There was a Time When Bob Dylan Wanted to Save Your Soul

By Joey Salgado

Bob Dylan was as much a part of a student activist’s cultural life in the 60s as Mao’s Red Book and Joma Sison’s Philippine Society and Revolution.

“Blowin' in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’," these were not merely songs but calls to arms, urgent dispatches from the front lines of social ferment, sung in small circles during breaks in overnight meetings in some UG or “underground” house, part of a vetted playlist that includes militant songs inspired by the now despised Chinese cultural revolution, background music while plotting ways to bring down the regime and usher in a new morning, or something like that.

But by the time martial law was declared in 1972, Dylan had already moved on from his persona as prophet and voice of his generation. He had gone electric. He was now pushing the boundaries of rock and roll and poetry on several groundbreaking albums, declarations of creative independence from the shackles of movements, ideologies, forms, and labels.

By the beginning of the 80s, Dylan found himself at the center of a revolt by devoted fans and music critics over the release of three albums of fierce Christian devotional music - “Slow Train Coming,” “Saved,” and “Shot of Love” - collectively known as the Christian trilogy.

The songs were strident, gloomy treatises on faith and salvation. Dylan was channeling the intensity of his protest era to proselytize. The pushback, however, was so extreme that even Dylan would later disown this phase in his artistic evolution.

This was the Dylan I knew in high school. On radio, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” featuring exquisite guitar playing by Mark Knopfler, played alongside The Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop,” Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing,” Paul Simon’s “Slip Sliding Away,” Led Zeppelin’s “All of My Love,” and James Taylor’s “Your Smiling Face.”

“Gotta Serve Somebody,” the lead single from “Slow Train Coming,” is a song that dares the listener to confront a moral dilemma. Dylan sings the words “It may be the devil/or it may be the Lord but you gotta serve somebody” with the conviction of someone who has experienced both trial and redemption, delivered from perdition by God’s grace (Chickoy Pura of the Jerks delivers a goosebumps-inducing cover of this song).

I gifted my son with a vinyl copy of “Slow Train Coming” on his birthday (that’s a first pressing, my man). His face lit up when he saw the cover. Their pastor, he said, had quoted “Gotta Serve Somebody” in a recent Church service and he and my daughter-in-law searched for the song online. It was a gift that was providential, even divinely inspired.

This perhaps explains Dylan’s endurance.

Every generation has a persona of Dylan in mind, like fragments of a mosaic. They identify with it, embrace it as their version of Dylan the genius, the chronicler of the human condition, the poet, a trickster, a “song and dance man,” as he once called himself. To his most ardent followers, a Dylan song or album carries secrets, hidden messages that need to be deciphered every so often, whether you first heard them in an activist sing-along, on the radio, or in your son's excited retelling of a Sunday homily.

Sixty four years after the release of his first album, Dylan is experiencing another creative peak. Fans and critics adored his recent albums, “Rough and Rowdy Ways” and “Shadow Kingdom.” His voice, thin and nasal in the 60s, had settled into a croak in the late 80s. Since “Time Out of Mind,” released in 1997, he has never sounded more vigorous, his works more vital.

At this point in his life and career, he can get away with recording an album of halfway decent covers of Frank Sinatra songs (“Shadows in the Night”) and grapple with the vocal nuances of the Great American Songbook (“Triplicate”). You can even forgive him for recording an album of Christmas songs.

At 85, Dylan, the “song and dance man,” continues to make listeners engaged, surprised, annoyed, and possibly transformed.