Inside Bob Dylan's Jesus Years
Review by Josh Hurst | posted 1/01/2008
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Columbia Records recently released Tell Tale Signs, the eighth installment of their official "bootleg" series of Bob Dylan rarities. The album includes two discs of outtakes, soundtrack cuts, live recordings, and general leftovers from the past two decades of Dylan's recording career—and it's a recording that finds Dylan, at the age of 67, to be just as cagey, elusive, and utterly inscrutable as ever. Which seems to be part of a larger trend: In the past few years, Dylan has saturated the market like never before, opening up the book of his life in the form of documentaries and feature films, a TV special and an autobiography, telling us more about himself and his work than ever before. Not surprisingly, Dylan's transparency has led to more questions than answers; it seems the more he tells us, the less we actually know about him.
Not that many fans would complain; part of Dylan's appeal has always been his mystery, an allure that attracts people from all walks of life and all musical tastes. That mysterious allure took an interesting turn in the late 1970s, when Dylan notoriously announced that he'd been born again and proceeded to record a trilogy of overtly Christian albums, even refusing to play his earlier, "secular" songs at many of his concerts. It was a baffling, beguiling chapter in one of the most colorful and unusual careers in rock history, one that found Dylan opening up about his spiritual life while also adding to his mystique.
Bob Dylan performing around 1980
Such is the subject of Inside Bob Dylan's Jesus Years: Busy Being Born … Again!, a new documentary that goes to great lengths to recreate that seminal period of Dylan's career and find some answers in it.
Not surprisingly, the film leaves more questions than answers, and even after viewing it, Dylan-ologists will find him no less mysterious. And yet, for the way it recreates the mood and atmosphere of that time in Dylan's life, contextualizes it within the broader confines of his career and work, and poses bigger questions about art, faith, commerce, it's a sometimes insightful film that's well worth watching.
But for whom is it most worth watching? The film is far-reaching, providing background for those less familiar with Dylan's career, going into painstaking detail about the reception of his first Christian album, Slow Train Coming, even discussing some of the technical, musical aspects of that seminal recording. This broad approach is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness; it ensures that there's something here for both hardcore Dylan fans as well as evangelicals who are simply curious, but it also means that, as a movie, it's a bit scattershot, and at times unfocused.
Dylan and band, 1979
But for its wealth of familiar history and new insight, it's ultimately a piece of work that offers ample reward. Director Joel Gilbert—who himself sports a mess of curly hair that makes him look a bit too much like a Dylan impersonator—coaxes some thoughtful responses from his interview subjects. Alas, Dylan himself is not interviewed here, except in a few short seconds of archival interview footage from the '70s. But Gilbert does speak at length with Bill Dwyer, the Vineyard pastor who mentored Dylan immediately after his conversion. Hearing a pastor talk about the experience of having Bob Dylan in his Bible study is alone worth the price of admission, and Dwyer's insights are invaluable for setting the scene, explaining the spiritual climate of that time and place—and how it led Dylan to make his Christian profession.
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