Dylan's first born-again shows, at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco in early November 1979, also offered encouraging hints that the public was open to his stern new message. Although much was made in the San Francisco dailies about a contingent of non-believers walking out of the first Warfield show, Dylan has long insisted that such reports were overblown. And Paul Williams, in his 1980 book Dylan: What Happened?, observed that "some people missed the old songs, but on the whole the audience seemed well satisfied."
By all accounts, Dylan began to radiate confidence over the course of his 14-night stand at the Warfield, as audience response grew progressively warmer. And four subsequent shows in Santa Monica were received with all the rapturous fervor of a Billy Graham revival.
Bob Dylan: Spreading the word on his evangelical 1979-80 tour.
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Scheduled to perform on Thursday,
August 23, Showtime is 8 p.m.
Sundome Center for the
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Then there was Dylan's first Christian show outside of California -- in Tempe at the Gammage Auditorium, on November 25, 1979.
Although word from the California gigs had made it common knowledge that Dylan was eschewing his monumental classics in favor of new born-again material, the ASU crowd reacted with shock and anger from the moment Dylan's three female back-up singers opened the show with a short set of gospel songs.
Heylin writes that on the first night, "the audience refused to sit still, shouting between songs until Dylan asked his lighting crew to 'turn the light on them down there.' As the heckling continued, he began to sermonize, this time minus the gentle coaxing tone adopted in San Francisco and Santa Monica."
Dylan's disgust at the abuse he received in Tempe hadn't worn off in 1985 when he offered a rambling critique in the sleeve notes for his boxed set Biograph. Although he doesn't mention ASU by name, there's little doubt who he's targeting when he says, "College kids showed me the most disrespect" on the Christian tour.
In the Biographnotes, Dylan demonstrates a strange sense of alienation from his core audience, an alienation that took root in Tempe and which he has never fully overcome.
"We'd play theaters in the mission and Time Square districts in some of the larger cities. . . . [T]he people that would come to the shows, you know, they'd be more or less from the neighborhood, prostitutes, pimps, whatever, shady looking characters," Dylan says in the notes. "In these areas, this particular show went down well, audiences would be very receptive and even if I say so myself, wildly enthusiastic.
"Then we'd play the so-called colleges, where my so-called fans were," Dylan adds. "And all hell would break loose -- 'take off that dress,' 'we want rock 'n' roll,' lots of other things I don't want to repeat, just really filthy mouth stuff. This really surprised me, that these kids didn't know any better, all from good homes and liberal minded to boot. . . . During the gospel tours I saw what the nation's universities were about. It was extremely fascinating."
If the first night at Gammage was a punishing blow to Dylan's psyche, it was a virtual love-in compared to the reception he faced the following night.
Dylan's reaction to unruly audiences in the mid-'60s had been to charge into the next song and drown out the dissidents with rock 'n' roll volume, but in Tempe he began to deliver lengthy speeches between songs, which only heightened the tension in the air.
While hecklers shouted, Dylan shot back: "Hmmm. Pretty rude bunch tonight, huh? You all know how to be real rude! You know about the spirit of the antichrist? Does anyone here know about that? Ah, the spirit of the antichrist is loose right now."
As audience demands for "rock 'n' roll" continued, Dylan sneered, "If you want rock 'n' roll, you go down and rock 'n' roll. You can go and see KISS and you can rock 'n' roll all the way down to the pit!" In the face of more taunts, Dylan grew more indignant: "You still wanna rock 'n' roll? I'll tell you what the two kinds of people are. . . . There's saved people and there's lost people. Remember I told you that. You may never see me again. You may not see me, sometime down the line you remember you heard it here, that Jesus is Lord. Every knee shall bow!"
The show grew more and more surreal as Dylan launched into detailed spiels about Armageddon, which he apparently believed was right around the corner. His raps included prophecies of the Soviet Union invading the Middle East, which would lead to a cataclysmic world war (months later, at a show in Toronto, Dylan took credit for anticipating the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). Ultimately, he couldn't resist a dig at the college students who dominated the crowd that night.
"You talk to your teachers about what I said," Dylan said. "I'm sure you're paying a lot of money for your education, so you'd better get one."
For one of the few times in his career, Dylan did not return for an encore.
Three months after his Tempe debacles, Dylan went into the studio to record Saved,his follow-up to Slow Train Coming. This time, however, the public wanted nothing to do with Dylan's brand of salvation. The record swiftly bombed, and was ignored by rock radio. Dylan, formerly the revered spokesman for a generation, was now widely viewed as a narrow-minded crackpot. Even his old pal John Lennon took a swipe at him with the unreleased song "Serve Yourself," a direct response to "Gotta Serve Somebody."
