The enduring, fantastical legends—in some ways even more than his formidable songbook—have always seemed to set Bob Dylan apart from his contemporaries. The fanciful biography he concocted as a fledgling singer-songwriter fresh to New York City's Greenwich Village, his friendship with folk legend Woody Guthrie, the boos and heckling on his U.K. tour in 1966, his mysterious motorcycle accident—even the most casual fan has had plenty to pour over when digging into Dylan's story, and the lore listed here doesn't even get us beyond the 1960s. But perhaps the most fascinating—and beguiling—tale in Dylan's long and storied career came when he was born again and converted to Christianity after seeing Jesus Christ in a hotel room in Tucson, Arizona in November 1978.
While Dylan's music often churned with biblical allegories even before he was signed to Columbia Records in 1962, it was in the aftermath of the epiphany Dylan had experienced that everything changed for both the rock and roll legend and his fans. During the late 1970s and early '80s "gospel" trilogy of albums Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love, Dylan fully embraced writing songs full of fire and brimstone and tales of a coming apocalypse, leaving behind the music that had soundtracked the previous 15 years.
"When Bob Dylan found God, it seemed as though he jettisoned everything that had come before," Sean Wilentz, author of the excellent Bob Dylan in America, says of the period. Dylan's fans were understandably taken aback when they arrived at the first stop on his Slow Train tour—a 14-night stand at San Francisco's fabled Warfield Theatre—and were confronted with a setlist chock full of songs about a coming rapture (and absolutely zero from his peerless catalog). "Christian music was not being heard outside of a small circle of followers; with his embrace, Dylan became an enemy to many people who had followed him. They were outraged."
Over the course of the Warfield shows, stories surfaced of fans in the front rows holding signs reading "Jesus loves your old songs" and of street musicians out in front of the concert hall playing Dylan's old hits and drawing more cheers than Dylan himself.
"Being born again is a hard thing," Dylan told Karen Hughes of The Dominion in 1980. "You ever seen a mother give birth to a child? Well, it's painful. We don't like to lose those old attitudes and hang-ups."
As the cat calls and boos grew louder at the Warfield, however, Dylan—no stranger to controversy—took it all in stride. In fact, within just a few performances he'd begun to incorporate long sermons into his performance, as a way to preface the more apocalyptic songs.
The period is documented in the latest edition of Dylan's long-running Bootleg Series, this time called Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series Volume 13 (1978-1981). Unlike the release of his fabled Royal Albert Hall concert from 1966, his Basement Tapes with The Band, or the "thin wild mercury music" made during the recording of his early classics Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, Trouble No More seeks to shine a new light on a period long dismissed by even Dylan's most ardent fans as a fallow phase in his career.
"I owned the albums, but they really did stay in the shrink wrap," says Penn Jillette, the illusionist, avowed Dylan obsessive, and confirmed atheist who wrote liner notes for Trouble No More. "When those albums came out, my friends—who knew how much I loved Bob—would call to rub it in. 'Look at what your boy's done now,' they'd say with glee. I don't think there was another time in my life that two things that defined me—Bob Dylan and atheism—had been driving 100 miles an hour in opposite directions. It may sound silly, but I had so much invested in Bob Dylan, emotionally, it hurt almost more than I can describe."
The move by Dylan's team and Sony/Legacy is a bold one, no doubt about it. Beyond diehards, there's a long list of releases fans have been clamouring for, and Dylan's "Gospel Years," as they are known, surely wasn't one of them. But much like 2013's Another Self Portrait, in which the tenth instalment in the Bootleg Series illuminated and thus redefined an oft-maligned period in Dylan's career, Trouble No More will make fans of even the most disbelieving among us.
Jillette himself has learned to take the Gospel Years material in stride and find the art behind the heavy Christian messaging. "I wanted to go through it and say to myself, 'Well, by Jesus Christ he means passion, and by God he means this and that,'" he says. "But that would be disrespectful. You're not allowed to change what he is saying. But I once I got over that I was shocked by what I discovered. The music is just so good. The band is phenomenal. And the performances are some of the best he ever gave. Look, we've had a chance to be in the same room as Shakespeare. That may sound crazy, but Bob is at that level. This music is the proof, because I came to this music not wanting to accept it, and I'm willing to accept it as truly great."
"He turned what people were expecting to be an old-school rock and roll show into an old-school revival meeting," Wilentz says, clearly concurring with Jillette's assessment of this era in Dylan's career. "It sure wasn't what people came to see, but he was preaching—testifying—with every fibre of his being. He wasn't faking it. He was taking that art to a different level. He was taking an American form, gospel in particular, and reinventing it with great respect for it. Bob Dylan was a legitimate gospel singer here."
As he had done so many times before, and would do again, Dylan was taking an old American art form, reinventing it for the times and for his own purposes. Still, during the period Trouble No More chronicles, Dylan went from being one of the highest-grossing arena acts in the world to playing small theatres, and even his peers were left wondering. In the past, Dylan's fellow musicians had climbed over one another to follow his latest "new direction." Not this time. In fact, the songwriter Leonard Cohen was reportedly so shaken by the news of Dylan's conversion that he paced his home, wringing his hands, wondering aloud about Dylan's conversion. John Lennon, after seeing Dylan perform "Gotta Serve Somebody" on television, vented his annoyance with his old friend by recording a series of home demos of a parody song he wrote entitled "Serve Yourself."
"When I get involved in something, I get totally involved," Dylan told Robert Hilburn of the L.A. Times of the way he viewed his Gospel era. "I don't play around on the fringes."
"Bob Dylan does whatever the hell he wants," explains producer Don Was, who has worked with Dylan numerous times over the years. "But when he does it, he means it. It's never half-hearted. It's never half-baked. Those performances during those Gospel Years tours are being celebrated now for a reason. The band was probably the best live band Dylan ever had backing him up, and over the course of the couple of years they were together they only got better and better. They pushed Dylan and Dylan pushed them. That some people missed that at the time is a shame."
While some early reviews have pointed out that there are multiple versions of seminal songs like "Slow Train," "Gotta Serve Somebody," and "Solid Rock" on the set, what they've failed to mention is that the evolution of those songs over the course of the four years covered by Trouble No More is so stark, they are unrecognisable from performance to performance. In fact, Dylan and his band—which included a core of legendary sidemen like drummer Jim Keltner, guitarist Fred Tackett, keyboardist Spooner Oldham, and bassist Tim Drummond—were virtually reinventing the material from night to night. They were also injecting the songs with a large helping of heart and soul, much of which was missing from the album recordings made by production legend Jerry Wexler at the famed Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama.
That the Gospel Years is seeing a reissue should not be too surprising; not only have Dylan fans reassessed their value, but a younger generation is now able to give this material equal weight alongside his more famous recordings. "For me, those Gospel Years records arrived out of context, because I didn't live through the period in which they were released," says New Yorker music critic Amanda Petrusich, who also contributed liner notes to Trouble No More. "I had gotten to know Dylan as a counter-cultural figure who was periodically transforming himself almost out of context, so I didn't feel the betrayal some people felt in the moment because I didn't live it in real time, and so I was able to approach those records more like, 'Oh, cool, more Dylan records I haven't heard!' When I first heard them I thought, 'Wow, this is some of the best singing of his career'—it's hard now to even imagine what all the fuss was about."
Petrusich gives the material on Trouble No More much more credit than Dylan's earlier critics; she says that the era is indicative of "Dylan at his most human, and his most accessible." But beyond the material he produced during this time, which has largely been the focus of previous critical assessments, Petrusich also notes that his religious epiphany was significant—and often neglected from the narrative. "Dylan was thirty-seven when he saw Jesus in a hotel room in Tucson," she explains. "I am thirty-seven now, and I remember thinking when I was working on my piece, 'Oh shit, this is that weird age that's kind of an odd moment in the arc of life where you think you're just figuring everything out and then suddenly there's just more and more questions.' So if we think of Dylan as a seeker in the broadest, most expansive sense, well, here he was doing that. He was seeking out this other thing, this other potential for wisdom. To read his accounting of that moment of epiphany, it's really intense and powerful. It's not a metaphor. So that's always been the compelling part of this story for people, but I think the fact that he was looking for answers, really intensely, has been overlooked."
And given that Dylan had constantly challenged the even-then-accepted orthodoxy of rock and roll—and since artists as diverse as Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Al Green had all made "religious" music at some point in their careers—Don Was finds the response to Dylan's music during his Gospel Years confounding, if sadly typical of his rabid following.
"I think when an artist becomes as big as Bob Dylan is, it's for reasons greater than just making good music," Was says. "It's because that artist's music has entered people's emotional lives, and they relate to the artist and they feel that the artist speaks for them. And when then that artist does a sudden left turn, it means that they have to do that left turn, too, because their identity is so tied up in how they perceive that artist. Of course that inability of people to adapt isn't Bob's problem."
Ultimately, though, the last word goes to Dylan. "Here's the thing with me and the religious thing, this is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music," he told Newsweek in 1997. "I don't find it anywhere else."
