Bob Dylan and I should have a talk

about God and Man and Beekeeping and all that...

While America was returning His Magasty to the White House, I was in the company of a man whose longevity at the forefront of American life makes Donald Trump look like an apprentice.

With a stirringly virtuosic band in tow, Bob Dylan brought his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour to the Usher Hall (Edinburgh’s equivalent of London’s Albert Hall but with better acoustics).

Even older than Trump at 83, the BobOne as Kris Kristofferson used to call him did not appear to be in the most enviable nick. Tottery and doddery onstage, he frequently leaned upon the piano to steady himself and take a look at a prompt sheet.

His voice, however, was surprisingly strong and even more unexpectedly, he seems to have hit upon a sweet and melodious higher register. For the first time in more than 60 years,  therefore, the sound that was coming out of his mouth might sometimes have been described as singing.

Alas, the music and the songs themselves cannot be said to have improved. Mark Knopfler who worked with Dylan on a couple of albums once said that any musical interest in those confections had to be stirred in by somebody other than the head chef. Meanwhile, his inimitable lyrical inventiveness and ingenuity continue to ebb away. Dylan recently said that he never knew where that unique originality came from and acknowledged that it had now largely departed as mysteriously as it arrived.

Much of Rough and Rowdy Ways consists, therefore, of lyrical doggerel mumbled within the confines of 4/4 time signature and 12-bar blues structure. Mercifully, at the Usher Hall we were spared the dreariest example which is Murder Most Foul – Dylan’s 17-minute maunder on the assassination of John Kennedy. Of course, the 2016 Nobel Laureate for Literature deserves credit for addressing the most critical moment in our age but you can’t help thinking he might have given a little more care to lines like:

Twas a dark day in Dallas, November '63
A day that will live on in infamy
President Kennedy was a-ridin' high
Good day to be livin' and a good day to die

However, many of the other songs on that new album have a devotional aspect which is right up my spiritual street. I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You (which is in a lightly dancing 6/8) sounds to me like a hymn to divinity, though others have interpreted it as a love song to a woman. And when he closed the show with Every Grain of Sand, Dylan and I bonded in a sacred communion which I don’t entirely share with anybody else on earth.

Though I have seen him play seven or eight times over the last 55 years I have never heard Bob Dylan perform this song, which he recorded on Shot of Love in 1981. The words are so familiar to me, however, that they are probably die-stamped on my soul as upon the metal rolls in a player-piano. For a period which you could call time out of mind, I have been playing it on Spotify every morning while I do yoga stretches after my daily prayers and meditations. The song comes second on a personalised playlist immediately after the exultant, jubilant Sanctus from Bach’s Mass in B Minor. Music for the gods.

Here are the concluding words:-

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other times it's only me
I am hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

The great Bobster and I are of one spirit at that point.

We also share other points in common. Like Dylan, I have been disturbed by the Kennedy assassination for more than 50 years and earnestly hope Donald Trump will keep his promise to RFK to open all the archives that have been kept secret since that day in Dallas. His choices of wives and lovers were rarely as misguided as mine though our paths in that pursuit crossed at the moment Joan Baez kissed me on the lips (and I thought, “My God! I’m kissing the lips that kissed Bob Dylan!”). I was better on motorbikes, both as a rider and as a writer. Like him, I yearned to

“Build me a cabin in Utah

Marry me a wife

Catch rainbow trout

Have a bunch of kids who call me pa”

But unlike him, I actually did it (with Scotland taking the place of Utah and bees standing in for rainbow trout)

It was in Dylan’s religious progress, however, that my life so closely paralleled his that we now seem to be ending up in roughly the same position. His has not always been an easy path to follow.

His sudden conversion to Christianity at the end of the 1970s remains a puzzling episode. An impartial judge might suspect that psychotropic drugs were at work. Overnight, as it seemed, the cool counter-cultural, sneering hipster of the 1960s turned into a hell-fire preaching evangelical who was capable of telling an audience, “You know we’re living in the end times ... …I’m telling you now Jesus is coming back… to set up His kingdom in Jerusalem for a thousand years.”

When he spoke in that period, the words coming out of his mouth were indistinguishable from Born Again tv hucksters like Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart. When he sang, he sounded like Ned Flanders from The Simpsons, the most cringe-making happy clapper in the aisles. Dylan’s conversion to evangelical Christianity reduced him dismayingly to squaredom and also informed the most banal records of his entire career.

It didn’t last long. He soon climbed down from the pulpit and resumed his usual habit of speaking in Delphic riddles out of the side of his mouth. While taking an interest in orthodox Judaism and hanging around a Zionist synagogue in Santa Monica, he also skirted on the fringes of a California group called Jews for Jesus. Increasingly, he became reluctant to talk at all about religion, declaring instead that he expressed his devotion through music. His work grew great again.

My own religious odyssey has brought me to a comparably syncretic place (as recorded in Blog 2 on this site). While Dylan has apparently returned to the Jewish observances of his childhood, I was confirmed in the Church of England in my 40s. I now read the CoE’s Morning Service every day online and recite the creed in church on Sunday while murmuring “metaphorically speaking” at several declarations of faith. My morning devotions include Zen and Stoic texts and the poems of Rumi. I imagine something like this might also be going on in the mornings at Dylan’s home in Malibu when he’s not on the road continuing his never-ending tour.

(Dylan’s house at Point Dume, Malibu)

He and I ought to talk about how we got here and where we go from here, alive or dead. I would like to think the conversation wouldn’t necessarily benefit me alone. I could, for instance, introduce him to bees. He may not be aware of the reverence that interest can inspire. Does he know, for instance, that the 60,000 bees in a colony can be seen as a single super organism? What might that add to his perception of divinity? I might even be able to edge Zen into the conversation but I expect he has been there, too.

However, with Dylan’s 83^rd birthday having just passed and my own 80^th not far off, the grains of sand left in the egg-timer are dwindling down to a passing few. If we’re going to get together, it had better be soon.

Any time, any place.

After all, as he said of Lenny Bruce, he's the brother I never had.