Bob Dylan's 'Rough and Rowdy Ways' Contains Religious Multitudes

Bob Dylan in 1980. Creative Commons photo.

(REVIEW) Earlier this summer Bob Dylan released his first new album of original music in eight years, much to the delight of a quarantined nation. The songs on “Rough and Rowdy Ways” are mostly ballads and blues, and like most Dylan works they’re extremely dense and require multiple listens to unpack. 

Let’s do a little of that, shall we? 

Among the many themes and motifs the album explores, spirituality and the afterlife spend a great deal of time on the main stage — as they have in almost all of Dylan’s works since he survived a near-death fungal infection in the late 1990s. Late-era Dylan is littered with aging characters, resigned fates and heavenly musings.

But “Rough and Rowdy Ways” takes things even further. The fleeting nature of mortality and the incomprehensibility of eternity pervade every track on the album. 

“Key West” is the place to be “if you’re looking for immortality.” “Mother of Muses” is an incantation, a humble prayer. “Crossing the Rubicon” is a bawdy, defiant blues ready to stare down whatever might come after death. 

The album’s lyrics are full of biblical imagery. Saints John and Peter make appearances, as do the Holy Grail, the Holy Spirit, Armageddon and a City of God on a hill. This verse from the rollicking “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” could just as easily be delivered from a pulpit as it could be sung at a juke joint:  

For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory

Go tell it on the Mountain, go tell the real story

Tell it in that straight forward puritanical tone

In the mystic hours when a person’s alone

Goodbye Jimmy Reed - Godspeed

Thump on the Bible - proclaim the creed

Given the sheer volume of both Old and New Testament references on the album, a recent Religion News Services piece by Jeffrey Salkin posited the question, “What Religion is Dylan Now?” 

Perhaps he’s returned to (or never left) the teachings of Christ he so famously proclaimed during his three-album arc of Christian albums between 1979 and 1981. Or maybe he’s reconnected with the Jewish faith of his Minnesota childhood, back when he was named Robert Zimmerman and studied the Torah in the upstairs apartment of the local rabbi.

While the question certainly provides a time-passing parlor game for scholars and fans, believers and skeptics, it misses entirely the greater point of Dylan’s songwriting and the overriding ethos behind so many of his public reincarnations — whatever he is or isn’t, Bob Dylan does not fit neatly into any one category, nor does he want to.

Dylan’s entire adult life has been a continual journey through disparate worldviews. He’s shifted back and forth from a political activist to an apolitical hermit, from a counterculture outlaw to a fundamentalist zealot, from a froggy folk cowboy who rebelled against Tin Pan Alley to a silky singer of dime-store standards. 

How does all this stuff square, man?   

In his 2009 book “Bargainin’ For Salvation,” religion and history professor Steven Heine tries to make sense of Dylan’s seemingly erratic ethos by contending that these shifts are not random, but instead part of a never-ending quest for self-awareness and authentic expression. He argues that there are only four ways the public can interpret Dylan’s chaotic career shifts. One would be that they’re purposeless, lacking any pattern or meaning. Another would be that they’re linear, with each phase building on the last, or that they’re circular, with multiple threads of influence vying for control of the same head.  

But the fourth way, Heine says, is to see Dylan’s constant evolution as tied to the Eastern philosophy of Zen Buddhism, where individuals absorb and reflect as many viewpoints as possible in an effort to see past those constructs into some greater, more universal truth. 

Under that theory, Dylan’s radical shifts in message are more about a man searching for the outer edges of one boundary after another, then using those experiences to triangulate a center path. If he was raised in the Jewish faith and already absorbed its wisdom, perhaps making a 180-degree turn and immersing himself in Christianity might provide counterbalance and new insights. 

The contradictions, in other words, are all about a quest for deeper spiritual understanding and truth. 

“Perhaps what [Dylan and the Zen Masters] share most fundamentally is a common intensity and even passion in their uncompromising quest for Truth, even while questioning assumptions about the very nature of what is truth,” Heine says. 

“Rough and Rowdy Ways” draws its material from so many different influences it does seem to be part of an ongoing exercise in triangulation. There’s the Judeo-Christian strand that espouses a top-down worldview where mankind is just a cog in a deity’s grander plan. The album offers many references to the universal love and forgiveness of Christianity, like in the sweet and somber “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”:

 If I had the wings of a snow white dove

I’d preach the gospel, the gospel of love 

Then there’s the Old Testament worldview of sin and retribution that shines through at its strongest when the narrator in “False Prophet” declares:  

I ain’t no false prophet - I just said what I said

I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head

While the narrator here could reasonably be interpreted to be a demon of the underworld or possibly even Old Scratch himself, the lyrics clearly carry an autobiographical message. During the early folk-singer phase of his career, Dylan was hailed by many as the “Voice of a Generation” and a prophet to the youth culture of the 1960s. For his part, Dylan rejected such a mantle and chose instead to don a leather jacket and an electric guitar. His shift from acoustic folk singer to rock-and-roll icon earned him a chorus of boos from concertgoers and the stinging heckle “Judas!” 

Almost 20 years later, when he became deeply involved in Christianity through the Vineyard Church movement in California, he angered fans again by releasing a series of religiously-charged albums and preaching from the stage of his concerts.  

In 1997, even Pope Benedict XVI, then a cardinal, argued against letting Dylan play for then-Pope John Paul II because he considered him to be the wrong kind of “prophet” for the Church to embrace. 

“You feel like an impostor when [everyone] thinks you’re something and you’re not,” he told 60 Minutes‘ Ed Bradley in 2004. “I never wanted to be a prophet or a savior. Elvis, maybe. I could easily see myself becoming him. But a prophet? No.”

He ain’t no false prophet. He just said what he said. 

So what is Bob Dylan then? What does he believe? 

In his only interview for “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” Dylan told historian Douglas Brinkley and the New York Times, while talking about Little Richard’s gospel period, that, “… gospel news is exemplary. It can give you courage. You can pace your life accordingly, or try to, anyway. And you can do it with honor and principles. There are theories of truth in gospel but to most people it’s unimportant. Their lives are lived out too fast. Too many bad influences. Sex and politics and murder is the way to go if you want to get people’s attention. It excites us, that’s our problem.”

Theories of truth? 

Far from being a hardline believer, Dylan appears to be of a mind to use theological concepts as a vehicle for moving past theology and into something more universal. (He sure does like dabbling in the realm of sex, politics and murder himself, though: the album’s longest and arguably most consequential song is a near 17-minute treatise on the Kennedy assassination.) 

Contrasting all of this spiritual heaviness is a mystical, playful element. Dylan’s best songs are frequently filled with passages that double back on top of themselves or poke fun at the concept of a higher power. Dylan also told the New York Times he thinks about humankind as, “the long strange trip of the naked ape.” 

Hardly a ringing endorsement of faith in a creator.

While his Judeo-Christian imagery invokes reverence for traditions and institutions, other parts of the album feel like looking at the world through a series of fun-house mirrors; the listener shouldn’t take what they see too seriously. Consider this little riff from “My Own Version of You,” where Dylan recasts himself as a grave robbing Dr. Frankenstein: 

I’ll take Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando

Mix ‘em up in a tank and get a robot commando 

If I do it upright and put the head on straight

I’ll be saved by the creature that I create

Here he takes the quite-reverential moment of creation and turns it into something more akin to a barista experimenting with this month’s cappuccino special. It’s this duality of direction, vacillating back and forth between the serious and the playful, which Heine finds Zen-like. 

“He demonstrates an ability to hold in his mind two disparate realities with creative tension that brings out the best yet does not interfere with both possibilities,” Heine says. 

Perhaps the best example on the album of Dylan’s Zen triangulation techniques is this one from “I Contain Multitudes”: 

I’m just like Anne Frank - like Indiana Jones

And them British bad boys the Rolling Stones

I go right to the edge - I go right to the end 

I go right where all things lost - are made good again

Then later:

I’m a man of contradictions and a man of many moods . . . I contain multitudes

During their New York Times interview, Brinkley asked Dylan about the relevance of the Anne Frank pastiche. His response was quite illuminating:

“But you’re taking Anne’s name out of context, she’s part of a trilogy. You could just as well ask, ‘What made you decide to include Indiana Jones or the Rolling Stones?’ The names themselves are not solitary. It’s the combination of them that adds up to something more than their singular parts. To go too much into detail is irrelevant. The song is like a painting, you can’t see it all at once if you’re standing too close. The individual pieces are just part of a whole.”

So is Dylan still a Christian? Sure, maybe. 

Is he still Jewish? He might be that too.

Is he something else entirely? Why not. 

In 1997, he told Newsweek’s David Gates: “Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else. Songs like ‘Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain’ or ‘I Saw the Light’ — that's my religion. I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I've learned more from the songs than I've learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.”

To go too much into detail is irrelevant. He contains multitudes.

A highly-decorated educator, Dr. R.J. Morgan teaches writing, reporting, and integrated marketing communication at the University of Mississippi, where he also serves as the executive director of the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association. Morgan has worked as a freelance journalist for the Associated Press and others since 2006 and is currently working on his first book-length project about Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and the intersection of the folk and civil rights movements of the early 1960s. His mother says it's going to be a bestseller.