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Down The Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan
Howard Sounes
Grove/Atlantic, 432 pages, $27.50

When Bob Dylan announced his born-again experience in 1978 and then recorded the album Slow Train Coming, I was an enthusiastic supporter of the change and was frequently called on to explain and justify it in the secular media. My argument was that Dylan had now found the answers to the questions he had so poignantly articulated to date and was a permanently altered man.

My opponents, and that included just about everyone else writing about rock music at the time, argued that it was just another Dylan phase, like polka-dot shirts or living in the country, and that he would grow out of it. Most of them hoped the phase would be brief, for while Christianity might have saved Dylan's soul, they believed it had damned his art.

From the perspective of May 2001, the month of Dylan's 60th birthday, these critics would probably consider their skepticism justified. After all, the finger-pointing gospel only lasted for three albums (Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love), the apocalyptic stage raps have long since stopped and whenever Dylan is questioned about his faith by interviewers he is evasive. As early as 1983 he was reportedly close to an Orthodox Hasidic sect, the Lubavitchers.

I don't regret welcoming the news of Dylan's conversion, but I made a mistake in assuming that his life was as rock solid as the songs. Because he sang so uncompromisingly about his new life and the weak foundation of his old life, I had added a few of my own assumptions and fit Dylan into an apologetic. The best advice I got was from a former sideman of Dylan's who had converted about the same time. He said it would be safer to distinguish between the lyrics of the songs, which would remain true whatever failings their author may later exhibit, and Dylan himself.

Yet I think the critics were wrong in assuming that Christianity was just another style for Dylan to try on. He didn't go on to recant. Dylan did say in one recent interview that he hadn't claimed to be a born-again Christian. (This despite his telling Robert Hillburn of the Los Angeles Times, in November 1980, "I truly had a born-again experience.")

It may be that Dylan doesn't want to be confined by a term with associations that are frequently more cultural than theological. This seemed to be the thinking behind his response to Edna Gundersen of USA Today when she raised the born-again issue with him in 1989. "Whatever label is put on you," he said, "the purpose of it is to limit your accessibility to people."

Likewise Dylan's songs have never denied the truths he exulted in so openly at the turn of the 1980s. True, the ardor of such songs as "Gotta Serve Somebody" and "Property of Jesus" has cooled, but that may be no bad thing. There was a brief time when he seemed to be denying his broader vision and restraining his poetic gifts in order to deliver "the message." It is natural that he would eventually move from writing about the light to writing about what could be seen by the light.

But is Dylan any more than an artist fascinated by religion who has a soft spot for the language of the Bible and a conviction that the world is headed for a conflagration? This is not a question that preoccupies Howard Sounes, author of Down the Highway. Sounes is more excited to discover that Dylan was secretly married to his backup singer, Carolyn Dennis, between 1986 and 1992 and that they had a child together.

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May 21 2001, Vol. 45, No. 7