The Dylanologists (11 page)

Peter didn't necessarily have a problem with Dylan finding Christ. As he pointed out, some of Dylan's great musical heroes—Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis—“had this Christ thing going on.” Peter liked
Slow Train
enough that when he found a bunch of copies in the discount bins, he bought them for his friends. His
Jewish
friends. He was not being ironic. “The singing on it is incredible!”

What did bother him in Connecticut was the right-wing political diatribe that Dylan spewed from the stage. Dylan started preaching about the Canaanites, and how God pronounced in the book of Genesis that Judgment Day would come for them someday, but “their iniquity is not yet full.” Centuries later, the scripture says, God ordered his chosen people to slaughter the wicked Canaanites one and all. On the stage in Hartford, Dylan—erstwhile friend of beat poet Allen Ginsberg—linked the Canaanites with gays. “San Francisco is kind of a unique town these days,” Dylan said. “I think it's either one third or two thirds of the population there are homosexuals. All right! I guess they're working up to a hundred percent, I don't know. Anyway . . . I guess the iniquity's not yet full. And I don't wanna be around when it is!”

Peter left Hartford appalled. “I was pissed at him for a really long time after that,” he says. “I just couldn't believe the man who wrote ‘Chimes of Freedom' was saying this total bullshit.”

He didn't burn all his records. But when
Saved
came out, he gave it a bad review.

4

Dylan was taunting her.

Robin Titus, wearing her new leopard-skin hat, was in the front row with her husband, Lex LeSage. As usual. They always found a way to the stage, close enough to see his face and, if Robin was lucky, touch his boots. Sometimes they scored front-row seats. Failing that, they would sneak up. When there were general-admission concerts on consecutive nights, they would tear out of town after the first show so they could be at the front of the line for the next. They'd been known to get in the line at four in the morning. Lex, the easygoing one of the pair, looked like Kenny Rogers. You could see Native American blood in Robin's face. Her eyes were small, and her hair streamed all the way down her back. Robin was all nerves, especially at the front of the line at a Dylan concert. Tension often crackled there, but Robin could hold her own. “I've gotta be first,” she says. “Open the door, Robin's first.”

If she wanted something, she pushed until she got it. Now, in the fall of 1995, Robin wanted Dylan to sign her copy of
Saved
, the album with the hand of God reaching down to touch the chosen ones. She tried on consecutive nights, and Dylan turned away, ignored her, flat-out refused. He asked for
her
autograph.

Finally, in San Antonio, Dylan told Robin he wouldn't sign it during the concert. She would have to come around back and meet him after the show.

That was all the opening she needed. She ran outside during the last encore with Lex and hustled to the backstage door. A phalanx of burly men guarded the path from the theater to the bus. When he walked outside she hailed him. “Bob,” she said, in a scolding tone. “Are you ready to sign this?”

He told the guards to let her through, and he signed it, in giant letters, with lines above and below. As he did he asked a question: I want to know what this album means to you.

Robin tried to explain, but she knew he didn't have time to listen to it chapter and verse before he got onto the bus and headed to Austin. It was a very long story.

Her father's mother, a full-blooded member of the Sac and Fox tribe of Indians, grew up on a reservation in Oklahoma before moving with the family to Wichita, Kansas. Her mother, who was white, had seven children with a series of men. Robin's father left when she was three and died when she was nine. Before he passed away, he took Robin to an Indian Baptist church in Wichita, where lessons about Jesus were leavened with tribal traditions. Robin's mother was raised a Catholic, but it never took root in her daughter. How was it that you could commit some grievous sin and then get off the hook simply by confessing to a man in a box? As a teen she harangued her mother to leave Catholicism for a form of Christianity that went “all the way.”

Robin had a son when she was sixteen. The boy's father split for another woman within a year. She moved out of her mother's house at eighteen and got a job assembling toy trucks and Popsicle trays and other random products at a plastics plant. When Robin met a new boyfriend, the partying started. Pills, pot, cocaine. “Whatever you got.” She woke up and got high. Her mother used to tell people,
Don't talk to Robin until she comes back from the garage.
She would light up “big ol' fatties” on the way to work. She woke up hung over every day. If she woke up at all. She was calling in sick all the time. She was a mess.

But
Saved
had come out the year she turned seventeen, and she just about wore out the record. Her son was still in diapers when he learned to call out for his favorite song, “Solid Rock,” on which Dylan sings about hanging on to the rock—Jesus—when the end comes. The kid knew all the words. Robin made him a sweatshirt with
BOB DYLAN
emblazoned on the front and a refrain from the song printed on the back:
WON'T LET GO CAN'T LET GO.
She wouldn't let him grow out of it. She just made bigger versions; he's wearing one in every single class picture.

Robin's early twenties were a tug-of-war between partying and
Saved
. It took a long time, but eventually,
Saved
won. She didn't go to therapy. Nobody did an intervention. She just did it. She quit the hard drugs (though not pot, not yet) and got herself right. She returned to the Christian life, and for this she thanked Dylan. Listening to his music over and over made the message sink in, she thought. On the Christian records, he may as well have been whispering it directly in her ear. “God is coming, Robin. Are you ready? Get ready!” Robin was certain that she would not have gotten clean without those songs.

She split with the boyfriend and rediscovered Lex, a childhood friend. It was 1987. She got a job at a hand truck manufacturer; he worked at Cessna, Wichita's top employer. He drove her to work every day. In fact, he drove her everywhere because for reasons she couldn't explain, getting behind the wheel freaked Robin out. Anyway, they were together so much that she never had to do it. They began going to Dylan shows in the Midwest and Great Plains.

Lex liked Dylan, but in the beginning the shows were just rock 'n' roll to him. He liked to travel around and see other fans and have a good time. But then in the summer of 1993, at an amphitheater outside Denver, something came over him. They didn't have seats up close, so they were plotting a rush to the front. It was Lex who led the charge this time. Robin couldn't believe it. “He heard it. It went to his heart.”

It turned out to be a true metamorphosis. After the concert Lex tried to process what had just happened to him. He had a hard time putting the experience into words. It felt like a detonation. Suddenly he realized that there was a real truth that Dylan had been singing about all this time. He was warning them that the apocalypse was coming. Dylan had long sung about a higher power. He was preoccupied with the quest for salvation. He sermonized against the brokenness and injustice of the world. Signs of Armageddon were always there in the songs. The land is condemned, things are burning, the sky is split. The mountains are filled with lost sheep. There is thunder on the mountain. The chosen are preparing. Lex felt like he was seeing a prophet of sorts. Or maybe that wasn't right. Not a prophet—a preacher, of the old brimstone school.

Lex had been raised in the Catholic church, but he had drifted away from it long ago. Now, in the wake of his epiphany in Colorado, he did a number of things. He started to listen to the television preachers on Sunday mornings. He picked up the Bible and began reading, and not with the book of Genesis, mind you, but with Revelation. That did it. Crack the shell on Revelation and you could get straightened up right away. Robin and Lex decided they ought to school the kids—they each brought a son to the marriage—and so they went to a Pentecostal church in town. It only lasted a couple of years. Two aspects of it pushed them away. It started to grate on Lex that the preacher had an expensive home and a fancy car and took lavish vacations with his family. Then someone suggested to Robin that she was possessed because she couldn't speak in tongues.

They were through with organized religion. It seemed their convictions burned too hot. Her mother tried to get them to go to her new congregation, said they needed fellowship. But Robin had a different idea. “I got my church,” she said, looking around her house. “It's right here.”

The place was a shrine. On their walls, Dylan seemed simultaneously a member of their family and a sort of religious figure. Maybe he was an older brother done good; maybe he was a saint. Robin made homemade plaques she called “woods.” She would glue photos and words to a board and slap a coat of varnish on top. She made one to give her hero. It had a portrait of Jesus in the middle surrounded by miniature crosses, small images of Dylan's Christian rec­ords, and excerpts of his gospel-era concert preaching. She handed it to him in Little Rock in 1995, a few days before that fateful night in San Antonio.

Her own Dylan woods hung all about their tidy house, alongside family photographs, crosses, images of Jesus, and Native American artifacts. Hanging from the ceiling above the couch in the living room were dream catchers, a graduation tassel, and what looked like homemade Dylan prayer cards. She had attached one of her tiny crosses to a photo of Dylan from the 1960s and laminated it. Another, attached to a white hanging cross, read
DYLAN LOVES ROBIN T
and had an invocation on the back: “I said a prayer for you today / And knew God must have heard.” Everywhere Robin and Lex had Stars of David. Their favorite was formed out of the letters
L-O-V-E
, and it appeared in custom-made stained glass over their front door, and in tattoo ink on his shoulder and her neck. They adopted this symbol of Judaism because “Jesus was a Jew.” But in Robin's favorite necklace, the centerpiece of the star was an emerald, Bob Dylan's birthstone.

Robin told her mother that she could get her spiritual fill any time she wanted. It was as simple as slipping a Dylan disc into her CD player. She and Lex listened to other musicians, but they were just so much rock 'n' roll. Bob was
church
. She wasn't calling him God, or Jesus, or even a prophet. She was just saying he was the best preacher she had ever heard. When she listened to
Saved
, she was wide awake. She felt it in her soul.

That night in San Antonio, there was no way she could tell Dylan all of this. There wasn't time. So she told him about her son rocking out to “Solid Rock” in his diapers. He just listened, and in a moment he was on the move.

Robin swore she was different from other women who went to show after show following Dylan. A lot of them wanted to sleep with him. She didn't. She was married to Lex, and she wouldn't be unfaithful. Not even for Dylan. God's honest truth. Her mother didn't raise dishonest girls. Still, she's the kind of woman who put her hands on people, and she was afraid of what she might do to her pastor if he gave her an opening. So she stood there with her arms crossed and her hands on her shoulders. She tried her best to control herself.

It was Dylan who grabbed her by the waist. He pulled her over, kissed her, and strode off.

She couldn't walk. She literally couldn't order her legs to move. Lex had to pick her up and carry her away. Dylan may as well have been a televangelist smacking Robin on the forehead and trumpeting a blessing—
Be healed!
—as she fell into Lex's arms. She was swept away.

5

The conversion and its aftermath heralded a new sort of parlor game: debating what Dylan believed.

A year after the San Francisco shows, he brought his nongospel repertoire back to the stage. In 1983, he released an album called
Infidels
that was welcomed as less overtly Christian, more open to interpretation, more Dylanesque. “Jokerman” sounded like a return to form, a meditation on the doubt that goes along with faith. There is a moment when he sings about a “manipulator of crowds” and it's unclear whether he's singing about Jesus or himself or both of them. It seemed to the fans who bought the record that his born-again fever had broken.

Dylan never renounced Christianity, but he did deny actually saying he'd been born again. (“That's just a media term.”) While he didn't regret “telling people how to get their souls saved,” the time had come for him to do something different. “Jesus himself only preached for three years,” he told the
Los Angeles Times
. Jewish fans clung to any sign that he might be returning to his childhood faith. They noticed when Dylan appeared in Jerusalem wearing a yarmulke and a prayer shawl for his son's bar mitzvah, or sang for a Chabad-Lubavitch charity telethon, or sat in on a Passover seder. Christian Dylan fans noted that in the midst of this, he was singing gospel up on stage. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he performed “In the Garden,” which asks whether the soldiers who came for Jesus on Gethsemane knew he was the Son of God.

As the years passed, writers have taken to their keyboards to claim him for one faith or another. Seth Rogovoy wrote a book highlighting lines in Jewish scripture that appeared in Dylan's songs. In “Crash on the Levee” (1967), the Great Flood was recast as a prophetic warning in slang and blues jargon. Rogovoy saw it as hip midrash, Jewish scholars' interpretations of scriptural texts. The “bread-crumb sins” of “Gates of Eden” (1965) bring to mind the Jewish tradition of ridding themselves of transgressions by casting bread into water; so did “Jokerman” from
Infidels
. “Father of Night” (1970) reminded the writer of observant Jews reciting morning prayers wearing shawls and tefillin. On “Forever Young” (1973) he heard “a sophisticated code built into the song.” It sounded a lot like the Kabbalah's
Sefirot
, “ten manifestations of godliness on earth.”