Bob Dylan (15 page)

That’s not all you gotta do if you want what Dylan claims to have. What Dylan does not understand—what most New Fundamentalists have neatly sidestepped—are the hard spiritual facts that have always formed the bedrock of traditional American faith. What he does not understand is that by accepting Christ, one does not achieve grace, but accepts a terrible, lifelong struggle to be worthy of grace, a struggle to live in a way that contradicts one’s natural impulses, one’s innately depraved soul. Sin does not vanish, it remains constant, but now one cannot hide from it, and one must accept the suffering recognition brings. Though one is renewed by moments of unspeakable peace and justification, nothing is finally settled except the fact of one’s quest. What sustains that quest is not self-righteousness, but the paradox God has made of life on earth, the tension between what men and women know they could be, and what, in most moments, they know they are. “And I’ll be changed,” Dorsey wrote in “Peace in the Valley,” as so many have sung, from Mahalia Jackson in 1939 to Elvis Presley in 1957 and on from there, “Changed from this creature / That I am.”

One never rests. One never claims, as Dylan does throughout
Slow Train,
that redemption is a simple affair. Against Dylan’s blithe declaration of allegiance to God, gospel music sets a hymn
like “I Would Be True.” The distance implied by the conditional, the implication that without God’s help one cannot
do
anything, is very great.

American piety is a deep mine, and in the past, without following any maps, Dylan has gone into it and returned with real treasures:
John Wesley Harding
is the best example, but there are many others.
Slow Train Coming
strips the earth, and what it leaves behind is wreckage.

 

 

Chuck Berry, who was railroaded into prison seventeen years ago on a Mann Act charge, has a new album out called
Rockit;
it contains strange songs about the passing away of suffering, a chase by the Klan, and one tune, “California” (“Will I ever go to Los Angeles or San Diego / To Redding or Fresno, Needles or Barstow”), that took on new meaning when, last month, Berry entered federal prison here after pleading guilty to tax evasion. Get the record, then write Chuck Berry at the Federal Prison Camp at Lompoc, Box 2000, California 93438, and tell him you’re listening.

 

Bob Dylan,
Slow Train Coming
(Columbia, 1979).

 

Henry Williams and Eddie Anthony, “Georgia Crawl” (Columbia, 1927). “Hey there, papa, look at sis / Out there in the back yard just shakin’ like this / Doin’ the Georgia crawl”—and with a keening fiddle, a light guitar beat, and a non-stop leer. Collected on Allen Lowe’s heroic
Really the Blues? A Blues History 1893-1959
(West Hill Radio Archives/Music and Arts, 2010).

17 December 1979

 

After canceling a national tour, Bob Dylan opened an unprecedented fourteen-show stand at the 2,300-seat Warfield Theater in San Francisco on November 1—his first concerts since his conversion to fundamentalist Christianity. The material (
Slow Train Coming
and unrecorded new songs) was strictly evangelical; the performance was lifeless almost beyond credence. Backed by a pedestrian group of L.A. session men and three lively black vocalists, Dylan sang without expression, without movement, as if the act of facing a crowd were irredeemably distasteful. The audience was at times abusive, calling for old favorites, but it was a stupid response. I was glad Dylan had drawn a line across his career—he’s been a prisoner of the history he made for too long. But for this?

The sold-out hall was almost empty when, after an encore, Dylan returned to the stage, sat down at the piano, and with the three backing vocalists—Regina Havis, Mona Lisa Young, and Helena Springs—began a classically styled piece of gospel: “Pressing On,” which surely had to be straight out of a hymnal. He sang with every bit of the feeling the concert had denied—he sang with passion, with humility, as a man who knew his worth. I left trying to figure out what had happened.

I came back November 16, for the last night. The show loosened up early, when Dylan-as-Adam sang the pig verse of “Man Gave Names to All the Animals”: “He wasn’t too small and he wasn’t too big / Ah, think I’ll call it a giraffe.” A grin spread over Dylan’s face; after a preacher’s introduction to “Slow Train” (“This world’s going to be destroyed, we know that, and Christ will set up his kingdom in Jerusalem for a thousand years, and the lion will lie down with the lamb—have you heard that before? Just curious, how many of you here believe that? Well, all right!”), the grin came back. Later, a shouting match broke out in the crowd—“We
want
Dylan!
” “Do whatever you want, Bob!” “He will!”—and Dylan plainly cracked up.

He hit a lot of high notes on a new tune, “Covenant Woman,” and the audience was up for every one of them. “No Man Righteous (No Not One),” a duet with Regina Harris, a bouncy number, kept the mood building; “God Uses Ordinary People,” a horrible, Vegas-style solo by Mona Lisa Young, dashed it. The songs from
Slow Train Coming
were still second-rate, the band was little better than functional, and a few of the new tunes were poor, but Dylan was putting himself into the music; he was leaning forward, reaching.

With “Hanging Onto a Solid Rock (Made Before the Foundation of the World),” he took over; his authority was back. This was a huge sound, and Dylan gave it everything. He struck Elvis poses, rocked back on his heels, took his guitar into a crouch; along with the backing singers he shouted out the chorus (“MADE! BEFORE! THE FOUNDATION!”) as if the words were being hurled into him.

And then—after more new songs, after an encore, when the show had gone on for almost two hours—it was time for “Pressing On”: Dylan’s song, as it turned out, and one of his best. Seated at the piano, Dylan traded lines with the other singers, and his voice suddenly grew in range; it was wrenching, scary, and yet completely without strain. It was the high, terrible Appalachian moan of his early ballads: timeless, lean, unforced, inescapable.

Dylan moved to the center of the stage as the band returned to close the song; grabbing the mike stand, he leaned it to one side, just like Rod Stewart, and the performance expanded until it seemed to take in every shade of emotion. As the song hit a surge, Dylan began to jump up and down. The song went on; it might have gone on for ten minutes, and it could have gone on all night.

28 July 1980

 

This column has been unable to confirm a rumor that Bob Dylan’s second born-again album,
Saved,
was held up because of tampering with the cover art, which depicts several hands reaching toward the outstretched, bleeding hand of Jesus Christ. Reportedly, someone broke into the CBS factory one night and very subtly re-drew the hand of the supplicant second from the left in such a manner as to make it appear that Jesus was being given the finger. The offender has supposedly been apprehended; a rumor that Elvis Costello’s name was found in his address book could not be confirmed.
⁸

 

Bob Dylan, “Pressing On,” from
Saved
(Columbia, 1980). The performance had stiffened up by the time it was recorded; while the opening passage has a light behind it, the rest of the song is overplayed, oversung, hammered with a near-hysteria of orchestration and decoration. The song didn’t really find its voice until almost thirty years later, in Todd Haynes’s 2007 film
I’m Not There,
with Christian Bale (acting) and John Doe (singing). With half of the combination missing, it wasn’t half as convincing on the soundtrack album.

January 1981

 

9) “Like a Rolling Stone” at Longhi’s, Lahina, Maui, February 22. Longhi’s is the ultimate laid-back watering hole; as I sat there that morning, the house radio tuned to KQMQ-FM and playing pop tunes that functioned strictly as unregistered background, Bob Dylan’s greatest song came on. The languid crowd slowly turned from its pineapple and Bloody Mary breakfast; feet began moving, conversations died. Everyone
listened,
and everyone looked a bit more alive when the last notes faded. It was a stunning moment: irrefutable proof that “Like a Rolling Stone” cannot be used as Muzak.

As for Dylan himself, his return to the Warfield Theater in San Francisco far outstripped similar appearances in 1979. The previous shows were one hundred percent holy-writ rock; this time the ads promised nostalgia: all your favorites! For Dylan, now so fervently committed to Jesus, it seemed like the first real sellout of his career: a sad concession to his once-doting audience, or a pathetic admission that he couldn’t live without it. That was not how the music came across. Ending a two-week run, Dylan gave a gruff, good-humored performance of what, that night, was on his mind: hard and syncopated gospel, an Appalachian ballad complete with autoharp, Little Willie John’s “Fever,” Dave Mason’s startlingly apt “We Just Disagree,” a few of his own, older numbers. It was the seventeenth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Dylan closed with “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” which has always been associated with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962—as far as the history books go, Kennedy’s finest hour. It was steely, mean, implacable, and forgiving, and it sounded as if Dylan had written it the night before. Maybe ninety-nine-and-a-half won’t do, but it did.

May 1985

 

The late Lester Bangs on the 1976 Second Annual Rock Music Awards telecast, hosted by Alice Cooper and Diana Ross:

Things haven’t changed much since then. Rock stars still invest whatever time they have in what they are most proud of. The only difference is that the Rock Music Awards have been replaced by the American Music Awards, and whales have been exchanged for Ethiopians.

Following the AMA telecast in January, more than forty performers gathered to make a record to raise funds for Ethiopian famine relief. AMA host and big winner Lionel Richie had already written the song with Michael Jackson; Quincy Jones produced. Diana Ross, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner, Willie Nelson, Steve Perry, James Ingram, Kenny Rogers, Paul Simon and the rest “checked their egos at the door” and, under the name of USA for Africa, cut “We Are the World.” As Oscar Wilde might have said, it takes a strong man to listen without laughing. Or throwing up.

As I was cleaning the floor, I had to admit that as a tune “We Are the World” isn’t at all bad—but a more vague composition about specific suffering could not be imagined. Small print on the sleeve claims “United Support of Artists for Africa (‘USA for Africa’) . . . has pledged to use . . . all profits realized by CBS Records from the sale of ‘We Are the World’ . . . to address immediate emergency needs in the USA and Africa, including food and medicine,” but there isn’t a word in the song about how or why this might be necessary. In the first verse one is told that “There are people dying” (STOP PRESS); in the last verse, that “When you’re down and out” (Ethiopians are “down and out”?) “...if you just believe there’s no way we can fall.” Literally, that means if Ethiopians believe in USA for Africa the stars will realize their own hopes. That’s it for Ethiopia.

While grammar is no help, contextualization comes to the rescue: certainly the superstars of USA for Africa knew their efforts would receive such overwhelming media coverage that their proximate inspiration would be clear to all. Thus once past “There are people dying” the rest of the song can fairly be about not the question but the answer—a celebration of the rock music personalities who are singing.

“There’s a choice we’re making / We’re saving our own lives”—those are the key lines of “We Are the World,” repeated again and again. Dylan sings them, Cyndi Lauper sings them, Springsteen sings them, Ray Charles sings them, Stevie Wonder sings them. Within the confines of desperately MOR music, Charles is magnificent, Wonder sounds fine, Springsteen sounds like Joe Cocker, and Dylan—well, if a comedian attempted a Dylan parody this broad he’d be laughed off the stage. But that’s irrelevant. Here recognition is all: objective parody is more recognizable, more saleable, than subjective performance. The point is voracious aggrandizement in the face of starvation—a collective aggrandizement, what those in the industry are most proud of. Melanie Klein posited the infant’s projection of itself on the world, and its instinctive attempt to devour the world; beneath perfectly decent, thoughtless intentions, that’s what’s to be heard on “We Are the World.” Forget the showbiz heaven of “We are the world, we are the children / We are the ones who make a brighter day”; listen to the way that, projecting themselves on the world, the USA for Africa singers eat it. Ethiopians may not have anything to eat, but at least these people get to eat Ethiopians.