SAM DINGMAN: As some of the Bob Dylan fans listening may be aware, Arizona plays a central role in Dylan mythology.
According to a book by music journalist Clinton Heylin, legend has it that one night in 1978, in a hotel room in Tucson, Dylan was feeling down and out, heartbroken over the collapse of his marriage, and exhausted from being on tour. And in that moment, as the story goes, Dylan had a vision of Jesus, which prompted him to dedicate his life to praising God with his music.
That phase ended a few years later, but for a little while there, Dylan’s songwriting took an explicitly evangelical turn, and he released three records in the late '70s and early '80s that are often referred to as his "Gospel Trilogy."
Writer and musician Jason Woodbury has long been fascinated by this particular chapter of Dylan lore, and he wrote about it recently on his Substack, Range and Basin. Last week, Jason stopped by the studio to talk about why he finds this story so compelling.
JASON WOODBURY: As far as I can tell, you can't really source this story to anything else, and it doesn't seem like it maybe factually it happened. I don't want to accuse Clinton of completely making it up. He very well might have heard it, you know, from a secondhand source, whether or not this, this sort of, let's say extraordinary, paranormal kind of thing happened, Bob Dylan does experience a dramatic conversion in 1978. He really does make a huge shift in his Artistic presentation and songwriting.
SAM DINGMAN: What's compelling to you about that in terms of the lore of Dylan? Like what, what it, what do you like about the idea of Dylan in this moment having this supposed epiphany?
WOODBURY: Dylan has always been a master craftsperson of persona, he's always been excellent at creating this air of sort of aloof, unknowable figure. So I like the idea of a sort of weak and broken Bob Dylan, honestly.
DINGMAN: It’s humanizing.
WOODBURY: Well, it's humanizing, yeah, and it's, it's deeply, we've all, we've all been there, you know, on some level or, or another. So I like that about it. And it's satisfying in this way that that feels, I don't know, maybe a little deeper than just your average rock and roll urban legend.
DINGMAN: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I loved about the piece you wrote about this is you also, you linked to this, I guess they're sort of in Bob Dylan mythology, they're referred to as sermons, these like long kind of rambling talks that he would give from the stage during this period. I mean, I guess he's always done that, but in this particular period, he was given to these meandering ruminations on the themes of the Bible.
RECORDING OF BOB DYLAN: I read the Bible a lot you know I mean it just it just happens I do.
DINGMAN: And one of the things I thought was really fascinating about it is there's one actually where he talks about being at, performing at a college in Arizona.
DYLAN: We were playing in, in, about 4 months ago someplace, it was at a college campus. I forget exactly where, Arizona I think it was some place.
DINGMAN: And what's fascinating to me about it is he's standing there and he's talking about like, “you know, in college campuses, they got these, I guess, they talk about ideas, you know, professors and stuff.”
DYLAN: You know it's like they have a higher learning people there they teach them different like philosophies and, so people they, they study all these different philosophies.
DINGMAN: He's talking like somebody who's never been to a college campus or heard of a college class, which like is obviously not true. Like this is somebody who makes like, you know, references to philosophers in his lyrics, like he obviously knows about these things.
And yet it's believable in that moment that he believes himself to be, have sort of a beginner's mind about these things in the midst of this religiosity that he was experiencing.
WOODBURY: Yeah, seeing him at the, Willie Nelson's Outlaw Festival a couple weeks ago here. I don't think Dylan said, you know, a single word to the audience beyond, I think, introducing the band.
It goes even further. He was like obscured by a lamp on his piano, so you couldn't even really fully tell that Bob was up there, you know, so he's kind of this silent figure who's obscured and, and hidden. When you look at the Gospel Trilogy, he's, he's out in the open in a way that is very different than what we generally associate with Bob.
[RECORDING OF DYLAN SINGING]
WOODBURY: Yeah I think about how humanizing it is and, and how when you're fresh with new convert energy, it's kind of totalizing. It's all you want to talk about, it's all you can focus on. And so again, you see, even the great master Bob Dylan himself, you know, just doing this all too human thing.
DINGMAN: For me, there's a connection between that sense of authenticity and what was happening and this bigger idea that you're writing about in this piece that I really love, which you refer to as ecstatic truth.
WOODBURY: Well, that's a concept that I borrowed wholesale from the great Werner Herzog, who is a filmmaker and a writer. Ecstatic truth means that it feels true on some deep level that goes beyond our rationality.
DINGMAN: Yes, something about the idea that this would have happened to Bob Dylan in this hotel room makes this person, who obviously exists, but there are so many things about him that are hard to understand or make sense of. Viewed through the lens of that incident, all of a sudden he comes into greater focus.
WOODBURY: Yeah, what it's getting at, what it's pointing to, what it somehow illustrates, even in its potential falsity or whatever, is something that is real, does make sense. Art's where the ambiguities, it's where the, the facts don't, they're not the only thing that matter.
DINGMAN: Totally. I mean, I'm also thinking in this moment I hadn't thought about this until you just said that about an explanation I often hear for why people love the Grateful Dead so much, and that explanation is that it's not about the fact that they always got to some apotheosis in their jams, because often they'd failed to get there, but it was the persistent sense that they might.
That there might be this moment of ecstasy that was going to be achieved not just by the musicians on the stage, but by them in communion with the 50,000 people in the middle of the field who had traveled from hundreds of miles to see them. The possibility of transcendent experience. There's an ecstatic truthiness to that.
WOODBURY: I mean, it's true, the jams do sometimes meander and never get where they are quote unquote going, you know, or where you think that they should go.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Sounds a lot like the lives we all live.
WOODBURY: But it's like the lives we live and it's like the, it's it's like when people say, you know, it's not about the destination, it's about the journey. If the possibility of failure is in the room, that means that the possibility of some thing that's even beyond success is also in the room.
DINGMAN: Well, in your piece, I think you talk about the fact that Dylan has in his live performances and on his records almost never played any of his songs the same way twice.
WOODBURY: And for a certain kind of listener, you're going to be frustrated when you go to see Dylan and you don't realize that he's playing “It's All Over Now, Baby Blue” until the second verse, you know, because he's doing it in such a sort of twisted and mangled version of it. And so …
DINGMAN: There is no truth to, to what the song itself is.
WOODBURY: The truth of the song is what's revealed each time you're playing that song. I think of Dylan's songs as a great repositories of incredible and profound truths, and you kind of have to be the one to, to excavate it.
DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah, it's a truth that you and the artist are kind of finding together.
WOODBURY: And I think maybe that's why this notion is fascinating to us as the listener. You are not incidental to the, to the brilliance, you actually are part of it. You have to be part of it in order for it to really truly work.
And so, that notion that we create the truth together, I think that's real.
