Greil Marcus on Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

Jon Wiener interviews Greil Marcus

OCTOBER 22, 2016

WE HEARD THE NEWS that Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize for Literature just after all those women came forward to testify that they had been sexually assaulted or groped by Donald Trump. It had been one of the most miserable and infuriating weeks in recent American political history. And then from Stockholm, out of the blue, we got this good news, something surprising and wonderful. My next door neighbor said that, for the first time in weeks, he felt pretty good about the world, all day long. I told him, “me too.”
So we called Greil Marcus to see what he thought. He’s been writing about Dylan for more than 40 years — in places including Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Artforum, Interview, Salon, City Pages, Threepenny Review, and The Village Voice; all those pieces have been collected and published in the book Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010. It’s 481 pages long.
And he had a new piece, about Bob Dylan getting the Nobel Prize, online at The New York Times last week.

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JON WIENER: Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature — do we have to argue about whether what Dylan writes is “literature”? Do we have to say Homer sang his epics, or that Virgil was a lyricist?
GREIL MARCUS: I have no interest in those questions. I’ve always thought the question of whether Bob Dylan was a poet was a waste of time.
And I always thought the campaign to win him the Nobel Prize didn’t have much to do with Bob Dylan at all. Campaigning for Nobel prizes is anything but unknown. A whole cohort of people worked very hard to get Toni Morrison the Nobel Prize. There’s nothing odd about that. People have been promoting Bob Dylan for years as someone who must win the Nobel Prize — and it always struck me that those were people wanting validation for their own admiration and obsession with Dylan. They wanted the Nobel committee to certify them and their seriousness. I always thought that was pretty ridiculous. He doesn’t need it.
On the other hand, when I heard about the news, I felt really good. I was very happy about it. And I was happy for him. And I was curious about what he might end up saying. He gave this extraordinary talk at the Music Cares award ceremony a year or so ago: a 30-minute talk, all written out ahead of time, nothing random about it; a lot of score settling, and a lot of pretty serious analysis of why he wrote his songs. Remarkable. I just hope that at the Nobel ceremony he doesn’t get up there and quote Faulkner: “We will endure.”
Okay we don’t need to have Bob Dylan be a poet. And yet the words of his songs do have real mystery and power — something like “literature,” I guess.
Who knows what literature is? And, really, who cares? I don’t care.
Bob Dylan is working in an area in the broadest sense that began with the troubadours in southern France in the 12th century. The troubadours took up subjects that were forbidden, that you weren’t supposed to talk about, and they were able to hide these in songs: attacks on power, the affirmation of romantic love between different classes of people. This is the realm in which Bob Dylan has always worked.
I think the first thing I ever wrote about Bob Dylan was a college paper about Bob Dylan and Walt Whitman. All you really need to know about that topic is not what people said in the ‘60s: If Walt Whitman were alive today he’d be playing an electric guitar. No. I think you could say, as Bob Dylan has certainly recognized, that Walt Whitman is his comrade. And Whitman would recognize Dylan as his “comerado,” in his word. You don’t need to say more than that.
In the song “Highway 61 Revisited” from 1965, Dylan sings these lines: “Abe says ‘Where you want this killin’ done?’/ God says ‘Out on Highway 61.’” A friend told me, “he deserves the Nobel prize just for those two lines.” You heard him sing this song two weeks ago at the Desert Trip festival in Indio — what was that like?
That was the big gathering of the Rolling Stones and the Who and Dylan and Paul McCartney and, let’s see who else, Elvis was there, and Little Richard; Frank Sinatra made an appearance, and Al Jolson really stole the show.
“Highway 61 Revisited” is probably the best song Bob Dylan ever wrote. It seemed like that in 1965, and it seems like that today: the way the language begins to break down in that first voice: “Abe say, ‘what?’” So fast.
The first time I ever drove onto Highway 61, which was in the Twin Cities, I really expected to have some sort of mystical vision. The highway had taken on such a charged sense from that song that it just didn’t seem like a real place, it didn’t seem like it could be ordinary in any way.
I grew up in Minnesota, so Highway 61 had been part of my life. It’s the way you got from Duluth to Minneapolis and St. Paul — Bob Dylan was born in Duluth and went to college for a year in Minneapolis. And then if you followed Highway 61 south, it went down the Mississippi all the way to New Orleans.
James Marsh came to the US to make four hour-long films for the BBC that were biographies of songs, and “Highway 61 Revisited” was one of them. He shows you that, among other things, Elvis Presley lived on Highway 61, Martin Luther King was assassinated on Highway 61, and Bessie Smith had her fatal auto accident on Highway 61. Just to name a few things.
“Masters of War” is a Dylan song we first heard in 1963: “You that never done nothin’/ But build to destroy/ You play with my world/ Like it’s your little toy…” In 1963 it was stunning, but it soon came to seem heavy-handed and much more literal than what he was doing just two years later with “Highway 61 Revisited.” You must have heard him sing “Masters of War” live dozens of times.
He closed his set at Desert Trip with that song. From 1963 to 2016 — that’s one hell of an arc. You can say the world still has lots of wars, so this song is still current. But the song is very specific: It’s about what Franklin Roosevelt used to call “war profiteers.” People who make money off wars, people who are invested in wars. It’s not an anti-war song as such. But it comes across that way, with a tremendous sense of weight, permanence, regret, despair, and defiance. Part of that is because its melody comes from a very ancient British folk song called “Nottamun Town.” Nobody knows how far back it goes, how old that melody is. That melody is part of what has kept that song alive because it just carries so might weight, its roots are so deep. You can feel that. It comes across. It doesn’t have to be discussed, it’s just the body of the song.
On the other hand, in 1991, when the first Gulf War was about to start, Dylan accepted a lifetime achievement award at the Grammy ceremonies. He comes on with his band, which at the time might have been the hottest band he’d ever played with, and he launches into a song, very fast, very noisy, with streaks of electricity all over it, and it’s almost completely incomprehensible. He is purposely slurring one word into another, you can’t make out the words, and it wasn’t until somewhere around the third verse that the melody crept back into the performance, and I said “Oh my God, this is ‘Masters of War!’” Then I could sort of begin to pick out a word here or there. It was an astonishing performance, one of the greatest of his career: to play “Masters of War” with more ferocity than he had ever played it, just as a war was beginning; and yet at the same time disguise it, so that the performance would go off like a bomb — maybe minutes, maybe months, maybe years after the fuse was first lit.
So this is a song that is alive for Bob Dylan. I’ve heard him do it in so many different ways. I wrote a long piece once called “Stories of a Bad Song” about “Masters of War.” In some ways it’s just incredibly heavy-handed and self-righteous and self-affirming in a cheap way. And yet given what he and other people have done with it, this may be the song that outlasts him the longest. Who knows.
I also want to talk about “Like a Rolling Stone”: “Once upon a time/ you looked so fine/ threw the bums a dime/ in your prime,/ Didn’t you?” A friend said “Hell, I’d give him the Nobel Prize just for the ‘aaah’ before the fourth verse.” The song is magnificent, and so is the performance.
I can’t listen to that song without feeling as if I’m hearing it for the first time. Every note in that song, every word, every inflection is a breakthrough. There is an energy that has come to bear on all the people in that room, all the people playing that song in that moment, that is taking them past themselves, taking them somewhere they’ve never been, somewhere they’ve never played, they’ve never sung with that kind of synchronicity. Every person playing off every other, and every person stepping into a realm where he’s never been before in terms of passion, expressiveness, intensity. Taking a form and pushing it to its absolute limit and pushing yourself past your limits. That’s what you hear over those six minutes.
Let’s put it this way: a song like that, a work of art like that, comes to no artist more than once. But it doesn’t necessarily come in anyone’s lifetime. We are lucky we are alive when that song can be played.

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This interview was originally recorded for The Nation podcast and has been edited and condensed.

What I owe my ‘crazy’ nuns

by Libby Purves

posted Thursday, 20 Oct 2016

Some ‘remarkably cool’ Sisters taught in Catholic schools in the 1960s (AP)

   

Our nuns taught us that strong, well-organised women can run things without being bossed about by men

I sometimes get into quite heated arguments about nuns. The problem occurs when I meet fellow 1960s women who went to bad convent schools. They relate horror stories of humourless (and, in some cases, dangerously stupid) nuns, who preached hellfire, imposed weird exotic punishments and daily excoriated the fearful, frightening, filthy world of sexuality. Not, frankly, the best way to the heart of a teenage girl, even a dreamy one with a picture of Cliff Richard on her wall.
And certainly not if her poster (torn down by Sister Evangelina with little cries of horror) depicted Mick Jagger with his shirt off.
Girls from such schools point accusingly to their own suffering, and conflate it with screen memories of the Magdalene laundries, Frost in May, Philomena and so on.
All of which was, indeed, reprehensible: human beings invested with authority and numinous dignity do risk succumbing to the temptations of power. No reason to think bad convents immune.
I spent three terms in a bad one when my Dad was posted to South Africa in the apartheid years. In Krugersdorp, the nuns pulled off a double by not only bashing us with rulers a lot but also being startlingly racist (“The kaffirs don’t clean the cheppel properly, they’re dirty people”).
It was useful to learn, at 13, that even people with great silver pectoral crosses clonking on their front could be unholy.
But the argument begins because once back in England, my other nuns were great. The Sacred Heart Convent, Tunbridge Wells (the one that’s less posh than Woldingham), was sparky, kindly and distinctly liberal.
Not in the extreme New Theology, modern way, but for a girls’ school in the 1960s they were remarkably cool. When there were occasional daft interdicts, they rapidly got laughed off: the ban on “vocals” in Saturday night pop sessions (one can get sick of the Shadows’ Telstar) was provoked by the Stones’ track Satisfaction. But we teased and teased until they pretended to believe that the singer was referring to political frustration in a materialist society.
In the sixth form we did have the gruesome Children of Mary sessions, but when I resigned from them nobody minded; nor did they when we argued points of doctrine (I was a convinced pantheist at 15). Mother Wilson also decided it would be a good idea to bring in a guest lecturer to explain communism. He wore purple gym shoes and gave us each a copy of The Communist Manifesto. I still have mine.
The next week he came back to explain anarchism. This homeopathic-size dose probably meant that at university we could look more coolly at the Revolutionary Socialist Party leaflets.
The same headmistress set treasure-hunts on high days and holidays, at one point dressing as a tramp to provide one of the clues (shabby overcoat, comedy boots, gardener’s old hat pulled over a full wimple). And on Halloween the whole school was always sent early to bed in highly theatrical disgrace for some imaginary crime, and then roused half an hour later by whooping sixth-formers and led in dressing gowns to be told ghost stories by candlelight.
For all the normal horrors of teenage years at boarding school – hockey, existential doubt, rows with friends, double Geography, soggy quiche – it was a benign second home.
And importantly, in our era, watching a healthy community of nuns taught us that strong-minded, well organised women can run things without being bossed about by men. The young visiting priest technically outranked them (and we resented that already), but face to face he was clearly well under the thumb.
When 10 years later Margaret Thatcher dominated her Cabinet, I suspect that Sacred Heart girls were the least surprised of anyone.
Down our lane, they’ve fixed the ruins. St Andrew’s was a 15th-century church, ruined through the Reformation and rebuilt as a smaller, neater structure alongside the towering old remains.
As a child I wandered about, enthralled by the dignified antiquity of arches and grassy nave, and did a village school project on it. But the ruins got dangerous, and were taped off for years. Until a splendid grant brought, all last winter, sensitive and careful restorers to make them safe. Now you can sit and dream and wonder there.
To mend ruins seems on the face of it crazy. Just as renouncing romance, children and domesticity to be a nun is crazy. But both put forth flowers, and dreams, and a sense of disciplined peacefulness. Long live crazy.

Will Bob Dylan, Jaan Kaplinski or Philip Roth Win the Nobel Prize This Year?

Benjamin Ivry October 4, 2016

Some book lovers see the annual circus around the Nobel Prize in Literature as mostly Swedish political meshugas, often not primarily about quality of writing. Others retain optimism about the award’s potential for spreading news about worthy honorees such as Imre Kertész (2002); Joseph Brodsky (1987); Elias Canetti (1981); and Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978). The posterity of Saul Bellow, honored in 1976, would doubtless be assured even without the Nobel, but more neglected Jewish writers may benefit from the unsurpassed hype.
Ladbrokes, the venerable UK betting parlour, has tipped the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami and Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o as favorites this year, with Philip Roth, a perpetual also-ran, not far behind. Yet Roth’s past snarky comments about the Nobel Committee for overlooking him may not work in his favor. As he has been for many years, Amos Oz is a middle-ranking prospect, close to the Italian writer Claudio Magris, who declared to “La Stampa” that he feels “like an honorary Jew” due to often treating subjects with Yiddishkeit, including Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Carlo Michelstaedter, apart from Magris’ personal contacts with past Jewish Nobel laureates such as Canetti and Singer.
After these possibilities, there is the category of long shots, led by the poet and musician Robert Allen Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan. Daniel Karlin, a professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol, UK, and Dylan maven, tells “The Forward”: “I have less faith than I did when I was younger that the Nobel committee would have the gumption to [award Dylan the prize].” Professor Karlin continues, “The Nobel Prize would ‘add’ nothing to Dylan; Dylan’s name would add lustre to the prize.” If the unlikely occurred and he received the honor? “[Dylan] would accept it,” suggests Karlin, “and would make some odd, unpredictable, possibly offensive statement about it. I like to think that his acceptance speech would consist of a performance of ‘Long and Wasted Years’ from “Tempest.”
Yet the eminent aficionado Christopher Ricks, the literary critic and author of “Dylan’s Visions of Sin,” is not holding his breath. Dylan’s “art is that of tripled media, compounded: voice, music, words,” Ricks cautions, adding, “Literature is probably best thought of — most of the time — as the art of a single medium, language… And the prize for literature may be best left to literature, I think, not to arts that have words as one among several media… A price is paid for these crossings over, and the price is probably not worth paying when Dylan’s name and fame — and achievement — are such as to make his art stand in need of no such recognition.”

Ranked evenly as a longshot with Dylan this year is the 75-year-old Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski, of Polish Jewish ancestry, who for many reasons would be an appropriate winner. His Warsaw-born father Jerzy Kaplinski (1901-1945), a philologist and lecturer at Tartu University, was arrested by Soviet troops and died as the result of starvation and beatings in a USSR labor camp during World War II. Kaplinski has written online that having Estonian and Polish Jewish roots combines “two fatal identities”:
“Two cultures that were not given a chance to develop fully, strangled and destroyed by the Western and Eastern imperialists. … As the Jews are mourning over the destruction of their temple … the Estonians, Finns, Saamis, Samoyeds, Maris and others can mourn over the destruction of their sacred groves, trees and lakes.”
Contacted by The Forward and asked whether Estonians in general share his feelings, Kaplinski replied:
“Estonians without Jewish ancestry know little about Jewish history and don’t care about it. They have their own historical narrative. This too, is a story of suffering; the high point is the birth of the independent Estonian Republic, the catastrophe is the Soviet annexation of it in 1940. Here, many Estonians feel their suffering — less human than political — is unjustly forgotten by the world, and the Jewish suffering — less political than human — is too publicized. The Jews, even in their suffering, are somewhat privileged; I think this is more or less the Estonian attitude to Jews.”
Kaplinski’s “Selected Poems” focus on the ongoing legacy of the Holocaust, where the ash from cremated bodies may still be airborn: “Maybe a flake of you fell today on the white white / apple blossom in my grandfather’s garden / and on my grey hair.” As solace, Kaplinski relies on Jewish scholarly traditions as an antidote to nationalism thriving in Eastern Europe today.
“The Jews have proven that it is possible to preserve a tradition, a culture without a nation state,” said Kaplinski. Something we should always keep in mind here in Estonia. I tried to, but couldn’t, recall the name of the rabbi [Yochanan ben Zakkai] who was smuggled out of besieged Jerusalem, the man who was instrumental in keeping the Pharisaic tradition alive. I admire him more than I admire the defenders of Masada. I have not so much respect for heroic death, perhaps because [Estonians] were brainwashed with tales of Soviet heroism. I love the Jewish humour that is so ingeniously combined with the strict observance of Halachic rules. No wonder that the Jews with traditional education or their descendants were so successful in sciences in the 20th century.”
Influenced by Buddhism, Kaplinski is active in the field of animal rights. He has opined: “We all live in Auschwitz. What we human beings are doing with Nature, with other living beings is not much better than Auschwitz. We exterminate some species and populations, and exploit the others mercilessly… We subject animals to all kinds of tortures, we behave as if only us, the Western variety of the species Homo sapiens had full human rights.”
Asked whether the treatment of animals should be compared to the Holocaust, Kaplinski admits: “No, it is not appropriate to use it in this way. But in our nature, in our culture there are dismal features that, taken the appropriate historic moment, give rise to Auschwitzes. The murders of ISIS, Al-Qaida and other Islamist fanatics prove that if we don’t change our culture, our attitudes to the Other, there are other Auschwitzes waiting. And the ecocide, destruction of our planets great web of life, is, in my view, something really comparable to genocide, to the Holocaust.”
The Nobel Committee is notoriously swayed by political messages; the last Jewish laureate in literature, the captious UK playwright Harold Pinter, was possibly chosen in part because he was sure to deliver scorching denunciations of America and its president at the time of the Iraq War. Would the Swedes hand an Estonian the prize as a rebuke to candidate Donald Trump, who has threatened that as president, he would only defend Baltic nations from a Russian invasion after evaluating whether “they fulfil their obligations to us”? Asked about this year’s election, Kaplinski notes:
“It’s an interesting campaign that says a lot about the American people, about its level of intelligence, but also about the political crisis there and in the West in general. If somebody with the manners and rhetoric of Donald Trump is able to compete with a member of old political elite, then something is changing — or even rotten — in the US. As to the danger of a Russian invasion here, I think it’s first of all hype, maybe even a hype orchestrated and supported by the military industry for whom Russia as adversary is much more useful than the Islamic extremists. To confront Russia, America and its allies and cronies need a lot of modern military hardware.”
Would Kaplinski even want the publicity, intrusion, and overall tsuris attached to winning the award?
“To be sincere,” he declares, “I have an ambivalent attitude to this prize. It would definitely help me to support my big family — the Kaplinski clan — and give to my somewhat dissident voice more authority. But, of course, it would also be a nuisance, especially for a person of my age. I remember the answer the late Seamus Heaney gave me when I asked him how he felt himself after having received [it]. He said, ‘You know, it’s a job, it’s a job.’ But I could always escape, fly to a distant island, to live somewhere incommunicado.”

Addiction and the 'recovery' gurus who profit from it

Focusing on the brain’s chemistry, the neuroscientist Marc Lewis explains that addiction is not a disease — and that to claim it is actually hinders recovery

Damian Thompson

The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease Marc Lewis

Scribe, pp.256, £9.99

Perhaps because so many of them are former drunks and junkies, ‘addiction experts’ are touchy people. Often they don’t like each other — hardly surprising, since they are fighting each other for such a lucrative business. You can make bigger bucks out of selling ‘recovery’ than by peddling drugs.
That’s not to imply moral equivalence, but the two do have one thing in common: plenty of repeat customers. In any media report of a celebrity’s battle with substance abuse, the words that you’re most likely to read before ‘rehab’ are ‘in and out of’.
Ah, say the addiction gurus, but that’s because they’re suffering from a disease. This is one area in which the rivals speak with one voice. The notion of addiction as an incurable, relapsing disease is the bedrock of the recovery industry. Especially the relapsing bit.
It’s a brave man who challenges the disease theory — especially if he is himself a specialist in addiction and therefore runs the risk of being cold-shouldered at conferences and savaged in professional journals. Step forward Dr Marc Lewis, a neuroscientist who spent over 20 years as a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Toronto before taking up a teaching post in the Netherlands. His new book is subtitled ‘Why Addiction is Not a Disease’. He’s not the only academic to rubbish the disease model — but, so far as I’m aware, he is the first who has done so by setting out a comprehensive theory of addiction rooted in neuroscience.
The Biology of Desire focuses relentlessly on the chemistry of the brain. That is what makes it the most important study of addiction to be published for many years. ‘Clear, insightful and necessary,’ proclaims the plagiarist Johann Hari on the cover — a worthless plug if ever there was one, but he’s not wrong.

Neuroscience isn’t just a fashionable subject: it’s all-conquering. Since the 1990s it has colonised one area of research after another. The human brain is the most complex object in the universe, and recently we’ve begun to understand how it works.
This makes neuroscience (which encompasses the entire nervous system regulated by the brain) a source of extraordinary promise and problems. Experts in one field after another have been forced to rewrite their textbooks; but their new findings are often out of date and sometimes discredited by the time they’re published.
That’s because neuroscience relies heavily on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a non-invasive but very expensive type of brain scan that allows us to see different regions of the brain light up as we perform everyday activities. One day, fMRI may help us to reverse Alzheimer’s and other horrors. It’s not a tool we can abandon just because researchers
inevitably have to do a lot of guesswork based on small sample sizes.
What we must stop doing, however, is turning that guesswork into grand theories that try to explain human nature on the basis of fMRI images of the brain lighting up when people (for example) say a prayer, vote Republican or chop up a line of coke.
The study of addiction has been grotesquely distorted by ‘voodoo correlations’ between brain imaging and behaviour. In particular, as Lewis points out, fMRI scans have been a godsend to believers in the notion that addiction is a disease.
Observable changes in the brain caused by drug use became part of a simple, scary, media-friendly narrative of drugs and other addictive experiences ‘hijacking the brain’. And the fact that these changes were still measurable after an addict cleaned up his act was taken as proof that the ‘disease’ of addiction is irreversible.
Lewis is just the man to demolish this theory. First, he’s a seriously distinguished brain scientist. Second, as he revealed in his previous book, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain (2012), when he himself was a young man he was so ‘fucked up’ by his craving for a high that he stole opiates from the science lab.
In the end he broke the habit. And that’s how The Biology of Desire portrays addiction: as a collection of habits deeply engraved in the brain. Lewis says there is no reliable formula for overcoming these patterns of behaviour, which — as his gruesomely entertaining case studies demonstrate — differ markedly from each other in respect of both biology and social context.
The good news is that there are many different routes out of addiction, though the recovery movement does its best to block them by spreading the message that addicts are ‘powerless’ unless they surrender their willpower and their bank account details to its ‘experts’.
Lewis is an amiable guy and tries not to be rude about his critics. He can’t,
however, hide his contempt for most of the 15,000 drug and alcohol rehab centres for whom the ‘disease model’ is a licence to print money. The cold-blooded methods employed by the recovery industry have never been properly scrutinised. Perhaps they should be the subject of Lewis’s next book.

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How Bob Dylan led me to Jesus

by Stephen Bullivant

posted Friday, 30 Sep 2016

Bob Dylan sings during his anniversary concert at New York's Madison Square Garden in 1992. (AP Photo/Ron Frehm)

'Saved' is an album slammed by the critics and yet it had a profound effect on me

‘God may speak to us through Russian Communism, through a flute concerto, through a blossoming shrub or through a dead dog. We shall do well to listen to him if he really does so.’
This famous remark by the Swiss Calvinist theologian Karl Barth – not otherwise renowned for his zippily quotable quotes – came forcefully to mind earlier this week. Despite having remembered it since my undergraduate days, I can’t say it’s something that I’ve ever really thought about.
Until, that is, I began relistening to one of Bob Dylan’s more obscure albums.
As even his most loyal fans will readily concede, Dylan’s albums have not always scaled the fullest heights of his capabilities. Knocked Out Loaded or Down in the Groove are not, to put it mildly, in the same league as Blood on the Tracks or Time Out of Mind. (Though to be fair, what is?)
That a person might be coaxed towards the divine by the full creative powers of a Dylan or Taylor Swift is hardly controversial.
Indeed, this is precisely the via pulchritudinis, or ‘way of beauty’, so beloved of Benedict XVI (citing different examples, admittedly). But that an unbaptised atheist might feel the first stirrings of a genuinely religious feeling through listening to, well, the musical equivalent of a Barthian ‘dead dog’… Well, that takes a bit more explaining.
Dylan released Saved in 1980, in the midst of a brief-but-fervent born-again period. Unlike the earlier Slow Train Coming, Dylan’s second gospel album is traditionally savaged by critics. In one ranking of his thirty-odd studio albums, it comes second-from-bottom. In another, it features dead last: ‘Dylan’s nadir’.
While I genuinely think these assessments are unfair – there are far, far worse Dylan albums – Saved’s artistic (de)merits are not my concern here. And in fact, it’s not actually the music that people find most off putting about the album.
Far more so than his other Christian albums, Saved combines a stark theological vision with a more-bracing-than-Skegness mode of expressing it. For instance, one is barely three-and-a-half minutes in before being smacked in the face with this lyric from the title track:
He bought me with a price,
Freed me from the pit,
Full of emptiness and wrath
And the fire that burns in it.
I’ve been saved
By the blood of the lamb!
Elsewhere, he testifies that ‘For me He was chastised, for me He was hated, For me He was rejected by a world that He created’, preaches that ‘There’s only one road and it leads to Calvary’, and gives thanks to his Saviour for having ‘chosen me to be among the Few’.
Now, forget the theological nuances here for a moment. When I first listened – really listened, at least – to these songs, I was a teenaged unbeliever, who had accidentally ended up studying Theology at university. True, I was reading the gospels for the first time. But I was also dissecting them each week, aided by the classic historical-critical exegetes on our first-term reading lists.
Meanwhile, the theological worldview of Saved – of cosmic drama, life-or-death choices, costly discipleship (‘I know all about poison, I know all about fiery darts; I don’t care how rough the road is, show me where it starts’) – was like nothing I’d ever encountered before. I recall being moved, genuinely if fleetingly, by some of its songs – ‘Saving Grace’, in particular.
At the time, true enough, none of this seemed terribly significant. It precipitated no sudden conversion experience; far from it. In fact, I’d almost forgotten about it all until this week. I stuck the album on again, for no particular reason, and some of those same religious stirrings came flooding back – stronger this time, or at least more readily recognised.
With the benefit of hindsight, I realise now that ‘Dylan’s nadir’ probably played a critically providential part in my eventual coming to Jesus. While I’ve tended to narrate my conversion primarily as a combination of intellectual (years of philosophy and theology) and social (drinking with Dominicans, mostly) factors, I’ve overlooked other – subtler, more emotional – ones… that ‘restless heart’ that St Augustine knew so well.
In his gospel-era live shows, Dylan used to improvise apocalyptic, fire-and-brimstone sermons – often enough, while being heckled by his own fans. In one of them, he remarks ironically:”Years ago they … said I was a prophet. I used to say, ‘No I’m not a prophet.’ They say ‘Yes you are, you’re a prophet.’ I said, ‘No it’s not me.’ They used to say ‘You sure are a prophet.’ They used to convince me I was a prophet. Now I come out and say Jesus Christ is the answer. They say, ‘Bob Dylan’s no prophet.'”
Aged eighteen, there was only one conceivable way I could be tempted to give a hearing to a full-blooded proclamation of the Christian kerygma: if it was on a Dylan CD. And even then, that’s only because listening to Dylan CDs – any Dylan CDs, all the Dylan CDs – was simply what I did.