"A slayer of Communists"

John Podhoretz is not particularly fond of Bob Dylan but liked A Complete Unknown because of a theme Podhoretz isn't sure the director understood. Who knew that electrified guitars were anti-Communist? From the review of the film:

The hidden story of A Complete Unknown is that Bob Dylan is a slayer of Communists—maybe not because they’re Communists, but I’ll take what I can get.

His rebellion against the elders in the folk movement of the 1960s was a rebellion in part against the static conformity and dreary humorlessness of the far-left politics that had dominated that corner of the music world for a quarter-century.

That is the secret hidden text of A Complete Unknown, the biopic in question, even if co-writer and director James Mangold might not completely grasp it. The not-so-hidden general theme of the movie is that Dylan is the inceptor of the new American age of the 1960s because he rebels against and ultimately rejects the expectations of elders and authority figures. What Dylan’s mentors, users, financial exploiters, and groupies want is the voice of social justice inveighing as he does against "Masters of War"—but a social-justice warrior is not what he wants to be. And this guy simply will not be what other people want him to be. In a genuinely brilliant performance, Timothée Chalamet captures Dylan’s combination of insolence, petulance, self-assurance, and hunger for authenticity without ever once trying to make the man even remotely endearing. In an equally brilliant performance, Edward Norton plays Pete Seeger, seemingly kindly but deeply self-satisfied, the mentor from whom Dylan must break away to be free. Their dynamic is the beating heart of A Complete Unknown. ....

The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, no conservative to put it mildly, lays it out authoritatively in his 2010 book, Bob Dylan in America: It was the political aesthetic of the American Communist Party and its fellow travelers, which had reached its entropic phase by the time Dylan stepped off the Greyhound. The world of folk music was, by then, led by a hidebound Establishment of its own that had emerged from the Popular Front—the effort, in the United States during the 1930s, to advance the interests of Stalin’s Soviet Union through the seizure of the high ground of culture.

It was led by an unreconstructed Stalinist named Alan Lomax, who worked out of the Library of Congress during the FDR era recording and storing and transcribing what he believed to be authentic working-class musical art unstained by bourgeois Kulak values in pursuit of revolutionary change. (He was assisted in these efforts by nepo daddy Charles Seeger, Pete’s paterfamilias.)

The key tunes of the time were the celebration of the radical Wobbly labor agitator Joe Hill and the anthemic "Which Side Are You On?" nominally about the Harlan County mining strike of 1931—but over time the "side" in question was the Soviet side in the battle between democracy and Stalinism.

A Complete Unknown concludes with Dylan’s betrayal of the aesthetic principles of the Popular Front through his embrace of electrified instruments—which an enraged Lomax and others considered a surrender to the capture of the youth vanguard that was supposed to save America from bourgeois conservatism by capitalist tools like the Beatles.

John Podhoretz, "REVIEW: ‘A Complete Unknown’," The Washington Free Beacon, Jan. 3, 2025.

A Complete Unknown

I may wait until it is streaming, but I will see A Complete Unknown. From a Wall Street Journal review of the film:

Among the many music greats who’ve gotten the biopic treatment, Bob Dylan presents an especially tough multiple choice problem. He’s an artistic deity whose output made a real mark on history. He’s also a living cartoon character with a rasp and patter that has inspired countless bad impressions. And he’s a shapeshifter with many musical phases and a habit of tweaking his own mythology. ....

“[Timothée Chalamet] was really excited to be the one to be able to introduce this music and these lyrics to a new generation.” Chalamet, who has said he knew little about Dylan before landing the part, got good enough with the material to do some 35 songs live on camera, including guitar and harmonica work, and for those on-set performances to make the final cut, the filmmakers say. ....

He’d been practicing the music since 2018, when he was cast in the role, and had extra time to get better thanks to pandemic and Hollywood strike delays. Along the way, he became the movie-star equivalent of that dude in your college dorm who was always noodling on a guitar. His “Dune” co-star Oscar Isaac has said that Chalamet demonstrated his stuff by playing “Girl From the North Country” for cast-mates. ....

“When someone does an impersonation of Dylan, what they’re often missing is the sincerity with which he sings those lyrics,” Vetro says. “He was getting a message across, and that’s what people gravitated to, not because they were like, ‘Oh, I love that nasal voice.’”

Chalamet studied Dylan’s vintage performance footage as well as his body language and his attitude in press conferences. “We’d be watching an interview and Timmy would start speaking the lines just like Bob did. So then he would go into singing it like Bob, but the Bob of that specific time period” ....

...“A Complete Unknown” focuses on four precipitous years. The story starts with a 19-year-old Dylan’s arrival in New York City and ends with the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he rocked out with a band and blew up his image as a lone prophet with an acoustic guitar. ....

Dylan, who is now 83, never got involved in Chalamet’s performance, Mangold says, but the singer reviewed the screenplay. He circled instances of people calling him “Bob” in the script, and changed that to “Bobby” for most characters. Dylan also crossed out a section of lyrics to “Masters of War” that he would skip when singing it live, the director recalls. “He was like, ‘Oh man, I never did this verse.’”

When they met (in a Santa Monica coffee shop that was closed to the public during the pandemic), Dylan said the decision to go electric at Newport had been less about shaking up the music scene than his craving for the camaraderie of playing in a rock band. .... (more)

John Jurgensen, "How Timothée Chalamet Learned to Sound Like Bob Dylan," The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 24, 2024.

"Revolution becomes fond celebration"

Based on several very favorable reviews I just ordered "Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert." From a review in The Spectator: "This recreation of Dylan’s Free Trade Hall concert is supremely good":

In May 1966, Bob Dylan toured the UK with The Band, minus drummer Levon Helm, and abrasively pulled the plug on any lingering notions of his being a mere folk singer. Playing two sets every night – the first acoustic, the second electric – even the solo numbers were wild, lysergic, unraveled. The electric ones whipped through the tweed and tradition like the howl of a strange new language. The crowds booed and one chap famously cried ‘Judas!’ (though presumably many of those present also enjoyed it). Dylan muttered and swore and was unbowed. ....

Last November, American singer Chan Marshall, who performs as Cat Power, recreated the entire Free Trade Hall concert – at the Royal Albert Hall. In other words, her aim was to engage with the mythology of the show as much as the music. A year later, that performance of a performance is being released as an album. ....

This album is on the one hand simply a souvenir of a historic recreation. The same songs played in the same order; even the same cry of ‘Judas!’ ringing out from the audience, this time to guffaws rather than uproar. ‘Jesus,’ Marshall responds.

But it is also an act of creative reimagination. Marshall possesses the same still, stoned, mesmeric quality in her presence as Dylan (sometimes) did at the time, but she also brings a deep devotional energy to the songs that wholly changes them. Her phrasing is as idiosyncratic as Dylan’s, only more nuanced. She has great musicians backing her – on acoustic guitar and harmonica in the first half, and a full electric band on the second half.

The acoustic set is slow and beautiful, a reminder of how deeply strange and yet brilliantly crafted songs such as ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Visions of Johanna’ are. If this part feels as though Marshall is trying to tiptoe back inside venerated history, the second set is more raucous and good-hearted. It lacks any whiff of the rancour of the 1966 show, which means the original play is shorn of much of its contemporary drama. That piledriving rock’n’roll swirl – new and shocking at the time – long ago became the cultural default. Revolution becomes fond celebration. ....

Graeme Thomson, "This recreation of Dylan’s Free Trade Hall concert is supremely good," The Spectator, November 11, 2023.

Good parenting

I've never been a parent but this book does seem to me to offer some good advice for parenting. From a review of A+ Parenting: 

.... "Some parents think they owe it to their children to clean up after them, to entertain them every moment they get bored, and to let them whine and complain whenever they're unhappy." On the contrary. "This may lead your children to think that the whole world revolves around them, and that their needs should take precedence over everyone else's, including yours, which isn't a good way to start life." Amen.

One way to make clear this point is by having your child spend time around adults. They will hear more advanced vocabulary and learn interesting things that they may not if they just spend time around kids their own age. But Moskowitz also has a lot of suggestions for family time. She is a big fan of board games and card games, but she is very specific. Even for younger kids she prefers games that involve strategy to those that are just luck. ....

Family activities should include a lot of talking and playing together and listening to music. Moskowitz even has strong opinions on children's songs. She is a fan of show tunes and Tom Lehrer. Because kids listen to them over and over, they can learn new vocabulary, and even if they don't get all the jokes at first, they can understand more as they go. ....

A child of the '60s, Moskowitz also recommends Bob Dylan. She imagines a child thinking about Dylan's lyric: "How many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry?" "The first reaction might be one of bemusement. The idea that a person may have more than two ears, or that this would allow them to hear better, may intrigue a child. This leads the child to think each time they listen to the song and to realize that Dylan isn't being literal. ....

For parents—especially immigrants or those in the working class—who are trying to give their kids more opportunities, A+ Parenting is invaluable. Not only does it offer real lists of the things kids should know—an E.D. Hirsch approach to childrearing—but it also explains how those things will enable parents to engage more with their children. ....

Naomi Schaefer Riley, "Teach Your Children Well," The Washington Free Beacon, October 22, 2023.

Robbie Robertson (1943-2023)

On Robbie Robertson and The Band:

.... Musically, what he achieved with The Band dominates his legacy (though he composed many movie soundtracks later in life, including the one for 1980’s Raging Bull) and was a key subsequent influence on the alt-country genre. But poetically, what Robertson achieved — with such studied craft, imbued with such intelligence and lived empathy that it transcended imitation and became the authentic article — was to touch the purest soul of American myth and legend and bring it to life in his deceptively folksy lyrics and subtle music with such delicacy and preternatural grace that it is only fitting that this most American of songwriters (along with most of his bandmates) was Canadian. ....

The story of how Levon and the Hawks, gigging with little profile around Ontario, managed to become Bob Dylan’s backing band is itself the stuff of cosmic fortune. Dylan’s manager’s secretary (that’s thrice removed, mind you) happened to be from the Toronto area and familiar with the band, and her tip made its way to Dylan when he decided he wanted to go “electric” on tour and needed a working group. The rest is history: the stuff of rock legend, musical awe, and multiple award-winning documentaries (only one of which was directed by Martin Scorsese). The Hawks slowly transformed into The Band over the years 1965–1967; their association with Dylan during the freewheeling and controversial tours of his albums Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde led to their constantly being referred to in press accounts as “the band” behind him....

The critical years spent under Dylan’s tutelage — the so called “Big Pink” era, named for the amusingly painted rural New York practice space that resulted in Dylan’s own legendary Basement Tapes, but which properly began in terms of songwriting and mutual influence during late 1966 — transformed Robertson. The artistic leap he took during this period is almost shocking: The man last seen writing such fare as “Uh Uh Uh” would reemerge in late 1967 after two years of steeping in Bob Dylan’s sensibility and the deepest reaches of the American folk songbook with songs like the Buñuel-influenced “The Weight.” ....

And “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is the most stunning act of them all, so bracingly successful in its attempt to put you inside the shoes of The Other that I can still remember, as a kid, catching my breath conflictedly over the gut twinge of empathy I felt for people whose defeat was absolutely necessary. Robertson turned to his bandmate Helm (the only American in the group) for some tonal advice and then wrote a song about a no-name dirt-farming soldier from southwestern Virginia who fought for the Confederacy because that’s just the thing you did back then — for family, for honor, for your state — and lost, hard. At every step of the way through this song we know that he had to lose, that it was good and just and proper that the Confederacy and slavery were extinguished. And yet the crushing reality of actual loss — loss of family, loss of pride, loss of self-understanding or any sense of where you will fit in the world to come — is at the forefront. Which is precisely why, when Robertson — with Levon Helm singing his words as only a southerner could — gets to the chorus (“where all the people were singing”) it is a transcendent act of empathy. No words are needed, only a wordless wail, both lullabye and lament, and all for American history’s most deserved losers. .... (more)

Jeffrey Blehar, "Robbie Robertson 1943–2023: The Band’s Leader Finally Rests the Weight," National Review, August10, 2023.

"Out of the darkness and into the light"

Almost a quarter of a century ago came Bob Dylan's album Slow Train Coming. That was about the time I began to take Dylan seriously. I enjoyed this.

.... By the late 1970s, he had begun spending time at the Vineyard Fellowship, a Pentecostal group of Biblical literalists in the San Fernando Valley. At Vineyard, Dylan attended a regular Bible class and a 14-week advanced discipleship training course. For some, Dylan’s attraction to this particularly severe expression of Protestantism has always been more puzzling than any broader interest he might have taken in Christianity....

...[I]n a suite in Tucson, Arizona, in November 1978, that would determine Dylan’s metaphysical and creative direction over the next half-decade or so. “Jesus put his hand on me,” he told the reporter Karen Hughes the following year. “It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble.” In interviews, he started talking about waiting on God in much the same kind of mystical vein that Simone Weil might have adopted. In his pocket (or so he said), he had kept a silver cross a fan had thrown to him on stage. ....

Dylan has one of the least polished voices in contemporary music, and this is sometimes taken to mean it’s his least attractive quality—adequate to the musical task at hand, sure, though hardly his finest asset. But one could just as easily argue, as Tim Grierson has done, that it’s one of his most dexterous strengths, its obvious imperfections notwithstanding. Certainly, the unpredictable phrasing and elasticised timbre, along with his obvious familiarity with the rhythms of the King James Bible, serve him well. ....

Dylan usually makes a point of finishing his albums on a note of hope or despair, more often than not with sparse instrumentation. “When He Returns,” the record’s closer, sells it on both fronts. Just the singer accompanied by Barry Beckett on a yellow-toothed piano, its stately notes hanging in the air like the scent of magnolia. The song ushers the listener out of the recording with its most overtly emotional expression of personal religious belief. ....

...[T]he actual music itself is still fantastic—jauntily arranged, sonically eccentric, jittery and menacing at times, incredibly ambitious, and rhythmically exuberant. Above all, Slow Train Coming really is the story of one guy’s flaming journey out of the darkness and into the light—or, if you insist, in precisely the opposite direction—bringing it all back home with feeling and a pedal-stomping style. Unhinged? Maybe. Inspired? Indisputably. .... (more)

A Larry Norman cover of Dylan's "When He Returns."

David Cohen, "In the Spirit of the Lord," Quillette, August 3, 2023.

"Not Dark Yet"

Scott Johnson at PowerLine recognises Bob Dylan's 82^nd birthday this coming Wednesday with two posts, "Not Dark Yet," and "Not Dark Yet, Cont'd." Johnson writes:

In my estimation Dylan is first and foremost a songwriter. .... Dylan somehow absorbed the folk, rock, country, and blues traditions as a precocious young man growing up in Hibbing and then recapitulated them in his own voice many times over while adding a twist of modernist poetry to the mix. ....

And so, rather than Dylan's recordings, everything in these two blog posts are covers of Dylan songs, in all about forty. If you have found Dylan's singing voice difficult, you can gain appreciation for him as a songwriter by listening to others sing his songs. A few of the choices Johnson made:

Much more.

Scott Johnson, "Not Dark Yet, Cont'd," PowerLine, May 21, 2023.

“It’s what a song makes you feel"

Bob Dylan's new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, has been reviewed many times in the last few days. I probably won't buy it, but comments about it have made it seem interesting, from a Brit who thinks him a "great man" to an American who thinks him a disturbing misogynist.

From The Telegraph:

Bob Dylan’s mischievously titled The Philosophy of Modern Song barely pretends to offer a coherent treatise on the state of contemporary songcraft. Rather, its lavishly and wittily illustrated 340 pages are an excuse for the great man to write with joyful zest, piercing profundity and flamboyant imagination about whatever crosses his mind....

At 81, Dylan can come across as a grumpy old man confronting the state of contemporary culture. “Everything is too full now; we are spoon-fed,” he complains in his appreciation of Hank Williams’s 1953 country classic Your Cheatin’ Heart. “All songs are about one thing and one thing specifically, there is no shading, no nuance, no mystery. Perhaps this is why music is not a place where people put their dreams at the moment; dreams suffocate in these airless environs. And it’s not just songs – movies, television shows, even clothing and food, everything is niche-marketed and overly fussed with. ....

“People can keep trying to turn music into a science, but in science one and one will always be two. Music, like all art, including the art of romance, tells us time and again that one plus one, in the best circumstances, equals three.” For Dylan, songs are metaphysics and alchemy. This book is lightning in a bottle.

The Washington Post:

It has 66 brief vignettes about memorable sides cut by performers ranging from the Sun Records also-ran Jimmy Wages to the 1940s multithreat Perry Como to Dylan’s old touring buddies the Grateful Dead to his musical inheritors, like Elvis Costello and the Clash. ....

These essays are not all terrifying verdicts on the fate of a corrupted humanity. There are history lessons, too! ....

Oftentimes, when interrogated about himself and his views, he is something of a pill: evasive, defensive and not infrequently ornery. But when speaking about peers and progenitors in the field of songwriting, the mood shifts. He has routinely been thoughtful, insightful and uncommonly generous to those with whom he shares the arena.

The Philosophy of Modern Song is the great manifestation of that praiseful impulse. Dylan has his nitpicks, but this is mostly a liturgy. Here are 66 instances of beauty, anxiety and deliverance that taken together would make a satisfying last will and testimony....

Los Angeles Times:

“Knowing a singer’s life story doesn’t particularly help your understanding of a song,” Dylan writes. “It’s what a song makes you feel about your own life that’s important.” ....

Most of us fall hard for pop music as adolescents and never quite shake the stranglehold those formative hits have on our consciousness. Dylan is no different. Twenty-eight songs in the book date from the 1950s. Nine were released in 1956, the year Dylan turned 15.

He also writes about ‘60s and ‘70s rock anthems — the Who’s “My Generation,” the Clash’s “London Calling” — and makes a couple of excursions into the ‘80s catalog of Willie Nelson. But it’s clear that Dylan’s definition of “modern song” does not extend into the hip-hop era. ....

...[C]oherence isn’t what you want from Bob Dylan. What you want is to watch songs ping-pong around his brain; you want a close encounter with his mind. Unfortunately, that same mind is the storehouse for some extremely dark and disturbing ideas about — to use the retrograde term that Dylan himself employs — the opposite sex. ....

Dylan makes the obvious but important point that pop lyrics, which may “seem so slight” when read, are “written for the ear and not for the eye.” It’s when those words are set to music and dramatized by a singer of skill and sympathy that the magical transmutation occurs.

Dylan is a brilliant songwriter, of course; the truth is, he’s a better singer, a master vocal stylist whose performances speak to the deeps of human emotion even when they carry unseemly attitudes and ideas. ....

Neil McCormick, "Bob Dylan tackles pop, polygamy and PC culture with wicked wit," The Telegraph, Oct. 29, 2022, Elizabeth Nelson, "Bob Dylan takes us on a wide-ranging tour of songs he admires,"The Washington Post, Oct. 31, 2022, Jody Rosen, "Bob Dylan’s new book is revealing, misogynistic and a special kind of bonkers," Los Angeles Times, Oct. 27, 2022.

To everything there is a season

Lance Morrow, thinking about President Biden's age. Morrow is 82. The President will be 80 this year.

For your eyes only, I have prepared a scouting report on conditions you will find when you cross over the mystic border of 80, into serious old age. ....

Think of old age in terms of The Pilgrim’s Progress. When John Bunyan wrote his tremendous allegory in the late 17^th century, his full title was “The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World to That Which Is to Come, Delivered Under the Similitude of a Dream.” That’s not a bad description of life in one’s ninth decade, which at times seems to transpire “under the similitude of a dream” and most certainly looks like one’s gateway to the world which is to come. The doddering Pilgrim will wallow in the Slough of Despond, louse up his blood sugar while lunching in Vanity Fair, gasp up the Hills of Difficulty, suffer through the Valley of Humiliation, dream of the Delectable Mountains. Old age is like life, but more intense—and made weird by debilities. ....

It is well to remember that TR died at 60, thoroughly worn out. His cousin Franklin died at 63—wasted, spent. Lyndon B. Johnson, FDR’s onetime protégé, expired, exhausted, at 64. I remember that when Dwight Eisenhower, age 70, left the White House in 1961—riding down snowy Pennsylvania Avenue beside his successor, 43-year-old John F. Kennedy —he seemed the oldest man in the world. But of course we were all young that winter.

That moment, when power passed from Eisenhower to Kennedy and the 1950s yielded to the 1960s, marked the empowerment of a fallacy that is still at work in American culture—an existential error Bob Dylan, now 81, summed up in his 1973 anthem, “Forever Young.”

That was the germ of the fatal national neoteny—a word defined as the retention of juvenile features in an adult animal. Old age became yucky—an attitude that, decades later, seemed hilarious as it was discovered, the hard way, that no one can be (or should be) forever young. In fact, life has about it a seemly, inevitable flow, a progression from birth to childhood to youth to adulthood to middle age to old age, and finally to death, with rules and roles appropriate to each stage. It is good to be old. It is good to be young. It is right to be a child and right, when the time comes, to be a mother or father, and right, further down the road, to be a grandfather and, by and by, a corpse. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. Let’s leave it at that.

Lance Morrow, "The 80s Called. They’re on Their Way for You, Mr. President," Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2022.

"May God bless and keep you always..."

On his 81^st birthday, Bob Dylan:


From 1971:

"It's not dark yet, but it's getting there"

Bob Dylan's 81^st birhtday is on Tuesday, May 24. Today, Scott Johnson at Power Line, in recognition of the event, has posted some of his favorite covers of Dylan compositions. Here are a few of them, but there are many more at the site.









Scott Johnson, "Not Dark Yet," Powerline, May 22, 2022.

Don't look back

"I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus."

Pressing on

Bob Dylan is 80

Lots of articles about Dylan today, his 80^th birthday. From "Bob Dylan Refused to Be the Voice of a Generation," quoting him:

There’s no black and white, Left and Right to me anymore, there’s only up and down, and down is very close to the ground, and I’m trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics.

A writer at the same site observes;

I had little enough use, myself, for Dylan’s music until I was in my mid 30s. Getting past the image and into the deeper waters is where Dylan is best encountered.

I didn't appreciate Dylan until I was about that age.

And:

Few American musicians have attracted more praise or influenced more artists than Dylan. He even won a Nobel Prize in Literature for his lyrics. Dylan is loved by some and respected without affection by others, yet, for many, the sound of his voice and the words of his songs produce a reflexive revulsion. Either way, Dylan has always been more complex and interesting than the public image embraced by casual fans and bitter detractors alike. ....

From 1971:

"I can see the Master's hand":

"Not dark yet, but it's getting there"

On Bob Dylan's 78^th birthday Power Line posts "Not dark yet" so I went looking for the song.

Shadows are falling and I been here all day It's too hot to sleep and time is running away Feel like my soul has turned into steel I've still got the scars that the sun didn't heal	Well I been to London and I been to gay Paree I followed the river and I got to the sea I've been down to the bottom of a whirlpool of lies I ain't lookin' for nothin' in anyone's eyes
There's not even room enough to be anywhere It's not dark yet, but it's getting there Well my sense of humanity is going down the drain Behind every beautiful thing, there's been some kind of pain	Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear It's not dark yet, but it's getting there I was born here and I'll die here, against my will I know it looks like I'm movin' but I'm standin' still
She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind She put down in writin' what was in her mind I just don't see why I should even care It's not dark yet, but it's getting there	Every nerve in my body is so naked and numb I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from Don't even hear the murmur of a prayer It's not dark yet, but it's getting there

More at Power Line: "Not dark yet, cont’d", with various well-known performers doing covers of Dylan songs.

Planted by the river

Bob Dylan:
You know, these are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness.
It's not happiness or unhappiness, it's either blessed or unblessed.
As the Bible says,
"Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly."
The Psalm he references: Psalm 1 (KJV)

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,
nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.
But his delight is in the law of the LORD;
and in his law doth he meditate day and night.
And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water,
that bringeth forth his fruit in his season;
his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.
The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.
Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.
For the LORD knoweth the way of the righteous:
but the way of the ungodly shall perish.

Trouble no more

From an atheist's appreciation of "Bob Dylan’s Soulful Christian Phase":

.... Bob Dylan has released a new box set, Trouble No More, chronicling the period of his career most controversial to critics—the three years, beginning in the late 1970s, during which he made exclusively Christian music. To anger secular listeners with great severity, Dylan’s gospel was not of the “Jesus is just alright” hippie variety. It was fire and brimstone, “sinners in the hands of an angry God” exhortation. In live performances, his introductions to songs such as “Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody” and “Are You Ready” included end-of-days prophecy and warnings of hellfire for nonbelievers.

Discovering Dylan’s Christian music decades after its release, I was prepared to hate it. But it became the stage of Dylan’s chameleon-like career to which I most return. The rock-gospel trilogy of Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love boasts of some of Dylan’s most powerful and impactful music. ...

In the most marvelous composition of Dylan’s Christian music, “Every Grain of Sand,” the songwriter takes measure of his entire life, and searches for some semblance of meaning and source of purpose:

Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear
Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer
The sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way
To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay
I gaze into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame
And every time I pass that way I always hear my name
Then onward in my journey I come to understand
That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand.

The questions at the heart of Dylan’s struggle are those that trouble every human life: How can we prevent our regrets from disabling our ambition? How do we face our imminent extinction with pride and strength? How do we gain the confidence to behave as if our lives matter for more than what is empirically verifiable? ....

Bob Dylan’s Soulful Christian Phase | The American Conservative

When He returns

The iron hand it ain't no match for the iron rod. The strongest wall will crumble and fall to a mighty God. For all those who have eyes and all those who have ears It is only He who can reduce me to tears. Don't you cry and don't you die and don't you burn. Like a thief in the night, he'll replace wrong with right When He returns.

Truth is an arrow and the gate is narrow that is passes through. He unreleased His power at an unknown hour that no one knew. How long can I listen to the lies of prejudice ? How long can I stay drunk on fear out in the wilderness ? Can I cast it aside, all this loyalty and this pride ? Will I ever learn that there'll be no peace, that the war won't cease Until He returns?

Surrender your crown on this blood-stained ground, take off your mask. He sees your deeds, He knows your needs even before you ask. How long can you falsify and deny what is real? How long can you hate yourself for the weakness you conceal? Of every earthly plan that be known to man, He is unconcerned. He's got plans of his own to set up His throne When He returns.

Philippians 3:14

"It ain't my goal to gain the whole world, but give up my soul."

From a Hollywood Reporter review:

Diving headlong into one of the most controversial moments in Bob Dylan's storied career and paying no heed to unbelievers, Jennifer Lebeau's Trouble No More unearths rare concert footage from the singer's "Christian period," when he toured small venues playing nothing but songs about his new faith. The singer's refusal to perform his hits angered fans at the time, and many critics were unkind to the new compositions. A chance for reappraisal comes next month, when Columbia/Legacy's latest Bootleg Series installment will collect many hours of live recordings from this period. Lebeau's film will be part of that set's "Deluxe Edition," and will be catnip for fans of the albums Slow Train Coming and Saved. But seen on the big screen at the New York Film Festival, it proved something of a come-to-Jesus moment for unconverted viewers as well, loaded with fine performances of songs that fit comfortably in the songwriter's canon. ....

On "Saved," Dylan puts the message across as fervently as a tent-revivalist, his band chugging along like a train on straight tracks. On the rarity "Ain't Going to Hell for Anybody," he acknowledges his sinful ways and puts them behind him.

Though he has six African-American backup singers, this show doesn't evoke the sounds of the church the way, for example, Lyle Lovett does with his Large Band. Rather, it weaves them into the kind of rock music Dylan was already making at this time. Tim Drummond's bass (which cuts loose on songs like "Solid Rock") and Jim Keltner's drumming keep Spooner Oldham's organ from ever sounding churchy. ....

I don't believe I have ever heard ""Ain't Going to Hell for Anybody" so I explored YouTube and found this performance:

I found it difficult to understand the words to the verses — the chorus is pretty clear — and commentary on the song indicates that in typical Dylan fashion they frequently change from performance to performance. Bob Dylan Lyrics: "Ain't Gonna Go To Hell (For Anybody)"

'Trouble No More' Review | Hollywood Reporter