Dylan's Christian period

yep quite a bit in the Dylan bootleg series thread

everyone loves it and is baptised in the blood of the lamb

Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series

im going to see the "trouble no more" film tonight!

jealous!
i love the lord & these live albums

jesus christ & bobby dylan are my reconciliation

I DON'T CARE ABOUT ECONOMY

I DON'T CARE ABOUT ASTRONOMY

"Ain't No Man Righteous" is such a jam.

aw man the "slow train coming" in this is MEAN

that and "what can I do for you" were the highlights

there really should be a Mavis thread, but anyway:

First, they couldn't settle on who has to sing the line "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse." "He said, 'You're going to sing it this time. I did it for you last time,' " Staples recalls. "I said, 'You didn't do it for me. It's your song!' " And with the song's seven verses, Staples, 78, had trouble getting the lyrics straight. "I asked him, 'Do you have a teleprompter?' He says" – she drops her voice to Dylan's guttural rasp – " 'I'm too cheap to buy a prompter, Mavis.' I told him, 'You can buy one for me, Bobby!' "

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/mavis-staples-second-act-bob-dylan-jeff-tweedy-w517080

He and Staples had a fling in the Sixties, with Staples famously rejecting his marriage proposal.

If this information is “famous,” I never heard it before!

was dylan sober from drugs and alcohol during the christian period?

maybe for a minute, but i think he got back into it pretty quick.
was just listening to the 1981 live performances on Trouble No More — really wild vocals from Dylan, like an attempt to create a whole new style for himself.

I’ve been sleeping on this bootleg series set, but will prob’ly have to get it.... I love “Saved” and some of the other stuff from this period.

Discussed this a bit on the Bootleg Series thread. I listened to almost nothing else for a month or two.

I DON'T CARE ABOUT ECONOMY

I DON'T CARE ABOUT ASTRONOMY

― tylerw, Friday, March 9, 2018 5:44 PM (two months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

grain-elevators-are-burstin'

love the Trouble No More set so much.

It's innaresting how angry and uninviting Dylan's version of xtianity is. Like, very little of it is uplifting or rapturous or thankful, a lot of it focuses on the harsh, judgmental end of things, not really the kind of angle that wins a lot of converts.

i always crack up during precious angel, which seems kinda like a tender love song until: "Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high /
When men will beg God to kill them and they won't be able to die."

haha yeah that's a prime example

there's still humor poking through, and occasional moments of tenderness and then hey don't forget FIRE AND BRIMSTONE

it's esp jarring because so much 70's pop-Christianity was inclusive and liberal e.g. Godspell, the Good News Bible, the communal "Jesus movement" etc., this is the v much the Reagan-era advent of evangelism as conservatism

but fuck yeah this set kicks so much ass

yeah it does coincide w Reaganism but my memories of the 80s evangelism revival doesn't really fit Dylan either - those guys were transparent hucksters in the faith healer tradition, constantly bursting into tears and dancing and reveling in opulence and the GLORY and btw send money

Bakker, Swaggart, Falwell, Robertson - Dylan bears at best a passing resemblance to those clowns. To a man they projected an avuncular happiness (and venality) that Dylan doesn't go anywhere near.

I probably said it upthread but for a Christian album I sure get cocaine vibes from Trouble No More

def one of the best of the bootleg series, ruined me on the studio albums

xp but I do think it's consistent with the liberal drift at the time though, still righteous but increasingly exclusionary and no doubt some of those SoCal yuppies hit thirty and stayed on for Ralph Reed et al

I've listened to a good number of shows from this period, and I agree with the assessment that the live performances smoke the studio recordings. When i pay more attention to the instrumentalists and the arrangements over anything else, the "Trouble No More" set is much more enjoyable than I'd expect. But eventually one's focus has to shift to the words, as well as Dylan's singing, and I can't say either helped in holding my interest. Sometimes, Dylan sounds re-invigorated in his righteous fury, but this can come on as relentless hectoring after a while. On some of the slower numbers, his voice cracks and breaks apart in a way that's cringe-inducing (see the live renditions of "I Believe in You"). And then there's the words. It's interesting to see Dylan apply the same methods he's always used in writing lyrics to Biblical sources - with each phase of his career, he mines rich new territory for material, whether it's folk songs or poetry or the Bible, and his approach to fragmenting them and fusing them back together in novel, even revelatory ways rarely fails to astonish. But the results here are pretty mixed. Quite a few lyrics, even entire verses, are not just awful but pretty offensive. Check out the title track of 'Slow Train Coming' and the verse about "Sheiks walkin' around like kings / Wearing fancy jewels and nose rings" - fortunately, Dylan dropped this from later performances, but it's there in the earlier ones. FWIW, in at least one case, it took someone else to really elevate a song or two into something truly transcendent. Sinead O'Connor's "I Believe in You" comes to mind - a beautifully fragile and moving rendition was released on one of those 'A Very Special Christmas' compilations (I think the second volume), and far more than Dylan's renditions, it's very moving to hear how religion can be a true lifeline for someone singing that song. (O'Connor's version was recorded soon after she was booed off the stage at Dylan's 30th anniversary concert, an experience that was very traumatizing. Not long after that, she attempted suicide, but even without knowing that, you get the sense she's hanging by a thread in "I Believe in You.")

xp Dylan and those ppl were really starting to lean into the "values" stuff, anti-abortion, homophobia that would come to define evangelism

bird solid post but grafs my man

I do love that Sinead version, it's always funny to me that "no one sings Dylan like Dylan" but at the same time so covers that do seem to elevate the material

so *many* covers

Dylan and those ppl were really starting to lean into the "values" stuff, anti-abortion, homophobia

? where are the anti-abortion and homophobia in Dylan's lyrics?

Check out the title track of 'Slow Train Coming' and the verse about "Sheiks walkin' around like kings / Wearing fancy jewels and nose rings"

this line doesn't bother me at all tbh

it's offensive to sheiks!

the line is also literally true so wgaf

the anti-OPEC implication in the verse is a little more suspect but really who cares, they *were* fucking with America!

iirc he called SF "a dwelling place for homoseluals" on stage but that stuff was all obv excised for this set

I also remember him also being anti-birth control in an RS interview dring this period...and aren't there a couple songs on Infidels that condemn abortion?

I can not type

idk I've never heard Infidels tbh!

he did say this around the time of infidels, which doesn't seem all that well thought out, but:

Well, I think birth control is another hoax that women shouldn’t have bought, but they did buy. I mean, if a man don’t wanna knock up a woman, that’s his problem, you know what I mean? It’s interesting: They arrest prostitutes, but they never arrest the guys with the prostitutes. It’s all very one-sided. And the same with birth control. Why do they make women take all them pills and fuck themselves up like that? People have used contraceptives for years and years and years. So all of a sudden some scientist invents a pill, and it’s a billion dollar industry. So we’re talkin’ about money. How to make money off of a sexual idea. “Yeah, you can go out and fuck anybody you want now; just take this pill.” You know? And it puts that in a person’s mind: “Yeah, if I take a pill. . . .” But who knows what those pills do to a person? I think they’re gonna be passé. But they’ve caused a lot of damage, a lot of damage.

So it’s the man’s responsibility? Vasectomy’s the best way?
I think so. A man don’t wanna get a woman pregnant, then he’s gotta take care of it. Otherwise, that’s just ultimate abuse, you know?

SF *is* a dwelling place for homosexuals and proud of it btw

xp

It's innaresting how angry and uninviting Dylan's version of xtianity is. Like, very little of it is uplifting or rapturous or thankful, a lot of it focuses on the harsh, judgmental end of things, not really the kind of angle that wins a lot of converts.

― Οὖτις, Thursday, March 5, 2020 3:21 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I feel qualified on this topic because I grew up in the 70s and early 80s in a non-denominational evangelical church that was a lot like this. Most of the members of the church (including my parents) were ex-hippies who came to the Church in a type of rejection of the excesses of the 60s. I am talking about Paul on the road to Damascus stuff. The entire feeling in our church was straight out of the Gospels/Revelations when the christian church was in it's early days: christians as a persecuted minority surrounded by wickedness at every turn who must stay strong for the end times coming soon. A lot of the hippie stuff still came through in the way members took care of each other and the general church community, but the primary thing I remember was the visceral feeling that the struggle for your soul was a day-to-day battle with the forces of the world shot through with Old Testament fire and brimstone: god is a living being, who is coming back soon, and he is going to punish the non-believers and you don't want to be one of them. I find Chick tracts funny but I heard similar shit daily/weekly.

A lot of the christian period has a similar vibe to the 60s protest songs. Dylan sells Christianity just as hard as he sold the civil rights movement. Dylan's projection of a sense of righteousness in the cause and the accusatory outrage at the injustice of civil rights, in say, "Hattie Carroll", is very similar to the righteousness and accusatory outrage he deploys at the wicked world of unbelievers.

I can see ums' point about the coke vibes on this stuff, especially the album cover where Dylan is in the army jacket and looks like a strung out Vietnam Vet. I also get a vibe of a guy who has a drinking problem (my recollection is that Bob started down the road to alcoholism in the late 70s), finds God, and for a short time the joy of his strong, newfound religion keeps him from drinking. But as the initial excitement of his conversion starts to wear off, the guy starts having to "white-knuckling" it: he thinks if he just proclaims his faith a little louder or proselytizes a little harder he can get that initial feeling back. Some of the coke vibes start to come off to me like the hysteria of someone trying to hold on to their belief/stop drinking.

shakey you gotta hear infidels!

I have never been able to locate a copy, can't find downloadable mp3s of it etc

(granted I haven't tried *that* hard, it looks like it probably sounds kind of bad)

xp I think some of that birth control vasectomy stuff is due to Bob fathering a couple of children in the late 70s/early 80s and having to pay child support.

Yeah, Infidels is really great in its own way, though obviously flawed.

haha wouldn't surprise me - good post btw

xp

I think this is Infidels-period? Still pretty fire and brimstone! (Also backed by the Heartbreakers!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxGzJQV1MI0

wait I meant this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG_Qlb5C4Xk

As someone who tried the pill and found it came with a fun side effect of crippling anxiety that wasn't listed on the box, I have a certain sympathy with the bonkers ramblings about birth control.