Ya either got faith or ya got unbelief and there ain’t no neutral ground.
—Dylan, “Precious Angel,” Slow Train Coming (1979)
Although decades have passed since Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle accident on the back roads near his home in Woodstock, New York, the incident is shrouded in mystery to this day. If there is a consensus among Dylanologists, it is that he dramatized the extent of his injuries or exaggerated his wounds in an attempt to remove himself from the intense, global media glare he faced at the time. Realistically, no one could have kept up the pace Dylan set in the years leading up to the crash, fueled by enormous talent and creativity, but also great quantities of drugs and alcohol. Given the pressures he faced, the accident might have not only not taken his life, but ironically also saved it.
After the mysterious accident, the rest and time away from the spotlight enabled Dylan to reassess. Only by removing himself from the media glare and the legions of fans tracking his every move could Dylan reconsider his life’s path; only five years removed from struggling New York City coffeehouse folksinger to being labeled the icon of a generation.
Looking back on this frenetic period, when he was just a young man in his mid-20s, Dylan reveals that he often took crude steps to insulate himself from the press and fans, like outright lying to critics or releasing music much different than fans expected. “My family was my light and I was going to protect that light at all cost,” he explains.1 The time away enabled Dylan to spend time with his family and find some semblance of normality. Still, the “icon” label never really went away and it had consequences. Perhaps the man is at his most revealing in Chronicles when he admits: “Legend, Icon, Enigma (Buddha in European Clothes was my favorite)—stuff like that, but that was all right. These titles were placid and harmless, threadbare, easy to get around with them. Prophet, Messiah, Savior—those are tough ones.”2
Dylan felt that his fans and outside commentators forced this crown on his head. He never asked for it or adjusted to what such a label might mean for him personally or professionally. Although Dylan left the public limelight, he did not stop working on his craft. He met with the members of the Hawks (later renamed the Band) each day at 1 P.M. to improvise and play whatever music came to mind. They let the flow direct them, often with Levon Helm providing vocals.
The Basement Tapes emerged from the sessions: first a series of bootleg tapes and then much later (1975) an official release. The tapes comprised both original tunes and standards from the history of American folklore. The Basement Tapes sessions gave Dylan a way to explore his music and reexamine the classics he heard growing up. Jamming with a group of musicians, more or less as just another band mate, gave him room to move in an atmosphere where talk of being a generational icon were forbidden. Here, in the upstate New York woods, Dylan was part of the band, not the singer alone in the harsh spotlight. He could breathe again and have fun making music.
Yet the outside world would not allow Dylan to remain hidden. Lacking information about the motorcycle spill, news reports and rumors coagulated into a mire of false gossip and speculation. Some thought the accident disfigured the singer or took his voice. Others placed him on the verge of death or in a coma. In today’s 24/7 media world, it is hard to imagine that reporters did not camp outside his home and apply indirect pressure by their very appearance there until he felt forced to comment.
When a reporter finally got to speak with Dylan, the singer responded, “Mainly, what I’ve been doin’ is workin’ on gettin’ better and makin’ better music, which is what my life is all about. Songs are in my head like they always are.”3 The world blew a collective sigh of relief: Dylan lives!
Looking for a new vibe and, possibly, a different set of influences, Dylan recorded his postaccident “comeback” album in Nashville, Tennessee, the long-time home of American country and western music. After the raucous sessions with the Hawks, which also resulted in a country-rock album Music from the Big Pink by the group now renamed The Band (Dylan cowrote three songs), Dylan’s solo work took a turn into softer, more poetic areas. The turn away from New York City to the American heartland and the country-music capital served as a significant symbol in what the new Dylan would become.
Dylan arrived in Nashville in October 1967 to record John Wesley Harding. The album debuted two months later to an audience eager for new music after his long absence. Fans snapped up John Wesley Harding, pushing it to gold-record status. What they heard was a return to acoustic-driven music, sparse and more like the singer’s early work than his more recent electric rock-and-roll work.
Residing somewhere between folk, rockabilly, and pop country, Dylan sings confidently on the Nashville album. What listeners immediately pick up is the focus on stories and narratives that drive the songs and album’s vibe. No one could have predicted that the supposed comeback album John Wesley Harding would serve as a kind of inspiration for the work Dylan would do in the 2000s on CDs like “Love and Theft” (2001) and Modern Times (2006). The sound of the songs on the two recent discs transports the listener back into Dylan’s Nashville era, focusing on the mix of his voice, lyrics, and stripped-down band.
On “Drifter’s Escape,” for example, in a mere three verses in a song just less than three minutes long, Dylan tells the story of a drifter sentenced to an unknown fate by a vengeful jury for a crime he does not understand. The ambiguity of the song extends to every actor within the piece, from the powerless judge, who the narrator says hears the verdict and “a tear came to his eye” to the crowd outside the courthouse stirring for more, but without providing a picture of whether they stir for vengeance or justice. In poetic form, the song’s message is the cry of the attendant and nurse who exclaim: “The trial was bad enough / But this is ten times worse.” The ambiguity is intensified as “a bolt of lightning” destroys the courthouse, forcing the spectators to their knees in prayer as the drifter escapes.4
“Drifter’s Escape” is reminiscent of “Long Black Veil” the folk standard made famous by Johnny Cash given its ominous story, yet the narrative on the Dylan song is more cryptic and shorter. Dylan’s work as a songwriter here is mindboggling, which leads to numerous interpretations. Is the anonymous drifter (perhaps a younger, pre-icon Dylan) innocent or guilty and does his escape justify or negate the jury’s rendering? After Dylan’s self-imposed exile in the upstate New York woods, perhaps he is signaling that only an act of God can free him from the sentence set down upon his head by overzealous fans and a hounding media. Furthermore, the listener is not even sure if the lightning bolt that frees the drifter is from God or an evil, unnamed force.
The commercial success of the new album had to satisfy Dylan and it certainly justified his new contract with Columbia, signed in August 1966. After 18 months without new material, seemingly a lifetime in the mid-1960s music scene, even an artist as important as Dylan felt pressure. Although album sales and commercial viability is routinely given less attention than critical reaction to Dylan’s work, giving him an aura of being above the dirty economics of the music business, his Columbia contract paid an unheard of 10 percent royalty—more than the Beatles received—and every artist faces such external pressures.5
Clearly, for Dylan, the time away from the red hot glare of public scrutiny recharged him as a songwriter. In an interview in late 1968, he spoke at length about the songwriting process, but in somewhat elusive terms. At one point, he discusses the relationship between a song and the singer being tightly interwoven, saying, “the songs are done for somebody, about somebody and to somebody. Usually that person is the somebody who is singing the song. Hear all the records which have ever been made and it kinda comes down to that after a while.”6 Yet, at the same time, Dylan claims that he cannot really explain the songs any better than an outside observer: “I’m not in the songs anymore. I’m just there singing them, and I’m not personally connected with them.”7
Dylan returned to Nashville 15 months after John Wesley Harding to record his next album—Nashville Skyline. As a result, the work is infused with country-music influences. A visit to the studio by country-music legend Johnny Cash certainly contributed to the vibes on the album. Dylan recalls:
The first time I went into the studio I had, I think, four songs. I pulled that instrumental one out . . . then Johnny [Cash] came in and did a song with me. Then I wrote one in the motel . . . pretty soon the whole album started fillin’ in together, and we had an album.8
The recording sessions with Cash strengthened and solidified their friendship, but they could not find the right groove to do a whole album together like they planned.
Released on April 9, 1969, Nashville Skyline sounds like a continuation of the work started on John Wesley Harding. Dylan keeps the sparse arrangements and basic songwriting structures of the former album. The most notable change—certainly shocking to listeners then and now—is the singer’s complete transformation of his voice. The country mellow twang reflected a softer side of Dylan. On first hearing “Lay Lady Lay,” one is shocked that this is the same Dylan of “Like a Rolling Stone” or even “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Nashville Skyline contrasted mightily with the cultural atmosphere of 1968 and the major works that year spawned by Dylan’s iconic contemporaries, such as Cash’s At Folsom Prison, the Beatles’ The White Album, and Beggars Banquet by the Rolling Stones. Intellectually or emotionally, Dylan’s pared-down country romp just could not compare to the high-charged records other musicians and bands produced.
Dylan wrote about 1968 in Chronicles, acknowledging the chaos of that time in global history, saying, “If you saw the news, you’d think that the whole nation was on fire.” He blamed the press, not only for “fanning the flames of hysteria,” but also for pushing him out in front. Instead, Dylan focused on his family and attempted to protect them from the crushing weight of fan expectations. He explains:
I was trying to provide for them, keep out of trouble, but the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I’d ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. . . . Being true to yourself, that was the thing. I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper.9
While Dylan continued to renounce the discussion of himself as the ideological father of the 1960s, the press and fans would not let him be who he felt he was—a folk musician. He viewed his success as something that “had blown up in my face and was hanging over me.” Providing an indication of where his head was at during the mid- to late 1960s, he admits, “I wasn’t a preacher performing miracles. It would have driven anybody mad.”10
Despite the turn away from protest songs or anthems, fans bought into their hero’s new sound, pushing the album to No. 3 on the U.S. charts and to No. 1 on the British. Surprisingly, given Dylan’s disregard for singles, hit songs played on am radio stations propelled the album’s success. “Lay Lady Lay,” written in 1968, hit the top 10, his first single to break through that barrier since “Rainy Day Women” in 1966. “I Threw It All Away” and “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” also found significant airplay, though neither scored in the top ten.
The success of the singles kept Dylan in the spotlight. He added to the glare by appearing on The Johnny Cash Show, the music and variety show put together and hosted by the legend. Dylan did not relish the gig on national television, as Clinton Heylin explains, “his first TV appearance since he had achieved real mass success.” In addition, the biographer adds, “it was the public unveiling of his Nashville Skyline persona . . . [but] destined for another stormy reception.”11
In the end, the early 1960s’ version of Dylan was simply unsustainable for a single artist to pull off. The fame, pressure, and constant public scrutiny left him wobbling. Many fans journeyed with him as he moved to a different style, yet most wanted, yearned for, or begged for Dylan to return to protest music. The musician, however, just wanted to be treated as a human being. In Chronicles, Dylan writes about this era as one of “living in the darkness.” The only “light” he found was in his family. Indignantly, he explains, “What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing. Not a damn thing. The press? I figured you lie to it.” Yet, the physical and emotional work required to retreat from the public spotlight nearly cost him his creative soul. “Sometime in the past I had written and performed songs that were most original and most influential,” he says, “and I didn’t know if I ever would again and I didn’t care.”12
The 1960s ended with Dylan appearing at the Isle of Wight music festival in the United Kingdom on August 31, 1969, rather than performing at the Woodstock Festival. Fan reactions to Dylan’s performance were mixed, particularly after the British press intimated that the singer would play for three hours. The appearance left a bad taste in his mouth and spoiled him on British audiences, despite the fact that his records sold so well there.
One of Dylan’s first public moves in the 1970s was to accept an honorary doctorate of music from Princeton University on June 9, 1970, only a little more than a month after the murder of four students when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd of antiwar demonstrators and other onlookers at Kent State University and the mass college cancellations that ensued in Kent State’s wake. Although on stage with famed philosopher and writer Walter Lippmann and Coretta Scott King, Dylan recalls all eyes on him. Surprisingly, he writes about being shocked when the speaker making introductory remarks calls him “the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of Young America.” Dylan felt “tricked” by the speaker, who emphasized his “isolation from the world,” rather than the young man’s music.13
Dylan searched for ways to divorce himself from his past as the prophet of a generation. His next album, Self Portrait, a double album, released in June 1970. The record contained a bunch of cover songs and several instrumentals, in addition to several tracks recorded live at the Isle of Wight show. Talking to writer and filmmaker Cameron Crowe about the record, Dylan says that he put out the album to thwart the efforts of bootleggers who were capitalizing on his outtakes and live recordings, thus producing inferior recordings of his material.14 Some of the songs on Self Portrait were leftovers from the Nashville sessions and Dylan continued in his country voice. According to Shelton, the singer purposely sought to move beyond his overshadowing image: “parodying himself was absolutely deliberate, a concerted attempt to defuse the mythology that had begun to surround him.”15
The critical reception of Self Portrait hit a new all-time low for Dylan. For example, Greil Marcus opened his review in Rolling Stone with the blistering question: “What is this shit?”16 Most others were similarly put off or plainly hostile. If the double album were a joke, the critics were not buying into the parody. The fans, however, again purchased the record in droves. Self Portrait reached No. 4 on the Billboard top albums list and reached No. 1 in the United Kingdom.
Surprisingly, the stench of Self Portrait dissipated with Dylan’s next album, New Morning, released just four months later. Marcus, this time reviewing the new record for the New York Times, called it Dylan’s “best album in years” and “fun to listen to,” adding that “Dylan has never sung with such flair.”17 Fans also reacted as expected. Sales in the United States reached gold-record status, scoring another top-10 hit. Listeners in the United Kingdom went crazy for New Morning, shooting the record to No. 1.
Although New Morning provided critical acclaim and commercial success, Dylan found himself slightly off-kilter for the next several years. He put his energy into appearances at benefit concerts and alternative recording sessions, like the ones with famed Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. The crown of thorns Dylan still wore as mouthpiece of a generation left him searching for a different life. Given the time Dylan has spent touring since the late-1980s, it is hard to imagine him not on the road, yet he stayed away from touring during this era.
The highest profile appearance came on August 1, 1971, at the Concert for Bangladesh, organized by former Beatle George Harrison. Dylan was a surprise performer at the concert, also put out as a record in 1971, with a film the following year. Shelton summed up the reaction, calling it “tumultuous . . . even the press responded enthusiastically, particularly delighted that he was singing in his good old nasal style and had abandoned the syrupy Nashville Skyline voice.”18
Van Morrison (left), Bob Dylan (center), and The Band’s Robbie Robertson (right) sing I Shall Be Released as the finale in director Martin Scorsese’s concert film The Last Waltz.
(Photo by United Artists/Getty Images)
George Harrison (left) and Bob Dylan perform at a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, August 1, 1971. The proceeds from the concert aided East Pakistan refugees.
(AP Photo)
Another important piece of the lost Dylan years of the early 1970s was his work with director Sam Peckinpah on the film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Contacted by his friend, screenwriter and novelist Rudy Wurlitzer, Dylan decided to put together some songs for the film, including the title track. The option of also playing a small part in the film also surfaced, so Dylan moved his family onto location in Durango, Mexico. Out of the difficult soundtrack work and Peckinpah’s many (often losing) battles with MGM over finances and other filmmaking challenges, one masterpiece emerged—the hypnotic ode to Old West violence, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”
In 1978, Dylan embarked on a world tour that covered 10 countries. He signed with a new business manager and then put together a new, eight-piece band to back him up that included a trio of gospel backup singers, saxophone, mandolin, and fiddle, among others. The concert series launched in with 11 shows in Japan. More than 100,000 fans packed in to see Dylan, demonstrating his lasting appeal in Asia. Two shows in Tokyo were recorded and released as the Live at Budokan album.19
In the middle of the world tour, Dylan recorded a new album in Santa Monica, California, released as Street-Legal (1978). The sound on the album carried over from the tour, featuring a bigger pop sound popular at the time in the work of adult contemporary artists, such as Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow. Few expected such a transformation from Dylan. Biographer Robert Shelton called the work, “one of Dylan’s most overtly autobiographical albums, telling of loss, searching, estrangement, and exile. . . . It is peopled by a group of narrators who are oppressed, wandering, and lonely, traveling in a foreign country of the spirit.”20 Others, though, were less positive, unable to find anything fresh or exciting in the new style.
Fans were intrigued enough by Street-Legal to push the album to No. 11 on the Billboard charts in the United States. However, the mediocre response halted Dylan’s streak of top 10 records, thus launching a new, dubious streak—number of albums that would not reach the top-10 marker. Certainly, audiences in the United States were not going crazy over the new sound. In the United Kingdom, however, Street-Legal sold extremely well, reaching No. 2. Dylan’s core fans in England remained more loyal that his ones at home.
In terms of critical response, though, Street-Legal received nearly universal panning. Most critics reacted violently against the album. Greil Marcus, for example, decided, “Most of the stuff here is dead air, or close to it.” He questioned nearly everything on the album, from the overt sexism in the song “Is Your Love in Vain” to Dylan’s singing, which declares “he has never sounded so utterly fake.” Marcus pointed to the nonstop touring as virtually destroying Dylan’s singing voice, explaining, “In the singing style Dylan is using now, emotion has been replaced by mannerism, subtlety by a straining to be heard.”21 Biographer Clinton Heylin suggests that Marcus’s review was “ill-considered” and set the tone for the press reaction to Street-Legal in America, as if reviewers simply read it and wrote their own version of the piece.22 Instead, they just copied Marcus or wrote their own in a similar vein.
Dylan, too, reacted negatively to press reports that the U.S. leg of the tour was overwrought and that the singer tried too hard to be an entertainer, along the lines of a Las Vegas lounge act. “The writers complain the show’s disco or Las Vegas. I don’t know how they came up with those theories. . . . It’s like someone made it up in one town and the writer in the next town read it.”23
Ironically, while Dylan performed to less than sold-out arenas and got murdered in the press, Bruce Springsteen received widespread commercial and critical praise. The younger musician, although clearly inspired by and using the older as a role model, burned with an intensity that people thought Dylan had lost along the way. Looking back on that era, Springsteen discussed his motivations on the 1978 Darkness on the Edge of Town tour: “There was something in the hardness of it, that young naked desire. We wanted people to hear our voices and we set our sights very big. I wanted the pink Cadillac and I wanted the girls, but above all I wanted a purposeful work life.”24 For many people, in comparison to Springsteen, Dylan seemed somewhat lost and musically adrift.
The first thing a person notices on the cover of the 1979 album Slow Train Coming is the pickax wielded by the railway worker in the foreground as the train approaches from around the bend. It is immediately clear that the ax is actually a cross. The stark line drawing conceals most of his face, but the worker is in full swing. In the background, workers scramble to lay down new track. It is impossible to tell if the train really is moving or stopped, but if it’s coming (like the title indicates), a catastrophe is about to take place.
I can only imagine what Dylan aficionados wondered when they saw that cover back then: “What, a cross on a Dylan album?” or maybe “Dylan, a Christian . . . isn’t he Jewish?” Surely some fans just scratched their heads. Others ran for the door, jumping off the train at the insane notion of Dylan as a Christian rocker. Scholars R. Clifton Spargo and Anne K. Ream are more direct, explaining, “Dylan had made his Christian turn, and many who had been accustomed to claiming him as free-thinking protest singer and prophet of modern peace felt betrayed.”25 Betrayal, however, would have been just one reaction. Mainly, record-buying audiences, already in the midst of the disco era, simply turned away from Dylan. He would lose the casual listener for decades.
Ironically, even many of the critics who spent their careers sifting through Dylan’s every phrase turned on him too when he started trumpeting his religious shift. The vitriol is often couched in disparaging remarks about the music, but in hindsight, it is hard to know if these critics were more disgusted with the Christian music or the fact that their hero seemed to turn his back on them by preaching. Greil Marcus, one of America’s most revered music critics, for example, says Slow Train Coming “offers surprises—Dylan celebrates his belief in Christ with the blues, which is nicely heretical; his singing is often bravely out of control—but they’re irrelevant to the burden Dylan is seeking to pass on to whoever will listen. What we’re faced with here is really very ugly.”26 This kind of attack—from a writer who would later arrogantly title his Dylan omnibus Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, essentially making himself as important as his subject—is filled with the reviewer’s feelings about Christianity, it seems, more than an assessment of the music the musician created. Jann Wenner, editor and founder of Rolling Stone, however, gave the new record a positive review, declaring it a great work and that Dylan still stood as the greatest singer of the age.27
Dylan later explained that he had a born-again experience on the road, in the midst of a grueling concert schedule in late 1978. He explains, “Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up.”28 What is hard to imagine now or for people at the time is what does a celebrity like Dylan do next when he has this kind of experience. If one’s entire career seems based on a set of principles—even for someone willing to work through transformation like Dylan—then what happens next when that entire past becomes null and void? Spargo and Ream call the change “a revolution in personal consciousness perceived by many as having deleterious effects on his music.”29 Ironically, during this religious phase, Dylan finally seemed to be giving his audiences some attempt at answers they had been begging for from him since 1964. The problem was, though, that they did not want to know that Jesus was his resolution.
Robert Shelton, who spent time with Dylan on the world tour and interviewed him extensively, recalls, “Even those most reluctant to accept that it was anything more than still another exploration by Dylan—into gospel song—were shocked by its fundamentalist, conservative theology.”30 When the singer returned to performing live again in late 1979, he removed all his old songs from the playlist. Undaunted by the way fans and critics reacted to Slow Train Coming, Dylan hit the recording studio to record Saved, another religious-themed album. The cover for this album pulled no punches, featuring a painting of God’s hand coming down from the heavens to touch those reaching up to him. Shelton notes that Saved differed from its predecessor because Dylan emphasized “personal faith and resolution,” rather than the evils of hell. In other words, he toned down the rhetoric and imagery of Saved, which made it a little more appealing to audiences and critics.31 Despite a softer message on the new album, Dylan still refused to play any of his old songs in concert until late in 1980.
In August 1981, Dylan continued his torrid writing, recording, and touring schedule releasing Shot of Love, still in the religious vein of the previous two albums, but again like Saved, softer and more introspective. Some of the album actually moved away from overt religious work, like “Lenny Bruce,” a song written out of respect for the late comedian. The strongest single is arguably “Heart of Mine,” which the band re-recorded with former Beatle Ringo Starr on drums and guitarist Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones sitting in. Many listeners believe that the live version of the song included on the Biograph boxed CD set (1985) is superior to the version on the album, but still demonstrated that Dylan had ended his religious experiment.
The American tour supporting the album lasted from mid-October through November 1981. Organist Al Kooper, who had instinctively added the organ to the iconic “Like a Rolling Stone,” joined the tour and peppered Dylan to play his old hits, not just religious music. Still, audiences stayed away, scared that he would not play the hits after reading about what had happened at previous shows. As he reached age 40, according to biographer Sounes, “Dylan’s brilliant career had begun to falter and it would be a long time before he regained his assurance and the acclaim of the public.”32
* * *
For Dylan, the late 1960s and then the late 1970s and early years of the 1980s seemed an era of constant transformation and attempt at redefining what his music meant to fans and critics who yearned for Dylan the icon to confront the political institutions that kept the nation in war in Vietnam, prevented blacks from fulfilling their rights, and then later staggered through economic challenges and conservative backlash. The more the nation reacted to ideas, events, and things happening globally, the more Dylan seemed to recoil. He distanced himself from these events and repeatedly (nearly begged) to be released from the pedestal that the public thrust under him.
He told John Cohen and Happy Traum, for example, that the song “Masters of War” and taking a stand “was an easy thing to do.” Contrasting 1963 to 1968, Dylan explains:
There were thousands and thousands of people just wanting that song, so I wrote it up. What I’m doing now isn’t more difficult, but I no longer have the capacity to feed this force which is needing all these songs. I know the force exists but my insight has turned to something else. I might meet one person now, and the same thing can happen between that one person (and myself) that used to happen between thousands.33
The spirit of the 1960s continued on, but Dylan wanted to move on to other ideas. No one seemed willing to let the musician off the hook for not staying stuck in the era, as if singing the protest songs night after night would keep the ideas of the era alive.
By the late 1970s, Dylan’s personal life and the pressures it placed on him would come to a head. He had essentially dropped out of the music scene in the late 1960s after his motorcycle accident to spend time with his family and recover from the chaos of nonstop touring and publicity. A decade later, he and Sara went through a vicious divorce (finalized in June 1977) that included accusations of adultery and domestic abuse. Custody battles broke the family into warring factions, which distracted him from concentrating on music.
Artistically, the Dylan of the late 1960s transformed into a new being by the end of the next decade. The pop-rock sound of Street-Legal seemed worlds away from his earlier work, characterized by extensive use of backup singers and horn sections. Ten years later, Dylan emerged as a born-again Christian, his albums filled with songs speculating on his relationship with Jesus and the potential end of days perhaps on the near horizon.
These changes were too much for many fans, even those who considered themselves hardcore Dylan devotees. The music scene had shifted to more carefree styles in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era. Disco and rock ballads ruled the airwaves. Dylan’s religious moves simply added to a vibe that he was a musical dinosaur. The surprising transformation shocked audiences and critics. According to famed rock-critic Lester Bangs, the Dylan of the born-again era allowed his opponents to attack him and question where he had been and what he had done since the mid-1960s. All those people who wanted to label him a sellout or phony suddenly had the ammunition since they could not equate the protest singer and the religious convert. This tension, Bangs explains, demonstrates that “America’s greatest troubadour since Hank Williams was never even heard as a songwriter but as a symbol.”34 Audiences and critics never understood him—then or now—proving his existence as a product more than person.
As the 1980s began and launched a decade that would be marked by the emergence of synthesizer-based dance music by artists like Duran Duran and Madonna, Dylan seemed lost. Even those closest to Dylan’s traditional style were forced to change during the decade. One sees this in the adaptations made by Bruce Springsteen, for example, launching a new sound that seemed supersonic and filled sports stadiums. Louder and faster marked much of the change, particularly as technology enabled rock groups to reach larger audiences. Dylan’s influence on this generation remained, but as the decade progressed, his place in it as a musician seemed dubious.