In 1979 Bob Dylan became a born-again Christian—“Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing”—and worse, released three albums of songs about God. About this perceived betrayal, I was too young to have an opinion; it was part of a lore I learned much later. In my teenage years I’d drive four hours north to visit my uncle Roy, not a “real” uncle, a close friend of my parents. He was a normie eyewitness to the ‘60s, and the first serious collector of vinyl I ever knew. We’d spend hours at used record stores and I’d watch him put his glasses on his forehead so he could look up close for scratches, a gesture my eyes are now old enough to need as well. Back at his house in the Berkeley hills he taught me to hold by the edges and to clean the disk before playing, and I remember him shouting “Woo Woo!” as he introduced me to The Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” During one rap session he told me he’d stuck with Dylan through the weak albums in the ‘70s, but the Christian thing, that was the end. I entered adulthood thinking that listening to Christian-period Dylan was a kind of sacrilege.
I never asked Roy why he gave up on Dylan when he did. Roy was an atheist Jew, was that it? But it wasn’t idiosyncratic. Dylan alienated a whole generation with his religious turn. Were they all atheists? I recently read a more sophisticated take: Dylan’s whole thing was supposed to be anti-authoritarian, and how could the man who sang “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more” write a song called “Gotta Serve Somebody”? On the other hand, couldn’t they see the pattern? The folk purists fell in love with Dylan in 1963, only to feel betrayed when he turned electric in ’65. The best moment in Todd Haynes’ Dylan film I’m Not There is when “Jude Quinn,” Cate Blanchett’s Dylan (there are five others), takes the stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with an electric backing band, and, as they turn to face the crowd, they’re holding machine guns, which they fire at the audience. Dylan toured the world in ’66, opening each show with an acoustic set, and then during the second, electric set the crowd would boo, and the atmosphere would turn evil, not just in the audience but onstage: in the No Direction Home documentary, after the famous “Judas!” accusation from the pit in Manchester, England, you hear Dylan say to the band play it fucking loud! just before the snare crack that ignites “Like a Rolling Stone.” We watch the post-concert interviews from ’66, young Brits denouncing Dylan with their cute accents, and we smugly think, you idiot, those songs were works of genius, and you were booing? Dylan will always betray his most ardent fans: even after he went country in 1969, and released crap albums like “Self-Portrait,” the lesson went unlearned. Instead of greeting the Christian Dylan with “oh gosh, there he goes again,” people had the nerve to say that’s it.
The folk purists saw the ’65 electric Dylan as a sell-out, but now we worship that incarnation as an idol of artistic integrity. One can hear “Maggie’s Farm” as aimed at the folk purists: it’s Dylan’s refusal to be bound by their standards or expectations. But in ’65 following his muse took Dylan right to the top of the charts. Knowing what we know now, the risky career move then was shunning electric rock. Dylan was just skating to where the puck was going. When he followed his muse again in 1979 it was to a place where no audience was waiting: that’s artistic integrity.
Back to why everyone quit Dylan: it wasn’t the religion alone. Some of the songs are prayers, and quite moving ones. In their articulations of faith and of doubt, “Pressing On” and “Every Grain of Sand” rank with the most powerful songs he ever wrote. But elsewhere on the albums are songs attacking a lack of faith, and warning of the hellfire to come if one does not repent: “Gotta Serve Somebody,” “Slow Train,” especially “When You Gonna Wake Up,” it’s there in the titles. Of course no one should have been surprised to find Dylan singing songs of accusation. These same fans cheered the finger-pointing in “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Positively 4th Street,” and “Idiot Wind.” The problem now, maybe, was they couldn’t identify with the singer—leaving them forced, uncomfortably, to identify with the target.
Dylan also forced this identity on them more directly. Interviewers like to bait Dylan with interpretations of his songs, and he’s trained himself in Dada-esque non-responses: is “Neighborhood Bully” (on Infidels) a “strong Zionist political statement?,” Kurt Loder asked in 1984, and Dylan said “If you listen closely, it really could be about other things.” But on his 1979 tour Dylan was not evasive. He took to preaching from the stage, and not “the gospel of love” he mentions in his most recent (2020) album:
there’s only two kinds of people: there’s saved people and there’s lost people. Yeah. Remember that I told you that. You may never seem me again…but sometime down the line you remember you heard it here, that Jesus is Lord. Every knee shall bow!
But it’s the music that matters. Dylan’s 1975 tour, The Rolling Thunder Review, was just okay. He shouts more than sings. In the 1979-1980 live sets, Dylan exhibits far more conviction. The music is tight, blues-rock from the Muscle Shoals backing band, not the unfocused mess that kind of worked on “Desire,” but then on “Street Legal” kind of didn’t. When you watch the concert footage, don’t miss Tim Drummond (ironically, the only non-believer in the group), playing bass on Dylan’s left, especially on “Solid Rock,” truly moved by the spirit of Rock ’n Roll. It’s been decades since this scandal, the storm has blown over, but I guess I recommend the stuff, yea even to the heathen among you.
An earlier version of this essay was published in December 2024.