Klees Bob Dylan

In the 1980s
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-624-0
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

No period of Bob Dylan's six-decade career confounds fans more than the 1980s. The singer began the decade with Saved, the second in a trio of explicitly religious records, and a tour in which he declined to play his older songs because of concern they were anti-God. Indeed many fans found his post-conversion messages strident and judgmental making Saved his worst selling album in years and setting a pattern for the next several years.
Despite being a prolific time, in which the singer released seven studio albums, the decade was defined by inconsistency. Throughout the 1980s, some of his most profound work alternated with lackluster compositions and indifferent performances - sometimes on the same album. However, even as Dylan struggled artistically, all of his albums contained reminders of why he continued to be celebrated.
By the end of the decade, his perseverance - both on stage and in the studio - and a spontaneous collaboration with some of his peers, coalesced into his best received releases since the 1970s. Rather than closing a book, the combination of Oh Mercy and the first Traveling Wilburys record pointed to new chapters and the following decade began a remarkable run of success that few popular artists have managed at any stage of their careers.

Don Klees literally watches TV for a living. When not basking in television's glow, he enjoys debating the merits of theatre versus film with his wife, telling his kids about music from before they were born (including his first Bob Dylan concert in 1986) and writing about pop-culture in general. Don regularly contributes to Chromakey, CultureSonar, and We Are Cult as well as various anthologies, including the David Bowie themed Me and the Starman.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Klees, Don

Leseproben

Chapter 1

1980: A Door No Man Can Shut

‘It would have been easier if I had become a Buddhist or a Scientologist, or if I had gone to Sing Sing,’ Dylan mused in a May 1980 interview with journalist Karen Hughes for New Zealand newspaper The Dominion. The comment neatly summarized the singer’s unusual position in the wake of his recent conversion to Christianity. Other artists had confounded their fans with major shifts in musical style – Dylan himself not the least of them – but his current expressions of religious devotion were perceived as a much starker break with his past work. And a much more difficult one for many to accept.

Hearing the man – whose first Top-40 single in the United States admonished listeners not to follow leaders – wholeheartedly embracing Christian dogma, clearly struck many listeners as being out of character at the time. However, what those who treat Dylan’s overtly Christian albums as an anomaly often miss, is that the professions of faith they contained were no less passionate than the sentiments expressed in any of his 1960s landmarks or even Blood on the Tracks. For all that he’s equivocated on spiritual matters since the early-1980s – and repeatedly (albeit erroneously) claimed not to have referred to himself as born-again – his convictions at the time appear to have been thoroughly sincere.

The period had its genesis in the tour promoting the album Street-Legal. After a concert in Arizona, ‘Jesus put his hand on me’, the singer told Hughes. ‘It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up.’

Dylan’s reaction to the encounter prefigured an observation he made a decade later: ‘People have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them.’ Though the topic in that 1991 interview was more abstract, the mindset was something with which he had firsthand experience. In the wake of this encounter with the Almighty, Dylan initially found himself unsure of how to proceed and kept the matter largely to himself. He discussed it with very few people aside from background singer (and occasional songwriting partner) Helena Springs.

He began writing songs reflecting his newfound concerns, trying out a couple in December as his current tour was winding down, but apparently was reluctant to record them himself. In a 1980 interview, the singer told Los Angeles Times journalist Robert Hilburn that he’d initially planned to give the songs to Carolyn Dennis to sing, for an album where he might just produce. Dennis – who performed as a vocalist on several of Dylan’s albums and tours in the 1980s – would have an exceedingly involved relationship with him over the next decade or so.

After some initial reticence, Dylan started a formal Bible-study course at the Vineyard Fellowship – a church in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Reseda – to which several members of his 1978 touring band already belonged. So did Dylan’s girlfriend at the time – Mary Alice Artes – and some credit her with bringing him into the church’s orbit, which also attracted Rolling Thunder Revue alumnus T Bone Burnett, and Hal Lindsey: author of the end-times bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth. As a practical matter, Lindsey’s apocalyptic interpretations of biblical prophecies exerted far greater influence on the expression of Dylan’s newfound faith than his former collaborator did, but some still believed that Burnett played a role in Dylan’s embrace of the church.

Burnett has dismissed this notion on multiple occasions. ‘I don’t think one person ever converts another,’ he told author Bill Flanagan in a 1984 interview for the book Written in My Soul – a collection of rock songwriter interviews whose subjects also included Dylan. More recently, the subject arose in a 2010 interview for The Onion’s A.V. Club. Discussing the move toward Christianity on the part of numerous musicians in the 1970s – a time in which the United States elected its first born-again President Jimmy Carter, Burnett commented: ‘Probably about fifteen people out of that Rolling Thunder tour started going to church, or going back to church. I was implicated in that Dylan thing for a while. But no, there’s no substance to that rumor.’

In any case, after several months of speculation, Vineyard Fellowship founder Kenn Gulliksen publicly confirmed Dylan’s association with the church. In the May 1979 story from The Washington Post, Gulliksen shared the news of an upcoming album that would convey the singer’s religious convictions ‘in no uncertain terms.’

If Dylan’s shift confused fans, at least a portion of his audience started out willing to give the new direction a chance. With an effusive review by Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner offsetting some of the more mixed assessments, 1979’s Slow Train Coming – Dylan’s first overtly religious album – became the singer’s last Top-10 album in the United States until 1997’s Time Out of Mind. ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ – Slow Train Coming’s first single and his last Top-40 hit to date – also benefited from this initial goodwill as the new decade began. In February 1980, the song earned Dylan his first-ever Grammy award (his only one until a lifetime-achievement Grammy presented in 1991) for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Male.

Shortly after the Karen Hughes interview, came the album that pushed many wavering fans off the fence. If the polished, accessible presentation of Slow Train Coming proffered an olive branch to Dylan’s audience, the far more direct Saved was perceived by many as a sword. In the pre-internet era, an interview published in a New Zealand newspaper might not have been widely seen in the United States, but the album’s content certainly wouldn’t have surprised anyone who’d seen his recent concerts.

Membership in the Vineyard Fellowship carried with it a mandate to spread the gospel. For a figure like Bob Dylan, this meant not just recording albums, but performing publicly. Having decided to stop playing his pre-conversion songs in concert – in part, because he worried they were ‘anti-God’ – the singer needed more material. Fortunately, the enthusiasm for his newfound faith continued to inspire his songwriting. The majority of songs that ultimately appeared on Saved, debuted at the 1 November 1979 show that began a two-week stand at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco.

Despite the 1978 touring band’s multiple connections to the Vineyard Fellowship, and an apparent desire to surround himself with fellow believers, the only veteran of that group included in the 1979 ensemble was singer Helena Springs. However, by January 1980, Carolyn Dennis had replaced Springs – suggesting a personal dimension to her falling-out with Dylan, who by all accounts remained devoutly reckless in his personal life.

Backstage drama aside, the band was defined by two key characteristics – in addition to having one of the more stable memberships of any of Dylan’s touring groups up to that point, they displayed a peerless ability to convey the singer’s message in concert. As with many great bands, the rhythm section provided the foundation. Drummer Jim Keltner was among the most in-demand session musicians of the 1970s and 1980s, with work on solo albums by all of the former Beatles (except Paul McCartney) being just one obvious highlight. Keltner – who also played on ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ in 1973 – had declined previous invitations to tour with Dylan, but felt a profound connection with his new music. Bassist Tim Drummond played on Slow Train Coming, and though he was one of the band members who wasn’t especially religious, he served as the tour’s bandleader. Dylan offered some insight into his views about whether the almighty involved themselves in Earthly matters, by referring to the duo of Keltner and Drummond as ‘the best rhythm section God ever invented.’

Guitarist Fred Tackett and keyboardists Spooner Oldham (whose credits included recording with Aretha Franklin and writing The Box Tops’ 1968 hit ‘Cry Like a Baby’) and Terry Young rounded out the group along with the background singers. Despite being the musical element most associated with Dylan’s religious music, he actually first incorporated background singers into his band for Street-Legal and the tour that followed. They were also the ensemble’s most fluid component. On the initial leg of the tour, Helena Springs shared the stage with Regina McCrary (then using her married name Regina Havis) and Mona Lisa Young. Other singers would come and go even after Carolyn Dennis replaced Springs. The most prominent of these was Clydie King: formerly one of Ray Charles’ Raelettes, and a recording artist in her own right.

The public reaction to the Warfield Theater shows is one of many areas of Dylan’s life and career where fact and legend coexist uneasily. Reviewers for the city’s main newspapers – The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner – both offered dismissive assessments with their respective headlines ‘Bob Dylan’s God-Awful Gospel’ and ‘Born-Again Dylan Bombs’. Chronicle reviewer Joel Selvin described the material as ‘some of the most banal, uninspired and inventionless songs of his career’. This...