God gave Rock and Roll to You

Here's the talk that I gave at Unveiled last Friday:

In the approach to Christmas 2022 several rock memoirs and other explorations of the genre were published that explored the place and influence of religion in rock music. These included Surrender, a memoir by Bono, the lead singer of U2, Faith, Hope and Carnage, a conversation between Nick Cave and the journalist Sean O’Hagan, a memoir entitled Walking Back Home by the lead singer of Deacon Blue, Ricky Ross, and Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song. Greg Clarke, writing about the former two books summed up their themes as being, “Submit, surrender, let God be God, recognise a higher power.” He wrote, “These are the concluding observations of two of the most famous musicians of the past forty years. It’s not very rock and roll.”

In this talk, I want to argue the reverse; that these themes of “Submit, surrender, let God be God, recognise a higher power” are actually very rock and roll. That’s because the roots of rock and soul music are to be found in Gospel music and because a variety of approaches to combining rock and religion have been practised since the birth of rock and roll in the 1950’s with a key distinction being whether one sings primarily about the light of Christ or about the way the world looks in the light of Christ.

In the early days of rock ‘n’ roll a unique event occurred; four of the biggest stars at the time happened to all be in the same recording studio at the very same time. They were Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee-Lewis, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley. Although they were not there to record but they did start a jam session. Someone left the tapes rolling, recorded their jamming and later released it under the title of the Million Dollar Quartet.

So, what did these four rock ‘n’ rollers sing when they got together for this impromptu jam session? The answer is that they sang hymns and country gospel songs. Because they all grew up in Southern Pentecostal Churches they drew on a shared background of Spirituals, Gospel and the charismata of Southern Pentecostalism. In creating rock ‘n’ roll each substituted what they deemed as secular words and movements for sacred songs and mannerisms. For example, Elvis’ first musical inspirations came at his Pentecostal church services at the Assembly of God in Tupelo. He later reflected that the more reserved singers didn't seem to inspire much fervor, but others did. They would be "jumpin' on the piano, movin' every which way. The audience liked 'em. I guess I learned from them singers."

As Bill Flanagan wrote in his book ‘Written In My Soul’, 'Rock & roll was born in the American South … The whole history of rock & roll could be told in Southern accents, from the delta bluesmen and country troubadours to the Baptist gospel singers and Okie folkies.' Blues singers included ministers and evangelists, such as Revd Gary Davies and Blind Willie Johnson. Paul Ackerman, a scholar of poetry and songs, wrote the following about Country singer Hank Williams: ‘A country songwriter without a highly developed sense of religious values is rare, so it is natural that Hank wrote many songs with spiritual themes.’ The tradition of Christian socialism in the US is epitomized particularly in the life and music of the folk singer Woody Guthrie.

Something similar occurred as Soul music developed out of Black Gospel. Ray Charles began a trend which was later successfully followed by the like of Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin, among many others, when he introduced gospel-singing techniques and the exhortatory style of Pentecostal preachers into his vocal style and adapted church-based songs into R&B hits. Tony Cummings wrote that: 'From James Brown to Diana Ross, black singers consistently show their origins to be a storefront church in Harlem or Macon or Detroit ... it’s a cliché. Every soul artist interviewed seems to have an identikit story – “I was always interested in music. I sang in a church choir.'

All of which means that rock and soul music has a spirit that derives from the exuberance and ecstasy of Gospel music (songs like Every time I feel the Spirit and Up Above My Head). This inspirational spirit informs the music regardless of its often-secularized content. Gayle Wald wrote that: ‘Like rock music, Pentecostalism tapped into something -- a Holy Spirit -- or human spirit? Whatever it was, it was deep and it seems to embody the sacred-secular tensions that run throughout the amazing story of rock.’ The entire purpose of Pentecostalism was to play music that most let its adherents feel the Holy Spirit in their bodies. It is that spirit that is transposed into the feel and flow of rock and soul and it is this that gives rock and soul its affective nature. As James Cosby writes this is where ‘the heart, joy and sheer exhilaration of rock 'n' roll comes from.’

Rock ‘n’ Roll merged blues (with its spiritual strand) and Country music (tapping its white gospel) while Soul music adapted much of its sound and content from Black Gospel. For both, their gestures and movements were adopted from Pentecostalism. Some, such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Cooke, felt guilt at secularising Gospel while others, like Johnny Cash, arrived at a hard-earned integration of faith and music.

All experienced opposition from a Church angry at its songs and influence being appropriated for secular ends. This opposition fed a narrative that, on both sides, equated rock and pop with hedonism and rebellion, with the born-again Cliff Richard often perceived (both positively and negatively) as the only alternative. Rock music was called ‘The Devil’s Music’ as it emerged from the secular culture of the 1950s. 'Conservative Christians in the United States were by turns hostile to the transgressive race-mixing early-1950s rock ’n’ roll and Elvis Presley’s hip-grinding sexuality, relieved by the early-1960s white-boy surf and hot-rod bands, and subsequently horrified by the Beatles.' Despite this, the roots of rock and roll uncover the first way in which rock and religion have been fused, with the early rock and soul artists such as Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Sam Cooke all secularising Gospel music.

Each of these faced anxiety over their decision to substitute secular words and movements for sacred songs and mannerisms and that anxiety leads to two related strands within the interweaving of rock and religion. The first is that of rock stars who give up their rock star life in order to practice their religion or who oscillate between the two. Examples include Little Richard, who became, for a time, an evangelist of the Universal Church of the Remnant of God, and Al Green, who continues to lead his own church. An example from Islam is that of Cat Stevens, who has later returned to performance as Yusuf.

In the early and mid-1970s, the release of songs like “Let’s Stay Together,” “Love and Happiness,” “Tired of Being Alone,” and “Take Me to The River” made Al Green one of the most successful soul and pop singers in the world. However, as the decade progressed, Green suffered an existential crisis, prompted by a questioning of his own increasingly decadent lifestyle, as well as by the death of a girlfriend who scalded him with hot grits before shooting and killing herself. He also claims to have had a religious reawakening after performing a concert at Disneyland, as well as periodic meltdowns on stage. All of this led to his abandonment of popular music, his purchase of a Memphis church building, his installation of himself as the pastor of that church, and the start of a part-time career as gospel artist. The 1984 film GOSPEL ACCORDING TO AL GREEN tells Green’s story and shows the continuing power of his performances and the intimacy of his storytelling.

A less drastic alternative was to record Gospel albums alongside secular albums, a strategy used by many from Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard to Aretha Franklin. Ron Wynn writes of Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace that ‘Franklin disproved the notion that once you leave the church, you can't go back. She returned in triumph on this 1972 double album, making what might be her greatest release ever in any style. Her voice was chilling, making it seem as if God and the angels were conducting a service alongside Franklin, Rev. James Cleveland, the Southern California Community Choir, and everyone else in attendance. Her versions of "How I Got Over" and "You've Got a Friend" are legendary.’

With the majority of Soul stars having begun singing in Church, many of the most effective integrations of faith and music were found there with Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and the Gospel-folk of the Staple Singers being among the best and most socially committed examples. Gospel featured directly with Billy Preston, Edwin Hawkins Singers and with Aretha Franklin’s gospel albums. Mainstream use of Christian themes or imagery in rock were initially either unsustained (e.g. Blind Faith’s ‘Presence of the Lord’ and Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit in the Sky’) or obscure (e.g. C.O.B.’s Moyshe McStiff and the Tartan Lancers of the Sacred Heart and Bill Fay’s Time of the Last Persecution).

This is where Russ Ballard’s song ‘God gave Rock and Roll to You’, written for Argent but made famous by Kiss, fits in this story. ‘God Gave Rock And Roll To You represented the end of his own dark night of the soul. “I felt blissful when I started writing God Gave Rock And Roll To You,” he reflects, “and that was the opposite of how I’d felt the year before. My parents had both been really ill; my dad had prostate cancer, my mum had bowel cancer, at the same time. I’d felt so low.’

“It was wonderful to feel myself come out of that depression,” Ballard recalls. “I felt so ‘up’. It probably only took twenty minutes to write it. I’d always liked gospel. With the lyric, I was saying that we live on this incredible planet, and when you find a passion, this world makes sense. Whereas, if you settle for a job to pay the bills, it’s very sad.”

‘Russ Ballard believes God Gave Rock And Roll To You’s message lives on, now more than ever. “I think the song will resonate for the next hundred years,” he considers, “whether people want to believe there’s a god or not. For me, music has been my saviour. God gave rock’n’roll to me, basically. That’s what I was trying to say.”’ (https://www.loudersound.com/features/argent-god-gave-rock-and-roll-to-you-the-story-behind-the-song)

This situation changed in three ways, however. First, the Church began to appropriate rock and pop to speak explicitly about Christian faith. This led to the emergence of a new genre, Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), with interaction between CCM and the mainstream. Mainstream artists such as Philip Bailey, David Grant, Al Green, Larry Norman and Candi Staton developed CCM careers while artists originally within CCM such as Delirious?, Martyn Joseph, Julie Miller, Leslie (Sam) Phillips, Sixpence None The Richer and Switchfoot achieved varying levels of mainstream exposure and success. One result was that 'rock music became the musical lingua franca of emerging non-denominational Evangelicalism: the music that the conservative Evangelicals rejected became the cornerstone of Evangelical liturgy.'

Larry Norman is often thought of as one of the founding figures of CCM but actually began his career recording for mainstream record labels and singing songs that named the name of Jesus and critiqued the society in which he lived. As a pioneer in writing Rock music explicitly from the perspective of a Christian, he attracted criticism from the Church and from the record industry with critics claiming that he was “too rock and roll for the Church and too religious for the rock and rollers.” Eventually, the pressure from the record companies became too much and he launched his own record label which played an important role in establishing the separate strand of music that we now know as CCM. However, while he was recording for mainstream labels, he wrote many songs that were not simply about the light of Christ but also about what you can see by that light. An example is the song Nightmare#71 from ‘So Long Ago The Garden’ which uses a dream format to speak a prophetic warning to Western society that is still relevant even though it was first released in 1973.

Second, the biblical language and imagery of stars like Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and Nick Cave began to be understood and appreciated (helped to varying degrees by explicitly ‘Christian’ periods in the work of Dylan and Van the Man).

Dylan comes from the tradition of hobo singers (Woody Guthrie) and beat poets (Jack Kerouac) for whom the journey and the documenting of their experience is life itself. Dylan as journeyman, as traveller, is the key insight of the liner notes for ‘Tell Tale Signs’ where Larry Sloman signs off with a paragraph quoting a myriad of Dylan's lyrics:

"He ain't talking, but he's still walking, heart burning, still yearning. He's trampling through the mud, through the blistering sun, getting damp from the misty rain. He's got his top hat on, ambling along with his cane, stopping to watch all the young men and young women in their bright-coloured clothes cavorting in the park. Despite all the grief and devastation he's seen on his odyssey, his heart isn't weary, it's light and free, bursting all over with affection for all those who sailed with him. Deep down he knows that his loyal and much-loved companions approve of him and share his code. And it's dawn now, the sun beginning to shine down on him and his heart is still in the Highlands, over those hills, far away. But there's a way to get there and if anyone can, he'll figure it out. And in the meantime, he's already there in his mind. That mind decidedly out of time. And we're all that much richer for his journey."

Dylan's manifesto for his work is A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall; a song about walking through a world which is surreal and unjust and singing what he sees:

"I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin' ..."

In the song he walks through a surreal and unjust world, ahead of him he sees a gathering apocalyptic storm and he resolves to walk in the shadow of the storm and sing out what he sees:

"... 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten,
Where black is the colour, where none is the number.
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect from the mountain so that all souls can see it ...".

This then is the other key element to Dylan's journey and work; the idea of journeying in face of the coming apocalypse. What we have in the best of Dylan is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey, undertaken in the eye of the Apocalypse, to stand with the damned at the heart of the darkness that is twentieth century culture.

Third, musicians such as After The Fire, The Alarm, T. Bone Burnett, The Call, Peter Case, Bruce Cockburn, Deacon Blue, Extreme, Galactic Cowboys, Innocence Mission, Kings X, Lone Justice, Buddy & Julie Miller, Over The Rhine, Ricky Ross, 16 Horsepower, The Staple Singers, U2, Violent Femmes, Gillian Welch, Jim White, and Victoria Williams rather than singing about the light (of Christ) instead sang about the world which they saw through the light (of Christ).

As rock and pop fragmented into a myriad of genres, this approach to the expression of faith continues in the work of Eric Bibb, Blessid Union of Souls, Creed, Brandon Flowers, Good Charlotte, Ben Harper, Michael Kiwanuka, Ed Kowalczyk, Lifehouse, Live, Low, Neal Morse, Mumford and Sons, Robert Randolph and the Family Band, Scott Stapp, and Woven Hand.

The Staple Singers have been called “God’s greatest hitmakers.” Steeped in the music of the church, this singing family from Mississippi crossed into the pop mainstream without compromising their gospel roots. The clan’s musical signatures have been patriarch Roebuck “Pops” Staples’ gospel-based songwriting and bluesy guitar, Mavis Staples’ rich, raspy vocals and the supple, ringing harmonies of Cleotha and Yvonne Staples. In the '60s they transitioned from strictly gospel songs to freedom songs and then to message songs like 'Respect Yourself', 'If You Are Ready (Come Go With Me)', 'Reach Out, Touch A Hand' and 'I'll Take You There'. As a result, the Staples Singers have left an imprint of soulful voices, social activism, religious conviction and danceable “message music” across the decades since the release of “Uncloudy Day” in 1956.

T. Bone Burnett is a Southern musician who got his first major break playing in the band for Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour and has gone on to have a successful recording and production career. It is Burnette who said that he “learned early on that if you believe Jesus is the Light of the World there are two kinds of song you can write – you can write songs about the light or about what you might see by the light.” Burnett has written a number of witty, erudite and critically acclaimed songs that address the distortions about which O’Connor wrote. In Hefner & Disney, a short story set to music, Burnette turns our understanding of the stories we tell ourselves on their head and claims that in our sentimentality and sensuality we are all dupes of the wicked King who wants to rob the children of their dreams.

Through his soundtrack to the film ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou’ and the subsequent ‘Down From The Mountain’ concert and film, Burnett played a part in a resurgence of interest in the country and bluegrass music of the American South. One tradition that he has highlighted has been the Appalachian country death songs; gothic backwoods ballads of mortality and disaster. The Violent Femmes are one band that have taken this tradition and who have used it to confront their audience with the reality of sin. 

At one point in his career, Burnett found that his songs critiquing society were being misunderstood by people who thought he was simply pointing the finger at others. Because he believed that any discussion of morality has to begin with oneself he switched many of his songs from the second to the first person. So, instead of singing, “He couldn’t help but notice her,” he would now sing, “I couldn’t help but notice her.” To reinforce the point he later wrote a song entitled The Criminal Under My Own Hat. David Eugene Edwards, lead singer with Sixteen Horsepower and later Woven Hand, sums up this approach when he says that his songs are all about the fact that we are all in trouble, that we all need a Saviour.

In talking about his album ‘We walk this Road’, which was produced by T. Bone Burnett, Robert Randolph has said of Burnett:

"T Bone opened a lot of doors for me serving as a link between the past and the present. He knows how to take something from the past and bring it into the present while still allowing the artist to make it his own, in the same way that Hendrix took Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” and made it belong to him.

T Bone listens to music that our grandmothers would listen to as children – not even music that our fathers listened to, but songs that go even further back ... some from Gospel and Christian blues, the music that people working in fields across the south likely sang nearly a century ago. Those are the real roots of rock and roll, where everything else comes from ...

Before this record, I didn’t sift through music past the Seventies. I didn’t know about Blind Willie Johnson, or Chess Records. I thank T Bone for being a tour guide into the deepest parts of my musical roots. We connected the last one hundred years of African-American music in the way people used to: You write your own songs, you cover other people’s material, you re-work older songs ...

My goal is to open the door for people, in the same way that musical doors have been opened for me. I want to take this musical history and make it relevant to give people a better idea of who I am and where I came from. I think even though I’m a young guy who was born into the era of hip-hop and contemporary gospel, I can help bridge the cultural gap between people who are seventy-five years old and kids who are fifteen years old by reaching back into this history of music.

‘We Walk This Road’ was done in our belief in what we all need right now: young voices saying something positive without preaching in hopes of inspiring people. When you stick to what you believe in, and with the roots of where you come from, things will always work out."

I end with a final and very contemporary example using a quote from John Thompson, who writes regularly on the history of Jesus Music (or CCM):

“The debut solo album by Natalie Bergman, for instance, absolutely does offer a call back to the roots of “Jesus Music.” Mercy, released earlier this year on Jack White’s Third Man Records, blends elements of West African world music, 60s Motown Soul, psychedelia-tinged Gospel blues, and mercurial folk as a backdrop for Bergman’s mournful yet lovely lyrics. Though songs like “He Will Lift You Up Higher,” “Shine Your Light on Me,” and “Talk To the Lord,” all spring from a place of pain and loss after a shocking death in her family, they are as obviously and unselfconsciously devotional as any of the early tunes by [Jesus Music performers] Larry Norman, Honeytree, or Love Song. In fact, I suspect it is precisely because of Bergman’s posture as a person in need, hands and heart open, and with no awareness of or compulsion to cater to market pressures, labels, or expectations in the faith-based economy, that she has been able to craft an album that is so inviting, innovative, and effective. It’s fascinating to me that this year [2021], with two films [‘The Jesus Music’ and ‘Electric Jesus’] delving into the roots of Christian rock and pop, it is a mainstream artist with no awareness of the evangelical subculture who has dropped the most compelling Roots Gospel, true “Jesus Music” album of the last several years, if not decades. One hopes it might inspire other young artists to re-calibrate their concepts of what Jesus Music can, and even should, be in troubled times.”

For more on these themes, see 'The Secret Chord', my co-authored book which is an accessible exploration of artistic dilemmas from a range of different perspectives seeking to draw the reader into a place of appreciation for what makes a moment in a 'performance' timeless and special.

Other relevant books to read include: ‘The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll’ by Randall J. Stephens; ‘Why should the Devil have all the Good Music? : Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock’ by Gregory Thornbury; ‘Hungry for Heaven: Rock 'N' Roll & the Search for Redemption’ by Steve Turner; ‘The Rock Cries Out: Discovering Eternal Truth in Unlikely Music’ by Steve Stockman; ‘The Rock & Roll Rebellion’, ‘Faith, God and Rock 'n Roll: How People of Faith Are Transforming American Popular Music’ and ‘Rock Gets Religion: The Battle for the Soul of the Devil's Music’, all by Mark Joseph.

Also worth checking out are: the website for ROCK OF AGES: Jesus in Popular Music, a multi-disciplinary research project by Delvyn Case exploring 50 years of secular songs about the Son of God (https://www.delvyncase.com/jesus); and Jesus Is Just Alright, a series of videos exploring the many guises in which Jesus has appeared in pop songs over the past 50 years (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO43Y1gJDjYRhlIaLhyd_ldMyOiZTMa6_).

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Aretha Franklin - Climbing Higher Mountains.

Bob Dylan: Pilgrim, Dante and Rimbaud

How many roads must a man walk down/Before you call him a man?" was the first of the questions that Bob Dylan posed in 'Blowin' in the Wind'. He didn't know the answer then - it was blowin' in the wind - and he still doesn't - because, for example, in the opening track of Time Out Of Mind, his end of millennium offering, he's still walkin':

"I'm walkin', through streets that are dead
Walkin', walkin' with you in my head
My feet are so tired,
My brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping." ('Love Sick').

Dylan comes from the tradition of hobo singers (Woody Guthrie) and beat poets (Jack Kerouac) for whom the journey and the documenting of their experience is life itself. When we first meet him singing in his original voice, on Bob Dylan, he's "ramblin' outa the wild West,/Leavin' the towns I love the best ... ''Til I come into New York town" ('Talkin' New York'). At this stage the ramblin', gamblin' hobo is a conscious image worn in homage to Woody Guthrie:

"I'm out here a thousand miles from my home,
Walkin' a road other men have gone down.
I'm seeing your world of people and things,
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song ...". ('Song to Woody')

Though he starts out on his journey in imitation of others what he sees on his journey is original, surreal and unjust:

"I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin' ..." ('A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall')

Ahead of him he sees a gathering apocalyptic storm and he resolves to go back out and walk in the shadow of the storm:

"... 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten,
Where black is the colour, where none is the number.
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect from the mountain so that all souls can see it ...".

He travels the paths of political protest, urban surrealism, country contentment, gospel conversion and world weary blues. On his journey he: sees "seven breezes a-blowin'" all around the cabin door where victims despair ('Ballad of Hollis Brown'); sees lightning flashing "For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse" ('Chimes of Freedom'); surveys 'Desolation Road'; talks truth with a thief as the wind begins to howl ('All Along the Watchtower'); takes shelter from a woman "With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair" ('Shelter from the Storm'); feels the Idiot Wind blowing through the buttons on his coat, recognises himself as an idiot and feels so sorry ('Idiot Wind'); finds a pathway to the stars and can't believe he's survived and is still alive ('Where Are You Tonight? Journey Through Deep Heat'); rides the slow train up around the bend ('Slow Train'); is driven out of town into the driving rain because of belief ('I Believe in You'); hears the ancient footsteps join him on his path ('Every Grain of Sand'); feels the Caribbean Winds, fanning desire, bringing him nearer to the fire ('Caribbean Wind'); betrays his commitment, feels the breath of the storm and goes searching for his first love ('Tight Connection to My Heart'); then at the final moment, it's not quite dark yet but:

"The air is getting hotter, there's a rumbling in the skies
I've been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes.
Everyday your memory grows dimmer.
It don't haunt me, like it did before.
I been walking through the middle of nowhere
Tryin' to get to heaven before they close the door." ('Tryin' To Get To Heaven').

Modern Times is an album that is also drenched in the imagery of journeying: "Gonna get up in the morning walk the hard road down/Some sweet day I'll stand beside my king". Dylan as journeyman, as traveller, is the key insight of the liner notes for Tell Tale Signs where Larry Sloman signs off with a paragraph quoting a myriad of Dylan's lyrics:

"He ain't talking, but he's still walking, heart burning, still yearning. He's trampling through the mud, through the blistering sun, getting damp from the misty rain. He's got his top hat on, ambling along with his cane, stopping to watch all the young men and young women in their bright-coloured clothes cavorting in the park. Despite all the grief and devastation he's seen on his odyssey, his heart isn't weary, it's light and free, bursting all over with affection for all those who sailed with him. Deep down he knows that his loyal and much-loved companions approve of him and share his code. And it's dawn now, the sun beginning to shine down on him and his heart is still in the Highlands, over those hills, far away. But there's a way to get there and if anyone can, he'll figure it out. And in the meantime, he's already there in his mind. That mind decidedly out of time. And we're all that much richer for his journey."

In many ways, this stream of inspiration has involved reworking and rearticulating the classic Dylan song, 'Blind Willie McTell', that was left off Infidels. Predominantly blues-based and extending the blues/folk metaphor of the drifter, Together Through Life finds Dylan's characters rambling through apocalyptic landscapes, experiencing life's hardness, grasping and eulogising love with a wry and sardonic irony wherever they can find it before the change that death will bring.

Dylan has said that:

"Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book. You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. Hank Williams singing 'I Saw The Light' or all the Luke The Drifter songs. That would be pretty close to my religion. The rabbis, priests, and ministers all do very well. But my belief system is more rugged and comes more from out of the old spiritual songs than from any of the established religious attempts at overcoming the devil."

This is also the picture of traditional American music conjured up by Bob Dylan in 1966: "Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes from legends, bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. ... All these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're not going to die. .... I mean, you'd think that the traditional music people could gather from their songs that mystery is a fact, a traditional fact ... In that music is the only true, valid death you can feel today off a record player. ... It has to do with a purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy."

Greil Marcus has pointed out that this 'traditional music' - the ancient ballads of mountain music, songs like Buell Kazee's 'East Virginia', Clarence Ashley's 'Coo Coo Bird' or Dock Boggs' 'Country Blues' - are what Dylan and the Band tapped into when recording The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding and The Band, music which Marcus describes as a "kaleidoscope of American music". "The "acceptance of death" that Dylan found in "traditional music"", says Marcus, "is simply a singer's insistence on mystery as inseparable from any honest understanding of what life is all about; it is the quiet terror of a man seeking salvation who stares into a void that stares back."

Biblical imagery and apocalyptic frameworks have been a constant within Dylan's work as throughout his career he has written songs that depict the apathy of humanity in the face of the coming apocalypse. What we have in the best of Dylan is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey, undertaken in the eye of the Apocalypse, to stand with the damned at the heart of the darkness that is twentieth century culture.

From Slow Train Coming onwards he equated the apocalypse with the imminent return of Christ. The return of Christ in judgement is the slow train that is "comin' up around the bend" and in the face of this apocalypse he calls on human beings to wake up and strengthen the things that remain. Similarly, in 'The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar', he sees the apocalypse coming ("Curtain risin' on a new age") but not yet here while the Groom (Christ who awaits his bride, the Church) is still waiting at the altar. In the time that remains he again calls on human beings to arise from our slumber: "Dead man, dead man / When will you arise? / Cobwebs in your mind / Dust upon your eyes" ('Dead Man, Dead Man').

In the light of this thread in Dylan's songs throughout this period, it seems to me to be consistent to read 'Jokerman', from Infidels as another song in this vein; as a song depicting the apathy of humanity in the face of the apocalypse and one which is shot through with apocalyptic imagery drawn from the Book of Revelation. We are the jokermen who laugh, dance and fly but only in the dark of the night (equated with sin and judgement) afraid to come into the revealing light of the Sun/Son.

Jokerman, though, is a greater song that any of those mentioned previously because its depiction of humanity is more nuanced. There is much that is negative: we are born with a snake in both our fists; we rush in where angels fear to tread; our future is full of dread; we are doing no more that keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within; we are going to Sodom and Gomorrah only knowing the law of the jungle (the law of revenge from the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy - 'an eye for an eye'). But these negatives are not the whole story as we also experience freedom, dance to the nightingale tune, fly high, walk on the clouds, and are a friend to the martyr. We have an inherent dignity and beauty to which only the greatest of artists such as Michelangelo can do justice. In Jokerman Dylan captures well the Biblical portrait of humanity as made in the image of God but marred by our rejection of God with our potential for beauty and compassion perverted into a selfish search for self-aggrandisement.

The final verse comes straight from the Book of Revelation and describes the birth of the AntiChrist who will deceive humanity into following him rather than Christ. The accusation and challenge that Dylan puts to us in the final lines of this final verse is that we know exactly what is happening (after all, it has all been prophesied in the Book of Revelation) but we make no response; we are apathetic in the face of the apocalypse. Our lack of response is what is fatal to us because it is only through repentance and turning to Christ that we will be saved from the coming judgement. These final lines are both an accusation and a challenge because, in line with the prophecy of Revelation, Dylan clearly believes that humanity as a whole will be apathetic and non-responsive but they must also be a challenge because, if there is no possibility that any of us will respond, why write the song at all!

In 'Sweetheart Like You', also from Infidels, we see the possibility of response through a wonderfully contemporary depiction of Christ's incarnation. The song is written from the perspective of a misogynist male employee in an all-male workplace that is literally a hell of a place in which to work. To be in here requires the doing of some evil deed, having your own harem, playing till your lips bleed. There's only one step down from here and that's the ironically named "land of permanent bliss."

Into this perverted and prejudiced environment comes a woman, the sweetheart of the song's title. She is a Christ figure; a sinless figure entering into a world of sin and experiencing abuse and betrayal (is "that first kiss" a Judas kiss?) from those she encounters and to whom she holds out the possibility of a different kind of existence. Dylan makes his equation of the woman with Christ explicit by quoting directly from Jesus: "They say in your father's house, there's many mansions" (John 14: 2).

The song's narrator is confused and challenged by her appearance. He wants to dismiss her out of hand and back to his stereotypical role for her - "You know, a woman like you should be at home / That's where you belong / Watching out for someone who loves you true / Who would never do you wrong" - but he can't simply dismiss her as she is really there in front of him and so he begins to wonder, "What's a sweetheart like you doin' in a dump like this?" All the time he asks that question there is the possibility that he may respond to her presence without abuse or dismissal.

In 'I and I' Dylan gives an honest depiction of the difficulties of response (based no doubt on his own inability to keep the moral standards that he seems to have perceived God to have expected of him and which, no doubt, his church at the time expected of him). The central character in this song has taken the untrodden path where the swift don't win the race (Matthew 7: 13 & 14 - "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."). He has looked into justice's beautiful face and yet as we meet him we discover that he has just slept with a strange woman (i.e. he has had sex outside of marriage).

In creation, Dylan sings, we neither honour nor forgive. Instead we take; our nature is the survival of the fittest. When we encounter God, our sinful, selfish human nature encounters the demand for pure perfection - "no man sees my face and lives." 'I and I' is about the difficulty of living between these two poles; of having started out on the untrodden path but then having slipped back. The song is an evocation of the guilt that the protagonist feels; a guilt that forces him to leave the woman, to go out for a walk into the narrow lanes, pushing himself along the darkest part of the road to get himself back on track and then hearing the accepting, forgiving words of Christ in his heart, "I made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot."

'I and I' is again set in the context of the apocalypse: "the world could come to an end tonight." The protagonist is responding in the face of the apocalypse. Even though he has sinned he is leaving that sin behind, pushing himself along the road and listening to Christ in his heart. Another song in which the protangonist becomes aware of the coming apocalypse while being in the wrong place is 'Tight Connection To My Heart' (originally recorded during the Infidels session as 'Someone's Got A Hold Of My Heart'). Here the protagonist grabs his coat because feels the breath of the storm that is the apocalypse. He is in the wrong place with the wrong person having valued the wrong things (lulled to sleep in a town without pity where the water runs deep, it's all been a charade, a big joke that he'll remember to forget) and now, when it may be too late, he is searching for his true love (his "first love" - see Revelation 2: 4). His issue has been that he could not commit: "Never could learn to drink that blood / And to call it wine / Never could learn to hold you, love / And to call you mine." Like the foolish virgins, he may be left outside in the cold when the bridegroom arrives because he was not faithful to his true love at the moment of the second coming (Matthew 25: 1 - 13).

It is not possible to understand these songs or Dylan's journey without understanding the biblical material on which they draw. Without this, as is the case in much contemporary cultural comment, the work of art is actively misunderstood. This was the case with reviews of Infidels at the time which used 'Sweetheart Like You' as an example of Dylan's supposed misogeny. So these reviewers were using a song that actually critiques and undercuts misogeny as an example of misogeny itself and this fundamental misunderstanding was the result of a failure to recognise and understand biblical references and imagery.

Happy Birthday, Bob. See also Peter Banks, Malcolm Guite and Philip Ritchie.

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Bob Dylan - Tight Connection To My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?).

Together Through Life

The period since Time Out Of Mind has been particularly fertile for Bob Dylan's songwriting particularly when compared to the period between Infidels and Oh Mercy. In that period, as he wrote in Chronicles, he "felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck." His own songs had become strangers to him, there was a hollow singing in his heart and he couldn't wait to retire and fold the tent.

What changed him was a moment of revelation that came during a concert in Locarno, Switzerland as he stepped up to the mic, panicked and felt unable to sing. He has said that "it was almost like I heard a voice ... I'm determined to stand, whether God will deliver me or not." That's when he knew, as Larry Sloman writes in the Tell Tale Signs booklet, that he had to "go out and keep playing those songs."

Those songs are the old, traditional songs of Americana: songs that he sang on his first album; songs that he sang on the two solo acoustic cover records that he recorded in 1992 and 1993; songs that he plays thematically on his successful radio show. With the publication of his memoirs and his radio show, there has been a renewed reflection on his own past and his own influences; one that seems to have released a stream of inspiration that is continued on his new album Together Through Life.

In many ways, this stream of inspiration has involved reworking and rearticulating the classic Dylan song, 'Blind Willie McTell', that was left off Infidels. Predominantly blues-based and extending the blues/folk metaphor of the drifter, Together Through Life finds Dylan's characters rambling through apocalyptic landscapes, experiencing life's hardness, grasping and eulogising love with a wry and sardonic irony wherever they can find it before the change that death will bring.

Dylan has said that:

"Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book. You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. Hank Williams singing 'I Saw The Light' or all the Luke The Drifter songs. That would be pretty close to my religion. The rabbis, priests, and ministers all do very well. But my belief system is more rugged and comes more from out of the old spiritual songs than from any of the established religious attempts at overcoming the devil."

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Bob Dylan - Beyond Here Lies Nothin'.

Tell Tale Signs

I'm loving listening to Bob Dylan's Tell Tale Signs, which is Volume 8 of the wonderful Bootleg Series. One effect has been to send me back to Dylan's Modern Times, an album that is drenched in the imagery of journeying: "Gonna get up in the morning walk the hard road down/Some sweet day I'll stand beside my king".

Dylan as journeyman, as traveller, is the key insight of the liner notes for Tell Tale Signs where Larry Sloman signs off with a paragraph quoting a myriad of Dylan's lyrics:

"He ain't talking, but he's still walking, heart burning, still yearning. He's trampling through the mud, through the blistering sun, getting damp from the misty rain. He's got his top hat on, ambling along with his cane, stopping to watch all the young men and young women in their bright-coloured clothes cavorting in the park. Despite all the grief and devastation he's seen on his odyssey, his heart isn't weary, it's light and free, bursting all over with affection for all those who sailed with him. Deep down he knows that his loyal and much-loved companions approve of him and share his code. And it's dawn now, the sun beginning to shine down on him and his heart is still in the Highlands, over those hills, far away. But there's a way to get there and if anyone can, he'll figure it out. And in the meantime, he's already there in his mind. That mind decidedly out of time. And we're all that much richer for his journey."

Sometime ago I had a go at setting my sense of how we're all that much richer for his journey. It goes like this. 2, 3, 4 ...

"How many roads must a man walk down/Before you call him a man?" was the first of the questions that Dylan posed in Blowin' in the Wind. He didn't know the answer then - it was blowin' in the wind - and he doesn't now - because in the opening track of Time Out Of Mind, his end of millennium offering, he's still walkin':

"I'm walkin', through streets that are dead
Walkin', walkin' with you in my head
My feet are so tired,
My brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping." (Love Sick).

Dylan comes from the tradition of hobo singers (Woody Guthrie) and beat poets (Jack Kerouac) for whom the journey and the documenting of their experience is life itself. When we first meet him singing in his original voice, on Bob Dylan, he's "ramblin' outa the wild West,/Leavin' the towns I love the best ... ''Til I come into New York town" (Talkin' New York). At this stage the ramblin', gamblin' hobo is a conscious image worn in homage to Woody Guthrie:

"I'm out here a thousand miles from my home,
Walkin' a road other men have gone down.
I'm seeing your world of people and things,
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song ...". (Song to Woody)

Though he starts out on his journey in imitation of others what he sees on his journey is original, surreal and unjust:

"I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin' ..."
(A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall)

Ahead of him he sees a gathering apocalyptic storm and he resolves to go back out and walk in the shadow of the storm:

"... 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten,
Where black is the colour, where none is the number.
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect from the mountain so that all souls can see it ...".

He travels the paths of political protest, urban surrealism, country contentment, gospel conversion and world weary blues. On his journey he: sees "seven breezes a-blowin'" all around the cabin door where victims despair (Ballad of Hollis Brown); sees lightning flashing "For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse" (Chimes of Freedom); surveys Desolation Road; talks truth with a thief as the wind begins to howl (All Along the Watchtower); takes shelter from a woman "With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair" (Shelter from the Storm); feels the Idiot Wind blowing through the buttons on his coat, recognises himself as an idiot and feels so sorry (Idiot Wind); finds a pathway to the stars and can't believe he's survived and is still alive (Where Are You Tonight? Journey Through Deep Heat); rides the slow train up around the bend (Slow Train); is driven out of town into the driving rain because of belief (I Believe in You); hears the ancient footsteps join him on his path (Every Grain of Sand); feels the Caribbean Winds, fanning desire, bringing him nearer to the fire (Caribbean Wind); betrays his commitment, feels the breath of the storm and goes searching for his first love (Tight Connection to My Heart); then at the final moment, it's not quite dark yet but:

"The air is getting hotter, there's a rumbling in the skies
I've been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes.
Everyday your memory grows dimmer.
It don't haunt me, like it did before.
I been walking through the middle of nowhere
Tryin' to get to heaven before they close the door." (Tryin' To Get To Heaven).

What we have in the best of Dylan is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey, undertaken in the eye of the Apocalypse, to stand with the damned at the heart of the darkness that is twentieth century culture. Oh, and the answer to that question, however many roads he has travelled in the songs he has become a man, an Everyman.

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Bob Dylan - Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Deep Heat).