‘Jesus put his hand on me’: When Bob Dylan was born again

In 1978 Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity astonished the world. But, writes Sean Smith, the apocalyptic imagery in some of his greatest hits show it was only the endgame of a process that had taken years

Dylan performing in 1978, a few months before the events that would lead to his conversion (AFP/Getty)

Bob Dylan has never acknowledged  that the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana may have triggered his dramatic conversion to evangelical Christianity but both events unfolded over the same weekend in November 1978 .

Prior to 9/11, the mass murder-suicide of more than 900 members of  the Jim Jones cult represented the single greatest loss of civilian life in American history. A third of the casualties were children. It was apocalyptic and Dylan would have been primed to see it that way.

Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth was one of the best selling non-fiction books of the 1970s. It combined biblical prophecy and recent harbinger events to calculate that the world would end in redemptive carnage in the 1980s when Christ would return to reign for a thousand years. That idea inspired a new generation of born again Christians and Dylan had been gravitating towards them for years.

With hindsight, you can see flashes of apocalyptic Christian imagery in the lyrics of Street Legal – the legacy album that he was still in the process of  promoting on that exhausting tour in mid-November 1978.

Bob Dylan’s own account is miraculous. On the eve of the Jonestown massacre, a feverish Bob Dylan was nearing the end of a concert, and his tether, in San Diego.

Interviewed months  later he explained what happened next: “Someone out in the crowd … knew I wasn’t feeling too well … And they threw a silver cross on the stage … So I picked up the cross and I put it in my pocket.”

A couple of days later, Dylan was still running a temperature when, alone a motel room in Tucson, Arizona, he experienced a warming physical sensation. Later still, in another interview, Dylan embellished further: “Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble.”

The story of the motel room miracle is the legend that Dylan began to ferment and feed to journalists in spring 1979, four months after the event when its coincidence with the Jonestown massacre went entirely unnoticed. But Dylan’s visitation occurred just as the first confused reports were emerging from Guyana. It’s hard to imagine a more harrowing harbinger.

Over the following days, as the traumatising images of the Jonestown compound were beamed around the world, Dylan began to pen the lyrics to a new kind of song: Slow Train Coming.

A fortnight later at a soundcheck on 2 December, his band caught a glimpse of the first ominous chorus chug of Dylan’s doomsday train coming down the tracks: it seemed relentless, inescapable and predestined.

Whatever triggered Dylan’s conversion there’s little doubt that fear was a factor; he had the urgency of a man who sensed the hour was getting late. In the songs of that era the end is always nigh. Armageddon is closing in and a god-fearing  Dylan is relentlessly thankful to his redeeming saviour Jesus.

Dylan’s conversion to Christianity astonished the world. Graham Stephenson, a recently retired teacher and lifelong Dylan fan, can still remember the shockwaves that reverberated around the UK music press. Stephenson was 19 in August 1979 when Slow Train Coming was released: “I’d never heard anything like it.” It was relentless: “Every song was about Jesus,” he recalls.

Stephenson has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Dylan’s music and realises now that the religious sensibility in it “had always been there from the very start”. He helps me trace it back to Dylan’s earliest recordings.

Dylan’s dramatic  conversion to Christianity was only the endgame of a process that had taken years. Perhaps the real surprise is that it hadn’t happened sooner.

It’s easy to see why even the most ardent Dylan fans struggle with the hectoring preachiness of the born again years: after, all who on earth did Dylan think he was?

Dylan’s conversion seems a lot less miraculous when you realise that he was surrounded by Christians at the time. Christianity was enjoying a revival in the rock community in the late 1970s. Survivors of a scene of excess turned to religion as a way of coping with the ravages of addiction. Two of Dylan’s band were already Christians and he was involved in a series of romances with women who were to define his new relationship with Jesus.

It was Mary Artes who introduced Dylan to the Vineyard Fellowship and in early 1979, Dylan was a regular attendee of early morning bible classes, which preached the value of self-discipline and warned of the pitfalls of promiscuity, alcohol and drugs.

Although he would later balk at the term “born again”, Dylan’s conversion was a fully immersive  experience in every sense: “When I get involved in something, I get totally involved. I just don’t play around on the fringes.”

He was baptised in the ocean off the west coast at some point during the spring of  1979, shortly before starting to record the album Slow Train Coming in April through to May of that year.

Listening to it today, it’s easy to understand Stephenson’s astonishment. Dylan albums were sometimes lo-fi, poorly produced affairs that didn’t always do his songs justice but Slow Train Coming was a sonic boom of an album. He remembers the  surreal sense that the lyrics weren’t to be taken at face value. Dylan couldn’t really mean what he was singing, could he? It would prove to be one of his most commercially successful albums. Keith Richards was even cynical enough to suggest that Dylan was the “prophet of profit” and had found an ingenious way of expanding his fanbase.

It was only when the album was toured that the world could see that Dylan meant every word as reports of his bombastic homilies started to circulate. By November 1979 Dylan had assembled a band for a fortnight’s residency at the aptly named Warfield theatre in San Francisco. Dylan had 17 songs about Jesus and he was going to play each and every one to an audience that had come to hear his greatest hits.

As the band worked their way through Slow Train Coming and songs that would later appear on its gospel-inspired sequel Saved, the crowd grew restless. But Dylan was as uncompromising as his new lyrics.

He was engaged in “spiritual warfare” for their souls. “Precious Angel” is an achingly beautiful ballad; its tone suggests a compassionate Christianity but its lyrics unequivocally put sinners to the sword. In the crucible of the Warfield there was “no neutral ground”.

Whatever triggered Dylan’s conversion there’s little doubt that fear was a factor; he had the urgency of a man who sensed the hour was getting late

To a soundtrack of hauntingly beautiful tunes Dylan harangued and hectored his audience to swallow their pride, mend their ways and repent before it was too late .

Although those late 1979 shows divided opinion, they united the ire of the local press. The San Francisco Examiner decided that “Born Again Dylan Bombs” while its rival paper The Chronicle also panned “Bob Dylan’s god awful gospel”.

Stephenson helps me source a more  balanced contemporary account written by Paul Williams, a music journalist who attended all 14 nights of the Warfield residency. Williams later published a slim volume account with the appropriately stunned title What Happened? Today, it reads like an act of self- therapy as an astonished acquaintance tries to come to terms with this new manifestation of his hero.  

One of Dylan’s onstage sermons later sought to establish the new material as a seamless segue from the old: “I told you the times they are a changing and they did. I said the answer was blowing in the wind and it was. I’m telling you Jesus is coming back and he is.”

But Williams felt that Dylan’s mind had been narrowed. He found that the musician had become hermetically sealed into a sect that eschewed modern media for being “so ultraconservative simply because they’ve never been exposed to anything else”.  However, Williams came to realise that the music itself was remarkable and that Dylan’s faith was heartfelt and profound. And he was scathing of traditional Dylan fans who booed and barracked their fallen idol: “They have no interest in living art at all; they want their performer to be time machines for them.” Dylan’s faith was for real, he concluded.

As if to challenge the notion that the devil had all the best tunes, Dylan’s Christian albums are filled with what in today’s modern parlance could only be described as absolute bangers. Dylan’s Christian trilogy rocks : “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking”, “When You Gonna Wake Up”, “Saved”, “Solid Rock” and “Property of Jesus” pulsate as Dylan goes hunting for your soul.

It’s easy to get lost in the triumphalist music and miss what Dylan was actually saying in the songs of this period. The opening bars of “Saved” are a glorious gospel stomp, gleeful in its conviction that we are born to burn. When Christ returns he will dispatch the worldly, the vain, the proud, the wise – almost everyone really – to the flames below. Only the  select elect of Dylan and his new friends were to be saved as the rest of the world literally goes to hell.

It’s easy to see why even the most ardent Dylan fans struggle with the hectoring preachiness of the born again years: after, all who on earth did Dylan think he was? What gave him the right to judge?

Dylan’s dramatic  conversion to Christianity was only the endgame of a process that had taken years. Perhaps the real surprise is that it hadn’t happened sooner

When it came to moral failings, Dylan felt himself to be an expert authority with a responsibility to lead and influence, saving others from his own mistakes. Looking at the lyrics today we have to credit Dylan with the self-awareness to know that he’ll always be more of a sinner than a saint.

When he rails against the moral failings of his audience, he’s simultaneously berating himself for fear that he’ll backslide before Christ returns. He may preach in the second person but he’s painfully describing his own first hand experiences. It’s himself he hates for the “weakness” he’s concealed.

The devil seems to enjoy a special place in Dylan’s heart. You can see him leering back at you from between the lines. Throughout the 1970s, Dylan had shown he could resist anything except temptation. It’s the missionary message at the heart of “Pressing On”, the sublime spiritual with which he chose to close most of the shows of this era. Dylan sings that he knows temptation is not an “easy thing” and that it “runs” in his “veins”.

Guilt-racked by the compulsive womanising that had destroyed his marriage, his faith was built on shame and self -loathing. It was there all along in that famous first line of Slow Train Coming when Dylan confides that he feels so “low down and disgusted”. Dylan is his own devil in disguise.

Decadence had led to despair, sincere repentance and a quest for atonement. The Christian trilogy is Dylan’s three-part act of contrition. He was literally on a mission. It was as if by saving our souls he could save his own by prolifically pressing records for the lord.

Anyone doubting his sincerity should listen to the start of “Solid Rock”. Its opening bars are as overwhelming as the flood it describes. You can almost see Dylan “hanging on” as the floodwaters rise around him as he reminds himself he “can’t let go”.

He gives thanks to Mary Artes as the “Precious Angel” who saved his soul by taking him to the Vineyard Fellowship in January 1979. Divorced, and depressed, Dylan had been running on “empty” – the word he used to describe his mood at the time.  You suspect that she probably saved his life and that without his newfound mission he would have succumbed to the waves of despair.

His trilogy of Christian albums from 1979 to 1981 have long been relegated to the back pages of his enormous catalogue, written off as an aberrant fever dream from which Dylan thankfully awoke before merging back into the secular 1980s mainstream.

It’s an era many of his fans would prefer to forget and Graham still seems  pained by the reactionary and “exclusionary” tone of  Dylan’s more obnoxious sermons when his idol had shown himself to have feet of clay.

But Stephenson knows that the religious sensibility remained. “It was always there and it never went away.” And it’s true. When you look for it, it’s everywhere, hiding in plain sight.  

Stephenson even cites the Christian, Jewish and even Hindu references on Dylan’s mesmerising 2020 lockdown release Rough and Rowdy Ways.

Forty years on from his hell-lowering days, Dylan is a towering titan as intimidating as his vast  body of work – something he acknowledges on the opening track of the new album with a knowing nod to his hero Walt Whitman: “I contain multitudes.”

Almost every movement has tried to claim him as their own but he has always kept “pressing on”. It’s as if this world cannot hold his attention; even the Nobel Prize seemed to barely register on his radar.

But Dylan’s faith is the only unbroken thread that spans his entire career. The distinguished academic Christopher Ricks has long argued that Dylan’s  religious sensibility was the  key to unlocking this most complex of characters. Ricks has run the reputational risk of putting him on the same pedestal as religious poets like Milton, Tennyson, Donne and Rossetti but surely Dylan belongs in that exalted company now? And now that he’s likely to be rock’s only ever Nobel laureate, where else could posterity possibly put him anyway?

Perhaps anyone who still thinks that’s preposterous hyperbole should listen to the Christian trilogy’s final track: “Every Grain of Sand”. It’s a cathedral of a song that’s been known to make atheists weep.

In a famous interview, Dylan is regaled by his stunning career achievements only to wryly quip that when it comes to jumping the queue and getting into heaven, none of that stuff is worth a damn. As he enters the canon and inherits the metaphorical kind of immortality that poets have always craved, you suspect that it won’t be enough for a man who has only ever really been interested in the actual afterlife. Dylan is still trying to get to heaven before they close the door he’s always been knocking on.