Well, Musket, I don't think of Bob Dylan as a theologian. I just think of him as a writer who has been strongly affected by religious and spiritual traditions and who thinks about theological and spiritual issues, therefore often writes material that reflects those issues. This is probably true of at least half the serious writers who have existed in the past couple of thousand years. ;-) Maybe a good deal more than half of them. So...no surprise that Dylan does it too.

To call Dylan "just a pop singer" is truly weird, and here's why. Most pop music is just vapid and melodramatic love songs of one sort or another. Turn on the radio, and you'll hear it. ;-) Serious and complex issues are almost never touched upon in pop music. Dylan has been writing about serious and complex issues all through his career. The audience that goes for pop music has generally been fairly oblivious to Dylan, because his material is way too serious for them...and it either fails to interest them at all or it scares them. Or they don't get it. A few of his songs have made it into what could vaguely be called "pop music", but that's only because his body of work is so huge and varied that it's made it into just about everything by now. He's too large for a single category.

Jack - (shrug) I see nothing in Dylan's work that suggests the kind of drug fascination that affected so many other singers' writing at the time. Yeah, it was a part of his life allright....like drinking pop or eating pizza is a part of people's life. A trivial part. Not particularly worth writing a bunch of songs about.