Nearly two years ago, Bob Dylan
had a motorcycle accident. Reports of his condition were vague, and he dropped
out of sight. Publication of his book, Tarantula, was postponed indefinitely.
New records appeared, but they were from his last album, Blonde on Blonde.
Gruesome rumors circulated: Dylan was dead; he was badly disfigured; he was
paralyzed; he was insane. The cataclysm his audience was always expecting
seemed to have arrived. Phil Ochs had predicted that Dylan might someday be
assassinated by a fan. Pete Seeger believed Dylan could become the
country’s greatest troubadour, if he didn’t explode. Alan Lomax had once
remarked that Dylan might develop into a great poet of the times, unless he
killed himself first. Now, images of James Dean filled the news vacuum. As
months passed, reflex apprehension turned to suspense, then irritation:
had we been put on again? We had. Friends began to admit, with smiles,
that they’d seen Bobby; he was rewriting his book; he was about to sign a
contract with MGM Records. The new rumor was that the accident had been a cover
for retreat. After Blonde on Blonde, his intensive foray into the pop
demimonde, Dylan needed time to replenish his imagination. According to a less
romantic version, he was keeping quiet till his contracts expired.
The confusion was typical. Not
since Rimbaud said “I is another” has an artist been so obsessed with
escaping identity. His masks hidden by other masks, Dylan is the celebrity
stalker’s ultimate antagonist. The original disparity between his public pose
as rootless wanderer with southwestern drawl and the private facts of home and
middle class Jewish family and high school diploma in Hibbing, Minnesota, was a
commonplace subterfuge, the kind that pays reporters’ salaries. It hardly
showed his talent for elusiveness; what it probably showed was naivetÉ. But his
attitude toward himself as a public personality was always clear. On an early
recording he used the eloquent pseudonym “Blind Boy Grunt.” “Dylan” is itself a
pseudonym, possibly inspired by Dylan Thomas (a story Dylan now denies),
possibly by a real or imaginary uncle named Dillon, who might or might not be
the “Las Vegas dealer” Dylan once claimed was his only living relative.
In six years Dylan’s stance has
evolved from proletarian assertiveness to anarchist angst to pop
detachment. At each stage he has made himself harder to follow, provoked howls
of execration from those left behind, and attracted an ever-larger, more
demanding audience. He has reacted with growing hostility to the possessiveness
of this audience and its shock troops, the journalists, the professional
categorizers. His baroque press conference inventions are extensions of his
work, full of imaginative truth and virtually devoid of information. The
classic Dylan interview appeared in Playboy, where Nat Hentoff, like a
housewife dusting her furniture while a tornado wrecks the house, pursued the
homely fact through exchanges like: “Do you have any unfulfilled ambitions?”
“Well, I guess I’ve always wanted to be Anthony Quinn in La Strada … I guess
I’ve always wanted to be Brigitte Bardot, too; but I don’t really want to think
about that too much.”
Dylan’s refusal to be known is
not simply a celebrity’s ploy, but a passion that has shaped his work. As
his songs have become more introspective, the introspections have become more
impersonal, the confidences of a no-man without past or future. Bob Dylan as
identifiable persona has been disappearing into his songs, which is what
he wants. This terrifies his audiences. They could accept a consistent
image — roving minstrel, poet of alienation, spokesman for youth — in lieu of
the “real” Bob Dylan. But his progressive self-annihilation cannot be contained
in a game of let’s pretend, and it conjures up nightmares of madness,
mutilation, death.
The nightmares are chimerical;
there is a continuing self, the Bobby Dylan friends describe as shy and
defensive, hyped up, careless of his health, a bit scared by fame,
unmaterialistic but shrewd about money, a professional absorbed in his
craft. Dylan’s songs bear the stigmata of an authentic middle-class adolescence;
his eye for detail, sense of humor, and skill at evoking the archetypal sexual
skirmishes show that some part of him is of as well as in the world. As further
evidence, he has a wife, son, and house in Woodstock, New York. Instead of an
image, Dylan has created a magic theater in which the public gets lost
willy-nilly. Yet he is more — or less — than the sum of his illusions.
Many people hate Bob Dylan
because they hate being fooled. Illusion is fine, if quarantined and
diagnosed as mild; otherwise it is potentially humiliating (is he laughing at
me? conning me out of my money?). Some still discount Dylan as merely a popular
culture hero (how can a teen-age idol be a serious artist — at most, perhaps, a
serious demagogue). But the most tempting answer — forget his public presence,
listen to his songs — won’t do. For Dylan has exploited his image as a vehicle
for artistic statement. The same is true of Andy Warhol and, to a lesser
degree, of the Beatles and Allen Ginsberg. (In contrast, James Dean and Marilyn
Monroe were creatures, not masters, of their images.) The tenacity of the
modern publicity apparatus often makes artists’ personalities more familiar
than their work, while its pervasiveness obscures the work of those who can’t
or won’t be personalities. If there is an audience for images, artists will
inevitably use the image as a medium — and some images are more original,
more compelling, more relevant than others. Dylan has self-consciously explored
the possibilities of mass communication just as the pop artists explored
the possibilities of mass production. In the same sense that pop art is about
commodities, Dylan’s art is about celebrity.
This is not to deny the intrinsic
value of Dylan’s songs. Everyone interested in folk and popular music agrees on
their importance, if not their merit. As composer, interpreter, most of all as
lyricist, Dylan has made a revolution. He expanded folk idiom into a rich,
figurative language, grafted literary and philosophical subtleties onto the
protest song, revitalized folk vision by rejecting proletarian and ethnic
sentimentality, then all but destroyed pure folk as a contemporary form by
merging it with pop. Since then rock-and-roll, which was already in the midst
of a creative flowering dominated by British rock and Motown, has been
transformed. Songwriters have raided folk music as never before for new sounds,
new images, new subject matter. Dylan’s innovative lyrics have been
enthusiastically imitated. The folk music lovers who managed to evolve with
him, the connoisseurs of pop, the bohemian fringe of the
literary community, hippies, and teen-agers consider him a genius, a
prophet. Folk purists and political radicals, who were inspired by his
earlier material, cry betrayal with a vehemence that acknowledges his gifts.
Yet many of Dylan’s fans —
especially ex-fans — miss the point. Dylan is no apostle of the electronic age.
Rather, he is a fifth-columnist from the past, shaped by personal and political
nonconformity, by blues and modern poetry. He has imposed his commitment to
individual freedom (and its obverse, isolation) on the hip passivity of pop
culture, his literacy on an illiterate music. He has used the publicity machine
to demonstrate his belief in privacy. His songs and public role are guides to survival
in the world of the image, the cool, and the high. And in coming to terms with
that world, he has forced it to come to terms with him.II
By 1960 the folk music revival
that began in the fifties had expanded into an allinclusive smorgasbord, with
kitschy imitation-folk groups at one end, resurrected cigarbox guitarists and
Ozark balladeers at the other. Of music that pretended to ethnic authenticity,
the most popular was folk blues — Leadbelly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee,
Lightnin’ Hopkins. The response to blues was in part a tribute to the
ascendancy of rock-and-roll — Negro rhythms had affected the consciousness of
every teen-ager in the fifties. But blues, unlike rock, was free of
identification with the dominant society. Its sexuality and rebelliousness were
undiluted, and it was about people, not teen-agers. Besides, the Negro, always
a dual symbol of suffering and life force, was gaining new political
importance, and folk blues expressed the restlessness of activists, bohemians,
dÉclassÉ intellectuals. Since younger Negro performers were not interested in
preserving a genre they had abandoned for more distinctly urban forms, white
city singers tried to fill the gap. Patronized unmercifully by blues purists,
the best of them did not simply approximate Negro sounds but evoked personal
pain and disenchantment with white culture.
At the same time there was a
surge of folk composing. The Weavers, in the vanguard of the revival, had
popularized the iconoclastic ballads and talking blues of Woody Guthrie,
chronicler of the dust bowl and the Depression, the open road, the unions, the
common man as intrepid endurer. Pete Seeger, the Weavers’ lead singer in
the early days and the most prestigious folk musician in the
country, had recorded albums of topical songs from the thirties and
forties. With the emergence of the civil rights movement, freedom songs,
some new, some updated spirituals and union chants, began coming out
of the South. Northern musicians began to write and perform their own material,
mainly variations on the hard-traveling theme and polemics against racism, the
bomb and middle-class conformity. Guthrie was their godfather, Seeger their
guru, California songwriter Malvina Reynolds their older sister. Later, they
were to acquire an angel — Joan Baez, who would record their songs and
sing them at racial demonstrations and peace rallies; an organ — Broadside, a
mimeographed magazine founded in 1962; and a sachem — Bob Dylan.
Gerde’s Folk City, an
unassuming, unbohemian cabaret in Greenwich Village, was the folk fans’
chief New York hangout. On Monday, hootenanny night, blues interpreters like
Dave Van Ronk, bluegrass groups like the Greenbriar Boys, the new topical
songwriters — Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Len Chandler — would stop in and perform.
Established singers came because Gerde’s was part of the scene, because they
enjoyed playing to the aficionados who gathered after midnight. The young ones
came for a showcase and for contact with musicians they admired.
When Bob Dylan first showed up
at Gerde’s in the spring of 1961, fresh-skinned and baby-faced and wearing a
schoolboy’s corduroy cap, the manager asked him for proof of age. He was
nineteen, only recently arrived in New York. Skinny, nervous, manic, the bohemian
patina of jeans and boots, scruffy hair, hip jargon and hitchhiking mileage
barely settled on nice Bobby Zimmerman, he had been trying to catch on at the
coffeehouses. His material and style were a cud of half-digested influences:
Guthrie cum Elliott; Blind Lemon Jefferson cum Leadbelly cum Van Ronk; the
hillbilly sounds of Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers; the rock-and-roll of
Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. He was constantly writing new songs.
Onstage, he varied poignancy with clownishness. His interpretations of
traditional songs — especially blues — were pretentious, and his harsh, flat
voice kept slipping over the edge of plaintiveness into strident self-pity. But
he shone as a comedian, charming audiences with Charlie Chaplin routines,
playing with his hair and cap, burlesquing his own mannerisms, and simply
enjoying himself. His specialty was composing lightly sardonic talking blues —
chants to a bass-run guitar accompaniment, a favorite vehicle of Woody
Guthrie’s: “Them Communists were all around/ in the air and on the ground/
… I run down most hurriedly/ and joined the John Birch society.”
That fall, New York Times folk
music critic Robert Shelton visited Gerde’s and gave Dylan an enthusiastic
review. Columbia Records signed him and released a mediocre first album in
February 1962. It contained only two Dylan compositions, both nonpolitical.
Dylan began publishing his topical songs in Broadside. Like his contemporaries,
he was more propagandist than artist, his syntax often barbarous, his diction
crude. Even so, his work stood out — it contained the most graphic descriptions
of racial atrocities. But Dylan also had a gentler mood. Road songs like “Song
to Woody” strove — not too successfully — for Guthrie’s expressive
understatement and simple, traditional sound.
In May 1962, Broadside published
a new Dylan song, “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Set to a melody adapted from a
spiritual, it combined indignation with Guthriesque simplicity and added a
touch of original imagery. It received little circulation until nearly a year
later, when Peter, Paul and Mary heard Dylan sing it at a coffeehouse.
Their recording of the song sold a million copies, inspired more than fifty
other versions, and established topical song as the most important development
of the folk revival. The relative subtlety of the lyric made the topical
movement aesthetically self-conscious. It did not drive out direct political
statements — Dylan himself continued to write them — but it set a standard
impossible to ignore, and topical songs began to show more wit, more
craftsmanship, more variety.“Blowin’ in the Wind” was included in Dylan’s
second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which appeared in May
1963. This time, nearly all the songs were his own; five had political themes.
It was an extraordinary record. The influences had coalesced; the voice,
unmusical as ever, had found an evocative range somewhere between abrasion and
sentimentality; the lyrics (except for “Masters of War,” a simplistic diatribe
against munitions-makers) were vibrant and pithy. The album contained what may
still be Dylan’s best song — “It’s A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” a vivid
evocation of nuclear apocalypse that owed much to Allen Ginsberg’s biblical
rhetoric and declamatory style. Its theme was modern, its spirit ancient. At
first hearing, most of the Freewheelin’ songs sounded less revolutionary than
they were: so skillfully had Dylan distilled the forms and moods of traditional
music that his originality took time to register.
Freewheelin’ illuminated Dylan’s
America — or rather, two Americas. “Hard Rain” confronted the underside, “where
the executioner’s face is always well-hidden,” “where black is the color and
none is the number,” a world of deserted diamond highways, incipient tidal
waves, clowns crying in alleys, children armed with guns and swords, “10,000
whisperin and nobody listenin” and occasional portents of redemption: “I met a
young girl, she gave me a rainbow.” The satirical “Talking World War III Blues”
toured the country’s surface: hot dog stands, parking meters, Cadillacs,
rockand-roll singers, telephone operators, cool females, officious doctors.
Dylan’s moral outrage coexisted with a grudging affection for American society
and its foibles. If there was “Masters of War,” there was also “I Shall Be
Free”: “My telephone rang, it would not stop, it was President Kennedy callin
me up./ He said my friend Bob what do we need to make this country grow I said
my friend John, Brigitte Bardot.”For a time the outrage predominated. Dylan’s
output of bitter protest increased and his humor receded. He was still learning
from Woody Guthrie, but he often substituted despair for Guthrie’s resilience:
his finest ballads chronicled the disintegration of an unemployed miner’s
family; the killing of a Negro maid, punished by a six-month sentence; the
extremity of a penniless farmer who shot himself, his wife, and five kids. At
the same time his prophetic songs discarded the pessimism of “Hard Rain” for
triumph in “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and vindictiveness in “When the Ship
Comes In”: “Then they’ll raise their hands, say we’ll meet all your demands,
and we’ll shout from the bow, your days are numbered.”
It was Dylan’s year. Stimulated
by the wide acceptance of his work, inspired by his ideas and images,
topical songwriters became more and more prolific. Dylan songs were recorded by
dozens of folk singers, notably Joan Baez (at whom he had once sneered, “She’s
still singing about Mary Hamilton. Where’s that at?”). No folk concert was
complete without “Hard Rain,” or “Don’t Think Twice,” or a protest song from
Dylan’s third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’. The college folk crowd
imitated Dylan; civil rights workers took heart from him; masochistic
journalists lionized him.
And in the attenuated versions
of Peter, Paul and Mary, the Chad Mitchell Trio, even Lawrence Welk, his songs
reached the fraternity house and the suburb. Then Dylan yanked the rug: he
renounced political protest. He put out an album of personal songs and in one
of them, “My Back Pages,” scoffed at his previous moral absolutism. His refrain
— “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now” — seemed a slap
at the thirties left. And the song contained scraps of uncomfortably private
imagery — hints of aesthetic escapism?
Folk devotees were shocked at
Dylan’s apostasy. Folk music and social protest have always fed on each
other, and the current revival had been political all along. For children of
Depression activists growing up in the Eisenhower slough, folk music was a way
of keeping the faith. When they converged on the Weavers’ Town Hall
hootenannies, they came as the anti-McCarthy resistance, pilgrims to the
thirties shrine. The Weavers were blacklisted for alleged Communist
connections; Pete Seeger had been there, singing for the unions, for the
Spanish Republic. It didn’t matter what they sang — in the atmosphere of
conspiratorial sympathy that permeated those performances, even “Greensleeves”
had radical overtones. Later, as the left revived, folk singing became a badge
of involvement, an expression of solidarity, and most important, a
history-in-the-raw of struggle. Now, Dylan’s defection threatened the
last aesthetically respectable haven for believers in proletarian art.
Dylan had written personal songs
before, but they were songs that accepted folk conventions. Narrative in
impulse, nostalgic but restless in mood, their central image the road and its
imperative, they complemented his protest songs: here was an outlaw, unable to
settle for one place, one girl, a merely private life, committed to that
symbolic onward journey. His new songs were more psychological, limning
characters and relationships. They substituted ambition for the artless
perfection of his best early songs; “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” a gloss on the
spiritual possessiveness of woman, took three stanzas to say what “Don’t Think
Twice, It’s All Right” had suggested in a few phrases: “I’m thinkin and
wonderin, walkin down the road/ I once loved a woman, a child I’m told/
gave her my heart but she wanted my soul.”
Dylan’s language was opening up—
doves sleeping in the sand were one thing, “crimson flames tied through my
ears” quite another. And his tone was changing: in his love songs,
ingenuousness began to yield to self-possession, the spontaneity of the road to
the gamesmanship of the city. They were transitional songs, full of
half-realized ideas; having rejected the role of people’s bard, Dylan had
yet to find a new niche.
In retrospect, Dylan’s break
with the topical song movement seemed inevitable. He had modeled himself on
Woody Guthrie, whose incessant traveling was an emotional as well as economic
necessity, whose commitment to radical politics was rooted in an individualism
as compulsive as Dylan’s own. But Guthrie had had to organize or submit; Dylan
had other choices. For Guthrie, the road was habitat; for Dylan, metaphor. The
closing of the iron mines had done to Hibbing what drought had done to
Guthrie’s Oklahoma, but while Guthrie had been a victim, Dylan was a bystander.
A voluntary refugee from middle-class life, more aesthete than activist, he had
less in common with the left than with literary rebels — Blake, Whitman,
Rimbaud, Crane, Ginsberg.
The beauty of “Hard Rain” was
that it exploited poetry while remaining a folk lyric, simple, repetitive,
seemingly uncontrived. Now Dylan became self-consciously poetic, adopting a
neo-beat style loaded with images. Though he had rejected the traditional
political categories, his new posture was if anything more scornful of the
social order than before. “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” attacked both
the “human gods” who “make everything from toy guns that spark to flesh-colored
Christs that glow in the dark” and their acquiescent victims. “Gates of Eden,”
like “Hard Rain,” descended into a surreal netherworld, the menace this
time a psychic bomb, the revolt of repressed instinct. As poetry these songs
were overrated — Howl had said it all much better — and they were
unmusical, near-chants declaimed to a monotonous guitar strum. Yet the
perfunctory music made the bohemian commonplaces work — made them fresh.
Perhaps it was the context: though few people realized it yet, the civil rights
movement was losing its moral force; the Vietnam juggernaut was becoming the
personal concern of every draftable man; a new generation of bohemians, more
expansive and less cynical than the beats, was about to blossom. The time was
right for a reaffirmation of individual revolt.
But Dylan had also been exposed
to a very different vision: in May 1964, he had toured an England transformed
by mod fashion and the unprecedented excitement over the Beatles and the
Rolling Stones. When his new record came out the following spring, its title
was Bringing It All Back Home. On the album jacket a chiaroscuro Dylan, bright
face emerging from ominous shadows, stared accusingly at the viewer. In black
suit and striped shirt, he perched on a long divan, hugging a cat, behind him a
modish, blankfaced beauty in scarlet lounging pajamas. The room, wreathed in
light and dominated by a baroque mantelpiece, abounded with artifacts — Time, a
movie magazine, a fallout shelter sign, folk and pop records (including
earlier Dylan), a portrait, a candlestick, a few mysterious objects obscured by
the halo.
Most of side one was devoted to
“Gates of Eden” and “It’s Alright, Ma.” But the most arresting cut on the
side was “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a hymn to the psychedelic quest: “take me
disappearing through the smoke-rings of my mind…. take me on a trip upon your
magic swirling ship.” Drug-oriented bohemians loved it; it was another step
away from the sobersided politicals. It was also more like a folk song than
anything Dylan had written since giving up politics, a spiritual road song with
a lilting, singable melody.
The other side was
rock-and-roll, Dylan on electric guitar and piano backed by a five-man band. It
was not hard rock. There was no over-dubbing, and Dylan played his amplified
guitar folk-style. But the beat was there, and the sound, if not overwhelming,
was big enough to muffle some of the lyrics. These dispensed a new kind of folk
wisdom. Chaos had become a condition, like the weather, not to analyze or
prophesy but to gripe about, cope with, dodge: “Look out, kid, it’s somethin
you did/ God knows when but you’re doin it again.” The message was pay attention
to what’s happening: “Don’t follow leaders, watch the parkin meters.”
One rock song, “Subterranean
Homesick Blues,” was released as a single. As Dylan’s pop debut, it was a
modest success, hovering halfway up the Cash Box and Billboard charts. That summer,
Dylan cut “Like a Rolling Stone,” the most scurrilous and — with its powerful
beat — the most dramatic in a long line of non-love songs. It was a number-one
hit, as “Blowin’ in the Wind” had been two years before — only now it was
Dylan’s own expressive snarl coming over radio and jukebox.
“Like a Rolling Stone” opened
Dylan’s first all-rock album, Highway 61 Revisited. More polished but less
daring than Bringing It All Back Home, the album reworked familiar motifs. The
title song, which depicted the highway as junkyard, temple, and battlefield,
was Dylan’s best face-of-America commentary since “Talking World War III
Blues.” The witty and scarifying “Ballad of a Thin Man,” which derided the
rationalist bewildered by the instinctual revolt, was an updated “Times They
Are AChangin’,” with battle lines redrawn according to pop morality. Dylan did
not hail the breakdown of sanity he described but merely kept his cool, mocking
Mr. Jones (the pop equivalent of Mr. Charlie) for committing squareness:
“The sword-swallower he comes up to you and then he kneels/ … and he says here
is your throat back, thanks for the loan/ and something is happening but you
don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”
“Desolation Row” was Dylan’s
final tribute to the GštterdŠmmerung strain in modern literature — an
eleven-minute freak show whose cast of losers, goons, and ghosts wandered
around in a miasma of sexual repression and latent violence underscored by the
electronic beat.The violent hostility of traditionalists to Dylan’s rock-and-roll
made the uproar over “My Back Pages” seem mild. Not only orthodox leftists but
bohemian radicals called him a sellout and a phony. At the July 1965 Newport
Folk Festival he appeared with his electric guitar and was booed off the stage.
Alan Lomax, America’s foremost authority on folk song, felt Dylan had
chucked his artistry for a big audience and forsaken a mature culture for
one that was evanescent and faddish. Tom Paxton, dean of the new crop of
topical songwriters, commented: “‘Where it’s at’ is a synonym for ”rich.’“
Defiantly, Dylan exacerbated the
furor, insisting on his contempt for message songs and his indifference to
causes, refusing to agonize over his wealth or his taxes (“Uncle Sam, he’s my
uncle! Can’t turn your back on a member of the family!”). In one notorious
interview he claimed he had written topical songs only to get published in
Broadside and attract attention. Many former fans took the bait. Actually,
Dylan’s work still bristled with messages; his “opportunism” had absorbed three
years of his life and produced the finest extensions of traditional music since
Guthrie. But the purists believed in it because they wanted to. Their passion
told less about Dylan than about their own peculiar compound of aristocratic
and proletarian sensitivities.
Pure folk sound and idiom, in
theory the expression of ordinary people, had become the province of
middle-class dissidents who identified with the common man but whose attitude
toward common men resembled that of White Russian expatriates toward the
communized peasants. For them popular music — especially rock-and-roll —
symbolized the displacement of the true folk by the mass. Rock was not created
by the people but purveyed by the communications industry. The performer
was incidental to engineer and publicity man. The beat was moronic, the
lyrics banal teenage trivia.These were half-truths. From the beginning, there
was a bottom-up as well as top-down movement in rock-and-roll:
neighborhood kids formed groups and wrote songs; country singers adopted a
rhythm-and-blues beat. Rock took a mechanized, acquisitive society for granted,
yet in its own way it was protest music, uniting teenagers against adults’ lack
of sympathy with youthful energy and love and sex. The mediocrity of most
performers only made rock more “authentic” — anyone could sing it — and one of
the few remaining vindications of the American dream — any kid from the slums
might become a millionaire. (The best singers, of course, were fine
interpreters; Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry did not have golden voices, but
neither did Leadbelly or Woody Guthrie.) Rock-and-roll was further from the
grass roots than traditional music, but closer than any other kind of pop. If
folk fans did not recognize this, the average adult did, and condemned the
music for its adolescent surliness and its sexuality, covert in the lyrics,
overt in the beat and in the intense response to idols.
But it remained for the British
renaissance to prove that the mainstream of mass culture could produce folk
music — that is, anti-establishment music. The Beatles, commercial without
apology, delighted in the Americanized decadence of their environment. Yet
their enthusiasm was subversive — they endorsed the reality of the culture, not
its official myths. The Rolling Stones were iconoclastic in a different way:
deliberately ugly, blatantly erotic, they exuded contempt for the public while
making a fortune. Their cynicism, like Leadbelly’s violence or Charlie Parker’s
heroin, was part of their charisma. Unlike traditional folk singers, they could
cheerfully censor their lyrics for Ed Sullivan without seeming domesticated —
the effect was more as if they had paraded a sign saying “Blank CBS.” British
rock was far superior to most early rock and roll.
Times had changed: electronic
techniques were more sophisticated, radio stations and record companies less
squeamish about sexual candor, and teen culture was merging into a more mature,
less superficial youth culture with semibohemian tastes. Most important, the
British groups successfully assimilated Negro music, neither vitiating
rhythm-and-blues nor imitating it, but refining it to reflect their own milieu
— white, urban, technological, materialistic, tough-minded.
Most folk fans — even those with
no intrinsic objections to rock, who had perhaps listened to it when they
were teen-agers and not obliged to be serious — assumed that commercial
exploitation automatically gutted music. Yet the Stones were creating blues as
valid as the work of any folk singers, black or white. After Bringing It All
Back Home, the contradiction could no longer be ignored, and those not
irrevocably committed to the traditional folk ethos saw the point. Phil Ochs
praised Highway 61; Joan Baez cut a rock-and-roll record; more and more folk
singers began to use electronic instruments. Folk-rock generated an
unaccustomed accord between the folk and pop worlds. In Crawdaddy! Richard
Fari–a lauded “this shift away from open-road-protestflat-pick-style to more
Nashville-Motown-Thameside, with the strong implication that some of us had
been listening to the A.M. radio.” Malvina Reynolds pronounced the new
rock-and-roll “a wonder and delight.” By November 1966, folk-rock had received
the final imprimatur — Pete Seeger recorded an album backed by three members of
the Blues Project.
Folk-rock was never a form, but
a simpleminded inspiration responsible for all sorts of hybrids. At first
it was mostly rock versions of Dylan folk songs, social protest rock, and
generational trauma rock, a weekend-hippie version of the classic formula,
children against parents. Then, self-styled musical poets Simon and Garfunkel
began imitating Dylan’s apocalyptic songs (“The words of the prophets are
written on a subway wall”), starting a trend to elaborate and, too often,
sophomoric lyrics. The Lovin’ Spoonful invented the “good-time sound,” a
varying mixture of rock, blues, jug, and old pop. Donovan wrote medieval
fantasies and pop collages like “Sunshine Superman” and “Mellow Yellow.” And
there was acid-rock, the music of new bohemia.
Psychedelic music, like
folk-rock, was a catchall label; it described a variety of products shaped by
folk, British rock. Chicago blues, jazz, Indian music.
psychedelic lyrics, heavily influenced by Dylanesque imagery, used
the conventions of the romantic pop song to express sexual and mystical rather
than sentimental love and focused on the trip — especially the flight — the way
folk music focused on the road. The Byrds, who had started folk-rock moving
with their hit record of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” launched the California
psychedelic sound with “Eight Miles High,” which picked up on the Beatles’
experiments with Indian instrumentation and was ostensibly about flying over
London airport (it was banned anyway by right-thinking disc jockeys).
Though the Byrds were from Los
Angeles, the scene soon shifted north, and a proliferation of underground rock
groups — some, like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Country Joe and
the Fish, quickly surfaced — made San Francisco the new center of avant-garde pop,
superseding Britain. The California groups came closest to making the term
folk-rock say something.
For hippie culture, bastard of
the beat generation out of pop, was much like a folk culture — oral, naive,
communal, its aphorisms (“Make love, not war,” “Turn on, tune in, drop out”)
intuited, not rationalized. Pop and beat, thesis and antithesis of the affluent
society, contained elements of synthesis: both movements rejected intellect
for sensation, politics for art, and Ginsberg and Kerouac glorified a grass-roots
America that included supermarkets and cars as well as mountains and apple pie.
The hippies simplified the beats’ utopian anarchism and substituted psychedelic
drugs for Zen and yoga; they also shared the pop enthusiasm for technology and
the rainbow surface of affluence — their music was rock, their style mod.
Like Dylan, they bridged old culture and new — they were still idealists — and
they idolized him. But he did not consider himself their spokesman. At
twenty-five, he was too old (“How can I be the voice of their generation? I’m
not their generation”) and, though he did not admit it publicly, too well-read.
While “Mr. Tambourine Man” was becoming the hippie anthem, he was saying “LSD
is for mad, hateful people” and making fun of drugs in “Memphis Blues Again.”
Dylan was really at cross-purposes with the hippies. They were trying to embody
pop sensibility in a folk culture. He was trying to comprehend pop culture with
— at bottom — a folk sensibility.
It is a truism among Dylan’s
admirers that he is a poet using rock-and-roll to spread his art: as Jack
Newfield put it in the Village Voice, “If Whitman were alive today, he too
would be playing an electric guitar.” This misrepresentation has only served to
discredit Dylan among intellectuals and draw predictable sniping from
conscientious Bstudent poets like Louis Simpson and John Ciardi. Dylan has a
lavish verbal imagination and a brilliant sense of irony, and many of his
images — especially on the two Blonde on Blonde records — are memorable. But
poetry also requires economy, coherence, and discrimination, and Dylan has
perpetrated prolix verses, horrendous grammar, tangled phrases, silly
metaphors, embarrassing clichés, muddled thought; at times he seems to believe
one good image deserves five others, and he relies too much on rhyme. His
chief literary virtue — sensitivity to psychological nuance — belongs to
fiction more than poetry. His skill at creating character has made good lyrics
out of terrible poetry, as in the prerock “Ballad in Plain D,” whose portraits
of the singer, his girl, and her family redeem lines like: “With unseen
consciousness I possessed in my grip/ a magnificent mantelpiece though its
heart being chipped.”
Dylan is not always undisciplined.
As early as Freewheelin’, it was clear that he could control his material
when he cared to. But his disciplines are songwriting and acting, not poetry;
his words fit the needs of music and performance, not an intrinsic pattern.
Words or rhymes that seem gratuitous in print often make good musical sense,
and Dylan’s voice, an extraordinary interpreter of emotion though (or more
likely because) it is almost devoid of melody, makes vague lines clear. Dylan’s
music is not inspired. His melodies and arrangements are derivative, and his
one technical accomplishment, a vivacious, evocative harmonica, does not
approach the virtuosity of a Sonny Terry. His strength as a musician is his
formidable eclecticism combined with a talent for choosing the right music to
go with a given lyric. The result is a unity of sound and word that eludes most
of his imitators.
Dylan is effective only when
exploiting this unity, which is why his free-verse album notes are
interesting mainly as autobiography (or mythology) and why Tarantula is
unlikely to be a masterpiece. When critics call Dylan a poet, they really mean
a visionary. Because the poet is the paradigmatic seer, it is conventional to
talk about the film poet, the jazz poet. Dylan is verbal, which makes the label
even more tempting. But it evades an important truth — the new visionaries are
not poets. Dylan is specifically pessimistic about the future of literature.
Far from Desolation Row, “The Titanic sails at dawn/ … Ezra Pound and T. S.
Eliot fighting in the captain’s towers/ while calypso singers laugh at them and
fishermen hold flowers.” The infamous Mr. Jones, with his pencil in his hand,
his eyes in his pocket, and his nose on the ground, is a literary man.
With the rock songs on Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan began trying to create
an alternative to poetry. If Whitman were alive today, he might be
playing electric guitar; then again, he might be writing advertising copy.
In May 1966, Dylan recorded
Blonde on Blonde, a double album cut in Nashville with local musicians.
Formally, it was his finest achievement since Freewheelin’, but while the
appeal of the Freewheelin’ songs was the illusion of spontaneous folk
expression, the songs from Blonde on Blonde were clearly artifacts, lovingly
and carefully made. The music was rock and Nashville country, with a sprinkling
of blues runs and English-ballad arpeggios. Thematically, the album was a
unity. It explored the subworld pop was creating, an exotic milieu of velvet
doors and scorpions, cool sex (“I saw you makin love with him,/ you forgot to
close the garage door”), zany fashions (“it balances on your head just
like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine,/ your brand new leopard-skin
pillbox hat”), strange potions (“it strangled up my mind,/ now people just get
uglier and I have no sense of time”), neurotic women (“she’s like all the rest/
with her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls”).
The songs did not preach: Dylan
was no longer rebel but seismograph, registering his emotions — fascination,
confusion, pity, annoyance, exuberance, anguish — with sardonic lucidity. Only
once, in “Just like a Woman,” did his culture shock get out of control: “I
can’t stay in here/ ain’t it clear/ that I just can’t fit.” Many of the songs
were about child-women, bitchy, unreliable, sometimes vulnerable, usually one
step ahead: “I told you as you clawed out my eyes/ I never really meant to do
you any harm.” But there were also goddesses like Johanna and the
mercury-mouthed, silken-fleshed Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands, Beatrices of pop who
shed not merely light but kaleidoscopic images.
The fashionable, sybaritic
denizens of Blonde on Blonde are the sort of people despised by radicals
as apologists for the system. Yet in accepting the surface that system has
produced, they subvert its assumptions. Conservative and utopian ideologues
agree that man must understand and control his environment; the
questions are how, and for whose benefit. But pop culture defines man as a
receiver of stimuli, his environment as sensory patterns to be enjoyed, not
interpreted (literature and philosophy are irrelevant) or acted upon (politics
is irrelevant). “If you want to understand me, look at my surface,” says Andy
Warhol. And “I like my paintings because anybody can do them.” The bureaucrat
defends standardization because it makes a complex society manageable. Yet he
thinks of himself as an individualist, and finds the idea of
mass-produced, mechanized art incomprehensible, threatening — or a put-on.
The pop artist looks at mass culture naively and sees beauty in its regular
patterns; like an anthropologist exhibiting Indian basket-weaving, Warhol shows
us our folk art — soup cans. His message — the Emperor has no clothes, but
that’s all right, in fact it’s beautiful — takes acceptance of image for essence
to its logical extreme. Blonde on Blonde is about this love of surface.
Dylan’s sensitivity to pop comes
straight out of his folk background. Both folk and pop mentalities are
leery of abstractions, and Dylan’s appreciation of surface detail represents
Guthriesque common sense — to Dylan, a television commercial was always a
television commercial as well as a symbol of alienation. From the first, a
basic pragmatism tempered his commitment to the passionate excesses of the
revolutionist and the pote maudit and set him apart from hipster heroes like
James Dean. Like the beats, who admired the total revolt of the hipster from a
safe distance, Dylan is essentially nonviolent. Any vengefulness in his songs
is either impersonal or funny, like the threats of a little boy to beat up the
bad guys; more often, he is the bemused butt of slapstick cruelty: “I’ve got a
woman, she’s so mean/ sticks my boots in the washing machine/ sticks me with
buckshot when I’m nude/ puts bubble gum in my food.”
Dylan’s basic rapport with
reality has also saved him from the excesses of pop, kept him from
merging, Warhol-like, into his public surface. John Wesley Harding, released
after twenty months of silence, shows that Dylan is still intact in spirit as
well as body. The songs are more impersonal — and in a way more inscrutable —
than ever, yet the human being behind them has never seemed less mysterious.
For they reveal Dylan not as the protean embodiment of some collective nerve,
but as an alert artist responding to challenge from his peers. If Dylan’s
first rock-and-roll songs were his reaction to the cultural changes the new
rock represented, John Wesley Harding is a reaction to the music itself as it
has evolved since his accident. The album is comprehensible only in this
context.
As Dylan’s recovery advanced, he
began making the papers again. He signed a new contract with Columbia — the
defection to MGM never came off — and the company announced that he was
recording. Dylan was still revered, his near-mythic status only solidified by
his long absence from the scene. But whether he could come back as an active
performer was another question. Shortly after the appearance of Blonde on
Blonde, three important albums — the Beatles’ Revolver, the Stones’ Aftermath,
and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds — had all set new standards of musical ambition
and pretension. Ever since, the “serious” rock groups had been producing albums
that said, in effect, “Can you top this? “ — a competition that extended to
album covers and titles. In the spring of 1967 the Beatles released Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, possibly the most elaborate rock album ever
made and certainly the most celebrated. It was reported that Dylan had listened
to the first few cuts of Sgt. Pepper and snapped “Turn that off!”; perhaps
the new developments in rock — which he had done so much to inspire — had left
him behind. On the other hand, perhaps he was leaving rock behind. Many of
Dylan’s associates — notably Tom Wilson, his former A&R man — had
always insisted that Dylan was much more sophisticated musically than he let
on. And in May a New York Daily News reporter quoted Dylan as saying he was at
work on “two new sounds.”
By Christmas the Stones were
first in the pretensions sweepstakes — Their Satanic Majesties Request,
with its 3-D cover, was almost a parody of the whole art-rock phenomenon. How
was Dylan going to top that? Everyone waited for a revolutionary masterpiece or
an extravagant flop. What we got was John Wesley Harding in a plain gray jacket
with a Polaroid snapshot of Dylan and three Indians in the country. The first
sound to greet the eager listener was the strumming of an acoustic guitar. The
first line of the first song was “John Wesley Harding was a friend to the
poor.” Dylan had done it again.
The new melodies are absurdly
simple, even for Dylan; the only instruments backing his guitar, piano,
and harmonica are a bass, a drum, and in two songs an extra guitar; the rock
beat has faded out and the country and English ballad strains
now dominate. The titles are all as straight as “John Wesley Harding”:
most are taken from the first lines of the songs. The lyrics are not only
simple but understated in a way that shows Dylan has learned a trick or
two from Lennon-McCartney, and they are folk lyrics. Or more precisely,
affectionate comments on folk lyrics — the album is not a reversion to his
early work but a kind of hymn to it. Nearly all the songs play with the clichés
of folk music. The title song, for instance, seems at first hearing to be a
second-rate “Jesse James” or “Pretty Boy Floyd.” It starts out with all the
catch phrases about the benevolent outlaw, then goes into the story: “It
was down in Cheney County the time they talk about/ With his lady by his
side he took a stand.” But the next line goes right out of it again: “And soon
the situation there was all but straightened out.” You never learn what
happened in Cheney County or why it wasn’t entirely straightened out, and the
song ends with more stock lines about the bandit’s elusiveness and the helplessness
of the law. It is not about John Wesley Harding, but about a familiar formula:
and this, friends, is how you write the generic outlaw song. Several of
the songs are folk-style fantasies. “Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” is both
a folk ballad (based on another stock situation, the gambler on the road) and
one of Dylan’s surrealist dream songs; “As I Walked Out One Morning”
describes a run-in with an Arthurian enchantress as if she were a revenue
agent or the farmer’s daughter. This juxtaposition of the conventional and
the fantastic produces an unsettling gnomic effect, enhanced in some cases
by truncated endings — in “The Drifter’s Escape,” the drifter’s trial for
some unknown offense ends abruptly when lightning strikes the courthouse
and he gets away in the confusion; “All along the Watchtower” ends with
a beginning, “Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.” The
aura of the uncanny that these songs create is probably what Dylan meant
when he remarked, years ago, that folk songs grew out of mysteries. But
some of the album is sheer fun, especially “Down Along the Cove,” a
jaunty blues banged out on the piano, and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” a
thirties-type pop tune that rhymes “moon” with “spoon” for the benefit of
those pundits who are always crowing over the demise of “Tin Pan Alley
pap.” And “Dear Landlord,” the best cut musically, is further evidence that
Dylan has — well, the only word for it is mellowed: “Now each of us has
his own special gift and you know this was meant to be true,/ And if you
don’t underestimate me I won’t underestimate you.”
In the end, what this album
is about is Dylan’s reconciliation with his past, with ordinary people, and
even— warily, ambivalently — with his archenemies, the landlords of the world. Of
course, being Bob Dylan, he has turned this reconciliation into a rebellion.
His sudden removal of the mask — see, it’s me, a songwriter, I just want
to write nice songs — and the apparent step backward could be as traumatic for
the public as his previous metamorphoses; Dylan is still in the business
of shaking us up. John Wesley Harding does not measure up to Blonde on Blonde.
It is basically a tour de force. But it serves its purpose, which is to
liberate Dylan — and the rest of us — from the Sgt. Pepper straitjacket. Dylan
is free now to work on his own terms. It would be foolish to predict
what he will do next. But I hope he will remain a mediator, using the
language of pop to transcend it. If the gap between past and present
continues to widen, such mediation may be crucial. In a communications
crisis, the true prophets are the translators.
Notes to Prologue
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