c. 2005 Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly
(UNDATED) How many personas does Bob Dylan have?
How many pages are there in a book? Or days in a year? Or, perhaps most important, how many songs in a story?
“A folk song,” Dylan writes in his recent book, “Chronicles: Volume One” (Simon & Schuster), “has over a thousand faces, and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff.”
“Chronicles” was cited as one of The New York Times’ 10 most notable books of the past year. It is, perhaps, a fitting tribute to a writer and performer who over the course of his nearly 45-year career has become one of the world’s most important cultural figures. By the sheer magnitude of his talent and duration, Dylan is now an entertainment icon and elder statesman whose Delphic riddling rhymes and gnomic puns are no longer part of the countercultural margins but are sought out by such paragons of mainstream culture as “60 Minutes” and Newsweek magazine.
As he approaches his 64th birthday, May 24, one is tempted to speculate that he is also tamed, enjoying a new kind of fame _ that of the establishment. Yet such acceptance _ a honorary doctorate from Princeton, a set of Grammys, a Kennedy Center Honors award, among many others _ has made Dylan no easier to understand, no easier to parse, and no less compelling a writer, one who both shapes and is shaped by the best and worst of America.
You can pick your badge of honor or outrage. He sang in Mississippi during the civil rights movement, denounced the war in Vietnam, embraced Protestant fundamentalism, condemned corporate greed, remained silent on Central America, celebrated Zionist nationalism, failed to credit members of the band on one of his major albums, and appeared in a Victoria’s Secret lingerie commercial.
As attention again focuses on him, the critical debates also rage about who he is, what his work means, what of his vast oeuvre matters.
He is hailed as a superb songwriter and musician and lauded as one of the best poets of the second half of the 20th century. He is the subject of dozens of books and hundreds of academic articles and numerous college courses. Most recently, suggesting the range of treatment Dylan elicits from scholars, literary critic Christopher Rick has published “Dylan’s Vision of Sin” (Ecco) and New Testament scholar Michael J. Gilmour has written “Tangled Up in the Bible: Bob Dylan and Scripture” (Continuum).
Over the years Dylan has refused to be confined to the boxes into which his fans seek to put him, whether they are political, religious or even musical. He seems almost a caricature of the American Adam, constantly reinventing his public and musical self. We all should have learned by now that “he not busy being born is busy dying.”
Still, he has consistencies and repeated themes in his many selves and their reinventions. From his first recordings, when he was still apprenticing himself to the folk and blues traditions, religious concerns and moral motifs have permeated his work as they do those musical traditions. Religious and biblical language has been a consistent but always complex and sometimes contradictory element in his work. As he said in a 1963 interview, “There’s mystery, magic, truth and the Bible in great folk music. I can’t hope to touch that. But I’m going to try.”
Thus it is important to note that at root, as English critic Michael Gray has pointed out, Dylan is a moralist rather than the prophet many of his fans, both secular and religious, have longed for. His songs are about the struggle for a moral code, and it is, ultimately, the music that provides his religious framework.
Dylan’s use of religious motifs and biblical imagery has sparked a host of commentaries and critical analyses, many by evangelical Christians. As fans and critics in the 1960s sought to make Dylan a spokesman for a generation involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements (a role he ultimately rejected, as he writes movingly but not always convincingly in “Chronicles”), so too many evangelicals welcomed his celebrated conversion to fundamentalist Christianity and sought to define the minstrel as minister.
For a brief period after his 1978 conversion, Dylan appeared willing to play that role, sometimes preaching from the stage, just as he had, for an equally brief time, embraced the persona of himself as the reincarnation of Woody Guthrie, social critic.
For some evangelical Christian critics who were drawn to the music but not the civil rights and peace politics of the 1960s and who dismissed Dylan’s “contemptuous insult-songs” such as “Masters of War” and “With God on Our Side,” the conversion to fundamentalist Protestantism was a vindication of their politics, an affirmation of their religion and their notion of the “prophetic.” The contempt for the “unsaved” in Dylan’s “born-again” songs (“Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One” and “Gotta Serve Somebody”) didn’t bother them and some even admitted to enjoying the discomfort of Dylan’s nonevangelical fans.
But the fundamentalist phase didn’t last long, either. Dylan was soon back to playing his old songs and writing new material that was less strident in its religious expression. But he has not renounced or recanted the songs of his fundamentalist period any more than the songs of the political protest period. The best of both are part of his repertoire.
While certainty of conviction can be a virtue in religious belief systems, it can work against creativity, which requires the artist to go beyond the last poem, the last canvas, to a new configuration. For a songwriter and performer like Dylan, there is always a new story to tell, a new way of telling the old story, and unlike dogmatic formulas, such new tellings change the meanings of the old versions.
In a famous interview with Newsweek magazine, Dylan put it this way: “I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me. … I find the religiosity and the philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. … I believe the songs.”
Ultimately, “Chronicles” is a kind of musical memoir rather than autobiography. It is the past remembered and refracted through time and the imagination. There is very little of politics or religion or any of the other controversies that marked Dylan’s career. For all the sense of intimacy, there is little for those seeking clues to Dylan’s “real” life _ the private life _ beyond the songs. Those looking for details of the 1966 motorcycle accident or the role of drugs or the Bible study at the Vineyard church won’t find much in the book.
What is there is a warm and generous and at times exuberant reflection by Dylan on musical points of his pilgrimage _ the first days in Greenwich Village; the making of the 1989 “Oh Mercy” album; his incubator time in Minneapolis where he was exposed to much of the folk traditions that were growing in popularity.
Reading “Chronicles” is a little bit like listening to a Dylan album. There are always stunning moments, puzzling moments and some clinkers. But what shines is Dylan’s warm and generous assessment of other musicians, both those he learned from, those he admired, and even, like Joan Baez, those with whom he has broken. Which is to say that “Chronicles,” like the person _ and for good or ill _ is mostly about the music and his own highs and lows in relationship to it.
“A song is like a dream,” writes Dylan, and it seems true of his long career as well, “and you try and make it come true.”
MO/PH END RNS
(David E. Anderson is a senior editor for Religion News Service)
Editors: This story originally appeared on the Web site of Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and may be reprinted by RNS clients. Please use the Religion & Ethics credit line. Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for photos of Dylan and his latest book.
Editors: Please display these words above the byline: “Folk songs are evasive _ the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that’s exactly the way we want it to be.” _ Bob Dylan, “Chronicles, Volume One”
