section_path: Career/1970–1979: Return to touring and Christian music
section_name: 1970–1979: Return to touring and Christian music
paragraph_text: 1970–1979: Return to touring and Christian music
  
  In the early 1970s, critics charged that Dylan's output was varied and unpredictable. Greil Marcus asked "What is this shit?" upon first hearing Self Portrait, released in June 1970. It was a double LP including few original songs and was poorly received. In October 1970, Dylan released New Morning, considered a return to form. The title track was from Dylan's ill-fated collaboration with MacLeish, and " Day of the Locusts " was his account of receiving an honorary degree from Princeton University on June 9, 1970. In November 1968, Dylan co-wrote " I'd Have You Anytime " with George Harrison; Harrison recorded that song and Dylan's " If Not for You " for his album All Things Must Pass. Olivia Newton-John covered "If Not For You" on her debut album and " The Man in Me " was prominently featured in the film The Big Lebowski (1998).
  
  Tarantula, a freeform book of prose-poetry, had been written by Dylan during a creative burst in 1964 – 65. Dylan shelved his book for several years, apparently uncertain of its status, until he suddenly informed Macmillan at the end of 1970 that the time had come to publish it. The book attracted negative reviews but later critics have suggested its affinities with Finnegans Wake and A Season in Hell.
  
  Between March 16 and 19, 1971, Dylan recorded with Leon Russell at Blue Rock, a small studio in Greenwich Village. These sessions resulted in " Watching the River Flow " and a new recording of " When I Paint My Masterpiece ". On November 4, 1971, Dylan recorded " George Jackson ", which he released a week later. For many, the single was a surprising return to protest material, mourning the killing of Black Panther George Jackson in San Quentin State Prison. Dylan's surprise appearance at Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh on August 1, 1971, attracted media coverage as his live appearances had become rare.
  
  In 1972, Dylan joined Sam Peckinpah 's film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, providing the soundtrack and playing "Alias", a member of Billy's gang. Despite the film's failure at the box office, " Knockin' on Heaven's Door " became one of Dylan's most covered songs. That same year, Dylan protested the move to deport John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who had been convicted for marijuana possession, by sending a letter to the US Immigration Service which read in part: "Hurray for John & Yoko. Let them stay and live here and breathe. The country's got plenty of room and space. Let John and Yoko stay!"
  
  Dylan began 1973 by signing with a new label, David Geffen 's Asylum Records, when his contract with Columbia Records expired. His next album, Planet Waves, was recorded in the fall of 1973, using the Band as his backing group as they rehearsed for a major tour. The album included two versions of "Forever Young", which became one of his most popular songs. As one critic described it, the song projected "something hymnal and heartfelt that spoke of the father in Dylan", and Dylan said "I wrote it thinking about one of my boys and not wanting to be too sentimental". Columbia Records simultaneously released Dylan, a collection of studio outtakes, widely interpreted as a churlish response to Dylan's signing with a rival record label.
  
  In January 1974, Dylan, backed by the Band, embarked on a North American tour of 40 concerts—his first tour for seven years. A live double album, Before the Flood, was released on Asylum Records. Soon, according to Clive Davis, Columbia Records sent word they "will spare nothing to bring Dylan back into the fold". Dylan had second thoughts about Asylum, unhappy that Geffen had sold only 600,000 copies of Planet Waves despite millions of unfulfilled ticket requests for the 1974 tour; he returned to Columbia Records, which reissued his two Asylum albums.
  
  After the tour, Dylan and his wife became estranged. He filled three small notebooks with songs about relationships and ruptures, and recorded the album Blood on the Tracks in September 1974. Dylan delayed the album's release and re-recorded half the songs at Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis with production assistance from his brother, David Zimmerman. Released in early 1975, Blood on the Tracks received mixed reviews. In NME, Nick Kent described the "accompaniments" as "often so trashy they sound like mere practice takes". In Rolling Stone, Jon Landau wrote that "the record has been made with typical shoddiness". Over the years critics came to see it as one of Dylan's masterpieces. In Salon, journalist Bill Wyman wrote:
  
  Blood on the Tracks is his only flawless album and his best produced; the songs, each of them, are constructed in disciplined fashion. It is his kindest album and most dismayed, and seems in hindsight to have achieved a sublime balance between the logorrhea-plagued excesses of his mid-1960s output and the self-consciously simple compositions of his post-accident years.
  
  In the middle of 1975, Dylan championed boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, imprisoned for triple murder, with his ballad " Hurricane " making the case for Carter's innocence. Despite its length—over eight minutes—the song was released as a single, peaking at 33 on the US Billboard chart, and performed at every 1975 date of Dylan's next tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue. Running through late 1975 and again through early 1976, the tour featured about one hundred performers and supporters from the Greenwich Village folk scene, among them Ramblin' Jack Elliott, T-Bone Burnett, Joni Mitchell, David Mansfield, Roger McGuinn, Mick Ronson, Ronee Blakely, Joan Baez and Scarlet Rivera, whom Dylan discovered walking down the street, her violin case on her back. The tour encompassed the January 1976 release of the album Desire. Many of Desire' s songs featuring a travelogue -like narrative style, influenced by Dylan's new collaborator, playwright Jacques Levy. The 1976 half of the tour was documented by a TV concert special, Hard Rain, and the LP Hard Rain.
  
  The 1975 tour with the Revue provided the backdrop to Dylan's film Renaldo and Clara, a sprawling narrative mixed with concert footage and reminiscences. Actor and playwright Sam Shepard accompanied the Revue and was to serve as screenwriter, but much of the film was improvised. Released in 1978, it received negative, sometimes scathing, reviews. Later in the year, a two-hour edit, dominated by the concert performances, was more widely released. In November 1976, Dylan appeared at the Band's farewell concert with Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Martin Scorsese 's 1978 film of the concert, The Last Waltz, included most of Dylan's set.
  
  In 1978, Dylan embarked on a year-long world tour, performing 114 shows in Japan, the Far East, Europe and North America, to a total audience of two million. Dylan assembled an eight-piece band and three backing singers. Concerts in Tokyo in February and March were released as the live double album Bob Dylan at Budokan. Reviews were mixed. Robert Christgau awarded the album a C+ rating, while Janet Maslin defended it: "These latest live versions of his old songs have the effect of liberating Bob Dylan from the originals". When Dylan brought the tour to the US in September 1978, the press described the look and sound as a "Las Vegas Tour". The 1978 tour grossed more than $20 million, and Dylan told the Los Angeles Times that he had debts because "I had a couple of bad years. I put a lot of money into the movie, built a big house... and it costs a lot to get divorced in California." In April and May 1978, Dylan took the same band and vocalists into Rundown Studios in Santa Monica, California, to record an album of new material, Street-Legal. It was described by Michael Gray as "after Blood On The Tracks, arguably Dylan's best record of the 1970s: a crucial album documenting a crucial period in Dylan's own life". However, it had poor sound and mixing (attributed to Dylan's studio practices), muddying the instrumental detail until a remastered CD release in 1999 restored some of the songs' strengths.
  
  In the late 1970s, Dylan converted to Evangelical Christianity, undertaking a three-month discipleship course run by the Association of Vineyard Churches. He released three albums of contemporary gospel music. Slow Train Coming (1979) featured Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler and was produced by veteran R&B producer Jerry Wexler. Wexler said that Dylan had tried to evangelize him during the recording. He replied: "Bob, you're dealing with a 62-year-old Jewish atheist. Let's just make an album." Dylan won the Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for the song " Gotta Serve Somebody ". When touring in late 1979 and early 1980, Dylan would not play his older, secular works, and he delivered declarations of his faith from the stage, such as:
  
  Years ago they... said I was a prophet. I used to say, "No I'm not a prophet", they say "Yes you are, you're a prophet." I said, "No it's not me." They used to say "You sure are a prophet." They used to convince me I was a prophet. Now I come out and say Jesus Christ is the answer. They say, "Bob Dylan's no prophet." They just can't handle it.
  
  Dylan's Christianity was unpopular with some fans and musicians. John Lennon, shortly before being murdered, recorded "Serve Yourself" in response to "Gotta Serve Somebody". In 1981, Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times that "neither age (he's now 40) nor his much-publicized conversion to born-again Christianity has altered his essentially iconoclastic temperament".
  
  In the early 1970s, critics charged that Dylan's output was varied and unpredictable. Greil Marcus asked "What is this shit?" upon first hearing Self Portrait, released in June 1970. It was a double LP including few original songs and was poorly received. In October 1970, Dylan released New Morning, considered a return to form. The title track was from Dylan's ill-fated collaboration with MacLeish, and " Day of the Locusts " was his account of receiving an honorary degree from Princeton University on June 9, 1970. In November 1968, Dylan co-wrote " I'd Have You Anytime " with George Harrison; Harrison recorded that song and Dylan's " If Not for You " for his album All Things Must Pass. Olivia Newton-John covered "If Not For You" on her debut album and " The Man in Me " was prominently featured in the film The Big Lebowski (1998).
  
  Tarantula, a freeform book of prose-poetry, had been written by Dylan during a creative burst in 1964 – 65. Dylan shelved his book for several years, apparently uncertain of its status, until he suddenly informed Macmillan at the end of 1970 that the time had come to publish it. The book attracted negative reviews but later critics have suggested its affinities with Finnegans Wake and A Season in Hell.
  
  Between March 16 and 19, 1971, Dylan recorded with Leon Russell at Blue Rock, a small studio in Greenwich Village. These sessions resulted in " Watching the River Flow " and a new recording of " When I Paint My Masterpiece ". On November 4, 1971, Dylan recorded " George Jackson ", which he released a week later. For many, the single was a surprising return to protest material, mourning the killing of Black Panther George Jackson in San Quentin State Prison. Dylan's surprise appearance at Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh on August 1, 1971, attracted media coverage as his live appearances had become rare.
  
  In 1972, Dylan joined Sam Peckinpah 's film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, providing the soundtrack and playing "Alias", a member of Billy's gang. Despite the film's failure at the box office, " Knockin' on Heaven's Door " became one of Dylan's most covered songs. That same year, Dylan protested the move to deport John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who had been convicted for marijuana possession, by sending a letter to the US Immigration Service which read in part: "Hurray for John & Yoko. Let them stay and live here and breathe. The country's got plenty of room and space. Let John and Yoko stay!"
  
  Dylan began 1973 by signing with a new label, David Geffen 's Asylum Records, when his contract with Columbia Records expired. His next album, Planet Waves, was recorded in the fall of 1973, using the Band as his backing group as they rehearsed for a major tour. The album included two versions of "Forever Young", which became one of his most popular songs. As one critic described it, the song projected "something hymnal and heartfelt that spoke of the father in Dylan", and Dylan said "I wrote it thinking about one of my boys and not wanting to be too sentimental". Columbia Records simultaneously released Dylan, a collection of studio outtakes, widely interpreted as a churlish response to Dylan's signing with a rival record label.
  
  In January 1974, Dylan, backed by the Band, embarked on a North American tour of 40 concerts—his first tour for seven years. A live double album, Before the Flood, was released on Asylum Records. Soon, according to Clive Davis, Columbia Records sent word they "will spare nothing to bring Dylan back into the fold". Dylan had second thoughts about Asylum, unhappy that Geffen had sold only 600,000 copies of Planet Waves despite millions of unfulfilled ticket requests for the 1974 tour; he returned to Columbia Records, which reissued his two Asylum albums.
  
  After the tour, Dylan and his wife became estranged. He filled three small notebooks with songs about relationships and ruptures, and recorded the album Blood on the Tracks in September 1974. Dylan delayed the album's release and re-recorded half the songs at Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis with production assistance from his brother, David Zimmerman. Released in early 1975, Blood on the Tracks received mixed reviews. In NME, Nick Kent described the "accompaniments" as "often so trashy they sound like mere practice takes". In Rolling Stone, Jon Landau wrote that "the record has been made with typical shoddiness". Over the years critics came to see it as one of Dylan's masterpieces. In Salon, journalist Bill Wyman wrote:
  
  Blood on the Tracks is his only flawless album and his best produced; the songs, each of them, are constructed in disciplined fashion. It is his kindest album and most dismayed, and seems in hindsight to have achieved a sublime balance between the logorrhea-plagued excesses of his mid-1960s output and the self-consciously simple compositions of his post-accident years.
  
  In the middle of 1975, Dylan championed boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, imprisoned for triple murder, with his ballad " Hurricane " making the case for Carter's innocence. Despite its length—over eight minutes—the song was released as a single, peaking at 33 on the US Billboard chart, and performed at every 1975 date of Dylan's next tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue. Running through late 1975 and again through early 1976, the tour featured about one hundred performers and supporters from the Greenwich Village folk scene, among them Ramblin' Jack Elliott, T-Bone Burnett, Joni Mitchell, David Mansfield, Roger McGuinn, Mick Ronson, Ronee Blakely, Joan Baez and Scarlet Rivera, whom Dylan discovered walking down the street, her violin case on her back. The tour encompassed the January 1976 release of the album Desire. Many of Desire' s songs featuring a travelogue -like narrative style, influenced by Dylan's new collaborator, playwright Jacques Levy. The 1976 half of the tour was documented by a TV concert special, Hard Rain, and the LP Hard Rain.
  
  The 1975 tour with the Revue provided the backdrop to Dylan's film Renaldo and Clara, a sprawling narrative mixed with concert footage and reminiscences. Actor and playwright Sam Shepard accompanied the Revue and was to serve as screenwriter, but much of the film was improvised. Released in 1978, it received negative, sometimes scathing, reviews. Later in the year, a two-hour edit, dominated by the concert performances, was more widely released. In November 1976, Dylan appeared at the Band's farewell concert with Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Martin Scorsese 's 1978 film of the concert, The Last Waltz, included most of Dylan's set.
  
  In 1978, Dylan embarked on a year-long world tour, performing 114 shows in Japan, the Far East, Europe and North America, to a total audience of two million. Dylan assembled an eight-piece band and three backing singers. Concerts in Tokyo in February and March were released as the live double album Bob Dylan at Budokan. Reviews were mixed. Robert Christgau awarded the album a C+ rating, while Janet Maslin defended it: "These latest live versions of his old songs have the effect of liberating Bob Dylan from the originals". When Dylan brought the tour to the US in September 1978, the press described the look and sound as a "Las Vegas Tour". The 1978 tour grossed more than $20 million, and Dylan told the Los Angeles Times that he had debts because "I had a couple of bad years. I put a lot of money into the movie, built a big house... and it costs a lot to get divorced in California." In April and May 1978, Dylan took the same band and vocalists into Rundown Studios in Santa Monica, California, to record an album of new material, Street-Legal. It was described by Michael Gray as "after Blood On The Tracks, arguably Dylan's best record of the 1970s: a crucial album documenting a crucial period in Dylan's own life". However, it had poor sound and mixing (attributed to Dylan's studio practices), muddying the instrumental detail until a remastered CD release in 1999 restored some of the songs' strengths.
  
  In the late 1970s, Dylan converted to Evangelical Christianity, undertaking a three-month discipleship course run by the Association of Vineyard Churches. He released three albums of contemporary gospel music. Slow Train Coming (1979) featured Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler and was produced by veteran R&B producer Jerry Wexler. Wexler said that Dylan had tried to evangelize him during the recording. He replied: "Bob, you're dealing with a 62-year-old Jewish atheist. Let's just make an album." Dylan won the Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for the song " Gotta Serve Somebody ". When touring in late 1979 and early 1980, Dylan would not play his older, secular works, and he delivered declarations of his faith from the stage, such as:
  
  Years ago they... said I was a prophet. I used to say, "No I'm not a prophet", they say "Yes you are, you're a prophet." I said, "No it's not me." They used to say "You sure are a prophet." They used to convince me I was a prophet. Now I come out and say Jesus Christ is the answer. They say, "Bob Dylan's no prophet." They just can't handle it.
  
  Dylan's Christianity was unpopular with some fans and musicians. John Lennon, shortly before being murdered, recorded "Serve Yourself" in response to "Gotta Serve Somebody". In 1981, Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times that "neither age (he's now 40) nor his much-publicized conversion to born-again Christianity has altered his essentially iconoclastic temperament".