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 counterculture 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.
It was time to move on: Dylan could always sense that truth. At the Warfield Theater on 15 November 1980, he had cajoled Mike Bloomfield to the stage. The guitarist who had stood with Dylan during the tempest of the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, who had helped to make Highway 61 Revisited the gravitational force of 1960s music, played with real vehemence that night on ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and on a new song, ‘The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar’. Though every date he mentioned was wrong, Dylan had told the audience the story – had told a story – of how he and his guest had first met. A fine tribute had then been paid to the blues prodigy who ‘just played circles around anything I could play’. Afterwards, Dylan invited Bloomfield to join the band on a permanent basis, or so it was said, but the guitar player had ceased to be fit for that kind of work. Heroin had claimed all of his attention years before. Three months after the show, Bloomfield, just 37, had died of an overdose.
Eras sometimes end several times over, with every appearance of finality. In January 1981, Playboy had published a long interview in which the unmistakable, disobliging voice of John Lennon could be heard pronouncing on everything under the sun and all parts beyond. Asked at one point if he found it ‘distressing’ that Dylan had become a born-again Christian, Lennon had replied:
For whatever reason he’s doing it, it is personal for him and he needs to do it. But the whole religion business suffers from the ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ bit. There’s too much talk about soldiers and marching and converting. I’m not pushing Buddhism, because I’m no more a Buddhist than I am a Christian, but there’s one thing I admire about the religion: there’s no proselytizing.
There had been no opportunity for Dylan to respond, even if he had felt so inclined. On 8 December 1980, a deranged fan by the name of Mark David Chapman, an individual with a direct line to God and a grievance against Lennon’s ‘blasphemy’ in once comparing the popularity of Jesus with the popularity of the Beatles, had put four bullets from a .38 Special into the singer on a wintry New York street. Another small part of Dylan’s universe had been chipped away. Afterwards he had been entitled to wonder about the things that might have been passing through the disordered minds of some of his own alleged fans. If peace-loving retired Beatles attracted homicidal losers, what lay in wait from those who hated what once they had loved about Bob Dylan? He had seen his share of fixated admirers and obsessive true believers. If he had read Playboy’s interview with John and Yoko, however, he might also have noticed his old, distant friend and sometime rival scorning the worship of dead heroes. ‘God willing, there are another 40 years of productivity to go,’ Lennon had said. Not for him. In this, as in so many things, he and Dylan had parted company.
*
A vastly better album could have been assembled from Shot of Love’s outtakes than the album the artist chose to release. Bootlegs, legal and illegal, still prove the point. Listen to those tracks once or twice and it becomes an indisputable point. Dylan worked on the set, on and off, from the first recording of ‘Every Grain of Sand’ late in September 1980 all the way through to the final sessions of May 1981. For him, that was a long stretch and an unprecedented effort. In the end, all the labour served only to show that there was a fine balance to be struck between his belief in spontaneity and the need for second thoughts. It was a balance Dylan could not achieve. What killed Shot of Love, in essence, was that he got bored with his own best songs long before the album was complete. Given too much time to think, he wound up ripping the heart from the work. A precedent was established.
The biggest loss was a song entitled ‘Caribbean Wind’. Next among the gold discarded for the sake of dross was a piece called ‘Angelina’. ‘The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar’, a track that succeeded in its lyrics as often as it failed musically – through no lack of trying – would be restored to Shot of Love when the CD format came along. The summary judgement remains, nevertheless, that Dylan lost the ability to catch quicksilver. If he tried to get through the loathed recording process in one as-live rush he was betting everything on a single throw of the dice and liable to lose. If, on the other hand, he tried to imitate the painstaking habits of his contemporaries, if he submitted to the industrial processes of the music industry, something inside of him died.
Bruce Springsteen’s The River was the number-one album in America when Dylan and his band took the stage at the Warfield. It had been a year and a half in the making. Dylan could disparage that kind of obsessive effort – and disparage Springsteen, in those days – but if sales were any guide the results spoke for themselves. Shot of Love consumed eight and a half months of the artist’s life, if mixing and overdubs are taken into account. A great many rehearsals were staged at Rundown before tapes rolled. Producers came and went. For the first time in his career, driven to distraction, Dylan became one of their number. He had never spent so long making a record. Yet the upstart Springsteen had put in twice as much effort and emerged with the prize. The River was at number one for the entire month of November 1980. Shot of Love got to number 33 late in August 1981.
Dylan simply could not work in the way others worked. For him, the songs existed in their moment. Others could rave about some old, discarded piece of tape. If the essence of a song couldn’t be caught in the first moments of creativity it was dead and gone. With Shot of Love Dylan tried and failed to cure himself of the attitude. He tried different studios, different arrangements, different groups of musicians. Yet he could not find an environment to suit his preferred methods. In the making of the album he simply wound up fiddling and tinkering, attempting numerous versions of numerous songs in numerous styles. That was one clue to all the problems he would face in the 1980s. He didn’t truly know what he wanted.
In 1981, at least two Bob Dylans had begun to contend for possession of the microphone. The album’s biggest failure was in the attempt to unite them, to mix the overtly religious and the apparently non-religious. Dylan still had his Christian faith and wrote accordingly. But he had also realised – it is not clear exactly when or how – that there were other things he wanted to say, or rather other ways in which he wanted to be heard. ‘Every Grain of Sand’, by far the best thing on the album – though a good argument can be made for the alternative version done with Jennifer Warnes – is the paramount case in point. It is, unambiguously, a religious song: most listeners get that far. Those who notice the hymn-like quality it shares with Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ are noticing what is obvious and true. But this is no joyous celebration of simple belief. It would not have suited the Vineyard’s evangelising purposes. This song stresses what Dylan explained when he said that conversion was difficult and painful. ‘Every Grain of Sand’ is an acknowledgement that when the believer raises his gaze from the pages of his Bible, when he pauses in his praises, life goes on, difficult and perplexing. Slow Train Coming and Saved had not paid much attention to that fact. Shot of Love, in construction and intent, is concerned with little else. Yet only in this one song does it succeed in achieving its purpose. ‘Every Grain of Sand’ is, aptly, the album’s single redeeming feature. Dylan could have spent the rest of his eternity in the studio and he would still have failed to transmute the other songs he chose to release into anything of real value. A couple, ‘Heart of Mine’ and ‘In the Summertime’, are bearable: that’s about the best you can say. The rest dishonour Dylan’s art and do no credit to his faith.
The detail is not incidental. The artist’s travails amid his ‘Christian trilogy’ did not arise, as he seemed to want to believe, simply from secular prejudice. His problems had a lot to do with the kind of faith he was expressing and, above all, with the way in which he chose to express it. Too often, the godly Dylan sounded like the opposite of a Christian. Besides which, the music wasn’t up to much. Paul Nelson, one of the best critics he ever had, noticed as much in a Rolling Stone review of Shot of Love. Throughout most of the album, Nelson wrote, ‘Bob Dylan sounds more like an irate child who’s just been spanked than a grown man who’s found the answer of answers.’ Nelson had begun his review with this:
Truth be known, my initial reaction was just another example of the old and familiar Bob Dylan syndrome: i.e., because the man’s past achievements have meant so much to so many of us, we tend to give his newest work the benefit of every doubt. No more. For me, it stops right here. Unfortunately, except for ‘Every Grain of Sand’, Shot of Love seldom gets any more interesting than that first listening. Quite the opposite, in fact.5
The reviewer went on to assault the tenor of the album. It was not an attack on the music or the songwriting – though Nelson got around to those – but an attack on the artist himself. This Dylan, bathed in God’s love or not, was simply unpleasant, a sanctimonious egomaniac.
By not appreciating the genius of Bob Dylan’s current material, we’re supposedly crucifying him, even though he’s awfully handy with the hammer and nails himself. Dullards that we are, we can’t understand God. We don’t understand Dylan. Our love is no damn good (‘Watered-Down Love’). We’re barely alive (‘Dead Man, Dead Man’). Therefore, each and every one of us can go to hell.
Well, fuck that. Sinning against God and sinning against Dylan are two different things.
The last remark was certainly true, though its truth was a fairly recent discovery for some critics. The fact was that Christianity had done nothing to diminish Dylan’s familiar self-righteousness. The sometimes vicious character he had displayed for much of the ’60s was intact on Shot of Love. The difference was that this time around the artist gave no credence to scepticism, or – ‘Every Grain of Sand’ always excepted – to humane doubt. The Dylan of the 1960s had set himself against proscriptive authority, against anyone who had tried to tell anyone else how to live or think. Finally he had gone over to the other side and a couple of almost-secular love songs couldn’t disguise the fact. Dylan had once stood up for the kind of liberty-loving individualism that Reagan invoked as a principle but disdained, as his treatment of the Berkeley students had shown, in practice. On Shot of Love there was a singer announcing that ‘Revolution even ain’t [sic] no solution for trouble’, inveighing against The glamor and the bright lights and the politics of sin’, denouncing those who ‘laugh at salvation’ and marking the line between the saved who were ‘the property of Jesus’ – in the truly awful song of that name – and those who were not. In this version of spiritual warfare, anyone who ‘Mocked my God, humiliated my friends’ was an enemy. The artist was as brutal towards that kind of foe as he had ever been while skewering hapless journalists with righteous wit in the ’60s. This Dylan might have had good Christian grounds for associating social breakdown with the absence of faith, but his analysis, if that’s the word, was just the Religious Right’s boilerplate rhetoric with a rhyme scheme attached. He surely knew as much. So when did Bob Dylan ‘turn his back on politics’, exactly?
‘Caribbean Wind’ was the song that could have made the difference, the song that makes so much else on Shot of Love sound juvenile and petty. Predictably, the version that would be released with the Biograph box set in 1985 in no sense represents the song in its best incarnations, lyrically or musically. It is inferior to the version Dylan performed at the Warfield on 12 November – for the first and last time in concert – and a lesser work to the much-bootlegged account captured at Richard Perry’s Studio 55 in Los Angeles at the end of the following March.6 The relevant point is that in any version this song, in all its multiple renderings and mangled transcriptions, revisions and rewrites, is still preferable to everything else on Shot of Love save ‘Every Grain of Sand’. In the struggle to pin down ‘Caribbean Wind’, Dylan lost track of it entirely. One consequence, as Clinton Heylin has explained, is that even the last-gasp attempt released on Biograph does not accord with the words printed in Dylan’s Lyrics 1962 – 2001.7 That’s the least of the complications. For example, the rather fine Studio 55 variant – not the first, not the last – begins with the arresting
She was well-rehearsed, fair-browed and blonde
She had friends who were busboys and friends in the Pentagon
On Biograph, the song begins with just the tiniest alteration:
She was the rose of Sharon from paradise lost
From the city of seven hills near the place of the cross
The second couplet has nothing to do with John Milton, who makes no mention of the rose of Sharon – hence Dylan’s lower-case rendering of ‘paradise lost’ – or with Tom Joad’s sister in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). It has everything to do with Song of Solomon (2:1). The leap from the Pentagon to Scripture is not small, but that was just part of Dylan’s difficulty. With apocalypse looming (again) in all versions of the song, he was trying to find a way to express the tensions between physical and spiritual desire, between the need to trust and the readiness to distrust. He was also trying to display these ideas within the structure of the narrative, much as he had done in ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, by switching points of view and juggling with timeframes. As with that song, the result of all the tinkering was a tangle of competing and sometimes conflicting versions.
Dylan would tell Cameron Crowe, author of the Biograph notes, that ‘Caribbean Wind’ started life on St Vincent in the Windward Islands after ‘a strange dream in the hot sun’. It also began to emerge, as Dylan would admit with uncharacteristic frankness, when he was ‘thinking about living with somebody for all the wrong reasons’. No name would be given. In Lyrics, if it matters, you can read: ‘Would I have married her? I don’t know, I suppose . . .’ The uncertainty, the tentativeness, was echoed at every step of the song’s composition. As Dylan would explain to Crowe,
That one I couldn’t quite grasp what it was about after I finished it. Sometimes you’ll write something to be very inspired, and you won’t quite finish it for one reason or another. Then you’ll go back and try and pick it up, and the inspiration is just gone. Either you get it all, and you can leave a few little pieces to fill in, or you’re always trying to finish it off. Then it’s a struggle. The inspiration’s gone and you can’t remember why you started it in the first place.
The writer calculated – though he seemed none too sure – that by the end he was wrestling with four different sets of lyrics. Of the Biograph version he could only concede that ‘maybe I got it right, I don’t know. I had to leave it. I just dropped it.’ Frustration clouded his judgement. There were several candidates on Shot of Love clearly more deserving of being ‘just dropped’. It was one thing to despair of a song that had given him so much trouble, quite another to stick with lesser works just because they had surrendered without too much of a fight during the recording process.
‘The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar’, a track that was discarded but later restored to the album, sits somewhere between the fistful of outright failures on Shot of Love and ‘Caribbean Wind’. Again, there are differences between the words as recorded and those in print under Dylan’s name. As lyrics, in either rendering, they are powerful indeed. ‘Prayed in the ghetto with my face in the cement, / Heard the last moan of a boxer, seen the massacre of the innocent’ is not a bad opening by anyone’s standards. Nevertheless, the usual Dylan-friendly dose of finical textual analysis will not alter the fact that musically the track is bombastic and pedestrian, an inadequate notion of R&B inadequately rendered. Praising the written words does not justify the track. Where Dylan is concerned, this annoying little truth is too often forgotten. Some rate the song highly, nevertheless, but even judging by one decent recording from the handful of live performances it was given in 1980, it fails to convince. Yet still its place on the album should never have been in doubt.
And then there was ‘Angelina’. The history of this song could almost persuade you that the Devil really was causing mischief in Dylan’s world. He – the artist, not the evil one – knew how good the piece was. He knew the album needed its lyrical weight amid tracks that were either insubstantial or routinely savage. It was planned as Shot of Love’s closing track even after ‘Caribbean Wind’ was discarded.8 In the end, ‘Angelina’ joined the discards for no better reason, supposedly, than to satisfy the technical demands of vinyl and keep the album’s running time to the 40-minute mark. Rhymes that were both audacious and wonderfully absurd – concertina/Angelina/hyena/subpoena/Argentina – and a dizzying depiction of an allegorical landscape straight from Revelation-the-movie: these were dumped wholesale, along with a fine melody and a lovely Dylan performance, just to spare the runts in the Shot of Love litter. That the artist was obliged to make choices is hardly the issue. The choices he made were catastrophic and baffling.
Why songs such as ‘Caribbean Wind’ or ‘Angelina’ had to make way for the likes of the strange, half-hearted and entirely pointless ‘Lenny Bruce’ remains one of the bigger mysteries. The artist has not explained himself. It’s not so much that Dylan does any disservice to the dead comedian, just that, in his writing and in his performance, he sounds as though he couldn’t care less about the supposed martyr for free speech half-remembered in an indifferent eulogy. It is truly hard to believe that the author of ‘Angelina’ and ‘Caribbean Wind’ could have written the likes of ‘Lenny Bruce is dead but his ghost lives on and on / Never did get any Golden Globe award, never made it to Synanon’. Why go through the motions?
On one ingenious reading, meanwhile, the album’s title track was ‘inspired’ by John Lennon’s death. It’s the kind of interpretation you need to want to believe. Dylan was reported to have paid a visit to Yoko Ono in New York a month after the murder, though the claim resists documentation. The real problem is that the verses of ‘Shot of Love’ contain only a couple of lines that could be applied, directly or remotely, to Mark David Chapman and his victim.
There’s a man that hates me and he’s swift, smooth and near
Am I supposed to set back and wait until he’s here?
At a press conference in Travemünde in (West) Germany in July 1981, Dylan would observe that Lennon ‘was actually shot by someone who supposedly loved him. But what kind of love is that? That’s fan love. That’s what hero worship can breed, if you worship a man in that kind of way.’ So the mere words shot and love would turn up in a reply to a journalist. How the actions of a crazed and armed fan could be discussed in any other way is difficult to fathom. In reality, the song ‘Shot of Love’, raising the curtain on another album packed with Dylan’s millennialist melodramas, comprises a set of simple oppositions. Such is the sermoner’s basic technique. The singer needs an inoculating shot of God’s love to protect him against the world’s vices. He doesn’t need a shot of heroin, codeine or whiskey for what he’s got. He has seen ‘the kingdoms of the world’ and been left afraid.
What I got ain’t painful, it’s just bound to kill me dead
Like the men that followed Jesus when they put a price upon His head
If this was a tribute to the agitator for universal peace and love, it was set out in terms Lennon would have struggled to understand. In his next response to the press in Travemünde, in any case, Dylan would give short shrift to the deceased’s most famous hymn to secular morality, the dreaming ballad that contemplated the absence both of heaven and of hell. Dylan wouldn’t waste words: ‘I never liked that song.’ ‘Shot of Love’, if it has anything at all to do with John Lennon, might just be taken as a graceless rebuttal to a murdered man’s beliefs. Should that be the case, the title wins no marks, given the circumstances, for good taste.
Dylan’s song was not redeemed, in any case, by the production assistance of the veteran Robert ‘Bumps’ Blackwell. (He had happened to drop by the studio. Ringo Starr and Ron Wood did the same and wound up recording ‘Heart of Mine’. This is how the album was made.) It was fruitless to attempt to turn the artist into a second-rate R&B performer, pointless to believe that even a little of Blackwell’s old Specialty Records precision would establish a meaningful difference between a groove and Dylan’s religious rut. The songs he was casting aside offered all the clues for which he was searching. Why spurn them for the sake of weary, preconceived ideas about the way a pop album should be assembled?
The question could have been asked several times over of Shot of Love. Any one of eight songs could have made room for ‘Angelina’, the best candidate – given an abundance of choice – being ‘Watered-Down Love’. But such arguments, like much of the album, are trivial in the end. Paul Nelson got it right. The credit Dylan earned in better works is not transferable and Shot of Love does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. To excuse it as ‘underrated’, as is the habit of fans who find justifications for any shoddy thing made in the artist’s name, is just special pleading. The important fact is that Dylan had begun to misjudge his own gifts utterly.
As though to crown the humiliation, he allowed the album to go on sale with a ghastly ‘pop art’ cover image that almost made the sleeve of Saved seem justifiable. Another biblical verse, Matthew 11:25, would be quoted. ‘I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth,’ it runs, ‘because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.’ The speaker doing the thanking is Jesus, not a contemporary songwriter, though whether God would have accepted responsibility in any event for some of the statements on Dylan’s album is a question for theologians. Shot of Love became his second big failure in succession for good reasons.
*
That year, like a nasty premonition come true in the aftermath of John Lennon’s murder, a stalker was plaguing the artist at Rundown and elsewhere. Had he been in the mood to think in such terms, Dylan might have noticed an unpleasant irony. By most measures, he was a waning star. According to the harshest judgements made of Saved, judgements that were about to be repeated, he no longer deserved all the attention he had once received as of right. Yet here he was with the least desirable of superstar accessories, a devotee so fixated, persistent and threatening it would take security guards, cops and a restraining order to get a woman named Carmel Hubbell out of Dylan’s life.9
Like Lennon’s killing, the incident was a reminder of how savagely weird parts of what remained of the counter-culture had become. That June, while Hubbell was trespassing repeatedly on Dylan’s Point Dume estate, NBC was broadcasting the first televised interview with Charles Manson, instigator of the hideous 1969 murders of the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four others, and of a helpless Los Angeles couple named LaBianca. While Hubbell was making death threats to Dylan’s security staff and calling herself ‘Ms Manson’, the imprisoned leader of ‘the Family’ was on TV evading Tom Snyder’s questions about the slaughter of innocent strangers. ‘Well,’ Charlie Manson said at one point, effortlessly sinister, ‘if I could get some help from the doctor then I could get my mind straightened out a little bit and I [could] come back and play like a human.’
It probably escaped Dylan’s notice, but the frenzy incited by this individual had been inspired in its turn by a fanatical belief in certain prophecies supposedly contained in the inerrant Book of Revelation. Manson was also a believer in the imminence of the apocalypse (to be inaugurated, in his version, by racial war). The Family’s leader had been confirmed in his psychotic convictions by an ability to interpret songs from the Beatles’ 1968 White Album as evidence either of Christ’s return, or as ‘programming’ for the final conflict. Seven people and an unborn child had been murdered, in other words, thanks to a crazed misreading of mostly banal Lennon-McCartney lyrics. Rock music, having taken itself far too seriously for too long, had been accepted by some of its most demented enthusiasts as one kind of gospel. On the other hand, Manson had not toured America to sing and preach his unforgiving version of Revelation and nightmarish global destruction.
Dylan’s concert schedule for the rest of 1981 was designed to give Shot of Love all the help the artist could provide. Albert Grossman, his unlovable former manager, was meanwhile suing for certain royalties he maintained were due under contracts that had always been more generous to the representative than to his client. Albert had never lacked gall. Dylan had paid him a lot of money during their partnership and was still handing over a large chunk of his earnings under a previous settlement, thanks entirely to the legal fiction that Grossman had made a contribution, any sort of contribution, to the songs and recordings. A counter-suit was lodged. The case would come close to winding up as the music world’s Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Bob v. the Bear, no quarter asked and none given, but the cash equivalent of a double-platinum album for lucky lawyers. For the most part, Dylan left his team to deal with the problem. Nevertheless, the willingness of a man who was anything but a spendthrift to sign big cheques for legal services was evidence of a deep animosity. Grossman had made off with the artist’s money once too often.
After a handful of warm-up concerts in Illinois, Michigan and Maryland, Dylan and his now-familiar band arrived in Toulouse at the end of the second week in June for the first of 23 European concerts. On his previous visit to the continent in 1978 acclaim had been near-universal. This time the tour, while not exactly inglorious, was granted a qualified welcome. In London, where six nights at Earls Court were planned in the confident belief that 1978’s triumphs would be repeated, ticket sales were slow. The fault did not lie with the artist and his musicians. The kindest explanation is that all the publicity generated by Dylan’s adoption of evangelical Christianity had poisoned the well of public affection. Slow Train Coming and Saved had both been hits in Britain, but by the summer of 1981 audiences had probably heard as much from that version of Bob Dylan as they wanted to hear. Whatever it represented in heartland America, evangelical preaching had long since ceased to be part of the British mainstream. On the first night at Earls Court there was slow handclapping when Dick Holler’s ’60s hit ‘Abraham, Martin and John’ was performed in the wake of ‘Slow Train’ and a Carolyn Dennis rendition of the gospel song ‘Walk Around Heaven All Day’. By the third night, though his high-register singing and his daring treatment of works such as ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ had received favourable coverage, Dylan seemed to be on the verge of admitting defeat where his religious works were concerned. He told his audience:
This is a new song off a forthcoming record album. I hope it’s on the album anyway. It’s called ‘Dead Man, Dead Man, When Will You Arise’. I wrote quite a few new songs. I thought I’d play them because I don’t know how much longer I’ll be playing new songs. People wanna hear the old songs. I was thinking of cutting out all the new songs. So I can play . . . I’m gonna play just older stuff. This time here in London I’m gonna play all the new songs in case they never get heard again.
Given that the tour was only being staged for the sake of his new Shot of Love songs, this was disingenuous. It was also a tacit admission, however, that Dylan was perfectly well aware of how completely he had squandered the confidence of many fans. It might not have counted as an emblematic moment, but on the last night at Earls Court a bottle was thrown from the audience after a run of three religious songs towards the end of the show. The missile struck Dylan’s guitar, prompting him to retort, ‘You’re gonna have to go out a long way to hurt me.’ Despite what he chose to believe or pretend, it wasn’t just a case of the old against the new. All performers with a back catalogue full of well-loved hits have to cope with that mixed blessing. The issue was the nature of songs such as ‘Dead Man, Dead Man’. Few audiences, Dylan’s audiences least of all, cared for this sort of remonstrance:
Satan got you by the heel, there’s a bird’s nest in your hair
Do you have any faith at all? Do you have any love to share?
Famously, Dylan had left audiences angry, disillusioned or apathetic before, but religion had altered the argument. It was, as the artist might have understood, fundamental to the way he was regarded and the way he wished to be regarded. The fact that ‘gospel’ formed only one small part of his 1981 concerts in Europe did not get Dylan off the hook. Who was he kidding? Throwing a bunch of old hits out into the crowd did not solve the basic problem. He might have believed that his first duty was to God, but audiences had a quaintly selfish attachment to the mesmerising, multifaceted art of Bob Dylan. If service to Christ meant endless attempts to rewrite the same redemption songs, non-believers (and non-Christians) would find their entertainment and illumination elsewhere. Dylan’s resentful little speech in London was a recognition of the truth.
In effect, he gave up. When he reached North America in October, performances began to deteriorate and the purely religious songs began to seem like gestures to appease the star’s pride. Group prayers were still held before the concerts, but they prepared the band for performances of ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ as much as they affirmed the truth of ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ and ‘Solid Rock’. The commitment Dylan had given to his religious works at the Warfield in San Francisco two years before had all but ebbed away. By the time he reached New Orleans in the second week in November he was even improvising fragmentary movie scenes, as of old, for Howard Alk, his cinematographer on Renaldo and Clara and editor of Eat the Document. It showed a certain lack of imagination. No one who became involved in the filming seems to have known what they were doing, or why. Dylan might simply have been providing a little work for Alk, but all concerned forgot – or chose to forget – that impromptu hit-and-run movie-making had paid few dividends hitherto. The artist invented a ‘scene’; Howard pointed his camera. It was a desultory effort, in any case.
Like still another all-purpose symbol of what had become of the ‘spirit of the ’60s’, Dylan’s old friend and colleague was in the throes of a heroin and cocaine habit. Alk had been living on the Point Dume estate for some time, but his marriage had failed at last. His mood was dark and his future bleak. Early in January 1982, Howard Alk was found dead of a heroin overdose, allegedly deliberate, at Rundown. Dylan’s reaction was to shut up the rehearsal studios and abandon any plans to go back on the road. Personally and artistically, he was running up a lot of losses.
*
In an uneasy promotional interview for Shot of Love organised by Columbia at the end of the Earls Court run, Dylan had told Dave Herman and an audience at WNEW-FM in New York that he ‘couldn’t see much difference’ between conservatism and liberalism in America. What he meant was that he had failed to notice much of a rightwards drift in opinion, despite Reagan’s election and the rise of the Moral Majority. Nevertheless, Dylan had also said that ‘personally’ he didn’t believe in abortion except when a woman’s life was at risk. On the other hand, he did believe that gun control ‘would make it harder for people who need to be protected’.
There is no way to prove that the artist would have held different opinions in the ’60s and 70s, but plenty of evidence to suggest that gun-happy anti-abortionists had never been exactly his kind of people. Suze Rotolo, his first serious lover in Greenwich Village, seems to have endured a termination towards the end of their relationship, an event that had upset him greatly, but Dylan had made no attempt to prevent the procedure. His 1963 song ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’, the one telling of ‘seven people dead / On a South Dakota farm’ thanks to a shotgun wielded by a father driven to kill his family and himself by hellish poverty, had meanwhile evinced no obvious sympathy for ‘people who need to be protected’ by firearms in the home. Dylan’s ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’, composed after the assassination of the civil-rights worker Medgar Evers in Mississippi, could have been written to promote gun control. The author might have decided he was blind to political differences, but by 1981 it was a selective blindness.
Talking to Herman, he had complained about ‘a whole world full of sickness’, a sickness he had blamed on film, TV, the print media and his own music industry. Each, he had said, ‘caters to people’s sickness’. Dylan had been talking, as was by then his habit, about ailments of the moral and spiritual kind and how they affected behaviour: about sin, in short. He had not offered specific examples. If the whole world was sick because it lacked faith and the blessings of God’s truth, there was no need to give details.
On 30 March in Washington, Reagan had been shot by a character called John Hinckley with a revolver bought in a Dallas pawnshop. Three others had been wounded that day, including the presidential press secretary James Brady, who had been left paralysed by his injuries. Such was the context for a disc jockey’s questions about gun control and the context, equally, for Dylan’s answers. He could remember the 1963 Kennedy killing clearly enough. He might even have remembered the poetry he had tried to compose in the aftermath of the Dallas murder, writing of Jackie Kennedy crawling on all fours to escape the stricken presidential limousine, of the endless news bulletins, of how ‘I am sick t my soul an my stomach’. By 1981, Dylan could say only that ‘I don’t think gun control is making any difference at all’. In one sense, he made an elementary point: in that year firearms were owned by around 49 per cent of households.10 But the belief that guns were intrinsic to the American way of life was part and parcel of the new conservatism – ‘sweeping across the world’, as Herman put it – that Dylan had said he could not even detect. Instead, he had argued: ‘Guns have been a great part of America’s past. So, there’s nothing you can do about it. The gun is just something which America has got, lives with.’
When his interviewer had mentioned that ‘the abortion question is becoming one of the major political controversies at home’, Dylan had replied that the issue was ‘just a diversion’, that it distracted people from ‘the bigger things’. When Herman had said that this all sounded a little ‘conspiratorial’, the artist had agreed. Then he had expressed surprise because Herman doubted that the fearsome arguments boiling up everywhere in America over reproductive rights were ‘calculated’.
It had been a clever, not to say chilling, attempt to give an opinion while dismissing the entire issue of human rights and wrongs as irrelevant to God’s ‘bigger things’. In fact, while Dylan was trying to extricate himself from the risk of controversy, abortion was dividing communities across his country. A clinic was about to open in Fargo, North Dakota, for example, amid picket lines and bomb scares. Dylan had once known the small city pretty well. It was just across the state line from Minnesota and only 200 miles from Hibbing, his home town. In Fargo, as a classic study would describe, something close to civic warfare would break out in the autumn of 1981 between those bitterly opposed to ‘the intrusion of secularism, narcissism, and materialism’ and those confronting ‘the forces of narrow-minded intolerance who would deny women access to a choice that they see as fundamental to women’s freedom’.11 Dylan could construct his exotic conspiracy theories, but at a time when ‘theocons’ were working hard for the recriminalisation of abortion he would pick his side. Thus: ‘I personally don’t believe in it.’
Faith had changed him in many more ways than one. There was nothing new about his habit of confounding expectations. It could even be argued that the fault lay with all the fans and critics who had long taken too much for granted and projected too many of their own precious assumptions across the opaque screen of his personality and his songs. Abortion and gun control were real, contemporary issues, however, and in the end there was nothing ambiguous about the opinions the artist was prepared to articulate.
*
For a while, nevertheless, silence seemed to descend upon him. In 1982, not for the first time, he made himself scarce. Dylan created no albums on his own behalf that year, contenting himself in June with the vague idea of recording a set of duets with Clydie King, his heart’s companion of the moment, before deciding that Columbia was not an outfit equipped to deal sympathetically with the results. (The company didn’t much care for the project, in other words.) In January, he played bass, for whatever reason, on an Allen Ginsberg session. In March, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In June, just after the King session, he turned up for a brief performance with Joan Baez at a ‘Peace Sunday’ anti-nuclear rally in Pasadena without offering public comment for or against the cause. Beyond that, there was nothing much to report. In any usual sense, Dylan stopped working. To all appearances, in fact, he even stopped writing. Sailing in the Caribbean on Water Pearl that summer he might just have come up with the beginnings of a song, but the world would not hear the marvellous thing called ‘Jokerman’ until November 1983.
Dylan paused, it seems, to contemplate a few things. One was religion. Based on no real evidence other than two failed albums in a row, there was media speculation that he must, surely, have begun to reconsider his position as an evangelical Christian. In its gossip column for the issue of 15 March 1982, New York magazine ran with a slight story from an unnamed ‘source’ claiming that Dylan would not be presenting the National Music Publishers Gospel Song of the Year during the following week, either because he wouldn’t ‘have time to do it’, or because the ‘evidence is that is over’. The ‘interpretation’ offered by this anonymous spy in the camp was that ‘the New Testament and Jesus were a message he thought he got, but that he was still testing’. Nevertheless, if the New York Daily News got its dates straight in June 1986 with the claim that Dylan had by then been studying among the Chabad-Lubavitch community for four years, the 1982 rumours were part-right guesses.
The Vineyard folk could hardly argue. Such was the play they had made of their infinite respect for Judaism and their claim that Jewish and Christian traditions could be reconciled like strayed siblings, the artist’s study of the Torah was not a habit to which they could object, even if – a proposition always to be doubted – Dylan had been prepared to listen. Paul Emond, one of the Vineyard first responders sent to minister to the artist early in 1979, put the best complexion possible on the state of spiritual play as far as the evangelicals were concerned when he was quoted in a 1984 Christianity Today article.12 Emond said:
I don’t think he ever left his Jewish roots. I think he was one of those fortunate ones who realised that Judaism and Christianity can work very well together, because Christ is just Yeshua ha’Meshiah (Jesus the Messiah). And so he doesn’t have any problems about putting on a yarmulke and going to a bar mitzvah, because he can respect that. And he recognises that maybe those people themselves will recognise who Yeshua ha’Meshiah is one of these days.
As a statement, Emond’s apparently definitive comment was as carefully worded as a press release. Mere ‘Jewish roots’ - as though Dylan could have possessed any other kind of roots - were preferred to ancestral Jewish faith. The artist was meanwhile ‘one of those fortunate ones’, a Jew who realised he had been in error, rather than a Jew who had taken a detour via Christianity. In this description, Dylan only donned traditional dress and attended ceremonies to indulge those he respected, not because he gave credence to what was going on during the rituals.
Warming to his theme, Emond ceased to be entirely generous to everyone with ‘Jewish roots’. Denying that Dylan had any desire to return to Judaism, the pastor maintained that meetings with Chabad-Lubavitch had taken place only at the movement’s request. In this telling, the Vineyard’s special relationship with Jews seemed a little less warm than the church liked to claim. Emond said: ‘They can’t take the fact that he was able to come to the discovery of his messiah as being Jesus. Jews always look at their own people as traitors when they come to that kind of faith . . . When one of their important figures is “led astray”, they’re going to do everything they can to get him back again.’
There was some truth in that. It is also true to say that in Dylan’s shoes Emond would not have hesitated to ‘really capitalise’ on his reputation for the church’s sake, at least according to what Christianity Today was told. So how did the Vineyard feel about the possibility that their prize convert was slipping away? Chabad had indeed put in a lot of work to win Dylan back for Judaism. In a neat, near-comical contrast with Emond, Rabbi Kasriel Kastel of the Brooklyn Lubavitch centre denied that the artist had ever forsaken his Jewish faith. ‘As far as we’re concerned,’ Kastel said, ‘he was a confused Jew. We feel he’s coming back.’ The rabbi explained matters by adding that Dylan had been ‘going in and out of a lot of things, trying to find himself. To that end, the Hasidic sect had ‘just been making ourselves available’. No pressure, of course.
Dylan had never said that in accepting the Christian Messiah he had ceased to be a Jew. It’s a small detail, but easily forgotten. First, he knew that Judaism was not something he could renounce in any manner recognisable to other Jews. Second, his embrace of Christ had been based, almost from the start, on the difficult idea of messianic Judaism. The balance of his allegiances might have shifted, but Dylan remained a Jew whose understanding of faith depended, at least in part, on Christianity, especially on the Book of Revelation, that Christian text with its roots in Jewish apocalyptic literature. He would spend a lot of time with members of the Chabad movement in the years ahead, and join his former wife Sara in Los Angeles in March 1982 on the occasion of their son Samuel becoming a bar mitzvah, but Dylan would acknowledge no contradiction.13 In the early ’80s he would drift away from the Vineyard, yet cling to aspects of Christianity and fail to declare himself – perhaps because he believed there was no need for a declaration – as Jewish. What’s most striking is the single consistent feature in all of Dylan’s dealings with religion. At no point has he felt bound to give absolute allegiance to a single creed, church or sect. These too are the things of man, peripheral to faith and the search for meaning. Nevertheless, if his interest in Judaism was revived at the start of 1982 it meant that unadulterated ‘gospel’ music was behind him.
That moment had passed, in any case. You can take the cynical view and judge that he had made a hard-headed commercial decision. Purely evangelical music was losing Dylan audiences, sales and a lot of critical respect. Whether he was being persecuted for his beliefs is open to doubt, despite all his complaints, but he was certainly being mocked. On this accounting, given the choice between Christian preaching and a career, he chose the career.
A more generous judgement might be that Dylan had recognised and begun to address a real artistic problem. The fundamental issues of faith were few in number. He had stated them repeatedly in three – or two and a half – albums. A broader and deeper kind of discourse needed a different kind of songwriting. There is no doubt that he was under pressure to relent, not least from his record company, but he had his own thoughts on the matter. For all that, God would never be far, ever after, from Dylan’s words and music.
*
In 19 days and nights in 1983, between 11 April and 17 May, he made an album that was both the best and the most troubling thing he had done since Street-Legal. Infidels would involve one of the finest studio bands he had worked with in many a year. Thanks to Mark Knopfler, it would be better produced, for whatever the fact is worth, than a great many of his records. There would be only a couple of real duds among its eight songs and only a modest amount of controversy over what the artist had to say in those songs. The album would seem, for a while at least, to have restored Dylan’s critical and commercial fortunes and to have earned its success. There would be nothing terribly wrong with what was offered on Infidels. The problem would lie with what was withheld.
Once you know what this piece of work could have been and should have been, the album becomes maddening. When you begin to consider the choices made and the reasons why those choices were made, the puzzle called Bob Dylan grows ever deeper. If you pause to attend to the works absent from the finished product, the temptation to drop the artist a stiff note of protest, even 30 years too late, grows strong. If ever a Dylan album cried out for the restoration and refurbishment services of the people involved in his archival Bootleg Series, it is Infidels. The self-doubt evident on Shot of Love here becomes pathological.
With Infidels a pattern was established that would influence critical reactions to the artist’s work through all the decades to come. Thanks to countless bootleg releases, legal and otherwise, two Dylans would seem to co-exist, one actual and one potential, one the author of the albums as they were set before the public, the other an artist reconstructed from the counterfactual history of what might have been. When countless concert recordings began to be thrown into the mix, dozens of them preferable to the albums sanctioned by Dylan, arguments over his reputation and worth would grow ever more tortuous. Certain fans and students would enjoy the never-ending archaeological effort for its own sake. For some, the collecting of illicit tapes and the ensuing Jesuitical debates over this or that outtake would become a consuming hobby, even a career. To have knowledge denied to the common herd was part of the fun, it seems. For others of us, it would all become just a bit tedious. Why couldn’t Dylan stop screwing around with his work? The fact would remain, nevertheless: without a knowledge of certain bootlegs – not, God help us, all of them – an understanding of the art and the artist would become hard to achieve. That truth would be as relevant to the worst of his albums, ironically enough, as it would be to the best. Infidels was far from the worst, but it could have been a lot better.
No such thoughts arose when the vinyl disc appeared at the start of November 1983, of course. Only a few, led by Knopfler, knew what Dylan had done and what he had refused to do. To anyone who lacked that insight it was simply the best album he had released in at least five years. Some still contend that Infidels is superior to anything he had managed since 1976’s Desire. When the album appeared a couple of reviewers, befuddled by cask-strength hyperbole, called it his best since – a pair of words that surely deserve to become a compound adjective – Blood on the Tracks. The man in the vinyl mine at Rolling Stone got his mention of the 1975 masterpiece into his first sentence, then wrote of Dylan’s ‘stunning recovery of the lyric and melodic powers that seemed to have all but deserted him’.14 Not everyone agreed. Some reviewers continued to be dismissive, less of the music or the production than of certain sentiments expressed, but the American record-buying public was more forgiving than it had been towards any Dylan release since Street-Legal. That was fair. All in all, Infidels is not a bad piece of work.
There was a degree of sheer relief evident in the album’s reception. Many critics gave it the benefit of all sorts of doubts simply because at first it seemed – an important word – that Dylan had been cured at last of his religious delirium. One song, ‘Neighborhood Bully’, struck a few listeners as an alarmingly right-wing piece of Zionist rhetoric, but most put aside their concerns. Another track, ‘Union Sundown’, sounded a little strident in its analysis of America’s labour relations and economic misfortunes, but at least the writer was taking an interest in the world around him. There were odd, even eccentric touches. Did Dylan truly believe that ‘man has invented his doom’ just by landing on the moon? Could it have been him or a character in a song declaring, ‘a woman like you should be at home / That’s where you belong / Taking care of somebody nice’?15 Neither question was treated as a big deal. Even when a bit of sustained attention proved that the artist had not in any sense left religion behind, Infidels was exempted from scorn.
Perhaps it had something to do with the set’s teasing title. Perhaps it was because Dylan was no longer brandishing a religious affiliation like an all-areas backstage pass. Perhaps he had been right all along about prejudice and born-again belief. For whatever reason, the album was granted an acceptance that had not been available to its immediate predecessors. Even when it was made explicitly obvious that the artist was still gripped by his Antichrist fixation – ‘sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace’ – Infidels was deemed ‘secular’.
‘Jokerman’, the opening track, helped matters somewhat. This was, unambiguously, one of Dylan’s great songs, recognised as such from the moment the album was released. It was also one of those great Dylan songs that did not yield its meaning instantly, if at all. Most who liked it didn’t quite know what the hell (and so forth) it was supposed to be about specifically, but that didn’t matter. The evangelical Dylan had forgotten the art of writing in this manner, in this meshing of melody and images to create something that seemed to make a sense of its own even when the sense could not be defined. He did not perform the trick to perfection with each of the Infidels songs, but in ‘Jokerman’ and in a few other places hope was restored.
Dylan, conscious of his deficiencies as a technician, had considered a number of people for co-production duties before inviting Knopfler to return to the combat zone. A couple of the big names who would be mentioned as rival contenders for the honour still boggle minds. Asking what Frank Zappa or David Bowie would have done with or to the artist’s work is like asking what might happen if the laws of physics could be suspended. Knopfler, clearly the best candidate, recommended his own keyboard player, Alan Clark, and the sound engineer Neil Dorfsman. The latter had handled the recording of Bruce Springsteen’s The River and the 1982 Dire Straits album Love Over Gold. Both of those vastly successful collections had been recorded at the Power Station studio on West 53rd Street in New York; Dylan followed suit. If the former ConEdison plant and its miraculous acoustic properties had generated millions of sales for Knopfler and the usurper Springsteen, the artist wanted all the benefits they had enjoyed.
He didn’t have to be reminded of what had become of Saved and Shot of Love. Columbia had given him another five-album contract in July 1982, but Dylan needed to regain both his credibility and his authority within the company. He had pushed his luck hard, several times over, in the preceding decade and a half among people whose idea of poetry began and ended at the bottom line. Having Bob Dylan on the roster was good for Columbia’s image, in theory, but the lawyers who ran the empire from the Black Rock building on a corner of Manhattan’s 6th Avenue- put their real faith in the miraculous transmutation of cheap vinyl into gold. Dylan had been failing to weave that brand of magic. In April 1983, as he commenced work on Infidels, corporate lawyer number one was about to sack corporate lawyer number two as a war between the company’s president, Walter Yetnikoff, and his deputy, Dick Asher, came to a head. Neither man could have been mistaken for a born music lover, nor for an individual in instinctive sympathy with artists.
Dylan wasn’t happy with them and they were not happy with Dylan. Performing at the Stade de Colombes in the Paris suburbs on 23 June 1981, he had expressed grumbling irritation over the fact that he was touring to support Shot of Love while Columbia, inept or apathetic, was failing to get the record into stores. The album, Dylan had told the French crowd, ‘should be coming out sometime soon. If you know exactly when, you call up the record company I record for, whatever one that is today.’ (My italics.) The plain truth remained that Shot of Love had expired like a mayfly. That fact, in turn, might well have had a bearing on Dylan’s rediscovery in 1983 of the joys of ‘secular’ song and the art of disguised meanings.
Dick Asher would be remembered as a typical major label corporate philistine in an article published in 2008 by Simon Napier-Bell, former manager of the Yardbirds, Wham! and several other groups.16 As he recalled the incident, the Englishman had just entered the executive’s office for a meeting when a secretary announced that Bob Dylan was ‘on line one’. The artist, as Napier-Bell would write, had just made ‘a couple of albums full of evangelical zeal but they’d bombed’. Dylan’s contract had come up for renewal – this would be around the time Shot of Love was being recorded, in other words – and Asher was not eager to take the call. As Napier-Bell remembered it, the conversation as it began ‘wasn’t too interesting’. Then the executive began to yell into the phone:
I’ve told you, Bob – no fucking religion! If you can’t agree to that, the deal’s off . . . Look, I’m telling you. There’ll be no fucking religion – not Christian, not Jewish, not Muslim. Nothing. For God’s sake, man – you were born Jewish, which makes your religion money, doesn’t it? So stick with it, for Christ’s sake. I’m giving you 20 million bucks – it’s like baptising you, like sending you to heaven. So what are you fucking moaning about? You want 20 million bucks from us? Well, you gotta do what we tell you. And what we’re telling you is . . . No Torah! No Bible! No Koran! No Jesus! No God! No Allah! No fucking religion. It’s going in the contract.
If indeed it did go ‘in the contract’ a great many of the earnest things written and said since about Dylan, Christianity, Judaism, philosophy, the trials of faith, religious art, the fate of humankind and gospel music might deserve to be erased. No one need go that far. Demonstrably, the artist did not abandon his complicated beliefs. Did he get his company orders, however? In Napier-Bell’s account the orders could not have been more explicit. And did Dylan obey Asher in exchange for 20 million pieces of silver? One reading of the Infidels lyrics says that might well have been the case. Napier-Bell’s ability to give a verbatim account of things allegedly said better than a quarter of a century before their transcription verges on the supernatural, of course. Nevertheless, the gist is clear enough. With a witness present, one of the top men at his record company gave it to Dylan straight: ‘no fucking religion’, not if he wanted a $20 million deal. You could call that interesting.
What can be said with certainty is that after Shot of Love he began to write about matters of religion in a manner that would not be confused easily with religious writing. He hid his meaning and purpose, hid them well enough to fool a lot of critics and, presumably, executives so dim-witted they could tell him to stick with Judaism ‘for Christ’s sake’.17 That happened to be the artist’s intention, more or less. Napier-Bell would further observe, dryly, that as a devout atheist he had no personal objections to Asher’s rant, though ‘it seemed tough that a contract should include such specific restrictions’. That, nevertheless, was his description of the exchange. If it was accurate, Dylan began to record Infidels under the thumb of a corporate lawyer type whom the English observer called ‘a very dull man indeed’.
Some details can be added. When the album was almost complete, for example, the artist would make several statements to the journalist Martin Keller that were markedly less forthright than before. Almost defiantly, Dylan would assert that Shot of Love was his favourite among all the albums, that the song of the same name was his ‘most perfect song’, that it defined him and showed anyone who was interested where his ‘sympathies’ lay. Despite ‘Neighborhood Bully’ and ‘Union Sundown’, he would also maintain, in the familiar manner, that I don’t write political songs. Political songs are slogans. I don’t even know the definition of politics.’ When the talk turned to the issue of religion, on the other hand, Dylan would become downright evasive. Whether thanks to Asher’s expletives or to his own evolving beliefs, his opinions would not be calculated to please the holy rollers of the Vineyard church, or the ascetic rebbes of Chabad-Lubavitch. They would cheer a lot of his old fans, however.
You can turn anything into a religious context. Religion is a dirty word. It doesn’t mean anything. Coca-Cola is a religion. Oil and steel are a religion. In the name of religion, people have been raped, killed and defiled. Today’s religion is tomorrow’s bondage.18
Faith was not denied, never that, but it was given the kind of spin to which faithless, secular types could assent without turning a hair. Dylan would perform the same trick with nuance when asked about the search, if any, for his Jewish identity. ‘My so-called Jewish roots are in Egypt,’ he would say. ‘They went down there with Joseph, and they came back out with Moses . . .’
Am I looking for them? Well, I don’t know. I ain’t looking for them in synagogues with six-pointed Egyptian stars shining down from every window, I can tell you that much.
Three months or so later, just before Infidels was due to be released, Dylan would take another crack at explaining where he stood on the issue of religious belief. He would also try to tell the Los Angeles Times why his musical ‘gospel’ moment had passed. He would not ‘disavow any of that’, but he would scarcely testify lustily for the Lord, either. Noticeably, his unfortunate if entirely unconscious habit of placing himself on the cross-but-one next to Christ would endure.
I don’t particularly regret telling people how to get their souls saved. I don’t particularly regret any of that. Whoever was supposed to pick it up, picked it up. But maybe the time for me to say that has just come and gone. Now it’s time for me to do something else . . . It’s like sometimes these things appear very quickly and disappear. Jesus himself only preached for three years.19
If he did win a contract worth $4 million an album, Dylan spent some of the money wisely. In addition to Knopfler and his colleagues he invited Mick Taylor, the best guitarist the Rolling Stones ever had, to join him at the Power Station. The two had been friends for a while, probably having met at the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles in January 1982 when Taylor was performing in a Bluesbreakers reunion tour with John Mayall and Fleetwood Mac’s John McVie. The blues guitar player was a good choice to support and complement Knopfler. Dylan’s next smart move was to call up Lowell ‘Sly’ Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, drums and bass respectively, a pair already long established as the rhythmic heart of modern reggae. All in all, it was a crew few recording artists could match, or afford to match.
At least 16 new Bob Dylan songs were recorded during the Infidels sessions amid the usual plethora of cover versions, traditional numbers, jams and phantom titles. Eight tracks would survive to give a vinyl album the near-standard duration of almost forty-two minutes. Of the eight original songs discarded, two would be retrieved for later albums, in one case because the artist was by then desperate enough to risk the woeful number entitled ‘Death Is Not the End’. (Listen to it once or twice and you begin to pray for an end that is certain and swift.) The second tune reserved for recycling, ‘Clean-Cut Kid’, was a kind of mid-period sub-Dylan protest song to do with the malign effects of a wicked society on the innocent mentioned in the title – ‘they made a killer out of him’ – that did not detain the artist for long in 1983 and would never amount to much. Of the remaining half-dozen works, one piece was entitled ‘Julius and Ethel’, a song recalling the notorious Rosenberg case and the Brooklyn couple’s execution in 1953 for espionage. These days there is little doubt that Julius attempted to pass America’s nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union; his wife’s guilt is less certain. In the 1980s, nevertheless, arguments over the case were still dividing opinion between left and right. Dylan took the accurate if uncomplicated view that the 1950s had been a weird and paranoid time in which America became a strange, bewildered and fearful place, but his song was no ‘Hurricane’, nor even a ‘George Jackson’. The author has never sanctioned its release in any form and its existence is not acknowledged by bobdylan.com. That might simply be because it is not a good song. ‘Juvenile’ would be one description.
Now that they are gone, you know, the truth it can be told;
They were sacrificial lambs in the market place sold –
Julius and Ethel, Julius and Ethel.
Now that they are gone, you know, the truth it can come out;
They were never proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt –
Julius and Ethel, Julius and Ethel.
That left five tracks. Versions of each would turn up on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1 – 3 in 1991, but that release would not solve the puzzle of what Dylan had done to Infidels. Two songs, ‘Lord Protect My Child’ and ‘Tell Me’, probably deserved to wind up on a ‘rare and unreleased’ compilation; two more, ‘Foot of Pride’ and ‘Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart’, should be listed on the charge sheet among the bigger crimes of omission the artist has committed. Even these lapses are dwarfed by the failure to allow the release in 1983 of the song called ‘Blind Willie McTell’. Its absence from Infidels has set Dylan against everyone who has ever heard the work and bothered to pass comment. At the time, Mark Knopfler, fighting hard for the song, was aghast. His opinion still wins the listener’s vote. Fans and those who write about Dylan meanwhile debate whether ‘Blind Willie McTell’ was just the best thing he did in the 1980s or among the best things he has ever done. In that context, discussions of whether the version captured on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1 – 3 is slightly superior or mildly inferior to a widely circulated, frighteningly powerful ‘electric’ rendition feel like casuistry.
Perhaps the real judgement on the artist is this: anyone who wants to hear how Infidels could (or should) have turned out has no choice but to reassemble the album from a range of sources, as though from spare parts. In this day and age, that’s no big deal. It was not especially difficult in the 1980s to hunt down outtakes and alternate takes: the better-known ‘acoustic’ version of ‘Blind Willie McTell’ was doing the rounds within a year of Infidels being released. The point is that Dylan is supposed to be known as a maker of albums as well as of songs, of artefacts with an artistic coherence and a considered design. The making of albums might be redundant in a pick-and-mix digital era, but it has been Dylan’s line of work for half a century. If Infidels had been a painting he would have stood accused of putting a boot through the canvas.20
As it was, he shredded his entire artistic scheme for the sake of one track, ‘Union Sundown’, mourning the fact that the land of the free market was losing out in capitalism’s race to the bottom. The song was an alert anticipation of globalisation and its discontents, but it was no ‘Blind Willie McTell’. Few of Dylan’s works save, perhaps, ‘Visions of Johanna’ and ‘All Along the Watchtower’ are as instantly haunting as this.
Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying ‘This land is condemned
To Jerusalem’
I travelled through East Texas
Where many martyrs fell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
It sounds at first like an evocation of the Passover story in the Book of Exodus. Egypt is the land condemned to suffer ten plagues; the Israelite slaves are meanwhile instructed to mark out their homes with a lamb’s blood so that God will spare them. As Exodus 12:7 has it: ‘And they shall take of the blood, and strike it on the two side posts and on the upper door post of the houses . . .’ It could also be that Dylan has in mind the ‘hobo signs’ that were common during the Depression. These were the crude, coded marks left by rambling men in chalk or coal on fences, walls and doors to guide their comrades. A circle with an arrow through it meant ‘Don’t go this way’. Two parallel arrows across the circle said ‘Get out fast’.
A third possibility is that with the phrase ‘this land is condemned’ Dylan is making poetic use of a common piece of legalese. By the right of eminent domain – in Britain, by the right of compulsory purchase – authorities acquire private land for public use, but only after it has first been ‘condemned’. In the nineteenth century, the ruthless hustlers who built America’s railroads got their hands on this useful power and abused it mightily. In Dylan’s context it has more to do with what became of African Americans and their farms in the Southern states after the Civil War as vengeful whites, deprived of their plantations and their slave economy, set about subjugating and robbing blacks once more. The land earned by the sweat of newly freed slaves who had dreamed of their ‘40 acres and a mule’ was stolen wholesale. If legalised theft didn’t do the trick, though often enough it was sufficient, the Klan and the lynch mob were at hand.21
Dylan being Dylan, it is better than possible that all three ideas are concentrated in a few words. Thus: a land condemned by God because of slavery; a land where it is dangerous to stray; a land stolen from its people. At the heart of ‘Blind Willie McTell’ is a meditation on what became of America thanks to the war between the states and the causes of that war. So the writer lifts us aloft in a few bare lines to look down on a landscape somewhere, at some shifting point in time, in the American South.
There are places called Jerusalem, most of them vanishingly small, dotted throughout the region – in Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee – and beyond. Nat Turner, leader of a slave revolt in 1831, was executed at one such town (since renamed Courtland) in Virginia’s Southampton County. Equally, the biblical allusion could be straightforward, intended to encompass the entire Judaeo-Christian world. It’s more likely that everything lying between a city of sin and the city of God has been condemned. Then, as though a movie camera has soared and dipped, we are in the dark lands of East Texas, ‘where many martyrs fell’. A song making a connection between the treatment of black Americans and enslaved Israelites, as many spirituals did, has plenty of history on its side. In this verse, Dylan might also have had in mind ‘Fallen’, a well-known (if very bad) nineteenth-century poem by the once-popular lecturer and hymnist John Lawson Stoddard. The horrors inflicted by lynch mobs are central to its theme. (Stoddard was also an early advocate of the Jewish right of return to Israel, interestingly enough.) In part, ‘Fallen’ runs:
Where history’s Martyr dared to break
The power that held a race in chains,
I see the ghastly lynching-stake,
Where brutal mobs their vengeance take,
And, since no law their course restrains,
Gloat o’er their writhing victim’s pains.
Where racism was concerned, the history of East Texas from the post-Civil War Reconstruction to the middle of the twentieth century was as vile as any among the Southern states. As one scholar explains, ‘At the dawn of the twentieth century, East Texas was notorious for lynching and was considered one of the worst regions in the state, leading the state in 1908 with 24 deaths.’ In 1910, when Blind Willie McTell was a child, ‘more than 100 blacks had been lynched in the Lone Star State’.22 Most died in East Texas, it is explained, in an area which then stood third among those regions of the United States in which lynchings were commonplace. After Mississippi and Georgia, where McTell was born, Texas as a whole was the state that gave itself over most eagerly to lynch law, accounting for 468 victims between 1885 and 1942.23
This, dense with history, thick with connections, is just the first verse. Dylan has here embarked on the kind of historical writing that would become a distinguishing glory of his later career, his era of consuming interest falling – very broadly speaking – in the years from the Civil War to the undated orphan birth of the blues. When he cast the song aside he would lose the thread he had discovered in ‘Blind Willie McTell’ for the best part of a decade. He would pick up this narrative again only when he remembered the art of ‘learning to go forward by turning back the clock’, as the fascinating sleeve notes to 1993’s World Gone Wrong would explain.
It is almost as if ‘Blind Willie McTell’ was removed from Infidels because Dylan himself wasn’t ready for the challenges implicit in the song. Here he sets the agonies of black Americans squarely at the centre, of the country’s history. Inevitably, he is laying out all the reasons for the civil-rights movement and, therefore, for his own earliest work. In this song, the inescapable fact of slavery defines both the nation and the singular cultural gift, the music that grew from the blues, it gave to the world. This, Dylan is saying, is what we come from: look and listen. The long bondage of black America, rendered here in terms both physical and spiritual, was the abiding horror that gave birth to the music that altered the country. African Americans were the enslaved children of God. So what were whites?
It is a moment of high sophistication in Dylan’s career. It makes the arguments of a song like ‘Neighborhood Bully’ seem crude and fatuous. At no point in ‘Blind Willie McTell’ is the listener’s sympathy or tears demanded. Dylan doesn’t bother to tell you that a historic crime without precedent or parallel was committed in the land of the free. He is insisting instead on its centrality, its near-biblical significance, and its expression in the music that has penetrated every fibre of American culture.
His first four verses resemble panels in an altarpiece, both sombre and glowing. In the second verse the scene is an encampment. Whether this is a stopping place for runaway slaves, a revival meeting, or one of the travelling tent shows that criss-crossed the south for 70 years is left unclear. It could be any and all of the three. History says, nevertheless, that the minstrel and variety companies run by the likes of F.S. Wolcott and Moses Stokes gave Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Bessie Smith and many others their starts. At one point, Dylan sings that ‘Them charcoal gypsy maidens / Can strut their feathers well’. Bessie Smith’s very first job as a teenager with the Stokes travelling troupe, just before the First World War, was as a dancer on the chorus line.
Dylan’s narrative is not linear. The third verse lies in the heart of darkness, but it reverses time. It harks back to William Tecumseh Sherman’s pitiless Savannah campaign during the Civil War, his ‘March to the Sea’ in the winter of 1864 that set the South aflame. That happened for the reasons set forth in eight astonishingly evocative and impeccably concise lines. Dylan begins with the Union’s attempt to raze the Confederacy and traces the line of cause and effect back to captive tribes.
See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear that undertaker’s bell
Nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
The fourth verse contains scenes from a later South. There’s a young man ‘dressed up like a squire’ with a bottle of bootleg whisky and a woman in tow. There’s a chain gang on the road and the rebel yells of the Ku Klux Klan in the distance. Racism is resurgent. The verse could be placed in any of the decades after Reconstruction, but inevitably the bootleg booze suggests Prohibition, the 1920s and early 1930s, when the Klan were once again busy and the chain gang, that favourite punishment in the Southern states with blacks its special victims, was a common sight on the highways. Blind Willie McTell made his first recordings, it should be noted, in 1927.
At the song’s close, Dylan draws as much of a moral as he intends to draw. ‘God is in his heaven’, indeed, as Robert Browning’s line from ‘Pippa Passes’, long since reduced to cliché, has told us, but all’s not right with this world. Browning took his inspiration, in any case, from the Bible’s placing of the Lord God above and humanity below. The song takes this old revealed truth and makes it a cause for doubt. We can aspire to the kingdom, but whether this deity cares to intervene is a question the narrator will not answer.
Is it the same narrator as the one heard at the song’s beginning? There is a possibility of doubled voices, as in Desire’s ‘Black Diamond Bay’ when it turns out that the speaker is not doomed within some Conradian episode but sitting at home in LA drinking beer. In ‘Blind Willie McTell’, the last personage is ‘gazing out the window / Of the St. James Hotel’ after announcing that God’s creation seems to contain only ‘power and greed and corruptible seed’. Is this just the voice of a storyteller, one who has only heard of those who saw the arrow on the doorpost and the big plantations burning? There is no possibility of proof in such an argument. It can only be said that the voice heard in this song is better understood as the voice of a hovering collective memory surveying the landscapes of a shared past. Multitudes are contained within it.
Michael Gray has pointed out, nevertheless, that Dylan’s work connects to McTell himself through a couple of related songs, Willie’s own ‘The Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues’, recorded late in 1940, and the old, ubiquitous ‘St. James Infirmary’.24 The latter piece was not attempted by the bluesman until 1956, but both songs form part of a vast musical tangle extending from venerable British folk song to ‘Streets of Laredo’, the late-nineteenth-century piece ‘Those Gambler’s Blues’, McTell’s ‘Dyin’ Gambler Blues’, and many more besides. Both ‘Crapshooter’ and ‘St. James’ involve doubled narration, as Gray describes, and both depend on the imminence of death suggested in Dylan’s last verse. In a footnote, meanwhile, Sean Wilentz observes that there was a St. James Hotel in Selma, Alabama, both before and after the Civil War, and another in New Orleans at around the same period.25 (Dylan could equally have been speaking in his own voice at the window of a deluxe modern joint. That last idea is possible, but somehow it doesn’t seem likely.)
The final verse of ‘Blind Willie McTell’ is, in one sense, a wholly conventional ending. It says: this has been the American past. It asks: wasn’t it hellish and is it not in the nature of humankind to descend into savagery? That’s Dylan’s nod to his born-again evangelical studies. The reference to ‘corruptible seed’, fallen humanity, is direct from 1 Peter 1:23: ‘Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which lives and stays for ever.’
So why Blind Willie McTell? He was no antique curiosity from the pre-history of American music. A neat, sometimes godly man who liked to preach and never forgot to dress well, he drank a fair bit, especially towards the end of his life, but made pretty decent money for years as a polished, professional travelling musician. He had a good head for business, too, by all accounts. McTell played the songs, any kinds of songs, that people would pay to hear. It might even be a mistake to call him a bluesman. Like many of his contemporaries, Blind Willie performed blues, ballads, spirituals, ragtime, show tunes, hillbilly songs and original songs. If anything, he tended at times to steer clear of the earthier versions of ‘the Devil’s music’. After following every clue and trail, Michael Gray has called him a ‘human jukebox and local hero’.26 No one ever said McTell had made a pact with Satan at the crossroads at midnight, or suffered the attentions of a hellhound on his trail. He was a fine guitar player in the Piedmont fingerpicking style of the eastern states, but he was a pragmatic working pro, not a tortured artist. He favoured a Stella 12-string guitar as much for the volume he could extract from the instrument as for its musical possibilities. McTell did not endure the chain gang or moan the blues. His was a respectable life, mostly, and he sang with a clear, respectable diction, albeit in a slightly nasal voice. He never made a hit record, but a couple of his things, ‘Statesboro Blues’ in particular, would become popular among the folk revivalists of the ’60s and beyond.
Blind from birth, possibly as a result of maternal syphilis, McTell was as much the white world’s victim as any African American born in the South near the start of the twentieth century. His ancestry contained an irony that was also common enough: his great-grandfather had been white. But it is simply not plausible to claim that Willie suffered as badly as many of the abused sharecroppers and common folk of his era. He did not match the stereotype and nor did he suffer the violent, degraded end inflicted on some of his peers in the music business. He coped very well, it appears, with his blindness. In fact, according to contemporaries he had for compensation astonishing hearing, not to mention perfect pitch, and a remarkable sense of direction. Educated at the State Blind School in Macon, Georgia, and in private institutions, he learned to read both books and musical notations in Braille.
It is hard, then, to depict Willie McTell as the quintessential voice of the blues in the old, outworn sense. He was no importunate hobo or singing convict. There is nothing harrowed or harrowing about his music. You can’t even say – though the game is futile in any case – that he was the best blues musician who ever lived. So why, of all the dozens of black people living and dead to whom he owed a debt, did Dylan pay homage to Blind Willie McTell?
It’s not clear that he did. What’s truly tantalising about the song is that it has nothing to do, in terms of biographical fact, with the man named in the title. Its scenes have no direct relevance to McTell’s life. Musically, there are those patently obvious opening piano chords straight from ‘St. James Infirmary’, but that tune was hardly Blind Willie’s property. It is almost easier to name the blues and jazz people who didn’t perform the standard as it is to name those who did, but he was not prominent among the latter. As for Dylan himself, the invocation of McTell seems to amount to this: the artist is putting all of that faith of his into music, his own music and the music of tradition. It is, in this song, the only thing that’s left to be trusted in a fallen world. He is calling on Blind Willie in the way some people call on saints: you can all but hear it in his voice. Dylan does not say that this was the very best of the bluesmen. Pushed for a judgement on that score, he has generally tended to nominate Robert Johnson. What the song does state, over and over, is that no one could sing the blues like McTell.
Why would that distinction matter? One explanation could be that Dylan was making a case for creative affinity, declaring that Blind Willie was, in the very deepest sense, his kind of musician, one who bore witness to origins and the meaning of art without being reduced to complaint or bluster or mere reportage. For McTell read Dylan, in other words, right down to a shared if erratic religiosity. A better idea, perhaps, is to take Blind Willie as an example of prototypical genius seeming to emerge from nowhere. This was the miracle attributed to the young Dylan – who was he, where the hell had he come from? – but the writer who was approaching his 42nd birthday when he made the song his first order of business at the first Infidels recording session knew better. Willie McTell had been ‘rediscovered’, like so many of his contemporaries, because he had first been ignored by a white world. That world, with its minstrel shows and movies and rock and roll, chose to forget his music’s origins and the reasons why, back to slavery and beyond, it had come into existence. All those aged ‘obscure’ bluesmen of Dylan’s youth had come from somewhere, after all, but they and their music were things America had tried to forget. In reclaiming the man, the artist was reclaiming the past. He was making Blind Willie McTell emblematic.
In 2006, interviewed by the novelist Jonathan Lethem, Dylan would dismiss the song as released, both in its official and unofficial versions. By then he had begun to play ‘Blind Willie McTell’ in his concerts, but only ‘because I heard The Band doing it’. He would compare the bootlegs of the Infidels outtakes to ‘taking a painting by Manet or Picasso – goin’ to his house and lookin’ at a half-finished painting and grabbing it and selling it to people who are “Picasso fans’”. Where many of the bootleg recordings are concerned, he had a point. Does the artist have no say in the matter? As so often, however, Dylan’s memory would then become a little vague. ‘Most likely it was a demo,’ he would say, ‘probably showing the musicians how it should go. It was never developed fully, I never got around to completing it. There wouldn’t have been any other reason for leaving it off the record.’27 In 1984, closer to the event, he would tell Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder that the song was discarded because ‘I don’t think I recorded it right’.28
As ever, Dylan’s answers would be occasions for still more questions. Neither version of ‘Blind Willie McTell’ sounds anything but ‘right’. Whether the song could have sat easily alongside the other tracks on Infidels is another matter entirely. That consideration might, in the far realms of guesswork, have been a reason for setting aside the work. Another guess sometimes heard is that Dylan believed his own vocal performance had been a failure. If the song was truly ‘half-finished’, on the other hand, you can only speculate and marvel at the vision that eluded the artist.
‘Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart’ should have been on the album; ‘Foot of Pride’ should have been on the album. In both cases, the arguments are, for this listener, straightforward. In the former case, Dylan knew he had a song of value. He would rework it when he came to make the album Empire Burlesque as ‘Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)’ and make the piece the opening track on a set that would need all the help it could get. Like ‘Foot of Pride’, the song works by transposing Dylan’s biblical imagery to his version of the modern (if pre-apocalyptic) world. Here there is still ‘fucking religion’ aplenty, but it is not insisted upon, not in a manner liable to trouble a Columbia executive. The dismissive allusion to the blood of Christ might, on the other hand, cause grief to a toiler in the Vineyard.
I been to Babylon and I got to confess
I could still hear the voice crying in the wilderness
What looks large from a distance
Close up is never that big . . .
Never could learn to drink that blood and call it wine
Never could learn to look at your face and call it mine
‘Neighborhood Bully’ should not have been on the album; ‘Man of Peace’ should not have been on the album. The former work, as was noticed instantly, was more than just a defence of Israel’s right to exist. Instead it was an attempt to justify the most right-wing variety of Zionist ‘security’ policy and would be recognised for what it was, as if for irony’s sake, even by Israelis. Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times would discover as much when Dylan came to play two concerts in Israel in 1987. Ron Maiberg, editor of a magazine called Montin, would tell the American critic that the song ‘portrays Israel as a helpless neighbor in a neighborhood full of bullies, which is a very right-wing political view here and it depresses me that Dylan is speaking for them’. Another prominent local journalist, Robert Rosenberg, would agree that ‘it’s a right-wing song in strictly Israeli jargon’. Nevertheless, this writer would ‘understand completely how Dylan, visiting here, takes a look around at the region . . . at the vulnerability of the country and says, “Yeah, you’ve got to be a neighborhood bully to survive.” It is not an unnatural reaction.’ For what it’s worth, the song would not be performed in either of the concerts in Israel.
Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized
Old women condemned him, said he should apologize
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad
The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad
There is probably little point in recording that the reasons for decades of conflict between Israel and its enemies have been just a little more complicated than Dylan chooses to believe. It is worth observing, however, that the artist’s reaction to Middle Eastern affairs would have gratified the Religious Right in America and cheered their conservative allies in Israel. Equally, as though it needs to be stated, there was once upon a time a Bob Dylan who would have abhorred this species of dim-witted propaganda. Nowhere in ‘Neighborhood Bully’ is it so much as suggested that anyone who was not an Israeli could have suffered in the region’s endless bloody confrontations. Asked about the piece a year or so after it was recorded, Dylan tried to say that it was not ‘political’ because he had no allegiance to any of the ‘maybe 20 political parties’ in Israel. He also tried to say that he didn’t deserve to be labelled – stuck with ‘some party-political slogan’ – because ‘I don’t know what the politics of Israel is’. He thought he knew enough to come out swinging on one side, however. Coming from the writer of ‘Masters of War’, the Infidels song is indeed depressing. Given what was sacrificed to allow it to remain on the album, the track, pedestrian enough just as a piece of music, is doubly dispiriting.
‘Man of Peace’ is meanwhile just a throwback to the overt, dismal proselytising of Saved. It is a rerun of a favourite born-again argument, founded on the distinctly weird contention that ‘Good intentions can be evil’, that the Antichrist – who might turn out to seem like a great humanitarian or philanthropist – is among us even now. (As though, as ever, we’ve nothing else to worry about.) The song does not begin to compete even with Dylan’s better evangelical songs.
‘Sweetheart Like You’ is a good song, despite its touches of not-so-latent sexism. ‘Union Sundown’ is a little confused but not catastrophic and rocks along in fine style. ‘Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight’ stands up well even now. ‘License to Kill’ and ‘I and I’ have their merits, though even their merits are nothing special. In the end, one song of those Dylan allowed himself raises the entire Infidels album above the commonplace. A very strange song it is, too.
‘Jokerman’ took part of its inspiration, according to the writer, from Caribbean legends of ‘these spirits they call jumbis’.29 The usual spelling, if it matters, is either jumbee or jumbie, while the weird tales of the creatures’ shenanigans vary greatly from island to island. It seems the stories also derive from a bewildering variety of ethnic and religious sources. Some of these evil dead busy themselves with vampirism, some with lycanthropy, some with basic possession of the living, some with sucking out the brains of unsuspecting passers-by. In other words, jumbees are malevolent spirits, in one guise or another.
Dylan’s mention of these entertaining folk myths could be ignored as just another of his vague explanations for the creative process were it not for the quantity of things he seemed capable of believing in 1983. His interviewer was told that ‘Jokerman’ is ‘very mystical’, as indeed it is. In the islands, the ‘shapes there, and shadows, seem to be so ancient’, Dylan said. But then he seemed to say that the spirits themselves had ‘sorta inspired’ the song. Even for him, that was fanciful. Yet when he had been asked by another journalist not long before if he believed in reincarnation, this same writer had answered, ‘Yeah, I do. I don’t think there are any new souls on earth.’30 It was not the first time he had affirmed such a belief. So what did he not believe? The chances of laughing all of this off as a playful Dylan hoax diminish slightly when you realise that he was talking about jumbees just after insisting, in the same interview, that the Bible is the literal truth and that ‘the battle of Armageddon definitely will be fought in the Middle East’.
You needn’t take him seriously – or the jumbees might get you – but it is worth pausing to think about what might have been going on in the mind of the author of ‘Jokerman’. With that exercise complete, you can ask how such a very strange concatenation of beliefs, ideas, images and emotions could result in a song that is as powerful as any Dylan ever recorded. If what goes into a piece of work is any guide to what comes out, ‘Jokerman’ should be no better than the usual ‘mystical’ prophetic nonsense. Instead, the song is potent enough to make you think twice about the allure of apocalyptic myth, messiahs false and real, and what evil means to those who daily detect its existence on every side. Dylan made art from the oddest materials.
The Jokerman has various guises: born with a snake in each fist, shedding his skins, ‘a man of the mountains’, a cloud walker, a benign demagogue, a twister of dreams, yet a ‘Friend to the martyr, a friend to the woman of shame’. Fair of face, worthy indeed of a Michelangelo, yet obedient only to ‘The law of the jungle and the sea’, the Jokerman rides a milky white steed and bears witness to a world tearing itself apart amid ‘Nightsticks and water cannons, tear gas, padlocks / Molotov cocktails and rocks behind every curtain’. This joker also witnesses the birth of the Antichrist:
It’s a shadowy world,
Skies are slippery grey
A woman just gave birth to a prince today
And dressed him in scarlet
He’ll put the priest in his pocket,
Put the blade to the heat
Take the motherless children off the street
And place them at the feet of the harlot
This is Revelation for the 32-track age, for the video age. With Infidels, in fact, Dylan acknowledged the existence of newly born MTV and the advent of the promotional clip. In the film for ‘Jokerman’ he supplied, among other things, the basis for what remains one of the most arresting examples of a peculiar genre, even if he did keep his eyes tight shut for most of the movie. Images and his lyrics emblazoned across the images communicated ideas in a dizzying rush: Albrecht Dürer’s self-portrait as Christ, a Turner, two Michelangelos, William Blake, Hieronymus Bosch, Picasso, Georgia O’Keefe, Munch and varieties of primitive art. Amid it all were newsreels and still photographs from a troubled world: dead Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Hitler, Ronald Reagan mocked, the first American combat troops into Vietnam, a nuclear blast, and mankind making its big mistake by ‘touching the moon’.
One set of verses from the song was reserved for a series of images of all the previous Bob Dylans. The artist was not entirely happy with the notion that a photograph could illustrate even a single ambiguous line from a song, but he played along. You sense that, grumbling or not, he knew what he was doing. Even if the video’s ‘concept’ was not his – George Lois, the advertising man who had fought so hard for Rubin Carter, deserved most of the credit – the conjunctions between life and art were surely no coincidence. The folk singer, the artist of 1965 – 6, the creator of Rolling Thunder: on the TV screen, one identity followed another.
So swiftly the sun
Sets in the sky
You rise up and say goodbye
To no one
Fools rush in
Where angels fear to tread
Both of their futures,
So full of dread,
You don’t show one
Shedding off
One more layer of skin
Keeping one step ahead
Of the persecutor within
Perhaps because of the video, or perhaps because he has so often been represented as a trickster, image manipulator and inveterate myth-maker, ‘Jokerman’ has sometimes been taken as Dylan’s song about his own legend, a track intermingled with a certain scepticism, all of a sudden, towards Christ’s active role, if any, in the world. It seems unlikely, to say the least, that the number could cover all those bases. When this messiah witnesses the arrival of the Antichrist, the Deceiver, He seems utterly passive.
You know what he wants
Oh, Jokerman,
You don’t show any response
If this is the usual Jesus, He isn’t doing His job. If this is Dylan getting carried away with his Christ-fixation, meanwhile, it all makes precious little sense, even given the endlessly perplexing nature of the song. It might be better to ask, first, why ‘Jokerman’, then to ask why, chorus after chorus, the incarnated, uninvolved deity would ‘dance to the nightingale tune’.
Perhaps because this a song about gods, not God, a song about humanity’s ability to touch the divine without hope of a guarantee that this world will be spared its usual biblical fate. Christ, if Christ it is, has a lot of humanity in him in ‘Jokerman’. He also carries the traces of many of the gods worshipped by man before the nativity. He dances? That’s an ancient idea. Those Caribbean spirits who ‘sorta inspired’ Dylan took (or take) possession of people during frenzied dances. Divine madness achieved in dancing is a notion common to cultures around the world. The old English carol, medieval in origin, called ‘Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day’ took this stately notion and presented a Jesus whose entire time on earth could be understood as an enactment of a celestial dance. The modern hymn, ‘Lord of the Dance’, simply exploits the conceit. In fourteenth-century England, they sang:
Before Pilate the Jews me brought,
Where Barabbas had deliverance;
They scourged me and set me at nought,
Judged me to die to lead the dance.
Then on the cross hanged I was,
Where a spear my heart did glance;
There issued forth both water and blood,
To call my true love to my dance.
Dylan’s Jokerman has within him the tension Nietzsche perceived between the Apollonian and Dionysian, order and disorder, law and misrule, intellect and instinct, mind and body. This god-figure dances to keep the world turning, dances to a tune supplied by John Keats and poetry’s nightingale. Meanwhile, He stands on water, walks on cloud and avails himself of whatever human vice is to be had in Sodom and Gomorrah. Freedom, of that variety, is ‘just around the corner’. Yet still, ‘with the truth so far off, what good will it do?’ The same figure is simultaneously obedient to ‘the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy’, Judaism’s rule books, and to ‘the law of the jungle and the sea’ underpinning earthly existence. Necessary order and divine disorder: the human dialectic. But still, how could a messiah be a joker?
Dylan has been at his Tarot again. This time there is not much ambiguity about the hand played, but the pillaging of the esoteric deck has interesting resonances within the song. In the standard Rider-Waite pack the Joker is known as the Fool, numbered zero if he is numbered at all. In older French and Italian sets of cards the Fool was rendered as some version of ‘Madman’. The figure was depicted, furthermore, either as a kind of holy fool, divinely deranged, or as the ragged Wildman of the Woods, the last descendant of pagan Dionysus. Commonly, even today, the Fool is shown as the possessor of a small dog. So:
Resting in the fields,
Far from the turbulent space
Half asleep near the stars
With a small dog licking your face
Near the stars might allude neatly to Oscar Wilde’s boast on behalf of those who rest in the gutter yet can see beyond grim reality; of the wee dog, there can surely be little doubt. Yet how would that fit with Dylan-plays-Christ? The former has kept dogs (rarely small) but Scripture makes no mention of Jesus in the company of pets beyond the familiar texts on sheep, lambs and straying flocks. The hound is in the song for a reason, nevertheless, and it can only be a Tarot-related reason. It is certainly a fact that the animal is present in an alternate ‘Jokerman’ take, one that gathers the Fool and his Dionysian antecedents together. As Dylan sings in this earlier, better version:
So drunk, standing in the middle of the street
Directing traffic, with a small dog at your feet
Perhaps he’s just fond of animals and gave us a Tarot joke to be going on with, interpreting until kingdom come. There are several points of difference between the two versions of the song, nevertheless, and one of these indicates a fascinating moment when the writer clearly had second thoughts about the truth he meant to convey. In the track as released, the earthly struggle between good and evil is conveyed as follows:
Well, the rifleman’s stalking
The sick and the lame
Preacherman seeks the same
Who’ll get there first is uncertain
On the bootlegs, meanwhile, Dylan can be heard to sing:
Well, a preacherman talkin’
‘Bout the deaf and the dumb
And a world to come
That’s already been pre-determined
There were sound and obvious metrical reasons for getting rid of ‘pre-determined’. By the time he settled on his preferred version, however, Dylan might also have decided – indeed, did decide – that he had no wish to pursue the kind of basic theological point that was otherwise transubstantiated meat and drink to the evangelicals. Whether he was heeding Dick Asher’s alleged $20-million threats or changing his own way of thinking, whether he had returned to secular views or not (not), there is a world of difference, in fact and logic, between what is pre-determined and what is uncertain.
There is plenty of doubt in ‘Jokerman’. That’s what helps to make it a great Bob Dylan song. The doubt is neither existential nor cosmological. For the artist, the fundamental issues had been settled, once and for all, before 1983. But in this song he is asking learned questions. What is a god who becomes a man and lives among men? What difference does it make to the existence of men? How does a messiah function ‘when He returns’ and the Antichrist is disguised by good deeds and clad in the scarlet of the Whore of Babylon? (Revelation 17:4: ‘And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.’) In Dylan’s belief, Christ does not, because He cannot, ‘show any response’.
Give the writer credit for audacity, despite it all. As albums containing ‘no fucking religion’ go, Infidels opens with a remarkable piece of work, a marvellous machine made of interlocking rhymes, rhythmic pulses and transcendent singing. Soon enough, people would be wondering what became of that Bob Dylan.
*
Some of the reviews for the album wouldn’t help. In New York’s Village Voice (29 November 1983), quantifying artistic success and failure with a helpful B-minus on his critic’s pocket calculator, Robert Christgau would judge that the artist had managed a ‘complexity of tone’ but nevertheless ‘turned into a hateful crackpot’ with his lectures on industrial relations, Israel and the risks of space travel. ‘Jokerman’ would not even be mentioned by the voice of the Voice. Others, such as the reviewer for Rolling Stone, were cheered by the album, excessively so, but the Christgau view would not disappear. Michael Gray, that most notable of writers on Dylan, grants everything to the opening track, but still finds Infidels giving off ‘feigned emotion wrapped in a fog of mere professional competence’. As for the artist, Gray has written, this ‘dissembling demeans him’. The album is ‘a small, shifty failure’, failing ‘in a small-minded, cheating way’.31
Such talk might be enough to persuade the unwary to prefer Saved and Shot of Love. That would be a big mistake. Those who greeted Infidels as a relief and heard its merits were not so far wrong. It would be a long while before they were again allowed even a notable-if-shifty failure from this artist. Nevertheless, the largest and most important fact, then as now, was that Dylan disfigured one of his better efforts in the studios for reasons that even he has struggled to explain. Mark Knopfler went off to Europe on tour with his band and the artist was left alone to overdub, mix the album and make his own choices. They were bad choices. Afterwards, Knopfler would be baffled, dismayed and just a little peeved by what became of all his exertions on behalf of Infidels. Once again, Dylan’s attitude towards his own work raised questions. Did he know what he was doing? More to the point, did he know why?
No tour was planned for 1983. Dylan went back to Malibu, messed around with some young local musicians and in March 1984 put in an appearance on NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman. The performance was both chaotic – for want of the right harmonica the singer was momentarily lost – and enthralling. The video for ‘Jokerman’ had been released during the previous month to much media chatter and acclaim. Predictably, the version of the song thrashed out for the TV audience with just bass, drums and guitar by Dylan and three under-rehearsed youngsters was barely a second cousin to the album track. The artist seemed invigorated, nevertheless, by his pick-up band and the company of a new generation of musicians.
Nothing came of it. Those four words could stand as the epitaph for most of Dylan’s endeavours in the years ahead.