Happy 40th Anniversary to Bob Dylan’s twentieth studio album Saved, originally released June 23, 1980.
I was twelve years old when I was saved. Unfortunately, I wasn’t down by the riverside, with several other souls dressed in white robes and all manner of raised hands praising Him as I was led under. Instead, it was in a rather nondescript baptismal in a southern Baptist church in Oxford, North Carolina.
The baptismal had four or five steps and it was situated directly below the cross behind the podium. I was, however, in a white robe, as was the pastor. I remember slowly and dramatically descending those steps into a small pool filled with warm water as the pastor quoted scripture, held the back of my head, titled me backward, and fully immersed me. When I arose, I was “washed in the blood of the lamb.” I was still and would always be a sinner, but I had declared Jesus Christ my Lord and Savior and could from that point on call on His forgiveness when I transgressed and still get into Heaven, as long as I truly meant it. Pretty sweet deal.
About a year later, I first discovered Bob Dylan. I had heard of him, of course. I knew he was a folk singer and even that he had written a song that Peter, Paul and Mary covered, “Blowin’ In the Wind.” I knew he had a weird voice (to my young, untrained ears) and he always seemed to look exasperated. What I wasn’t ready for was, “Sweetheart Like You.” It was on this new network I was obsessed with called MTV. When I came home from school, I would immediately turn it on, and on Saturdays, it replaced the cartoons I had grown up watching. As with many GenXers, it had become my false idol.
Little did I know then, but would soon find out, that “Sweetheart Like You” was taken from Dylan’s album Infidels (1983), his first “secular” album after a trilogy of albums that celebrated his conversion to Christianity, starting with 1979’s Slow Train Coming and ending with 1981’s Shot of Love; in between was 1980’s Saved.
My decision as a twelve-year-old to be baptized wasn’t the result of some epiphany or revelation. No bright light or sign. It was simply me thinking, after being raised in the church, so to speak (going every Sunday, including Sunday School and Vacation Bible School), that getting into Heaven sounded better than burning in Hell for all eternity.
Dylan’s conversion reportedly began when he placed in his pocket a small silver cross someone threw onto a San Diego stage on November 17, 1978. The next night, he felt a powerful presence in his hotel room that he believed had to be Jesus Christ.
What came next was a succession of events that was not unlike his conversion to electricity almost fifteen years earlier, at least where his fanbase was concerned. It was just as unexpected, just as shocking, just as bewildering to them as the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and the subsequent world tour with the Hawks had been. He went down to Muscle Shoals in 1979 to cut a new album with the famed Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. Mark Knopfler joined in on guitar (he would later produce Infidels) and the legendary Jerry Wexler produced. The result was Slow Train Coming, and it announced to the world that Dylan had not only found Jesus, but he was doing the Lord’s work by ministering the Gospel to us all through his music.
He then went on the road to spread it to the masses, kicking off his gospel tour in San Francisco on November 1, 1979. That night, Dylan proselytized, evangelized, preached, and sang the gospel. He sang nothing but the gospel. No “Like A Rolling Stone,” no “Maggie’s Farm,” no “Tangled Up In Blue,” not even “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” Instead, the seventeen-song set consisted only of material from the newly released Slow Train Coming and seven of the nine songs which would eventually be included on Slow Train’s follow-up, Saved, eight months later. Some fans, just as others did more than a decade before, walked out.
When he re-entered the studio four months later, he brought along the peerless group of musicians he had assembled for the tour: Jim Keltner on drums, Spooner Oldham and Terry Young on keys, Tim Drummond on bass, Fred Tackett on guitar, and backing vocalists Carolyn Dennis (to whom Dylan would later be “secretly” married from 1986 to 1992), Regina Havis, Clydie King, and Monalisa Young. Muscle Shoals legend Barry Beckett took over the producer’s chair.
Where Slow Train Coming had been seen as a curious novelty, Saved doubled-down on Dylan’s conversion. If the tour hadn’t made the point clear, Dylan was serious about this Jesus stuff. It kicks off with Joe “Red” Hayes and Jack Rhodes’ modern spiritual, “A Satisfied Mind,” a song that’s been covered by everyone from Porter Wagoner to Lucinda Williams to Lindsey Buckingham to Ben Harper to Rosanne Cash. Dylan treats it in the traditional southern gospel way, with the backing vocalists testifying behind his lines in wordless affirmations.
“A Satisfied Mind” is immediately followed by the title cut, where we’re taken to church. Dylan expresses the joy felt by one who was once lost but is now found and possesses a new purpose in life. It’s the power of belief and faith. Its joy is contagious while its music is the perfect soundtrack to a sweaty southern tent revival.
That celebratory feel is present throughout Saved, while there is little in the way of the judgement or hellfire and brimstone that sometimes find their way into the sermons of the fundamentalists. Here Dylan isn’t pointing fingers or issuing warnings (as he would sometimes on tour and on parts of Shot of Love). Instead, he’s spreading the Word of God as the way to everlasting peace as he sees it. He’s “hanging on to solid rock” because of the reward that awaits him in the afterlife. He’s “pressing on” regardless of what the doubters say. After all the blessings he’s received in his life, he’s now asking God, “what can I do for you?”
Throughout Saved, while nonbelievers may take exception to the message, the music is impeccable, as one would expect from the group of players on board. Dylan delivers one of his most beautiful harmonica solos at the end of “What Can I Do For You?” while his vocals are some of the most expressive and heartfelt of his career. Note the devotion given to “Pressing On,” the energy and jubilance expressed in “Saved,” and the propulsion and tension that builds to a fever pitch throughout “In the Garden.”
The songs here are no throwaways, no mere curiosity pieces. As Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan tribute album from 2003 makes clear, heavyweights from the world of Gospel music including Shirley Caesar, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, Dottie Peoples, and the Fairfield Four all covered these songs, adding instant credibility to Dylan’s devotion and commitment.
However, by the time of Infidels in 1983, Dylan was back in the secular world. He had not so much abandoned his faith as he had simply expanded his lyrical concerns again. He was still warning us about Satan while fearing the inhumanity of man and the evils of corporate greed. As he sang on the opening track of that album, the possibly autobiographical, “Jokerman:” “Manipulator of crowds, you’re a dream twister.” The impenetrable Bob Dylan had returned.
Although I haven’t stepped foot inside a church near as often as I should have in the years since I was baptized, I still carry with me the belief that love and forgiveness can get us through the most trying of times, and I do find comfort that although Dylan isn’t necessarily directing his songs explicitly toward Jesus these days, he’s still motivated by the faith and strength of music and the performance of it, while his muse, whatever it may be, is still pressing on.
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