“FAMOUS DOGS OF THE CIVIL WAR” – Part 2 (Or, “DYLAN’S CHRISTIAN CONVERSION: A SIMPLE TWIST OF FATE?”)

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Fate: …3. that which is inevitably predetermined; destiny: Death is our ineluctable fate. 4. a prophetic declaration of what must be: The oracle pronounced their fate.
~ Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary

Do we have free will? Or is everything foreordained by God? How can a God know our every decision in advance unless our decisions were Divinely preprogrammed? But how then could there be free will?

Or . . . is there another possibility?

There are a number of people who idolize the singer Bob Dylan (Robert Allen Zimmerman) to such a degree that they are sometimes referred to as “Dylanologists”. These people analyze every lyric Dylan ever wrote, they read all the books about him, they contemplate his every burp, and they pretty much go through life asking, “What Would Dylan Do?”

That’s not me. I ain’t no Dylanologist, even though I admit to having a strange fascination with the man entirely because of his extraordinary songwriting talent and because, as I’ve often said, his music pretty much taught me how to think creatively.

In very early 1993, I got the idea to write some kind of a poem-like thing. I wanted to write a free-form, non-rhyming poem in which the title was considerably longer than the poem itself. I’m certainly not saying that the end result was good but I believe it was an original idea, and one I doubt seriously I would have ever imagined had I not learned to open up my mind to unique creative ideas as a result of listening to songs like “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” many years earlier.

The title of my poem-thing was:

BELIEVING THERE IS A POSSIBILITY THAT IT MIGHT NOT LIVE UP TO ITS WORLD RENOWNED REPUTATION, I AM UNWILLING TO PART WITH MY EXTREMELY HARD-EARNED AND DISMALLY MEAGER FUNDS IN ORDER TO PURCHASE THE TICKET REQUIRED TO GAIN ADMITTANCE TO THE CIRCUS THAT HAS COME TO TOWN.

And the poem itself went like this:

Life looks interesting
Passing by my window day and night
I’d join in
But it might be cold outside

Did that seem nonsensical? Actually, it really had a message to convey – regardless of whether or not it was conveyed effectively.

The “Circus” in the title is meant to represent life itself, and the subject of the poem is our reluctance to fully live life because we fear the pain we might experience while living “xtremely”. We fear spending our funds (i.e., investing our energy and taking chances) on a Circus (i.e., a life) that might ultimately hurt or disappoint us. So we just stay indoors and watch others live their lives while they pass by our "window", or across our TV screens, or in the pages of the books we read.

Not great poetry, obviously, but I did have something to say and believe I found a creative way of saying it, thanks in part to the music of Bob Dylan.

I don’t believe I would like Dylan on a personal level, but from time to time I do think about him and what he’s written. And I have thought about his conversion to Christianity in 1978. I think I may have an orginal idea about Dylan’s religious experience and if you’ll hang in here with me, you may find it raises some intriguing questions . . .

Here’s a bit of background info borrowed from the “Slow Train Coming” Wikipedia page:

Dylan was in good spirits, according to his own account. "I was doing fine. I had come a long way in just the year we were on the road [in 1978]." This would change on November 17th in San Diego, California. As Clinton Heylin reports, "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."


"Towards the end of the show someone out in the crowd...knew I wasn't feeling too well," recalled Dylan in a 1979 interview. "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 I 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."


Dylan believed he had experienced a vision of Christ in his Tucson hotel room. "Jesus did appear to me as King of Kings, and Lord of Lords," he'd later say. "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."
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"[Dylan's] conversion wasn't one of those things that happens when an alcoholic goes to Alcoholics Anonymous," David Mansfield, one of Dylan's band members and fellow-born-again Christian, would later say. "The simplest explanation is that he had a very profound experience which answered certain lifelong issues for him."

In 1965, on the heels of his “Bringing It All Back Home” album release, but prior to the recording of the “Highway 61 Revisited” album – which was released later that same year – Bob Dylan played a series of late April/early May concerts in England. That tour was famously preserved in the legendary D.A. Pennebaker film “Don’t Look Back”.

There is one portion of that documentary that I find exceedingly intriguing: Dylan is being interviewd by a throng of journalists. At one point, a young female carries on a brief, whispered, semi-secret conversation with Bob Dylan. In the DVD set’s accompanying booklet she is referred to simply as “Girl Reporter”, but to be more specific, she was in fact Maureen Cleave of the ‘London Evening Standard’.

Here’s what was said in 1965, followed by a video showing the actual exchange:

Girl Reporter: [Leans over and whispers to Dylan.] “Do you ever read the Bible?”
Bob Dylan: “What about the Bible?”

Girl Reporter: “Do you ever read the Bible?”
Bob Dylan: “Um . . .  no.”

Girl Reporter: “Have you read it?”
Bob Dylan: “Have I ever? I’ve glanced through it…”

Girl Reporter: “Because you see, a lot of the things you say…”
Bob Dylan: “I’ve glanced through it. I haven’t read it.”

And that’s how the conversation ended because Dylan seemed uneager to follow that line of questioning and he turned his attention to other matters in the room.

Here’s the video of that exchange:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxUXd8wt3ng

Remember now, this was prior to the recording of songs like “Highway 61 Revisited” which begins with the lines, “Oh God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’. Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on’” and other songs with clear Biblical references. It was also 13 years prior to Dylan’s conversion to Christianity.

Granted there were allusions to The Bible in earlier songs, such as “Gates Of Eden” etc., but in my opinion, it was fairly perceptive of “Girl Reporter” Maureen Cleave to have discerned the religious thread that could be found woven into many of Dylan’s earliest songs. And it also begs the question, did she somehow instinctively suspect that times they were a-changin’ for Bob Dylan in some sort of spiritual sense?

And now we’ve arrived at my original observation. Well, I seriously doubt it’s too original; some of the Dylanologists must have noticed this before, but I have never seen or heard it mentioned anywhere:

In 1978, Bob Dylan had his religious experience and converted to Christianity. The following year he released his first album of Christian music titled “SLOW TRAIN COMING”. I believe it’s almost a given that the train symbol is meant to express the idea that the “Second Coming” of Jesus Christ is just up around the bend. And Christ may be coming “slowly”, but He’s also coming with the unstoppable force and power of a train. It may have also been a reference to the “Gospel train” in the traditional spiritual “If I Got My Ticket”.

But awhile back I was reading through the liner notes that Dylan wrote for his 1965 album “Highway 61 Revisited”. The notes are just some crazy, seemingly nonsensical story and I think a person would have to be flying on the magic peyote carpet of many colors to make heads or tails out of it. However, something he referred to three different times in those liner notes (3 = Father, Son & Holy Spirit?) really knocked me on the noggin. Remember now, this was 1965 – 13 years before Dylan’s Christian conversion and the release of the “Slow Train Coming” album!

The story begins like this:
“On the slow train time does not interfere…

Not long later we encounter this:
“…she points to the slow train & prays for rain and for time to interfere -”

And toward the end we encounter this:
“the songs on this specific record are not so much songs but rather exercises in tonal breath control… the subject matter – tho meaningless as it is – has something to do with the beautiful strangers… the beautiful strangers, Vivaldi’s green jacket & the holy slow train”.

“The holy slow train”? What was Dylan referring to in '65? Did he himself even know? When he recorded his first Christian album 13 years later, “Slow Train Coming”, did he even remember his reference to a “holy slow train” in his “Highway 61 Revisited” album liner notes? It seems to me that something hard to explain was at work throughout Dylan’s professional life. I sense that perhaps there was something more than meets the eye - something occurring behind the scenes - in all of this.

Was Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity merely a simple twist of fate? Did he really have a choice? Was it decreed by God that Dylan embrace God’s Son even before Robert Allen Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota on May 24, 1941?

In the final installment of this series, I will take a brief look at Biblical prophecy and propose a theory I developed years ago which might explain how it is possible for all of us to have absolute free will while it’s simultaneously possible for God to know in advance very precisely every decision we will make.

~ Stephen T. McCarthy

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