President Jimmy Carter preferred the music of a drug-loving, bed-hopping Bob Dylan, for once the rock icon gave up that life and became a Christian, Carter turned him off.
That’s the claim in “What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President,” a new book on the former president out this week from Bloomsbury. While the book covers Carter’s famous “malaise speech” — the book’s title is taken from a July 4, 1978, New York Post headline after the speech — author Kevin Mattson discusses Carter’s changing love for singer Bob Dylan.
Mattson writes that the president was a big fan of Dylan as the 1960s activist folk singer, but when he converted to Christianity after his divorce, he “pushed rock ‘n’ roll from celebrating love and drugs to providing apocalyptic warnings about decadence.”
Carter particularly didn’t like Dylan’s lyrics of “foreign oil controlling American soil” and “sheiks running around like kings.”
“Jimmy Carter’s favorite rock musician now refused to sing the songs the president most enjoyed … [those] written before Dylan found Jesus,” Mattson writes.
We guess Carter didn’t want the “times a-changin’. ”
