Bob Dylan’s “Wilderness Years”

By John Lane

“Towards the end of the show someone out in the crowd. . . threw a silver cross on the stage. Now usually I don’t pick things up in front of the stage. Once in a while I do. Sometimes I don’t. But I looked down at that cross. I said, ‘I gotta pick that up.’ So I picked up the cross and I put it in my pocket. . . And I brought it backstage and I brought it with me to the next town, which was out in Arizona. . . I was feeling even worse than I’d felt when I was in San Diego. I said, ‘Well, I need something tonight.’ I didn’t know what it was. I was used to all kinds of things. I said, ‘I need something tonight that I didn’t have before.’ And I looked in my pocket and I had this cross.”
—1979 Bob Dylan interview, from Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, by Clinton Heylin

Bob Dylan
Photo © 1980 Larry Kaplan

As Bob Dylan settles into the 21st century and morphs into the bluesman he always wanted to become (witness his last real album Together Through Life, not the Christmas one-off), it seems necessary to look into the man’s back catalog to trace the trajectory of his long, strange career.

If there’s one constant thread running through his oeuvre, it’s his ability to put off diehard fans and casual listeners—his propensity for veering left just when you’ve gotten comfortable with where he is. The course of his career has taken him through the guises of ragamuffin protest singer, wild-haired/sunglassed, skeletal hipster in Beatle boots, country-bumpkin recluse, and spit ‘n’ nails concert performer. But what of the left turn that he took towards the end of 1978 that has kind of slipped into the hushed tones of a sometimes embarrassing mythology?

I’m speaking of Dylan’s “Christian phase,” what I call his “Wildnerness Years.”

Everyone’s familiar with Dylan “going electric” in ’65 and then audaciously touring in ’66 with a vengeance. It seems quaint now to discuss how the merits of an acoustic versus a Fender turned the music world on its head. But his foray into Christianity, which clearly influenced and saturated his music, deserves some attention.

The over-arching question remains: is it possible to look upon his three Christian-era records with an appreciative eye regardless of the weightiness of his agenda inherent in those discs? My answer is an unequivocable “yes,” with no apology sugarcoating it. There’s an old expression that goes like this, “Nobody sings louder than the recently-converted.” The statement is intended as a sort of put-down, but yet there is truth to it. In the flush of new love (be it for God, or a new lover, or a new interest/fascination), the recently converted can’t help but bubble and babble relentlessly.

See, everyone bemoans the loss of the ’66 Dylan that strung together words rich in American allusions and tongue-twisting, Kerouac-esque sentences; people mourn the death of the Dylan that pissed people off. But in 1979, he reappeared—ready to roll, ready to piss people off—and people were still looking back 12 years.

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