“You can go and see Kiss, and you can rock ‘n’ roll all the way down to the pit!” That was Bob Dylan’s declaration in 1979 when he was in the tightest grip of his spiritual phase. The artist had found God, or was claiming God found him and turned him against Gene Simmons.
“Jesus did appear to me as King of Kings, and Lord of Lords,” Dylan said of this shift in himself, “There was a presence in the room that couldn’t have been anybody but Jesus”.
This was the start of his late 1970s spiritual phase. For an artist who has been through many eras and iterations, a new chapter came as a surprise to no one. But for Dylan to become so staunchly Christian, it was a peculiar new moment in his life, and then for him to start turning on rock acts? That seemed downright odd.
As his own albums began pivoting towards Christian or worship music, his thoughts on the whole industry became stricter and stricter. “If you want rock ‘n’ roll, you go down and rock ‘n’ roll,” he said, basically declaring the form sinful and dooming its fans to hell with Kiss standing in as the ultimate devils in disguise.
But the connection between Dylan and Simmons is way more complex than that. In the years before this godly phase, the folk star had been openly inspired by Kiss. In the mid-1970s, Dylan’s touring violinist Scarlet Rivera was dating Simmons, so he caught one of the band’s shows with her. After that, he was so transfixed by the band’s makeup that it seemed to directly inspire his own white face paint during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour.
Simmons, too, had a deep respect and admiration for Dylan, enduring even when the musician basically called him Lucifer. “Next to Zappa, one of the other pivotal people for me is Bob Dylan,” the rocker said in 2010. He bestowed high praise on him, stating, “There’s certainly no greater lyricist in pop culture. But Dylan is classic poetry to me”.
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