Interview with Seth Rogovoy, author of "Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet "(Part One)

(Photo: Scott Barrow)

Seth Rogovoy is the author of BOB DYLAN: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, a new book which examines Dylan’s work in the context of his Jewish heritage. Among his many accomplishments, Rogovoy is the author of The Essential Klezmer, and the editor-in-chief of Berkshire Living Magazine. Rogovoy has now merged his interest  in exploring his own religious background with his love and admiration of the works of Bob Dylan.

While many books have been written about Bob Dylan, the focus has mostly been on his personal life; his recordings and performances; or his artistic influences in music, literature, cinema, and the visual arts. BOB DYLAN: Prophet, Mystic, Poet  focuses on the one seemingly obvious aspect of Dylan’s work that has not been explored in much detail - his religion. From his early original song, “Talkin’ Hava Negila Blues” to his so-called born-again period of 30 years ago, from his politically sarcastic “Neighborhood Bully” through his new album Christmas In The Heart, Dylan has confounded fans and critics by crossing all sort of religious boundaries, as he has done in everything he decides to explore.

Rogovoy deftly places Dylan life and art in the context of various Jewish texts and customs -as well as biographical facts - by finding many Jewish references in Dylan‘s art, both obvious and obscure, that allow the reader to see Dylan’s work in a new light. Rogovoy discusses songs from each phase of Dylan’s nearly 50-year career, and finds an interesting angle in each period that is connected to his heritage.

In the interest of full disclosure, I want to inform my readers that Seth has been a friend of mine since high school, and has thanked me in the acknowledgments section of this book.

How did this book come about ? How long had you been thinking about it ?

I have known for many years that I wanted someday to write a book about Bob Dylan. It’s something of an occupational hazard, as a writer, that all one’s enthusiasms find their way onto one’s plate as a writer.

But ever since I began listening in earnest to Bob Dylan as a teenager, I have been writing about him one way or another. It was in order to review albums like Before the Flood and The Basement Tapes and Desire that I became my high school newspaper’s rock critic. And it was in order to prevent bad editors from messing around with my writing that I became editor of my high school paper.

I loved reading about Bob Dylan nearly as much as listening to him and playing his songs on guitar before I left high school. I’ll never forget that one time I was talking animatedly to a friend and fellow Dylan enthusiast about Dylan, and the friend predicted that someday I’d write a book on Dylan.

Years went by, of course, and I continued to follow Dylan’s career. I became a rock critic -- something I think in large part so that I could get free tickets to Dylan concerts -- but in large part to write about him, and really , through the process of writing about him -- reviewing his concerts and albums as well as more general considerations of his work -- tried to figure out just what it was that made him so different, unique, and, in my estimation, such a great artist.

As far as how long I’d been thinking specifically about this book, that’s hard to say. I guess for many years the Jewish correspondences and connections in Bob Dylan’s life and work have interested me -- they were pretty obvious from the beginning, they were right there in the liner notes, lyrics, and even the name of his newly formed publishing company, Ram’s Horn Music, on the first Dylan album I bought with my own money, Planet Waves, when I was fourteen.

But as I note in the book’s introduction, it wasn’t until I began studying Judaism in my late thirties that I truly realized the profound depths of the connection between Jewish texts and Bob Dylan - that the torah of Bob Dylan was so strongly influenced by the Torah of Moses.

So over the years I’d been collecting a lot of the information that would eventually go into BOB DYLAN: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, in notebooks and files. In that sense, the book gestated for years, maybe even decades. In late 2006, I finally felt ready to attack the project in a serious manner. So I wrote up a proposal, gave it to my literary agent, and she sold it in a week to Scribner, where it turns out my editor secretly harbored a desire to do a Bob Dylan book at some point, but was waiting for something different, which this book certainly is.

So in early 2007, I got the deal with Scribner to go ahead and write the book, and now it’s finally coming out. These things take time, obviously.

What do you think is the current perception of Dylan's religious background and beliefs ?

I don’t directly deal with Dylan’s religious beliefs in the book, and I don’t really pretend to have any insight into what, if anything, Bob Dylan believes in. If we take him at his word, you can find quotes to support just about anything -- that he’s Jewish, Christian, Rastafarian, or finds God in music.

As for the current perception of Dylan’s background and beliefs, I’m still pretty surprised. When I tell people about the book, they often respond, “But isn’t he a born-again Christian?” Considering it’s been about thirty years since Dylan released what are commonly thought of as his two “born-again” albums, and that so much else has gone on since then, including his involvement with the Orthodox Jewish outreach movement, Chabad, and songs that are strewn with allusions, quotations, and concepts drawn from the Jewish prophets, Torah, Talmud, Kabbalah, and liturgy, you’d think that Bob Dylan’s gospel period would rightly be seen as a short chapter in his career (although it winds up being a long chapter in my book -- perhaps the longest, as I go to great pains to show how, in fact, the gospel albums are a lot less about the narrator’s belief in Jesus than they are about the narrator’s identification of Jesus with the Jewish prophets), along the lines of, say, his “country” period, his “protest” period, or his “Grateful Dead” period.

Of course I hope that BOB DYLAN: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, serves in large part to correct these misperceptions, or at least to suggest another perspective, another context, in which to think about Dylan’s gospel period, and his career as a whole.

Was it difficult finding enough material for the book ?

Oh, dear, not at all. In fact, the book wound up being longer than we had originally planned, and had I not been working with a deadline, I could have easily detailed many more instances of Jewish themes and concepts in Bob Dylan’s songs. It seems every time I opened up the book of Daniel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, or Jeremiah, or re-read the stories of King David and Samson, more lines would leap out at me for their familiar correspondences in Dylan lyrics. And the more I read about the Prophets in general, and the more I studied mystical concepts of Creation, the more they all informed Bob Dylan’s works. But at some point, you just need to run with what you have. This book was never meant to be complete or exhaustive -- it’s not meant to catalog every last Jewish allusion in a Dylan song, or every visit Bob’s ever made to a synagogue or to Israel. It’s just meant to provide enough of this sort of thing to help a reader who is also a Bob Dylan listener, or who may become a Bob Dylan listener after reading the book -- to have an expanded appreciation for Dylan as a Jewish artist.

(Scribner)

What is your own religious background?

I was raised in a somewhat typical suburban Reform temple, where most Jewish practice took place in English, where there was little serious Torah study, and where the emphasis was on how Jewish ethics informed contemporary politics -- Israel, Soviet Jewry, civil rights and the antiwar movement. They were very well meaning people, and at the time I found it a very rich environment, but in retrospect it was very assimilationist and it ignored the real meat of what made Judaism distinctive.

But all my grandparents were immigrants, and I grew up spending a lot of time with them, so I had a strong kinship with Eastern European Jewry. And when that was awakened in me in my mid-thirties, when I began a family and wanted to provide my children with some connection to their heritage, I relied on that to guide me back toward the religion of my ancestors. I began a course of self-study, as well as occasional ad hoc learning with much more educated people, that led me to traditional Jewish practice and belief. Which is when I discovered the connection between Bob Dylan and traditional Judaism.

How long did the book take to write, and how did the various drafts evolve ? How did you do your research ?

As I said earlier, in one way or another I’ve been working on the book for years if not decades. But the actual writing of the text took about two years. Research began years earlier, and fortunately I took a lot of notes along the way. But when I began writing in earnest, research and writing took place simultaneously. It involved a lot of dedicated listening over and over again to all of Dylan’s recordings; re-reading fundamental Jewish texts and key guidebooks, including Abraham Joshua Heschel on the Prophets -- you read him on the likes of Jeremiah and Ezekiel and just substitute Bob Dylan for the ancients and it totally resonates.

I also read almost every book ever written on Bob Dylan, but that was mostly just to get myself in the head of knowing everything there was to know about his life and career in order to add my original contributions to the analysis of his life and career. There was no precedent for what I was attempting, and only a few articles addressing the topic in any systematic way.

One thing I didn’t do is I didn’t write the book from beginning to end. Although in the end, the narrative is organized chronologically, I wrote it out of order. I think my first big chapter dealt with the album New Morning - that chapter in particular just felt like something so strongly new and individual, it was important for me to get that down to see how the story would be told. And, frankly, it was important to impress my editor at Scribner that I knew what I was doing. Fortunately, not only did he love the chapter - it turned out that New Morning was one of his favorite Dylan albums.

From there I jumped around. I don’t remember the exact order. Maybe John Wesley Harding next; maybe the mid-sixties albums. I spent a lot of time dealing with the so-called gospel albums, and was thrilled with some of the discoveries I made about those years and albums.

For example, Slow Train Coming is an album full of jokes and ironic self-references. What’s that about? People think of that album as all self-righteousness, but it’s really a beautiful, funny, and very political album -- really as much of a protest album as some of his early sixties albums -- and one with very little Jesus on it at all.

Saved deals more overtly with Jesus as an historical figure, but it’s also interesting how in the songs that talk about the narrator’s relationship with Jesus or a woman who introduced him to Jesus, the singer puts himself in the position of someone who has a different relationship to God. It’s most explicit in “Covenant Woman,” when he sings, “I’ll always be right by your side/ I’ve got a covenant, too,” implying that his covenant is different from hers, hers being the Christian one, his presumably being the original, Jewish one.

Did you learn anything more about Dylan as you were writing Prophet, Mystic, Poet ?

Yes, absolutely, up until the very end. Every time I sat down to write, I learned something, as I constantly was referring back both to Dylan’s lyrics and Jewish scripture. And those were both infinite wellsprings of new discoveries. It was only late in the game, for example, when I stumbled upon a whole strain of midrash, or imaginative retelling, of parts of the story of King David in “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” Speaking for myself, that’s a song that I’d never paid much attention to, at least lyrically, only to find that it was riddled with detailed references to Davidic lore. And I previously had no idea how much the basic concepts of Ecclesiastes, about futility, were wrapped into “It’s Alright Ma ( I’m Only Bleeding).”

I learned plenty more about Dylan, too, in the process of writing, not just about his Jewish connections. I just became stunned by the richness and power of his writing, especially on Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. I mean, I always knew those were great albums with great songs, but I don’t think I ever fully appreciated the poetry. And to think he was only about 24 or 25 years old when he wrote those songs.

Did you have any contact with, or receive any feedback from, Dylan, or his management ?

When I commenced this project in early 2007, I sent a note to Bob Dylan’s publishing company letting them know about it, just as a courtesy. I also let his record company know about it, too. They both replied with words of encouragement. Then when it was time to seek permissions to reprint lyrics, I sent portions of the manuscript that including lyric quotations to his publisher, so they could see what I was doing and how I was using the lyrics in my text. They were very generous in granting me permission to quote from Bob Dylan’s lyrics. Make of that what you will.

To be continued  . . .

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