Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (35 page)

All of this could be reconciled with messianic Judaism, no doubt, but for one difficulty. Among other things, Chabad-Lubavitch, perhaps the biggest of the Hasidic sects, styles itself as a Jewish ‘outreach’ operation. As such, it has devoted a good deal of its time and energy over the years to counteracting Christian missionary work among Jews. Dylan’s presence in Crown Heights between 1982 and 1986 would come about as the result, direct or indirect, of a determined effort to reclaim him for Judaism. A Lubavitcher from Minnesota, one Rabbi Manis Friedman, an individual later to be condemned universally for voicing grotesque opinions on child sex abuse, would get most of the credit for waging the campaign to win the artist back for the home team.
³⁶
Hence the widespread belief in the early 1980s – a belief not discouraged by Columbia Records – that Dylan had given up on the born-again Christianity fad and returned to his secular (if Jewish) ways.

This, though, is where things become a little more interesting. The venerable Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who would be 84 in the summer of 1986, was a determined evangelist for Judaism, but also, simultaneously, a keen promoter of efforts to ‘hasten the messianic age’. By the time Dylan came to make contact with the Chabad-Lubavitch sect, many of Menachem Schneerson’s followers would be proclaiming the belief, unprecedented in Judaism, that the rebbe
was
the Messiah. Within the wider faith the assertion would prove controversial, to put it no higher, but it remains the case that the sect has failed to replace its rabbi since his death in 1994 – again, a decision without precedent – while claims made for his status have accumulated, both in Israel and in America. A headstone beside his open-air mausoleum in the New York borough of Queens refers to Schneerson in Hebrew as ‘the Messiah of God’. Some have further alleged that he acknowledged this supposed fact while still alive.

As it is, the idea of a dead Messiah is unthinkable to traditional Jews. In 1996, the Rabbinical Council of America passed by an overwhelming majority a resolution declaring: ‘In light of disturbing developments which have arisen in the Jewish community, the Rabbinical Council of America in convention assembled declares that there is not and has never been a place in Judaism for the belief that Mashiach ben David (the Messiah, son of David) will begin his messianic mission only to experience death, burial and resurrection before completing it.’

The fact remains that by the time the
Daily News
carried its report on his four years of intermittent study and worship in Crown Heights, fully a decade before the council spoke out, Dylan would be spending a lot of his time with people who believed the Messiah was among them. In 1986, bluntly, the artist would be listening to talks from the alleged Messiah himself. So the figure of a saviour and the idea of salvation would linger in Dylan’s life and thought while Chabad-Lubavitch worked to reclaim him for Judaism. Whether He turned out to be Jesus or an aged rabbi, what would matter most for the artist during and after his Vineyard interlude was this ineluctable figure, this mystery, the Messiah. In practice, it would amount to a subtle change in theological emphasis. In his interview during the summer of 1984, irrespective of the shifting balance of religious allegiances in his own mind, Dylan could sound for all the world as though he was still as one with the evangelicals on a central point of belief. As he would tell
Rolling Stone
’s Kurt Loder:

But what’s going on today isn’t gonna last, you know? The battle of Armageddon is specifically spelled out: where it will be fought, and if you wanna get technical, when it will be fought. And the battle of Armageddon definitely will be fought in the Middle East.
³⁷

Little more than a year later, it would seem to most readers of
Spin
magazine that the bloodcurdling theme had persisted. In September 1985, Dylan would lay it all out for Scott Cohen.

The messianic thing has to do with this world, the flesh world, and you got to pass through this to get to that. The messianic thing has to do with the world of mankind, like it is. This world is scheduled to go for 7,000 years. Six thousand years of this, where man has his way, and 1,000 years where God has his way. Just like a week. Six days works, one day rest. The last thousand years is called the Messianic Age. Messiah will rule. He is, was, will be about God, doing God’s business. Drought, famine, war, murder, theft, earthquakes and all other evil things will be no more. No more disease. That’s all of this world.
³⁸

In this interview, Dylan would recite his lessons and recite them almost word for word. The point is that these were the lessons, wholly unexceptional, of conservative Judaism, not of the Armageddon-obsessed Christian evangelicals. Talking to
Spin
, Dylan would fail to make that distinction clear. The battle at the End of Days due to be incited by Messiah refuseniks is not a major part of Jewish teaching. Instead, the passing of 6,000 years is seen almost as a stage in human development. In his telling of this version, you’ll notice, Dylan would make no mention of a Technicolor apocalypse, clashing armies, mass destruction and the promised eradication of one-third of humanity. The six-from-seven schema mentioned was lifted by the fundamentalist Protestants for the seven ‘dispensations’ – this one is number six, of course – which an ingenious God has devised, supposedly, to run tests of obedience on humanity. But by 1985, if not before, Dylan would have transferred his allegiance to old Jewish prophecy.

He would tell Cohen that when the time came there would be ‘a run on godliness’, that people were ‘gonna run to the Jews’ for the word of God and that Jews, embroiled in worldly things, ‘ain’t gonna know’. That sounds like Schneerson talking. Nevertheless, thanks to the Lubavitchers, Dylan would discern an important difference between the big fireworks promised in
The Late, Great Planet Earth
and his own tradition’s long-held views on the messianic age. You could equally say that he would make a choice of superstitions, that he would wind up choosing between two irrational fairy tales to make his life seem more rational. But they would be his choices.

Dylan would be consistently inconsistent in the years ahead. He does not practise systematic theology. He does favour obedience to instinct and emotion. He is as creative in the matter of fundamentalist superstition as he is in everything else. That he remains the religious fundamentalist he became in early 1979 is, meanwhile, self-evident. His habits of thought are eclectic, however. As we have seen, the Book of Revelation, a text not easily reconciled with Schneerson’s teachings, far less with the rebbe’s alleged status as Messiah, would go on exercising a profound fascination in all the decades to come during the long effort to unite art with faith. Dylan is a messianic Jew but, thanks to Chabad-Lubavitch, a lot more Jewish than Christian.

The singer Helena Springs, who knew him as well as anyone in 1978 and 1979, would later assert that in converting the artist was simply ‘exploring Christianity. He didn’t give up being a Jewish person, but he learned how to pray. And when he’d learned all he could learn, he went on to something else.’
³⁹
These days, Dylan makes his observances in synagogues, not churches, while proclaiming his belief in Revelation to passing journalists. Just to keep professors of comparative religion on their toes, he is also the unabashed author of an album entitled
Christmas in the Heart
. As ever, he does not care who is left puzzled.

In 1979 and 1980 he would accept the Vineyard’s fire-and-brimstone sermons with little apparent argument. Soon enough, nevertheless, he would begin to prowl again through the thickets and lush pastures of esoteric wisdom. It seems likely, too, that Dylan failed – and who can really blame him? – to get every version of the end-times tale straight in his head. For all that, the single, fixed messianic idea became embedded in his Judaeo-Christian thinking in 1979 and it would not shift.

You could give Dylan, or Chabad, some credit for sophistication. As it turns out, there is a way to read Revelation simply as a rewrite of old Jewish apocalyptic literature. You can make the argument, too, that one of the rewriters, stuck on an island off the Turkish coast in the first century, was a good messianic Jew whose lurid allegory was intended as propaganda to prevent the cult of rabbi Yeshua from opening itself up to Gentiles, as the apostle-apostate Paul was then demanding.
⁴⁰
With all that in mind, someone who might have been burned by importuning twentieth-century evangelical Californian Protestants could these days treat Revelation as ‘essentially an anti-Christian polemic’ and as good Jewish literature.
⁴¹
For someone with a messianic outlook, the strange book’s code – a Dylan word, if ever there was one – conceals the story of a persecuted Jew’s struggle to proclaim the Messiah while remaining Jewish. The controversies over Menachem Schneerson would then be relevant. The puzzles over Bob Dylan’s meandering path to faith would certainly be relevant.

A lot of points need to be stretched to reach that conclusion. For one, Dylan didn’t know any of that stuff when he went under in a Santa Monica swimming pool. Mainstream Judaism finds Revelation interesting, at best, but unacceptable. There was a lot of apocalyptic literature around, in any case, when the book was being written. Many scholars meanwhile reject the anti-Christian interpretation of the text. Cut away all the possibilities and you are left with the simple fact that Dylan’s top text to this day is the finale of the Christian Bible. His faith is messianic; religions are secondary.

So the joke is hardly worth resisting. One at whom the word ‘messiah’ had been tossed so often for the sake of irony or a tabloid headline acquired a conviction involving the alleged real deal. At the end of another strange decade Dylan was living, writing and performing as though in the last days of the world. But try explaining that to a rock and roll audience.

DYLAN COULD HAVE DONE WITH THE SERVICES OF JERRY WEXLER ON
Street-Legal
. For the want of a competent producer a great album was almost lost. With Wexler in the Muscle Shoals control room for
Slow Train Coming
a poor group of songs unlikely to bring anyone to Christ was turned into a hit record, earning Dylan a Grammy award in the process. The producer didn’t deserve the entire credit – he would have no such success in his second attempt – but his presence in Sheffield, Alabama, was a reminder that the artist’s approach to recording was sometimes redeemed by the intercession of a guardian angel who could sense an incipient rhythm and read a VU meter. It would take Dylan a long time to learn the lesson.

The individual whose name and face appeared on the record sleeves didn’t like making records: you could call that an obstacle. He had no patience for the increasingly complex and painstaking work involved. He distrusted overdubs, headphones and all the technological voodoo. For preference, defying the evidence of his own ears when playbacks said he was making a mistake, he performed live with the band. In a radio interview in 1984 he would complain, a little extravagantly, that being in the recording studio was ‘like working in a coalmine’.
¹
In the spring of 1979, Wexler, the born unbeliever, a man whose personal interest in the content of Dylan’s latest set of lyrics approached zero, was a godsend. For years afterwards the producer would tell the story of how the artist ‘in an access of evangelism … pulled out the Bible and started to hit on me’. Wexler told him to forget it. Dylan was ‘dealing with a confirmed 63-year-old Jewish atheist’, one who had never once believed in any god, ‘not for a hot minute’.
²
The artist, to his credit, ‘cracked up’ when he was rebuffed. You sense, nevertheless, that the producer was making a stand in this small trial of strength. His autonomy in the studio, if not his soul, was at stake.

Whatever he thought of religion, Wexler understood something about gospel. You don’t produce Aretha’s
Amazing Grace
(1972) unless you know a few things. If you can also claim to have invented rhythm and blues – or at least to have come up with the term while working for
Billboard
after the war – you can probably locate any studio sound required, even when the client is an eccentric poet who suddenly wants to proselytise. In reality, Wexler’s deep knowledge of gospel music was not truly essential to
Slow Train Coming
, but his intuitions where the stubborn artist was concerned mattered greatly.

Dylan’s new-found faith, though disconcerting, had not the slightest influence on the veteran producer during the making of the album. In fact, Wexler’s lack of interest in any version of God might have been the dispassionate favour the artist needed. The additional presence of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section keyboard player and producer Barry Beckett was a bonus. Whatever anyone thought of the songs, no one was going to quarrel with the sound that was achieved. For Wexler and Beckett, that was a point of honour. For Dylan, with the unhappy memory of
Street-Legal
’s reception still fresh, it might have been the whole idea. He could be his own worst enemy in the struggle to get the sound he wanted, but want it he did. Rock and roll’s first and only poet was about to offer his fans a set of lyrics that many would find hard to swallow. He surely knew as much. An immaculate sound would act as a diversion, if not as a disguise. The sentiments in the words were impossible to disguise.

The producers were aided immeasurably, as was Dylan, by the guitar of Mark Knopfler. Many great musicians had coped with the artist, or failed to cope, over the course of 18 studio projects before
Slow Train Coming
, but the Dire Straits leader seemed from the start to have a better understanding of what he was up against than most. Knopfler had finished working with Wexler and Beckett on his band’s second album,
Communiqué
, not many weeks before. At the end of March he had found himself coming under Dylan’s scrutiny during the third and last Dire Straits performance in Los Angeles in the midst of a tour of Europe and America. After the show Knopfler had accepted the invitation to play on
Slow Train Coming
without hesitation, despite the fact that he and drummer Pick Withers had to be in Germany 12 days after the end of the Alabama sessions. They too would be a little taken aback by the nature of the songs on which they were expected to play. Dylan could count himself fortunate, nevertheless, that the guitarist found the time to lend some light and shade to his album. In later years Knopfler’s playing would sound mannered and self-referential, but in 1979, if your thoughts didn’t run to J.J. Cale, he was the freshest thing around.