Redeeming Dylan by J.D. BUHL
When a haggard and horny Bob Dylan slipped into Victoria’s Secret commercials a few years ago, a vituperative cry went up until some clearheaded journalist reminded us that when asked in 1965, “If you were going to sell out to a commercial interest, which one would you choose?” Dylan answered, “Ladies garments.”
A cry of greater intensity greeted Dylan’s conversion to Christianity in the late ’70s. There was a deep sense of betrayal, since Dylan has always been cast as emblematic of ’60s counterculture values and revolutionary politics, and the emerging evangelical subculture he identified with had not been invited to the party.
Biographers have urged us to see this musical and spiritual direction in the context of his whole career, citing Dylan’s moral fortitude and earlier use of biblical imagery. In Dylan Redeemed (Continuum, 2006), the latest book on Dylan’s “Christian period” (1979-1983), Wabash College professor Stephen H. Webb looks to the past to say Dylan “became the conscience of his generation by contradicting it.”
Webb is writing in the post-Chronicles era (Dylan’s 2004 autobiography changed everything) and wrings from 40-plus years of scholarship on the artist a new approach, proposing that Dylan’s Christian period “looks unnatural only to those who let a leftist political perspective dominate their interpretations of his work.” Webb sees Dylan as more of a religious artist than a political one throughout his career and wishes to extricate him from the context of ’60s cultural radicalism that he believes has led to selfresentations of Dylan’s work by those who feel they have Bob on their side. A few such Dylanologists he addresses directly, finding in their work a refusal to let the artist be himself. “Try as [they] might,” he concludes, “[they] never manage to separate Dylan’s music from [their] own political passion.”
Webb also presents an alternative to the theory that the artist’s turn to Jesus was the result of disillusionment with the idealized woman and his commercial/critical low at the time. Such positions bring him up against some of the best writers in rock journalism, and Stephen Webb is no rock ‘n’ roller. This is a man who credits “Bill Harley”—instead of Haley (one of many annoying mistakes in the book)—as an inventor of rock ‘n’ roll, blows a sly reference to Steely Dan by spelling Rikki incorrectly, and admits to singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” at church camp with no knowledge of its origin. But the fact that he accepted the song as an old Christian hymn fuels his contention that Dylan’s conversion should not have come as any surprise.
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