Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (38 page)

The band selected to join the artist on tour was composed of safe choices and, in the main, stout Christians. Jim Keltner was a reliable if predictable drummer, so reliable he turned up on every other superstar session (former Beatles a speciality) during the 1970s. Dewey ‘Spooner’ Oldham was a Muscles Shoals keyboard player and songwriter with an impressive pedigree who was hired on Jerry Wexler’s recommendation. Tim Drummond, the bassist and sole non-believer in the group, was another of the producer’s choices, one who had helped to give
Slow Training Coming
its rhythmic solidity. Fred Tackett, already a contributor to Little Feat’s music, was no Mark Knopfler as a guitarist, but he was no slouch. In essence, this was a band of session players, trustworthy pros, but Dylan was sticking with the belief that nothing musical would be left to chance. On this occasion the artist’s requirements as to ‘gospel’ would be fulfilled by the singers Regina Havis, Helena Springs and Monalisa Young. Next to faith, professionalism was Dylan’s new favourite word.

After five or so weeks of sometimes chaotic rehearsals, the ensemble’s first performance, bizarrely, was on the tiresome TV comedy sketch show
Saturday Night Live
on 18 October. With Bill Murray pulling his knowing faces, strange Andy Kaufman challenging women in the audience to wrestling matches and Monty Python’s Eric Idle acting in the vague role of ‘host’, Dylan and his band performed ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’, ‘I Believe in You’ and ‘When You Gonna Wake Up?’ Perhaps in an effort to kill off the ‘Vegas’ jokes once and for all, the artist appeared in a short pale-blue jerkin so inoffensive he could have been taken for a janitor. Judging by the tape, his New York audience were not exactly roused to a revivalist fervour by the new songs. That, however, was the real puzzle of born-again Dylan. What did he expect? Asking people to heed nine religious songs on a single album was one thing. Insisting that they listen to nothing but his brand of ‘gospel’ through entire concerts when he had a back catalogue overflowing with vastly better work was either brave, deluded, or presumptuous. Nevertheless, that was to be the deal when the tour opened at the Warfield on Market and 6th streets in San Francisco on 1 November.

Contrary to certain legends, there were some good nights on the first of Dylan’s ‘gospel tours’. Four shows in Santa Monica
after
the Warfield run went down very well indeed. Even in San Francisco, it stretched credulity to suggest that every last person paying $12.50 for a ticket to the old theatre was outraged, or even disappointed. The concerts had sold out quickly and completely. After Joel Selvin’s review in the
San Francisco Chronicle
on 3 November locals preparing to attend the 12 remaining shows could have been under no illusions about what to expect.
Slow Train Coming
was a bestseller; ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ had been given a lot of airplay. Those who can take the lumbering songs argue further, rightly, that the artist and his band performed immaculately in these winter concerts. Just as in 1966, when every last stop on a world tour was depicted fancifully as a blood-curdling confrontation between artist and audience, most of those who would afterwards claim to have been affronted by Dylan’s god-awful gospel had paid good money for the privilege. People are strange, but not entirely, collectively perverse. The artist and his musicians were certainly put to trial by ordeal by some audiences, but Dylan would have a point – up to a point – when in 1985 he blamed Selvin’s review and others like it as the badmouthing that ‘hurt us at the box office’.

In 1979 I went out on tour and played no song that I had ever played before live. It was a whole different show, and I thought that was a pretty amazing thing to do. I don’t know any other artist who has done that, has not played whatever they’re known for … Yet it got all kinds of negative publicity. The negative publicity was so hateful it turned a lot of people off from making up their own minds.
¹¹

Clearly, group prayers before performances and the ministrations of Larry Myers did not quite have the desired effect. The Vineyard’s point man had been assigned to Dylan as a kind of personal chaplain or spiritual chaperone for the tour. If you believe one version of events, the artist himself had requested the pastor’s company. Like Gulliksen, Myers would ever afterwards deny having interfered with the singer’s decisions and claim, in fact, to have given all the pre-conversion hits a clean bill of health on Christ’s behalf. In fact, Dylan seems to have needed no reassurances on that score. He had no intention of performing any of the songs he was ‘known for’. To all appearances, the art he had made in his old life held no interest for him. With
Slow Train Coming
barely arrived in the stores, he had begun to write still more songs affirming his relationship with the deity. The new work was being ‘shared’ with Myers as it came to fruition, but there is no evidence that the pastor aspired to become God’s answer to Jacques Levy. Whether he kept an absolute vow of silence in all things is another matter. What does a spiritual adviser do if not advise? The songs would not amount to much, in any case, in the great scheme of Dylan, but such bursts of creativity were always sure signs that he was preoccupied with the task at hand.

He didn’t say a great deal to audiences during the first few shows in San Francisco. The catcalls and booing reported by Joel Selvin brought no response until the fourth night, when Dylan announced through the fug of dope hanging over the crowd that ‘we all know we’re living in the end of the end of times. So you’ll need something strong to hang on to.’ Much the same line was repeated on the next two nights, but Dylan said little else. On 10 November he stated: ‘The rabble says the preaching of the cross is foolishness. To those who perish [it is], but to those who are saved it is the power of God.’

It was proof that the artist had changed somewhat, but it hardly amounted to a full-scale, thundering sermon. If it had been on Dylan’s mind to preach, he took a while to warm up. In reality, the apocalyptic little speeches that would overshadow the music on this tour, the ‘gospel raps’ or ‘Jesus raps’ as aficionados describe them, were in many cases the artist’s righteous responses to what he took to be provocation. When it came to spreading true religion, he was no rock and roll John Donne, no amplified Jonathan Edwards. He wasn’t even a poor man’s Billy Graham. To begin with, a declaration that the End of Days is upon us and the occasional assurance that ‘God don’t make promises He don’t keep’ were about the extent of Dylan’s excursions into theology. Only on the 14th did it become clear that the former topical singer had revived one of his old Greenwich Village writing tricks and begun to delve into the daily papers for inspiration. Fifty-two Americans had been taken hostage in their country’s Iranian embassy on 4 November. The fact, shocking enough in itself, became a part of Dylan’s text for the remainder of the tour, but only as the basis for an injunction to audiences to ignore the trivia of this world. Once again, compassion went missing.

We read about all the trouble, you know Iran, Great Britain, Russia, Red China and the United States. But we’re not going to be bothered by all that because we know the world is going to be destroyed and we look forward to the approach of the Second Coming. And if the gospel is hid it is hidden to those that are lost. So anyway, we’re hanging on now to a stronger rock. One made before the foundation of the world. That real, that true …’

On the next night, Dylan elaborated just a little with ‘Christ will set his kingdom up for a thousand years; we know that it’s true. So it’s a slow train coming, but it’s picking up speed.’ The train, set rolling nightly with real gospel songs from the backing vocalists, would never truly leave North America. In fact, it would not be until April of 1980 and the third of the born-again tours that Dylan would risk performances in Canada and his old stamping-grounds on the Eastern Seaboard. Europe would not be considered until the summer of 1981, but the concerts that year would illustrate the kind of reception Dylan might have faced had he turned up at Earls Court with just hot gospel and ‘played no song that I had ever played before live’. Only nine of the twenty-five songs he would perform in London on the first night – 26 June 1981 – would be drawn from the ‘gospel trilogy’. There would be lots of old favourites in the set. But there would still be a great many empty seats in the godforsaken Earls Court barn after slow ticket sales and rumours of cancellations.

On the last night in San Francisco, nevertheless, there was evidence that even in that bastion of sinful American liberalism not every customer was alienated by the Religious Right’s singing preacher. The shock among the first-night audience when it became clear that God was all they were going to get had dissipated. On one bootleg from 16 November, the cry ‘God loves you, Bobby!’ can be heard from the crowd. An artist who is clearly at ease is interrupted three times over by applause as he introduces ‘Slow Train’ and chats about ‘what a horrible situation this world is in’ and how ‘God chooses the foolish things in this world to confound the wise’. Then it’s back to global destruction and Christ establishing His thousand-year kingdom, lion bedding down with lamb, slow train coming.
Pace
the
San Francisco Chronicle
, Dylan is delighted with this night’s audience. ‘Have you heard that before?’ he asks of the millennial prophecy. Applause is his response. ‘Have you heard that before?’ More applause. ‘I’m just curious to know: how many believe that?’ The last question is greeted with still more applause. Later in the show, Dylan can be heard thanking ‘all you people for all the letters and all the cards and all the encouragement’. He even declares that he loves San Francisco, despite there being ‘a lot of things wrong with it’.

Interviewed 20 years later, the band’s organist, Spooner Oldham, would confirm that the roughest nights in San Francisco were at the very start of the run. He would reckon that for the first three nights half the audience had been perfectly willing to applaud while the other half did their booing. Oldham, though he failed to notice the walkouts that certainly took place, would also mention protests outside the theatre, ‘folks out in the parking lot with placards’. After the opening nights, however, things calmed down: ‘all the rebels didn’t come back, or accepted it’.
¹²

In addition to the songs from
Slow Train Coming
, Dylan had been giving the Warfield audiences the largest part of a whole new album during these shows. Titles such as ‘Saved’, ‘Solid Rock’, ‘Saving Grace’, ‘Covenant Woman’, ‘In the Garden’, ‘What Can I Do for You?’ and ‘Pressing On’ didn’t require much elucidation. Whatever they meant to San Francisco’s paying customers, they were patently what the Vineyard crowd, clustered backstage nightly like virtuous groupies, had ordered. Or so you might assume. Their consistent claim would be that they played no part in deciding the nature of the concerts. Given that they were an energetically evangelical bunch whose avowed purpose was to save souls for Christ, not least the souls of dope-smoking Californians, that doesn’t seem to make much sense. But even if the godly didn’t try to tell Dylan his business, at least one witness believed the Vineyard’s ‘Jesus-type people’ were ‘pressuring him about a lot of things’. As Helena Springs would remember, ‘They were not allowing him to live. I remember one time he said to me, “God, it’s awfully tight. It’s so tight, you know?” He found a lot of hypocrisy in those Jesus people that he had gotten involved with.’
¹³

If that’s the case – and who knows? – perhaps it is worth thinking twice about the claim by Larry Myers and others from his church that Dylan alone was responsible for the decision to perform only religious songs on the tour. Let’s say the assertion is as honest as you would expect from a pastor. The implication is, therefore, that the Vineyard, a church well versed in the use of pop-type music, was more than happy for Dylan to sing all the big hits. If that is the case, the church’s leadership might not have been wholly delighted to see their most famous convert refusing to perform his most famous songs, the ones that caught and held all those millions of fans. The dire ‘negative publicity’ for god-awful gospel of which Dylan would complain was no aid to a church on a recruitment mission from God and a church, moreover, that had no desire to be perceived as odd, sectarian or extreme by mainstream America.

The artist was valuable to the Vineyard because of his immortal soul – what could have counted for more? – but his fame and the songs that had made him famous were worth something too. You can only pause to wonder about the enthusiasm these LA evangelicals might have summoned if a homeless hobo Dylan had wandered in off the street with a beat-up old guitar and begun to sing about his precious angel. Such, though, was the nature of celebrity Christianity and religion’s dalliance with rock music at the end of the 1970s. What you were mattered to the Lord, but who you were counted for a lot among those engaged on a membership drive for the Jesus lifestyle choice. The situation was not beneficial, necessarily, to either party.

After San Francisco, Santa Monica was easy. The four shows there were staged as benefits for the evangelical Christian relief charity World Vision International. The audiences were therefore predisposed, to put no fine points on the matter, to welcome the songs and anything else the star might have to say. After all, some of them inclined to the notion that anything popping into the head of a true believer was liable to be divinely inspired. The Vineyard types, led by Kenn Gulliksen, were out in force to provide impeccably moral support. Dylan seemed to be buoyed by the atmosphere generated by those he took to be of his kind and mind. His statements, those ‘Jesus raps’, thus began to pass beyond the outer fringes of common Christian discourse.

On the first night, 18 November, he said: ‘I don’t know what kind of God you believe in, but I believe in a God that can raise the dead. Will raise the dead, does raise the dead, all the time.’ On the second night, he became garrulous, not to say delirious, as though each piece of his new esoteric wisdom was swirling brightly if confusedly in his head. Dylan wasn’t quite talking in tongues – he had already written ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ – but there was a strange, ecstatic quality to the way he spoke about the world’s coming end. In part, he said: