Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (31 page)

Amid the basement tapes there was, conspicuously, ‘Sign on the Cross’ and a singer ‘worried’, though Jewish by birth, by what the Roman insult pinned to Christianity’s symbol might have signified. As mentioned,
John Wesley Harding
is studded throughout with religious imagery, each instance – at least five dozen of those, they say – recorded scrupulously by adherents. During his remarkable researches for
The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan
, researches so assiduous they could only have been pursued by a Protestant theologian who happened to be a fan of the artist, the late Colbert ‘Bert’ Cartwright found no fewer than 387 biblical allusions in the 246 Dylan songs and sleeve notes published between 1961 and 1978. Significantly, perhaps, Cartwright also recorded that the references were apportioned almost evenly between the Bible of the Jews and the Bible known to Christians.
⁷

Even five decades after he started out, his commitment to specific creeds having abated somewhat, Dylan was still declaring that he was trying to get to heaven before they closed the door. The righteous anger had dissipated slightly, but still he invoked the ‘Spirit on the water / darkness on the face of the deep’ on the 2006 album
Modern Times
. He still talked of paradise and belief; clearly, contrary to every nonsensical rumour, he still believed. The only surprise is that anyone had ever reached any other conclusion.

In 2012, late in the day, Dylan would introduce the album
Tempest
to interviewers with the explanation that he had set out to write something else entirely. His initial ambition, he would say, had been to write ten purely religious songs, songs akin to the old ‘Just a Closer Walk With Thee’, but the concentration required had eluded him. In the course of the ritual interview with
Rolling Stone
that October, Dylan would further assert that ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’,
Blonde on Blonde
’s apparent ode to the sacrament of dope back in 1966, had been misunderstood – people are strange – by those ‘that aren’t familiar with the Book of Acts’ and what it truly means to be stoned. At one point he would claim the ability to see God’s hand in all things, yet tease his interviewer with the thought that people can have faith ‘in just about anything’. Few of them would explain their lives and careers as an example of actual ‘transfiguration’, however. Dylan did so in the interview in all (apparent) seriousness before accepting, as a statement of the obvious, that his songs are shot through still with biblical language.

Of course, what else could there be? I believe in the Book of Revelation. I believe in disclosure, you know? There’s truth in all books. In some kind of way. Confucius, Sun Tzu, Marcus Aurelius, the Koran, the Torah, the New Testament, the Buddhist sutras, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and many thousands more. You can’t go through life without reading some kind of book.
⁸

Of all the books you could stumble across, and of all the 27 accepted texts in the New Testament compendium, the one attributed to the fevered cave-dwelling John of Patmos is, let’s say, a revealing first choice. The Christian Bible’s big finish – visionary, apocalyptic, supremely resistant to a single interpretation – is a poem made for a certain kind of poet, and for a particular sort of believer. This piece of theologically incoherent art has a specific contemporary resonance, equally, for born-again Americans with a taste for prophetic utterances who set their spiritual watches by the end times, ‘rapture’, Armageddon and vindication. Several of those who were influential within the Vineyard Fellowship in the 1970s and 1980s were of that persuasion and industrious in spreading the news. By the twenty-first century, if not before, Dylan had come to believe that ‘disclosure’ is to be had from John’s verses and all they portend. So God, presence and idea, had permeated the singer’s every fibre and utterance in 1979. It was a very particular version of God, however.

*

Dylan then studied in the School of Discipleship under Kenn Gulliksen and at least four other competent pastor-teachers, including myself. We met in a comfortable conference room that was part of a suite of offices, which served as the church offices. The church worship services were held on Sunday afternoons in the sanctuary of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Reseda, so it was necessary for us to occupy offices elsewhere. There was a real estate firm occupying the first floor suite of offices. Bob attended the intense course of study along with other students for three and one-half months.

Larry Myers, 1994
⁹

In one of its histories, the Vineyard Fellowship says that the church ‘finds its roots in the unique period of the 1970s when a lost generation met a sovereign move of God. This generation that included a counterculture and anti-establishment dynamic sought a living faith, marked by simplicity of structure, vitality of contemporary music, personal experience of God’s love, and an invitation to make a real difference in a lost world.’
¹⁰
When Dylan encountered them they were a friendly bunch, too, and fond of music. They were very fond of famous musicians. That isn’t quite the whole story, however, of this version of neo-charismatic third-wave church-planting evangelical Christianity.

The fellowship had not been in existence for long when Dylan came its way. Gulliksen had been an assistant pastor with Calvary Chapel, a group of evangelical churches founded on a belief in the ‘inerrancy’ of the Bible and on
sola scriptura
, the conviction that ‘the Old and New Testaments are the Word of God, fully inspired without error and the infallible rule of faith and practice’. In 1974, Gulliksen and his wife had moved from Texas to Los Angeles to launch a new ministry. Bringing together various Bible study groups, he soon began holding Sunday services among the downtrodden of Beverly Hills. Believing that God had instructed him, the pastor gave the name Vineyard to his emerging congregation. In 1977 or 1978, Gulliksen joined his forces with those of another disaffected Calvary Chapel ‘affiliate’ named John Wimber, an individual who was to prove charismatic in every sense, though Wimber did not assume the organisation’s leadership fully until 1982.
¹¹
One way or another, in any case, the Association of Vineyard Churches, these days an international movement claiming 1,500 outposts, was born.

In his ‘three and one-half months’ of study Dylan was exposed to specialised teaching. The Vineyard is keen, to take the most conspicuous example, on what is known as kingdom theology, the belief that all history turns on the struggle between God and Satan, a struggle that will be concluded by the second coming of Christ, but only after the Antichrist, paradoxically enough, has brought a deceptive peace to humankind. (Critics denounce radical versions of this thinking, which take the struggle to be altogether literal, as ‘militant Biblicism’ and ‘holy war theology’.) For now, the kingdom is here, it is argued, but not complete, a matter of ‘the already and the not yet’ as believers say. Some of those believers have a taste for ‘signs and wonders’, for evidence of supernatural events involving the laying on of hands, for the alleged healing of the sick and the casting out of demons. A minority are not averse to glossolalia, to ‘speaking in tongues’. At times in its short history the Vineyard movement has also produced a remarkable number of individuals blessed with the gift, albeit not the unerring gift, of prophecy.

It is taken for granted that humanity is born in sin. It is believed – and Dylan went for this one in a big way – that the Devil is real, actual and everywhere active among us. Chiefly, however, and to simplify greatly, everything is pinned on the return of the Messiah and the End of Days, the time of punishment and reward. The idea is taken for granted among most dispensationalist evangelicals, though they quibble over precise definitions of ‘the rapture’, that moment when the Almighty will snatch true believers from the face of the earth. Apparently there is some argument over the precise timing of this event, whether amid, before or after ‘tribulation’. Another part of the Vineyard creed, not the least important, is ‘justification’ before God, accomplished by faith in Jesus alone.

Dylan did not hesitate over that aspect of belief. But then, after a more intensive course of study than he had endured since high school, it seems he did not hesitate over much that he was told. In his gospel songs he would part from other Vineyard adherents only in seeming to skip over the benign manifestations of this version of Christianity. The central tenet, the cleaving to a messiah first and last, gripped him. It grips him still. Everything in the Bible is the literal truth. This world is coming to an end. Judgement will follow.

It speaks to character. Dylan is a dogmatist until the minute he changes his mind. When he is in thrall to one idea all competing ideas are, by definition, false or – that word from his youth – phoney. It is as though he starts from the assumption that Bob Dylan would not take an interest in anything that isn’t supremely important.

So his beloved antique folk and blues music ceases to be just a thing of abiding wonder and becomes a key to life’s mysteries, something akin to a philosophy, even a creed. It is notable that when he ceased to preach, if not to believe, Dylan began to tell interviewers that music had always been the most meaningful thing in his life.

Equally, when he declined to be used on behalf of political causes in the 1960s there would be no appeal against his judgement that all organised politics is a deceit and a waste of time. By 1984, he would be framing his opinion in the terms he understood best: ‘politics is an instrument of the Devil.’
¹²
Dylan might refuse to be anyone’s leader, but he does not hesitate to lay down the law. When he accepted the evangelical Messiah as fundamental to the nature of existence, therefore, there could be no deviation, no doubt, no holding back. Say this much for the artist (or for his state of mind): any thoughts of the likely damage to his career did not impede him in the slightest. As Robert Hilburn of the
Los Angeles Times
would be informed in November 1980: ‘When I believe in something, I don’t care what anybody else thinks.’ That was never entirely true, but as a declaration of faith it would stand.

Gulliksen assigned Myers as a full-time guide and minder to the most prominent of the Vineyard’s show-business converts during the artist’s studies in the ‘school of discipleship’. The measure was intended, supposedly, to protect Dylan from the media types clustering daily in Reseda. In 1999, when he was entreating believers to ‘intercede for Bob, to pray without ceasing that God will access his heart so that he will be open to responding again to the truth’, Gulliksen would give an insight, unwittingly no doubt, into the Vineyard’s real attitude towards the catch it had made for Jesus. As to celebrities, the pastor – who had by then returned to the Calvary Chapel flock – said:

The three best known of that decade were Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, and Bob Dylan. Two of them were killed and Dylan was the only one left. So you are not talking about just a celebrity, you are talking about ‘the’ remaining celebrity.
¹³

The Vineyard church was both star-struck and pragmatic. You could also mention opportunistic. Music, smiles and ‘contemporary worship’ were intrinsic to its effort to connect with the ‘counterculture and anti-establishment dynamic’. Who better embodied all of that than Dylan? If the main business at hand was the winning of converts among the entertainment-industry types of Southern California – and among their millions of fans – he was the perfect advertisement for the Vineyard Jesus. The pastors cared about Dylan’s soul, too, of course. As Myers saw fit to insist, as though he might have said it once or twice before, it would not have crossed their minds to ‘attempt to convince, manipulate or pressure this man into anything’. Heaven forfend.

The Book of Revelation was at the heart of everything Dylan learned. Or rather, the interpretation placed upon the visionary writings ascribed to ‘John of Patmos’ by the Vineyard folk was central to what was taught in the conference room of a real-estate business. Modern textual analysis suggests there might in fact have been three Johns at work in compiling the Patmos book, and that the trio were not always in agreement theologically, but such details were no impediment to students in the San Fernando Valley who heard they were getting a glimpse, 1,900 years after the prophecies were inscribed, of an imminent apocalypse. In Dylan’s childhood pointless Cold War civil-defence advice had urged him to ‘duck and cover’ when doomsday arrived. That, he learned in 1979, would be worse than foolish when the angelic trumpeters, the scorpion-tailed locusts, the Four Horsemen, the False Prophet, the Whore of Babylon and the Archangel Michael hove into view. It was all true. Once ‘decoded’ the Book of Revelation told it, as Californian evangelicals probably said, like it was, or certainly would be.

The decrypting of an inerrant biblical text was a fruitful line of research. Beyond question, it also helped some people to sell a great many exciting books of their own. This meant that students such as Dylan could spend as much time on contemporary ‘interpretations’ of things the Bible could be made to say as they spent on Scripture itself. A flood of speculative literature had been unleashed amid the fashion for being born again. Modern American religiosity gets much of its reputation, in Europe at least, from its appetite for this theological equivalent of junk food.

The Late
,
Great Planet Earth
(1970) by Hal Lindsey (‘with Carole C. Carlson’) is an uncomplicated sort of work. It takes ‘dispensational eschatology’ for granted. It therefore does not quarrel with the possibility, never mind the argument, that the Bible is not necessarily prophetic in a simple, predictive sense. Lindsey’s glossing of holy writ is never so dull. He treats the good book as a cosmic countdown. All the stuff that’s in there, suitably interpreted, will happen in this world and in our times. So what might bring about rapture, tribulation and the Second Coming?