Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (36 page)

Such were to be the saving graces of
Slow Train Coming
after the muddle and mess of
Street-Legal
. Dylan would have the professionally made album he wanted, with the unimpeachable – if sometimes overly ‘tasteful’ – playing that might keep a certain kind of critic off his back. Wexler and Beckett would take care of the technicalities he detested. Knopfler would play with a rare, intuitive sympathy, asking questions of the melodies without burying them beneath self-aggrandising displays of virtuosity. The rest of the musicians would take their cues smoothly from the guitar. Helena Springs, Carolyn Dennis and Regina Havis would set aside any disagreements between themselves – what with one Dylan-related thing and another, Springs and Dennis were not in harmony away from the microphone – long enough to achieve the singing the artist understood as gospel. The rest was up to him.

It is possible to admire
Slow Train Coming
, in a distant sort of way, and still detest the thing. It is possible, just about, to set aside any views you might have about deities, for or against or none-of-the-above, while finding it impossible to be agnostic about the album Dylan chose to make. Many people detect no chilliness at its adamantine heart, the rest of us – correctly, of course – can sense nothing else. The singer and writer Nick Cave probably put it best in 1997 (while naming
Slow Train Coming
as his favourite album of any description). The work, Cave said, is ‘full of mean-spirited spirituality. It’s a genuinely nasty record, certainly the nastiest “Christian” album I’ve ever come across.’
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The album beloved by some is, to others among us, a gesture of artistic subordination and a specimen of arid and often puerile dogmatism. That’s just for starters. Once you pause to consider Dylan’s words and his delivery of those words, the hour of judgement is at hand.

There are four dozen mentions of God, Lord, Jesus, He, the Man and Christ in the 12 songs prepared for
Slow Train Coming
(nine would be used). The Devil and/or Satan gets around a dozen mentions. Pass no opinions on the theology: that’s a lot. Not one of those songs achieves the annunciative power of ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’ (Gerard Manley Hopkins), or the simple purity of ‘Faith – is the Pierless Bridge / Supporting what We see …’ (Emily Dickinson). Not one song comes close, for that matter, to the radiant imagery,
Dylan-via-Poe, of ‘My love she’s like some raven / At my window with a broken wing’. Nothing on the album approaches the visionary expansiveness of ‘I Shall Be Released’. If you take the Dylan of
Slow Train Coming
on his own terms, as a religious writer, you will listen in vain for signs of transcendence or notes of joy. Instead, the album is a narrow, confining, self-involved work that does not begin to address a straightforward creative problem: how many times can you say the same few things?

Slow Train Coming
would be treated ever afterwards as the first in Dylan’s ‘gospel trilogy’. The assumption would be made that within a few brief years, the spiritual breezes having shifted, he simply turned his attention back to the garden of earthly delights and deliriums. That’s not remotely true. ‘Trilogy’, equally, is stretching things where the third nominated album,
Shot of Love
, is concerned. ‘Gospel’ is meanwhile just a lazy way of saying religious, or of making vague reference to a stream of biblical quotations and allusions. Dylan’s music, his ‘gospel sound’, bears only the faintest resemblance to the genre as it was understood in 1979. Gospel is and always was a broad church, but
Slow Train Coming
is a Christian rock album with inflections and affectations.

How would Dylan have proceeded in the years ahead if his allegiance to the Vineyard had endured?
Slow Train Coming
and its successor,
Saved
, would cover all the angles where his monosemous preaching was concerned. There were, after all, few enough angles to begin with. In this manifestation, religion – his version of religion – offered slim pickings for a writer. After
Slow Train Coming
, the
Saved
album would strike a great many listeners, Christian or otherwise, as redundant. You can only suspect that Dylan made a quick return to ‘secular’ music simply because he had nothing left to say about the meaning of religion. Any new and dramatic spiritual upheavals were incidental. ‘Get saved or be damned’ is not, in fact, a theme you can develop until kingdom come.

It points to a problem with what Dylan was choosing to believe in 1979. A great many religious writers in every era have managed to say plenty about the mysteries, problems and rewards of faith. This artist, fresh from his ‘three and one half months’ of study, was wrapping up the arguments in short order with pontifical authority. The question arose: who did he think he was, exactly? That question probably helped to explain several uncharitable reactions to the album. Many would not care for Dylan’s ‘Bible-thumping’: so much was inevitable. But even those who were prepared to sympathise, prepared to understand that the artist was attempting to testify to a life-changing experience, couldn’t help but be struck by his lack of humility. Some people spend their lives wrestling with the secrets of Scripture; study consumes their existence. Dylan considered himself learned enough to preach and lay down the law after just 14 weeks. Only a mail-order diploma would have been quicker.

No one had paid much serious attention to the religious allusions in his work before this album. Some of the references had been obvious enough, but they had failed to alter perceptions of the counter-culture’s prophet. Few had heard his mother’s anecdote about the big Bible kept open on the lectern at the Woodstock house throughout the writing of
John Wesley Harding
. Among those who cared before 1979 the religious motifs and borrowings had been regarded as just more leavening in the lyrical dough. But even if such details had been widely noticed or known, even if Dylan’s interest in religion had been common knowledge, none of it would have qualified him to preach. Barely five months had passed between the commotion in an Arizona hotel room and the first day’s attempts in the Muscle Shoals studio to nail an acceptable version of a song entitled ‘Trouble in Mind’. In those few weeks Dylan had gone from being the naive soul asking about the meaning of the crucifixion to one dealing out the fundamentalist cards. He had, even by his standards, a lot of nerve and it would not go unnoticed when the album was released in August. He had set about the mysteries of religion much as he had set about mastering the folk tradition: Bob Dylan had to know, or appear to know, everything. In reality, either he had acquired a lot of scriptural knowledge on his own time – so why bother with discipleship school? – or the teachings he had absorbed in a few classes were utterly simplistic. Listen to the album.

‘Trouble in Mind’, the product of the first, failed Muscles Shoals session, a song assembled from biblical quotations by way of Vineyard pamphlets and Hal Lindsey’s fantasy literature, is as good an example as any of Dylan’s method in the writing of
Slow Train Coming
. Genesis, Jeremiah, 1 John, Luke, Matthew and the (possibly) Pauline Epistle to the Ephesians are pulled apart for lyrics. Satan as the ‘prince of the power of the air’, soon to be a recurring figure in Dylan’s rhetoric, puts in an early appearance. The title is meanwhile lifted from a blues song that was at least half a century old by the time it suited the writer’s purpose, a song covered by everyone from Victoria Spivey to Janis Joplin to Sam Cooke. It had also been recorded by Big Bill Broonzy – Dylan’s most likely inspiration – for Folkways in the mid-1950s.

So far, so Dylan. Half the songs on
John Wesley Harding
could be deconstructed according to the same crude principles. But what is achieved here? ‘Trouble in Mind’ would wind up, in some countries, as a B-side to the hit ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’, but it was neither worse nor better than most of the things on
Slow Train Coming
. All that ancient wisdom for this?

Set aside the proposed equivalence between wives and possessions. Even Luke 12:15 doesn’t make the connection, though it should be remembered that by Dylan’s time fundamentalists were beginning to reject the nineteenth-century belief in families and marriages enduring eternally (and blessed they were) in the afterlife. Some among the born-again were doing away with gender, too, as a feature of the world to come. That possibility might not have been to Dylan’s taste. Nevertheless, his kind of Christians were strangely silent on the subject of heaven.
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You could excuse them for failing to describe the unknowable and indescribable. You could also suspect that they were much more interested in apocalyptic fantasies. If so, they had found their singer. Even for a non-believer, it is faintly startling to realise that in all of
Slow Train Coming
there is but one solitary mention of the promised life hereafter. In ‘Gonna Change My Way of Thinking’, heaven is described simply as ‘A place where there is no pain of birth’. That, existentially speaking, is it. And when Dylan got the chance to rewrite the failed song decades later for Mavis Staples he expunged all mention of this paradise.

In 1979, in a musically dismal piece such as ‘Trouble in Mind’ and throughout the album, his concerns were narrow and contemporary, his writing grisly. ‘They self-inflict punishment on their own broken lives’ is a metrical abomination even by the standards of Dylan’s personalised poetics. ‘Broken lives’ is a Vineyard-by-numbers phrase: for the church, everything in this world is ‘broken’. But such is the nature of the album: lumps of Scripture go into the stew alongside desiccated fragments of an old Bob Dylan persona, shavings from evangelical tracts, a few dashes of conservative pepper and the cheaper cuts from the Lamb. It doesn’t matter what you believe. The result is indigestible when it is not tasteless.
Slow Train Coming
became a hit album, but had it not been for the skills of Jerry Wexler, Beckett, Knopfler and the rest, Dylan’s career would never have risen again. As it was, he had to be denied thrice by fans and critics before he began to get the message. The problem was not faith, as such, but the horrifying spectre of Bob Dylan the fanatic.

‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ would become the hit, Grammy-winning single. Since Dylan has elected to believe that biblical data are not to be doubted, a ponderous melody resolves itself around a single dialectic in the verses. You serve the Lord or the Devil: there is no alternative. No one would call this sermon too complex. ‘Precious Angel’, the best track on the album, might sound like a love song to Mary Alice Artes in thanks for her part in the artist’s conversion. In fact, it turns out to be a report from the front line in the ‘spiritual warfare’ favoured by those who espouse kingdom theology. This Dylan, unlike every previous version, does not risk ambiguity: ‘Ya either got faith or ya got unbelief and there ain’t no neutral ground.’ ‘I Believe in You’, a lachrymose affair, sets Bob the Believer in the evangelical Christian’s favourite pose as the victim of ignorance and scorn. Those hoping for the best would later attempt to reimagine the item as a set of verses with a dual meaning, personal and spiritual. The interpretation would fail.

Self-pity, an abiding if occasional weakness in this artist, never makes for a good noise. In ‘I Believe in You’, as elsewhere on
Slow Train Coming
, Dylan’s writing wilts under the pressure of his determination to be right with God in all things save syntax, imagery and metaphor. In ‘When You Gonna Wake Up?’ and ‘Slow Train’, meanwhile, the old ruses of the protest singer are revived shamelessly for the sake of reductive arguments that would have gratified candidate Reagan. Dylan was as entitled to his opinions as he was to deploy cheap politics, that ‘instrument of the Devil’. Still, the purely Christian justification for ‘Slow Train’ remains difficult to state.

‘When You Gonna Wake Up?’ is explicit. The state of the nation – dire, of course – is here described as a direct consequence of the failure to understand why the ‘Man up on a cross’ died. Reagan and most of those who had created Reagan, the Religious Right, the Moral Majority and the entire conservative insurgency, would not have demurred from any of it. Such was their default argument in every policy debate. Lack of faith, in Dylan’s song, means

Thanks to America’s failure to wake up and heed the Word, a noted adulterer then sings histrionically of

In several senses save the important one,
Slow Train Coming
remains a breathtaking piece of work. Dylan even elects to frighten the children and encourage a few Creationists with ‘Man Gave Names to All the Animals’, an Edenic little comic song whose sole purpose, it seems, is to get the serpent into paradise and invite infants to guess the name of the creature blighting their born-sinful little lives. For some, Sunday school is eternal punishment. It is not a track you would want on your conscience, far less on your CV. As an attempt to lighten the mood of the album it feels like what it is, a contrivance with a preconceived purpose.