The Seventies I see as a period of reconstruction after the Sixties, that’s all. That’s why people say: well, it’s boring, nothing’s really happening, and that’s because wounds are healing. By the Eighties, anyone who’s going to be doing anything will have his or her cards showing. You won’t be able to get back in the game in the Eighties.
—Bob Dylan to Jonathan Cott (1978, 186)
“Wounds were healing,” Dylan says, an apropos comment on how the battles of the sixties changed in the seventies, but also suggesting his own personal growth. From the early period when his artistic development had become a point of reference for many, he moved into a period when he tried to become more private, only to have his private life become the catalyst for a return to more vital songwriting. Had the wounds healed as Dylan came to the end of the decade?
Many struggles for political recognition were fought in the streets in the sixties; the battle for a more liberal state had its victories, but with the onset of the seventies, the United States began to face an economic crisis and a growing conservative backlash against the policies of President Johnson’s “Great Society.” The years of the Carter administration, 1977–1981, were years in which the difference between the sixties and seventies was becoming evident enough for those who had placed their hopes in the cultural collectivism of the earlier period. The U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, though a “victory” for peace, presented a setback for the U.S. military; many believed the United States and the USSR would find other grounds upon which to stage a more direct confrontation between the forces of communism and capitalism. Alarmist concern extended beyond the proliferation of nuclear arsenals—and the increasing number of countries with nuclear capabilities—to the “no nukes” movement which was against nuclear energy in all its guises.
The boredom Dylan speaks of has to do with the lack of direction in the arts and in rock music. The period of “revolutionary energies” was no longer influencing the mainstream of either politics or music. While not yet as bad as things would get—as Dylan’s glance ahead to the eighties suggests—the corporatism of U.S. culture was a dominant feature of commercial undertakings like films and popular music, creating hard realities for independent productions like Renaldo and Clara as the “art house cinema” was on its way to becoming a thing of the past in all but the largest cities. The late seventies could still claim holdovers and throwbacks in most media, with the only real provocations coming from the fringes. Otherwise, a peppy populism was the dominant note.
In England, the late seventies was the period of the transition from punk—at its most livid in 1976—to what was generally called “New Wave Music,” a style that expressed the bleaker, edgier, more mechanistic feel of the coming decade. Computer technology and digital technology, the cutting-edge tools of all media-based arts, led the way into the eighties. This constituted a major change in how “state of the art” recordings would be made, thus altering the expectations of the listening audience, so that Dylan’s fast and loose approach became even more outdated as studio engineers dismissed his preferred “live in the studio” method.
Rock is rather unforgiving of its aging practitioners, as there are always younger artists to set the tone and direction of the genre. Thanks to the baby boom at the end of World War II, the late seventies found a large number of persons hitting the transition from youth into the early stage of middle age. Certain figures who had long represented “the sixties”—and Dylan was preeminent among them—would become touchstones for the transition. Would they still appeal to the young? Would they keep their aging fans’ attention as the latter drifted into the cares of their maturity, in many cases distancing themselves—as the coming decade would show all too well—from the beliefs and passions of their youth? As the most visible figures for a generation moving toward its forties, artists like Dylan would face the challenge of “speaking to” and “speaking for” a generation loathe to surrender its youth. The viability of rock itself would come increasingly into question as the eighties progressed.
And what of Dylan? He had mythified certain aspects of his private life and was now a divorced father faced with the prospect of not only reimagining his erotic life, but also reinventing his creative life. What should be the guiding principles of the next phase of his career?
In February 1978, Dylan undertook a series of concerts in Japan. The markets of thriving Japan were eager for entertainment from the West, with Budokan arena in Tokyo becoming a popular venue where rock acts met with appreciative welcomes. There, Dylan debuted a new road show that traveled to Australia and back to Japan. Gone were the impromptu performances so valued in the Rolling Thunder Revue, replaced by very precise arrangements with an eight-piece band and backup singers. The new incarnation of Dylan was closer to the kind of “showman” one associated with the musical acts of his elders—most notably Elvis Presley, who had died in August 1977. In the decade after his 1969 “comeback,” Elvis had developed a Las Vegas show with a repertoire to appeal to his middle-aged fan base. Dylan, now in his late thirties, could be said to be reaching a moment that tests the career of many artists in a youth-based medium. With his influential earlier albums still available for those passing through the phase when Dylan’s idiosyncratic poetry stimulates the search for an authentic grasp of self and community, the current Dylan might become a self-parody or a nostalgia show. It is a credit to Dylan’s instincts and abilities as a performer that he became neither. The “big band” shows were both a respectful retrospective, as might be expected from an artist after more than a decade and a half of recording, and a reinvention of his sound and persona.
Dylan at Budokan, at first only a double LP tie-in for the audiences in Japan, recorded at shows early in the tour, was eventually released in the States in April 1979. Neither before nor since has Dylan shown himself in such glib command of all phases of his output. Dylan’s voice was strong and versatile in this period, enabling him to find surprisingly varied approaches to songs from all phases of his career. To do so, without revisiting again the hallowed folk movement, retreading the rockabilly shadings of The Band, or attempting an unlikely revisiting of the stoned ferocity of his youth, required considerable presence of mind. The innovation Dylan developed was the introduction of black backup singers who brought a soul inflection to the concerts and kept his vocals on point, as well as the use—for the first time in his career—of that most ubiquitous instrument of the late seventies, the saxophone.
The sax had long since lost its cultural associations with be-bop and jazz experimentation to become the preeminent instrument for mellow arrangements, aligning rock with the cooler and more sensual aspects of soul, R&B, and light jazz. The adoption of the saxophone as the lead instrument—accompanied by guitar, keyboards, violin, and Dylan’s trademark harmonica—breathed contemporary life into the Bob Dylan songbook. If this was “middle-of-the-road” rock, it was also a renovated approach to one of the great song catalogs of our times. “I Shall Be Released” on the Budokan album showcases the strengths of the new approach, which makes its case for seeing the song as a gospel-flavored show tune, complete with wailing sax and a big crescendo in each chorus. Other distinctive touches were the African-influenced drum patterns in “Oh Sister” and “One More Cup of Coffee,” and the use of flute to evoke the youthful detachment of songs like “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Love Minus Zero.” “It’s Alright, Ma” became a rocker along the lines of “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and “Don’t Think Twice” an easy-going reggae strut. On the 1978 tour, Dylan explored a range of musical settings for his best-known songs, and then, for most of the next decade, proceeded to apply those lessons in writing new material.
The tour made a great impression on fans and critics in Europe and England in the spring of 1978, though the concerts in the States in the summer and fall of 1978 did not meet with praise in the press. U.S. critics seemed eager to distance themselves from the taint of the sixties still associated with Dylan; others, to some extent proprietary about Dylan and ready to dismiss any wrinkle of his career that did not satisfy either a prescriptive sense of what rock “should be” or what Dylan’s historical position must be, tended to write off any contemporary version of Dylan’s music as posturing. While certainly professional and successful musical entertainments, the concerts were in no way confrontational or spontaneous. For the first time in his career, Dylan’s command of his material showed that his music could become an easily accessible version of contemporary rock. It was a sign of the times; one would be hard-pressed to find major rock acts—pace The Grateful Dead—courting spontaneity and “jamming” over carefully rehearsed solos and arrangements. Even Bruce Springsteen, new to playing in arenas, was performing shows that were more or less choreographed and thrilling audiences.
Eschewing the pickup bands on his last few records, Dylan recorded Street-Legal with a band that had already proven itself on the road, and the textured sound of Dylan’s live shows should have made for a musically satisfying album. Unfortunately, the recording process, at Dylan’s own rehearsal/recording space, Rundown Studios, overseen by Don DeVito, did not translate the stage polish of the band to the finished record. Rather than accept the methods of multitrack recording, which uses overdubs and individual tracking to make each instrument as pristine as possible, Dylan chose his characteristic live-in-the-studio method (Heylin 1995, 124–25). Street-Legal, released in June 1978, is certainly not all that it could be aurally. And yet in terms of its material, it is one of the strongest of Dylan’s albums from the seventies (as was perceived by critics and fans alike in Britain). U.S. rock fans and folk fans were perhaps put off by the backup singers, the saxophone, the sense of a “big production” poorly recorded, but for all that, the album gains a certain “cred” by not being a slick product. This is no Steely Dan album nor was it meant to be. The term “street-legal” designates an automobile passing the minimum level of drivability for an old clunker to be driven in public. The album is not pretty or state-of-the-art, but it gets where it needs to go.
Most of the songs continue Blood on the Track’s interrogation of romantic relations, though four songs develop the more imagery-driven style of a song like “Shelter from the Storm”: “Changing of the Guards,” “No Time to Think,” “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power),” and “O Where Are You Tonight (Journey Through Dark Heat).” These songs develop Dylan’s tendency to make big statements that transcend individual concerns with a more mythic perspective. “Guards” is a meditation on a world out of joint, with lyrical references toward the occult, the Tarot, and other mystical figures. Dylan’s vocals have not sounded this feverish in some time. The effort to simply get all the words out gives the song a propulsive urgency aided by backup singers offering choral “ooohs” for the first two lines of each verse and reciting the fourth after Dylan. The melody is given a sonorous treatment by Steven Douglas’s sax, creating a graceful counterpoint to the song’s chugging rhythm. While perhaps a bit too reedy and thin in its sound, this opening stream-of-consciousness track features many remarkable lines and shows that Dylan, in abandoning the narrative story songs featured on Desire, has found an imagistic style even less grounded in place or action than his older visionary songs. The constant refrain, “changing of the guards,” comes to seem a circumstance devoutly to be wished, as the song calls for a change well beyond those broached in “The Times, They Are A-Changin’.” Dylan, if not invoking an outright apocalypse—in the sense of revealed truth—is at least suggesting that the days of the powers that be are numbered: “‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I don’t need your organization / I’ve moved your mountains and marked your cards / But Eden is burning. Either get ready for elimination / Or your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.’” The song ends with one of Dylan’s most sweeping gestures toward revelation: “And cruel Death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating between the King and the Queen of Swords.” Death and the King and Queen of Swords are figures in the Tarot deck, and the line sounds like the outcome of a reading as well as suggesting a symbolic achievement that conquers death.
“No Time to Think” is even less focused, running through a lockstep lyric that nonetheless features entertaining rhymes and some brilliant throwaway lines. The cool delivery gives the song a tongue-in-cheek tone in the style of Dylan’s earlier comic songs. The quickness of the rhymes and the oddity of the associations—“betrayed by a kiss on a cool night of bliss in the valley of the missing link”—along with refrains consisting of four abstractions—“Socialism, hypnotism, patriotism, materialism” is a particularly memorable string—create an antic mood, as if the perspective of the song is that of a figure much like The Fool in the Tarot deck: a view that sees the world as “decoys / Through a set of deep turquoise / Eyes.” While insisting on the urgency of time—“there’s no time to think” is the line constantly repeated—the song manages to convey a sense of ring-around-the-rosy stasis, of circling through a barrage of images without any forward progress.
“Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” is one of the standout songs on the album, a darkly conceived first person address to a Yankee overlord. The voice seems to speak for an underclass abused by big business and the invasive, self-serving policies of the United States with regard to Latin American countries. The sound is chilling and sinister with lines that imply a need for change, violent if need be: “can you tell me where we’re headin’ / Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?” The perspective of the singer is bemused, perhaps even desperate—“this place don’t make sense to me no more”—with occasional segues into evocative if cryptic imagery: “a marching band still playing in that vacant lot”; “a gypsy with a broken flag and a flashing ring.” In the vein of a song like “All Along the Watchtower” or “One More Cup of Coffee,” “Señor” creates a mood of anticipation, tinged with dread, partaking of a foreboding fairly familiar in Dylan’s songs that here attains one of its most superlative instances.
The album’s final song is a rare vocal tour de force. “O Where Are You Tonight” builds to a frenzy as Dylan fires off verses extraordinary in their heroic claims: “I’ve bitten to the root / Of forbidden fruit / With the juice running down my leg”; “If you don’t believe there’s a price / For this sweet paradise / Just remind me to show you the scars.” The song has rarely been given its due among Dylan’s critics, though one senses that, if he were to sing the identical song in his characteristic mid-sixties’ Blonde on Blonde drawl, the song would be hailed as a masterpiece. As it is, the song’s instrumentation never quite achieves the recklessness of the lyrics, feeling, especially in the rather polite guitar solo at the end, more friendly than frenzied. Yet Dylan’s vocals offer much stabbing conviction, as in the delivery of the line “I won’t, but then again I might—O if I could just find you tonight!” The song seems addressed to a current muse, and the figure behind the invective of the song is a woman who, like “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” is not able to be pinned down. The song presents a dark night of the soul—or, as the subtitle would have it, a “journey through dark heat”—and ends the album with a resounding sense of Dylan as one who has been tested but who has come through. “If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived.”
What test? The other songs on the album add up to a consideration of the psychic disturbances of romantic love, from the sympathetic direct address of “Baby Stop Crying” to the quizzing of intentions in “Is Your Love in Vain”; to a rueful, if upbeat, sense of inevitable breakup in “True Love Tends to Forget”; to a straightforward consideration of going separate ways in “We Better Talk This Over”; to a sense of new erotic possibility in “New Pony.” “Baby Stop Crying,” a hit in Europe, finds Dylan offering a fairly conventional lyric about proving his love for a woman who has “been down to the bottom with a bad man.” The chorus, in its trio of repetition, is primarily a showcase for the backup singers who add a very savvy sense of emotional investment. “Love in Vain” spins out a form of questionnaire in which the singer makes demands of his lover, while also allowing for the difficulty of making love matter: “I’ve been burned before and I know the score, so you won’t hear me complain.” The overriding question is delivered twice, after sketching—in the voice of an eligibility quiz—the domestic comforts a woman can provide: “are you willing to risk it all?”
“True Love Tends to Forget” boasts some characteristic Dylan wit in its final couplet: “Don’t keep me knockin’ about from Mexico to Tibet” to rhyme with the title phrase. Elsewhere “this weekend in Hell is making me sweat.” The song doesn’t take its situation seriously—like “Don’t Think Twice,” “I Don’t Believe You,” and “Most Likely You Go Your Way,” the song shrugs at the inevitable sundering and refuses to pull its punches. “We Better Talk This Over” is even more canny in its appraisal of the impasse of lost passion: “You don’t have to be afraid of looking into my face / We’ve done nothing to each other time will not erase.” The position of the song makes it kin to some of the great broken romance songs on Blonde on Blonde—such as “One of Us Must Know”—or Blood on the Tracks’ “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome.” There’s a rueful sense of no longer wanting to indulge a love that has gone wrong—“two-faced and double-dealing”—while at the same time maintaining a testy independence—“I’m exiled and you can’t convert me.” The song includes one of the most clear-eyed couplets for the value of a concluded romance: “Don’t think of me and fantasize on what we’ve never had / Be grateful for what we’ve shared together and be glad.” Later in his career Dylan would team up with The Grateful Dead and even compose songs with Robert Hunter, Jerry Garcia’s lyricist; the feel of “Better Talk This Over” has the kind of positive spin The Dead are known for, while the shuffling groove of the song would not be out of place on the band’s 1979 album Shakedown Street.
The mention of conversion above is interesting in the light of Dylan’s subsequent conversion to Christianity during the 1978 tour; even more interesting is the line in “New Pony”: “baby, but that god that you been prayin’ to gonna give you back what you wishin’ on someone else.” The line takes the song’s image for a new lover—as a pony to “climb up on top of”—toward a statement of principles. The previous line mentions voodoo, and a will to wish ill on someone else through prayers to a pagan god. But regardless of what god is prayed to, the un-Christian idea of praying against someone brings a rebuke of such ill will. In the midst of a bawdy song of sexual ascendancy, suggesting the costs of having to shoot one pony (named “Lucifer”) only to find a better one, Dylan testifies to a sense of vocation. With a funky blues delivery, the line rings with the kind of “touch me not” sentiment found in lines like “don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’ I just might tell you the truth.”
Despite its at times uninspired recording, Street-Legal, with its songs full of the need to arrive at a personal vision of truth, is the last great Dylan album for some time. Songs like “New Pony” and “O Where Are You Tonight?” go furthest to show the extent of the estrangement Dylan might be feeling at this point—not only from his family, friends, and fans but even from his earlier personae. The songs about romance are deft and economical and the visionary songs show Dylan to be awash in cryptic images and language he is struggling to master. One might expect a turn from such complexity to songs more simple and straightforward. Slow Train Coming, the album released fifteen months later, would find Dylan ditching his more tangled self-conceptions in pursuit of the simplicity of soul that befits a true Christian. This unprecedented change in direction had mixed results.
I follow God, so if my followers are following me, indirectly they’re gonna be following God too, because I don’t sing any song which hasn’t been given to me by the Lord to sing.
—Bob Dylan to Bruce Heiman, KMEX (Tucson, Arizona) (273)
The extremity of the position stated above, in an interview Dylan gave on the radio while on tour in 1979, nearly four months after the release of Slow Train Coming, illustrates why Dylan at this time perplexed his fans anew, and more so than ever before. While the switch from the folk song to rock and surreal poetry had been jarring, making his listeners question whatever they believed they already knew about Bob Dylan, the change to singing only songs that carried a message of belief in Jesus Christ was even more astonishing. Dylan presented his new music as not only an artistic departure but also as having a different relation both to himself and his listeners. To “follow” him now, as a fan or as a casual listener, was to “follow God.” While other artists Dylan admired—notably Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash—had often sung devotional songs and made statements about their efforts to be followers of Christ, Dylan took the sense of devotion to a further extreme, as if any former purposes as an artist/entertainer or as a writer/performer were irrelevant. The absolutism of the change drew critical flak even as it impressed some with its commitment.
Those who caught Dylan’s shows in 1979 and 1980, besides hearing new songs played with great conviction by a crack touring band, encountered a new Bob Dylan: a proselytizing preacher, a man with a message he was no longer content to let his songs enunciate, rapping between songs with his audience about faith in Christ. The need for Christ, in Dylan’s mini-sermons, had to do not only with one’s personal salvation but with the ultimate fate of the world. Dylan often offered doomsday pronouncements, indicating that whoever did not discover Christ soon, for real, risked losing everything “when He returns.” Dylan’s conversion was not simply a decision to “get religion” for the sake of “a closer walk with Thee,” but was couched in terms of eschatological prophecy, of ideas about “end times” and “the last days.” Rather than a believer spreading the joyful news, Dylan sounded like an Old Testament prophet, calling down God’s wrath on an atheistic, materialistic, immoral world—in the name of Jesus.
For a writer who had, in his youth, presented listeners with songs like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “With God on Our Side,” and “When the Ship Comes In,” the tone of these pronouncements was not unfamiliar. Dylan’s early work at times alluded to planetary destruction, to World War III, and described the world as a modern Babylon without values or peace of mind. With John Wesley Harding, Dylan had shown his ability to construct modern fables, to brood upon the state of his own soul, and to find the message of love. The vision of love that concluded that landmark album—the love of a man and a woman—was not enough to sustain the mature search for meaning that came in the wake of his own failed marriage and, it seems, a loss of conviction about his own ability as a writer to discover truth in his own “message.” In other words, Dylan’s crisis at the end of the seventies was fueled both by his personal needs and by a more general feeling of crisis in the world at large. According to his biographer, Howard Sounes, women close to him at the time, such as Mary Alice Artes and Carolyn Dennis, who was also a member of Dylan’s band and eventually his second wife, were instrumental in his move toward Christ, but other musicians in his circle had converted as well (324–25). Dylan tells the story of a conversion moment or “born-again experience” while on tour in 1978 (Hilburn, 279, 281).
For all its turmoil, the sixties represented only the early stages of the Cold War, with less developed nuclear capabilities and, in the West, unprecedented prosperity. By the end of the seventies, the bite of economic crisis had become a concept: “stagflation,” with low growth, low wages, high prices. And, with the oil crisis, the costs of the gas-guzzling lifestyle of the modern world became evident, causing anxieties about the parts of the world—particularly the Arab world—whose oil supplies the “first world” relied on to a great extent. For some, the sense of global crisis was very much in the air as the eighties dawned, with the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 inspiring prophets of doom to foresee an imminent Armageddon. What’s more, this was the period of such events as the Three Mile Island accident at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, so that the sense of a world imperiled by nuclear power set off more doomsayers. For some, such events bring to mind biblical prophecies, in the belief that any major catastrophe or cataclysm must be in keeping with God’s plan for mankind. Such associations were by no means rare or obscure, with books like Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth trumpeting how biblical prophecies could be interpreted to identify the 1980s as the time of Christ’s second coming. First published in 1970, the book played to fundamentalist fears, and the film version was one of the top-grossing movies of 1979. Christianity, both in its millennial variety and in its populist reach through televangelists, had become a viable platform from which to condemn everything from abortion to homosexuality, calling for a strict interpretation of the Bible to determine civil policies. Such self-righteous judgments on the modern world in the name of Christ would be with us well into our current century.
Dylan’s new direction capitalized on this spirit. Slow Train Coming, released in August 1979, was much better received than Street-Legal (the first Dylan album since Another Side not to crack the Top 10). Slow Train reached number 3 in the United States and earned Dylan a Grammy for Rock Vocal Performance, Male, for the lead song “Gotta Serve Somebody.” One reason for the album’s success was that Dylan found in Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett producers able to record with both slickness and muscle. The record meets the AOR requirements of a smooth radio sound, abetted by the sinuous guitar of Mark Knopfler. Knopfler, the lead guitar, voice, and songwriter for Dire Straits, had not yet attained the mega-stardom that would come in the mid-eighties, but he had already created a radio-friendly sound with the hit “Sultans of Swing.” That said, Slow Train can best be described as having a great side 1 and a rather spotty side 2, with only “When He Returns,” the closer, offering a song of sufficient quality to match the album’s first side. Still, the combination of production and musicians on Slow Train proved effective, and Dylan’s Christ-centered message reached a wide audience.
And yet there was considerable resistance to the message when it dominated Dylan’s shows. Such was the typical disjunction between Dylan’s albums and the expectations surrounding his performances. For some, Dylan should be a greatest hits machine, forever recreating a long-gone heyday. Those better informed might avoid the concerts altogether, preferring some more secular version of rock and roll salvation. Those who wanted to hear Dylan’s new music played with maximum conviction were ecstatic at his shows.
The album’s hit, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” achieves a better mix of female singers with the overall sound than anything on the previous album (with the possible exception of “New Pony”), giving the song a richer texture, its bass and drums creating a percolating groove, as if ready to bubble over into outright funk at any moment. The song feels at times quite lighthearted—with the aside “You can call me Bobby, you can call me Zimmy”—and also slyly taunting, offering a litany of situations that might occur before one finds the Lord, much like the possibilities in which “they’ll stone ya” in “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.” Here, the exhortation is that one will have to “serve somebody”: the devil or the Lord. The urgency of the singing at times lifts the song from the fanciful into a register that makes the promise of a coming revelation convincing. Dylan cannily announces his conversion with a song that plays with his listeners, tossing off rhymes and affecting the stance of a glib preacher reaching his audience through his savoir faire rather than his humility.
“Precious Angel” is an example of how a great sound—with horns, Knopfler’s liquid guitar fills, and girl-group backing vocals embellishing lines like, “you either got faith or you got unbelief and there ain’t no neutral ground”—tempers the message of Dylan’s new music. The swankiness of the track emphasizes that God’s mercy may be best found embodied in a woman who can “torch up the night.” There are some truly odd lines—“but there’s violence in the eyes, girl, because our forefathers were slaves / Let us hope they’ve found mercy in their bone-filled graves”—and a new version of Dylan’s characteristic whine in “I just couldn’t make it by myself, I’m a little too blind to seeee-heeee.” The song, not wholly successful, shows Dylan’s verbal imagination struggling to find images to embody his new convictions. As might be expected, a Christian message, in Dylan’s terms, might take some odd turns: “On the way out of Egypt, through Ethiopia, to the judgment hall of Christ.” Dylan may well be identifying with the Hebrew exodus from Egypt, here coming to Christianity due to the influence of “Ethiopia,” standing perhaps for his black girlfriends, all of whom may have influenced his move to gospel, though it seems Mary Alice Artes was the main catalyst (Sounes 317–26).
The third track is where Slow Train Coming really arrives. Here Knopfler’s fills are more supportive than distracting and the vocal from Dylan, while edging toward a kind of lovesick bleat at times, achieves a restrained dignity in most of the verses. The song lays out a reworking of an old blues conceit: being persecuted for one’s beliefs or for one’s love, here one and the same. Dylan’s singer is a man whose friends will forsake him, but who begs to be “set apart from all the plans they do pursue.” It might seem an oddly separatist credo—rather than uniting all in the true faith—as the singer insists that, though shunned and misunderstood, his belief in “You” will not be swayed. The song demonstrates an effective yoking together of the belief in God’s love and the belief that a lover finds in his beloved. The success of the song is in Dylan’s skill at evoking “the blues” of both kinds of love.
“Slow Train,” more or less the title track, is a rare lyrical tour de force in this period of Dylan’s writing. The attitude of the song is rather prickly for a Christian, with Dylan, in the era of the oil crisis, railing against OPEC—“shieks walking around like kings, wearing fancy jewels and nose rings, deciding America’s future from Amsterdam and Paris.” If Dylan seems an unlikely patriot—think only of his “115th Dream”—the sentiment is much in keeping with the Christian U.S. view of “the infidels” of the Muslim nations. The “with God on our side” ideal that Dylan had held up for sharp scrutiny in his song of that title seems to underwrite the idea that the United States, in its status as a self-defining “Christian nation,” is morally superior to the nations of unbelievers. In the name of this rather reactionary God, the song is generally cranky toward the singer’s contemporaries, or “companions”—“all their earthly principles they’re gonna have to abandon.” But when has a holier-than-thou attitude been delivered with such a strong groove? And Dylan, enlightened by his conviction of true belief, effectively distances himself from the high-priced charlatans professing Jesus on the airwaves of the United States, taking aim at “nonbelievers and men stealers talkin’ in the name of religion,” while throwing down a gauntlet for the godly: “they talk about a life of brotherly love—show me someone who knows how to live it.” Knopfler’s guitar helps create the barbed vibe of the song, a coiled rant by someone feeling “lowdown and disgusted.”
Side 2 starts with “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking,” which speaks of a woman who can “do the Georgia Crawl” and “walk in the spirit of the Lord,” while telling us that heaven and earth were made about the same time. With a little more work, the song might have said something interesting about the change in Dylan’s thinking, but as it is, the singer simply spouts homilies. “When You Gonna Wake Up” runs further afield, yoking together Marx and Henry Kissinger and offers: “There’s a man named Christ and He been crucified for you / Believe in His power, that’s about all you gotta do.” As fulfilling as that thought might be for the faithful, it offers little as a claim for belief in Christ or even as a statement about what his belief in Christ means for Dylan. Elsewhere there are pat put-downs that sound like the views of any armchair curmudgeon: “Adulterers in churches and pornography in the schools / Gangsters in power and lawbreakers making rules.” Certainly, Dylan, like a Mr. Jones surveying the current world, might be moved to say “Oh my God, am I here all alone?” The song deserves better verses as its chorus, in a gospel-inflected blues, asks the rhetorical question: “when you gonna wake up, strengthen the things that remain”—a phrase cribbed from the Bible that Dylan puts to good effect.
Two other songs on the side are essentially good musical grooves that have little to say. “Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others),” as the catchiest song on the album, is brighter than “Serve Somebody,” reciting a host of “don’t wannas” that might strike Dylan’s listeners as reminiscent of “All I Really Want to Do”; in both cases the pronouncements are good natured, and the refrain, “Do right to me baby and I’ll do right to you too / You got to do onto others like you’d have them do unto you,” takes a tenet of scripture and makes it singable and danceable. “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” provides a shuffling dance with a hypnotic repetitive rhythm as it reels off “just so stories” about how Adam, as the Bible tells it, named all the creatures of the earth. The rhymes are simplistic, aiming at the whimsy of a children’s nursery song without quite achieving it. The lyrics of the song were eventually made into a children’s book.
Finally, Dylan saves the best for last. “When He Returns” shows that, in the hands of a fertile writer such as Dylan, even a topic as hoary as the imminent Second Coming can find a striking presentation. Set against stark piano, the song could be seen as the antidote to the shattered values of “Dirge” (from Planet Waves). There, Dylan voiced a darkly jaded feeling that saw through love as merely prideful and self-serving. Here, trust in Christ has the power to redeem such a fallen world, offering a vision of Christ as—using a metaphor Christ applied to himself—“a thief in the night.” The song also effectively cites Christ’s line “he who has ears to hear, let him hear” to suggest that, like Christ, Dylan’s songs are aimed only for ears that can grasp their spiritual value. “It is only He who can reduce me to tears,” Dylan sings, capturing the change in his outlook much more effectively than the ranting elsewhere on the album. Delivered in a stringent vocal that caterwauls into oddly drawn-out phrases on each fourth line, “When He Returns,” is a tour de force, presenting Dylan as a seeker grappling with the power of his own faith: “How long can you falsify and deny what is real / How long can you hate yourself for the weakness you conceal?” Recalling “you have no secrets to conceal” in “Like a Rolling Stone,” the line aims to unmask the vanity of living without God, as if we are all “Miss Lonely” and rock and roll is no longer the answer, if it ever was.
Sharp in his condemnations of the modern world, Dylan makes his faith on Slow Train Coming sound judgmental and opportunistic, a way of setting himself apart from and above others while also enjoying hot times with church-going ladies. But in the final song on the album—while still threatening the end of the world upon Christ’s return—Dylan’s grasp of how identification with Christ drives the chariot of Christianity in both its power and its humility begins to come through. One begins to believe he really means what he’s singing about, that the return of Christ is imminent and necessary. And yet there is still much doubt as to whether the message of Christ is best for Dylan’s songs, and even more, whether Dylan’s songs are the best settings for Christ’s message. It is clear, however, that Dylan has found a belief in something beyond human history and beyond the present: heaven, as the realm of God and of the eternal, matters to him as an answer to dark doubts about his fellow man. Christ is still primarily a prophet to Dylan, as he is in the Jewish tradition. Crucial to Dylan’s Christ is his status as the prophet who fulfilled his own prophecy—in dying and being raised from the dead—and who will yet fulfill the prophecy about coming in judgment at the end of human time. Ron Rosenbaum’s reaction to the album was maybe best: “Perhaps we’re lucky he’s only claimed he’s found Jesus; it wouldn’t be totally surprising if he claimed he was Jesus” (Thompson, 236).
Saved, the follow-up “Born Again” album, was released in the brutal summer of 1980, when a heat wave in the central and southern United States caused over a thousand deaths, joined by a drought of almost biblical proportions. Such “hell on earth” conditions might inspire more credence for an imminent heavenly intervention. The album, however, did not garner nearly the attention, sales, or critical approval of its predecessor. In general, Saved feels as if Dylan has become the celebrant of a rock-gospel cult of Christ. The music is infectious and, much more than on the previous LP, imparts the sense that belief in Christ is an upbeat and joyous affair. Four of the songs, “Saved,” “Solid Rock,” “Pressing On,” and “Are You Ready,” have the enthusiasm of a prayer meeting, making the album a genuine gospel effort. The performances, delivered with Dylan’s usual live-in-the-studio recording technique, are not as fully successful as they might be, partly because one feels that this music, perhaps more than any other album in Dylan’s career, would benefit from a live audience. But Tim Drummond’s melodic bass guitar in “Solid Rock” is a distinct pleasure, while “Pressing On” rocks with a full head of steam provided by the impassioned backup singers. The songs attest the joy at being “saved” by Christ’s sacrifice, stating confidence in the “solid rock” of faith, finding a duty to be “pressing on” against doubts, and finally, giving an exhortation to be “ready” for Armageddon. Obviously, only those with God on their side will be overjoyed at the ultimate destruction of this fallen world. Dylan’s lyrics stop short of calling for “the Rapture”—the actual bodily lifting of the faithful up into heaven—but the implication is that being saved means not only release from punishment for sins committed on earth but from the earth’s inevitable destruction.
The other four original compositions include a love song to a woman (“Covenant Woman”), a love song to Christ (“What Can I Do for You”), a song of personal testimony (“Saving Grace”), and a narrative testimony (“In the Garden”). “Covenant Woman” repeats some of the sentiments of “Precious Angel,” though without the more abrasive flights of imagery; the song is heartfelt and humble, with the singer thanking God for a woman to whom he feels “closer than any friend.” The song’s uplift depends upon seeing a romantic relationship in terms of God’s plan—“he must’ve loved me oh so much to send me someone as fine as you.” When “profane” or sexual love must first be understood in Christian terms, we might say the conversion is complete. More interesting is “What Can I Do for You” which, like “I Believe in You,” addresses what feels like a secular love song to Christ, but unlike the earlier song, here the emphasis is not on the persecutions the speaker endures for his faith, but rather on Christ’s unrepayable sacrifice. “You’ve done it all and there’s nothing anyone else can pretend to do” sums up the singer’s sense of debt to Christ, but also his sense that Christ has achieved all that matters. It’s a strong testament of faith and, as with other songs of Dylan’s that feature rhetorical questions, makes its strongest case as a questioning of one’s own pride.
“In the Garden” is one of the more successful Christian songs, again using rhetorical questions, this time to recount scenes from the life of Christ. The song presents stark but effective sketches of Christ as a teacher, healer, and savior and articulates the outlook of the faithful toward the unbelievers: did they know, did they see, did they hear, did they dare speak out against him? Each time asking whether “they” grasped the meaning of Christ’s presence and concluding with the question, “when He rose from the dead, did they believe?” The last question, one of the key doctrines in belief in Christ as God, arrives with considerable force as the question that puts all the others into perspective. The song is an effective reworking of events from the Gospels to ask the central questions of the Christian faith and to voice its status in a world of unbelievers. Of all the Christian songs Dylan wrote in this period, “In the Garden” remained in his return to secular concerts in the eighties.
On Saved, the heartfelt piano tune is “Saving Grace,” and unlike Slow Train’s “When He Returns” and its disquisition on the Second Coming, the subject is a personal testament to Christ’s power. Dylan opens with a line of humility: “If You find it in Your heart can I be forgiven”—we might think he’s addressing a lover, or possibly even his fans, only to find that he’s speaking to his Savior. The song has the kind of ready defiance of nonbelievers that Dylan once reserved for the Mr. Joneses of this world. Dylan’s model might be a well-known hymn like “Amazing Grace” in asserting that “grace” is what saves the sinner from perdition. Much less a “wretch” than the singer of “Amazing Grace,” Dylan seems to take pride in his ability to endure.
The quest for Christ’s grace inspires these two albums, but Dylan’s attempts to describe his faith tend to come off heavy-handed. Granted, the position of the singer in any of Dylan’s songs can be quite mercurial. His love songs run a wide gamut from hurt and reproachful to expansive and jovial, from mystical to bawdy, from romantic to callous. There seems no reason his attempts to register the effect of Christ’s love in his heart should be any different. What is off-putting to listeners who have sought their own individual, at times highly creative, meanings in Dylan’s songs is that the songs on Slow Train Coming and Saved do not admit the same degree of interpretive latitude. And if that is also true of some of his love songs, the difference is that the love songs speak from a truly universal position of a lover addressing or describing a beloved. When the “loved one” becomes the Lord, the emotions must circumscribe an individual relation to a higher power. Whether or not we feel called to share in Dylan’s faith before God, we must also decide whether Dylan’s claims about his faith and his version of Christ resonate. Many of the songs do, and in that sense they succeed, but Dylan’s phrases seem at times deliberately antagonistic, at times clumsy, and often indulge a contemptuous, un-Christ-like dismissal of those who haven’t accepted Christ.
Saved is the last Dylan album, to date, with an entirely Christian theme.[1] The next album, Shot of Love, released in August 1981, is more eclectic and for that reason more satisfying. As a transitional document, Shot of Love is interesting and even more so when one considers that the album exists in two different versions: a potential and an actual. “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar,” a track recorded for the LP and released as a B-side to the single “Heart of Mine,” was subsequently, in CD versions, added to the album. There were other songs written for the album and suppressed as well, most notably “Caribbean Wind” and “Angelina,” two songs with the kind of vibrant stream of consciousness Dylan had not indulged in since Street-Legal.[2]
On Shot of Love, Dylan’s position toward the Christian faith is most in evidence in the song “Property of Jesus.” Written in the tone of Dylan’s put-down songs, “Property” takes aim as critics who denigrated Dylan’s conversion, suggesting they are jealous of his righteousness, “because he can’t be bribed or bought by the things that you adore.” The jibe that his critics “resent him to the bone” for being “the property of Jesus,” would act as the proverbial “red rag” to many critics’ bull. Other songs express a relation to Christ that is more subtle, delivered in the title track with a funky R&B vibe due in part to Bumps Blackwell sitting in as producer and, in “Dead Man, Dead Man,” a loose shuffle, complete with sax and wailing background vocals. Dylan’s religious fervor, we might say, is moving away from gospel toward something with more “street cred.” Add to the mix the straight-ahead blues tune “Trouble”—a song that simply describes the fallen world without making any gestures about its end or salvation—to see that Dylan is arriving at a unique gospel-blues sound.
Love songs on Shot of Love move toward the secular, but with a more high-minded sense of love’s benefits than in songs typically addressed to a beloved. In fact, “Heart of Mine” addresses the singer’s own heart, exhorting it to not pursue an unworthy, perhaps adulterous, affair—“If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.” The version released on the album enlists Ron Wood, of The Rolling Stones, and Ringo Starr, the former Beatle, and for that reason might be considered a notable track, if only to find these three friends together in the studio. The song is loose, off-the-cuff, sounding more like a rehearsal than a finished track. Such would be the nature of most of Dylan’s albums in the eighties. Sessions, often with some famous sidemen sitting in, would yield a few tracks that might never be given a definitive treatment, with neither overdubs nor better takes. Likewise, “Watered Down Love” sounds a bit lopsided; the recording aims for a pop buoyancy, with horns playing the hook, whereas on tour the song had a leaner, hard-rock sound. In other words, even apart from decisions about which tracks to finish and include, the decision about how a song should sound on a record starts to seem increasingly arbitrary, with this album in particular receiving many reworkings with different participants. The problem is less a lack of commitment to the material and more an uncertainty about how to make an album in which all the songs fit and contribute to the whole.
Even so, Shot of Love features three standout songs and a fourth so peculiar it merits some comment. The title song is a blast of soul and an indication of how far Dylan is able to go from the kind of music that made his reputation. With the emphatic background vocals at times almost dominating the song, and with the aggressive R&B sound of the rhythm section and Steve Douglas’s sax, the song seems to blast out in an entirely new direction for Dylan. And in its lyrics, the sanctimony of some of the previous Christ-beholden songs has been tempered by the sense of humor that had been lacking in recent work. The litany of atrocities committed against the singer—“you only murdered my father, raped his wife, tattooed my babies with a poison pen, mocked my God, humiliated my friends”—mounts with a sense of the absurd, even as it gives voice to some of Dylan’s concerns: the mocking of “his god” by those who don’t accept his conversion, as well as, figuratively, murdering “The Father,” a glance at the atheistic stance of those for whom “God is dead.” The song is appealing in its ability to convey the themes of a fallen, godless world that Dylan, in a kind of pilgrim’s progress, feels called upon to explore, but the terms are more in keeping with the stance of anyone who is looking for truth in a false world. Jesus gets mentioned but in such a way as to make his presence in the song a source of tension: “like the men who followed Jesus when they put a price upon His head.” In other words, a reference to the moment at which one either stays the course or cuts and runs. Even the possible Rapture gets deflated: “Called home, everybody seems to have moved away / My conscience is beginning to bother me today.” The “shot of love,” then could be both profane and spiritual. We could say that Dylan is looking for something new again.
“In the Summertime” is a mature love song, able to look back on a remarkable affair and speak of it with respect rather than regret. What could be a mournful song of lost youth—the “summertime” of young love and regard—becomes instead a reflection on how the lessons of the past build mansions in the future: “and I’m still carrying the gift you gave, it’s a part of me now, it’s been cherished and saved, it’ll be with me unto the grave and then into eternity.” Without overstating the possible “life after death” that his Christian faith makes available, Dylan suggests the possibility of an endless love, the kind that might be shareable, ultimately, only with one’s Creator. The song begins: “I was in your presence for an hour or so, or was it a day, I truly don’t know,” a statement that could more easily address the fleeting feeling of God’s presence in one’s life than a lover’s absence, but at the same time, the lyric lets us see how the moment of recognized love, whenever it occurs and of whatever duration, is the point. The virtue of feeling creates the moment that shall not pass away. Learning the language of Christ’s love, as both sacrifice and promise of life everlasting, has deepened Dylan’s vocabulary in singing about earthly love.
And a new humility that comes with the realization that there is something beyond the artist’s own self-conceptions is present in two other songs on the album. In “Lenny Bruce,” Dylan attempts to sum up his feelings for a more or less contemporary figure greater than himself. The occasion for the song, we might suppose, is that Dylan, having written about his sense of persecution for his newfound faith, conjures up another figure who “showed the wise men of his day to be nothing more than fools.” In other words, there’s still something of a soapbox in this tribute to the taboo-breaking comedian, but at the same time there is sincere awe that finds in someone who “just had the insight to rip off the lid before its time” a source of inspiration: “he was the brother that you never had.” Dylan seems unable to pay tribute in song to any but a fallen hero, but here the terms of the tribute suggest the accomplishment: “he fought a war on a battlefield where every victory hurt.”
The final song on the album is even more remarkable as Dylan takes stock of the period of strong personal belief which, if not ending, is at least changing. “Every Grain of Sand” shows Dylan trying to assess the wisdom and humility that comes with belief in something greater—whether we call that God’s love or a divine plan or simply “meaning.” The song opens with the soul-searching sense of coming to terms with events—“In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need.” The lyrics abound in genitive abstractions: “the morals of despair,” “the flowers of indulgence,” “the weeds of yesteryear,” “the memory of decay,” “the mirror of loneliness.” Because Dylan is not prone to such phrases, we can assume that there is a particular reason for such constructions, which are generally regarded as lacking in specificity. In this case, the effect is deliberate—we hear nothing of the actual confession or of what provokes the “deepest need”; instead, the song uses abstractions to support its sense of “sub specie aeternitatis”—the need for universal application beyond any individual’s experience. The reflection “every hair is numbered like every grain of sand,” a proverb in itself, epitomizes the sense that all of creation has its place and serves its purpose in the whole. Stripped of any images that would situate the song in a specific time and place, “Every Grain of Sand” makes its claim upon the timeless state of “hanging in the balance of the reality of man”—a phrase that would be rather ponderous if not for the delicate delivery and the solemn tone of the song. Dylan caps off this reflective tune with one of the most lyrical and meditative harmonica solos he has ever recorded.
With this song, positioning his own needs within a divine framework that includes all of mankind and all of the earth, Dylan might well choose to rest from his labors. There would not be a new album for two years and that album would be the start of a time of searching and veering about for a course by which to steer not only his recording career but also the very creativity that sustains it.
In an interview with Mikal Gilmore in 2012 about Tempest, Dylan states that he had “wanted to make something more religious.” When finally asked about that remark by Gilmore, he mentions “Newly written songs, but ones that are traditionally motivated . . . like a ‘Just a Closer Walk With Thee’” (44, 51). Perhaps further Christian songs will be forthcoming.
These two songs seem to be referred to by Dylan in an interview in 1981 with Neil Spencer, though he doesn’t name either. “Angelina” seems to be the song he likens to “Visions of Johanna,” while “Caribbean Wind” would be the song that “goes way back and then it’s brought up to the present” (179–80). The latter was released on Biograph, in a live version, and “Angelina” on The Bootleg Series Vol. 1–3.