Dylan has always nursed a fairly jaundiced view of the media in general and probably took these latest harsh words in his usual stride. But a far darker cloud hanging over him during this period was all the emotional and spiritual fallout from a painful recent divorce. In 1977 the singer/songwriter had even been accused of spousal abuse in the nation’s tabloids. Now he no longer had a family to anchor himself to, and with only a gruelling tour schedule to focus on, he fell into a deep depression. One of his backing singers, Helena Springs, suggested he try prayer as an antidote to his inner suffering. Another musician friend, T-Bone Burnett-a recent convert to Christianity - read Bible passages to Dylan late one night out on the road at the latter’s request. When Burnett came to the line about those who place their faith in astrologers and other spokespersons of ‘the dark arts’ being automatically doomed to lose their families, Dylan reacted as if a lightning bolt had just struck him. And then on December 17th 1978, after a show in Tucson, Arizona, he experienced a full-blown spiritual ‘awakening’ whilst alone in his hotel suite. ‘There was a presence in the room that couldn’t have been anybody but Jesus,’ he later recalled. ‘Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. The Glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up. It’s like waking one day and being reborn. Can you imagine turning into another person? It’s pretty scary if you think about it.’
Dylan’s conversion was so dramatic that in 1979 he put all his back catalogue in the closet and set out on another long US tour, this time determined to perform only brand-new self-composed material, with all the lyrics exclusively slanted on his sudden embrace of Jesus Christ as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
An album of such songs named
Slow Train Coming
was recorded and made available before decade’s end to a generally perplexed world reaction. His vocal cords may have been gainfully loosened up by the son of God’s impromptu visit but godly surrender hadn’t brought his singular gift for songcraft any blessings. In point of fact, it robbed him outright of his wicked sense of humour and - worse yet - made him small-minded and a bit of a bigot. ‘You’ve either got faith or you’ve got disbelief. And there ain’t no neutral ground,’ he railed out on one track. It was just too weird for most of Dylan’s core following to readily accept.
At least his European fan base was spared the jarring spectacle of him addressing audiences between songs like some curly-haired Elmer Gantry preaching hellfire and brimstone to the disbelievers as he did during his US shows throughout the year. Several of these rants were tape-recorded and then transcribed to print by audience members. ‘I told you “the times they are a-changin’” and they did,’ Dylan informed one crowd. ‘I said the answer was “blowin’ in the wind” and it was. I’m telling you now that Jesus is coming back and He is! And there is no other way of salvation.
‘You know we’re living in the end times. The scriptures say in the last days, perilous times shall be at hand. Men shall become lovers of their own selves. Blasphemous, heavy and high-minded. ’
The ‘Jesus saves’ banter may have come off as cranky and depressingly out of character but Dylan’s quasi-apocalyptic depiction of the seventies as vanity-driven, drug-sodden ‘perilous times’ was pretty spot on in retrospect. The sixties had been so tumultuous for him that he’d spent the last third of that decade in a state of reclusive semi-retirement. But surviving the seventies
had finally sapped his will and brought him so low that he could only react by subjugating his very spirit to some supposed higher power. Ultimately it would get marked down as just another of Dylan’s bewildering ‘phases’, but at the time it left many deeply estranged and unable to reconcile themselves with the man.
Out on a boat navigating the Bahamas in the autumn of ’79, John Lennon, Dylan’s old creative sparring partner back in the mid-sixties, heard the song ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ on the radio and suddenly felt the urge to pen a song of his own on the subject of spiritual servitude. A cassette recording he made of the impromptu composition is now available for all to hear on a posthumous box set. It’s called ‘Serve Yourself’ and it’s more of a rant than a song per se, a sustained howl of derision at his greatest rival’s desperate clutching at the most inflexible straws of orthodox religious dogma.
Lennon had never been visited by Jesus Christ personally but in the LSD delirium of the late sixties had briefly toyed with the idea that he might indeed be the living reincarnation of God’s only son. He apparently even tried to summon up a press conference in May ’68 in order to inform the world of his Christ-like status until wiser heads prevailed and dissuaded him from this course of action. Yet he still managed to factor his Jesus complex into the lyrics to ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ the following year, addressing the Messiah as though he were Lennon’s own personal Siamese twin. At the end of the day, though, a ferocious intellect like Lennon’s was never going to be cowed by fairy stories involving a humble carpenter from Nazareth changing water into wine. Lennon had his own living, breathing higher power to prostrate himself before: her name was Yoko Ono.
In 1975 they’d reconciled and conceived a child, Sean, an event
that prompted Lennon to stop making music and concentrate on a new vocation instead, that of house-husbandry. Apart from the creation in 1970 of his last real musical masterpiece - the primal-scream-driven
Plastic Ono Band
- the first half of the decade had been one long bad dream for Lennon in the shape of drug problems, FBI wire-taps and one highly publicised Hollywood meltdown. He’d had to do battle in court with money-hungry bloodsuckers like Allen Klein, work alongside egomaniacal nut-cases like Phil Spector and live with the scary sensation of being constantly spied on by US government agents in the pay of Richard Nixon. Facing off adversaries like these would have been enough to take the fight out of any man.
How comforting it must have been then to hear the love of his life soothingly inform him that he didn’t need to record another record or have any further contact with the music industry and the outside world in general. With her career in the avant-garde at something of a temporary impasse, Yoko Ono had become intrigued by the idea of launching herself as a businesswoman. She calmly informed Lennon that from now on she would be the family breadwinner and that he would simply concentrate on rearing their infant son.
It was evidently a sweet deal to his way of thinking because he fell into the new routine like a newborn babe into slumber. His fan base felt slighted and blamed Ono for brainwashing him into creative inactivity, but Lennon’s escape from the vanity factory of seventies pop was still probably the coolest move he made in that whole ten-year stretch. Suddenly he was no longer just a valuable commodity, he was a free man. But as we all know, freedom is a very relative concept and this was as true for John Lennon as for any other human being.
When Lennon saw how his wife deftly managed to quadruple his finances by decade’s end with a series of canny investment strategies, her word became law to him and he deferred to her judgement on all aspects of his life. That’s why he was sailing around the Bahamas in ’79 when he first tuned in to Bob Dylan crooning to his saviour: Yoko Ono - under the direction of several astrologers - had sent him out there without further explanation and he’d bowed to her wishes without question.
Listening to the radio on the vessel each day he felt suddenly compelled to start writing songs again for the first time in almost five years. At first he didn’t know what to do with these new compositions until one night he heard over the airwaves a record by a new group from Athens, Georgia, known as the B-52’s. The quintet had a distinctive danceable sound that was both artsy and garage-rock-friendly but what really piqued Lennon’s interest were the weird Yma Sumac-like female voices shrieking out through the mix. They instantly reminded him of a sound he’d once been all too familiar with - the wife at full vocal pelt. Maybe - he thought to himself - the world is finally ready to embrace Yoko Ono’s singular take on music-making with open arms. From that moment forward, his return to an active musical career became a done deal. But not as a solo entity. Lennon really wanted Ono to get the praise and attention this time around. He genuinely saw her as his superior and had even taken to referring to her as ‘mother’ at all times.
We all know what happened next. Lennon and Ono recorded their
Double Fantasy
album and Geffen Records released it on November 15th 1980 to generally lukewarm fanfare. Then on December 8th Lennon was returning home after having mixed a new track his wife had just concocted entitled ‘Walking on Thin
Ice’ at a local studio when a deranged fan shot him to death in front of his family’s apartment building.
It’s quite tempting to play up his murder as a kind of definitive ‘death of the seventies’ moment but on closer inspection it doesn’t really hold up. Lennon was a spent force throughout much of the seventies anyway and had little direct influence on its ebbs and flows. No, his slaying felt far more like the death of the sixties instead, or at least the final nail in the coffin of the spirit of that now long-gone era of marmalade skies and endless possibilities.
I remember hearing the news whilst floating through central London. A radio announcement kept leaking out of all the shops along the way, followed by the eerie sound of Lennon’s own voice recorded in an interview just prior to his passing. Everyone around me in the busy streets had the same stricken ‘this can’t be happening’ look etched across their faces. Involuntarily my memory returned to the days of my youth when the Christmas season had always been soundtracked by the hotly anticipated release of a new Beatles album. When December rolled around, the shops would all be playing the record seemingly in rotation and the communal joy this music conjured up everywhere was both palpable and deeply infectious. But that was then-agentler, more enchanted time - and this was now, the era when ‘greed is good’ was about to become the mantra of the masses.
In due course, I arrived at the
NME
’s Carnaby Street offices, only to walk into a scene of utter desolation. The old-timers there were all teary-eyed and barely able to speak. One was so distraught he kept having to go to the toilet to throw up. Even the younger scribes were all choked up as though it wasn’t John Lennon but their beloved John Lydon who’d bitten the bullet in
his place. But then how else were we all expected to react? It was a heartbreaker whichever way you looked at it: a gifted family man still nimble-witted and rife with rude health slain at the hand of some insane narcissist, a wife widowed, a young son left fatherless and a world robbed of the victim’s physical presence and future artistic contributions. It was such a senseless scenario that almost thirty years later we’re still trying to make sense of it.
But then again, maybe Lennon had received a momentary mental flash of what fate ultimately had in store for him back in 1970 when he wrote the song that became his second post-Beatles single release - ‘Instant Karma!’. ‘Instant karma’s gonna get you,’ he sang almost maliciously on the finished record. ‘Gonna knock you out of your head / Better get yourself together, darlin’ / Sooner or later you’re gonna be dead.’ People at the time thought these sentiments were directed squarely at Paul McCartney but Lennon could just as easily have been addressing himself. John Lennon knew a thing or two about karma after all. He saw it as the central guiding spiritual force in the universe.
As a young man he’d often behaved viciously and done his share of nasty, despicable things. But then LSD consumption had caused him to detach himself from his naturally violent temperament and become more peaceable and inward-looking. As his personality evolved so did his music and his quest for personal redemption from past transgressions. This he found with the arrival of Yoko Ono. But in strict karmic law the dark doings of the past have a way of impacting on the individual even after he or she has arrived at a state of some personal grace. And Lennon always had a scary knack for overstimulating the mad outer fringes of society, mainly because he was such an incorrigible weirdo himself.
Some years back, I was browsing through Mark Lewisohn’s
Beatles: Recording Sessions
doorstopper, which chronicles each and every Abbey Road session Lennon’s old group ever attended in impressively exhaustive detail, when a stunning hitherto unknown fact jumped out of the text to grab my attention. When John Lennon had recorded his vocal for ‘Come Together’ in 1969, the master tape revealed he’d prefaced the verses by repeating the words ‘Shoot me!’ again and again over the introductory riff. (George Martin had later wisely edited the phrase down to a spooky-sounding ‘Shoo’ that’s still clearly audible on the finished track.) What can you say about such a brazenly insane act except to duly note that eleven years later, someone actually took him at his word?
But enough fanciful conjecture about the karmic destinies of rock’s pioneer stock. Let’s turn to the fate of lesser folk instead. What was happening to poor, poor pitiful me during these two dreary endgame years?
Things could have been worse. I always had a roof over my head as well as one square meal a day in my intestinal tract. I was way more productive than I’d been in the two preceding years. I was writing songs now and even had two of them recorded one night at Island’s Basing Street studio, the place where I’d almost gotten into a fist fight with Bob Marley and the Wailers five years earlier. A friend of mine, Peter Perrett, played on the session and brought along two of his co-workers in the Only Ones - guitarist John Perry and drummer Mike Kellie - to further augment the line-up. Tony James from Generation X provided the bass parts. The finished tracks, ‘Chinese Shadow’ and ‘Switch-Hitter’, were never released - although someone told me they later briefly surfaced on a new-wave compilation released only in Japan
sometime in the nineties - but I remember playing them to Iggy Pop shortly after their completion and him telling me they were good works and encouraging me to continue.