“Slow Train Coming” by Bob Dylan

A watershed moment for a rock legend.

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Welcome to a new edition of the Best Music of All Time newsletter!

Today’s music pick marks the 45th anniversary of a watershed moment in a legendary rock and roll career.

Genre: Rock, Folk, Singer/Songwriter

Label: Columbia

Release Date: August 20, 1979

Vibe: 🙏

Did faith save Bob Dylan’s career?

It’s a question I wrestled with preparing for this write-up. It’s not like Dylan’s legacy needed wholesale salvaging—even in 1979, his run from 1965 to 1969 was largely considered unassailable quality-wise. But, following the release of 1975’s Blood on the Tracks, his studio output and live performances became increasingly erratic. Those parallel slides converged with Renaldo and Clara, the 1978 feature film that used Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour as the backdrop. It was an utter disaster commercially and critically, with The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael summarizing: “It's not just people previously unexposed to Dylan who are likely to be repelled by his arrogant passivity; even those who idolized him in the sixties may gag a little.” Couple that negative PR with the dissolution of his marriage to Sara Lowndes in 1977, and if you’re Dylan, you have a lot of demons to exorcise.

According to Clinton Heylin’s fascinating book, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, the singer/songwriter tried to compensate by gigging. It wasn’t going well due to the physical nature of the shows Dylan insisted on staging. The catalyst for Dylan’s spiritual (and professional) salvation came in November 1978 during a concert in San Diego.

The rock legend explained it this way:

“Towards the end of the show someone out in the crowd ... knew I wasn't feeling too well," Dylan explained. "I think they could see that. And they threw a silver cross on the stage. Now usually I don't pick things up in front of the stage. Once in a while I do. Sometimes I don't. But I looked down at that cross. I said, 'I gotta pick that up.' So I picked up the cross and I put it in my pocket ... And I brought it backstage and I brought it with me to the next town, which was out in Arizona” I was feeling even worse than I'd felt when I was in San Diego. I said, 'Well, I need something tonight.' I didn't know what it was. I was used to all kinds of things. I said, 'I need something tonight that I didn't have before.' And I looked in my pocket and I had this cross.”

Later on, he said he experienced a powerful vision of Christ in his Tuscon hotel room. "There was a presence in the room that couldn't have been anybody but Jesus,” he offered. “[He] put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up."

The book includes further anecdotes of Dylan attending Bible school, replacing lyrics with religious readings during subsequent live performances, and trying to convert Slow Train Coming’s producer, the great Jerry Wexler, during the album sessions. “I said, 'Bob, you're dealing with a sixty-two-year-old confirmed Jewish atheist. I'm hopeless,” Wexler supposedly told him. “Let's just make an album.'"

Wexler was an interesting choice for this project. His long and impressive credits list skews in the vintage soul direction and includes names like Wilson Pickett, Dusty Springfield, and Aretha Franklin. In the process, he helped define the Muscle Shoals Sound of the South. You can hear some of that flavor throughout, especially on opener, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” a track that cracked the Top 30 on the US singles chart. But, over top of that steely groove is what really sets this album apart from a lot of Dyaln releases: focus. It doesn’t meander. It doesn’t purposely obfuscate. For better and worse, its religious dogma is so laser-focused and uncompromising that I remember my eyebrows arching up a few times when I first heard it.

Take “Precious Angel” as an example. Partway through the first verse, he’d already built an evangelical walled garden (”Now there's spiritual warfare/And flesh and blood breaking down/You either got faith or you got unbelief/And there is no neutral ground”). By the third verse, his newfound devotion goes entirely toxic, calling out Judaism in the process (”We are covered in blood, girl/You know both our forefathers were slaves/Let us hope they've found mercy/In their bone-filled graves”). There’s plenty more where that came from in the lyrics for “When You Gonna Wake Up” and “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking,” where Dylan makes it clear he’s not going to suffer fools (read: unbelievers) kindly.

And yet, despite the mean-spiritedness that underpins much of the writing, the instrumentals have genuine beauty. The interplay between Barry Beckett’s electric keyboard and Mark Knopfler’s guitar on “Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)” is spectacularly crisp and funky. The rhythm section of bassist Tim Drummond and Konpfler’s Dire Straits bandmate, drummer Pick Withers, on the title track is effortlessly smooth and deceptively muscular, giving the arrangement real heft. Then there’s the gorgeous piano work on closer “When He Returns,” laying a delicate sonic foundation for a top-tier Dylan vocal performance, arguably among his best of the decade.

Regardless of how you feel about the fire-and-brimstone aspects of the rhetoric, there’s plenty to admire when peeling back the layers of Slow Train Coming. It may not be his best LP nor most accessible, but it’s among his most fiery and performed with steadfast conviction. This quality made casual listeners fans of socially conscious Dylan folk in the first place. The contributions he received from the all-star supporting cast behind the microphone and mixing board still sound outstanding. I couldn’t find an anecdote that confirmed this suspicion, but I have a hunch it set a new standard for production value in Dylan’s catalog from that point on, too.

On that note, I return to the original question: Did faith save this music legend’s career? If not the faith itself, then maybe the creative push it gave him?

You’d think that with this new Christian fulcrum giving him stability and support, writing the tracks on this Slow Train Coming would’ve been a much easier process for Dylan, but that wasn’t the case. According to Heylin, Dylan remarked: "The songs that I wrote for the Slow Train album [frightened me] ... I didn't plan to write them ... I didn't like writing them. I didn't want to write them."

Maybe he had to. Maybe that’s what ultimately made the difference here.

👉 Don’t forget to click the album image to stream the album on your favorite platform 👈