Look, I don't mind if Bob Dylan played for the Pope in Bologne. It's cool with me. The Pope looked pretty bored anyway. And Dylan doesn't need to give an explanation any more. Maybe he was stuck for the money. 200,000 for three songs seems like an offer I'd find hard to turn down myself. I only wish that instead of Knocking On Heaven's Door, Dylan had performed one of the songs from his brilliant new album. Something like Trying To Get To Heaven . . . Before They Close The Door, with the typical Dylan line - "When you think that you've lost everything, you find out you can always lose some more." In his crackling, 56-yearold voice, Dylan still knows how to swing the lyrics to put a long, emphatic groan into the word lose.
Bob Dylan had a brush with religion before in the 1980s with all that born-again, evangelical stuff. So what? We can understand the perils of the Christianity trap. Dylan always lived in the precarious terrain of emotion and self-questioning. We knew the old rebel would "keep on keeping on". And who knows, maybe there is some twist to this Papal gig. Maybe Dylan will turn around and tell us the Pontiff has got his hands on the famous Leopard skin Pillbox Hat and wears it all the time around the Basilica. " . . . I sure wish he'd take that off his head".
What makes the Pope think he's going to get a handle on the youth of today with Blow- ing In The Wind is another question. He might have been better off going for the Fugees or the Spice Girls. Dylan's words are generally too subversive and introverted to flow easily into a homily. I'd like to see the Pope trying out lyrics such as "God said to Abraham, kill me a son. Abe said to God, where do you want this killin' done".
Or what about lines like "What's bad is good, what's good is bad. You'll find out when you reach the top, you're on the bottom." The whole momentum of Dylan's words fits in badly with the concept of faith, because there is too much rage and satire behind it. Dylan was always too angry to go along with the benevolent power of the church.
By all accounts, the pontiff looked a lot more sprightly at 77, than Bob Dylan does at 56. The ageing rock legend even stumbled on stage, perhaps still suffering the effects of a recent heart ailment that forced him to cancel his trip to Ireland this summer. His appearance on the papal platform will remain a mystery to his fans and disciples; but then mystery was always a large part of the equation. Dylan has long been enigmatic, from the moment he ran away from home in Minnesota at the age of 10. He was always good at turning his back on things. His hometown of Hibbing was, in his own words, "a good place to get out of". When he was on the way up in the world, he refused to go on America's top chat show with Ed Sullivan, because they wouldn't let him play Talking John Birch Society Blues.
At the top of the folk wave, Dylan turned his back on his fans by going electric. He refused to play at the legendary Woodstock gig, the muddy Eucharistic Congress of hippies. He preferred to remain contrary - the love-ins of the time didn't agree with him.
He once told the Times Literary Supple- ment that the Bible was the "most overrated" and "most underrated" book in the last 75 years. He didn't elaborate. Who knows, maybe the whole evangelical trip which Dylan took in the 1980s was just another way of walking out on a relationship that had gone cold.
The Martin Scorcese film The Last Waltz seemed to place a punctuation mark at the end of the long folk-rock era. It seems like a farewell to "deep" lyrics as the punk/techo/rap era got underway. But Dylan kept on moving. In the 1990s he started bringing younger stars - including Bono - on stage. His 1995 world tour ended in Dublin, with Dylan performing an unforgettable encore with Van Morrison, the two of them surrounded by so many well-known names that for starters, Carole King is reported to have fallen off the stage.
And now, forever his own man, Dylan lashes back with a superb new album, Time Out Of Mind which stands proudly beside any of his best: Highway 61, Blonde on Blonde or Blood On The Tracks. Dylan has recorded a set of simple, evocative songs, every bit as thought provoking as the great ones, blending his laconic humour and the epiphenomenal doom of his poetics, with lots of Hammond organ and harmonica wailing in the background, like a quivering chin. Dylan has always been reflecting on things with an air of sadness, pointing out the trickery of life and all its deceptions. The new songs seem to look back with a new loneliness, as if everything has slipped out of reach and he has come to an understanding of how inaccessible things are. "Yesterday, everything was going too fast, today, everything's movin' too slow . . . " It's as though his new gravelly voice has become even more philosophical than ever: " . . . on the highway of regret", longing for the love that still haunts him. But there is also a simple truth in these songs that make them unmistakably personal. "I'm just going down the road feeling sad, trying to get to Heaven before they close the door."
After all, the whole point about Dylan is that you "take it so personal". It's not just the power of the lyrics, but the layers of biographical data and impressions that we add on to his songs ourselves. It's the pubs we drank in. The people we knew. The whole archaeology of images that adhere to a song. Music always stores a latent archive of personal details.
For instance, the geography of Dublin was quite different when Dylan produced his best work. Listening to Blood On The Tracks, you can still make your way up from Kehoes pub, round by Rices, Synotts and the Toby Jug, not forgetting the Cana Inn, all the way back down to Grogans. Now of course, you have the Stephen's Green Shopping Centre, a frilly monument to commerce. Another anonymous Telecom building stands where the Toby Jug was. A friend told me that a phantom graffiti artist has recently been daubing the walls with "Save the Toby Jug", some 15 years after it disappeared.
I can remember people speaking to each other in Dylan lyrics in those pubs. It was like a code. I heard them conduct in-depth discussions on any subject from politics to war using Dylan's caustic words. I even once thought it would be possible to write a play using only Dylan dialogue. Couples could argue all night in Dylan lyrics. "You've got a lotta nerve . . . " There was a phrase for every occasion in his repertoire, like "Give me some milk or else go home . . . "
In general, we lived our lives through Dylan words. We "drove that car as far as we could, abandoned it out west", somewhere near Oranmore. You replied to demands from the bank with " . . . please don't send me no letters, no, not unless you mail them from Desolation Row." The new album extends that repertoire again and gives us a great new vocabulary to look back with. We will be able to communicate with croaky voices now, saying things like " . . . I'm sick of love, I wish I'd never met you." There is even a lovely postmodern reference to Blonde On Blonde when he says he no longer knows "the difference between a real blonde and a fake . . . "
Sure, music in general has moved on to sophisticated and exciting new pastures. All music and art can ultimately be accused of becoming a museum culture, when placed beside a relentless techno beat and rap. But they will always have to come back to Bob Dylan, the father of stream-of-consciousness. There is something raw and compelling about the spiky humour of his 12-bar blues. Dylan's heart is in the Highland, according to the last song on the album, where he finds himself alone in a restaurant in Boston, staring at the menu. "I've got no idea what I want, Maybe I do, but. I'm not really sure . . . " he howls, when a young woman with a "pretty face" and "long white legs" enters and makes up his mind for him. "You probably want a hard boiled egg . . . " she says.
But it is the haunting quality of the songs that hits you most. Some of the songs are almost like Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, fading into eternity under the hum of the Hammond organ. Sit on the floor with your knees up. Put it on repeat. "I know it looks like I'm movin', but I'm standing still . . . "
Bob Dylan's Time Out Of Mind (Columbia) is on sale nationwide