – when He returns. Somehow, nevertheless, even familiar Dylan questions are enfeebled by the purpose to which here they are put. They are no longer his questions.
Slow Train Coming
sees an artist abdicate art’s duty to truth in deference to a higher power. Such was the baptismal transaction, freely accepted. At times on the album, when he is not snarling theatrically in a calculated simulation of old performances, Dylan seems almost relieved to be handing over the job of deciding what is false and what is real. There is an irony in that. Christianity had indeed relieved him of many burdens. It had stilled the buzzing noise of perplexity and human variety. What is missing from the nine songs chosen for
Slow Train Coming
is any sense whatever of life’s complexity, any evidence of doubt or difficulty, any suggestion that faith can be perplexing. Once you see what Dylan is about – after 30 seconds or so – everything that follows on the album is predictable. Those who wrestle with faith tend to tell you that the struggle is never simple. The writer of
Slow Train Coming
disagrees. In consequence, there is nothing surprising or challenging in the songs. His God, set in His ways, was not the best writing partner Bob Dylan ever came across.

*

Bob Dylan at Budokan
had been released just a week before the first of the
Slow Train Coming
sessions. Recorded over two nights near the start of the 1978 world tour, it had captured only the faintest hints of the music Dylan and his band would achieve once they hit their stride on that expedition, but neither he nor the record company had worried about misrepresentation. The double album had appeared in Japan and Australasia, the markets for which it had been conceived, fully eight months before Dylan arrived in the Muscle Shoals studio, but a flood of imports and a couple of bootlegs had concentrated Columbia’s finest minds. No one had paused to wonder if another live album was justified barely a year and a half after
Hard Rain
. It would not be the last time that Dylan’s reputation would suffer thanks to a casual attitude towards concert souvenirs.

Several reviewers had been dumbfounded by what seemed to be – and in certain cases were –
Budokan
’s wilfully kitsch arrangements. Few had given Dylan credit for adopting an audacious approach to what was, in essence, another greatest-hits package. In Britain, where the 1978 tour had been welcomed as revelatory, there had been mystification (the album still reached number four in the charts) followed by unease. In America, all the ‘Vegas lounge act’ jibes had been heard again, helped along by photographs that appeared to show Dylan honouring the dress sense, if not the spirit, of late Elvis. Almost alone,
Rolling Stone
’s Janet Maslin had been brave enough to say that, overall, she liked the thing. She had called the double album ‘a shock, a sacrilege and an unexpectedly playful bonanza’.
At Budokan
was ‘spotty’, Maslin had conceded, but liberating for artist and audience alike. Then the journalist had picked exactly the wrong words to explain this latest ‘new Dylan’. Given the story that was about to unfold, she could not have been more mistaken. ‘The fire and brimstone are behind Dylan,’ Maslin had written, ‘if only because his adolescence, and that of his principal audience, are things of the past.’
⁵
Brimstone and fire were about to become gluts on the Dylan market. The artist was aflame with his new beliefs. By the second week in May, the tedium of overdubs behind him, he had a record to prove it. Finally he would be telling the world nothing but God’s honest truth.

A couple of cruciform images – a pickaxe, a telegraph pole – would dominate the finished album’s sleeve. Dylan paid close attention to the design. The record’s title was meanwhile a straightforward evocation of numerous holy rolling trains in the American musical landscape, from Curtis Mayfield’s 1965 hit ‘People Get Ready’ – a song Dylan and The Band had attempted back in the Woodstock basement – to the old standard ‘This Train’. A spiritual entitled ‘The Gospel Train’ had made the salvation express a key part of American revivalist iconography as far back as the 1870s, though the idea was older: Nathaniel Hawthorne had published his parodic short story ‘The Celestial Railroad’ in 1843. A century later, Woody Guthrie had borrowed from ‘This Train’ for his semi-autobiographical
Bound for Glory
(1943), while Sister Rosetta Tharpe had set about the song with her electric guitar in the early ’50s, helping rock and roll, the devil’s latest music, on its way. Dylan would broadcast that version on his
Theme Time Radio Hour
show in the middle of the twenty-first century’s first decade, when he and the world were older.

The nearest ancestor to his own ‘Slow Train’ was probably Guthrie’s
adapted/borrowed ‘Little Black Train’, a tune Woody had recorded for the pioneering folk promoter Moses ‘Moe’ Asch in 1944.
⁶
That song warns bar-room gamblers against trying to cheat their way through life and tells ‘silken bar-room ladies’ that ‘worldly pride’ will do them no good when the time comes for the ‘final ride’. All that can be done, as Dylan’s song also argues, is to ‘get ready for your savior’. In one of the sometimes-sung variant verses of ‘Little Black Train’ we hear of a young man ‘who cared not for the gospel light, until suddenly the whistle blew from the little black train in sight’. The train-as-metaphor had exercised a fascination for many nineteenth-century Americans as they contemplated their place amid the vastness of a newly claimed country. The railroad was an obvious symbol of the ‘straight and narrow path’ as passengers were carried inexorably along thanks to an all-powerful engineer and a benign conductor.
⁷

In the summer of 1979 there was nothing even slightly ironic about Dylan’s album, its title, or the drawing on its sleeve of an antique train arriving in a frontier landscape while the track is still being prepared by a pioneering evangel with a cross-shaped pickaxe. Dylan was immune to doubt. Rumours of his conversion were beginning to emerge, but disclosure had only ever been a matter of time. His choice would be believe-it-or-not news far beyond the little world of rock music. At the end of May, while the artist was dealing with the lawsuit brought by Ms Patty Valentine over her appearance in ‘Hurricane’ – and dropping Satan’s name into his deposition before the hearing – Kenn Gulliksen felt able to share the glad tidings with the
Washington Post
. Whether the pastor had been authorised to do so is an interesting question, but at the time it hardly mattered. Dylan had already begun to make plans to take his new songs out on the road. He had no intention of trying to hide. Gulliksen would soon be among the first of the Vineyarders to deny that pressure had been applied on the singer to perform only religious material in his concerts. That was, they would say, entirely his own idea.

One simple fact needs to be borne in mind:
Slow Train Coming
, the work of the long-derided born-again Bob Dylan, would be a big success, his last truly successful album in America for a very long time to come. In its first year on release it would sell more quickly than
Blood on the Tracks
. The evangelical album would be certified platinum – one million copies sold in the US – within only nine months.
Blood
, the masterpiece ‘everyone bought’, supposedly, would not achieve that status until the end of the ’80s.

Given the usual depiction of Dylan’s conversion to Christianity as a three-act tragedy for his reputation, the initial commercial success of that ‘mean-spirited spirituality’ counts as puzzling. It cannot be argued, for one thing, that
Slow Train Coming
owed its popularity to America’s religious revival. Conservative church-goers remained to be convinced, at the very least, that music so long synonymous with sin could have redeeming qualities. The words might be fine and well – if you could make them out – but temptation lurked down in the grooves and in the inflaming coital rhythm. Dylan, the Jewish convert so recently identified with left-wing causes, could not count on those believers. Besides, the success of
Slow Train Coming
would not be confined to America. The album would reach number three in the US, but number two in the UK, where the Christian evangelical market was never, to put it kindly, the biggest in all creation.

When
Slow Train Coming
entered the US album charts in September, those who were dismayed or disgusted by its unforgiving preaching could take their pick. Either people liked the record and accepted the sentiments, or they liked the noise and, sadly for the Christian Dylan and his critics alike, didn’t give a damn about what was being said. In any event it is a mistake to allow the reactions of a few disdainful reviewers, then or now, to obscure the facts. We should not be distracted either by subsequent events in Dylan’s born-again career. On its release
Slow Train Coming
was more popular by far than a lot of his albums.

He had reason to be optimistic, then, as he began tour rehearsals at the end of August. If the mood took him, he was entitled to believe that he was, of all things, the voice of a generation once more and the leading shining light of a genuine movement. Just not
that
generation, or
that
movement. Whether he understood that he was accepting the kind of spokesman’s role he had rejected back in the ’60s is a still unanswered question. Perhaps, instead, Dylan knew he was about to be tested sorely. Such was a true believer’s lot, after all. Whatever happened, he meant to put out the Word.

His second decade as a writer and performer was drawing to a close. You can only wonder if he could still recognise himself. Or rather, you wonder which self he still recognised. Whatever else it signified, the first, hot flush of Christian belief amounted to a willed amnesia in an individual whose habit of selective recall had become ingrained in his youth. Forget all the glib talk, still persistent, of masks, ‘reinvention’, superstar games and role-playing. By 1979, Dylan had set aside at least half a dozen complete identities. The acceptance of Christ, accomplished with relief and little hesitation after the busted marriage, the bad recreational habits, the endless womanising, the creative confusion, the relentless pressure of impossible expectations and the sheer ennui that is the default state of genius, was an attempt at absolute eradication. What else could it be? By definition, you had to be extinguished as a person in order to be born again.

The religious experience required to achieve that state might have been as old as humankind, but in 1979 the phrase was of recent origin. Jimmy Carter had attracted a lot of media attention just by describing himself as ‘born again’ while running for the presidency in 1976. Dylan, you suspect, grasped the idea instantly. It was, after all, a sanctified version of what he had always done. Clearly, the question he did not ask himself when he underwent baptism was whether it was truly possible to erase a person and start again. The faith of his forefathers said that it was impossible for anyone born Jewish to cease to be a Jew. Typically, Dylan would not be deterred from making the attempt, whatever the critics or anyone else said about his new songs.

What the critics actually said was more or less predictable. The reviewer for Britain’s
Melody Maker
commenced as he meant to go on by announcing, as though passing sentence, ‘Dylan has switched roles once too often.’
⁸
This time around, ‘Dylan as a Bible-puncher is just too much to swallow.’ Several other writers found the views expressed on the album as unpleasant as the splenetic manner of their expression. The contrast between sheer intolerance and professions of faith in a religion founded on love was mentioned more than once. The artist’s newly conservative politics – from one who had supposedly turned his back on political causes – did not go unnoticed. In New York, John Lennon caught ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ on local radio in the first week of September. The domesticated former Beatle sneered at Dylan serving as Christ’s flunkey. Lennon, in those days talking mostly to himself, called the track’s production mediocre, the vocal performance pathetic and the words ‘just embarrassing’.

Writing in the magazine
New West
, Greil Marcus gave some initial credit to the professionalism behind the album’s music and to Dylan’s singing, but observed, ‘What we’re faced with here is really very ugly.’ There was nothing new about the use of religious imagery in the artist’s work, Marcus explained, but here it was being employed just to sell a received and ‘pre-packaged doctrine’. In
Slow Train Coming
the mysteries of revealed religion were reduced to a brutish proposition: ‘Jesus is the answer and if you don’t believe it, you’re fucked.’ Inadvertently or not, the critic confirmed Dylan’s declaration in ‘Precious Angel’: ‘there ain’t no neutral ground’. Marcus retorted that the artist was ‘falsely settling all questions’ by claiming ‘that redemption is a simple affair’. The review concluded:

American piety is a deep mine and, in the past, without following any maps, Dylan has gone into it and returned with real treasures:
John Wesley Harding
is the best example, but there are many others.
Slow Train Coming
strips the earth and what it leaves behind is wreckage.
⁹

Perhaps surprisingly, Dylan was not entirely friendless.
Rolling Stone
’s editor, Jann Wenner – who was not necessarily the best critic Jann Wenner ever hired – decided that
Slow Train Coming
qualified for the ‘best since’ laurel, that honour granted traditionally by any reviewer who can’t quite decide how to evaluate a disconcerting Dylan album. On this occasion Wenner concluded, for reasons he neglected to explain, that
Slow Train Coming
was the very best thing Dylan had managed since
The Basement Tapes
. The editor had listened to the new album ‘at least 50 times’ and failed to cure himself of the conviction ‘that it might even be considered his greatest’. Dylan’s work was at risk of being damned with loud praise. This was the ‘overwhelming’ record ‘that’s been a long time coming, with an awesome, sudden stroke of transcendent and cohesive visions’. Wenner ended his two-page review with the immortal sentence ‘I am hearing a voice.’
¹⁰
The editor liked it, then. On the other hand, he was far from alone. Few of those who hated the born-again maker of the million-selling
Slow Train Coming
would ever ponder that mystery, far less explain it.