August 20, 2001, “Creating a Social and Historical Context for Dylan’s Christian Period” presented at the Mizel Center, Denver
CREATING A SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR DYLAN’S “CHRISTIAN PERIOD”
I want to talk about the Christian period in Dylan’s life, but first, in order to really understand it, we’re going to have to backtrack a little bit and put it in a social and historical context. For the weight it sometimes carries, it’s important to remember that Dylan’s Christian period lasted for only two years—that is if you date it from May 1st, 1979, when he entered the studio to record “Slow Train Coming,” until May 1981, when he finished recording his third and final Christian LP, “A Shot of Love.”
Dylan actually dates the beginning of his Christian conversion to his days with the Rolling Thunder Revue—a crosscounty folk caravan Dylan embarked on in 1975 with a variety of performers such as Joan Baez and Roger McGuinn. The master of ceremonies for that tour was T Bone Burnett, a Born Again Christian, who saw that there was something profoundly sad and self-destructive in Dylan at one of the most successful periods of his life, and began talking to him about the “inner light” he’d discovered in Christianity.
Dylan had a hellacious 1977. He spent almost the entire year editing “Renaldo and Clara” from film shot on The Rolling Thunder Revue, releasing a four-hour version of the film on January 25th 1978. The film cost more than $1.2 million and was universally savaged in the media. One memorable headline appeared on the cover of the Village Voice, where a Godzilla-sized Dylan towered over the Manhattan skyline underneath the banner “Giant Ego Attacks Earth.” 1977 was also memorable for the grotesque details of his personal life with wife Sara that were reported in the papers during their divorce proceedings, which she initiated on March 1st, and for which she was ultimately awarded $12 million dollars, half of his assets, as well as custody of their children. In addition, he made the papers as one of a number of show business personalities who had been cheated out of a fortune by a Ponzi scam that year, and the 3 million dollar house he’d been building in Malibu that the press had nicknamed Xanadu for its copper dome and his endless and expensive redesigns, which he’d insisted on keeping as part of the divorce settlement, was declared by geologists to be slipping into the sea.
After the financial fiasco of “Renaldo & Clara,” his divorce, and Xanadu, Dylan was broke and designed a world tour which became known in the press as “The Alimony Tour.” It began in Japan in February 1978, and two early shows at Budokan were recorded with plans to release a double album by the time the tour arrived in America. Dylan performed these early shows in full Las Vegas era Elvis drag, wearing a rhinestoned white jumpsuit and rarely playing guitar but mostly hoisting a handheld microphone and awkwardly and stiffly meandering around the stage while warbling his old tunes to new and peculiar arrangements heavy with syrupy flutes and violins. The results were so bizarre that Columbia decided not to release the album in the U.S. after all. And so Dylan, in the midst of a world tour, took time off to fly back from Australia and record an album of new material in April and May at his studio in Santa Monica. The resulting album, “Street Legal,” was mastered, pressed, and released in less than a month in order to coincide with a series of shows in L.A., his first U.S. appearances since the Rolling Thunder Revue. In July “Bob Dylan at Budokan” was released in Japan and the clamor in America, which was underwhelmed by “Street Legal,” convinced Columbia to release the double album in the U.S. as well in August. Ironically, the LP came with a fold-out poster of Dylan in full Elvis regalia at the time Dylan had gone back to black leather, having abandoned the Las Vegas road show featured on the albums for some of the most powerful and longest rock and roll shows of his career—sometimes playing as many as 32 songs and over 3 hours of material a night. The band hit their stride during the European portion of the tour, where one concert at Blackbushe Arena outside London attracted over 500,000 people. Closing out the rollercoaster year of 1978, in November he re-released a much shorter version of “Renaldo and Clara,” but the movie sank as quickly as the original.
During a show in San Diego in November of 1978, nearing the end of the “Alimony Tour,” someone in the audience threw a small silver cross onstage and Dylan picked it up and put it in his pocket. When he arrived in Tempe Arizona for his next show, he felt that he “needed something that he never needed before” and reached into his pocket and found the silver cross. At that point, Dylan knelt down to pray in his hotel room and had a vision of a heavenly and infinite power that entered the room and was trying to communicate with him. Later he described his experience to a Born Again friend of his that “Jesus put His hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of God knocked me down and picked me up.” His friend contacted members of her church, the Vineyard Fellowship in Los Angeles, who came to Dylan’s house to discuss the Bible with him. They recommended a 3-month Bible study course, which Dylan wasn’t interested in at all. But a week later, he went to bed at dawn and woke up from a very deep sleep at 7 a.m., got out of bed, and before he knew where he was going, found himself driving to the Vineyard Fellowship, an experience he described as being pulled there by a strange hypnotic force. Dylan attended the Vineyard Fellowship’s School of Discipleship Bible study program five days a week for the next 3½ months and never missed a session, and actually took part in a lot of other programs there as well. He described this experience as “making Christ the Lord of your life. You’re talking about your life now, you’re not talking about just a part of it, you’re not talking about a certain hour every day. You’re talking about making Christ the Lord and Master of your life, and King of your life. And you’re also talking about Christ, the resurrected Christ; you’re not talking about some dead man who had a bunch of good ideas and was nailed to a tree—who died with those ideas—you’re talking about a resurrected Christ who is Lord of your life. We’re talking about that type of Christianity.” He was baptized in May 1979, and then returned to the studio with 16 new songs, and in 11 days he recorded 9 of them for “Slow Train Coming.”
Word had already leaked out that Dylan had become a Christian, but it was still a surprise when “Slow Train Coming” was released just how fundamentalist Dylan had become. Not surprisingly, the LP was attacked in the media, although it also became his bestselling album to date. Greil Markus for example—the same guy who would later write “Invisible Republic,” a book celebrating the Basement Tapes era of Dylan and the Band—accused Dylan of using Christianity to pump up a badly deflated career, and to polish his tarnished mystique after a divorce in which he was accused of generally bizarre behavior, rock star eccentricities and absences (such as missing the birth of their last child in order to finish a chess game), physical abuse, and some serious lapses in good judgment, such as bringing a new girlfriend down to his kitchen in the morning to have breakfast with his wife and children. And Joel Selvin, music columnist for the S.F. Chronicle, wrote that “Dylan has written some the most banal, uninspired, and inventionless songs of his career for his Jesus phase. Years from now, when social historians look back over these years, Dylan’s conversion will serve as a concise metaphor for the vast emptiness of the era.” To understand the severity of his criticism, it’s important to remember that the big hits that year were Rod Stewart’s “Do You Think I’m Sexy” and the Village People’s “YMCA.”
After an appearance on Saturday Night Live on October 20th 1979, Dylan began his first Christian tour with fourteen shows at the Berkeley Community Center beginning on November 1st 1979. The excitement of seeing Dylan in a 2000-seat arena quickly turned into impatience and resentment when the evening began with a gospel trio singing six tent-show revival hymns accompanied by pianist Terry Young, before Dylan took the stage with a band consisting of some of the best studio musicians on the west coast—including Fred Tackett, Spooner Oldham, Tim Drummond, and Jim Keltner—to play the nine songs of “Slow Train Coming,” followed by eight of the nine songs that he’d later release in 1980 as “Saved”—a performance that ended with boos and catcalls from an outraged audience who expected at least something from Dylan’s extensive back catalog. The reviews were resoundingly negative. The headline in the S.F. Chronicle read “Bob Dylan’s God-Awful Gospel,” and Philip Elwood of the San Francisco Examiner wrote under the headline “Born Again Dylan Bombs,” “Ninety minutes of poorly played, poorly presented and often poorly written sounds … is a pretty grueling experience.”
Undaunted, Dylan repeated the exact same show from start to finish for every one of the 78 nights on that year’s U.S. and Canadian tour. At certain points during most shows he would preach from the stage. The longest speeches often preceded a song which he introduced as “Hangin’ On To A Solid Rock Made Before The Foundation Of The World,” which would later appear as “Solid Rock” on “Saved.” One of his shortest and most coherent speeches comes from a concert on Thanksgiving night: “The world as we know it now is being destroyed. Sorry, but it’s the truth. In a short time—I don’t know, in 3 years, maybe 5 years, could be ten years—there’s going to be a war. It’s gonna be called the War of Armageddon. It’s gonna be fought in the Middle East. Russia’s gonna come down first. Anyway, we’re not worried about that. We know there’s gonna be a new kingdom set up in Jerusalem for a thousand years. That’s where Christ will set up His Kingdom, as sure as you’re standing there, it’s gonna happen.”
There were also other more spontaneous interactions with the audience. At almost every show, people would get up and make dramatic and noisy exits, shouting at Dylan from the crowd. But this was a situation where Dylan always excelled, whether it was at the Newport Folk Festival, the Forest Hills Stadium, or the Freetrade Hall in Manchester. In Dallas, for example, when someone yelled out for “rock and roll” during the middle of one of his “end times” speeches, Dylan yelled back, “If you want rock ‘n’ roll, you can go down with rock ‘n’ roll. You can go and see Kiss and you can rock ‘n’ roll all the way down into the pit!”
By the time Dylan reached Denver in January 1980 (playing three shows at the now non-existent Rainbow Music Hall), Allen Ginsberg was living in Boulder and mounted a caravan of poets to appear at the concert and confront Dylan publicly about his new-found Christianity. That night, Dylan’s only speech to the audience occurred before “Slow Train Coming,” where he said, “I wanna tell everybody here to stay away from those—what do they call them—cults. To get out. There’s only one gospel. Don’t let yourself get fooled.” After the show, when Ginsberg went backstage to talk to Dylan, Dylan refused to see the man he’d personally chosen to be the resident poet for the Rolling Thunder Revue five years earlier, the man he’d once called the greatest poet in America, and sent a message that he would pray for the poet instead.
In November 1980, almost exactly a year after his first Christian appearance, Dylan returned to the Warfield Theater in San Francisco to play another extended series of concerts backed by the same band—but something was very different. First of all, although he was still singing several songs from the Christian LPs, they were now performed less as religious tracts and more as raunchy rock and roll numbers. Secondly, songs like “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Just Like a Woman,” and “Simple Twist of Fate” were back in the set list, performed with a passion and fire that harkened back to the shows at the end of the 1978 tour. And finally, on many nights he welcomed old friends to the stage who were mostly far from saved, including Jerry Garcia, Carlos Santana, Maria Muldaur, Mike Bloomfield, and Roger McGuinn.
Dylan’s final LP of the Christian trilogy was recorded in April and May of 1981 and released on August 12th as “A Shot of Love.” Although still largely Christian in nature, the LP also included a song praising the decidedly un-Christian Lenny Bruce, as well as songs he decided not to release at the time, such as the earthy “Need a Woman” the very secular love song “Angelina,” and a still unreleased version of “Mystery Train.”
In January 1982, less than two months after the last of the Christian shows, Dylan was in his studio recording “Do the Meditation Rock” with Allen Ginsberg, the man he’d lectured from the stage about being part of a cult barely two years before.
Dylan’s next major world tour began in Europe after the release of the somewhat hermetic and rocking “Infidels,” and although this tour included two songs from the Christian period—“When You Gonna Wake Up” and “Every Grain of Sand”—they were in the decided minority, and it was clear that this was yet again a new Dylan or maybe an old Dylan or a Dylan who, it was rumored, had returned to his Jewish roots.
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