God’s newest mouthpiece: Inside Bob Dylan’s strange year of 1979
Bob Dylan is an enigmatic man.
Even still today, well into his 80s, he’s impossible to pin down as he routinely takes to his social media accounts to share a seemingly undying love for the American rapper Machine Gun Kelly. As the latest in his many phases and obsessions, his life can be mapped out by a series of strange chapters.
Some are more infamous than others, though. The moment Dylan cast off folk and first plugged in an electric guitar is undeniably the most well-known of them all. That wasn’t even just a musical change in his sound; it was a complete career rearrange as he essentially rejected the genre that made him a star.
Risking it all like that is something few others would do. In that one move, Dylan essentially risked alienating all the fans he’d gathered so far, risking setting his career back to square one. Arguably, that was actually what he wanted as he rebelled against his own success, but perhaps to his own dismay, the people stuck with him.
What followed felt like a long series of attempted shake-offs, and maybe that’s actually the key to it all: Dylan was desperate to be free and felt weighed down by the shackles of his own success. That was clearest in 1970 when he released Self Portrait, a purposefully bad album.
“It was a joke,” he later admitted, a joke crafted to try and get rid of his own followers as he explained, “I wasn’t going to be anybody’s puppet, and I figured this record would put an end to that…I was just so fed up with all that ‘who people thought I was’ nonsense.”
Still, though, they stuck around, and at some point, Dylan seemed to find a different kind of freedom. The lead-up to him going all-in on Christianity is confusing, which some draw back to his mysterious motorcycle accident in 1966, where Dylan claimed he broke several vertebrae in his neck, but there was no ambulance called to the scene, and the singer never went to the hospital. According to some sources, this was the moment that he found God.
But if he did, he kept it to himself for a good while, as it wasn’t until the late 1970s when another twist in his tale came. Randomly, the Bob Dylan once known for fearsome protest songs, known for changing the sound of folk, for writing songs of love and hate, was suddenly writing hymns.
He took it seriously, as his 1979 was a year of complete devotion. He started it in solitude as he took an intensive three-month-long discipleship course at a church, not just getting good with God in a typical fashion, but fully converting to Evangelical Christianity and getting baptised.
Later that year, Slow Train Coming could be released, and once again, fans were left confused as he presented them with nine worship songs. “It may be the Devil, and it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody,” he sings on the opening track, and he stays on that devotional path, but it wasn’t just the songs.
Dylan got all-out preachy as he declared, “Jesus did appear to me as King of Kings, and Lord of Lords,” adding, “There was a presence in the room that couldn’t have been anybody but Jesus”. Now believing himself to be the mouthpiece for the lord, he rounded off 1979 by telling an audience of rock and roll fans that they were going to hell, yelling from the stage, “If you want rock ‘n’ roll, you can go see Kiss and rock ‘n’ roll all the way down to the pit”.
And thus began Dylan’s Christian era, one that would end as abruptly as all the rest when he moved onto something else.
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