McCartney Times

The imminent release of “Trouble No More” — the latest installment of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series; this one covers his controversial 1979-81 “Christian period” — recalls the long-gone age of high-profile rock star conversions.

Dylan became a Christian, George Harrison dived into Krishna consciousness, and Cat Stevens embraced Islam, and each demonstrated, yet again, that Leftist dogma is false. The content of one’s religious beliefs does matter, and influences those who take their religions seriously.

Both Harrison and Dylan were widely criticized for their sanctimony. Reviewing Harrison’s 1973 album “Living in the Material World” in New Musical Express, Tony Tyler called the record “so damn holy I could scream.” In their book The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, Tyler and his co-author Roy Carr say of Harrison:

[I]t’s difficult to see why he travelled all the way to India to import a God who, by the sound of him (“The Lord Loves the One [That] Loves the Lord”) is as intractable and selfish as the petulant Jehovah of Victorian Sunday schools.

Reviewing Harrison’s “Extra Texture” album in Rolling Stone in 1975, Dave Marsh criticized the album’s “vague cant and astral pomposity,” and concluded:

Finally, we are faced with the fact that Harrison’s records are nothing so much as boring. They drone, and while chants and mantras may be paths to glory in other realms, in pop music they are only routes to tedium.

Harrison’s first wife Pattie may have agreed: she cited as one of the reasons for the breakup of their marriage his “obsessiveness” with his devotional practices.

Born-again Bob Dylan was similarly received. Performing in San Francisco on November 1, 1979, his first concert after his conversion, Dylan played only his new, Christian-themed songs. Reviewing the concert for Rolling Stone, Robert Palmer opined that “the unrelenting sermonizing grew tedious.” Reviewing Dylan’s 1980 album “Saved” for Rolling Stone, Kurt Loder called him “a perfect caricature of a Bible-thumping convert.”

The following year, reviewing Dylan’s subsequent album, “Shot of Love,” also for Rolling Stone, Paul Nelson quoted a lyric from one of the songs, “Trouble”:

“Nightclubs of the brokenhearted / Stadiums of the damned,” Dylan intones, and you wonder if these places could possibly be any worse than being trapped in a room with this record.

After Cat Stevens converted to Islam and started calling himself Yusuf Islam, there were no scathing reviews from Rolling Stone, because there was no music. Stevens/Islam quit the music business, as Islam forbids music except for nasheeds, songs praising Allah that are usually performed a cappella.

Source: Three Converts, Three Religions: George Harrison, Bob Dylan, and Cat Stevens | Homeland Security