Lucy Sante. Six Sermons for Bob Dylan. Tenement, 2024. 74 pp.
Reviewed by Michael Gilmour, Providence University College, Canada
Lucy Sante’s Six Sermons for Bob Dylan is the script she prepared for the Jennifer LeBeau film Trouble No More – A Musical Film (2017), and consequently a review of her book ought to have some parallel discussion of that setting. The eight CD, one DVD boxset Bob Dylan, Trouble No More, the Bootleg Series Vol. 13 / 1979–1981, Deluxe Edition (2017) is a revelation (fitting term), adding considerably to the three-album gospel trilogy – Slow Train Coming, 1979; Saved, 1980; Shot of Love, 1981 – that previously constituted the official record of this divisive period. Some love(d) it, some loath(ed) it. Joel Selvin’s oft-quoted ‘79 review “Bob Dylan’s God-Awful Gospel,” written after hearing the singer in concert beat “the drum for God as surely and thoroughly as Billy Graham,” encapsulates the latter camp’s assessment. For many on both sides, Dylan’s post-Street-Legal turn to fundamentalist Christianity remains a lyrical and attitudinal shift that continues to baffle. This bootleg collection takes us well beyond that earlier trinity of albums, providing listeners with more material to sort through, all of it previously unreleased, as they attempt to make sense of Dylan’s changed way of thinking.
Without question, the pearl in this oyster of a release is Trouble No More–A Musical Film, produced and directed by LeBeau. The concert and rehearsal footage that constitutes the bulk of the hour-long film includes many familiar songs from the time but also lesser-known ones like “Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody,” and a touching rehearsal cover of Dick Holler’s “Abraham, Martin and John” (which Dylan sings with Clydie King). What concerns us here is the series of scenes interspersed among the twelve songs involving “The Preacher,” played by actor Michael Shannon. With the camera focused on him, Shannon delivers brief, two-or-so-minute homilies, each a tirade on a moral issue directed at an implied congregation. The titular six sermons of Sante’s recent book, Six Sermons for Bob Dylan, are the full text scripts used for Shannon’s clergyman, somewhat abbreviated for the film.
Those interested in this bootleg collection, and sympathetic to or curious about Dylan’s work during his gospel years more generally, are likely to appreciate Sante’s short book and the peek-behind-the-curtain it offers. It opens with a brief account of how the assignment came about, and her process for researching and writing it. This was not the first time the Dylan camp reached out to her. Earlier assignments included “speeches, press kits, prefaces, [and] a Buick commercial” (13). A request for sermon scripts was something altogether different from previous requests coming through Jeff Rosen’s emails. But what kind of sermon would suit such a project? It required research to ensure the texts produced matched the spirit (another fitting term) of the film’s musical setting. Sante then explains how the hunt for appropriate source material took her back to early twentieth-century recordings of preachers like Reverend J. M. Gates, Reverend D. C. Rice, Reverend A. W. Nix: “These were Black, mostly Southern preachers of the 1920s and ‘30s, whose recorded sermons, often unaccompanied, handily outsold the blues issued on the same labels” (13). The Sante-LeBeau-Shannon “Preacher” and his messages are thus an amalgam that captures a homiletical style with deep American roots, one “grounded in the rhythms and imagery of the King James Bible” (14). A series of black and white photographs of churches, clergy, wall-mounted Bible verses, baptisms, and other sacred gatherings from those bygone days help evoke this slice of interwar American religion.
With respect to content, Sante explains that “Bob had assigned me six topics: Hypocrisy, Virtue, Gluttony, Temperance, Justice, [and] Prudence” (16), a list perhaps meant to be loosely suggestive of the traditional seven deadly sins. In the film, LeBeau divides these six topics into eight separate episodes. The concert recordings included come from different shows, so “The Preacher” segments provide a degree of continuity to the film. Shannon delivers all the exhortations in the same church, standing most often near his pulpit, Bible in hand, with stain glass windows and organ pipes in the background. His suits and ties change topic-to-topic, so presumably we should imagine these to be services across a series of Sundays delivered to the same congregation.
Quite apart from Shannon’s preacher, the gospel-era concerts themselves already had a Sunday-go-to-meetin’ vibe about them, which is evident in the footage included in the film. This goes some way toward explaining why Sante found appropriate inspiration in the southern American gospel traditions she describes in the book’s introduction. Shared elements include the presence of Black gospel singers with tambourines in hand, use of an organ in the musical arrangements (played admirably by Spooner Oldham), and structurally the call and response pattern so characteristic of southern preaching, with audiences responding to everything Dylan said or sang just as congregations did and do with an animated pastor. “If you don’t know Jesus,” the singer advised his San Diego audience on November 27, 1979, “you better check into it. He’s real,” to which, and without missing a beat, a woman in the audience shouted back, “He’s real!” (transcript in Clinton Heylin’s Trouble in Mind: Bob Dylan’s Gospel Years, What Really Happened, 302). Much of the stage-to-seats back and forth of these shows resembles the pulpit-to-pews exchanges in many churches where shouts of “Amen” and “Hallelujah” and the like are a hallmark of the community’s shared worship experience. And these church-styled performances of 1979–1981 included sermons. The Dylan of earlier and later decades is not known for stage banter, so it is hard to imagine him evangelizing from the stage during the gospel years, often antagonizing concertgoers in the process. “People were walking out of the shows,” writes Amanda Petrusich in her essay “Fire in My Bones,” part of the Bootleg Vol. 13 liner notes. “In Tempe, Arizona, in the fall of 1979, Dylan was seething at the crowd’s reaction, admonishing his hecklers for their Godlessness. It is hard to say whether any of these sanctified jeremiads – and they were frequent – actually furthered his message” (10). In one harangue early in the tour, the singer shouts down calls for “Rock ‘n’ roll!” from an audience frustrated that he wouldn’t perform the old songs: “Pretty rude bunch tonight! You all know how to be real rude. You [all] know about the spirit of Antichrist! … If you wanna rock ‘n’ roll … You can go see KISS, and you [can] rock ‘n’ roll all your way down to the pit!” (Heylin, Trouble in Mind, 105).
Since Dylan preached this way during the shows, it makes sense to include an equivalent in a film meant to replicate them. Sante’s Shannon-delivered homilies thus stand in for those “sanctified jeremiads.” Viewed one way, there’s a bit of revisionist history at play here, and it’s possible to see this official release engaging in reputational mending. Dylan’s own sermons at the time were earnest but arguably meandering, and often confrontational and odd, if not incoherent. Among examples that could be cited are Dylan’s end-times rants that reflect some awareness of writings by doomsday evangelist Hal Lindsey, best-known for books like The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth (1972). “In a short time,” according to Dylan, “I don’t know, maybe in three years, maybe five years, could be ten years – there’s gonna be a war … called the war of Armageddon. It’s gonna happen in the Middle East. Russia will come down and attack first. You watch for that sign.” And again: “Russia is gonna come down and attack the Middle East. It says this in the Bible” (taken from Heylin, Trouble in Mind, 101, 103). Such abstruse dialogue (the Bible doesn’t say anything about Russia attacking the Middle East) would certainly have puzzled more than informed. The film does not include any of those rambling talks, so the insertion of the eloquent Shannon-Sante sermons between songs not only serves to reproduce the rhythm of the concerts but also serves to rehabilitate that aspect of the shows. Sante is a great writer and Shannon a brilliant actor, and quite apart from the religious content, however off-putting that may be to some, we encounter something elegant when reading, watching, and listening to the Sante-LeBeau-Shannon hexalogy of performances. Consider, to illustrate, this simple but elegantly crafted conclusion to the “Prudence” sermon, based on Proverbs 13:16 in the Authorized Version (“Every prudent man dealeth from knowledge, but a fool layeth open his folly” [55]):
… if we are living right, we prepare for our passage into the next world. We read the
manual, which is scripture. We take out insurance, which is good work. We trim down
our luggage, by cutting out sin and vice. We speak to the manager, who is almighty God. And even if we are fools in every other part of our lives, but we prepare for heaven, then we are the wisest of all. (56)
No arcane esoterica, no strange end-time speculations. The “Preacher’s” messages are uncomplicated and easily translated into a moral takeaway.
The book itself is rather spartan in design – plain cover, black and white pictures, lots of unadorned, blank pages, generous spacing – and whether intended or not, this otherwise irrelevant detail subtly reinforces the atmosphere of both the text and the Shannon sermons. The preacher that emerges on the page and screen is not flashy either. No trappings of high church religion here. The man is well groomed, wearing dark-toned suits (if I had to guess, off the rack as opposed to tailored), sometimes lightly accessorized with a vest, matching pocket handkerchief, and a cross worn overtop the tie. He’s humorless and plain spoken, perhaps shepherding a small, rural, evangelical church. The messages delivered are not theologically sophisticated nor do they allow for ambiguity on moral matters. In his lesson on “Temperance,” the Preacher comes out swinging in his opening sentence: “I feel that I should not have to tell you about the evils of strong drink, brothers and sisters” (43; with proof text Proverbs 20:1: “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging, and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise”). On the subject of “Gluttony,” he is equally blunt in his assessment of fast food: “When you replace the fruits of nature’s bounty with that sweet, fat, salty, dripping mess made in a factory somewhere … you are spitting in the temple [of God]! You are drawing devil’s faces on its walls! You are cursing God just as you are cursing yourself” (39; with proof text 1 Corinthians 3:16–17). He sees the world in black and white. I imagine him closing his sermons with altar calls, not invitations to debate interpretations of his chosen proof-texts. He likely graduated from a fundamentalist Bible college, perhaps along the lines of a Bob Jones or Liberty University, rather than the religious studies department of an Ivy league school. He prefers the Authorized Version to any other translation and would be more comfortable at a tent revival meeting than a scholarly biblical studies conference. The sermons are folksy, practical, and accessible, and at moments charming, even if harsh and judgmental.
For my part, I enjoy the film and Shannon’s performances. They are beautifully crafted by LeBeau. But it’s not the content of the messages that appeals, with their critical tone, lack of nuance, condescension, and oversimplified worldview. And I don’t mean that as a criticism of Sante. She set out to capture in these homiletical snapshots a glimpse of a uniquely American form of religious rhetoric, and she achieved it admirably. It is the artistry of the whole project I admire: Sante’s research and writing; LeBeau’s directing; Shannon’s acting; and of course, Dylan’s music. As Greil Marcus puts it in his Afterword (59–66), Sante’s sermons “sing on the page” (64), and when experienced as part of this larger whole, they offer fans an education in this expression of American religiosity and its attendant culture. For those interested in this period of Dylan’s career, it is well worth reading, and for full appreciation ought to be paired with LeBeau’s film.
