After my parents separated in early 1977 my mother moved to Southern Oregon. The family was split: I stayed with my father the first year while my sisters took up residence in Ashland with my mother. This entailed many regular seven-to-eight hour trips up and down Interstate 5 in my mother's old orange (because it was once owned by the county) Dodge three-speed pickup. Along the freeway in Northern California huge "I'M SAVED!" signs starting springing up over the next couple of years. This was also the time that Rollen Stewart, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, inserted himself into the national consciousness via televised professional sporting events.
Bob Dylan's conversion took place at the end of 1978 while he was performing on the road. He was on stage in San Diego when someone threw him a silver cross. He bent down and picked it up and put it in his pocket. Then later, one night in Arizona, feeling low and in need he reached into his pocket and found the crucifix. That was it. Dylan was Born Again. He began preaching the Gospel during his shows.
In preparation for tonight's post I reread Saved! The Gospel Speeches of Bob Dylan, a tiny little paperback (part of a series, No. 36, put out by Hanuman Books, which also include titles authored by Richard Hell and Cookie Mueller) that I picked up at St. Mark's Bookshop at a time when I had recently separated from my wife. What Clinton Heylin, the Dylan scholar who edited the book, must have done (there is no forward or introduction) is transcribe all the talking parts from concert bootlegs in 1979 and 1980. The book is organized in numbered sections that correspond to concert locations/dates or interviews listed in an index at the back; it is a record of Dylan proselytizing his audience. Sounding like a fire and brimstone Pentecostal preacher, Dylan warns his fans to be wary of this world because it is ruled by Satan, the prince of the power of the air; that Jesus defeated Satan when he died on the cross; that they must let Jesus into their hearts for the end of the world is nigh. Dylan draws heavily from the Book of Revelation; he sees proof of its prophecy in geopolitical current events -- Iran, Afghanistan.
Dylan saw it all at the end of the 1970s. And the grip of the prince of the power of the air has done nothing but tighten in the last thirty years. Oil, money, power -- a profane world grown ever more corrupt. Slow Train Coming (1979) is a truly great album. Listen to it today and you'll find that it sounds like it was just recorded.
By 1979 the path is already cleared for Reagan. The previous year there was the rise of anti-tax ideology in the form of Howard Jarvis' Proposition 13. This began a generalized vilification from the Right of all things governmental. By 1979 you also had the rise of an American version of the stab-in-the-back myth with the politicization of the POW/MIA issue. Captured in the Chuck Norris film, Good Guys Wear Black (1978), the idea is that the G.I.s would've crushed the gooks if not for being sold out by venal politicians and those fucking filthy peace-freak Hippies. This ideology becomes rampant in the '80s with the Rambo movies; it is synonymous with the zenith of Reaganism. In 1979 you had the creation of the Moral Majority by Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell whose plan was to harness the resurgence of that "Old Time Religion" for a new, more conservative Republican Party.
A couple months after the Moral Majority is founded, Dylan releases Slow Train Coming. The one-time standard bearer of the counter culture is reading from the same script as Jerry Falwell. That's it. The party is officially over. The Hippies have melted away. They remain only as a scarecrow in the Right's stab-in-the-back myth and never-ending culture war, a pitiful effigy to toss around at the end of a noose and then set ablaze. The Punks never had the numbers to engage mainstream culture in serious battle. The Hippies did at one point. But by the end of the '70s, they're done. The field is free for Reaganism.
And though Dylan's three Christian albums -- Slow Train; Saved (1980); Shot of Love (1981) -- are significant events in the extinction of the Hippies (whether as effect or cause doesn't matter) and presage ever-darkening times, they are the Dylan albums (along with Time Out of Mind from 1997) that I continue to listen to the most.
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