Bob Dylan's Phenomenal Gospel

Just after his conversion to Christianity in 1979, Bob Dylan took his new songs of faith recorded on "Slow Train Coming" straight to San Francisco's Warfield Theater for a two-week engagement that didn't exactly win the local media over. After the opening night, Philip Elwood's article in the San Francisco Examiner--"Bob Dylan: His Born-Again Show's a Real Drag"--set the stage. "I thought that night was a pretty incomprehensible performance and senseless.Not the band, just the whole theme of the material," Elwood recalled.

Because of all of the hubbub surrounding Dylan's conversion, the other Bay Area newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, sent Susan Sward to cover the second concert as a news story. As Dylan fans stood in line outside the old vaudeville theater, Sward gauged the atmosphere before the show. What she discovered was a contingent of faithful fans who were willing to overlook Dylan's conversion just for the sheer pleasure of seeing him perform again. But this was before the show.

What Sward discovered during and after the show was a different matter. Several fans who ducked out before the end expressed their disappointment that Dylan hadn't played any of his classic songs from the sixties. Despite shouted requests from the audience, Dylan only played his new gospel songs, and that did not sit well with the crowd that night. One visitor from England complained that he had stood in line five hours to buy tickets only to come away with the feeling that he had been to church instead of a concert.

In the Chronicle's review of the second night--"Bob Dylan's God-Awful Gospel"--Joel Selvin wrote that although some catcalls and boos echoed throughout the theater, the audience mostly sat in "stunned silence." Sward claimed Dylan's songs were met with loud applause; Selvin described it as polite applause. Selvin concluded that Dylan's conversion to the "opium of the masses," as Karl Marx described religion, reflected the emptiness of the times and had stopped Dylan from asking the hard questions he had historically asked.

Continued on page 2: »