Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  Dylan loved to mess with his myth, screw around with the minds of fans and critics. He gave the impression that he really did have the answer, even if no one was quite sure what the question was. His public image had a total lack of sentimentality, or sadness even, which made Dylan seem old and wise, cold and unbreakable. The more he obscured the truth, the more people dug for it. Eventually, he would wake each morning to find people rifling through his garbage, trying to find ‘clues’, trying to understand.

  All of this adds up to a figure that was barely recognisable as pop at all, or only on the occasions when he fancied venturing into simple, melodic territory on a single like ‘Lay Lady Lay’ (US no. 7, UK no. 5 ’69). Yet no one in this book is a greater shapeshifter, and virtually no one has had more impact on the shape of modern pop itself. So how could such a non-pop figure become so Pop?

  Originally he was Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota, a mining town where ‘it was so cold, you couldn’t be a rebel’. Once he escaped his backwater town and made it to New York he found himself in one of the tightest scenes ever, the Greenwich Village folk revival, which was based around the coffee bars on Bleecker and MacDougal, and had evolved from the late-fifties beat-poetry scene in places like the Gaslight and Cafe Wha?. Greenwich Village had little to do with the America of Guy Mitchell, or even Buddy Holly: fights between Stalinists and Trotskyites were common. Yet it considered itself the soul of America. The Village folkies could take a talented, smart-aleck Jewish kid from the sticks and subsume him, make him part of their cause, use him to their own ends. Or so they thought.

  The American folk scene had become bound and gagged after the Weavers’ cover of Leadbelly’s ‘Goodnight Irene’ was America’s best-selling single of 1950, and it was still living with enforced conformism when Bob Dylan arrived in New York in 1961. The Weavers had been led by Pete Seeger, who was openly communist, and this, during the intense conformity of the McCarthy witch-hunt era, led to the belief that any other folk singer with an acoustic guitar might be a communist too. While skiffle boomed in Britain, the only safe way to play folk songs in the US was by frying them, tossing them and coating them in sugar: Harry Belafonte (‘Banana Boat Song’, US no. 5 ’57), the Kingston Trio (‘Tom Dooley’, US no. 1 ’58) and the Brothers Four (‘Green Fields’, US no. 2 ’60) scored major hits, but it was a long, long way from Pete Seeger’s American vision.

  The Weavers had been dropped by Decca in ’53, and Seeger quit the group after they did a cigarette ad. Still watched by the FBI, he holed up in Greenwich Village. To Seeger, and other Village bohos who soon gathered around him in the early sixties, the cause was crystal clear: America still had lynchings in the South, and Kennedy was taking the world to the brink of nuclear war. Siding with the left didn’t necessarily mean siding with the Soviets, it meant not having a death wish, and the craziness in the country became a bounteous lyrical source. This concentration of like-minded liberals brought a large amount of self-righteousness and dogma, a self-inflicted conformism, into the new folk scene: when Phil Ochs cut an album called All the News That’s Fit to Sing in 1964, you knew he wasn’t going to include the football results.

  Some of the Greenwich folkies gave the impression of a cause waiting to be lost (the sensitive but weak David Blue, who died when a wall collapsed on him when he was out jogging; Korean vet and helpless morphine addict Tim Hardin); others were pious and unlistenable (Peggy Seeger, the Village Akela). Phil Ochs was easily the most accessible, open, almost conservative in his patriotism. He was a singer with the bearing of a bear, the arms of a stevedore, an unflinching union man. He was also witty and pugnacious, and could write a beautiful melody. While he was the biggest draw on the scene, it’s easy to imagine the hardliners frowning at his Kennedy tribute, ‘That Was the President’, and lines like ‘systems, not men, are the enemy’. More worryingly yet, he had a quiff and loved Elvis.

  Bob Dylan must have seemed much more Seeger’s kind of people when he shuffled into town. He quickly learnt how to cover his tracks, re invent himself, claiming that he ‘never went to classes. Didn’t have time.’ Instead he had been reading Kerouac, Dylan Thomas, Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory. The folk music he discovered – John Jacob Niles, Harry Belafonte, Odetta, the Clancy Brothers – reflected how Dylan felt about life, institutions, ideologies. It gave him a new way to live. Previously an Elvis fanatic, he swapped his electric guitar for an acoustic.

  By the time Dylan arrived in ’61 Greenwich Village was already something of a tourist trap; he looked out for singers who gave the impression of having a secret knowledge, something beyond the ability to play a few Leadbelly covers and knowing where to get the best espresso. He had ambition. He became a sponge, an actor even, and worked out some spiel about growing up in New Mexico, where he’d picked up songs from cowboys, other songs from Indians, real American roots stuff. He created this story after borrowing a bunch of rare, out-of-print folk albums from collector Paul Nelson, and learning obscure songs that weren’t familiar on the Village circuit. Dylan aped Woody Guthrie’s hobo look and, with his cute looks and youth – he was still only nineteen – made his way around the record companies. Vanguard was home to Joan Baez, the public face of Greenwich Village and a singer whose dark eyes radiated sincerity and understanding; they rejected him as ‘too visceral’. John Hammond, an A&R man at Columbia who had signed Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, Count Basie and Miles Davis, was so confident in Dylan’s ability and proclaimed it so loudly that even Mitch Miller – the Columbia-label boss who had signed Guy Mitchell and got Sinatra to bark like a dog – was convinced.

  His first album in ’62 didn’t sell more than any other Village folkie tract. Dylan had picked the wrong songs and sounded uptight, but at least he’d borrowed Dave Van Ronk’s arrangement of ‘House of the Rising Sun’, which would, gradually, cause pop’s greatest coals-to-Newcastle moment.

  He found himself a girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who was good-looking enough to feature on the cover of his second album, 1963’s Freewheelin’, as well as inspiring two of his best love songs (‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’, ‘Tomorrow Is a Long Time’). Moreover, she worked for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and under her influence he wrote a bunch of songs that were politically charged, that sounded modern and ancient at the same time, the greatest songs in the civil-rights canon: ‘With God on Our Side’, ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’, ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’. Another was ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, which the biblically named Peter, Paul and Mary took all the way to number two on Billboard’s Hot Hundred in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis.

  At this point Bob Dylan became a pop star. But he didn’t honour pop, or pop radio. Most of his records were caught in one take, raw and unproduced, something that didn’t change when he became a Top 20 regular after ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ (US no. 2, UK no. 4 ’65) was released; his densest, longest and best recording was one that Dylan would have discarded altogether, moving straight on to the next song, if producer Bob Johnston hadn’t rescued the tape and played it back to him a few days later.

  Dylan was a receiver and, at his peak, he articulated what all of the Greenwich Village folkies wanted to say but couldn’t. He wasn’t only channelling Woody Guthrie, but Lenny Bruce, and Abraham Lincoln. In the wake of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and its attendant success he found himself sniped at as a sell-out by jealous contemporaries. They had initially giggled behind his back and thought him a political naif; suddenly he was on national TV, storming the charts and getting covers of his songs by everyone from Sam Cooke to Trini Lopez. Dylan had been the smart one, it transpired, and some of his Greenwich Village buddies, with their horizontal worldview, were pissed off. On top of this he dated Joan Baez, and they became the scene’s celebrity couple, the spokes-people for disaffected youth. Given an award in late ’63, Dylan declared that he no longer saw things as left and right, black and white, only up and down. He was no one’s trained seal. To many he had become a shaman, but Dylan still
thought himself an outsider and he wanted no part of this trip.

  He first started to sidestep the folk scene with the apolitical Another Side of Bob Dylan in ’64, but the trouble really began when he reverted to his rock ’n’ roll roots on a 1965 single called ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. When he plugged in at the ’65 Newport Folk Festival, Pete Seeger tried to cut the electrical cables with an axe. If Dylan had come out as a secret Klansman, his folk fans couldn’t have felt more wounded. Rock ’n’ roll was for saps, unthinkers. What the hell was he playing at? Pop, that’s what. The clues had been there all along: on his first album there’s a ‘Wake Up Little Susie’ riff on ‘Highway 61’; ‘Mixed Up Confusion’, a rattling, electric Freewheelin’ outtake, was even released as a single in ’63 but sank without trace.1 He was a song-and-dance man. He was versatile. He wanted to let his corkscrew hair grow as wild as Little Richard’s.

  In the spotlight, finally letting the mask of unknowability slip, he was not a pretty sight. Like Elvis, Dylan coped with suffocating fame by constructing a gang around him. Instead of old high-school buddies, though, he chose hipsters, guys permanently wearing shades, sidekicks like Bob Neuwirth who were a manifestation of Dylan’s worst characteristics. Dylan found that the best way to fight against the fear, envy and meanness of his erstwhile left-wing colleagues was to develop a scything misanthropy. In D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back documentary, filmed on a UK tour in ’65, he gets his kicks from attacking earnest Cambridge students, the clearly infatuated British folk singer Donovan and his soon-to-be ex Baez. One evening in 1966, in a limo cruising the New York streets, Phil Ochs suggested that Dylan’s current single, ‘Can You Please Crawl out Your Window’, wasn’t the best thing he’d ever done. The driver hit the brakes, the door flew open – ‘Get outta the car, Ochs.’ They didn’t speak again for almost a decade.

  By now people expected answers; they demanded them, fuelled by the weird mixture of love for the man and hatred for what he had done to the cause. Dylan spat right back in their faces: ‘You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.’ And the music he made during this ’65–66 period was extraordinary – thin wild mercury music, he called it. But his European shows with Canadian pickup group the Hawks2 were heckled by his old fans, who had no time for the hair-raising, teeth-clenching rock ’n’ roll Dylan was now dealing in.

  Let’s look at one single from this period, 1965’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, a contender for the best in the entire pop canon. Producer Tom Wilson thinks Dylan had the Holy Ghost on his shoulder that day. It starts with a gunshot snare, then bores deeper and deeper, somehow gains in intensity – lyrically, vocally, physically – for a full six minutes. The story is of a person (or a nation) falling hard, of ends and new beginnings, of odd characters like the mystery tramp and Napoleon in rags – some of whom may be Dylan himself. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime recording. You are transfixed and morbidly fascinated, as if you are a small child and Dylan is explaining death to you for the first time. Outside of deep soul, it is the most draining record in pop, the most physically demanding:

  ‘I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit, twenty pages long and out of it I took “Like a Rolling Stone” and made it as a single. And I’d never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me that this is what I should do. Nobody had ever done that before. I’m not saying it’s better than anything else, I’m saying that I think … I think “Like a Rolling Stone” is definitely the thing that I do.’

  Dylan had peaked and he knew it. By now considered a cross between Elvis Presley and Nostradamus, he had no direction home. After returning from a European tour, he had a mysterious bike smash in the summer of 1966 and disappeared for almost two years. When he re-emerged, he looked totally different, sang in a new softer voice and came up with lyrics like ‘Oh me oh my, love that country pie.’ Not surprisingly, people thought this Dylan was an imposter – the real Bob Dylan, the prophet, seer and sage, had been killed in that bike crash.

  In some ways this comeback kid character is the closest Bob Dylan ever got to dropping all the masks and revealing himself. He even called his 1970 album Self Portrait, and on it he turned out to be a guy who liked pie, country music, horses and his Canadian counterpart Gordon Lightfoot. It also included a live version of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ on which he sang like Kermit the Frog. Critics called it ‘shit’.3 It was interpreted as an act of self-destruction – Dylan was desperate for someone else to be hailed as the new Dylan, to get the world off his shoulders.

  Maybe his best album is 1970’s New Morning. On the cover he has a slightly ratty, unkempt beard that suggests humility, openness; no more oversize polka dots and ‘keep out’ shades. He’s looking directly at you, and he looks relaxed: if he was filling out a lonely-hearts ad he’d describe himself as ‘comfortable in his own skin’. But there was no need for an ad. Dylan was now thoroughly domesticated, wife and kids and home on the range, recording the old American songbook the way it played in his head. Rabbits, roosters, automobiles, Dylan loved it all: he sounded as perky as Guy Mitchell had done on his folks’ wireless back in Hibbing. ‘So happy just to be alive underneath this sky of blue.’

  There would be further peaks (Blood on the Tracks), troughs (Hearts of Fire and sundry cinema outings), and more unexpected leaps sideways (his misanthropic conversion to Christianity), but from the Dylan of New Morning you could draw a straight line to a point several decades on. By the twenty-first century he was relaxed enough to host a radio show, drawing up new road maps of America, his now smoky voice perfectly suited to late-night radio. He was aurally doodling, joining the dots between Jimmy Reed and the Honey Cone, Merle Haggard and Howlin’ Wolf, Eddie Cochran, Prince Buster and the theme from Top Cat. This, it turned out, was what he was built for. It was a hard-won battle and he sounded all the better for it. ‘I like email,’ he’d say, ‘but I miss the postman.’ He almost sounded like fun.

  Bob Dylan’s back catalogue is like a library, with narrow, twisting corridors and deep oak shelves drawing you in: start leafing through the pages and you may never want to stop. His legacy is a lot of bad poetry, a lot of skinny guys in shades throwing ‘fuck you’ poses. It is also a sly cynicism. And it is also the lyrics of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, or Scott Walker’s ‘Montague Terrace in Blue’, or the Fall’s ‘New Face in Hell’. Gerry Goffin may have lost his mind trying to get close to Dylan’s muse, but in the process he wrote ‘Goin’ Back’ for Dusty Springfield and the Byrds’ ‘Wasn’t Born to Follow’, two philosophical songs you could build your life around; he may consider the sacrifice was worth it.

  People were asking Bob Dylan the impossible, asking him to make sense of the world. That was beyond anybody. What is most remarkable about Dylan, and a task not far short, is that he helped America to make sense of itself.

  1 Dylan’s earliest stagecraft had been learnt as part of teen idol Bobby Vee’s backing group; the acoustic period was, effectively, a long interlude in his rock career.

  2 The Hawks were a tour-hardened outfit who had been the backing group for Canadian rocker Ronnie Hawkins. It doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to get from Hawkins’s best known single, ‘Forty Days’, a rock ’n’ roll classic covered in the UK by Cliff Richard, to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’.

  3 This was the judgement of Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone. He was wrong. But maybe A Self Portrait would have been a more accurate title; he could have had plenty more in the attic.

  17

  AMERICA STRIKES BACK: THE BYRDS AND FOLK ROCK

  The Beatles had been the first modern pop event that almost everyone in America could agree on. This had a lot to do with the fact that they were outsiders. Coming from England they couldn’t aggravate prejudice; they were parachuted into a conflict without evident allegiances in either direction. As well as hooking Ed Sullivan viewers on first sight, they opened the door to a lot of other people – the pre-rock Vegas set, jazzers like Gary McFarland – who
would have previously dismissed modern pop out of hand. Most significantly they converted folk singers, including Bob Dylan, and in this way they joined the finest minds and the lithest bodies in the country. Social revolt was imminent.

  With very few exceptions, the old order had been swept aside in 1964; Bob Dylan gave American pop the strength to regroup, recover and rebuild after the hurricane of the British Invasion. Yet the first recording to reflect Dylan’s popularity in the hit parade originated not in New York, or anywhere else in the States, but in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England.

  The Animals were a spotty R&B group1 who picked up ‘House of the Rising Sun’ from Dylan’s debut and turned it into a manic, organled rave-up. Singer Eric Burdon had a raw roar of a voice which often sounded too pleased with its own ability, but not in this instance. The tale of a New Orleans whorehouse went to number one just about everywhere in the summer of ’64, and Dylan, plus dozens of other folkniks stateside, woke up to the possibilities of fusing folk with their new guilty pop pleasures, the Beatles and the Stones.

  Los Angeles was about as far from Newcastle as Vladivostok, but the Animals’ insurrectionary sound reached a bunch of country folksters who soon hitched onto the British beat bandwagon, calling themselves the Jet Set, then the Beefeaters and finally the Byrds. They were led by Jim McGuinn, who was so obsessed with aeroplanes and pilot lore that he later changed his name to Roger. McGuinn was completely taken with ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, and so convinced it would lead to a bright teenage future that he left the trad-folk Chad Mitchell Trio to go solo. At his first show, supporting country singer Hoyt Axton at LA’s Troubadour club in early ’64, he played nothing but Beatles songs. Nobody in the audience was particularly impressed, except for a lanky singer from Kansas, Gene Clark, who resembled a troubled bird of prey and had just left another established folk act, the New Christy Minstrels. He wondered if Jim would like to try songwriting with him. A few weeks later, round-faced cheeky boy David Crosby saw McGuinn and Clark at the Troubadour and leapt on stage to add a high, clear harmony. Crosby had already been attempting rocked-up takes on traditional songs with producer Jim Dickson; they added drummer Michael Clarke (who Crosby had seen playing bongos with proto-hippie Dino Valente) and bassist Chris Hillman (who had just finished making a bluegrass album with the Gosdin Brothers) to complete the group. They demo’d with Dickson, Lenny Bruce’s mum got them their first paying gig (East Los Angeles College – they were paid $50), and Miles Davis heard about the commotion they caused and promptly told Columbia Records, who signed them in November ’64. Their advance bought a drum kit for Clarke – he’d been playing on cardboard boxes, with a tambourine for a snare – and, crucially, a Rickenbacker twelve-string guitar for McGuinn. Columbia producer Terry Melcher, Doris Day’s son, produced their debut 45, a cover of Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. Melcher’s thinking was that Dylan couldn’t sing, but he could write; using the Animals’ ‘House of the Rising Sun’ as his guide, he re arranged Dylan’s surreal lyric – cutting all but one verse – and, by placing McGuinn’s twelve-string centre stage, he made the song 3D, a jingle-jangle morning of a record. ‘All my senses have been stripped,’ sang McGuinn, ready to go anywhere.