WHEN people talk about Bob Dylan’s ‘born again period’, they can miss the point. If there was a determining spiritual rebirth, it didn’t happen in the late 1970s, but two decades earlier, when the Hibbing kid with a headful of Hank Williams and Little Richard vowed to dedicate himself to song. It became a never-ending baptism; he immersed himself in that river and never emerged, just swam deeper.
Speaking to Newsweek around the time of 1997’s Time Out Of Mind, Dylan was unambiguous: “Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.” He reiterated to The New York Times: “Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book… You can find all my philosophy in those old songs.”
What religion, what philosophy is this? The answer blows through the 300-odd pages of his extraordinary new publication, . When it was announced, this book, billed as Dylan writing
