‘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 newspaperThe 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 oftenmiss, is that the professions of faith they contained were no less passionate than the sentiments expressed in any of his 1960s landmarks or evenBlood 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 albumStreet-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 toldLos 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 bestsellerThe Late Great Planet Earth. A
