Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (42 page)

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.

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.

What Reagan brought to the ideological party was an enthusiasm for ‘fusionism’, a confused theory based on a belief in the inevitable, necessary alliance between traditional social conservatives and libertarians. A year after taking charge, the president would explain: ‘We have one agenda. Just as surely as we seek to put our financial house in order and rebuild our nation’s defenses, so too we seek to protect the unborn, to end the manipulation of schoolchildren by utopian planners, and permit the acknowledgement of a supreme being in our classrooms just as we allow such acknowledgements in other public institutions.’
⁴
Neo-conservatives, former Democrats and old leftists in the van, were the intellectual expression of a popular mood. In Reagan, conservatives of every variety had found their man. He expressed the majority’s will, or so they told themselves. The counter-culture had met its counter-revolution.

Godly or not, Dylan was left in an odd position. He had long since fled the political limelight, flatly refusing to be conscripted to anyone’s ideology. By the beginning of the 1980s, that was the cliché lodged high in every article written about him. The counter-culture, whatever it amounted to or became, had been formed in his image, in large part, and taken his music for its soundtrack. Yet he had been profoundly sceptical – let’s put it that way – of an upheaval he had inspired. Now here he was, a committed Christian two years in the making at the moment a declared born-again conservative Christian was assuming the office of president. How, if at all, could Dylan respond to this new reality? It was less a question of whether he cared about politics and presidents than how he reacted, as a writer, to the things of this world. A strange journey had commenced, for him and for his country, at the beginning of a new decade.

*

There is another way to describe things. For Dylan, the 1980s were the worst of times. Much of that was his own doing. Those years were not arid without exception, not unrelentingly grim, but the damage done to the man, his reputation and his career was extensive. For a while it seemed permanent. ‘Bob Dylan’, art and act, barely got out of the decade in one piece. In fact, there came a moment, by his own account, when he almost ‘packed it in’ and retired the legend. At times it would seem as though that might be the only dignified solution. For all his affected indifference to current affairs and the vanity of human wishes generally, Dylan’s decline would stand as a significant footnote to the 1980s. For much of the time he would seem unable to decide just how he felt about the world, public and private, that he was in. Whatever he might have thought about the gaudy decade to which his name was pasted like a label, the ’60s had given him currents within which to swim. Reagan’s years were a wasteland. The least you can say is that for Dylan the cards would fall badly, time after time.

The 1990s would contain years that were lean enough – no new songs of any description for seven of them – but that decade would be redeemed towards its end by an album called
Time Out of Mind
and by a new legend, that of Dylan the perpetual performer, last of the itinerant bluesmen. If you follow the dates, arbitrary as the divisions might be, Dylan made only two albums of real consequence in the 1980s and managed to botch both of them. He managed to release – though these things are a matter of taste – barely more than a dozen great songs in those ten years. For much of the time he also laid waste public esteem for a once-scintillating concert artist.

Dylan would not remain oblivious to any of this. He could read sales returns as well as anyone. Disdaining ‘the media’ as forgers and fools, he nevertheless gave every sign of being acquainted with reviews. Those he suffered for
Shot of Love
after it appeared in August 1981 would be about as bad as those he had endured after
Saved
. The former should, by rights, have been by far the better record. It should have been one of those ‘returns to form’ that litter the history of his career. When the opportunity came he had the songs; he had time to kill; he had the ability to call on the services of almost any musician he cared to mention. In the end, the record Dylan made was better than
Saved
– which is saying absolutely nothing – but it was the roughest, ragged sketch of the work it might have been.