Slate has a review up this morning of David Kinney’s new book about people who are obsessed with Bob Dylan. Do you think that I should read it? I’m offended to not have been interviewed!

I just ordered it – should have it by the end of the week (May 13th release date in Canada).

1979 was not a big year for Dylan as a live performer, relatively speaking. After the enormous world tour of the previous year, he performed “The First Gospel Tour” (of three). This began with an epic fourteen day residency at the Fox Warfield Theatre in San Francisco from the 1st to the 16th of November. From there he performed four shows in Santa Monica for World Vision International, and then a further eight shows on the road in California, New Mexico and Arizona.

All of the Dylan shows during this period were pretty close to the same thing: He generally performed the same seventeen gospel songs in the same order every night, with only the slightest possible variation. He never played a single song from any of his previous albums, which must have been tough for people who didn’t know that going into the show. I’m sure that there are people out there who have listened to every single bootleg and who can point to very fine distinctions between the shows, but that’s not going to be me. There is an old AngelFire website dedicated to this tour here – it has transcriptions of a lot of his stage patter, including his description of having the cross thrown on stage in San Diego the year before.

What I listened to this week was the contrast between two shows. I listened repeatedly to one of the Santa Monica shows. This has an appreciative audience – he is playing for a religious crowd who know that they have come to see a gospel show. Generally, the band is tight, Dylan is in good form, the venue is intimate enough to provide good sound. It’s a really good show – if you’re into the music from Slow Train Coming and Saved, which all in all I’m really not. It’s a genuinely strong performance of music that I’m not interested in much at all.

The striking counter-example is the second Tempe, AZ show on November 26. Dylan performs only two songs before he loses the crowd. During his introduction to his third song of the night, “When You Gonna Wake Up?” there is hooting and hollering and general noisiness. Dylan goes off. Listen to it right here, and the transcript (courtesy Bjorner) is below:

Dylan: “Well. What a rude bunch tonight, huh? You all know how to be real rude. You know about the spirit of the anti-Christ? Does anybody here know about that? Well, it’s clear the anti-Christ is loose right now, let me give you an example. You know, I got a place out, ah, somebody stopped by my house and gave me this, uh, tape cassette. Some of these kind of people, you know, there’s many false deceivers running around these days. There’s only one gospel. The Bible says anybody who preaches anything other than that one gospel, let him be accursed. [“Rock-n-roll!”] Anyway, you know, this fellow stopped by my house one time and wanted to, so called, “turn me on” to a . . . well I’m not gonna mention his name, he’s a certain guru. I don’t want to mention his name right now, but ah, he, he has a place out there, near LA [“Malibu!”] And ah, he stopped by and he gave me this taped cassette to show me … [“Rock-n-roll!”] … You wanna rock-n-roll you can go down and rock-n-roll. You can go see Kiss and you rock-n-roll all your way down to the pit. Anyway, let me give you an example here. I’m gonna give you a real good example, I took a look, I dropped this tape cassette off with a friend of mine. [lots of heckling and others trying to shout the hecklers down] Turn the lights on in here. I want to see these people. Turn some lights on. Give them some light. Let them in the light. [applause] So anyway, this certain guru, you wanna hear about this guru? So anyhow, [“Rock-n-roll!” “Shut up!”] All right, so this guru, he made a film of himself. He had one of these big conventions. He does have a convention I think every so often like once a month, he’ll go to a big city. [“Praise the lord with puke!” “Shut that guy up!” Applause] Now, so, I took a look at this tape, and sure enough he was having himself a big convention. He had, must have had five thousand to ten thousand people there. Eight thousand people. And what he was doing on the stage was, he was sitting on there with a lot of flowers and things. And he sure did look pretty though. He’d sit up there, you know like kind of like on a throne and you’d listen to him talk on the tape. And on the tape, he said, you know, what’s life all about is life is to have fun. He said, “I’m gonna show you now how you all can have fun.” And he had a big fire extinguisher there and he put colored water in this fire extinguisher, and he would spray it out on the people. And they all laughed and just had a good time. They took their clothes off. They were overjoyed to be sprayed by this man. [Booooo!] And a little while after that, he started talking about his philosophy. And he said that he was God — he did say that. He said that God’s inside of him and he is God. And, you know, that those people could just think of themselves as God. I want to tell you this because there’s many of these people walking around. They might not come right out and say they’re God, but they’re just waiting for the opportunity too. And there is only one God. And let me hear you say who that God is? [mixed shouts] Their God, he makes promises that he doesn’t keep. There’s only two kinds of people like the preacher says — only two kinds of people. Color don’t separate them, neither does their clothes … [Rock-n-roll!] … You still want to rock-n-roll? I’ll tell you what the two kinds of people are. Don’t matter how much money you got, there’s only two kinds of people: There are saved people and there’s lost people. [applause] Yeah. Now remember that I told you that. You may never see me again. I may not be through here again, you may not see me, sometime down the line you’ll remember you heard it here. That Jesus is Lord. And every knee shall bow to him. 

You’re rarely going to hear a recording of a more fundamental and deep-seated disconnect between performer and fans. Dylan’s anger sort of grows during the show as the heckling never ends. He goes off on an even longer lecture later in the show, informing them about the impending apocalypse that will drag America into the end times. No one is really listening though. Here’s that one:

How many people here are aware that we’re living in the end of times right now? How many people are aware of that? Anybody wanna know that? Anybody interested in knowing that we’re living in the end times? How many people do know that? Just, yell out or do something. How many people don’t know that. Well, we are, we’re living in the end times. [“The times they are-a changin!”] That’s right. I told you that. I told you “TheTimes They Are A-Changin” twenty years ago. And I don’t believe I’ve ever lied to you. I don’t think I said anything that’s been a lie. I never told you to vote for nobody. Never told you to follow nobody. Well, I’ll tell you a story about that now. When Jesus saw this woman, they all wanted to stone her. Because, you know, she was an adulteress. So they come by and they wanted to stone her. And they said to Jesus, they said, “Master” they said, they wanted to trick him, you know, so they said, “What say you? What do you say there, should we stone this woman? Because she has been an adulterer?” And he says, “Well, let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” They all just dropped their stones and they walked away. And then he said to the woman, he said “Woman,” he said, “You’re free now. You go and sin no more.” And the woman left. Well, let me tell you, that the devil owns this world. He’s called the God of this world. Now we’re living in America. I like America just as much as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged. You know, God comes against a country in three ways. First way he comes against them, he come against them in their economy. Did you know that? He messes with their economy the first time. You can check it all the way back to Babylon, and Persia and Egypt. Many of you here are college students aren’t you? Many of you are college students. You ask your teachers about this now. You see, I …uh .. I know they’re gonna verify what I say. Every time God comes against a nation, first of all he comes against their economy. If that doesn’t work, he comes against their ecology. It ain’t nothing new that’s happening. He did it with Egypt. He did it with Persia. He did it with Babylon. He did it with the whole Middle East. It’s desert now. It used to be flourishing gardens. All right. If that don’t work, if that don’t work, he just brings up another nation against them. So one of those three things has got to work. Now. Jesus Christ is that solid rock. He’s supposed to come two times. He came once already. See, that’s the thing, he’s been here already. Now, he’s coming back again. You gotta be prepared for this. Because, no matter what you read in the newspapers, that’s all deceit. The real truth is that he’s coming back already. And you just watch your newspapers. You’re gonna see, maybe two years, maybe three years, five years from now, you just watch and see. Russia will come down and attack in the Middle East. China’s got an army of two hundred million people. They’re gonna come down in the Middle East. There’s gonna be a war called the “Battle of Armageddon” which is like some war you never even dreamed about. And Christ will set up his kingdom. He will set up his kingdom and he’ll rule it from Jerusalem. I know, as far out as that might seem, this is what the Bible says. [“Everybody must get stoned!”] I’ll tell you about getting stoned. What do you want to know about getting stoned? [Mixed shouts] Alright, what you’re gonna need is something strong to hang on to. You got drugs to hang on to now. You might have a job to hang on to now. You might have your college education to hang on to now. But you’re gonna need something very solid to hang on to when these days come. Let me tell you one more thing. When Jesus spoke his parables, he spoke them to people, he said, he said parables to all these people. Everybody could hear the parables. Everybody heard the same parables. Some people understood them and some people didn’t. But he said the same one, he said the same thing to everybody. You understand, he didn’t try to hide them, he just said it. Those that believed it, believed it and understood it, and those that didn’t, didn’t. That’s right. We’re gonna play a song now called “Hanging On to a Solid Rock, Made Before the Foundation of the World.” Now remember now, you talk to your teachers about what I said. I’m sure you’re paying a lot of good money for your education now, so you better get one.

Unlike the KMEX interview, here we get some genuine sense of what it is that Dylan actually believes, straight from his own mouth, and we get considerable pushback from some angry fans who want to hear his older songs. Sorry, pal, you can call out all the titles you want, but Dylan doesn’t play that anymore.

From what I can tell, Bob Dylan only granted one interview in 1979. Unfortunately it’s not a very good one, but it is his earliest statement about his Christian beliefs (other than the music). Recorded on December 7, 1979 for KMEX, a radio station in Tucson, AZ, it was conducted by Bruce Heiman. It seems that it was occasioned by the determination of the Tucson chapter of American Atheists to picket Dylan’s performance in the city the next night. The problem with the interview is that Heiman is struggling to understand exactly what the Atheist group wants to accomplish or what it is that they actually believe. It is also clear that Dylan doesn’t know, so you have an interviewer and interviewee trying to get to the heart of American Atheism in the 1970s, not very successfully.

Here’s how Heiman characterizes their press release: “We got a press release from the Tuscon chapter of the American Atheists and they said in response to your recent embrace of the born-again Christian movement they plan to leaflet your upcoming concert. They say they recognize the need to inform those in the audience that the new Dylan cause-celebre is a repressive and and reactionary ideology and that members intend to draw attention to the contradictions between the previous content of your art form and the message which your songs now expound.”

First, it made me wonder if American Atheists continue to send out press releases about Christian rock stars to this day, or was this a particular function of the late-1970s?

But we’re not here to blog about Madelaine Mary O’Hare and her followers. What does Dylan have to say about his faith? That’s what we want to know. It’s pretty straightforward and pretty direct. When Heiman suggests that the Atheists are against any sort of religion he responds:

Dylan: Well, Christ is no religion. We’re not talking about religion … Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

A little later, when Heiman avers that the Atheists believe that all religion is repressive, he responds:

Dylan: Well, religion is repressive to a certain degree. Religion is another form of bondage which man invents to to get himself to God. But that’s why Christ came. Christ didn’t preach religion. He preached the Truth, the Way and the Life. He said He’d come to give life and life more abundantly. He talked about life, not necessarily religion …

Finally, when confronted with the notion that he has adopted a new ideology:

Dylan: Well, this ideology isn’t my ideology either. My ideology now would be coming out of the Scripture. You see, I didn’t invent these things – these things have just been shown to me. I’ll stand on that faith – that they are true. I believe they’re true. I *know* they’re true.

Most of the rest is just two guys talking past each other about atheism. You can read a transcript of it here. It’s short. I feel sort of cheated by this interview, because it is clear that Heiman isn’t prepared to get to the heart of what Dylan believes, and he’s a poor stand-in for someone who might want to challenge Dylan on any of this.

That said, it is instructive to a degree. It is clear that the betrayal that many of Dylan’s fans felt at this moment was real and palpable, and it is also clear that Dylan really and truly does not care. It would be idiotic to suggest that his new-found faith was not one hundred per cent legitimate. He would do three tours (one in 1979, two in 1980) without playing any of his secular songs. He very clearly is hoping to win over some of his former fans to his way of thinking. He is hoping that his music will lead others to see the light.

This was an interview where everybody seemed to come off confused.

I’ll admit it – I was a little bit scared of this album. You hear the stories. The legends of the born again period. The genius lost in confusion. The earnestness of the songs. Dire Straits as the backing band. Well, Slow Train Coming has all that and, you know, it’s not really that bad. Well, maybe the Dire Straits.

The only song that I knew well from this album was “Gotta Serve Somebody”, which was enough of a hit, that it is pretty inescapable as a radio presence. Most of the rest has been new to me this week, and it has been a hit or miss kind of week.

Let’s get rid of the bad right away. “Precious Angel”, as noted, is a song that I’m quite happy to be done with after this week, though I think it probably gets played at some live shows next week as well. Almost done with that one.

The title track, which is actually known as “Slow Train”, is just not very good at all on the album. There are live versions where it is better, but it is still not actually good. The third verse is highly problematic.

All that foreign oil controlling American soil

Look around you, it’s just bound to make you embarrassed

Sheiks walkin’ around like kings

Wearing fancy jewels and nose rings

Deciding America’s future from Amsterdam and to Paris

And there’s a slow, slow train comin’ up around the bend

Really, I could have lived a long time without hearing Dylan sing this kind of nativist bullshit. So that’s another one that I’m looking forward to jettisoning.

“Gonna Change My Way of Thinking” has a lot of power chords, and, really?, is that a cowbell? I think it might actually be a cowbell. Not good. “When You Gonna Wake Up?” is also bad (the “Gonna” songs on this album are all bad….). Lots of Dire Straits touches on that one, and these horrible lyrics:

Counterfeit philosophies have polluted all of your thoughts

Karl Marx has got ya by the throat, Henry Kissinger’s got you tied up in knots

Should probably just leave Kissinger out of your gospel songs, I’m thinking.

“Do Right To Me Baby (Do Unto Others)” is fine, but that’s all it is. Just fine.

So, that’s a pretty bad track record. That said, I do think that there are three songs on here worth keeping.

First, “Man Gave Names to All the Animals”. This one gets a lot of votes for “worst Dylan song ever” (please, “If Dogs Run Free” – end of argument). I don’t see it. It’s a great song to sing around the bonfire at your church camp, or in a Sunday school class. It’s clearly a song for children (a children’s book will even be made out of it somewhere down the line), and that seems to bother some people for some reason that I can’t see. It’s a fun song! I also like the fact that he drops the final line of the last verse:

He saw an animal as smooth as glass

Slithering his way through the grass

Saw him disappear by a tree near a lake . . .

Better, the band doesn’t resolve the song to its opening chord. The first time I heard it (on Sunday) I thought “that’s absolutely brilliant!”. Live, his back-up singers hissed after “a lake”, and that didn’t work nearly as well. The unresolved note is much more powerful.

Second, “I Believe In You” is, frankly, a beautiful song. This is one that Dylan has kept playing live (as recently as 2009). It’s just a great, great love song to God. He performs it well here, and it is simple and it is elegant, and it is great. I love the slide guitar bits. The only thing that keeps this from being the best-late 1970s Dylan song is:

Third, “When He Returns”. This was the shocker for me. Most of the time the final song on any Dylan album has a good chance of being a loser. Not this time. Dylan had actually planned for this to be sung by one of his back-up singers, and to close out the album that way. As it is, it’s Barry Beckett on the piano, a driving, riveting performance, that Dylan sings over. Apparently he did this eight times, and on the eighth he nailed it. Clinton Heylin says that this is his best vocal performance on an album since “Visions of Johanna”. He might be right about that one. This a great Dylan performance, proving that he hadn’t actually lost it, he’d just changed it.

In his interview with Bruce Heiman on KMEX Dylan was asked about separating the songs from the music:

Dylan: Well, they can’t do that. You can’t separate the words from the music. I know people try to do that. But they can’t do that. It’s like separating the foot from the knee.

I know some people won’t like any of these songs because they won’t be able to separate the song from the gospel that informs it. That’s too bad, because at least three of the songs on this album are really quite good. That’s a better number than some of the early-1970s albums.

I’ll admit it – I’m still a little bit scared of Saved.

We have definitively arrived at the moment where Bob Dylan became uncool. If you watch Dylan from his earliest appearances on television or on stage at Newport in Murray Lerner’s documentaries or in Dont Look Back (especially!) Dylan seems to have been the coolest man on the planet. Watch the concert scenes in Renaldo and Clara and he was still the coolest man on the planet. Concert for Bangladesh and The Last Waltz? Still unbelievably cool. Now go watch Bob Dylan’s only appearance on Saturday Night Live. As he didn’t sing in Hattie Carroll, “now is the time you’re not cool”.

Bob Dylan appeared as the musical guest in second episode of the fifth season (20 October 1979). A bearded Eric Idle was the host. This was in the Bill Murray, Gilda Radnor, Lorraine Newman era – no Chevy, no Dan, no Belushi. You can watch the entire episode online here.

Watching old SNL is an odd experience. I was ten when this aired, so I didn’t see it then (I didn’t really see SNL until Eddie Murphy was part of the cast). The opening bit is ok, and most of the stuff with Idle isn’t great. The news segment is great. The best part of the whole thing – by miles – is the appearance by Andy Kaufman in his “I wrestle women” phase. He was an unbelievable heat magnet at this point in his career. That is a surreal experience. Most of the skits aren’t bad.

What is bad is Bob Dylan. Dylan does three songs: “Gotta Serve Somebody” (12:24 into the episode), “I Believe in You” (39:02) and “When You Gonna Wake Up?” (59:39). He never looks happy, not even for a second. He stands out there on stage dressed like a dad taking his kids to soccer practice. Gone are the sunglasses and awesome Rolling Thunder hats. Here is a button down shirt and faded denim jacket. He is the embodiment of anti-cool. Look at his band! Off to the side are four back-up singers (three women, one men). They are awesome – all decked out in spangly disco outfits. With Dylan looking like he just stepped out of the minivan.

These performances are pretty terrible. That may be a function of the genre. In almost forty years SNL has produced only a handful of truly memorable musical performances (Elvis Costello booting “Less Than Zero” for “Radio Radio” and getting banned; Simon and Garfunkel not looking at each other in the second episode ever; Sinead O’Connor ripping up the pope; Ashlee Simpson trying to lip-sync to the wrong song). In fact, if you google “Best SNL Musical performances” the top picks are Kanye West and Nirvana and Arcade Fire. I had forgotten all of those. As I say, not memorable.

Dylan is unforgettable, for all the wrong reasons. Lifeless, humourless, dour – this is why people hate the Christian period.

Andy Kaufman, though. Hilarious.

Here’s a clip of “Gotta Serve Somebody” that I can’t get to embed right now for some reason.

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTY4NzgxMDQw.html

It’s weird. I’ve listened to Slow Train Coming about ten times so far this week already, and I was very much under the impression that it moves from songs that are religious but not overtly so towards ones that are more explicit in their Christian point of view. Just now, however, I sat down and actually listened intently to “Precious Angel”, the second song on the album and the second single while reading the lyrics. And, yeah, that theory about gradualism was just shot to pieces.

This is a sort of creepy song. It is the subject of some speculation as to who the “Precious Angel” actually is. In some ways, I feel like this is one of the songs I’d least like to have Dylan sing about me. The whole whispered lyrics things, his phrasing, it’s just generally unenjoyable for me. I haven’t heard a good live version of it yet, but I’ve only dabbled in a couple of his concerts from 1979 (these range from actually pretty good to downright awful – check back in a couple of days).

Sort of a null entity for me. Don’t like it. Don’t have much to say. The end. Just ticking off this box, really.

Let’s take a moment, shall we, and note for the record: Bob Dylan’s last top forty hit. “Gotta Serve Somebody”, the first of a ridiculous four singles from Slow Train Coming, peaked at #24 in the United States in August 1979. He has not even sniffed the singles pop charts in the intervening three and a half decades.

For such a legendary singer, he never did that well on the pop charts. In fifty-two years of recording, Dylan has never had a #1 hit (in the US), although he had two #2s (“Like a Rolling Stone” and “Rainy Day Women”) and four in the top ten. It’s a pretty meagre success rate, if this is your gold standard.

Slow Train Coming was actually a successful album – peaking at #3 on the album chart. It would be his last success until 2001. It has been suggested that the album brought Dylan to an entirely new audience of right-wing Christians, and maybe that is the case. It’s not too far-fetched as to be unbelievable.

“Gotta Serve Somebody” is one of the better songs on Slow Train Coming, which is an album that I generally am finding not too bad. It has a very 1970s bass line, and Dylan sort of whispers the lyrics into the mic. The back-up singers are also used pretty well here. In 1980 this song will win Dylan his first Grammy – which is not so much a celebration of the quality of this song as it is a complete condemnation of the uselessness of the Grammys, but we’ll deal with that next week.

Lyrically, this song is one of the least direct expressions of Dylan’s new-found Christian faith on the album. It’s a song all about humility, and Dylan includes himself in this. I generally like it up until the fourth minute when we get this verse:

You may call me Terry, you may call me Timmy

You may call me Bobby, you may call me Zimmy

You may call me R.J., you may call me Ray

You may call me anything but no matter what you say

That one bugs me every single time as it seems so out of place.

Wikipedia notes that John Lennon didn’t much like this song, and so shortly before he died he recorded “Serve Yourself”, a goofy paean to self-involvement and selfishness that makes him come across like a complete ass. Here’s the Lennon:

Here’s the great Judy Collins singing the Dylan song. It’s even weirder when she asks to be called “Zimmy”:

Bob Dylan’s At Budokan, released in April 1979, is a bit of a strange album. Dylan performed 114 live shows on his four-part world tour in 1978. By the time the album came out, it was memorializing a Dylan that didn’t really exist any longer. In a lot of ways, it is the coda to the first part of his career.

The album was recorded at two different shows – February 28 and March 1 – at the famed Budokan Hall in Tokyo, a home for martial and professional wrestling events that became a concert venue as well in 1966 when The Beatles played there. These were the fourth and fifth shows at Budokan (the seventh and eighth of the tour, as Dylan opened his world tour in Tokyo before doing three shows in Hirakata City and then returning to Budokan), and, as almost every critic is obliged to note, the band had not really gelled yet in terms of what they were trying to accomplish on this tour. If Hard Rain, his previous live album, seemed listless because it was recorded at the end of the tour, this one sounds a little spotty because it was recorded too early. You can’t win.

Actually, the album is pretty good – it’s just not as good as some of the better shows from the tour. The sound quality is excellent. When you spend a lot of time listening to audience recordings, it can be surprising to suddenly hear professionally recorded and mixed material (I had the same reaction to the Montreal footage from Renaldo and Clara – the bootleg sounds great, the official recording sounds awesome). Dylan started the tour in Japan and had been told by the promoters that he had to play a large number of his hits. This is what he does, but he provides new arrangements for almost everything. It’s a revisiting of the Dylan catalogue, but in an entirely new way. The songs that carry over from Rolling Thunder, or from the 1974 tour with The Band, are, once again, completely redone.

Many people hated this tour. Dylan was out there with a very large band, and three back-up singers, and a saxophone player. This seemed to be the sound – or one of the sounds – that Dylan had always been going for, but he was roundly knocked for it. With the then-recent passing of Elvis, many people felt that Dylan was seeking to occupy his spot, and the tour was condemned as too “Vegas”. Some of the shows in the US didn’t sell out and were met with mixed reactions.

I like a lot of the material here, but I generally don’t like any of it as much as I like Rolling Thunder or The Band tour, so I can definitely see the argument that there is a decline happening at this point. There were better options for live albums if they had been recorded. The Paris shows from July 1978 are generally held to be vastly superior to the Japanese shows, and the show at Blackbushe Aerodome, one of Dylan’s longest (33 songs), is really fantastic, despite an audience recording where you get to hear every moron in the crowd complain about people standing up in front of them.

The 1978 tour is well worth listening to – there’s a nice six CD bootleg that is very comprehensive and shows off what Dylan was doing better than this does. One of the things that I found most interesting about it was that near the end of the tour Dylan got chatty with the audiences. For more than a decade he hadn’t been one for stage banter, and even in the summer shows in Paris he doesn’t say much more than “Merci!” between songs. Then suddenly in November, everything changed.

On November 13, in Oakland, he introduced “Ballad of a Thin Man” with this spiel (credit to Bjorner for transcribing all of this):

“In the Midwest in the fifties, during the fifties in the Midwest, they used to have these carnivals go by. And there always used to be someone in the carnival called a geek. A geek is a man who bit the head off a chicken and ate it, live. Anyway, everybody used to think of him as a freak. I mean if you think you’re funky, this guy was low-down all the way. And he used to think about other people as being freaks. I just wanted to tell you that.”

At the same show, before “One More Cup of Coffee”, he talked about the king of gypsies:

One year on my birthday I went to France where they have a big gypsy festival. All the gypsies from all over the world go there, and they party for a week. It just happens to be on my birthday. Anyway, I met the king of the gypsies a little ways away from there. He had 16 wives and 100 children and he still wasn’t faithful and true. Anyway I did get mixed up with someone over there. I don’t remember what was happening but in the morning they said, “Would you like anything for the road?” And without thinking I just said “one more cup of coffee.” I wasn’t sure if I could say anything else, but it was dangerous territory. 

 He told variants of these two anecdotes pretty much through the rest of the tour (Bjorner has them all transcribed), and on November 17 in San Diego (the same show at which someone threw him a crucifix), he said this before “Señor” (my favourite of the three):

Thank you. I took a train once from Monterey, Chihuahua, up to San Diego. Anyway, this guys was sitting next to me on this train, a man wearing a blanket. He (…..) to know everything. One of them (…..) guys. His eyes were burning up, smoke was coming out of his nostrils. I though I’d talk to him. When I turned around to look at him, he was gone. He’d either got off when the train stopped. (…..) I was hallucinating which I could have been doing too.

For better or for worse, Dylan will keep talking all the way through his 1979 tour, the First Gospel Tour, but there it is almost exclusively proselytizing. For about a month there, at the end of 1978, the crowds got weird chatty Bob up on stage. None of that part of the tour is captured on At Budokan, another reason why it’s only a so-so representation of Dylan’t grandest tour – up until that point in time.

I can’t find anything from this album online to post here, except this utterly bizarre thought experiment which I am sharing because I’m not sure why someone would do it, but it is great. All four bridges from “Simple Twist of Fate” overlaid on top of each other:

Before we begin, a quick note to say that my wife has held onto this button for thirty-five years, apparently in anticipation of someday being married to someone who decides to blog about Bob Dylan’s religious conversion. Our relationship was clearly preordained.

I’ll be wearing this button for the next three weeks.

As we open 1979, fair warning: Dylan has become a born again Christian. He will release his first, and best, album in the Christian trilogy, Slow Train Coming, and will go on a tour during which he will play only gospel music and antagonize his fans much more than he ever did at Newport.

So before we begin, I asked myself: How did this happen?

Bjorner’s site has a breakdown for every year of Dylan’s life that opens with “At a Glance”. This has been unbelievably useful to me on this project, helping to signal things that are worth considering and keeping me oriented. Here’s what he writes about the November 17 show in San Diego:

“It is at the same show that someone throws up a little silver cross onto the stage. Dylan picks it up and puts in his pocket. This little incident turns out to be the start of a new chapter in the life and art of Bob Dylan.”

I thought: Really?

I listened to a tape of that show last week and you certainly can’t figure out when the cross was thrown (not that I was expecting it to land with an audible clang). Dylan seems uncomfortable during the show, and even mentions something about food poisoning at one point (it’s not a great tape, so I’m not 100% certain what he says). He does sound a bit laboured. This is how Clinton Heylin reports it:

“Towards the end of the show someone out in the crowd … knew I wasn’t feeling too well,” recalled Dylan in a 1979 interview. “I think they could see that. And they threw a silver cross on the stage. Now usually I don’t pick things up in front of the stage. Once in a while I do. Sometimes I don’t. But I looked down at that cross. I said, ‘I gotta pick that up.’ So I picked up the cross and I put it in my pocket … And I brought it backstage and I brought it with me to the next town, which was out in Arizona … I was feeling even worse than I’d felt when I was in San Diego. I said, ‘Well, I need something tonight.’ I didn’t know what it was. I was used to all kinds of things. I said, ‘I need something tonight that I didn’t have before.’ And I looked in my pocket and I had this cross.”

Ok, so that’s why Bjorner bring it up. Let’s continue with Heylin:

“Dylan believed he had experienced a vision of Christ in his Tucson hotel room. “Jesus did appear to me as King of Kings, and Lord of Lords,” he’d later say. “There was a presence in the room that couldn’t have been anybody but Jesus … Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up.”

So, that’s a pretty clear conversion story.

The question I then had was “How long did it take to impact his performing?”. I knew from listening to one of the December shows (Charlotte, NC – an unbelievably great show) that Dylan changed the lyrics of “Tangled Up in Blue” to reflect his conversion. This was not new, Dylan changed the lyrics a little bit almost every time that he played the song, but it seemed hugely significant. This morning I tried to figure this out. Here’s what I learned.

At San Diego, the night of the cross thrown onto the stage, he played “Tangled Up in Blue” sixth (this was standard by this point – in each of the shows I’m discussing her TUiB is sixth). In the verse where “She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe”, the “she” is wearing “a dress made out of stars and stripes” (so: “she lit a burner on the stove, wearing a dress made out of stars and stripes”) and then the verse continues roughly the same, with a reading from a “book of poems written by an Italian poet in the thirteenth century”.

At Forth Worth, TX a week later the version is roughly the same. Now “she” is working at The Flamingo Club rather than at a generic topless place, but she still has that dress and poems. At Austin (November 25, in a bootleg with terrible quality) we get that version for the last time.

The conversion of “Tangled Up in Blue” takes place in Houston on November 26. Now when “she” opens a book it is the Bible and the rhyme for “handed it to me” is “Matthew 33”. The next night in Jackson, MS it has shifted to “Jeremiah, verses one and thirty-three”. Three days late in Memphis the dress has become a housecoat of stars and stripes, and the verses are Jeremiah 22:1 and 33. Dylan will continue with Jeremiah through the end of the tour, eventually quoting Jeremiah 31:31 in the liner notes of Saved: ‘Behold, the days come, sayeth the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah’.

So that’s how it happened, and how fast. For the next three weeks I’l be dealing with the fallout.

Here’s the live version from Charlotte, NC (December 10) and someone has even helpfully subtitled it to draw attention to the Biblical version. As I said, great show.