Dylan likely to pull anything out of new Christmas bag

Even Bob Dylan's upcoming Christmas album is self-contradictory.

Thirty-second clips of songs such as "Here Comes Santa Claus" and "Do You Hear What I Hear?" recently surfaced on YouTube and they're heartfelt, laughable, baroque, coy. Dylan's voice sounds like an aged, eggnog-drunk Muppet's; backing vocals are sugary Andrews Sisters-meet-Perry Como fa-la-las and wooh-oohs; arrangements are radio Golden Age luxurious, glockenspiel chiming and sleigh bells ringing. The album cover is Pasternak as imagined by Rockwell. Royalties go to the United Nations' World Food Program.

Disagreement about Dylan is endemic to Dylan, and endless. His voice, his intent, his corruption, his integrity. His anti-commercialism, his commercialism. His art, his religion, his life. He's a genius, but also post-genius. And now this, "Christmas in the Heart." A gag gift? An appeal for charity? It comes out Oct. 13 on Columbia Records.

Dylan's upcoming, tour-opening concerts in Seattle — at the Moore Theatre on Sunday and WaMu Theater on Monday — will probably clarify little. This is the superstar who ceased performing the bulk of his catalog for a few years in the late '70s and early '80s, after his conversion to Christianity. Even then, his relationship to religion — like his relationship to his fans, his peers and the media — was inscrutable. It could be calculation or it could be whim.

During his Christian phase, Dylan played three shows at the Paramount in January 1980. Bootleg recordings reveal he was heckled as he evangelized: "Jesus is Lord," Dylan declares, to which someone in the audience shouted a vulgarity.

Dylan replies, "Don't you like the Lord or don't you know the Lord? Which one of those is it?"

Someone else yells, "I don't care!"

"You don't care? I know you don't care. I didn't used to."

A week later, at a concert in Omaha, Neb., before playing "Solid Rock," Dylan told the crowd, "Years ago they said I was a prophet. I used to say, 'No, I'm not a prophet.' They used to convince me I was a prophet. Now I come out and say Jesus Christ is the answer. They say, 'Bob Dylan's no prophet.' They just can't handle it."

To Dylan, Jesus offered lessons in manipulation and perception as well as spiritual matters. Which should come as no surprise; he understood Gospel through his own artistic lens. Indeed, for Dylan, manipulation and perception are spiritual matters.

One of the featured songs on Dylan's Gospel tours was "Gotta Serve Somebody," a song demanding deference before the Highest Power. It won his first solo Grammy, for "Best Rock Vocal Performance, Male," of all things. Turns out Dylan's adherents weren't the only ones skeptical of their hero's spiritual vicissitudes: In early 1980, John Lennon recorded a scathing response — a predecessor of the now-standard hip-hop diss track — called "Gotta Serve Yourself." It goes, "You gotta serve yourself, ain't nobody gonna do for you."

Within a few years, Dylan was distancing himself from Christianity and rejecting ever being "born again." By the mid-'80s, he was attending Orthodox Jewish services at synagogues in Brooklyn and St. Paul and playing recorder to raise money for a Chabad telethon. In 2007, he read from the Torah at a Yom Kippur service in Atlanta.

Religion, social justice, love, death — Bob Dylan traffics in Big Ideas as readily as leopard-skin pillbox hats. A Christmas album — especially one as simultaneously reverent and goony as this — wasn't inevitable, but it makes sense. Christmas songs are folk songs; "Winter Wonderland" less religious hymn than American songbook standard. Come Sunday at the Moore, even money's on him opening with "I Have a Little Dreidel."

Jonathan Zwickel: zwickelicious@gmail.com