Bob Dylan Song #156: Father of Night

"Three thousand years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax - YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I'M LIVING IN THE (expletive) PAST!" - John Goodman in The Big Lebowski

Now, while the previous song had baffled me in a way that I'm embarrassed to think about even now, "Father of Night" somehow manages to make a perfect, almost serene sense. On an album that has evoked such gentle images of pastoral life and quiet solitude (except with a lady, of course), there's something kind of nice about Bob offering up his version of a Jewish prayer as the album's end, sort of a droll Hebrew equivalent of T.S. Eliot's "shantih shantih shantih" or something. And the presentation is gorgeous - running a mere 92 seconds (surely Bob's shortest song ever), opened with a nifty little bit of singing from Bob's backup singers that occasionally repeats throughout, Dylan offers up a simple and plaintive paean to the God of the Torah that he'd worshiped as a young man. It's beautiful, no two ways about it, and a fine ending to an album that hearkens for the simple life he knew as that boy in Hibbing, before rock and roll, Woody Guthrie, and fistfuls of barbituates changed everything.

One of my friends from Michigan is an atheist raised in a Jewish family, and while she continues to not believe in a God, she still makes it a point to observe all the Jewish holidays and traditions and pay homage to the faith in which she was raised. I'm not going to lie - I found that odd when I'd first heard about it (she's not going to read this, so I feel safe mentioning it, although I'm sure she'd be fine with it anyway), as most people that don't believe in God tend to have something less than a favorable opinion about faith in general, and especially in the traditions and occasional prejudices that make up the world's religions. But the more I thought about it, the more respect I have for her stance - even though she has objection to the one principle that binds this entire group of people together, she finds enough worthy in the sort of cultural framework that's sprung up around this group and their devotion to that principle that she's decided to remain a willing participant. It really is an extraordinary thing.

I'm jumping way ahead here, but one of the most remarkable facts of Dylan's career in retrospect, something that I think doesn't get nearly the play that it deserves, was Dylan's conversion to Christianity. It isn't that it's not understandable, so much as it was a fervor that gripped him with remarkable tightness and then loosened itself almost as fast (I've seen pictures of Bob in his yarmulke in the mid-80s). What tends to get lost in the whole thing, though, between the controversy over the music he made and his infamous battles with the crowds in Tempe and all that, is just how deeply human it actually makes Bob. After all, what is more human in the experience of life than the search for a greater truth, a higher plane of existence beyond mortal flesh and blood, and the search for the reason why we're here in the first place? I'm not saying that I consider Bob some sort of demigod, so much as I'm saying that Bob's crisis of faith gives us something to hang our hat on, something we can relate to, just as much as the adultery and the boozing and drug use and occasional terrible albums are things we can relate to. Bob becomes much more enjoyable, I'm starting to find, when he's not on the pedestal that (it has to be said) things like this blog put him on.

And a song like "Father of Night", which has no other purpose than recasting the Amidah into a short little tune to close out a short little album, is just as much a part of that equation that makes Bob a flesh and blood man. His faith (aside from the Christian years, of course) has never been much of a talking point; we knew he was Jewish (I mean, Zimmerman? C'mon, now), but it was never overtly shoved in our faces at any point in his career. And when he does decide to pay a little homage to his old faith, he does it in as low-key a way as possible, paring down his language almost to the point where you can see bone, singing simple words to the Lord of Abraham and Ezekiel. As mantras go, it's pretty hard to top.

And that's it for New Morning! Coming up next - the three unwritten songs from the 2nd Greatest Hits, "Billy" and "Knockin' On Heaven's Door"...then Dylan's second great creative period. I cannot wait. Hope you all join me on the trip!