Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  Though it would take Dylan another twenty years to find a direct use for Johnson’s aphorism (in "Sweetheart Like You"), he began writing a lyric that encapsulated the eminent doctor’s dictum, directed at an American audience. Unconvinced that Behan had tapped into the universality of the sentiment, he seized upon a motto emblazoned on every dollar bill, "In God We Trust." He would later suggest to journalist Margaret Steen that he felt such songs were somewhat forced in their diction, because he imposed line after line to drive home his point: "Before [Another Side] . . . every song had to have a specific point behind it, a person, a thing; I would squeeze a shapeless concept into this artificial shape, like ‘With God On Our Side.’ . . . This thing I wanted to say, I had to jam into a very timed, rigid, stylized pattern."

  In the process Dylan sparked another controversy concerning the scale of any debt owed to Behan, and this time it was crystal clear that his precursor was unhappy with such a brazen act of appropriation. A quarter of a century later, Behan was still steaming. When journalist Robin Denselow referred to Dylan’s condemnation of bootlegging in a 1985 review of Biograph, Behan let readers of The Guardian know just what he thought of Dylan the pirate: "Bob should know [all] about such piracy. Let me give you an instance: my song ‘The Patriot Game’ . . . Dylan’s ‘God on Our Side’ takes my music lock, stock and barrel, and very nearly the words. . . . The song is a complete parody of ‘The Patriot Game.’"

  Behan promptly brought the wrath of the Dylan-listening, Guardian-

  reading demographic down upon his head, as letter writers galore pointed out it was hardly "his" tune. Behan now became disingenuous, stating, "I made a recording of ‘The Nightingale’ sometime in the sixties for Major Minor Records and I sang it to the tune of ‘The Patriot Game.’" In fact "The Nightingale" had been sung to that tune by Jo Stafford as far back as 1948, nine years before Behan wrote his song; a point made by, among others, Liam Clancy.

  Perhaps Dylan was already aware of Behan’s ire. During a July 1963 workshop performance at Newport (now on DVD), he claimed that he’d learned the "The Patriot Game" from the Clancys and that he’d heard Liam sing it "two years ago." Though Dylan is probably exaggerating, the Clancys did issue their own version of "The Patriot Game" in 1963. So maybe the Troubadour was not the first place Dylan heard "The Patriot Game" (or "Nottamun Town" or "Lady Franklin"). As for the tune, when "The Patriot Game" was published in Sing Out! the following year, it clearly stated, "music adapted from traditional airs."

  Behan’s assertion that Dylan’s song is "a complete parody of ‘The Patriot Game,’" is also patent nonsense. Yes, the songs share a similar concern. However, Behan is preaching to the converted with his references to the likes of James Connolly and de Valera—martyrs to the Irish cause of "freedom"—while Dylan picks grander struggles, like two world wars, as the backdrop to a song that universalizes its subject matter. He also shows a sharper eye for the absurdities underlying the patriots’ position. In an era of reds under the bed, he both lectures and lampoons. When he says in verse six, "I’ve learned to hate Russians / all through my whole life," no-one knew at the time that here was a boy who grew up sharing a home with at least one grandparent who had emigrated from Odessa at the turn of the century. As he would write in Chronicles, "These were the same Russians that my uncles had fought alongside only a few years earlier. Now they had become monsters who were coming to slit our throats and incinerate us."

  At the time of its composition, he found himself obliged to explain the tenor of the song to his father (both of whose parents were Russian). Misled by the title into thinking it was a patriotic song, Abraham was set right by his son. As he told Robert Shelton, shortly before his own death in 1968: "When I heard about this song—‘With God On Our Side’ . . . I mentioned it to Bob. He said, ‘Dad, it’s not the kind of song you think it is.’ Because I hadn’t seen the words yet. I said, ‘The title infers that it is a beautiful song,’ and he said, ‘No, it’s kind of a sarcastic song.’"

  "A sarcastic song" it may have been, but Dylan insists he was trying not to sermonize. As he told British journalist John Preston at the time of Chronicles, "Some people seemed to think that listening to songs should be like listening to dull sermons. I didn’t want my songs to be anything like that." Unfortunately, "With God on Our Side" crossed the line, laying the ground for yet more judgmental songs to come.

  Not surprisingly, Broadside’s Sis Cunningham, Sing Out!’s Irwin Silber, and a besotted Joan Baez all loved the song and insisted on publishing or performing it. Dylan was less convinced and soon decided to vent his sarcasm on shadier targets. Prior to the song becoming a surprise radio hit after being recorded by The Neville Brothers for their 1988 Yellow Moon album, he had performed it exactly twice in twenty-five years: once at a 1975 Rolling Thunder show in Providence (maybe as a request from some old Newportees) and then during a joint Dylan/Baez set at Peace Sunday in June 1982. Yet for a brief time in the fall of 1988, he began performing the song again, incorporating the sophomoric extra verse the Nevilles themselves had written about Vietnam.

  As for any moral debt he had to "The Patriot Game," Dylan would doubtless argue that both he and Behan were drawing from the "folk idiom"—and the (long out of copyright) collected works of Samuel Johnson. Dylan, though, probably now wishes one could copyright an idea, since he would now be entitled to a share of the untold millions earned by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber from Jesus Christ Superstar, a rock opera that began life because Rice decided to write a libretto that would answer the question Dylan posed at the end of ‘With God On Our Side’—"whether Judas Iscariot / Had God on his side."

  {101} TALKIN’ WORLD WAR III BLUES

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, April 23, 1963 [FR].

  First known performance: The Bear, Chicago, April 25, 1963.

  When Dylan returned to Columbia in late April 1963, it appears to have been with one specific idea in mind—to update the album he thought he’d completed the previous December, incorporating winter 1963 songs at the expense of the winter 1962 songs. Out went the once highly regarded "Let Me Die in My Footsteps," "Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie," and "Rocks and Gravel," all songs cut the previous April, to be replaced by "Masters of War," "Bob Dylan’s Dream," and "Girl from the North Country," all penned during the previous three months.

  Also part of the cull—indeed the purported reason for Freewheelin’s recall—was the earliest original composition scheduled for the album, "Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues." The reason for its exclusion? A potential libel suit that necessitated a new set of sleeve notes, a new album sequence, and the recalling of promotional copies and a few stock copies of the original version (now worth at least five figures).

  The legend does not quite tally with the fact that these "replacement songs" were recorded in the studio a good three weeks before the aborted Ed Sullivan show appearance, which allegedly triggered the album’s recall. Evidently Columbia expressed their concerns before the (canceled) TV appearance and instructed Dylan—via attorney Clive Davis—to come up with an alternative. The fact that Dylan chose to replace "Talkin’ John Birch" with another talkin’ blues, newly penned, strongly suggests that the decision had already been made by April 24—when he made these new recordings.

  As one would expect, the song with which Dylan replaced the former talkin’ blues was funnier, more topical, and altogether more relevant to the world of 1963. And yet, according to Scaduto, "Talkin’ World War III Blues" "was nothing more than a partially worked out idea in Dylan’s mind when he went into the studio." There is probably something to this. We have plenty of evidence of Dylan’s capacity for improvising around a central lyrical idea. And he doesn’t seem to have had the song at hand twelve days earlier, when he unveiled almost his entire repertoire

  at Town Hall (including "Talkin’ New York"). Unlike the wil
dly unfunny "Talkin’ Devil," "You’ve Been Hiding Too Long," "Masters of War," and "Train A-Travelin," this spontaneous display of antibomb rhetoric allowed Dylan to convey a life after the bomb that is more Beyond the Fringe than Omega Man.

  The talkin’ blues had become so innate to Dylan’s art form that he captured the song in the studio in a single full take (after four false starts). And what a deliriously sardonic tour de force this Freewheelin’ performance is. Here in microcosmic (as opposed to capsule) form is the cerebral seed of every surreal flight of fancy he will embark on post-acid (his first "trip" was still a year away, to the day). Rather than murdering the singer for coming up with such a post-apocalyptic scenario, the doctor in "TWWIII Blues" has a simpler solution: "Nurse, get your pad, this boy’s insane." It doesn’t stop the singer spending eight verses traversing this eery landscape. He even manages to slip a dig at red-baiters past the Columbia lawyers:

  I seen a man, I said, ‘Howdy friend, I guess there’s just us two.’

  He screamed a bit and away he flew. Thought I was a Communist.

  {102} LIVERPOOL GAL

  Published lyrics: In His Own Words 2.

  Nothing was known of this intriguing song until the late eighties, when it appeared in manuscript form as part of the so-called Margolis and Moss papers. Given that the majority of these papers, mostly typescripts of poems and an unfinished play, date from the fall of 1963, it was presumed that the song also came from this period, when Dylan was taking a break from songwriting. It subsequently came out that the song featured on the last of the Tony Glover "home tapes," recorded the previous July on another of Dylan’s trips home, putting its composition back to a period when the ink still poured out of his pen. It probably dates from a trip to Woodstock in May, a time when according to Suze, "songs . . . were coming out of him rapid fire." (There is a Woodstock connection to all of the Margolis and Moss material.)

  Though the July tape remains solely in Glover’s possession, the inclusion of the song on a tape of originals played to impress old friends and one curmudgeonly critic (Paul Nelson) barely three weeks before he began work on his third album makes it all the more surprising that he made no attempt to record the song for Columbia. Nor did he copyright it with Witmark, the company for which he continued to cut demos. Maybe the song was already old hat and was played for a specific reason (and person) that July evening.

  Nelson, who had just given Dylan’s second album a lukewarm review in Little Sandy Review #27, was giving the songwriter a hard time about the topical songs he was then writing, so this performance could have been a palliative to Nelson’s bruised sensibilities; what with him being steeped in the genuinely traditional. Nelson would definitely have recognized the template to which Dylan set his tale, "When First Unto This Country," a stalwart of many a revivalist repertoire, and a song Dylan performed in both electric and acoustic guises at the start of the Never Ending Tour in 1989 and 1991.

  Originally about the son of a poor immigrant, Dylan inverts the folk song’s vantage point, making the singer a traveler who’d gone to "London town" but cannot help "thinkin’ about / the land I left back home." This depiction of someone who "walked the streets so silently" and "did not know no one" may well reflect his own feeling on arriving in the great city, the previous December. The verse where he describes the winter weather also has the ring of authentic experience: "I gazed all up at her window, where the stormy snowflakes blowed / I put my hands deep in my pockets, and I walked on down the road."

  One ineluctable question the song raises is whether there really was a "Liverpool gal / who lived in London town," with whom the singer spent the night, only to feel the following morning, "Of her love I know not much." Its belated, solitary appearance suggests a song that gestated for some time. And its appearance among papers assembled after the completion of Times . . . presumably means it was a song he had not quite resolved to forget. At least he ended up saving the idea for "I Don’t Believe You."

  {103} ONLY A PAWN IN THEIR GAME

  Published lyrics: Broadside #33; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  First known performance: Greenwood Rally, Mississippi July 6, 1963 [DLB].

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, August 6, 1963—6 takes; August 7, 1963—1 take [TIMES—tk.1].

  Medgar Evers was a field secretary for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in Mississippi. He was therefore both a prominent and an easy target for racist agitators. And by the summer of 1963, tensions had risen to an all-time high. Even locals, though, were stunned when Evers was gunned down outside his own home in Jackson on June 12. The reaction, from both a primed media and an angry mob, resulted in localized rioting. The local police had no problem arresting twenty-seven (mostly black) rioters, but when they arrested a white suspect for the murder, he was immediately released.

  With said tensions (and concomitant political pressure) still mounting, the one and only suspect, Byron de la Beckwith, was finally indicted for the shooting a fortnight later. By then, one must presume, Dylan had already written this response-in-song, which appears to take its immediate inspiration from a quote supplied by NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins for the June 16 edition of the New York Times. According to Wilkins, it was the "Southern political system" that had put the murderer "behind that rifle." Wilkins thus provided Dylan with an evocative couplet and a core theme:

  A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers blood

  A finger fired the trigger to his name . . .

  But he can’t be blamed

  He’s only a pawn in their game.

  In keeping with the topical rivalry Dylan now enjoyed with certain Village peers, the race was on to provide the first expression of outrage for the Broadside presses. Once more, Dylan let others fire the first retaliatory volleys. It was poetaster Phil Ochs who again offered his "Ballad of Medgar Evers" to Cunningham’s magazine, taking great delight in portraying the killer as a cowardly bigot:

  The killer waited by his home hidden by the night

  As Evers stepped out from his car into the rifle sight

  He slowly squeezed the trigger, the bullet left his side

  It struck the heart of every man as Evers fell and died.

  Like Dylan, Ochs offered no name for the killer. Indeed, initial reports of the murder were careful not to name Beckwith as the likely culprit. Yet by the time Dylan debuted the song in Mississippi on July 6, Beckwith had been charged with the crime. Unfortunately for Dylan’s thesis, de la Beckwith—as his name implies—was hardly someone who came "from the poverty shacks." In fact he paid the $10,000 bail set in cash. Nor did he feel any need to "hide ’neath the [KKK] hood." A high-ranking official in the Klu Klux Klan, he made no secret of his views or affiliation. Nor, it appears, did he need to. Such was the groundswell of support for the man and his views that when he ran for lieutenant governor of Mississippi, four years after being charged with Evers’s murder, he still polled some 34,000 votes.

  By then he had been subjected to two trials, both of which failed to reach a verdict. Eventually the charges were dropped (though he was never formally acquitted). These high-profile trials—which made it plain that the man was a bigot, but no pawn—failed to convince Dylan to quietly let the song go. He would still be performing it in October 1964—fifteen months after its debut at a voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi (a performance memorably inserted into Don’t Look Back at the last minute).

  Throughout the summer of 1963 Dylan used the song to validate his credentials as a civil rights activist still willing to activate his pen for the cause. He performed it passionately at the Newport Folk Festival; a CBS Sales Convention in San Juan, where its performance apparently instigated a mass walkout by the southern reps; and to half a million strong at the Washington Civil Rights March in late August. Its most select audience, though, was Tony Glov
er and friends, back home in Minnesota just eleven days after the Mississippi rally. And despite its tenuous thesis, Dylan’s song received very little opprobrium, save from Paul Nelson, who boldly challenged his motives for writing such a song in the first place:

  After [Freewheelin’] we had this debate. . . . It went on and on. [The Little Sandy Review] were sort of the anti topical song people, not because we disagreed with it politically but just because we thought it was such shitty art, y’know. These songs were like fish in the barrel stuff. I didn’t like the Phil Ochs songs much. . . . It’s like patting yourself on the back music, it just seemed so obvious and not particularly well done. And Dylan was arguing, "No, no, this is really where it’s at." But he also made the point that the easiest way to get published if you wrote your own songs was to write topical songs ’cause Broadside wouldn’t publish if you didn’t, and you had a tough time getting in Sing Out!

  Dylan thought "Only a Pawn in Their Game" provided the lyrical ammunition necessary to shoot down Nelson’s argument, playing it twice that night—as if Nelson just hadn’t quite got it first time around. A few days later, he continued putting his side of the argument in an open letter "For Dave Glover," intended for the Newport Folk Festival program at the month’s end. In this free-verse poem he claimed he "don[’t] worry no more bout the covered up lies an twisted truths in front a my eyes / . . . [or] bout the no-talent criticizers an know-nothin philosophizers." Nelson, it appears, had got under his skin.

  Even after the courts failed to prosecute de la Beckwith successfully for his crime, Dylan continued to argue that the song succeeded in its aim. He informed Melody Maker’s Max Jones the following May that the assassin was "sheltered" by a deep-rooted ignorance: "If someone gets killed, who’s to say who fired the gun? And why? He fired just because he was uptight. Everybody reacts to what he knows, to what he’s been taught and has come in contact with. He’s been taught there’s only one way; he’s been sheltered. He’s gonna get uptight about it when he sees something different. We have to ask why these people have sheltered him and taught him this. They have reasons too."