“Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” sizzles with comic disbelief at the delusional antics of the red-hunters. Dylan had lessons in the stifling absurdities of McCarthyism close to hand, in the fate of Woody Guthrie’s associates. Seeger himself had been indicted in 1956 for contempt of Congress—in refusing to answer questions, he cited the First and not the Fifth Amendment—and in 1961 had been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment; he was technically out on appeal when he took Dylan to meet the Broadside founders. His case was finally dismissed by the courts later that year. Nonetheless, Seeger was blacklisted by Hootenanny, ABC’s attempt to cash in on the folk revival. As a result, Baez, Dylan, and others refused to appear on the program. In 1963, when Dylan turned up at a CBS studio to rehearse for his first national network TV appearance—on The Ed Sullivan Show—he played the John Birch satire. He was asked to play something else. He refused. His appearance was canceled.56
At the time, both the peace and civil rights movements were racked by debates about relations with Communists or people alleged to be Communists. Martin Luther King was cajoled into dissociating himself from some of his closest advisers because of their alleged links with the Communist Party, past or present. The Student Peace Union was under internal and external pressure (the latter in the form of media-hungry Congressional committees) to repudiate not only “communism,” but also any individual with ties to any form of organized Marxism. But the radical youth who formed the cadre of SNCC, and others who would soon form the cadre of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), were increasingly convinced that McCarthyism was a far greater danger to freedom than any Communist conspiracy. To them, the search for reds under the bed had become ludicrous—and Dylan gave expression to that nascent contempt in his talking blues. Already, in 1960, students had disrupted a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in San Francisco. Later in the decade, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and others debunked the proceedings through parody and pantomime. In place of the deliberately sober and solemn approach of the leftists who had faced the inquisition in the forties and fifties, Dylan and his contemporaries dismissed the entire witch-hunting enterprise with caustic mockery. In so doing, they shook off a crippling political inhibition, and embarked on a journey toward a more all-embracing critique of their country and its role in the world.
Dylan wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” somewhere in the Village—backstage at Gerde’s or in a café opposite the Gaslight—at the beginning of April 1962. He introduced an early performance with the caveat: “This here ain’t a protest song or anything like that, ’cause I don’t write protest songs. . . . I’m just writing it as something to be said, for somebody, by somebody.”57 Though it was to be more than a year before recordings of the song were released, it spread rapidly through the folk set. In May, Dylan sang it on WBAI accompanied by Pete Seeger and Sis Cunningham. Weeks later, the lyrics were plastered across the cover of the sixth issue of Broadside. By word of mouth, it soon acquired the status of underground sing-along standard.
“Blowin’ in the Wind” slipped easily into the folk revival repertoire: its musical formula and lyrical style were already familiar. The melody, as Seeger was the first to spot and as Dylan has acknowledged, is in part a reworking of “No More Auction Block (Many Thousands Gone)”—a song first sung by escaped slaves in Canada before the Civil War. Paul Robeson performed and recorded it; Odetta picked it up from him and Dylan picked it up from her. When he sang “Auction Block” in the Village in 1962, he gave it a fierce, haunted quality not found in the stately lamentations of Robeson or Odetta.
In retrospect, “Blowin’ in the Wind” seems timeless, abstract, naive. But in context its glancing references to the great social challenges of the day—racism and war—carried a powerful topical punch. Listeners had no doubt what Dylan was referring to when he asked when the “cannon balls” would be “forever banned” or how long it would be before “some people . . . are allowed to be free.” The song is delicately poised between hope and impatience. It is filled with a sense that a long-awaited transformation is both imminent and frustratingly out of reach. The ambiguous refrain—“the answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind”—gropes for the unnameable. In this it touches a mood explored in Dylan’s work through the rest of the decade. The “answer” is here, and not here; it exists, a force felt all around us, but remains elusive.
When Peter, Paul and Mary’s smooth and earnest cover version was released in June 1963, it sold 300,000 copies in two weeks, making it the fastest selling single in Warner Brothers’ history. This unexpected intrusion of social consciousness into the pop chartsh took pundits by surprise, and the media ruminated over the significance of the latest youth phenomenon and its unkempt troubadour hero. But there was no mystery to the song’s success. In the weeks before the Peter, Paul and Mary single was released, U.S. television screens had been filled with images from Birmingham, Alabama, where thousands of marching black children had been attacked by police with dogs and fire hoses. “How many times can a man turn his head / and pretend that he just doesn’t see?” The same insistent demand that now, not tomorrow, is the time to tackle injustice, fills the open letter Martin Luther King wrote from his Birmingham jail cell.
Peter, Paul and Mary were only the first of many to cover “Blowin’ in the Wind.” One of the artists who tried his hand with the song was Sam Cooke, the gospel star turned crossover teen idol. Cooke covered the song as part of his ceaseless efforts to fashion a mass, multiracial audience; ironically, for him, Dylan’s brave new song was a commercial opportunity—it was already familiar to a section of the white audience he wanted to reach.58 But he was also drawn to the song because of his growing political engagement, and lamented to friends that it had to be a white boy who first dared talk about these realities on the jukeboxes. The success of “Blowin’ in the Wind” helped inspire Cooke’s own composition, the magnificent “A Change Is Gonna Come,” the first masterpiece of socially aware soul, written in late 1964. Even in 1966, when the sixteen-year-old Stevie Wonder decided to record “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Motown bosses worried that their prodigy would be tainted by political controversy. Wonder’s zestful rendition topped the R&B charts, and in the years to come the politics of race and war would become ever more explicit in black popular music.
Dylan himself never saw the song as a rallying cry but as a challenge—to the establishment and the movement, to the apathetic and the active. In the notes he wrote for Broadside in 1962, he declared:Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is, but oh, I don’t believe that. I still say it’s in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper, it’s got to come down some time. . . . But the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down so not too many people get to see and know it . . . and then it flies away again. . . . I still say that some of the biggest criminals are those who turn their heads away when they see wrong and know it’s wrong. I’m only 21 years old and I know that there’s been too many wars. . . . You people over 21 should know better . . . cause after all, you’re older and smarter.
Soon after “Blowin’ in the Wind” made its way around the coffeehouses, Dave Van Ronk told the song’s author it was “incredibly dumb.” Dylan may have agreed, because within a year he dropped the tune from live performances—except for mandatory sing-alongs at folk festivals and the March on Washington. In 1971, when Dylan—after a long hiatus in his public support for good causes—appeared at the Concert for Bangladesh organized by George Harrison, the former Beatle suggested he sing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” An irritated Dylan asked Harrison whether he still performed “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” But the primitive Beatles classic did not carry the political resonance of the primitive Dylan classic, and Harrison was right to see its appositeness to a concert whose central purpose was a moral appeal to the comfortable and affluent to assist the poor and disaster-stricken—not tomorrow, but today. This was confirmed by the audience response when Dylan, yielding to Harrison, but se
izing the moment, belted out the familiar number from the stage.59
In June of 1962, the UAW-owned FDR Camp at Port Huron, north of Detroit, hosted the annual convention of Students for a Democratic Society. The then little-known SDS was the student wing of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), a venerable social democratic think tank long committed to a stringent anticommunism. After five days of meetings, the fifty-nine delegates—ostensibly representing SDS’s two thousand student contacts—adopted the Port Huron Statement, which was to become the most widely circulated and influential manifesto of the New (white, American) Left, though it was created under the auspices of the old. Spurred by the protests against the bomb, the exponential growth of the civil rights movement, and many of the same discontents that drew young people to the folk revival, its authors consciously sought to map out a vision of American social change that would ring true for a new student generation.60
The statement eschewed the vocabulary of the old Left. The words capitalism, imperialism, class, and revolution were nowhere to be found. Its specific proposals for reform were modest. It envisioned working in a renewed Democratic Party. But it was saturated with intimations that deeper and more radical change would be needed. “America rests in national stalemate,” the students declared. “America is without community, impulse, without the inner momentum necessary. . . . Americans are in withdrawal from public life, from any collective effort at directing their own affairs.”
The critique of American society in the Port Huron Statement was as much cultural as political. Speaking as young people to young people, the authors portrayed themselves as a generation shadowed by the bomb. They lamented “the decline of utopia and hope” but saw signs that “students are breaking the crust of apathy.” Unlike the old Left, they stressed individual freedom and creativity, which they argued were being stifled by the conformist, bureaucratic order of postwar America. “The goal of man and society should be human independence . . . finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic . . .” Politics itself would have to be redefined. Its function would be “bringing people out of isolation and into community.” Tactics, strategy, and ideology were tied together under the ringing rubric of “participatory democracy.”
The moment that created “Blowin’ in the Wind” also created the Port Huron Statement, which shares the song’s mixture of idealism and subdued impatience, as well as its longing for a bigger answer to the growing questions posed by the events of the day—the civil rights movement, the nuclear threat, and the bland complacency of the cultural mainstream. “We have no formulas, no closed theories . . .” the statement cautioned. Skeptical of both the liberal and Communist traditions, severed from organized labor by the Cold War, and emboldened by their own experience of material comfort, they paraded their innocent openness. Year zero had been declared on the American Left. It was a historical moment that was to shape Dylan’s trajectory in the coming years as well as the evolution of many others, not least SDS itself.
As a result of events at Port Huron, the young SDS leaders were upbraided by their elder LID sponsors. It was an article of faith for them that members of Communist and “totalitarian” groups had no place in the democratic left. Yet at the outset of the Port Huron meeting, the student delegates had voted to grant observer status to a member of a Communist Party youth organization. The LID veterans were also worried that the statement was too even-handed in its denunciation of U.S. and Soviet foreign policies. Worse yet, it openly opposed what it called “an unreasoning anticommunism.” The SDS people couldn’t see what the problem was. A generation gap had opened.
In July 1962, Dylan prefaced the Freewheelin’ recording of “Bob Dylan’s Blues” by saying: “Unlike most of the songs nowadays that are being written uptown in Tin Pan Alley—that’s where most of the folk songs come from nowadays—this wasn’t written up there, this was written somewhere down in the USA.” It’s a reworking of Guthrie’s Rainbow Room jibe, a claim of authenticity, and a restatement of the Lomax credo that true folk music reflected American reality. But the reality that Dylan writes about in this off-the-cuff number includes the TV figures of the Lone Ranger and Tonto, sports cars (“I don’t have no sports car / And I don’t even care to have one”), and a final admonition by Dylan to an imagined acolyte (at this stage he had none):You want to be like me
Pull out your six-shooter
And rob every bank you can see
Tell the judge I said it was all right
Dylan played and wrote songs about outlaws of all kinds, and frequently imagined himself as one. But already in “Bob Dylan’s Blues” he displaces outlawry into a satirical realm. This slim one-and-a-half joke song may be based on a venerable blues, but it hints at a different world, one in which the authentic is contradictory and American reality frustratingly elusive.
It’s often claimed that Dylan wrote “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” in response to the Cuban missile crisis. Dylan himself seems to believe it. “I was in Bleecker Street in New York,” he recalled some years later. “People sat around wondering if it was the end and so did I. . . . it was a song of desperation. What could we do? Could we control men on the verge of wiping us out? The words came fast, very fast. It was a song of terror. Line after line, trying to capture the feeling of nothingness.”61 Nonetheless, the fact remains that Dylan premiered “Hard Rain” at a Carnegie Hall hootenanny organized by Pete Seeger on September 22, 1962, some weeks before the U2 spotted the Soviet missiles on Cuban soil. It was only on October 22 that Kennedy announced his naval blockade and the crisis erupted in the headlines.
None of which makes “Hard Rain” any less relevant to the missile crisis. The audience at Carnegie Hall seemed impressed by the new song, and Seeger himself quickly incorporated it into his repertoire. For these people, and for Dylan, the possibility of nuclear extinction had been in the air for some time. Dylan was able to write “Hard Rain” “before the event” not because he was a prophetic mystic, but because he was a political artist in a political milieu with an astute sense of the prevailing anxieties. The urgency and despair out of which Dylan says he wrote the song were undeniably real.
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” is the first of Dylan’s songs to be comprised of a series of disconnected, enigmatic images (an indulgence in obscurity to which he would not return for two years). The song borrows its quizzical refrain from “Lord Randal,” a Childi ballad (“Oh, where have you been, Lord Randal, my son?”) and is driven by an insistent if rough-edged rhythm that anticipates his later turn to rock ’n’ roll. The singer’s vision in this song is panoptic: evoking global destruction (“seven sad forests” and “a dozen dead oceans”) as well as more metaphorical disasters (“ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,” “a newborn babe with wild wolves all around it”). He hears not only “the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world” but also “the song of a poet who died in the gutter.” Finally, he ventures out into a postapocalypse landscape that is also the reality of the here and now:Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And he vows, with more confidence than in “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” written only seven months earlier, to “tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it.”
At Carnegie Hall, Dylan introduced his audience to another new song, “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” the tale of a man driven to murder and suicide by poverty. (The melody is derived from the traditional “Pretty Polly.”) The language was as pared down as that of “Hard Rain” was luxuriant, but like “Hard Rain” it beats with a stark, bleak terror. This song has been disparaged as “hysterical” but that’s what it needs to be; it’s the hysteria of poverty and powerlessness. Dylan’s presentation of the self-destruction of the oppressed makes the blood run cold. “Hollis Brown” touches the tragic monumentality of the folk ballads it’s based on. Unlike them, it was written n
ot for people who knew poverty all too well but for people who scarcely acknowledged it existed. Dylan was writing about what Michael Harrington called the “other America,” about the casualties of class that crossed racial boundaries.
Weeks after writing “Hard Rain” and “Hollis Brown,” Dylan returned to the theme of racial violence with “Oxford Town,” his response to that autumn’s events at the University of Mississippi. When James Meredith sought enrollment as Ole Miss’s first black student, whites across the South reacted in horror. In a display of reactionary defiance, Governor Ross Barnett blocked Meredith’s path. The Kennedy administration was forced to intervene. Federal agents escorted Meredith to his dormitory. In the most violent student disturbances of the decade, several thousand white college boys (pumped up by the regional media and the governor himself, and assisted by highway patrolmen and local police) besieged the campus, attacked the federal marshals guarding Meredith, slashed tires, hurled Molotov cocktails, bricks and lead pipes, and fired shotguns. “Two men died ’neath the Mississippi moon,” Dylan sings, accurately— and another 28 were shot and 160 wounded. In the end, the Kennedy administration deployed 23,000 troops—three times the population of Oxford—to subdue the white resistance to Meredith.62 Dylan’s song is plainspoken and moving, if one-dimensional. He seems to have played it live only once—on his sole visit to Oxford, Mississippi, in 1991.63
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