'Ain't Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody': Bob
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This is a peer-reviewed, post-print (final draft post-refereeing) version of the following published document and is licensed under All Rights Reserved license: Hughes, John D ORCID: 0000-0002-2187-2911 (2014) 'Ain’t Gonna Go To Hell For Anybody': Bob Dylan’s Christian Years. Popular Music History, 8 (2). pp. 205-221. doi:10.1558/pomh.v8i2.205 Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v8i2.205 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v8i2.205 EPrint URI: http://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/2528 Disclaimer The University of Gloucestershire has obtained warranties from all depositors as to their title in the material deposited and as to their right to deposit such material. The University of Gloucestershire makes no representation or warranties of commercial utility, title, or fitness for a particular purpose or any other warranty, express or implied in respect of any material deposited. The University of Gloucestershire makes no representation that the use of the materials will not infringe any patent, copyright, trademark or other property or proprietary rights. The University of Gloucestershire accepts no liability for any infringement of intellectual property rights in any material deposited but will remove such material from public view pending investigation in the event of an allegation of any such infringement. PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR TEXT. ‘Ain’t Gonna Go To Hell For Anybody’: Dylan’s Christian Years In 1978 Bob Dylan had embarked on a world tour that had induced a form of mass- hysteria in Europe. Fans, mostly unsuccessful, had queued for up to 48 hours over a spring weekend for their four-ticket allocation. This demand led Dylan to follow his six-night stint in the cavernous Earls Court Exhibition Centre in mid-June with an appearance before over 200,000 at the ‘Picnic’ festival at Blackbushe aerodrome in Surrey, where the performers variously descended from the heavens by helicopters before ascending whence they came. Dylan played a lengthy two-and-a-half hour set, a toy figure in a top hat on a huge stage amidst the mid-July gloaming, while the sound was relayed to the far-off addled masses through huge towers.1 As with all the 1978 performances, Dylan was assisted by all kinds of musical fire-power: including saxophonist, Steve Douglas; the multi-instrumentalist prodigy, David Mansfield; and three female singers – Helena Springs, Carolyn Dennis and Jo Ann Harris – of whom the first two would later add such unforgettable potency to his gospel tours. Unsurprisingly perhaps, these 1978 shows in England garnered euphoric reviews – eight pages of strident puffery in Melody Maker for Earls Court, and later a hyperbolic account of Blackbushe. As in Japan and Australasia (where Dylan ‘enjoyed a three-day holiday in New Zealand with a native princess’), the atmosphere of the English shows was a perfect storm of adulation, whipped up out of the unprecedented confluence of audience expectation and Dylan’s evident and uncharacteristic connivance in attempting something spectacular (Heylin 2011: 477). The set-list was a greatest-hits package for the most part, a veritable consolidation (even cashing in) of the musical and counter-cultural capital of the previous sixteen years. These were the first concerts in England since the now-mythical pitched battles of 1966, and they clearly revealed Dylan’s own investment in the mass wish to conjure into being what the Daily Mail reviewer at Earls Court wishfully and faithfully termed ‘The Greatest Concert I Have Ever Seen’ (Heylin 2011: 482-83). Self-celebrating and retrospective, the performances on this tour in fact resembled far more the 1974 stadium tour of the U. S. than the 1966 small venue shows of Liverpool or Leicester. Dylan himself would later confess how ‘I hated every moment of that 1974 tour’, feeling that he had been manipulated and packaged, and that people had come for the myth.2 Listening to those 1974 shows, one hears Dylan’s voice for the first time in his career taking on a ferocious and flailing impotence, as if struggling to break out of everything that was imprisoning, exposing, and factitious about the situation. Outwardly different though the glitzy1978 shows were from 1974, they were also bombastic and dispiriting affairs. The rigid and tricksy arrangements of the songs, the extravagant, gimmicky lighting, and the turgid, vulgar accompaniment left Dylan’s voice with nowhere to go. At Earls Court, Dylan himself was bizarrely decked out as if he was the reincarnation of a 1970s Elvis, in a white rhinestone jumpsuit with a lightening stripe down the leg. The audience might connive in the collective wish that this was the second coming, and the performances were competent enough. However, what was clear was that Bob Dylan as a creative force had not so much left the building as never really arrived. Indeed, the prevailing note of the retrospective 1978 shows is a kind of tristesse, a deflated air of belatedness evident in the blaring or lyrical brayings of the saxophone, where the brazen embellishments sound the note of a performance searching mournfully for an inspiration that has long vanished into the ether. So also Dylan’s voice can pace the bounds of the reworked versions: at times in a routine, perfunctory, dismissive way, at others sounding something like a trapped circus animal. This sense of something overblown, gone to seed, and lacking in genuine direction, is suggested also even by Dylan’s appearance (as on the Budokan album cover from this time) with all its careless, confused, elements: the scraggy beard, bead necklace, black eyeliner, the clichéd show-time gestures, and the frowsy, overgrown mat of hair. It is easy to point out the striking contrast between what is inflated, directionless, and self-glorifying about these 1978 extravaganzas and the utterly different values that would characterize Dylan’s residency in the small 2000-seater San Francisco venue, the venerable Fox Warfield theatre, with its small arched stage, balconies and venerable vaudeville history, in November 1979 (and later, in November 1980). Nonetheless, in both cases what is of creative value in the concerts draws on new kinds of direct convergence between Dylan’s life and art. Dylan hated the designation, ‘Alimony Tour’, but the ghost of his wrecked marriage haunts the 1978 tour, appearing to infiltrate the singing and inflect it often with a certain nostalgia or sense of drift and emptiness. At rare moments, loss, regret and emotional pain are turned to expressive advantage, rising to the surface and breaking through enough to sustain a whole song, as in the slow, even languorous, versions of ‘Señor’, ‘I Want You’, or ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. Of all the songs in 1978, these most of all took on a moving sense of wounded expansiveness in performance. A few months after Blackbushe, though, the axis of the latter song has shifted again, as Dylan comes to factor in his religious travails, as in the extraordinary rendering at the Charlotte Coliseum on December 10th, apparently three weeks or so after his conversion, where he mentions the biblical verses that were later to turn up on the cover of Saved: She lit a burner on the stove Wearing a dress made out of stars and stripes “Thought you’d never say hello” she said “You know you look like you could be the silent type” Then she opened up the Bible and she started quoting it to me Jeremiah, Chapter 13, verses 21 and 33…3 Here the rebarbative, gnarled snarl that often provides a kind of dispiriting default in 1978 is eclipsed by a voice that increasingly tears the self open with each agonized inflection, as if the only escape from the pain of personal history was abandoned self- evisceration. Ironically enough (in view of this performance and others such as the Memphis), the American leg of the tour had attracted very different reviews, where it was fatally dubbed the ‘Disco Tour’ or ‘Vegas Tour’. But by the end of the tour Dylan was singing an early version of ‘Slow Train Coming’ in sound-checks, and in the final show, on December 16th (at the wonderfully named Hollywood Sportatorium in Florida) he debuted a Christian song for the first time on stage: ‘Do Right To me Baby’. According to Dylan, three months earlier, singing with a high fever in San Diego, he had picked up a cross thrown on to the stage.4 At this time, he was surrounded by born-again Christians, like band-members David Mansfield and Steven Soles, and was coming under the sway of Christianity. Together with Dylan’s friend, T-Bone Burnett, these two played in a Californian church band and one occasion Dylan sat incognito in the back of the church. The decisive turning point though, came about apparently due to the influence of a woman (ironically comparable to the way that Suze Rotolo had steered him towards political protest). Dylan’s girlfriend, Helena Springs, herself a Christian, had found herself supplanted by an actress, Mary Alice Artes, who in turn broke up with him under the influence of the Vineyard Fellowship. This led him to take stock spiritually, to convert, and ultimately to attend a three-month course of bible-based, apocalypse-infused, evangelism at the Vineyard School of Discipleship in Reseda. There he came under the tutelage of Hal Lindsey, who was, as Heylin dryly put it, ‘the man to whom God in his infinite wisdom had revealed the true code of Revelation’ (Heylin 2011: 498). It is tempting to dismiss Lindsey as God’s A. J. Weberman, yet he is not easily dismissed.