Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (45 page)

Famously, Dylan had left audiences angry, disillusioned or apathetic before, but religion had altered the argument. It was, as the artist might have understood, fundamental to the way he was regarded and the way he wished to be regarded. The fact that ‘gospel’ formed only one small part of his 1981 concerts in Europe did not get Dylan off the hook. Who was he kidding? Throwing a bunch of old hits out into the crowd did not solve the basic problem. He might have believed that his first duty was to God, but audiences had a quaintly selfish attachment to the mesmerising, multifaceted art of Bob Dylan. If service to Christ meant endless attempts to rewrite the same redemption songs, non-believers (and non-Christians) would find their entertainment and illumination elsewhere. Dylan’s resentful little speech in London was a recognition of the truth.

In effect, he gave up. When he reached North America in October, performances began to deteriorate and the purely religious songs began to seem like gestures to appease the star’s pride. Group prayers were still held before the concerts, but they prepared the band for performances of ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ as much as they affirmed the truth of ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ and ‘Solid Rock’. The commitment Dylan had given to his religious works at the Warfield in San Francisco two years before had all but ebbed away. By the time he reached New Orleans in the second week in November he was even improvising fragmentary movie scenes, as of old, for Howard Alk, his cinematographer on
Renaldo and Clara
and editor of
Eat the Document
. It showed a certain lack of imagination. No one who became involved in the filming seems to have known what they were doing, or why. Dylan might simply have been providing a little work for Alk, but all concerned forgot – or chose to forget – that impromptu hit-and-run movie-making had paid few dividends hitherto. The artist invented a ‘scene’; Howard pointed his camera. It was a desultory effort, in any case.

Like still another all-purpose symbol of what had become of the ‘spirit of the ’60s’, Dylan’s old friend and colleague was in the throes of a heroin and cocaine habit. Alk had been living on the Point Dume estate for some time, but his marriage had failed at last. His mood was dark and his future bleak. Early in January 1982, Howard Alk was found dead of a heroin overdose, allegedly deliberate, at Rundown. Dylan’s reaction was to shut up the rehearsal studios and abandon any plans to go back on the road. Personally and artistically, he was running up a lot of losses.

*

In an uneasy promotional interview for
Shot of Love
organised by Columbia at the end of the Earls Court run, Dylan had told Dave Herman and an audience at WNEW-FM in New York that he ‘couldn’t see much difference’ between conservatism and liberalism in America. What he meant was that he had failed to notice much of a rightwards drift in opinion, despite Reagan’s election and the rise of the Moral Majority. Nevertheless, Dylan had also said that ‘personally’ he didn’t believe in abortion except when a woman’s life was at risk. On the other hand, he did believe that gun control ‘would make it harder for people who need to be protected’.

There is no way to prove that the artist would have held different opinions in the ’60s and ’70s, but plenty of evidence to suggest that gun-happy anti-abortionists had never been exactly his kind of people. Suze Rotolo, his first serious lover in Greenwich Village, seems to have endured a termination towards the end of their relationship, an event that had upset him greatly, but Dylan had made no attempt to prevent the procedure. His 1963 song ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’, the one telling of ‘seven people dead / On a South Dakota farm’ thanks to a shotgun wielded by a father driven to kill his family and himself by hellish poverty, had meanwhile evinced no obvious sympathy for ‘people who need to be protected’ by firearms in the home. Dylan’s ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’, composed after the assassination of the civil-rights worker Medgar Evers in Mississippi, could have been written to promote gun control. The author might have decided he was blind to political differences, but by 1981 it was a selective blindness.

Talking to Herman, he had complained about ‘a whole world full of sickness’, a sickness he had blamed on film, TV, the print media and his own music industry. Each, he had said, ‘caters to people’s sickness’. Dylan had been talking, as was by then his habit, about ailments of the moral and spiritual kind and how they affected behaviour: about sin, in short. He had not offered specific examples. If the whole world was sick because it lacked faith and the blessings of God’s truth, there was no need to give details.

On 30 March in Washington, Reagan had been shot by a character called John Hinckley with a revolver bought in a Dallas pawnshop. Three others had been wounded that day, including the presidential press secretary James Brady, who had been left paralysed by his injuries. Such was the context for a disc jockey’s questions about gun control and the context, equally, for Dylan’s answers. He could remember the 1963 Kennedy killing clearly enough. He might even have remembered the poetry he had tried to compose in the aftermath of the Dallas murder, writing of Jackie Kennedy crawling on all fours to escape the stricken presidential limousine, of the endless news bulletins, of how ‘I am sick t my soul an my stomach’. By 1981, Dylan could say only that ‘I don’t think gun control is making any difference at all’. In one sense, he made an elementary point: in that year firearms were owned by around 49 per cent of households.
¹⁰
But the belief that guns were intrinsic to the American way of life was part and parcel of the new conservatism – ‘sweeping across the world’, as Herman put it – that Dylan had said he could not even detect. Instead, he had argued: ‘Guns have been a great part of America’s past. So, there’s nothing you can do about it. The gun is just something which America has got, lives with.’

When his interviewer had mentioned that ‘the abortion question is becoming one of the major political controversies at home’, Dylan had replied that the issue was ‘just a diversion’, that it distracted people from ‘the bigger things’. When Herman had said that this all sounded a little ‘conspiratorial’, the artist had agreed. Then he had expressed surprise because Herman doubted that the fearsome arguments boiling up everywhere in America over reproductive rights were ‘calculated’.

It had been a clever, not to say chilling, attempt to give an opinion while dismissing the entire issue of human rights and wrongs as irrelevant to God’s ‘bigger things’. In fact, while Dylan was trying to extricate himself from the risk of controversy, abortion was dividing communities across his country. A clinic was about to open in Fargo, North Dakota, for example, amid picket lines and bomb scares. Dylan had once known the small city pretty well. It was just across the state line from Minnesota and only 200 miles from Hibbing, his home town. In Fargo, as a classic study would describe, something close to civic warfare would break out in the autumn of 1981 between those bitterly opposed to ‘the intrusion of secularism, narcissism, and materialism’ and those confronting ‘the forces of narrow-minded intolerance who would deny women access to a choice that they see as fundamental to women’s freedom’.
¹¹
Dylan could construct his exotic conspiracy theories, but at a time when ‘theocons’ were working hard for the recriminalisation of abortion he would pick his side. Thus: ‘I personally don’t believe in it.’

Faith had changed him in many more ways than one. There was nothing new about his habit of confounding expectations. It could even be argued that the fault lay with all the fans and critics who had long taken too much for granted and projected too many of their own precious assumptions across the opaque screen of his personality and his songs. Abortion and gun control were real, contemporary issues, however, and in the end there was nothing ambiguous about the opinions the artist was prepared to articulate.

*

For a while, nevertheless, silence seemed to descend upon him. In 1982, not for the first time, he made himself scarce. Dylan created no albums on his own behalf that year, contenting himself in June with the vague idea of recording a set of duets with Clydie King, his heart’s companion of the moment, before deciding that Columbia was not an outfit equipped to deal sympathetically with the results. (The company didn’t much care for the project, in other words.) In January, he played bass, for whatever reason, on an Allen Ginsberg session. In March, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In June, just after the King session, he turned up for a brief performance with Joan Baez at a ‘Peace Sunday’ anti-nuclear rally in Pasadena without offering public comment for or against the cause. Beyond that, there was nothing much to report. In any usual sense, Dylan stopped working. To all appearances, in fact, he even stopped writing. Sailing in the Caribbean on
Water Pearl
that summer he might just have come up with the beginnings of a song, but the world would not hear the marvellous thing called ‘Jokerman’ until November 1983.

Dylan paused, it seems, to contemplate a few things. One was religion. Based on no real evidence other than two failed albums in a row, there was media speculation that he must, surely, have begun to reconsider his position as an evangelical Christian. In its gossip column for the issue of 15 March 1982,
New York
magazine ran with a slight story from an unnamed ‘source’ claiming that Dylan would not be presenting the National Music Publishers Gospel Song of the Year during the following week, either because he wouldn’t ‘have time to do it’, or because the ‘evidence is that is over’. The ‘interpretation’ offered by this anonymous spy in the camp was that ‘the New Testament and Jesus were a message he thought he got, but that he was still testing’. Nevertheless, if the New York
Daily News
got its dates straight in June 1986 with the claim that Dylan had by then been studying among the Chabad-Lubavitch community for four years, the 1982 rumours were part-right guesses.

The Vineyard folk could hardly argue. Such was the play they had made of their infinite respect for Judaism and their claim that Jewish and Christian traditions could be reconciled like strayed siblings, the artist’s study of the Torah was not a habit to which they could object, even if – a proposition always to be doubted – Dylan had been prepared to listen. Paul Emond, one of the Vineyard first responders sent to minister to the artist early in 1979, put the best complexion possible on the state of spiritual play as far as the evangelicals were concerned when he was quoted in a 1984
Christianity Today
article.
¹²
Emond said:

I don’t think he ever left his Jewish roots. I think he was one of those fortunate ones who realised that Judaism and Christianity can work very well together, because Christ is just
Yeshua ha’Meshiah
(Jesus the Messiah). And so he doesn’t have any problems about putting on a
yarmulke
and going to a
bar mitzvah
, because he can respect that. And he recognises that maybe those people themselves will recognise who
Yeshua ha’Meshiah
is one of these days.

As a statement, Emond’s apparently definitive comment was as carefully worded as a press release. Mere ‘Jewish roots’ – as though Dylan could have possessed any other kind of roots – were preferred to ancestral Jewish faith. The artist was meanwhile ‘one of those fortunate ones’, a Jew who realised he had been in error, rather than a Jew who had taken a detour via Christianity. In this description, Dylan only donned traditional dress and attended ceremonies to indulge those he respected, not because he gave credence to what was going on during the rituals.

Warming to his theme, Emond ceased to be entirely generous to everyone with ‘Jewish roots’. Denying that Dylan had any desire to return to Judaism, the pastor maintained that meetings with Chabad-Lubavitch had taken place only at the movement’s request. In this telling, the Vineyard’s special relationship with Jews seemed a little less warm than the church liked to claim. Emond said: ‘They can’t take the fact that he was able to come to the discovery of his messiah as being Jesus. Jews always look at their own people as traitors when they come to that kind of faith … When one of their important figures is “led astray”, they’re going to do everything they can to get him back again.’

There was some truth in that. It is also true to say that in Dylan’s shoes Emond would not have hesitated to ‘really capitalise’ on his reputation for the church’s sake, at least according to what
Christianity Today
was told. So how did the Vineyard feel about the possibility that their prize convert was slipping away? Chabad had indeed put in a lot of work to win Dylan back for Judaism. In a neat, near-comical contrast with Emond, Rabbi Kasriel Kastel of the Brooklyn Lubavitch centre denied that the artist had ever forsaken his Jewish faith. ‘As far as we’re concerned,’ Kastel said, ‘he was a confused Jew. We feel he’s coming back.’ The rabbi explained matters by adding that Dylan had been ‘going in and out of a lot of things, trying to find himself’. To that end, the Hasidic sect had ‘just been making ourselves available’. No pressure, of course.

Dylan had never said that in accepting the Christian Messiah he had ceased to be a Jew. It’s a small detail, but easily forgotten. First, he knew that Judaism was not something he could renounce in any manner recognisable to other Jews. Second, his embrace of Christ had been based, almost from the start, on the difficult idea of messianic Judaism. The balance of his allegiances might have shifted, but Dylan remained a Jew whose understanding of faith depended, at least in part, on Christianity, especially on the Book of Revelation, that Christian text with its roots in Jewish apocalyptic literature. He would spend a lot of time with members of the Chabad movement in the years ahead, and join his former wife Sara in Los Angeles in March 1982 on the occasion of their son Samuel becoming a
bar mitzvah
, but Dylan would acknowledge no contradiction.
¹³
In the early ’80s he would drift away from the Vineyard, yet cling to aspects of Christianity and fail to declare himself – perhaps because he believed there was no need for a declaration – as Jewish. What’s most striking is the single consistent feature in all of Dylan’s dealings with religion. At no point has he felt bound to give absolute allegiance to a single creed, church or sect. These too are the things of man, peripheral to faith and the search for meaning. Nevertheless, if his interest in Judaism was revived at the start of 1982 it meant that unadulterated ‘gospel’ music was behind him.