Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (41 page)

In 1985, when Christianity was supposed to be behind him, Dylan would say the song was ‘inspired’. Talking to the journalist Cameron Crowe for the booklet designed to accompany the
Biograph
box set, the artist would claim that writing ‘Every Grain of Sand’ ‘wasn’t really too difficult. I felt like I was just putting words down that were coming from somewhere else, and I just stuck it out.’ The Dylan who was alleged to have returned to the secular world would then turn his remarks into something that sounded very like a sermon.

Make something religious and people don’t have to deal with it, they can say it’s irrelevant. ‘Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand.’ That scares the shit out of people. They’d like to avoid that. Tell that to someone and you become their enemy. There does come a time, though, when you have to face facts and the truth is true whether you wanna believe it or not. It doesn’t need you to make it true …

‘Every Grain of Sand’ is often tracked back to William Blake. In fact, that’s a little unfair to Dylan. The Blake of the Pickering Manuscript, a believer with a unique theology – deism without the Deists, more or less – begins his paradoxical ‘Auguries of Innocence’ with a pair of images intended to contain the universal within the particular. Dylan reverses the idea. Blake’s opening, the only relevant verse, runs:

Dylan’s song, in contrast, describes the discovery of the presence of Jesus, ‘the Master’, in
every
grain of sand. Blake sees his heaven contained in a single flower; Dylan perceives God ‘in every leaf that trembles’. It is a fine distinction, but essential to grasping a song in which the writer is locating himself within infinite creation. Blake is observing infinity in the palm of his hand; Dylan is placing his afflicted, penitent self amid the minutiae of existence at every level. He is no more (or less) important than any leaf or ‘every hair … numbered like every grain of sand’.

Blake has provided an image of multiplicity. Dylan’s net is cast wider. There are echoes in ‘Every Grain of Sand’ of that other Dylan, the God-driven Welsh atheist Dylan Marlais Thomas, and of his ‘Jesus poems’ above all. There are also cadences and metaphysical fragments oddly reminiscent of John Donne. There is biblical quotation: the numbered hairs are from Matthew 10:30. There are, equally, those seemingly effortless bits of borrowing and conflation that had gone missing during
Slow Train Coming
and
Saved
. Thus:

The injunction to be ‘of good cheer’ turns up time and again in the New Testament like some apostolic catchphrase. Conscience, equally, is held out repeatedly, in gospel after gospel, as the essential key to virtue. There is an allusion too, no doubt, to Matthew 4:13–20 (‘the sower soweth the Word’) and the parable of seed falling on stony and noxious ground. Quite how flowers and weeds can behave like criminals isn’t obvious, but Dylan’s poetry-reading habits in his youth, that era when fashionable opinion held him to be first cousin to Arthur Rimbaud, might provide one explanation. He knew his way around the works of Charles Baudelaire. The jump from
Les Fleurs du Mal
/
Flowers of Evil
to the song’s ‘flowers of indulgence’ is not so great. In his youth, Dylan certainly knew and invoked François Villon’s fifteenth-century ballads. The ‘Ballade des dames du temps jadis’ is the best remembered of them all. Its refrain, ‘
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?
’ has long been translated as ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ Dylan at his best doesn’t use a word like yesteryear accidentally. So Villon’s snows become weeds, those flowers of former sins reduced to spiritual waste by passing time, by wasted time.

It’s brilliantly done. It is not brilliant, however, because the writer reminds us that he reads a lot. ‘Every Grain of Sand’ is authentically human, both as writing and as an expression of faith, in a way that so many of Dylan’s ‘gospel’ songs are not. The lovely harmonica solo on the
Shot of Love
track is a finer testament to belief than all the merciless, browbeating evangelical verses. Nothing on
Slow Train Coming
or
Saved
approaches poetry like this song’s last verse.

One coincidence is worth observing. When Dylan made an attempt to record ‘Every Grain of Sand’ at Rundown at the end of September he asked Jennifer Warnes to sing it with him. She was at that time involved with Leonard Cohen, another friend and fellow Jew who was perplexed by Dylan’s embrace of Christianity’s alleged Messiah. What’s striking is that when ‘Every Grain of Sand’ was being written in ‘that area where Keats is’, in ‘like 12 seconds, or that’s how it felt’, Cohen was slaving, in his usual painstaking way, over the dozens of verses that would be condensed finally in 1984 to form the song ‘Hallelujah’.
¹⁵
The Canadian was another who had toyed often enough with Christian imagery, most famously in the evocation of Jesus-the-sailor in ‘Suzanne’, but his act of worship in ‘Hallelujah’ was contemporaneous with Dylan’s ‘Every Grain of Sand’ and a counterpoint to it, Judaism answering to Christianity.

Cohen’s famous song is an injunction to praise in the face of all doubt, a ‘broken hallelujah’ from a man who allows only that ‘maybe’ there is a God, a man who doesn’t know the name he is supposed to have taken in vain, but who still finds a blazing light in every word no matter how the words are understood. The parallels with Dylan’s song are as striking as the differences. Dylan seemed to know it, too. When the so-called Never-Ending Tour was barely a month old in July of 1988, he would give the first of two performances on the road of ‘Hallelujah’ at the Forum de Montréal in Quebec. The experience would seem to stir something deep within him. In seventy-one concerts that year, two renditions of Cohen’s work would be answered by just two performances of ‘Every Grain of Sand’. Dylan and his friend in the tower of song understood one another.

That didn’t ease the artist’s plight in 1980. The radiant version of ‘Every Grain of Sand’ recorded with Jennifer Warnes would not appear until 1991 and the release of
The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3
. The album on which the song could first be heard would in the meantime turn out to be even more of a flop than
Saved
. Dylan was entering a period in which his great songs would fail, time and again, to save the albums for which they were written. For most of that time he would only have himself to blame. Sometimes, too often, he would refuse even to allow the greatest songs to appear on those albums. Most of the catastrophes would have nothing to do with his religious beliefs, whatever the beliefs happened to be in any given year. It is beyond question, however, that Dylan’s precipitous decline in popularity began when he was born again.

*

At the beginning of November, he took his band back to the Warfield Theater in San Francisco for another long run of concerts. Spooner Oldham had withdrawn from the troupe and Willie Smith had arrived to take care of keyboards. The platoon of backing vocalists, swollen to five members during the last of the spring concerts, had been reduced to a trio: Clydie King, Carolyn Dennis and Regina Havis. The first of these women had by then joined the long list of those who were important to Dylan for reasons that were not simply professional. There were other changes. First, this short tour, just 19 concerts, was advertised, somewhat disingenuously, as ‘A Musical Retrospective’. Second, the artist no longer felt moved to preach to his audience. Third, though plenty of the religious songs were performed, these would be the first Dylan shows since December 1978 which did not depend entirely on ‘gospel’. The shows, by no accident, were the better for it.

On the first night in San Francisco, Dylan’s third number was – lo and behold – ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. During the last show almost a fortnight later ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, complete with the voice of Roger McGuinn, and ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ were raised from the crypt. As though another bout of willed amnesia had passed, ‘Girl From the North Country’, ‘Just Like a Woman’ and ‘Señor’ were also heard. Either Dylan had accepted the fact that he could not disown his entire career, or he had given up the unequal struggle to force purely religious music on his audiences. He still took time during the final concert to attack the reviewers who had, he said, misrepresented and defamed the previous year’s Warfield shows, but he was coming to terms with reality. He might be able to extinguish all the Bob Dylans who had gone before; history and public memory would not be denied. There was also a career to be considered. He had given unadulterated evangelism his best shot, but it was no longer sustainable. His spirit was willing, but his sales figures were weak. Perhaps more significantly, on the fourth night of the Warfield run Dylan slipped in a song that he would perform on 16 occasions in the months ahead. Another kind of faith was being restored.

All right, we’re gonna try something new tonight. Don’t know how it’s gonna come off, but we’ll try it anyway. A lot of people ask me, they want to know about old songs, and new songs and stuff like that. This is a song I used to sing before I even wrote any songs. But this is a real old song, as old as I know … So this is how I guess you call one of them old folk songs I used to sing. I used to sing a lot of these things. Well, I hope it brings you back, I know it brings me back. This is ‘Mary and the Wild Moor’. I guess it’s about 200 years old.

The English broadside ballad goes back at least to the early nineteenth century and probably emigrated from the London stage to America in the 1820s. Dylan wasn’t entirely accurate in claiming that he was doing something new by singing it – he had performed the old song ‘The Water Is Wide’ as a duet with Joan Baez during some of the Rolling Thunder shows – but he was close enough. His recourse to the folk tradition would become fundamental to his practice in the years ahead. As he said in San Francisco, ‘I hope it brings you back, I know it brings me back.’ That would not happen overnight. There were tough times ahead.

*

Why did Dylan turn to fundamentalist religion so suddenly, as it seemed, and with such absolute conviction? Because he was predisposed towards superstitious faith from childhood? Because, bloody and bowed, he had worn out one Bob Dylan and stood in need of another? In this argument, two schools of wholly unsystematic thought can be identified. One says, with the support of numerous lines and verses from a host of songs, that Dylan had always inclined towards religion. It was the biggest of his open secrets and there was nothing sudden about his embrace. In this version, all that truly happened when he encountered the Vineyard people was the decision finally to reveal his deepest convictions and express them, temporarily, through a particular creed. The trigger was the addictive idea of the Messiah and what that idea seemed to explain. The argument holds, essentially, that while the experience of conversion might have been shattering, Dylan had always been ripe for faith.

The parallel view says simply that religion was the prop with which he tried to shore up his fragmenting identity. ‘Bob Dylan’ needed to be refurbished and he had tried most other things. In the summer of 1978 he had undergone a difficult, multimillion-dollar divorce and a deeply unpleasant fight over the custody of his children. Sara and his family had been at the centre of his world and suddenly, thanks to him, they were gone. Relentless hedonism, in its several guises, had proved no substitute. Art being pitiless and greedy, these traumas did his music a power of good, for a while, but Dylan was left as an aimless and profoundly vulnerable individual, so the argument goes, and easy prey for those peddling supernatural answers. It was simple for the Vineyard, offering order amidst the chaos of his life, to take advantage of his weakness.

But was that really all it took? Was he no smarter in the end than all the unhappy teenagers busy being reborn all across the western world? It sounds too simple and it does Dylan no credit. It makes him sound, for one thing, like just another unhappy sucker taken in by the latest fad. Embracing faith, he also rejected a great deal. He was not wholly passive during the process. Only he could attempt to rid himself of every previous Bob Dylan and only he could decide what to do with a born-again identity. It is clear, too, that he had thought often enough about religion. No one was spinning him a line he had not heard before. Interviewers had been asking Bob Dylan for his deepest thoughts on God for years. One way or another, he had read a great deal of Scripture long before the Vineyard’s special-forces team were summoned. The history of his public utterances on the subject is a fascinating study in its own right.

In October 1975, long before his decision to embrace Christ,
People
magazine had already been informed of where the artist thought he stood. ‘I don’t care what people expect of me,’ Dylan had said. ‘Doesn’t concern me. I’m doin’ God’s work. That’s all I know.’ In September 1976, interrogated by that noted theological journal the American
TV Guide
, Dylan had become lyrical – had anticipated the lyrics of ‘Every Grain of Sand’, in fact – in describing his ability to detect the presence of God ‘in a daisy … in the wind and rain’. ‘I see creation just about everywhere,’ he had said. ‘The highest form of song is prayer. King David’s, Solomon’s, the wailing of a coyote, the rumble of the earth.’

He felt no obligation to be consistent in his statements, however, before or after he converted to Christianity. By March 1978, amid an interview in Brisbane, Australia, destined for Britain’s
New Musical Express
, Dylan had explained to Craig McGregor that he harboured ‘no dedicated religion’. He had not, he said, ‘gotten into that’. Barely ten months before his apparently whole-hearted embrace of evangelical Christianity, Dylan had added: ‘No dogma. I don’t usually do that; I usually play my guitar. I don’t know why, I’ve never gone on any of them guru trips. I’ve never felt that lost.’