With nearly a half-century hindsight, it’s no overstatement to declare the release of Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming (released 8/20/79) was met with a combination of shock and awe upon its release. Shock because the man once described as ‘the voice of a generation’ was (most vehemently) espousing overtly Christian beliefs and awe because the future Nobel Laureate’s nineteenth album was almost universally lauded as the best-produced album of his career to that point.
For the general public, the message outweighed the medium. To hear Bob preach as opposed to the profound equanimity of “My Back Pages,” but in the wake of his divorce and a period of generally unfavorable response to his work–his 1978 album Street Legal and his film Renaldo and Clara (shot during the 1975 Rolling Thunder tour)–live shows as captured on Bob Dylan at Budokan did little to stem the tide of negativity.
So, public sentiment was running against an artist who had become a cultural icon a little over a decade prior (though admittedly not without being the target of more than a few slings and arrows in the process). The emotional weight of such circumstances primed Dylan for some kind of redemption, a source of which he found in attending a school of fundamentalist Christian teaching.
Having amassed a collection of newly-composed material based on that experience, Dylan asked Dire Straits’ guitarist Mark Knopfler to participate, as well as famed Muscle Shoals producer Jerry Wexler (celebrated for his work with Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and Percy Sledge, among others). The latter may have rebuffed his famous client’s evangelical overtures but otherwise acceded, if somewhat fitfully, to his wishes to create the album that would become Dylan’s nineteenth long-player.
Appropriately enough, the aim for polished yet ornate arrangements is most fully realized on the title song: Knopfler’s guitar mixed with the Muscle Shoals Horns makes for earthy, punchy music, the likes of which fell flat on the prior record. Meanwhile, the piano of the Alabama studio’s Barry Beckett (also the co-producer here), combined with the drums by Dire Straits’ Pick Withers, is decidedly reminiscent of The Band (especially on their second self-titled record, the so-called ‘Brown Album’).
From that broad perspective too, what became the most famous selection on the album, the 1980 Grammy Award-winning “Gotta Serve Somebody,” is easy to hear as a satire, particularly when taking into account Bob’s singing: it might be fair to say he’s never sounded so stylized in his delivery. And perhaps never so caricatured either, but, by the same token, his performance in songs like “I Believe In You” is also so profoundly passionate that there’s no question about how seriously the man is taking his music.
Although The Bard from Minnesota rarely, if ever, performs selections from Slow Train Coming anymore, when his setlists were replete with these numbers in ’79 and ’80, he played with the arrangements as generously as he did when he embarked on the so-called ‘Never-Ending Tour’ later in that latter decade. Without the on-stage sermonizing and avoidance of familiar material in the setlists, it’s arguable songs like “When You Gonna Wake Up” world garner so much attention for the didactic lyrics;
To that end, it’s very much worth hearing the bounty of live content in The Bootleg Series Vol. 13. As Dylan began to juxtapose classic culls from his early catalog with works from this album as well as its successor, Saved, (plus new and as yet unrecorded songs like “Lenny” that would appear on the next LP, Shot Of Love), the scope of his and his band’s versatility was never more obvious.
From a perspective of forty-five years, it’s never been clearer that Dylan’s incorporation of such overt religious elements in his work was a process far more abrupt than previous progressions, such as his transition from folkie to rocker. After all, he’s never sounded more self-righteous (or implicitly sexist) than on “Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others),” even in the midst of his campaign on behalf of “Hurricane” a few years prior.
On the other hand, it is hardly a wayward thought to theorize the tough-minded attitude that radiates from the blues-derived “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking.” is Dylan at his most honest–with himself as much as his audience. So, for once, the general consensus is generally correct: sans irony or excessive detachment, Bob is more fully engaged on Slow Train Coming than on most anything he’s ever recorded in his now sixty-year-plus career (except perhaps the Revue tour of 1976 as documented on Hard Rain).
In that respect, then, it’s (still) worth hearing close to fifty years after it came out, precisely because it remains as authentic a set of expressions as the best of Dylan’s latter-day efforts, such as 1989’s Oh Mercy and Tempest, almost a quarter century later.
