Clinton Heylin's Dylan-Salvation Myth-Hoax of a 1978 Tucson Arizona Hotel-Room Jesus Epiphany: the wind blows where it,

not Heylin, wills

Determined to stand epiphaning against the uncritical wind The wind blows where it wills. John 3:
1Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. 2He came to Jesus at night and said, "Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him." 3In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.[a]" 4"How can a man be born when he is old?" Nicodemus asked. "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!" 5Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. 6Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit[b] gives birth to spirit. 7You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You[c] must be born again.' 8The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit." 9"How can this be?" Nicodemus asked. 10"You are Israel's teacher," said Jesus, "and do you not understand these things?

Whats the formula? Where's the evangelical pamphlet? Biographer Clinton Heylin contradicts himself about when and where Dylan had his vision of Christ. What vision? Which vision? And Robert Hilburn, LA Times November 23, 1980, might or might not. Heylin, Behind the Shades: Take Two p 491:
When revelation came, it came alone. Dylan only turned to a very close friend after Jesus had appeared to him. The significance of that manifestation would be ineluctably shaped by contact between Dylan, his close friend, and her counsellors.

All Across the Telegraph p 179, On stage at Golden Hall, San Diego 27 November 1979; for now Im quoting from Wikipedia without any editing or correction:
"Towards the end of the show someone out in the crowd...knew I wasn't feeling too well," recalled Dylan in a 1979 interview. "I think they could see that. And they 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."

Heylin:
Stuck in a Tucson hotel room, after a lifetime of visions that caused divisions, Dylan experienced a vision of Christ, Lord of Lords, King of Kings. His state of mind may well have made him susceptible to such an experience.
1

In reality Dylans makes no reference to Tucson or Arizona in the context of his vision and feeling of Christ. Wikipedia states, even more misleadingly:
Dylan believed he had experienced a vision of Christ in his Tucson hotel room . "Jesus did appear to me as King of Kings, and Lord of Lords," he'd later say . "There was a presence in the room that couldn't have been anybody but Jesus.[Hilburn introduction to the interview proper]..Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up." [Karen Hughes interview]
2 3

Square brackets mine. Note Wikipedias as, which is in fact correctly taken from the quotation as incorrectly transcribed by Heylin in his cavalier splicing together of (allegedly) 1981 Dylan quotes at the start of chapter 27 of Behind the Shades, with the caption Bob Dylan, 1981. A terrible mess, it starts: Jesus did appear to me as King of Kings, and Lord of Lords ... This is a misquote from the 13 July 1981 Press Conference, Kurhaus Hotel, Travemunde, West Germany: as should be and is. Quite different. Unless Heylin is quoting from some gospel stage rap. But his Saved! The Gospel Speeches of Bob Dylan, is said to be highly inaccurate and full of typos. Wikipedia, having segued the two interviews, Hughes and Hilburn, continues,
Heylin writes that "his state of mind may well have made him susceptible to such an experience. Lacking a sense of purpose in his personal life since the collapse of his marriage, he came to believe that, when Jesus revealed Himself, He quite literally rescued him from an early grave."

But in the Hilburn interview, Dylan clearly states he had the vision and feeling after the well-known meeting with the two Vineyard pastors which the biographers report as having taken place early 79, though Dylan does not say when exactly. Surely December at the earliest, one month on from San Diego. Hilburn:
Through a friend, Dylan met two young pastors.

I was kind of skeptical, but I was also open. I certainly wasnt cynical. I asked lots of
questions, questions like, Whats the son of God, whats all that mean? and What does it meandying for my sins? Slowly, Dylan began to accept that Jesus is real and I wanted that....I knew that He wasnt going to come into my life and make it miserable, so one thing led to another . . . until I had this feeling, this vision and feeling.

Heylin has an agenda of the conversion, or at least epiphany, taking place when Dylan was feeling, supposedly at least, at his lowest and so susceptible - and prior to Vineyard contact (nothwithstanding Mary Alice Artes who had walked out on him to rededicate her life). YOU CHANGED MY LIFE: came along in a time of strife.

Dylan told Robert Hilburn, for The Los Angeles Times November 23, 1980:
The funny thing is a lot of people think that Jesus comes into a person's life only when they are either down and out or are miserable or just old and withering away. That's not the way it was for me.

Wikipedia quotes the continuation:

I was doing fine. I had come a long way in just the year we were on the road [in 1978]. I
was relatively content, but a very close friend of mine mentioned a couple of things and one of them was Jesus."

According to Wikipedia, following Heylin's overall cue:

This would change on November 17th in San Diego, California. As Clinton Heylin reports, "the show itself was proving to be very physically demanding, but then, he perhaps reasoned, he'd played a gig in Montreal a month earlier with a temperature of 105."[1]

But with Heylin the doing fine, while quoted, is glossed over in the interests of the agenda; and he makes no suggestion of a sudden change from fine either, as this does not fit his scheme. Rather he cranks up a spiritual crisis from a feeling of being unwell that is not well defined. This is not to deny Dylan is feeling spiritually unwell, but Heylin, having the agenda of a subjective pre-Vineyard epiphany whose presence is not yet defined - paradoxically in the form of a literal vision of Jesus Christ as King of Kings and Lord of Lords - needs a tremendous crisis here, so fabricates or at least overblows one effectively posing as the Holy Spirit in the process. But at least he has more insight than Sounes. So Heylin strongly implies that the Vineyard projected Christ onto the 'presence' Dylan felt in the room supposedly on the road. But elsewhere, either in his first edition or in Stolen Moments, Heylin, I recall from my local library in the early Nineties, said, He seems to have had a literal vision of Christ as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, thus contradicting himself. (Was that the first edition?) But now Heylin has gone further if my memory serves me well formalizing his position from previous hesitancy. Having later made up his mind on this, Heylin cannot really make up his mind on the nature of Dylans supposed Tucson experience which would be fine were he not simultaneously so definite and self-contradictory. His sly insinuation of Vineyard manipulation would only be pertinent if: i. ii. Dylan had a vaguer mystical vision which he did not clearly attribute to Christ at the time; The vision occurred when Heylin says, prior to Vineyard contact.

But if he saw, or even just felt, Christ as King of Kings and Lord of Lords during an unmediated pre-Vineyard vision, he would not have needed the Vineyard to interpret it/him later as a Californian Christ1 or Christ at all; at most he would have needed them to tell him the formula for receiving Christ as Saviour which could in no way corrupt his original experience or perception of it if he had not received Christ as Saviour during his epiphany experience. Vineyard practices or emphases could not
1

On p 493 Heylin speaks of the Vineyards particularly Californian creed of Christianity

affect his own original experience (if it was so definite). And receiving Christ as Saviour later could hardly distort a literal vision of him earlier. But if, conversely, he wasnt sure it was Christ at the time, it could not simultaneously have been the literal vision of Christ which Heylin claims or claims incorrectly, that Dylan later claimed. You cant have the Vineyard projecting Christ backwards onto a literal vision of Christ; and California would make him no more or less Christ. And if Heylin means that Dylan, subsequently manipulated by the Vineyard, later projected a literal vision of Christ back onto a vaguer mystical apparition or experience of less definable identity (strangely and risibly precipitated by a silver crucifix), then it could not also have been that: When revelation came, it came alone. Dylan only turned to a very close friend after Jesus appeared to him. If Dylan had already seen Jesus when the Vineyard got onto him, then there was nothing left to manipulate other than Dylans acceptance of a Christ whom Heylin effectively claims Dylan had already received by virtue of wearing a cross and reworking Tangled Up in Blue. And the whole point of even a hallucinatory Christ appearing to people is so that they may believe and receive not believe in some vague apparition who was also, strangely, a literal vision of Christ! According to the gospels he said, Go and make disciples. So anyway you look at it, Heylin is, with his paperback fiction, screwed. This is not biography. In fact the best Heylin could ever come up with in terms of logical time sequence without contradicting himself would be that Dylan conspired with the Vineyard to lie to the press that the room moved following pastoral contact, concealing the fact of an earlier vision or at least part one of a two-part visionary experience. With what motive? To make it look like you can only get visions of Christ through the Vineyard? A heavily edited (?) Karen Hughes: The Dominion, May 21, 1980:
Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up.

Heylin p 492:
Six days on from Tucson, Dylan was in Fort Worth, playing the Convention Center. On stage, he was seen to be wearing a metal cross around his neck. For a man raised a Jew, this could not have been a casual gesture. He began to improvise a new line [for Tangled Up in Blue]...

Ken Brooks, in the syntactically challenging The Man in Him (1999), says Dylan wore the cross the very next day; see how Clintons apocryphal conversion snowballs into greater inaccuracy. But, slightly to recap, if the supposed hotel-room vision was, as Heylin claims, sandwiched between picking up a cross from the stage and then later wearing it on stage (and, in turn, inserting [spurious] verse numbers from Matthew into Tangled Up in Blue), then there would have been nothing left for the Vineyard to shape further into an epiphany of Jesus Christ no supposedly prior event to manipulate or even just interpret.

Heylins waffle about a Californian Christ is nonsense and a non sequitur; a caring and sharing church ethos in Californian accents has nothing to do with brainwashing Dylan into believing a strange presence in his room had been Jesus. The fact that Heylin effectively also says that Dylan had already decided or perceived that the vision was of Christ belies his more-than-implicit claim that the Vineyard exerted mind control to shape that experience. Indeed, Heylins disingenuous (and wholly spurious and gratuitous) assumption of a late-November 78 vision of an identifiable Christ appropriates, exploits, the very retrospective circumstantial evidence, as he silently deems it to be for that end, which, in bizarre logic distortion, he would have simultaneously undermine that definite interpretation of events, more than effectively: you dont wear a cross and put gospel verses in TANGLED UP IN BLUEkkk if you experienced a strange apparition, not sure whether it was Buddha or Mohammed, which then needs to be interpreted for you by Christians. Rather, you would put the cross around your neck because the vision left, by default, no room for the Vineyard to manipulate anything. The disingenuousness is on Heylins part, not the Vineyards. Furthermore, to lead Dylan to confession of sin and repentance in no way constitutes interpreting a supposedly prior vision for him; on the contrary, this could, to play devils advocate, have manipulated him into having a vision of Christ subsequently. The manipulation would have been if the Vineyard had conjured a later vision of Christ before Dylans eyes in association with themselves or subjected him to brainwashing so that Tucsons literal vision was brought backwards in time (or forwards on the wall calendar) by about a month. Ironically, Heylin would have a better case, albeit still poor, for mind control if he accepted the facts: Dylan places his vision and feeling after initial contact with the Vineyard, which follows the more usual and conventional pattern for conversion: ask and you shall receive. Heylin wants, even misrepresents, a brainwashed Dylan distorting the real sequence of events in interview with Karen Hughes and then Robert Hilburn. Also note that any longer conversion process is already present in Renaldo and Clara at the very latest. Why is Heylin only conveniently cottoning on to liaisons with witchy women, as a precipitator of conversion, in relation to very late 78 given his having taken this phrase from a pre-conversion interview with Jonathan Cott on 17 September, published 16 November, where the reference is backwards through Street Legal to the Desire period? Heylin wants a witchy-women crisis making Dylan so unwell on stage he picks up a cross, takes it to the hotel then sees the resurrected Christ! A vision of Christ while fondling a cross picked up from the stage makes a good secular caricature of conversion, potentially even a good Hollywood film, but outside Catholicism or its spoofs or religious pretensions this is not the way it works. With regard to the literal vision, why had Heylin originally said, somewhere as I recall, seems? I think Heylin is, rather was, going by YOU CHANGED MY LIFE, which is a highly stylized apocalyptic presentation influenced by Revelation and probably Shelley; compare also IN THE SUMMERTIME. Does the influence of Blake on EVERY GRAIN OF SAND mean Dylan had the same visions Blake may have done? No. To Hilburn Dylan says specifically he had a 'born again experience'; It happened in 1978. This is in the interview as laid out as if verbatim, a page on from the undated vision and feeling following the visit from the two pastors. In his introduction to the interview, Hilburn already dates the experience to 1978:

Dylan said he accepted Jesus Christ in his heart in 1978 after a vision and feeling during which the room moved: There was a presence in the room that couldnt have been anybody but Jesus.

(Did this precede his asking Christ into his heart? Hardly.) Now, was this Dylan being imprecise, as so often with dates, when it was really January 1979 (as per Sounes the unreliable) or did Dylan, bizarrely, have a bornagain experience (rather too specific for Heylin's agenda) in a hotel room late 78 (in which he didnt then know it was Jesus even though it 'couldnt have been anybody but Jesus') followed by a vision of Christ in 79 (or even later in 78) following encounter with the Vineyard? Hmm. Doesnt make sense; if he was born again in a hotel room, as 'opposed' to just having had a vision (specific or open to interpretation), he wouldnt have needed the Vineyard to project that interpretation of the 'vision and feeling' onto him or to ask of them what it all meant as per the Hilburn interview. Whats the son of God, whats all that mean? Now note the sequence.
Slowly, Dylan began to accept that Jesus is real and I wanted that. I knew that He wasnt going to come into my life and make it miserable, so one thing led to another . . . until I had this feeling, this vision and feeling.

So rather than Heylins two-part agenda, did a single event happen late 78 (through the Vineyard), Dylan being more accurate with the date? I say Heylin makes the presumption of being unwarrantedly over-specific in a desperate attempt to sound authoritative. A cross on stage does not automatically equal a vision and feeling in a hotel soon after. Nor does the subsequent replacement of TANGLED UP IN BLUE's Italian poet with verses from Matthew late 78 require Dylan to have had a Jesus epiphany prior to this to coincide with a witchywomen crisis beefed up by Heylin. Ditto for the appearance of the song SLOW TRAIN, an apparently initially secular song, in concert in December. Ironically, with regard to the chronological relationship of Dylan's Jesus epiphany and asking Jesus into his life, although Hilburn effectively creates or leaves open a late78/early-79 time warp or vacuum which Heylin readily fills with his agenda, he is otherwise specific in his extraction from Dylan the sequence with regard to the threemonth bible school.
But you had already accepted Jesus into your heart? Yeah, but I hadnt told anybody about it

Then Hilburn asks:

I had assumed that these feelings came to you at a crisis point in your life, a time when you were desperately needing something else to believe in? No

What Heylin does is conflate Dylan's circumstantial need for something, temporarily met by a cross on stage, with a Jesus epiphany that had not happened yet.

Notice how Sounes, uncovering nothing new (until now), as so often, hedges his bets with: 'Shortly after this [the cross] Dylan had a vision'. This means he doesnt know. He's almost following Heylin but doesnt want to admit it or be left out of the action. Wikipedia quoting Sounes [sic]:
Pastor Kenn says Mary Alice Artes approached him one Sunday in January 1979 after a service in a rented church building in Reseda and said she wanted somebody to speak with her boyfriend at home. Two of Pastor Kenn's colleagues, Paul Ekkkdmond and Larry Myers, duly went with Artes to an apartment in the West Los Angeles suburb of Brentwood. It was here that they met Bob. According to Pastor Kenn, who received a report back, Bob told them his life was empty. The pastors replied that God was the "only ultimate success" and Bob indicated that he wanted what Pastor Kenn calls a "lifestyle relationship" with God. "He was apparently ready to ask for God's forgiveness for sin," says Pastor Kenn. Larry Myers spoke to Bob about Jesus Christ, and talked about the Bible, from Genesis through to the Revelation of St. John the Divine. "Sometime in the next few days, privately and on his own, Bob accepted Christ and believed that Jesus Christ is indeed the Messiah," says Myers.

These words sound familiar from decades before Sounes's bio; are they from a preexisting interview I have mislaid? Time plays tricks, indeed. If Dylan had already had a vision of Christ, and that had motivated a late 78 reworking of TANGLED lyrics, why would his life still be empty and he be only open to the idea of receiving Christ? I asked Scott Marshall, author of Restless Pilgrim: Bob Dylans Spiritual Journey, this the other year. And he didnt have a clue and had never thought of it. In the Buzz magazine article (UK), August 1983, Bob Dylan: Pressing on or sliding back?, the author Dan Wooding quotes a recent conversation he claims to have had with Paul Emond (not Heylins misspelled Esmond), whose verdict is that the backsliding is media Idiot Wind; and Emond's hand in the conversion is said to have been in 1978 not '79. Therefore Dylan's statement that the Jesus experience happened in 1978 does not corroborate Heylin's spurious and inconsistent claim of a hotel-room vision, in Tucson or anywhere, preceding his Vineyard encounter with the pastors through Mary Alice Artes. Heylin's Tucson vision is a myth, an even greater hallucination than Dylan's or St Paul's encounter with the risen Christ motivated by his need to pin down Dylan's 'needing something tonight' at his, possibly, emotionally lowest point while on the 78 road. The wind blows where it wills not where Heylin wills it. Why Tucson anyway? This was the second night after San Diego, not the first. Was Clinton there, wherever 'there' was? The gig sequence was San Diego, 17; Tempe, 18; Tucson, 19. According to http://www.bjorner.com/78-6.htm#_Toc37496277: 10.91 Sports Arena, San Diego, California, 17 November 1978 10.92 A.S.U. Activities Center, Tempe, Arizona, 18 November 1978 10.93 McKale Memorial Center, University Of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, 19 November 1978

There is no reason per se why Dylan's Jesus epiphany could not have happened in a Tucson hotel room and at that time, but Heylin's assumption of it neither constitutes evidence of it nor is warranted or even suggested by Dylan's own statements or the biographical 'facts' as far as they can be gleaned . Dylan could, in principle, have had more than one stage to his Jesus epiphany. It need not conform to an evangelical formula of 'one-off' bang (or subdued feeling of calm), but the available facts and myth in no way support a Tucson vision for which Heylin provides no evidence beyond his own sequential agenda. Nor does a Jesus epiphany have to conform to the evangelical-agenda sequence of repent, ask, receive. Jesus discourse on being born again in John 3 does not set out this sequence. (Nor does it deny it, as in the next chapter when the woman at the well asks Jesus how she might acquire the living water, he tells her to call her husband, which is an elliptical statement of precondition: repentance from a sinful lifestyle.) Saul's epiphany of Christ on the road to Damascus did not conform to the conventional sequence; the risen Christ manifested himself to Saul unilaterally. But not even Saul, who became St Paul, had a literal vision of Christ beyond that of a blinding light. Jesus appears, blinds him, then tells him to go to the house of Ananias to receive his sight and get further instructions. But then the transformed St Paul wrote the epistle to the Romans, which contains elaborate discourses on dying to the sinful nature. The hallucination who unilaterally appeared to Saul clearly had in mind a particular type for writing this work: an orthodox Jew who had been killing Christians. The biographers are at their most foolish and Mr Jones-like when trying to pin down the blowing of the late-'78 wind change which they cannot decide to have been then or early '79. The month for Dylan's Vineyard encounter would be inconsequential pedantry, implicitly December 78 or Jan 79 given the confusion, were it not for the fact Heylin wants an earlier late-November date for a vague yet paradoxically over-specific pre-Vineyard Christ encounter on the road while on the run from the White Goddess. The biographers dont know; neither do or did the interviewers. And as for Michael Gray in the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, the Vineyard didnt formalise Dylans conversion; Dylan formalized it in the press. Any formalizing done by the Vineyard was in response to interview requests from the press at the time and biographers later. Its the press who formalized it which is why Dylan doesnt like to talk about it now. So much for cavalier splicing and grafting.

The Vineyard should not have talked to press and biographers, as this is a breach of
confidentiality. The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. For someone so obtuse on the blowing of the wind, Heylin is astoundingly insightful into the depths of Dylan's desperate and sinful spiritual condition while on the road in November 1978.

It is disappointing that even after so many decades the pastors spoke to biographer Sounes. And it is particularly pathetic that, given they have done so, the confusion which I outline has nowhere been addressed. The fact Sounes does not ask them, given the opportunity to do so in person, demonstrates the depth of his obtuseness on this subject. In the Q Magazine DYLAN Collector's [sic] Edition 2000, the two writers on this period both repeat the Tucson myth and mythologize it further, contradicting each other (like the false witnesses at the pre-trial of Jesus). Phil Sutcliffe in Dont Mess With a Missionary Man claims, on p 82, the 'born-again experience' (designated, perhaps sarcastically, 'what he later designated a'2) happened 'after a Tucson, Arizona, gig on November 17' (really 19 November, two days on from San Diego on 17 November). But in the 'Jesus Wept' article, John Aizlewood claims, p 113, that, following the Tucson vision (undated but implicitly straight after San Diego, correctly dated 17 November) in, of course, a hotel room:
If it seemed unnaturally chilly when Dylan shuffled on [sic] the Tuscon [sic] stage later that night, that was simply because as he looked towards Heaven and saw Jesus Christ seated beside God, Hell had actually frozen over.

Did Dylan stay in a Tucson hotel before or after the Tucson gig? Or both? Furthermore, Aizlewood, following Heylins lead, makes the Heylin-derived myth of a Tucson vision, with the added apocryphal accretion of this taking place upon 'fondling his cross' thrown in, the very referent of Dylan's description to Hilburn of the visionary born-again experience . As we have already covered, Dylan clearly places this after the visit from the two Vineyard pastors. Aizlewood also segues this with Karen Hughes followed by 'Jesus appeared to me as Lord Of Lord [sic] and King Of Kings', whereby Heylin's original speculation, as I seem to recall (possibly from his first edition), as to the nature of the vision (which he places in Tucson) becomes, albeit with more than a little help from Heylin, a statement put into Dylan's mouth. This misrepresentation turns up in short articles on the worldwide web, probably copied from Q.
6

In The Bob Dylan Albums, Anthony Varesi, perhaps aware of Heylins being out by a day , follows the cross-fondling myth, p 147:
7

A couple of days later, while examining the cross in his hotel room in Arizona, Dylan said that he sensed Jesus Christs presence.

Tempe or Tucson? Both are in Arizona. 13 July 1981 Press Conference, Kurhaus Hotel, Travemunde, West Germany by Patrick J Webster Source: Endless Road

Thereby exceeding Heylins cynicism. What does Heylin designate it to be exactly or approximately?

Oh yeah, for sure yeah, a few years ago. Jesus did appear to me and is King of Kings and Lord of Lords and he did die on the cross for all mankind. How did he appear to you. I mean what did you do at this time in the winter of '79? Do you really want to know? Mm, well I dont know, I've told the story so many times. Reborn, that's what they call it. Re-born. It's pretty scary to think about, so I dont think about it too much. I'm not preaching, it's spiritual, it's not complicated.

As Dylan said he accepted the Artes invitation when he had nothing to do for two days, this must have been some time after his final gig of 1978 on 16 December and by the end of January at the latest. Dylan's vision and feeling happened in this period, not in Tucson or anywhere else in late November. And the room was more than likely in his own home or one of them. The wind blows where it wills, not where Heylin wills it. It is interesting that, although Heylin segues on p 491 the presence in the room [Hilburn], joined by ellipses, with the Karen Hughes account, he leaves out born again, possibly as part of his agenda of divorcing the supposed Tucson experience from later Vineyard implied manipulation. Indeed, does Heylin even know whether he attributes born again to the Tucson presence in the room or to the Vineyard? As for Dylan, hes talking about one event following Vineyard contact.

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