1979 - Bob Dylan
After attending a
Dire Straits show during their residency at the Roxy in Los Angeles,
Bob Dylan asked Mark Knopfler and drummer Pick Withers to play on the sessions for his next album. Slow Train Coming was the album, recorded in Muscle Shoals in May of 1979, with Jerry Wexler producing. Dylan had first heard
Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler when his assistant Arthur Rosato played him the single 'Sultans of Swing'.
I didn't know any of this. . . . . .
en.wikipedia.org
By November 1978, Dylan had received some of the worst reviews of his career. In late January, he finally premiered
Renaldo and Clara, the part-fiction, part-concert film shot in the fall of 1975, during the first
Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Though the performances were well-received, the overwhelming majority of film reviews were negative, particularly those by
The Village Voice, which printed four negative reviews by four different critics. Though critical reception in the
United Kingdom was kinder, with some British critics proclaiming it a major work, his most recent album,
Street-Legal, was also received poorly by most American critics. Charges of sexism, poor production, and poor writing were thrown at the album.
[5]
In the meantime, Dylan's latest tour was getting its own share of negative reviews, many of which reflected the negative criticism which greeted the American release of
Bob Dylan at Budokan, taken from performances in February and March 1978.
Yet Dylan was in good spirits, according to his own account: "I was doing fine. I had come a long way in just the year we were on the road [in 1978]." This would change on November 17 in
San Diego, California. As
Clinton Heylin reports, "the show itself was proving to be very physically demanding, but then, he perhaps reasoned, he'd played a gig in
Montreal a month earlier with a temperature of 105."
[6]
"Towards the end of the show someone out in the crowd ... knew I wasn't feeling too well," recalled Dylan in a 1979 interview. "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."
[6]
Dylan believed he had experienced a vision of Christ in his
Tucson hotel room. "Jesus did appear to me as King of Kings, and Lord of Lords," he would later say. "There was a presence in the room that couldn't have been anybody but Jesus ... Jesus 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."
Heylin writes that "his state of mind may well have made him susceptible to such an experience. Lacking a sense of purpose in his personal life since the collapse of his marriage, he came to believe that, when Jesus revealed Himself, He quite literally rescued him from an early grave."
