music & film

Devils & Dust, the latest Springsteen album, is a “must buy”! Bruce has gone theological on us, and the critics are debating whether he’s finally “got religion”. The good Catholic boy, whose childhood was blighted and faith shattered by the nuns who ran his school, has consistently embraced Christian values but repudiated faith and institutional church. Until now.

Springsteen’s concerts – especially on his native American soil – have always been stunning examples of secular evangelism. His gospel is a re-visioning of the American Dream. It is the Good News that, although the Dream has been betrayed by greedy, self-serving politicians and the dominance of the American Right, there is an alternative – an America where the poor, the dispossessed, the working classes and the no-hopers are the significant shapers of a new society.

Bruce doesn’t just produce a playlist for his concerts. He crafts a story – a journey. “Covenant to come with me,” he tells his audience at the outset, “and I’ll take you somewhere good. Come with me and I’ll show you the Promised Land - the Land of Hope and Dreams!” His songs tell the story of hope betrayed, of corruption and war-mongering. They move through to hope and new possibilities. They end, standing, Moses-like, on the threshold of the Promised Land.

Get hold of the DVD of The Rising. Watch “Land of Hope and Dreams”. The metaphor is the traditional gospel train. In fact, he closes with a two-line reprise of the black spiritual, “People Get Ready”: “People get ready, there’s a train a-comin’/Don’t need no ticket – you just get on board!” Yet while the spiritual belongs in the holiness tradition, and excludes unworthy passengers, the train that journeys to the Land of Hope and Dreams is different: “This train/carries saints and sinners/this train/carries whores and gamblers/this train/carries lost souls.” It’s a radically inclusive vision. And it goes on: “This train/dreams will not be thwarted/This train/faith will be rewarded …” I defy anyone to listen and watch and remain unmoved.

And, having preached the gospel and presented the vision, there’s the “altar call”. “Come and be born again! Come down into the river! Be baptised!” Bruce struts the stage, calling to would-be converts. Ever the satirist, he deliberately mimics the stage antics of evangelists like Jimmy Swaggart. Yet the satire only underlies his own passionate seriousness.

His music and metaphors have always been steeped in the Bible and in traditional gospel spirituality. Devils & Dust moves into explicitly Christian, theological territory, however. The title track is an anti-war song, decrying the ways in which war dehumanises the participants: “It’ll take your God-filled soul/and fill it with devils and dust!” It’s not clear whether this song was written before or after 9/11. Is it the Vietnam war he is on about, or Iraq? Whichever, it was Iraq that took Springsteen off the political fence and he campaigned actively against George W Bush. In a masterpiece of political irony, Bush wanted to use Springsteen’s best-known anthem, “Born in the USA” as a Republican campaign theme song. He obviously hadn’t listened to anything other than the chorus, because the song is a vitriolic denunciation of Vietnam and the militarism of the Republican government … DUH!

But it’s “Jesus was an only Son” that gets my vote as something worth serious theological attention. The second verse goes like this:

“In the Garden of Gethsemane he prayed for the life he’d never live/He beseeched his heavenly Father to remove the cup of death from his lips/And there’s a loss that can never be replaced, a destination that cannot be reached/a light you’ll never find in another’s face, a sea whose distance cannot be breached”

“… he prayed for the life he’d never live”? Wow! I’d never thought of that, nor seen it in any exegesis of the agony of Gethsemane (though it was the theme of Scorsese’s account of the cross in The Last Temptation of Christ). But it’s true, isn’t it? Death means a life that cannot now be lived. It’s the death of possibilities, joys, sadnesses, meetings, partings, experiences, relationships. And it was for Christ just as much for anyone else. More familiarly, it was the death of the possibility of the coming of the Kingdom – all that Jesus had lived for. Yet somehow, phrasing it as he does, Springsteen adds so much more to the agony. He reclaims the humanity of Jesus, which can so easily be obscured by the divine significance of this encounter between Son and Father.

And isn’t it true, too, that there is a loss that can never be replaced? Resurrection (and eschatology) may make possible something good and wonderful and new, but it doesn’t undo or make good the loss of the life never lived. A different future is a marvellous gift, because it is a future born out of the ashes of the old life, but it is a different future and precludes ever reaching the original destination.

To me, that says something vitally true about human bereavement. It reminds me, too, that God in Christ has entered into the human experience of irredeemable loss that accompanies every human death – both for those who die and those left behind. God is marked by loss as we are. These insights into the reality of bereavement are so important pastorally and as part of our theology of the cross. They’re so much more gritty and real than the Christian guff we often pump out over bereavements and at funerals, that balks at giving expression and reality to the agony of loss. Darn, Bruce, but you’re good …

Did anyone else see Amazon's 10th Anniversary Concert online yesterday, or catch the last chance to see it today? If you get this in time (today only!) go to www.amazon.com (ie the US site) and navigate from the ad on the RHS of the page. It featured Bob and Norah Jones - their two highest selling singers.

I felt profoundly sad, watching it. Dylan's getting old. He still makes music - wonderfully and generously - but his voice is going. Of course, there are those who maintain that he never had a voice, but that's to misunderstand what he does. There have always been three vital elements to Dylan - the lyrics, the music and the voice. Dylan uses his voice as an instrument to interpret his songs. He plays with his voice as others play a guitar or piano. If you've ever admired what Clapton can make a guitar do, and how he can change the mood or feel of something, then you'll undertand how Dylan does the same thing with his voice. He can snarl, sneer, beg, mock, woo, entrance, and terrify. Or he could. That's what makes the man so astoundingly versatile and infuriating. Dylan is probably the one perfomer who has always maintained absolute rights to his own music. He will change the tune, the lyrics, or reinterpret the songs radically. You never know what Dylan in concert is going to do with his songs. One of the audience's favourite games is "Guess the song" from the instrumental introduction. It beats "Who wants to be a millionaire?" for unpredictability!

This is part of what makes his music truly great - but not as others count greatness. Bob has never pandered to fans' demands to hear the songs again and again "just like on the record" (Lawrence, you're showing your age here, mate!) His songs endure because they mean constantly new things to Bob. Listen to "Just like a woman". The young Dylan howls and sneers. The older Dylan makes it drip with irony. My desert island disc selection would include at least two versions of "Like a Rolling Stone" - cos they're two different songs!

[I'm not going to miss the chance to observe that the enduring newness of his songs and the open-endedness and polyvalence of the lyrics - the ability to say something new and fresh in a different time and context - is pretty much how I think the Bible functions as Living Word. Nor am I going to miss the chance to invite you folk to come to Rock & Redemption at the Windermere Centre to come and do some serious theology through the music of Dylan, Cohen and Springsteen! But this is by way of parenthesis.]

So Bob getting old and losing his voice is much, much more than just an issue about what the singing sounds like. It means he's losing control over his own creations. His versatility gave him the means to reinterpret his work; to remould the songs; to say something new with old words. So it was heartbreaking to watch him limited by his voice. The spark was gone. The songs were singing Bob. I could hardly bear to listen to "Maggie's Farm", not because it was bad (it was!) but because he was powerless to do it differently. It might be ok to listen to Sir Paul struggling - and failing - to hit the notes in the classic numbers he did for Live8, cos it's wonderfully nostalgic. Audience memory does what the voice fails to do, and we hear "The Long and Winding Road" filtered through years of sameness. Not so with Bob. You can't sit there and smile indulgently, or wash away on a wave of nostalgia seeing His Bobness do the good ol' numbers, cos he's never done that and they've never been old! Always forever young!

It was all the more poignant because when he hit the harp, you could see the gawky young singer of 45 years ago. Dylan's always looked awkward and anally retentive when he moves to music on stage. As though there's an Elvis inside a wooden puppet trying to get out. But that just made it all the harder to watch.

His voice warmed up and gained in strength. "Blind Willie McTell" still gave me goosebumps. He dripped vintage bob-sarc at the pretensions of Mr Jones. "Lay Lady Lay" was great - I found myself wondering (as in full of wonder) at how an old man could sing a young man's song and make it mean something absolutely different but relevant. But then, I guess it isn't difficult to sing that particular number if you have a libido and a score card like Dylan maintains. When he donned his cowboy hat, he was in Love & Theft territory and completely at home there. He made that music for and with his voice as it is today.

He was generous with the harmonica. Now, I've always maintained that Bob uses the harmonica on songs that are really important to him. It's a cue for what matters. And he also uses it as a gift to audiences (Dylan's notoriously ungenerous to audiences, getting positively surly, curt and churlish with them as he's got older). So I rate his perfomance as generous. He gave what he had to give. He'd obviously refused to allow the cameras to zoom in on him. Oh, and he ought to have sacked his band - or rehearsed more! But he was generous. And none more so when he called Norah Jones onstage to do a duet with him - "I Shall be Released" (gives me a fresh set of goosebumps just remembering that!). Who can forget Bob Dylan and Joan Baez doing that one together? It was an anthem for a generation. They were its voice. And he gave it to Norah. He really did give it to her, because his singing was quite deliberately instrumental. You could see that Norah knew it, too. She didn't take it and try to own it - she did it beautifully, with just the right amount of deference and awe in the face of the gift's significance.

It's getting dark. And it's shaken me. Dylan is part of the fabric of my universe. Just as my world is constituted by the fact that my parents are still alive, and I don't have ultimately to stop the buck just yet, so it is with Dylan. I go to Dylan to be awed, and puzzled, and challenged. I go to hear Dylan articulate my thoughts and values, my dreams for the world and my anger at what's wrong. He says them far better than I ever could. His conscience has been a guide. And he's never rested - he's always pressing on, experimenting. His grasp of literature and the Bible and poetry is astounding and his range is monumental. So is his musical knowledge. He's like Mandela. He can't die - mustn't die - because memories aren't enough. Dylan's power is never only in what he's done, but in the vitality of what he's doing now and will do tomorrow. His tomorrow's are running out. Like those of my parents. And Mandela. And where then will be the voices that we desperately need to hear?