User:C.Logan/Bob Dylan

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This page is intended to be used as a temporary resource for those users who do not have access to the following books (which are currently being used as sources for Bob Dylan's entry on List of notable converts to Christianity).

This page exists so that they may review the published sources in light of the current dispute regarding Dylan's status as a convert, and his inclusion on the aforementioned list.

This page is not intended to permanently host these transcriptions, but is only meant to be used until the point is reached where these sources are no longer questioned in their usefulness as sources for Dylan's conversion.


Contents

[edit] Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades: Revisited

What follows is a series of excerpts from Clinton Heylin's Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades: Revisited. It is intended for use as a source for the Bob Dylan article and the List of notable converts to Christianity page. It is placed here purely for the purposes of review.


After an impressive show in his hometown, Los Angeles, on November 15, he had a month left on the road. In San Diego, two days later, something remarkable happened. He was no longer feeling quite so good. The show itself was proving to be very physically demanding, but then, he perhaps reasoned, he'd played a gig in Montreal a month earlier with a temperature of 105.

Bob Dylan: Towards the end of the show someone out in the crowd... knew I wasn't feeling too well. I think they could see that. And they threw a silver cross on the stage. Now usually, I don't pick things up in front of the stage. Once in a while, I do. Sometimes I don't. But I looked down at that cross. I said, 'I gotta pick that up'. So I picked up the cross and put it in my pocket... And I brought it backstage and I brought it with me to the next town, which was out in Arizona... I was feeling even worse than I'd felt when I was in San Diego. I said, 'Well, I need something tonight.' I didn't know what it was. I was used to all kinds of things. I said, 'I need something tonight that I didn't have before.' And I looked in my pocket and I had this cross [1979]

Stuck in a Tuscon hotel room, after a lifetime of visions that caused divisions, Dylan experienced a vision of Christ, Lord of Lords, King of Kings. His state of mind may well have made him susceptible to such an experience. Lacking a sense of purpose in his personal life since the collapse of his marriage, he came to believe that, when Jesus revealed Himself, He quite literally rescued him from an early grave.

Bob Dylan: There was a presence in the room that couldn't have been anybody but Jesus... Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up. [1980]

On the road, 'heading towards the sun,' Dylan started to question his whole value system. The import of his experience, though, temporarily eluded him. Meanwhile, few clues were given to the thousands of fans he was playing to every night, in the final four weeks of his yearlong world tour. That small silver cross, though, clearly represented a new starting point. Six days on from Tuscon, Dylan was in Fort Worth, playing the Convention Center. On stage, he was seen to be wearing a metal cross around his neck. For a man raised as a Jew, this could not have been a casual gesture.

He also began to improvise a new line for the stripped-bare arrangement of 'Tangled Up in Blue' he was performing at the time. Rather than having the mysterious lady in the topless bar quoting an Italian poet from the fourteenth century [sic], she was quoting from the Bible, initially from the Gospel According to Matthew. Gradually, though, the lines changed, until he settled upon a verse from Jeremiah- the one he would quote on the inner sleeve of the Saved album: 'Behold, the days come, sayeth the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and the house of Judah.' (Jeremiah 31.31), the same 'contract with the Lord' his 'covenant woman' was about to undertake.

pgs. 491-492

[...]

Helena Springs: I think he was having some problems... He called me and he asked me, and they were questions that no one could possibly help with. And I just said, 'Don't you ever pray?' ...And he said 'Pray?' Like that, you know. And he said, 'Really?' And he asked me more questions... He started inquiring... He's a very inquisitive person, which is one good thing about searching for truth.

Not that others in his ensemble couldn't have suggested something more tangible than prayer. If Jesus appeared to Dylan that night in Tucson, He was presumably passing through on His way to the Alpha Band contingent in Dylan's band. Steven Soles and David Mansfield has both become members of a particularly Californian creed of Christianity, the Vineyard Fellowship, in recent months, their old compadre T-Bone Burnett having led the way.

David Mansfield: T-Bone was the first one to go through this experience, and Steven sort of followed him, and I eventually did, too. And T-Bone has more than a bit of preacher in him and was probably hammering at all of his friends in the ways that he could have been most affective- arguing Christian apologetics. But there was this revival going on- there was a certain time when we were all going to the same church, and Bob would be way in the back incognito, but T-Bone, Steven and I were all playing in the church band.

An adamant Burnett insists he was not approached by an inquisitive Dylan at this juncture. Nor, says Mansfield, was he. Soles, though, recalls being subjected to Dylan's inquiries about the nature of his faith. One thing he said, in particular, struck a chord: 'I kept telling him that I was so glad I didn't have to place my faith in man any longer.' As in 1976, though, Dylan seems to have largely reserved his inner philosophical struggles for the 'witchy women' who shared his battleground. Ever the pluralist, he continued to balance his affection for Helena with an infatuation for Sally Kirkland's ex-roommate, black actress Mary Alice Artes. Artes had also been brought up as a Christian; but, unlike Springs, her faith had faded- until, that is, she encountered the Vineyard Fellowship.

David Mansfield: Mary Alice Artes was one of these dynamic personalities that Bob's probably attracted to in general, and if they're black so much the better- she was really powerful. She could look really sexy, dress really sexy, without ever exuding sex, but meanwhile being one of those really competent mothers who would shower you with all this love and attention, and... tell you what you should do, and slap your bottom to get you off doing it. She would have been like the perfect Jewish wife... At the point I became a Christian she was so sweet and intense, and 'praise the Lord,' this and that.

Independently of the Alpha boys, Artes had attended a Vineyard Fellowship meeting in Tarzana, California. According to a press report at the time, she actually moved out on Dylan upon 'rededicat[ing] her life to the Lord,' a move guaranteed to impress a genuinely smitten Dylan. According to pastor Ken Gulliksen, she requested pastoral guidance for her boyfriend.

Ken Gulliksen: At the end of the meeting she came up to me and said that she wanted to rededicate her life to the Lord... That morning she did rededicate her life to the Lord. Then she revealed that she was Bob Dylan's girlfriend and asked if a couple of the pastors would come, there and then, and talk to Bob. And so Larry Myers and Paul Esmond went over to Bob's house and ministered to him. He responded by saying, Yes, he did in fact want Christ in his life. And he prayed that day and received the Lord.

If he was on the run from the Triple Goddess, Dylan was bound to need the protection of a strong, patriarchal religion, and the 'born-again' songs he wrote that year are littered with references to redemption from the power of women. In 'Trouble in Mind,' notably, Satan whispers the the singer that, when he grows bored of Miss So-and-So, 'I got another woman for ya.' On the verge of collapse from a five-year struggle with his various muses, he now found himself renewed by a God-given strength, and a new message.

Bob Dylan: Beauty can be very, very deceiving and it's not always of God. Beauty appeals to our eyes... The beauty of the sunset... that's God-given. [But] I spent a lot of time dealing with man-made Beauty, so that sometimes the beauty of God's world has evaded me. [1981]

By embracing the New age brand of Christianity advocated by the Vineyard Fellowship, Dylan was about to become, in popular perception, just another Bible-bashing fundamentalist. In fact, thought the Fellowship certainly shared the 'born again' precepts of more right-wing credos- believing such a change was an awakening from original sin ('Adam given the Devil reign / Because he sinned I got no choice')- it represented a more joyous baptism of faith.

David Mansfield: A big part of the fellowship of that church was music. I remember all those courses they offered- Dylan took the whole Discipleship thing! It was as intense as what was going on in fundamentalist circles, but it was culturally from an entirely opposite place.

Dylan had always been thorough in his reinventions of self. Never one for half measures, the man who after Newport became Rimbaud's spitting son, after Nashville Skyline became the cud-chewing country farmer, after Blood on the Tracks became the wronged part, after Desire became the dutiful husband, was bound to be attracted to the idea of another dramatic rebirth. Certainly the Born-Again Bob now preparing to preach out in the world was as thorough a reinvention as any since Elston Gunn had decided he'd rather be Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan: Being born again is a hard thing... We don't like to lose those old attitudes and hang-ups. Conversion takes time because you have to learn to crawl before you can walk. You have to learn to drink milk before you can eat meat. You're reborn, but like a baby. A baby doesn't know anything about this world, and that's what it's like when you're reborn. You're a stranger. You have to learn all over again. [1980]

The first stage of this process was carefully supervised by the Vineyard Fellowship, who were bound to recognize the benefits of having the spokesman for a generation speaking out on their behalf. In having 'to learn all over again,' Dylan was required to return to school. An autodidact of twenty years' standing, and never the best of students, he was his usual recalcitrant self when it was suggested he undertake an intensive course in learning to walk in the spirit of the Lord.

Bob Dylan: At first I said, 'There's no way I can devote three months to this. I've got to be back on the road soon.' But I was sleeping one day and I just sat up in bed at seven in the morning and I was compelled to get dressed and drive over to Bible school... I didn't know myself if I could go for three months. But I did begin telling people after a couple of months, and a lot of them got angry at me. [1980]

One suspects that it was Dylan's way of 'telling a few people' that got them angry, not necessarily the message that Christ is Lord. References to 'so-called friends' and 'companions' who'll 'someday account for all the deeds [they] done' abound on the songs he was writing contemporaneously, songs of praise and damnation like 'Slow Train,I Believe in You,Precious Angel,' and 'No Man Righteous (No Not One).' If the simple acceptance of Christ did not imbue him with righteous fervor, the adoption of the Vineyard brand of Christianity most certainly did. And, when it came to righteousness, the author of 'The Times They Are A-Changin was still up there with the best of them.

The three-month course at the Vineyard School of Discipleship demanded regular attendance- four days a week. The regime itself perhaps reminded Dylan of the breakthrough he'd achieved with Norman Raeban back in 1974. The classes were held in a back room, above a Realtor's office in Reseda, California, and lasted from 8:30 A.M. till noon. An anecdote recounted in Stairway to Heaven, a thorough survey of Christian rock music by Gavin Seay and Mary Neely, reveals a Dylan surprisingly eager to participate in the process:

During class breaks, Dylan would often walk into the parking lot in back of the prefab building, dressed against the brisk morning air in a leather jacket and stocking cap, to smoke Marlboro cigarettes and talk with his girlfriend ...One morning a student stood to report a dream he had the night before. In the dream, the members of the class were gathered in an upper room, a beautiful cedar-paneled loft lit golden by sun pouring through a skylight. One corner of the room, the student said, had been left unfinished, exposing insulation padding, ducts, and a tangle of dangerously frayed electric wiring. The hazardous wiring, it seemed, had to be pulled down before the room could be safe for habitation. It was a difficult, dangerous job, and the dreamer was frightened, until an unidentified man assured him that only boldness was required. Encouraged, the dreamer thrust his hands into the wiring and pulled. It fell away, and through the hole in the roof, fresh, clean water began to flow. From his seat in the corner of the room, Dylan's eyes were bright. He was nodding and smiling as a moment of unmistakable recognition passed between the student and the star... Bob Dylan's interpretation of his classmate's dream of the upper room was the simple one: 'Old things are passed away, and all things are made new.' Old circuits must be stripped for the cleansing water to flow.

The course pounded into Dylan a responsibility that devolved to all fellowship members- to evangelize. Pastor Gulliksen insists, 'It was an intensive course studying about the life of Jesus; principles of discipleship; the Sermon on the Mount; what it is to be a believer; how to grow; how to share... but at the same time a good solid Bible-study overview type of ministry.' The important phrases here are 'principles of discipleship' and 'how to share.' The later controversy surrounding Dylan's conversion might have been considerably more muted if it had not been for this evangelical codex. Even fans who could tolerate a Dylan for whom Jesus was the savior foretold in the Old Testament found out there was 'no neutral ground' when it came to the 'principles of discipleship.'

Bob Dylan: That [born-again period] was all part of my experience. It had to happen. When I get involved in something, I get totally involved. I don't just play around on the fringes. [1983]

The Chambers Dictionary defines evangelical as 'Of the school that insists especially on the total depravity of unregenerate human nature, the justification of sinner by faith alone, the free offer of the Gospel to all, and the plenary inspiration and exclusive authority of the Bible.' Taught to conceive of man as born into a state of sin; that the gospels represented not figurative, but literal truth; and that the Devil was at work every minute of every day, insidiously undermining man's morals, Dylan now denied himself all evidence to the contrary. A well-read man, for whom the Bible had previously been little more than a literary resource, he now made its allegories come out in black and white.

Bob Dylan: You would think the enemy is someone you can strike at and that would solve the problem, but the real enemy is the Devil. That's the real enemy, but he tends to shade himself and hide himself, and put it into people's minds that he's really not there and he's really not so bad, and that he's got a lot of good things to offer, too... What Jesus does for an ignorant man like myself is to make the qualities and characteristics of God more believable to me, 'cause I can't beat the Devil. Only God can... Satan's working everywhere. You're faced with him constantly. If you can't see him, he's inside you making you feel a certain way. He's feeding you envy and jealousy. [1981]

The message conveyed by the Vineyard Fellowship was not simply concerned with spreading the Gospel. It elevated the final book of New Testament allegories, St. John the Divine's Revelation, into a literal account of the end times. All one needed was the code. The end of the world was not merely nigh, it was NIGH, with a capital double underlined N!

Bob Dylan: What I learned in Bible school was just... an extension of the same thing I believed in all along, but just couldn't verbalize or articulate. Whether you want to believe Jesus Christ is the messiah is irrelevant, but whether you're aware of the messianic complex, that's... important.... People who believe in the coming of the Messiah live their lives right now, as if He was here. That's my idea of it, anyway. I know people are going to say to themselves, 'What the fuck is this guy talking about?' but it's all there in black and white, the written and unwritten word. I don't have to defend this. The scriptures back me up. [1985]

Aside from the scriptures, the classes sought to provide a grounding in the works of one Hal Lindsey, the man to whom God in his infinite wisdom had revealed the true code of Revelation. Though no saint himself, Lindsey was closely associated with the Vineyard Church. His book The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), became Dylan's second Bible and added an apocalyptic edge to his worldview, allowing Christ Come Again precedence over Jesus the Teacher.

pgs. 493-498

[...]

Nat Hentoff: What do you have to look forward to? Bob Dylan: Salvation. Just plain salvation. -Playboy interview, 1996

pg.510

Bob Dylan: Satan is called the god of this world. Anyone here who knows that? That's right- he's called the god of this world, and Prince of the Power of the Air. [someone shouts: 'he sucks!'] That's right! He does! But anyhow, we know he's been defeated at the cross. I'm curious to know how many of you all know that? [1979]

pg.514

[...]

Bob Dylan: You know we read in the newspaper every day what a horrible situation this world is in. Now God chooses to do these things in this world to confound the wise. Anyway, we know this world's gonna be destroyed; we know that. Christ will set up His Kingdom in Jerusalem for a thousand years, where the lion will lie down with the lamb. Have you heard that before? I'm just curious to know, how many people believe that? [mixed response] All right. This is called 'Slow Train Coming.' It's been coming a long time and it's picking up speed. [1979]

If Dylan gradually won over most of those San Franciscans who stayed to the end, those in attendance at the next four shows needed no such convincing. Two days on from the Warfield, he returned to Los Angeles for shows at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, his first concerts there in nearly fifteen years. As benefits for World Vision, a non-denominational Christian charity, and this being home territory for the Vineyard Fellowship, the shows were bound to be a quite different experience for Dylan and the band. On the first night, when he asked the audience knew that Satan had been defeated at the cross, the response suggested an ecumenical revival meeting. He was clearly delighted, affirming, 'Awright! At least we're not alone.' The following three shows found Dylan singing with a passion that only comes with burning conviction. His apocalyptic sermons were also becoming imbued with the same fiery fervor. The second night, his pre-'Solid Rock' rap was his most lengthy pronouncement to date:

Bob Dylan: You wanna know something, we're not worried at all, even though it is the last of the End times; because we see all these hostages being taken here and drugs being outlawed there. All these sad stories that are floating around. We're not worried about any of that. We don't care about the atom bomb, any of that, 'cause we know this world is going to be destroyed and Christ will set up His kingdom in Jerusalem for a thousand years, where the lion will lie down with the lamb. Y'know, the lion will eat straw that day. Also, if a man doesn't live to a hundred years old, he will be called accursed. That's interesting, isn't it? And we don't mind. We know that's coming, and if any man have not the spirit of Christ in him, he is a slave to bondage. I know you're all into bondage, so you something just a little bit tough to hang on to. This song's called 'Hanging on to a Solid Rock Made Before the Foundation of the World.' And if you don't have that to hang on to, you better look into it. [1979]

pgs. 515-516

[...]

Bob Dylan: Hmmm. Pretty rude bunch tonight, huh? You all know how to be real rude. You know about the spirit of the Anti-Christ? Does anyone here know about that? Ah, the spirit of the Anti-Christ is loose right now. Let me give you an example [begins to tell story about a guru spraying his disciples with a fire extinguisher, at which point someone loudly shouts, 'Rock & roll!']... If you want rock & roll, you go down and rock & roll. You can go an see Kiss and you can rock & roll all the way down to the pit! [continues story until, responding to further shouts of 'Rock & roll!']... You still wanna rock & roll? I'll tell you what the two kinds of people are. Don't matter how much money you got, there's only two kinds of people: there's saved people and there's lost people. Yeah. Remember that I told you that. You may never see me again. You may not see me, but sometime down the line, you remember you heard it here, that Jesus is Lord. Every knee shall bow!! [1979]

pg. 517

[...]

Bruce Heiman: I think basically what they are talking about is your stand in the past and the type of music you played, with the message you tried to get across, and the music you're playing today [and] the different message you're trying to get across. Bob Dylan: Yeah, well, whatever the old message was, the Bible says, 'All things become new, old things are passed away.' I guess this group doesn't believe that. What is it exactly that they're protesting [about]? BH: Well, the atheists are against any sort of religion, be it Christianity... BD: Well, Christ is no religion. We're not talking about religion. Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. BH: There's another statement they made that maybe you could shed some light on. They said they would like to remind Dylan fans and audiences that one's right to say something does not per se lend any validity to that statement. So, in essence, what they're saying is that you have followers who are going to be at the concert and are going to listen to the message of your music. BD: Right, I follow God, so if my followers are following me, indirectly they're gonna be following God, too, because I don't sing any song which hasn't been given to me by the Lord to sing. BH: Okay. So I think that was one thing that they were concerned about. Do you have any idea what they mean... see, they believe that all religion is repressive and reactionary. BD: Well, religion is repressive to a certain degree. Religion is another form of bondage, which man invents to get himself to God. But that's why Christ came. Christ didn't preach religion. He preached the truth, the way, and the life. He said He'd come to give life and life more abundantly. He is talking about life, not necessarily religion... My ideology now would be coming out of the Scriptures. You see, I didn't invent these things. These things have just been shown to me and I'll stand on that faith, that they are true. I believe they're true. I know they're true. BH: Do you feel that the message of your music has changed over the years, from the music which talked about war to music that now talks about Christianity? BD: No. There's gonna be a war. There's always war and rumors of war. And the Bible talks about a war coming up which will be a war to end all wars... [in which] the spirit of the atheist will not prevail. I can tell you that much.

The shows in Tucson signaled the end of the first stage of Dylan's mission, as he retired to his Minnesota farm for his first Christmas as a Christian in a family of Jews. But 'preaching the Gospel from place to place' was back on the agenda soon enough, commencing with shows the second week in January in Oregon. If the message remained the same, Dylan had shed the one force in the band close enough to coax him into a broader view of faith. Helena Springs had departed from the tour after a particularly uncomfortable confrontation.

pgs. 519-520

Clinton Heylin, recognized as the world's leading Bob Dylan scholar, is the author of Bootleg! and Dylan: Day by Day. He also edited The Penguin Book of Rock and Roll Writing and is the general editor of Schirmer's Classic Rock Albums series. A native of Manchester, he now makes his home in Somerset, England.


[edit] Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan

What follows is a series of excerpts from Howard Sounes' Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan. It is intended for use as a source for the Bob Dylan article and the List of notable converts to Christianity page. It is placed here purely for the purposes of review.


There were signs during the latter stages of the 1978 tour that Bob had become caught up in this enthusiasm for Jesus Christ. Bob met his old college friend Dave Whitaker after a concert in Oakland, California, in mid-November, and spoke to Dave's eleven-year-old son, Ubi. "Would you send me a guitar?" asked the kid. The next day a truck pulled up with a gift from Dylan- a brand-new Fender Stratocaster decorated with quotations from the Book of Paul. A few days later Bob played a show in San Diego. He picked up a cross that a fan had thrown on stage and started wearing it. Shortly after this incident Bob felt what he later described as "this vision and feeling," which he believed to be the presence of Jesus Christ in the room. Billy Cross was sitting next to Bob on the bus when he looked over and noticed that Bob seemed to be writing a spiritual song- "Slow Train Coming"- the lyrics of which were only partly formed at this time but which described a resurgence of faith of God. The band played the song at a sound check in Nashville on December 2.

The catalyst to Bob's extraordinary full-blown conversion to Christianity seems to have been his relationship with sometime girlfriend Mary Alice Artes, although his relationship with Carolyn Dennis also focused his mind on the subject. Artes was linked with the Vineyard Fellowship, a small but growing evangelical church in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. The Fellowship was founded in 1974 by Kenn GUlliksen, a singing pastor with a Lutheran background. "I did an album of my own and had a number-one song in the Christian world," he says. "It sounded like The Carpenters, it was so boring." Popular music was used to enliven services at the Fellowship, with people encouraged to get up and play songs. Several well-known musicians were associated with the Vineyard Fellowship, including a member of The Eagles. Church meetings were informal and Pastor Kenn often dressed in shorts. Because the Fellowship did not have a dedicated church building, they would lease buildings or meet on the beach. Ideologically, the Vineyard Fellowship was Bible-based, taking a fairly strong line on drugs, excessive drinking, and adultery.

Pastor Kenn says Mary Alice Artes approached him one Sunday in January 1979 after a service in a rented church building in Reseda and said she wanted somebody to speak with her boyfriend at home. Two of Pastor Kenn's colleagues, Paul Edmond and Larry Myers, duly went with Artes to an apartment in the West Los Angeles suburb of Brentwood. It was here that they met Bob. According to Pastor Kenn, who received a report back, Bob told them his life was empty. The pastors replied that God was the "only ultimate success" and Bob indicated that he wanted what Pastor Kenn calls a "lifestyle relationship" with God. "He was apparently ready to ask for God's forgiveness for sin," says Pastor Kenn. Larry Myers spoke to Bob about Jesus Christ, and talked about the Bible, from Genesis through to the Revelation of St. John the Divine. "Sometime in the next few days, privately and on his own, Bob accepted Christ and believed that Jesus Christ is indeed the Messiah," says Myers.

Bob later said that Mary Alice Artes was instrumental in his conversion. But she resists suggestions that any one person was responsible. "I cannot lead anyone to the Lord... I could only say that God did what he had to do," she says. "I think that too many people wanna be glorifying themselves in a situation that really should not have any glory at all."

Bob and Mary Alice enrolled in the Vineyard Fellowship's School of Discipleship, attending Bible class most weekday mornings for more than three months at the beginning of 1979. At first Bob thought there was no way that he could devote so much time to the project; he felt he had to get back on the road. Soon, though, he found himself awake at 7 A.M., compelled to get up and drive to the real estate office in Reseda where Bible classes were held. "I couldn't believe I was there," he said.

Assistant Pastor Bill Dwyer, who taught a class on the Sermon on the Mount, recalls Bob as being withdrawn in Bible class and also when he made rare appearances at church. "He probably needs to be," says Pastor Bill. "The few times he would [come] into church people would glom onto him: Oh, it's Bob Dylan!" Indeed, Pastor Bill, who had all Bob's albums, had to restrain himself from doing the same.

It was during this late winter/spring period of 1979 that Mary Alice Ares was baptized in a swimming pool at Pastor Bill's house.

"This was total immersion. Because baptism is a symbol of burial, burying guilt, and then pulling the new man out of the water," says Pastor Kenn. Bob attended the baptism and, not long afterward, Bob was himself baptized, probably in the ocean, which was where the fellowship normally conducted baptisms. By being immersed in water, Bob became, in common parlance, a born-again Christian, though he would later shrink from the term, claiming he had never used it. Yet he was clearly quoted in a 1980 interview with trusted Los Angeles Times journalist Robert Hilburn saying: "I truly has a born-again experience, if you want to call it that. It's an overused term, but it's something that people can relate to."

An element of religiosity had always existed in Bob's work, and it was particularly strong on the album John Wesley Harding. Religion had in fact been with him since childhood when his father instilled a strict moral code in his eldest son and sent him to study with a rabbi for his bar mitzvah. As a songwriter, Bob had always felt himself to be a channel for inspiration. At the start of his career, he told Sing Out! that words just came to him: "The songs are there. They exist all by themselves just waiting for someone to write them down." In this sense, he had a powerful everyday connection with a mysterious source of information and, over the years, he came to think that the songs arose from God. It was a small step, apparently, from this to flinging himself headfirst into orthodox religion. Yet Bob of course was born and raised in the Jewish faith, and it is fundamentally wrong to most Jews to think of Jesus Christ as the Messiah. "For a person to be a 'completed Jew' is very offensive to them," admits Pastor Kenn. "They think that is an oxymoron, where as I see it, Christians see it, and Jewish Christians see it at the [truth]." Indeed, Bob's embracing of Christianity caused consternation, and some offense, among his Jewish friends and family. "I think it was for publicity, that's what I think. Because he is Jewish-minded, plenty Jewish-minded. He was brought up that way. He was bar mitzvahed," says Bob's aunt, Ethel Crystal.

Bob's conversion to Christianity also caused considerable upset to his own children, who had been raised in the Jewish faith. Suddenly, packs of journalists were following their father to the Vineyard Fellowship in the hope of getting pictures of him going to a Christian church, and then staking out his home. The children saw this commotion when they visited their father. It was embarrassing and one of the few times when his celebrity was a problem in their lives.

pgs. 324-326

In the fall of 1983, Bob's seventeen-year-old son Jesse had a belated bar mitzvah in Jerusalem- Jakob and Samuel had already been bar mitzvahed in California- and Bob was photographed wearing a yarmulke at the Wailing Wall, adding to speculation that he had returned to Judaism. "As far as we're concerned, he was a confused Jew," Rabbi Kasriel Kastel told Christianity Today. "We feel he's coming back." In fact, Jesse was on vacation in Israel with his grandmother, Beatty, when they discovered a bar mitzvah could be conducted quickly and easily at the Wailing Wall and Bob simply flew in to play his part. He still believed Jesus Christ was the Messiah, and kept a broadly Christian outlook, although he had not maintained regular contact with the Vineyard Fellowship since the early flush of his conversion.

pg. 356


[edit] The Rough Guide to Bob Dylan (2nd Edition)

What follows is a series of excerpts from Nigel Willamson's The Rough Guide to Bob Dylan (2nd Edition). It is intended for use as a source for the Bob Dylan article and the List of notable converts to Christianity page. It is placed here purely for the purposes of review.

[edit] Jewish roots' sidebar

Prior to his Christian conversion, Dylan had shown some interest in getting back in touch with his Jewish roots. After his father's funeral in June 1968, he confessed to Harold Leventhal, Woody Guthrie's former manager, that he had never really known the man who was Abe Zimmerman. Leventhal's response was to urge Dylan to get back in touch with his Jewish faith. Over the next few years he read widely around the subject and held talks with Rabbi Meir Kahane, a founder of the Jewish Defense League.

He visited the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem on his birthday in May 1971. Time magazine reported that he was considering changing his name back to Zimmerman. Dylan dismissed such reports as "pure journalese". But he did consider the possibility of taking his family to live on a kibbutz. Bruce Dorfman, the painter who was his neighbor in Woodstock, reported that when he returned from Israel he was seriously considering become a Hasid. Instead, by the end of the decade he had become a born-again Christian.

His conversion caused offence to members of his family and is Jewish friends. "I think it was for publicity, that's what I think," said his aunt Ethel Crystal. "He is Jewish-minded, plenty Jewish-minded, he was brought up that way. He was bar mitzvahed." And, despite his Christian conversion, his children all had bar mitzvahs and he attended the ceremonies on each occasion. When he encountered Leventhal at a party in Hollywood in 1980, his old friend confronted him and demanded, "What have you got that cross dangling around you for?"

In 1982, there were strong rumours that he was again exploring his Jewish heritage, sparked by a picture of him wearing a yarmulke at the bar mitzvah of his son Jesse in Jerusalem. The following year there were further stories that he had been spending time with an ultra-orthodox sect called the Lubavitchers and even that he had recorded an album of Hasidic songs. Dylan kept silent, which only encouraged the rumours.

By 1986, Allen Ginsberg was claiming that Dylan had reverted back to "his natural Judaism". Dylan appeared with his son-in-law Peter Himmelman (husband of his step-daughter Maria) at the annual Jewish Chabad telethon in Los Angeles in November 1989 wearing a yarmulke and singing "Hava Nagila". But ultimately, the importance of his Jewish roots appears to have been cultural rather than religious.


[edit] The Vineyard Fellowship' sidebar

The Vineyard Fellowship, to which Dylan's girlfriend Mary Alice Artes introduced him in late 1978, was a small evangelical church that peddled a New Age, born-again version of Christianity. It had been found in Los Angeles in 1974 by Ken Gulliksen, who had previous been a singer on the Christian Music circuit. The church's style was informal. Gulliksen took services dressed in his shorts and counted a number of LA musicians among his congregation, including T-Bone Burnett, Steven Soles and David Mansfield, all of whom had played on Dylan's Rolling Thunder Tour.


[edit] Body Text

In January 1979, one of Dylan's girlfriends, Mary Alice Artes, approached Pastor Kenn Gulliksen of an evangelical church called the Vineyard Fellowship in the San Fernando Valley and told him that he wanted someone to speak to her boyfriend. Gulliksen sent two colleagues, Paul Esmond and Larry Myers, to meet Dylan in the West LA suburb of Brentwood. Within days he had signed up with the Fellowship. Sometime in the coming weeks, he was baptized and he and Artes commenced a three-month series of bible classes at the School of Discipleship.

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