When Dylan's "How Many Roads" Became
a One-Way Street
This is written in response to a recent online essay about Bob Dylan's detour into Christianity beginning in 1978, what might have caused his conversion, what it may have meant, and its contemporary and lasting effect on his music. The essay link is at the end.
I had been introduced to the whole you-should-be-a-Christian thing at an early
age in my small Southern hometown. Baptists and Catholics predominated
there, and my friends went to those churches and others. I'd go drinking
with them many Saturday nights and they'd go to church hungover the next
day. And we'd get drunk and go to Midnight Mass together on Christmas
Eve.
So I had a pretty good idea of what
being a Christian could mean and not mean. Anyway, cynical Jewish me
would never do anything so ridiculously rash, obviously stupid, or weirdly
radical as convert to Christianity. But a crush on a girl in
college changed all that. I was trying to get her to like me, to show her how daring I was, so I tried
to accept Jesus. It didn't work, but was a good college try. I didn't anticipate any further fallout.
There had been extenuating circumstances of alienation from a decent upper-ish
middle class family and the continuous pressures of intense political
times. Trump times so far seem but a
particularly nasty foretaste. Mainly
though, the future seemed an impossibly worrisome thing to have to deal
with.
Basically no one does anything so radical religiously as Bob Dylan did
or so many others have done if they actually believe they have a better
alternative. Well, that was my experience anyway. 'Accepting Jesus'
had always seemed like the worst thing I could possibly ever do, even at
the moment I tried it, except for everything else I could conceivably
imagine myself doing in that moment.
What really drew me in deep enough to the whole crazy schmear to soon become
associated with an off-the-wall organized group not unlike the one Dylan found
was indeed Hal Lindsey's book, The Late Great Planet Earth, the book that helped hook Dylan into the wider flock. The world already seemed to be about
to cave in on itself and everyone in it including me, and, as preposterous as Lindsey's general
hypothesis is, it registered only slightly moreso on the Preposterous Continuum compared to much of everything else going on at the time. It was really wild and crazy out there.
I had read the book before I found that group, which was not emphatically
apocalyptic like Lindsey. In fact, first impressions informed me that this group was anything but apocalyptic, seeming harmless and goofy but open-hearted and positive. There were lay
leaders and families with children, young marrieds, single people, mostly
white but all races, several former Protestant ministers, other Jews, and a respected
former student body president of the college I was attending. So there was a sense of normalcy about
it, and of hope. There was also an attractive ad hoc zeitgeist
and an easygoing atmosphere that presupposed the busy structured life of the
members, many of whom lived together.
I think of it now as sort of a Zen Baptist fellowship of self-exiles and
rejects from mainstream society. It was live and let live, accept
everyone as an equal, and basically learn to be glad to do what you're led to
think is the best and right way to see and do things. Luckily, there was not
any harmful deviance going on at the leadership level or otherwise besides the
casually enforced conformity. The group met six days a week in one form
or other, and it was an entirely pleasant experience if you bought into
it. Doubts were allowed but very subtly discouraged.
Overall, it
was a sweet and sober experiment in dealing with existential uncertainty under
the reliable auspices of a slow-moving gentle (Gentile?) zestfully clean
mindwashing. But it was by choice, and there were people there with whom
I'd still be friends today if they weren't still such kooks!
This was all before Watergate purged
the nation of much of its contradictory tensions. In fact, one related thing that later proved to be a key departure point from my voluntary mindwashing and that helped propel me to just up and leave the group was that its genial leader one day, out of apparently
nowhere, encouraged the group's members to support Nixon in the 1972 election
because it would be best for the economy so that group members could more easily find jobs. That was the last straw that broke the spell for me, a campus
radical-lite, and my group participation had become less and less
enthusiastic anyway. I had never been able to swallow the
group's particular Christian template and its 'unique'
interpretation of 'end times', let alone digest it.
For me, my joining the group hadn't been wholly a cry for help, though it was somewhat that. I
think it had mainly been an odd somewhat desperate exploration of a major
part of the world previously denied to me about which I had become more curious
than I'd realized. What WOULD it be like to be a Christian, my
unconscious was asking. Would there be any relief? AND there seemed to be an unconditional love
for and acceptance of one another that I'd never experienced elsewhere.
That part I still believe was true enough, despite my complex emotional and psychological reasons underpinning that belief, and it felt like I thought a real family should feel, one that
didn't tear you down behind your back and wanted to have your back when you needed
it and also bothered to try and find out when that might be. Also, any port in a storm.
So when Dylan's Slow Train album came out in later 1979, and a good six years had
passed since I had returned to being a normal secular born-Jewish
never-really-was-that-kind-of-Christian, lets-never-talk-about-this-again prodigal
black sheep son, and a couple of years after I'd later married the college girl
for whom I'd tried to accept 'the Lord' in the first place (she'd joined the
group too, but we got together after we each had left it), the album made me
giddily happy to see that I was not the only Jew to have fallen into the
sincere but seemingly silly trappings of instant Christian religiosity. DYLAN HAD!
I could hardly believe what I was hearing on Slow Train. He really had
gone Jesus freak. And the songs were immaculately conceived and felt,
Dylan actually translating for the world what it was like to feel free and
freed for the first time. It was iconic
and real. I could relate to it deeply
and understood that he was both embracing and mining gospel traditions.
He was also becoming more musically authentic Dylan.
At that point I could see
how this turn of his was to an even deeper embrace of the natural spirit of
America. It was the most radical thing he had ever done. It made going
electric at Newport seem almost inconsequential. He went to where early American slaves and
especially many minority peoples still today are forced to go to blend in the
best they can into the fabric of white America, and where many poor and less poor whites need
to go for the elusive sense of warmth and belonging the country is again
proving incapable of providing its forgotten and disadvantaged. It is where they have all gone like pilgrims
for emotional relief and for hope and to pay homage to what should be. They were trying to find and sustain their
own better angels, as was Dylan.
I could also feel the familiar fury and
brimstone of Lindsey's self-reveling co-optation of The Book of
Revelations. So I understood the urgency behind the songs but also
recognized the lens of instability that provided the true focus for the book
and underlay Dylan's conversion itself.
I only wished, or hoped, that he would soon or eventually move on to the next
phase of his career where his newfound awareness would more directly help challenge the
harmful traditions of patriarchy, sexism, and institutionalized capitalistic
violence. Oh well. He's aged beautifully anyway, and I think his
more deeply religious phase was a transition to a more honest
portrayal of his more down-to-earth values and keener insights of the human
condition, altogether an expression of his more authentic spiritual self.
Interestingly (to me), my post-group wife and I saw Dylan in concert in our adopted city
Portland, Oregon in January 1979, during his first gospel tour, though I wasn't
aware of it being that. I knew I
didn't recognize the songs except for maybe one or two (Lay Lady Lay?), and I
rationalized it was likely because he often played his songs differently than
as recorded. But it was energetic and
enjoyable - it was Dylan! - yet enigmatic, and I remembered having enjoyed The
Rolling Thunder Revue in Houston's Astrodome four years earlier a whole lot more. But hmm this Slow Train Coming was powerful and evocative of earlier revolutionary Dylan.
When I bought Slow Train later that year, it hit me what
it was we had witnessed. It explained
everything. I could hear the hokey but
sincere innocent catchphrases and generalized adopted language of new converts and the
idiosyncratic phraseology of the particular strain of church people with whom
he must have been interacting.
"Pressing on" and other such interpretive descriptions of
spiritual process were everywhere, as well as deserved judgments upon the
world ("it's a wonder we can even feed ourselves" writ religious large). The
'newborn Christian' enthusiasm and professions of unquestioned belief in the
unlikely and unprovable were all accounted for. It
was so familiar. Have faith, I told
myself. He will come back to us someday,
an even better Dylan, he's on a journey.
I'm not the biggest music afficionado, especially from the technical
point of view, but I was in a band in 1975 that moved from Louisiana to Memphis
because Memphis' Ardent Records producer Ron Capone, who won an Emmy for Isaac
Hayes' Shaft album (and engineered also at Stax and for Sam and Dave, Otis
Redding, Johnnie Taylor, Tower of Power, the list goes on) had
invited us to record our songs for free in barter for being house session band at
Ardent. We
played on demo projects for Steve Cropper (of the Stax house band, Booker T & the MGs, and
the Blues Brothers band) on demos, for instance.
So at that time, in the enlightened musical presence of masters who'd worked with legends, I inadvertently experienced an enlivening touch of a venerable musical tradition, and I think this exposure later helped me recognize, at least for my own
purposes, something of what Dylan was doing musically and personally. It was a sea change of Parting-the-Red-Sea
caliber, and it must have been incredibly tumultuous for him, all of it, and I could readily imagine the strange but promising impact he had begun having on other musicians, a kind of creative tumult of its own. Yet the courage he showed in that phase was
undeniable and indelible.
Funny (to me), I felt more 'saved' listening to Slow Train in 1979 than I had
felt the entire year I was in the alt-Christian group. But it was not because of his songs or salvation (though the songs, wow, just
terrific!).
It was because someone as amazing as Bob Dylan had gone down
that track too, had given in to the gravitational pull for a new exploration
and hoped to find something that worked better for him than his life had
provided him at his own juncture, that he was actually doing something brave
and true to his wizardry nature and was still a freewheeling chameleon willing to take on the
approbation of others because it didn't really truly harm anyone and it could give inspiration to a whole new generation of fans and musicians, and in his creative process it helped catalyze something culturally and musically important, though still not well-defined, that was not all that
different from going electric at the legendary Newport Folk Festival in 1965 (the 1979 Dylan probably upset a new generation of
musical Pharisees).
So Dylan helped me salvage my
soul, or more clearly, helped me reclaim my fuller self-esteem from the
murky miasma of lingering guilt and memory of previous shunning that was thrust
upon me innocently by family and friends. Not that
I blame them, or anyone resenting Dylan for baptizing his music in the Holy
Ghost. They couldn't help it either.
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The essay responds to this post. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/dylan-and-the-cross
