Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  Meanwhile, in its exuberance, the crowd had disregarded the official marshals and surged ahead of schedule toward the Lincoln Memorial. To create the illusion for posterity that Martin Luther King and the heads of the major sponsoring organizations had led the way, the marshals waded in and wedged open a space for the designated leaders, who duly squeezed themselves in front of the enthusiastic multitude, locked arms and had their photographs taken.

  Once safely backstage, the march leaders squabbled. At issue was the anguished, impatient rhetoric of the speech to be given by John Lewis on behalf SNCC, whose young black activists had been at the sharp end of the struggle in the South. Over the previous three and a half years, since the first sit-ins, their willingness to suffer and sacrifice had driven the movement forward. The march was a vindication of their heroism and a testament to an aroused people. But the question was: where next? The SNCC activists could not share the march’s official mood of optimism (a mood partly engendered by their own heroic actions) and specifically its uncritical approach to the Kennedy administration and the federal government. Many of the young militants, freshly scarred on the battlefields of the South, feared that the demonstration and the movement were being appropriated—by the Kennedy administration, by the middle-class black leadership, by the establishment media.

  The draft of Lewis’s speech included not only barbed criticisms of the failures of the federal government and the inadequacies of JFK’s proposed legislation (“too little, too late”), but also what seemed to the elders an incendiary pledge: “We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—non-violently.” Walter Reuther, the UAW leader whose union had bankrolled the march, was furious. Officials at the Justice Department, who had somehow seen advance copies of the speech, proposed amendments. A Catholic archbishop threatened to walk off the platform. NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, who had offered SNCC activists in the field little support, shouted and waved his finger at Lewis, and Lewis reciprocated. King urged some changes in the speech’s style that, he assured Lewis, would not be changes in substance. Lewis agreed, and SNCC secretary James Forman, whom Dylan had met and admired in Mississippi earlier in the summer, hastily retyped the speech, deleting what he himself considered its deeper truths. For the moment, the desire to preserve movement unity prevailed.

  Even in its censored form, Lewis’s speech went far beyond the con-sensual limits respected by other speakers. In its litany of arrests, bombings, beatings, and killings, its description of civil rights workers and black communities living “in constant fear of a police state” and its angry refrain “what did the federal government do?,” it emphasized that political institutions, and not merely “prejudice,” were the key obstacles to equality. On that day, Dylan was the only other voice to stress the reality of the state’s collaboration with racism as he sang: “The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid / And the marshals and cops get the same.” It was Lewis who spelled out what “Only a Pawn in Their Game” was hinting at:My friends, let us not forget that we are involved in a serious social revolution. By and large, American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation. . . . Where is our party? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march on Washington? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march on the streets of Birmingham?4

  Dylan echoed Lewis’s speech in the lines addressed to James Forman in “11 Outlined Epitaphs,” written in September 1963, within weeks of the march, and published as the liner notes on his third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’:Jim, Jim

  where is our party?

  where is the party that’s one

  where all members’re held equal

  an’ vow t’infiltrate that thought

  among the people it hopes t’serve

  an’ sets a respected road

  for all of those like me

  In Washington, Lewis’s speech was well-received, but it was Mahalia Jackson’s singing “I Been Buked and I Been Scorned” that really roused the huge throng, and it was King’s climactic peroration that sent them home filled with hope and purpose. In fact, King at one point seemed to be losing his way as he read from his carefully prepared text. Behind him, Mahalia Jackson called, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” Abandoning his script, King rose to the occasion with a vision of the society they were struggling and sacrificing to create. Behind the famous speech were many of the elements that had forged the folksingers’ repertoire and infused the new music of Bob Dylan: the imagery and rhythmic syntax of the King James Bible, the call-and-response traditions of the black church, the music created by the slaves and the field hands, the sense of a collective destiny that yet also demanded an individual moral choice, the search for an idiom that could reach and move masses of modern human beings. Like the singers of the spirituals, King fashioned a durable utopian vision out of the brutality of centuries of racism. He spun gold from the mire. And as he did so, Dylan watched and listened, along with hundreds of thousands in the mall and millions more via television (and not only in America).

  The stirring sounds and images of the March on Washington helped place the African-American demand for legal equality at the center of American popular consciousness. But they were also the means by which the legacy of the movement came to be tamed. Today the march appears a distant and depoliticized phenomenon, an idealistic celebration of human brotherhood. Even on the day itself, the debate had begun: Was this an exercise in resistance or cooptation? Malcolm X sat contemptuously on the sidelines, mocking “the farce on Washington” and decrying the moderate leaders as the “puppets” of a white political system. Some of the young SNCC activists were almost ready to agree. In the face of an America that had, in their immediate experience, revealed ever-deeper layers of brutality, the potential America of brotherhood and freedom celebrated in folk song and in civil rights speeches was beginning to seem nothing but a cruel illusion. What was needed was much more than a few legislative reforms. At this stage, these sentiments were confined to a small minority, but there can be little doubt that Bob Dylan was among them, though as ever for his own reasons and in his own manner.

  In August 1963, at the very moment the great civil rights coalition was redefining the national consensus, its constituent elements and impulses were coming into conflict; its underlying contradictions were beginning to surface. The rhetoric of love and unity was being challenged by a more militant, hard-edged analysis. The radicals were leaving the liberals behind, but where were they going?

  While the march itself received overwhelmingly favorable publicity (reading the reports now, one is struck by the patronizing note with which white reporters informed their readers that the Negro masses had behaved well), not everyone was impressed by the contribution of Dylan and the folkies. In the extensive New York Times coverage, Dylan was mentioned twenty-three paragraphs below a quote from waning teen idol Bobby Darin, who did not perform. “Bob Dylan, a young folksinger, rendered a lugubrious mountain song about ‘the day Medgar Evers was buried from a bullet that he caught.’ Mr. Lancaster, Mr. Belafonte and Mr. Heston found time dragging, stood up to stretch and chat.” A commentator in the Boston Herald Traveler mocked:Though I am all for such civil rights as integrate white and colored, I am not yet convinced that white should be expected to put up with white—or rather with every other white. Fair is fair, but should anyone be made to go to school with such as, say, this Dylan? And would you want your sister to marry him? . . . Our colored brethren were actually implying that we are expected to give house room to fraudulent folk singers.5

  As Dylan sang, Dick Gregory, the comedian-activist who had repeatedly exposed himself to arrest and beatings on visits to the South, covered his ears. “What was a white boy like Bob Dylan there for?” he asked. “Or—who else? Joan Baez? To support the cause? Wonderful—support the cause. March. Stand behind us—b
ut not in front of us.” Harry Belafonte, whose commitment to the movement was regarded by activists as second to none, took a different view. “Joan and Bob demonstrated with their participation that freedom and justice are universal concerns of import to responsible people of all colors. . . . Were they taking advantage of the movement? Or was the movement taking advantage of them?”6

  The role of the white and (relatively) famous in a mass movement for black rights was only one aspect of a broader dilemma that was to haunt the decade. Whose was the authentic voice of the movement? What was the relationship between the experience of oppression and the protest against it? Where was the line between selling the message and selling out? In this movement to end exploitation, who was exploiting whom? As the sixties wore on, the relationship between vanguards (or would-be vanguards) and the masses of people they claimed to speak for and aimed to mobilize, was to grow more acutely troubled—even as larger numbers were drawn into political action. No sooner did challenges from below thrust themselves into public view than their language, gestures, and cultural products were snapped up by a new mass media, packaged and sold to a new mass market. These political and cultural tensions were dramatized in Dylan’s music and the public response to it. Throughout the decade, they drove his art forward at breakneck pace.

  America was still very “straight,” “postwar” and sort of into a gray-flannelled suit thing. McCarthy, commies, puritanical, very claustrophobic and whatever was happening of real value was happening away from that and sort of hidden from view and it would be years before the media would be able to recognize it and choke-hold it and reduce it to silliness.

  —Bob Dylan7

  Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village in February 1961, still only nineteen, with a head full of songs—pop, rock ’n’ roll, gospel, blues, country, folk. The product of a small-town, middle-class, Jewish upbringing in northern Minnesota, he had already renamed himself and remodeled himself as a latter-day Woody Guthrie, a veteran of hard times and the open road. With his strangled singing, mumbling nervous manner, tall tales of sitting at the feet of ancient bluesmen and his ersatz Okie accent, he struck not a few as affected and preposterous. Nonetheless, he quickly won the admiration of a small coterie of dedicated folk artists and fans. The Irish singer Liam Clancy recalled the chain-smoking cherub who insinuated himself so rapidly into the hothouse Village scene: “The only thing I can compare him with is blotting paper. He soaked everything up. He had this immense curiosity; he was totally blank, and ready to suck up everything that was within his range.”8 Famously, Dylan soaked up songs—poring over his friends’ record collections and raiding the repertoire of every singer in town. But along with the songs there was much more to soak up “within his range”—a living heritage of political, cultural, and personal dissent.

  Greenwich Village had first become America’s bohemian capital in the years before World War I, when intellectuals and artists had been drawn to the neighborhood by its cheap rents and immigrant community, which, as in so many cities and eras, offered a protective bolt-hole for dissidents and eccentrics. John Reed celebrated the joys of “living at 42 Washington Square” in a poem published in 1913: “But nobody questions your morals, / And nobody asks for the rent / There’s no one to pry if we’re tight, you and I / Or demand how our evenings are spent.” Reed shared this Village demimonde with political activists like Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, and Margaret Sanger, artists like John Sloan and Eugene O’Neill, and intellectuals like Max Eastman. Many contributed to The Masses, fountainhead of America’s alternative press, which advertised itself as “a revolutionary and not a reform magazine; a magazine with a sense of humor and no respect for the respectable; frank, arrogant, impertinent, a magazine whose final policy is to do as it pleases, and conciliate nobody, not even its readers.”

  The prewar Masses-Village milieu “contained two types of revolt,” Malcolm Cowley recalled, “the individual and the social—or the aesthetic and the political, or the revolt against puritanism and the revolt against capitalism—we might tag the two of them briefly as bohemianism and radicalism. In those prewar days, however, the two currents were hard to distinguish. Bohemians read Marx and all the radicals had a touch of the Bohemian. Socialism, free love, anarchism, syndicalism, free verse—all these creeds were lumped together by the public and all were physically dangerous to practice.”9

  World War I fractured these commingling currents, but they were to remain, in varying admixtures, part and parcel of the Greenwich Village scene as it mutated over the following decades. The legacy of that sometimes fruitful, sometimes frustrating search for a synthesis between individual creativity and collective political action, between vanguard modernism and popular radicalism—what might be called the evanescent Masses moment—is the launch point for Dylan’s extraordinary journey through the sixties.

  I could see men of all colors bouncing in the boxcar. The first line of Bound for Glory, Woody Guthrie’s 1943 autobiography, sets the theme and tone for the book, a picaresque account of the adventures of a democratic-minded individual among an interracial people on the move. Dylan read a friend’s copy of the first edition in Minneapolis in 1960. The impact was immediate and decisive. “I went though it from cover to cover like a hurricane,” he recalled. “Totally focused on every word, and the book sang out to me like the radio. Guthrie writes like the whirlwind and you get tripped out on the sounds of the words alone.” He adopted his Woody Guthrie persona and set about mastering Woody’s songbook. He even copied Woody’s vernacular orthography, scattering apostrophes across the page, using phonetic renderings like wuz and sez.

  Guthrie’s book exalted the working class in all its colors, accents, and moods; it raged against cops and security guards; it flashed with contempt for the rich and their stooges. It was also peppered with vivid evocations of a vast, changing landscape and a cheerfully unmoralistic approach to drink, gambling, lovemaking, and crime. Importantly for the young Dylan, it told the story of Guthrie’s vocation as a maker of songs for ordinary people. The teenage Guthrie had felt a need to express himself. “Things was starting to stack up in my head and I just felt like I was going out of my wits if I didn’t find some way of saying what I was thinking.” After trying oil painting, he turned to the guitar. He was soon playing at square dances—and making up new words for old tunes. “There on the Texas plains right in the dead center of the dust bowl, with the oil boom over and the wheat blowed out and the hard-working people just stumbling about, bothered with mortgages, debts, bills, sickness, worries of every blowing kind, I seen there was plenty to make up songs about.”10

  The music that stirred him came from working people: “no Hollywood put-on, no fake wiggling” but songs that “say something about our hard traveling, something about our hard luck, our hard get-by.” But singing such songs didn’t make it easy to earn a living. He told a passing girlfriend: “Most radio stations, they won’t let ya sing th’ real songs. They want ya ta sing pure ol’ bull manure an’ nothin’ else.”11 Nonetheless, Guthrie’s brilliance as an entertainer did earn him commercial opportunities. In Bound for Glory, he sums up his response to these in a tale of his audition at the Rainbow Room, the elite watering hole on the 65th floor of Rockefeller Center in mid-Manhattan “where the shrimps are boiled in Standard Oil.” As he approaches the microphone, he reviews the varied venues he’s sung at in recent months—from the apricot orchards of California and the “tough joints around th’ battery park” to CBS studios and a huge union meeting in Madison Square Garden. At the last moment, he decides to sing a song called “New York Town,” with new words: “the Rainbow Room is up so high / that John D’sc spirit comes a driftin’ by.”

  I took the tune to church, took it holy roller, shot in a few split notes, oozed in a fake one, come down barrel house, hit off a good old cross-country lonesome note or two, trying to get that old guitar to help me, to talk with me, talk for me, and say what I was thinking, just this one time:

  Well this R
ainbow Room’s a funny place ta play It’s a long way’s from here to th’USA

  Delighted, the Rainbow Room bosses offer him a job. But they decide he should wear makeup (he looks too pale under the lights) and, worse yet, a costume. A gushing rich woman suggests he dress in French peasant garb, or as a Louisiana swamp dweller, or as a clownlike Pierrot figure, something to evoke “quaint simplicity.” Meanwhile, Woody looks out the window at the city below, and the innumerable New Yorkers “standing up living and breathing and cussing and laughing down yonder.” Telling his would-be patrons that he is going to the rest room, he hops in the elevator and says to the operator: “Quickest way down’s too slow.” As he walks into the polished marble foyer, he sings and strums his guitar as loud as he can: “Old John Dee he ain’t no friend of mine,” then wanders through the teeming city. “Thank the good Lord, everybody, everything ain’t all slicked up, and starched and imitation.”12

  This hunger for authenticity was to be handed down to Guthrie’s sixties disciples. Not only in his public image, but in his own mind, Woody was of the people for whom he sang. Any distinction in status between himself and his audience troubled him. “Somehow or another the best singing just naturally comes from under the leakingest roof.” When he was appearing on a Los Angeles radio station in the late thirties, he used to mail out a mimeographed songbook to listeners. It included this note:This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.13