More Of An Outlaw Than You Ever Were?

BOB DYLAN

More Of An Outlaw Than You Ever Were?

(Hold The Mayo On The Golden Globe Awards)

During the 70s, Dylan got swept up into those overblown, superstarred ships of fools which claimed so many promising prophets from the 60*s.

by

Richard Riegel

"But this is just for the interview, you know, when they want to do interviews in places like Omaha, or in Cincinnati, man, you know. I dont do it and then they write bald things.

—Bob Dylan, 1965 quoted in The Rolling Stone Interviews, Vol. 2

Hiya from Cincinnati, Bob. Not that I really expected any special interview dispensations from your Dylanness, after all, not when youve made yourself inaccessible to much more powerful journalists than me, for more years than Ive even been writing. Still, Columbia was hinting that your renewed openness to your public on this Shot Of Love tour just might lead you to concede an audience or two along the line, and if the Red Sea of your defense mechanisms happened to part in Cincinnati, by God I was gonna be there, to take it on the lam right into the psychic kibbutz of your Promised-Land soul.

No tough questions, either, Bob. Main reason I wanted to talk to you was to tell you it was fine by me if you didnt grant me an interview. See, I heard your recent WNEW interview when it was rebroadcast on WAIF here, and I dont blame you for putting on that oh-so-serious fellow, for strumming your guitar with ever-louderSPROING! s, to drown out his boringnewsbrother queries about Whats-yourrelationship-with-organized-religion? and Where-do-you-stand-on-social-protest-today? etc., etc. I didnt want to know any of that stuff about you even in the 60s—you had already answered my own seeker priorities, sex and revenge, for good, on Blonde On Blonde—and Im still satisfied that your politics can take care of themselves.

Nah, Bob, I was just plain fascinated by the WNEW pieces exposition of your virtuoso interviewee sty/e, so reminiscent of my eight-year-old daughter, Sarah (a fellow Midwestern-Jewish Gemini wunderkind, by the way), and of her characteristic evasions of my and my wifes wicked interrogations, e.g.,Have you cleaned up your room yet, Sarah? And she counters with something approximating those prose-poem liner notes you put on Highway 61 Revisited, plenty of mental bubble gum for us to masticate while we end up dragging her dusty toys from under her bed.

In other words, Id love to have you confront me just once, Bob, simply to see what kind of mind games you might run on me, just to sit there in happy amazement, uttering silent-hipsterGo man, go! s, as you reduced my wormy rockcritic soul to less than zero, no limit.

But no interview this time, thats no problem either, Bob. Write bad things about you? Never! After all, Bob, wasnt it you who taught me this writers credo—You only kid the ones you love—way back when?

Bob Dylans suddenconversion to born-again Christianity in 1979 didnt bother me a bit, initially. Like I said in my review of Saved last year, Im not a Christian myself, but at the same time Ive never ever been the kind of Dylan disciple who gets so emotionally intertwined with the Bobbist father figure that he has to dictate his Masters religious preferences as a condition of continued obeisance.

As much as certain of Bob Dylans early rock songs—notablyI Want You,Just Like A Woman, andPositively 4th Street—flicked on intense neon lights within my soul, I kept Dylan-the-goldenidol at arms length all through the 60s, just because there were so many Dylanworshipping geeks on the scene in those days. I cant forget that gray winter afternoon in January, 1968, I was toiling away at some lit paper in the college library, and in walks one of the nightlyHuntley-Brinkley-watcher good campus liberals, a big dogshit-eating grin on his face, cause hes got Dylans brand-new John Wesley Harding under his arm, hes on his way to the record-listening rooms to find out the Secrets of Existence doncha .c know, man! I think even Bob Dylan 1 wouldve forgiven me my non-fandom at ^ that moment.

^ Ditto for the 70s, Bob Dylan got swept >up into those overblown, superstarred ships of fools—the Rolling Thunder Revue, etc.—which claimed so many of the promising prophets left over from the 60s, and my yawn became a roar, in context. But around the time Bob Dylan At Budokan appeared, in early 1979, my sensibilities began to prick with interest in the latest-model Dylan. It seemed that some of Dylans older supporters were beginning to turn against him, for what struck me as fairly minor heresies: some old fans resented Dylan imposing new arrangements on his classics in concert, while others appeared permanently threatened by Bobs penchant for wearing eye makeup onstage (those old folkies saw that lurid mascara coming the first time Dylan picked up an electric guitar).

Bob Dylan At Budokan sounded OK to my carefully-cultivated no-expectations approach to Dylan, and I liked his subsequent Slow Train Coming, for all its rantingly Messianic Christrock, even better, mainly for the explosions it set off among Dylans old camp followers. I relished the spectacle of Dylan leading Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner around by the nose (in Wenners breathlessly reverent review of Slow Train Coming), and I only wished that Ralph J. Gleason couldve been with us for Dylans conversion, just so he could get all huff & puff indignant in one of his fumbling editorials.

Wow! Dylan was really starting to look like the John Wesley Harding/Hurricane Carter benign-outlaw hed always mythologized for himself, and I was all ready to ride off with his righteous gang, to rob every posthippie-conformist data bank in the country. Wed trample the Eagles and their ilk into the dust, before they could even put down their tequila sunrises and go for their guns.

By coming out for Christ, Bob Dylan had ironically enough branded himself as a devils advocate within the stiffening shell of the old counterculture, just my kinda guy! So I volunteered to review his next album, Saved, for CREEM, I was all set to praise Dylan to the skies for his ornery nonconformity in freaking out for Jesus, and whaddya know?!? (once again with this guy!), Saved turned out to be a rotten album.

Which I had to say in print, of course (I betrayed the Lord and His servant for a cool 35 pieces of silver). I dunno, first impressions can be deadly with me, but the cover art of Saved is just so atrociously ugly that I can hardly bear to slip the record out, even today. The front cover painting looks like it couldve been done by one of those quadriplegics who holds the brush in his teeth, eternally grateful to his Lord for ths smallest favors. And Dylan himself looks so mealy-mouthed unhappy in the liner photo (a mood which the clenchedjaw homilies of the recorded music therein do nothing to dispel), that Saved remains Dylans worst advertisement for his Christianity. Sure hes sincere, but is it art?

Which is where I come back in, as an unabashed fan of Bob Dylans latest LP, Shot Of Love. Christian/Shmistian, at least he opens his mouth wide and bawls out the loud lyrics this time, plenty of radio-worthy rousers, on an all-round pretty good album. (Not great, mind you, but I dont suppose you surpassed Dylans past work this week, either, did ya?) Even all the first impressions are in place on the Shot Of Love package, for superficial types like me: that pop art explosion on the front is such a clever parody of some K-Tel disco-quickie supermarket album that itll drive Dylans old-folkie fans wild, theres plenty of rich blue (my & Judaisms favorite) color all over the place, and Brother Bob himself looks estatically youthful and beatific in the back cover photo, hes contemplating that rose with the rapt stoned intensity of our own beloved, forever-young, Mr. Tambourine Man.

Like I said, my kinda guy.

As 1 prepare to attend the first Bob Dylan concert of my 34-year-old life, I run into some rather curious public impressions of the New Dylan. A pal tells me hell pass on this show, because,I liked Dylan better when he was an atheist. (But was he ever that, even when he was strung out on speed aboard his careening 1966 motorcycle?)

I visited a used-record shop, to fill in the gaps in my Dylan collection, and comment to the manager on the large selection of perfect-condition Bob Dylan albums, from all the periods of his career that people have traded-in there.Yeh, he offers,Maybe Dylanll get popular again if he gets back to his Judaism. (But I thoroughly studied both Scadutos Bob Dylan and Toby Thompsons Positively Main Street, in preparation for this article, and I learned that the Zimmerman family was rather cut off from a Jewish religious community up there in Hibbing, Minnesota. 1 found out that the incipient Bob Dylan grew up in a largely Catholic town, among mostly gentile friends. Having come from that context, its just as logical andorganic for Bob Dylan to go Christian in his religious beliefs, as it would be for him to stick exclusively to the Judaism of his ethnic ancestry. Besides, nobody has required us other children of the 40s to cling undeviatingly to Catholicism or Methodism or to whatever our parents happened to have been. Bob Dylan, of all people, oughta be eligible for the same freedom of choice.)

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Inside Music Hall, filled to the brim with people from all interested generations, we dont spot anybody with obvious crosses around their necks. The word had obviously gotten out that Dylan is doing his old songs again on this tour, and probably a good 80% of this audience are the same people who stayed away from Dylans halffilled, Christianity-or-else show in Dayton last year.

Some ludeball in back even yells outROCK N ROLL!!, as though were •waiting to see Van Halen or Black Sabbath, and a fellow in a denim jacket, way down in front, stands up and fires back,He plays gospel, Goddammit! (The Lords name not in vain, under the circumstances.) Teresa, with her readyJewish sarcasm, wants to know if Bob Dylan is backstage praying at this very moment, a la the Bus Boys.

Whatever, everybodys prayers are soon answered, when Bob Dylan and his big band suddenly bound onto the stage. Dylan certainly looks secular enough tonight: hes wearing a dark leather jacket, black T-shirt, tight pants, boots, nothing-isrevealed dark shades, his whole costume a touching rerun from his manic peak, that insane winter of 1965-66 (when he played an absolutely searing show at this same Music Hall, the oldtimers tell me). Down at the left end of the stage is A1 Kooper, in porkpie hat, shades, shorter hair, hes bending intently over his keyboards, as though all his misspent days between making Highway 61 Revisited and playing at Dylans side again are merely a fading 115th nightmare.

Dylan opens this show withGotta Serve Somebody, the initial public musical message of his conversion to Christianity back in 79, but also, as tonights show continues to reveal, a highly appropriate credo for Bob Dylans own relationship with his 1981 audience. He seems determined to serve all of his fans, from all his epochs, by living up to the best expectations hes raised in each of them over the years.

Bob Dylan hops all over his two-decade discography as the evening progresses, doing most of his strong-voiced songs with their appropriate signature instrumentation —Bob alone with his acoustic guitar and harmonica forThe Times They Are AChangin, the whole band revved up for the supercharged gospel-diesel rhythms ofMaggies Farm—but with the ever-new arrangements and tempos Mr. Gemini Dylan keeps digging up for his old songs.

As Bob Dylans greatest hits smash by us one by one, the audience members are going into religious frenzies, theyre so ecstatic to have their (apparently) secular Dylan back again. DuringDead Man, Dead Man, Dylan stalks along the edge of the stage, his hallowed profile stark black against the harsh white of the backstage spotlight, and the people down in front go wild with the expectation that Bob will drip his holy sweat on them, and save their sinner souls.

The obviously gratified Dylan diddybops back to center stage, smiles, and says, in that nasal-hooky voice,I dont know what to play—Ill think of something! Whaddya Want? Something 10, 20, 30 years old? ˜"Lay Lady Lay! booms out a true-believer voice somewhere near us, and sure enough Dylan and the band respond with their only cover of the evening, the 20s/ 50sIts All In The Game, done light-heartedly but probably sincerely. This is a self-portrait of the pinched-jaw Fundamentalist of Saved?

In fact, the guy sitting beside me, whos caught Dylan live six or seven times in the past decade, says hes never seen Bob so animated and friendly with his audience as he is tonight. As we approach the climax of the show, Dylan is carefully balancing his born-again-religious numbers ("When You Gonna Wake Up,Its Alright, Ma), so that maybe a few people out there can begin to sense the stubborn constants of all his eras, each of them walked in whatever vision of Biblical righteousness he coughed up at the time.

But the eternally sarcastic, worldly Bob Dylans on hand tonight, too:Im gonna see if I can get in tune, he sez, a trifle wickedly as he adjusts his guitar,I only sang one song in tune all night. TheIt Aint Me Babe which follows, sounds musically correct, if lyrically as gently ironic as his between-song patter. Sometime duringKnockin On Heavens Door, Bob Dylan slips out the back of the stage, to rejoin J.C. in the warm crushed velvet of their limo, to be spirited away into their lonely-at-the-top night, probably even before the band has stopped playing.

Teresa and I hang around the dressingroom door, to no avail of course, and when we finally walk out onto the desolation row of Elm Street, I notice a plain, late model/fullsized Chevrolet sedan, with Minnesota plates, parked just across the street. Im certain the Bob Dylan Teresa and I (still) know & love, had it placed there, just to kid us from on high.

Next day Dylan publicist Debbie Gold tells me, when I interview her by phone,He never asked to be labelled as a Christian. There was a hole in his philosophy, where he hadnt yet explored Christianity, and now he has. Yep, I suppose so. Myself, I know for certain that Bob Dylans boiling-Gemini personality has traditionally marked off its abrupt stylistic thrusts and reversals in roughly three-album cycles, and that Shot Of Love was the third installment of Dylanesque Christian-rock. His next artistic foray could pop up absolutely anywhere, including the Top 40 charts, and well be as interested as ever.

"1 think Bob Dylan said that!

—Eric Burdon,The Story Of Bo Diddley, 1964fH