The Dylanologists (12 page)

On purely technical grounds, Rogovoy disputed the notion that Dylan really was born again. He could have been baptized and converted, but “once a Jew, always a Jew, is the rule,” he wrote. He preferred to think of the Christian episode as an isolated dalliance lasting a short time, and he did not consider it inconsistent with what Dylan had written before or after. Many of the songs could work as Christian or Judaic. Yes, being saved by the blood of the lamb was a reference to Jesus dying on the cross, but it also worked as a nod to the Passover story. The way Rogovoy saw it, Dylan really may have identified personally with Jesus in 1979, but wasn't it more likely that he was just putting the New Testament drama to creative use?

Stephen Webb, an evangelical Christian turned Roman Catholic who teaches religion and philosophy at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, didn't think so. As a child, Webb sang “Blowin' in the Wind” at church camp and thought it was an old hymn. (It's a testament to the song's ecumenical spirit, or Dylan's precocious genius in 1962, that many Jews had warm memories of singing the song at
their
camps growing up.) Webb was a high school senior and editor of an evangelical student newspaper when Dylan converted, and to him,
Slow Train Coming
was thrilling. “The word went through the evangelical community like wildfire,” he says. Why did it matter so much? It wasn't just that the record was Christian. It also was filled with thorny questions and mature philosophical musings. The songs captured ideas Webb was wrestling with himself.

Like a lot of people, he lost track of Dylan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Years later, when he came back to Dylan, he was shocked. The more he listened to
non-
gospel Dylan, the more he heard Christian themes pouring out of the speakers. Webb decided to write a book,
Dylan Redeemed
, in which he would pull apart the religious and political themes in the music. He argued that left-wing critics had gotten it wrong from the beginning: “The impossibility of locating Dylan along the spectrum of leftist politics has afflicted Dylanologists with a plague of anxiety,” Webb wrote. They concluded that Dylan was wearing masks and changing identities because they were uncomfortable with the idea that he might not be the liberal they thought he was. “Even in the sixties,” Webb argued, “Dylan was more of a religious than a political artist. He has often been called a philosopher and a poet, but I think he is best understood as a musical theologian.”

It struck Webb that Dylan has never been in tune with his ­listeners, or his times. He sang not what people wanted to hear but what they needed to hear. His work pondered original sin and “the tragic inevitability of human failure.” He did not share the view that man was essentially good. People were essentially broken, in need of salvation. If he had to bet, Webb would say Dylan is still a Christian.

He's not the only one who thinks that. “I would like one person to produce one shred of evidence that he has renounced his faith,” says Clinton Heylin, author of the Dylan biography
Behind the Shades
. In 2009, Dylan released, of all things, a Christmas record, and an interviewer asked him about his rendition of “O Little Town of Bethlehem”: “I don't want to put you on the spot, but you sure deliver that song like a true believer.”

“Well, I
am
a true believer,” Dylan replied.

“That's as unequivocal as it gets,” Heylin says. “I don't even understand why the debate even happens. I understand people are uncomfortable with the idea.”

The thought of anyone trying to classify Dylan's religious thinking makes men like Stephen Hazan Arnoff crazy. A Jewish scholar in New York who knows pop music as well as he knows the Talmud, Arnoff considers most commentary on this subject to be superficial and unsophisticated. Think about what the world really knows about this, he says. Dylan went through a divorce, was born again, maybe dabbled in fundamentalist Judaism, then went radio silent. He renounced nothing and he claimed nothing. “Most people who are serious about religion are as complicated as that,” Arnoff says.

Dylan seems to have dabbled in every religious, mystical, and philosophical school known to man. He grew up steeped in Judaism. He read the Bible. He talked about the I Ching, the Chinese book of changes, and the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scripture. He lifted from ancient Egyptian beliefs and he flicked through the tarot.

Mysterious as ever, Dylan turned the questions about his faith back onto his audience. “People want to know where I'm at because they don't know where they're at,” he told one interviewer. That was as succinct a description of his view of the artist-audience dynamic as he ever gave. Naïve writers kept asking him to clarify his religious beliefs, and he kept declining to give straight answers. In
Rolling Stone
, five years after the gospel concerts shocked his audience in San Francisco, he said this: “I've always thought there's a superior power, that this is not the real world and that there's a world to come. That no soul has died, every soul is alive—either in holiness or in flames. And there's probably a lot of middle ground.”

In later years, Dylan said he believed God put him on earth to write songs. He said he found the sacred not in churches, but in music. “Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book. All my beliefs come out of those old songs, literally, anything from ‘Let Me Rest on That Peaceful Mountain' to ‘Keep on the Sunny Side.' You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. I believe in a God of time and space, but if people ask me about that, my impulse is to point them back toward those songs. I believe in Hank Williams singing ‘I Saw the Light,' I've seen the light too.”

On
60 Minutes
in 2004, Dylan described what sounded like the flip side of Delta bluesman Robert Johnson's crossroads deal with the devil. He said he still toured because in order to get where he was, he made an agreement—a “bargain,” he called it—with the “chief commander.”

“On this earth?” interviewer Ed Bradley asked.

“In this earth,” Dylan replied, “and in the world we can't see.”

5

“HE CASTS A SPELL”

S
even years after
Saved
, Dylan was at low ebb. Deep into his forties, his life seemed as chaotic as ever. In the years after his marriage to Sara foundered, Dylan had fallen into relationships with women one after another after another, several of whom were backup singers hired during his gospel years. He married and divorced once, or possibly twice, according to biographers; his was “a polygamously peripatetic lifestyle,” Heylin wrote in
Behind the Shades
. Dylan seemed to age in a matter of a few years. Where he appeared hale and strong in 1980, he looked haggard by 1985, his hair thinner, his face suddenly craggy, his vocal cords beginning to turn to gravel. It happened that quickly.

Dylan's standing as the most important artist of his generation was in grave danger. He had become, he later wrote, “a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows.” His conversion had provoked a revolt in his base. Some fans left and never returned. He shot awkward music videos at the dawn of the MTV Age. He did a parody of himself for charity on “We Are the World.” With some two billion people in sixty countries watching on television, he played a set at Live Aid in Philadelphia that was so ramshackle his supporters could not bring themselves to defend it. He had become an embarrassment. The world had stopped listening.

He was thinking of giving up music altogether. “I was going on my name for a long time—name and reputation, which was about all I had,” he would say later. “I had sort of fallen into an amnesia spell.” No longer able to put fans in seats, Dylan was touring with bigger artists, and in 1987, dates were scheduled with the Grateful Dead.

At rehearsals, the band suggested playing some of his old songs, but he had lost touch with the words and couldn't recapture the emotions that created them. Annoyed, he went for a walk. He wasn't planning on going back to the rehearsal. After a few blocks, he heard jazz coming from a bar, and he walked inside to find an old man in a mohair suit singing ballads. He had a flash of realization. He felt as though the jazz cat was telling him,
You should do it this way.
He was reminded of a forgotten “formulaic approach to the vocal technique,” and energized, he returned to the rehearsals and sailed through the summer concerts on autopilot.

In September, he set out for two months of shows with Tom Petty, beginning in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, then wending through Europe. In October the concert caravan made its way north from Milan to Locarno, Switzerland, a quaint lakeside city hemmed in by mountains. The stage was set up in the cobblestoned Piazza Grande on the edge of the city's old district. Picturesque buildings lined the square, some painted in jaunty blues or yellows and roofed with red tile. Above shops and restaurants, flower boxes clung to the balconies. At the cafés and pizzerias, customers sat outside under striped awnings. In 1480, a Franciscan monk said the Virgin Mary appeared to him in the hills above town.

The night was foggy and windy as Dylan took the stage. He began to sing, and made a frightening discovery. His new approach to singing was falling apart, right there in front of the crowd. He panicked. His throat closed.

Then a thought flashed through his head, clear as a voice. It said,
I'm determined to stand whether God will deliver me or not.
“All of a sudden everything just exploded,” he said later. “It exploded every which way.”

He was born again, again.

“This gift was given back to me and I knew it,” Dylan said. “The essence was back.”

After he described this drama in interviews a decade later, fans rooted around for the tape and searched for this mystical moment, listening for a hitch in his voice, a change in intensity, some evidence of his life-altering transformation captured on their cassettes. They didn't find it, and most of them didn't expect they would. It had always been hard to take Dylan at his word. But however it happened, Dylan had come to the realization that his life's work was to be about one thing: performing music to crowds. That was what he wanted to do, and that was what he was going to do until he died, or until his audience stopped showing up. Like most epiphanies, it only seemed inevitable in hindsight.

The Never Ending Tour started in the summer of 1988. (A British rock music writer coined the catchy phrase during an interview with Dylan, but when he wrote the story, he quoted Dylan saying it.) Backed by a taut three-piece band, Dylan played both his own songs and the traditional music he had long loved. The first shows lasted barely more than an hour and were met with brutal reviews. He mumbled. Everything was sloppy. He was galloping through songs at breakneck pace. But he persisted. He knew the tour would not take off right away. He was breaking everything down, and rebuilding it from the ground up would take time.

Beyond the supposed groundbreaking new vocal technique—even aficionados would not notice much difference—Dylan decided that he needed something else: a new audience. As he looked out from the stage, his fans seemed like “cutouts from a shooting gallery.” He could not conceive of them as living, breathing people moved by his music. They had grown up with his records, and he felt bogged down by them and their demands and expectations. They came with baggage, “mental psychic stuff.” They couldn't think of him in a fresh way, so they would only be confounded by this new turn of his. He was sure of it.

“In many ways, this audience was past its prime and its reflexes were shot,” he would write in
Chronicles
. “They came to stare and not participate. That was okay, but the kind of crowd that would have to find me would be the kind of crowd who didn't know what yesterday was.”

2

Glen Dundas figured that the people who knew him in Thunder Bay, Ontario, his frigid home on the northwest shore of Lake Superior, would never believe half the stories he could tell about following Dylan around in the 1980s and 1990s. Their Glen Dundas was a quiet accountant whiling away his middle age. They didn't know that when he traveled the world to see Dylan shows by the hundreds, he illicitly recorded most of them. That he had established himself as a respected hub in a global tape-trading network. That he and his wife, Madge, had like-minded friends in Sweden, Italy, England, Germany. That they had partied in their basement with Dylan's guitar player and his security chief when the tour came through Canada. That Paul Shaffer had played his wedding in New York City. The Never Ending Tour literally changed Glen's life. As far as he could tell, most of the people in Thunder Bay had no idea who Bob Dylan even was.

Glen's father worked in gold mines and grain elevators and drove a truck for the pulp and paper company. Glen never wanted that life. He dropped out of college—it wasn't for him—and while he was trying to figure out what to do, he got a temporary job at the paper mill. They had an assignment tailor-made for newcomers and other unfortunates: “broke hustler.” The enormous mill machines sat idle on the weekends. On Monday mornings when they first coughed to life, they would not run smoothly and the paper would tear. The broke hustler clambered inside the burning machines and cleared the jams and stuffed the paper down giant holes. After everything was operating, he was tasked to fetch coffee for the other workers.

Glen hated that shift, and dreaded the hassling he would get as he took the pick-me-up orders. Above all else, he hated being told what to do. So one Monday morning around nine-thirty he said,
Fuck this
. He grabbed his lunch pail and went home without telling anyone. Thinking he had fallen into the hole, the foreman shut down the operation until he figured out where Glen was. Later, a guy he grew up with told Glen he was an idiot. He had blown his chance to ever work in the mill again. Glen was flabbergasted. What could he say to make the guy understand? He didn't
want
to work in the mill. That was the whole point.

No wonder he loved Dylan. It wasn't just the music. The hardheaded side of Glen was continually amazed by Dylan's attitude. “He's always done what he wants to do,” he says. “He never thinks twice about doing it. It's awesome, really.” Glen went on to become an accountant, and over time he became a company man with a corner office. When he was pushed out, he couldn't say he was shocked. Looking back, it seemed inevitable. At a golf outing with some of his old colleagues not long after he left the company, one former coworker put it right: “Glen just doesn't fit.”

Glen had been a Dylan fan for years, but had only made it to a single show. In 1986, his first marriage over and newly out of work, Glen heard Dylan was coming through the Midwest. This time he was going. He was dating Madge at the time, and she was game. Glen sold fifty bootlegs to a collector for two tickets to the Chicago concert—eleventh row—and enough cash to see two additional shows. He and Madge headed south, and into a new life.

One of the first people they met on the road was a man named Christian Behrens, who was in the middle of a month and a half following the tour with a recording machine. Glen was amazed: He had never heard of anybody doing that. That year, Behrens covered twenty-one thousand miles to see thirty-two concerts, driven by the sense that if he didn't record them, nobody would—not even the musician himself. Dylan prohibited taping and photography, so it took some nerve and some guile. At the time, capturing the music in sufficiently high quality required smuggling in a heavy deck. The one Behrens lugged around was designed for journalists, not spies.

To Glen there was a romance to the cause. Besides, he was a collector: If he had his own recordings he would be able to make trades. In 1988, at the dawn of the Never Ending Tour, he went into a Minneapolis camera shop and put down $500 for a Sony Walkman cassette recorder and a set of mics. The show was a few days later. Congenitally a worrier, he was in full fret as he wired up at the hotel, hiding the machine in his pants and the mics in his hair. Security wasn't likely to pick him out for further screening. He was short, balding, unobtrusive. He usually wore black shirts, black jeans, and black basketball sneakers, which made him look like a roadie. If anybody was going to be stopped it was his friend Ken, who planned to videotape the concert. He had cinched a camera around his wife's waist so it hung between her legs, hidden by a long dress. They got everything situated, walked over to the venue, and made it in unscathed.

Every taper got preshow jitters. Some of them actually had nightmares about getting caught. They would compare notes with other tapers. They all had the same dreams. But more often than not, they came home with their illicit recordings. Sometimes security didn't even care. Mitch's tape-hunting friend Jeff Friedman started taping in 1974, and he would sweat every last detail. He flew to San Francisco and documented the first gospel shows at the Warfield in 1979. His gear was the size of a couple of laptops stacked together. His microphone was a foot and a half tall. He stashed everything at the bottom of a rucksack beneath piles of clothing. When the security men looked—if they looked—they just made sure he wasn't selling unofficial Dylan T-shirts and let him pass.

Short of mass strip searches, security could do little to combat the smugglers. The tapers had too many tricks. The ripping you heard in the bathrooms before a show was the sound of men pulling off gear taped to their legs and backs. They would disassemble their video cameras and give the parts to friends to smuggle inside. They would sneak gear inside a loaf of bread. One hid his lens inside a coffee thermos with a false bottom just an inch or two from the top. When he poured a little coffee in, it looked like a full pot. One guy stuffed all his gear inside a pillow and strapped it to his girlfriend so she looked like she was with child. At a major festival, where people posted flags to help friends find their spot, a taper posted his mic atop a giant pole hidden behind an arrow. In 1986, Behrens got to Berkeley to find particularly tight security. He came up with an unconventional plan. In the afternoon, he hopped on board a soda truck making a delivery inside the venue. He put his recorder in a plastic bag, hid the bag behind a plant, and slipped back outside. Returning through the gate later with his ticket, he was horrified to discover a guard stationed beside his plant. What to do, what to do? He walked up, concocted a story about some trouble in some other part of the theater, and when the guard went to deal with the matter, the taper grabbed the bag and got his tape. There were a thousand and one ways to get the stuff inside. Beating security became part of the buzz of the concert. One fan took to taunting security at the turnstiles.
Don't you see? You have no chance. We're smarter than you.

The tapers approached the concerts as they would a job. They scouted the venues closely, sometimes a day ahead of time. They were not on the road to drink and dance and blow off steam. If they wanted a decent tape, they couldn't make any noise at all. They couldn't talk to their friends. They couldn't run to the bathroom. If they clapped, they did it quietly, preferably silently. They didn't stand where they had the best view of the stage, like most fans, but where they could capture the best sound. Some of them would get as close to the speakers as possible to drown out gabbers. Others searched for a sweet spot farther back and centered between the speakers.

If you saw them in the postconcert hotel party rooms, they were likely to be in a corner talking not about Dylan but about technical taping questions. Sometimes they would bring their recording of that night's show to play on the stereo. The generous ones made instant copies. A guy from St. Louis had a computer in the back of his van, and he'd burn discs for friends so they could listen en route to the next show.

Glen tapped into a network of men—the tapers were almost exclusively men—around the world. They tried to cover every show. He upgraded his cheap mics to Sennheisers, the gold standard of the era, and did his part. It gave Glen cachet. He wasn't just buying or collecting the underground music everyone wanted; he was capturing it himself. The tapers believed they were doing important work. They were documenting music that otherwise would have floated off into the ether, never to be heard again. Maybe it was illegal in a technical sense. Maybe Dylan hated it, and hated them for doing it. But as far as Heylin, the biographer, was concerned, these men were “custodians of popular music.”