Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (30 page)

The Nazarene, in the Bible’s account, was alert to class, to what it means and what it does to humanity. In ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ Dylan’s late-American born-again conservatism requires the fiction that all will be as one, brick-hauler and mansion-dweller alike, when the judgement bell sounds. The distinction between the meek and the rest is abolished. The song is explicit: ‘You may be rich or poor, you may be blind or lame.’ It became the most notable feature of
Slow Train Coming
: no trace of human compassion, not an ounce, not even a hint. ‘Human’ had ceased to be the preoccupation of a writer who had once found an inexhaustible fascination in the chaos of mortal existence, in what we are. Selvin was right about the absence of any sign of joy in this ‘gospel singer’. As represented by the artist, being saved was not a lot of fun.

Dylan’s idea of redemption involved the least-worst choice: accept or go straight to hell. Even among the godless, who didn’t necessarily know any better, his pitiless relish at the prospect of eternal suffering for those not saved was akin to a parody of superstar heaven. Most other versions of Christianity would have been far easier for audiences to accept, even in 1979, even in a San Francisco that did not yet blink at a misused Marxian cliché in the local newspaper.

A word is missing, nevertheless, from Selvin’s famously damning (in some circles) review. The word is ‘Jewish’. Dylan might have affronted the remnant counter-culture with his ‘doses of Bible-thumping’. At the time, few paused to wonder how his discovery of a messiah, the veritable confirmation of ancient prophecies, would sit with the faith into which he had been born. It was, after all, the faith that held the worship of such a messiah-type to be, straightforwardly, idolatry.

Most of the tales of born-again Bob are shaped around the alienation of the secular erstwhile Christians who had once bought his records. The meaning of his conversion for Dylan himself, and for his fugitive, vaporous identity, is far more interesting. Selvin, like several of the reviewers who witnessed that first gospel tour, accused the artist of betrayal, as though a sincere conviction could also amount – the joke within the joke – to bad faith. The deeper truth is that Dylan believed he was reuniting the fragments of his identity, this Jew in a Christian world, through messianic Judaism. Some would account that a delusion and the most complete betrayal of all. For him, nevertheless, it was very real. And how did that happen?

*

On 13 November 1979, Dylan and his band were performing the 11th show in their hard-fought 14-date run at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco. The former governor of California was meanwhile in New York City. At the old vaudeville joint on Market Street, where the quizzical ghost of Charlie Chaplin ambled, Dylan was achieving a version of a song called ‘Covenant Woman’ that is still admired by some bootleg fans. At the Hilton New York, in a gargantuan dormitory-tower looming over the Avenue of the Americas, the genial ex-governor was announcing his candidacy for the presidency of the United States.

While Dylan and his troupe were asking ‘When You Gonna Wake Up?’ and the singer was assuring his fans that ‘God don’t make promises He don’t keep’, Ronald Reagan had this to say:

I believe this nation hungers for a spiritual revival; hungers to once again see honour placed above political expediency; to see government once again the protector of our liberties, not the distributor of gifts and privilege. Government should uphold and not undermine those institutions which are custodians of the very values upon which civilization is founded – religion, education and, above all, family. Government cannot be clergyman, teacher and patriot. It is our servant, beholden to us.

Reagan, by then 68, went on tell his party and prospective voters that a ‘troubled and afflicted mankind’ was pleading with them to keep a rendezvous with destiny, uphold familiar moral principles and become ‘that shining city on a hill’ surveyed, planned and claimed outright by their putative Puritan forebears. Back in San Francisco, Dylan was singing a song entitled ‘Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)’. One part went: ‘Don’t wanna burn nobody, don’t wanna be burned / Don’t wanna learn from nobody what I gotta unlearn’. Afterwards, the artist thanked those who had applauded and said: ‘You know you read about that situation in Iran, but we’re not worried about that because we know the world is going to be destroyed. We know that Jesus is coming back.’ Candidate Reagan was not yet ready to share that news with the electorate.

*

Dylan was in a bad way towards the end of the 1978 world tour. Sheer exhaustion played its part, of course, but his recreational habits were not what any doctor ordered. The usual lurid allegations of drug use and hard drinking have been made. Anomie is not, in any case, a condition that is diagnosed easily or often. Dylan had done the proper, professional thing and repaired his finances in spectacular style during all those months on the road. Whatever his habits, he had imposed an unusual degree of discipline on himself. But, city by city, sports arena by sports arena, the early enthusiasm had given way to a kind of self-disgust. He was making money at the expense of his music.

Dylan was perfectly capable of doing what was expedient, but he was no hypocrite. Besides, he understood the law of diminishing creative returns. When it became obvious that an artist had ceased to care about his work, customers stopped showing up. They were fickle enough to begin with. Barely four years after the deluge of ticket applications for Tour ’74, the final American leg of the excursion around the world had been a hard sell from the start. In 1978, sceptical concert-goers who knew nothing else knew Dylan as the pretentious creator of that dumb unwatchable movie, as the maker of the ‘lazy’ album
Street-Legal
, as the formerly dissentient street poet who had ‘gone Vegas’ with his chick singers and his slick band. If his performances seemed only to confirm those accusations, Dylan was done for. As 1978 began to give way to 1979, with his silver cross in his pocket, he was asking a lot of questions about himself, his art and his life. Jesus picked his moment to show up.

The truth was probably more complicated. Dylan was undoubtedly at a low ebb, but his band was full of people who had ‘received Christ’. The guitarist Steven Soles and the young multi-instrumentalist David Mansfield were both enthusiastic converts to Christianity in its evangelical Californian guise. Roger McGuinn had gone with God, as had Johnny Cash (in that case a short trip) and assorted members of bands such as Poco, America, Santana and others besides. Helena Springs was a believer. Carolyn Dennis had been raised on gospel. Mary Alice Artes, still another companion – ‘girlfriend’ barely begins to describe a member of the circle of women around Dylan at this point in his life – had just been born again. She was, it seems, the ‘close friend’ to whom he turned after his experience in or around Tucson. There was no shortage of people in Dylan’s life for whom evangelism mattered. In the spiritually promiscuous milieu of late-’70s California, non-belief was fast becoming the devilish exception. Christianity, modernised and glamorised, was the rising faith in the music business. In any case, Dylan had never been a non-believer.

Even a cursory examination of his work since 1967’s
John Wesley Harding
showed evidence of an interest in matters of religion at every step of the way. Several of that album’s songs would not have existed without the Book of Revelation and the Book of Isaiah.
Blood on the Tracks
,
Desire
and
Street-Legal
had been flecked and stained deeply with biblical imagery. The fact that Mary Alice Artes was connected with the Vineyard Fellowship, a small but fast-growing evangelical group in the San Fernando Valley, only provided what seems, in one version of hindsight, like the last link in the chain.

In January of 1979, after a Sunday service, Artes spoke to Kenn Gulliksen, a leading pastor at her church. It was, to begin with, familiar stuff about how she wanted to ‘rededicate’ her life to Jesus rather than persist with a different kind of superstar relationship. Then Artes asked if there was anyone available to have a serious talk with her ‘boyfriend’. Her boyfriend turned out to be Bob Dylan. Two other pastors, Larry Myers and Paul Emond, were dispatched – their precise velocity has not been calculated – to an apartment in the West LA suburb of Brentwood.

Dylan had been seen wearing a cross of some description during the final dates of the 1978 tour, but as he later told the story he had not rushed into the arms of Christ after his hotel room experience. When the Vineyard pastors arrived at the apartment he was ‘kind of sceptical’ but ‘also open’. Though he had a lot of questions – chiefly to do with the perplexing nature of the claimed Messiah – he ‘certainly wasn’t cynical’.
³
What did the preachers mean by ‘son of God’? What was the meaning of this claim ‘dying for my sins’?

These were Jewish questions. Conversion to Christianity had a baleful, immemorial significance for many of Dylan’s people because, historically, it had so often been accomplished through persecution. In modern times, equally, conversion was often derided by faithful Jews as a purely self-interested attempt at assimilation, a surrender to the majority culture for the sake of acceptance or a career. It was also apostasy. Jews simply did not buy the fundamentalist claims made on behalf of the wonder-working Essene from Galilee. In any case, Dylan had not been raised as a secular Jew. He had studied; he had learned his Hebrew; he had enjoyed his weeks and months at a Zionist summer camp. His parents had been leading lights in Jewish organisations. As a child he must have asked about the differences between himself and all the Christian kids. In 1971, he had spent some time ‘investigating’ what Judaism meant to him and had paid a visit both to Jerusalem’s Western Wall – on his 30th birthday – and to the Mount Zion yeshiva, Diaspora Yeshiva Toras Yisrael. In January 1979, Dylan was asking basic questions of the messengers from Jesus. In essence, they led to one question: how could he
be
Jewish and become Christian? The answer, when it came to him, would be a little out of the ordinary.

Larry Myers would remember his first encounter with the artist. Speaking in 1994, he recalled meeting ‘a man who was very interested in learning what the Bible says about Jesus Christ’.

To the best of my ability I started at the beginning in Genesis and walked through the Old Testament and the New Testament and ended in Revelation. I tried to clearly express what is the historical, orthodox understanding of who Jesus is. It was a quiet, intelligent conversation with a man who was seriously intent on understanding the Bible. There was no attempt to convince, manipulate or pressure this man into anything. But in my view God spoke through His Word, the Bible, to a man who had been seeking for many years. Sometime in the next few days, privately and on his own, Bob accepted Christ and believed that Jesus Christ is indeed the messiah.
⁴

Conversion was not easy, Dylan would say later, and you are inclined to believe him. Interviewed by an Australian journalist in 1980 he would call the process ‘painful’ and compare it to a baby learning to crawl, observing:

You have to learn to drink milk before you can eat meat. You’re reborn, but like a baby. A baby doesn’t know anything about this world and that’s what it’s like when you’re reborn. You’re a stranger. You have to learn all over again.
⁵

In the same interview, Dylan would make the guess – ‘gently’, as the journalist noted – that ‘He’s always been calling me. Of course, how would I have ever known that?’ Yet even after talking to the two Vineyard pastors he remained reluctant to commit himself to fully fourteen weeks of intensive Bible study.
⁶
Then, in his telling, he woke early one morning feeling compelled to show up at the classes in the fellowship’s improvised school in the town of Reseda, 30 or so miles from his Point Dume compound.

*

In the 1960s and 1970s secularism in art, pop and rock was taken for granted. John Lennon’s 1966 remark, wholly uncontroversial in Britain, that the Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus’ – and that the disciples were ‘thick and ordinary’ – had defined one side of the argument. The bonfires made of the band’s records in some Southern states that year had formed the evangelical rebuttal. Rock and roll was not virtuous, not chaste, not obedient, not respectful and not necessarily in accord with each and every commandment. Dylan, it was presumed, would never surrender himself to mere uncritical faith, or to the ‘conservative values’ that seemed always to be part of the deal. Sing a white man’s gospel? Preach like some polyester-clad TV hellfire evangelist? Actually believe that Armageddon was imminent (turn right at Tel Aviv) and insist that only those born again in Christ could hope to be saved? For the hip, record-buying true believer this was blasphemy, or a hideous joke, or (yet again) the last straw. Ostentatious faith was the preserve of those who embraced every right-wing cliché available. For Bob Dylan to squander his art on the banalities of the modern revival show was preposterous, depressing, insulting, or more evidence that he had lost his wits. ‘Christian rock’ was a contradiction in terms. In 1979, as always, the deep-dyed Dylan fans were convinced they knew him better than he knew himself.

This was foolish. Hindsight says that the only surprise lay in how long it took for a highly moral and moralising writer to act on all the clues in certain of his most self-righteous songs. Wasn’t Dylan insistent on fundamental truth? Didn’t he mistrust the surface appearance of material things? Wasn’t his a restless intelligence forever seeking a deeper understanding of existence? Had he ever said a single word, in any case, to suggest that he harboured doubts about the omnipresence of a deity? And wasn’t he given to saying that something was very wrong with the flimsy world of man? By converting to Christianity, Dylan stuck the counter-culture’s note of scepticism back in its bottle and cast all upon the waters.

From start to finish his verses have been littered with the language of religion. ‘I’d Hate to Be With You On That Dreadful Day’, a poor song assembled from damnation clichés in 1962, might never have made the cut for an album, but it was unambiguous. He was barely 21 when he sang: