Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life by Scott Marshall

Author:Scott Marshall [Marshall, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WND Books
Published: 2017-06-02T18:30:00+00:00

Another stop on Dylan’s 1998 tour was the city of his birth, Duluth, Minnesota, and oddly enough, it marked his first-ever concert there. “Welcome Home” signs adorned some downtown business windows. The local newspaper, the News-Tribune, ran a front-page story for two days. As for the concert itself, the fifty-seven-year-old singer/songwriter opened with “Gotta Serve Somebody” and closed his encore with “Forever Young.” So from “it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord” to “may the Lord bless and keep you,” the native son was willing to let the echo decide who was right or wrong.

Certainly some audiences in early 1999 were pleasantly surprised by stage debuts for Jimmie Rodgers’ “My Blue-Eyed Jane,” Lefty Frizzell’s “You’re Too Late,” Hank Williams’ “Honky Tonk Blues,” and an everpresent encore inclusion of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.” This was likely a tribute to the twenty-two-year-old singer whom Dylan had seen in concert forty years earlier, at age seventeen, in his hometown of Duluth, just days before Holly’s death.

But a crowd in Pensacola, Florida, on February 2, 1999, may have been downright mystified: Dylan gave an onstage debut to a Christian hymn – more than two centuries removed no less: Augustus Toplady’s composition from 1776, “Rock of Ages.”

Considering that eight concerts earlier, a crowd in Rochester, New York, heard both “Gotta Serve Somebody” and “I Believe in You,” it does not seem unreasonable to conclude that Dylan was expressing the faith he expressed back in 1979, in new and different ways. In fact, songs with overt lyrics about Jesus began to appear more often in 1999. Prophetic now, it seems, are Dylan’s comments to Jon Pareles in 1997: about his lexicon, about his beliefs being rooted in those old songs, songs that pointed back toward “a God of time and space.”

What nudged Dylan to sing “Rock of Ages” is anyone’s guess, but a prompting from on high coupled with a Stanley Brothers recording does not seem too preposterous a notion. Whatever the case, the folks in Pensacola witnessed an interesting selection as Dylan returned to that same Rock he had sung about twenty years before. The “Solid Rock” of 1979-1981 carried the great urgency of newborn zeal; the “Rock of Ages” in 1999 sounded, and felt, much different. Although it was given a mellow, country treatment – as opposed to the fiery, bristling delivery of an up-tempo “Solid Rock” – the references to Jesus as Savior were apparent.

If Dylan’s belief that the highest form of song is prayer remained intact, then “Rock of Ages” amounted to a humble prayer offered up to the Most High. By 1999, it was no secret to those who had followed Dylan’s career, that the tour years that followed the so-called gospel tours (1984, 1986–1998) were not void of the songs from 1979 to 1981. But by 1999, songs about Jesus began to appear more often as cover songs.

A few weeks after Pensacola, in Buffalo, New York, Dylan brought another hymn to the stage. This time

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