Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  He set his tale to a tune adapted from the sixteenth-century Scottish ballad, “Mary Hamilton” (like Hattie Carroll, the story of a maidservant whose life is destroyed by the whims of the powerful). He recorded the new song in the studio on October 23 and premiered it live at Carnegie Hall three days later. It left the audience stunned, as it so often has in the years since then. This is one of Dylan’s most immediately accessible and affecting songs, a mesmerizing piece of storytelling that takes the audience step by step through the social mechanics of a single injustice.

  In Broadside, Phil Ochs praised the song as a model for the new generation of songwriters. “One of his most important techniques is that he always avoids the obvious,” said Ochs, who complained that “so many of the songs sent to Broadside . . . overstate the obvious when it doesn’t need to be stated at all.”81 In “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” Dylan doesn’t even bother to tell us that Carroll is black and Zantzinger is white. It wasn’t necessary—not in the America of 1963. The racial context was a given. Within it, Dylan focused on Carroll as a worker and mother, and Zantzinger as a scion of wealth and privilege. Critics sometimes complain that there are no individuals in Dylan’s protest songs, only social forces and abstractions. But for the purposes of this song we don’t need to know anything more than we are told.

  The first verse states the facts of the case, newspaper style. The baldness of the narrative is relieved by the poetic detail of the “cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger” (and its internal rhyme with “Zanzinger,” as Dylan spells it) and the vocal attention he lavishes on every syllable of “Baltimore hotel society gathering.” In the second verse, a portrait of Zantzinger—his inherited wealth, his social status, his bad manners, and indifference to the consequences of his actions—ends with the information that he was out on bail within minutes. The third verse tells us about Hattie Carroll: her age (fifty-one), her ten children (actually, according to the newspaper report, she had eleven), her life of menial labor. Three lines in succession end with the word table (the table on which she waited and at whose head she never sat), flatly stressing the grinding reduction of a human spirit dispossessed and exploited by others. This verse concludes with a slow-motion re-creation of the attack itself, the movement of the cane through the air: “doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle.”

  Each of these first three verses is followed by the refrain:You who philosophize disgrace, and criticize all fears,

  Take the rag away from your face, now ain’t the time for your tears.

  These lines aren’t easily explicated, and however you look at them, the words retain their mystery. But the thrust, I think, is clear. To “philosophize” here seems to imply to “rationalize,” to dissolve “disgrace” (a much stronger word than injustice, carrying overtones of both private and public shame) into mere words. The refrain is addressed to those who counsel patience, the supercilious liberals who offer their sympathy, their “tears,” but little else. They’re the same people Nina Simone talked about in “Mississippi Goddam,” the ones who say “go slow.” They are able to react, at a safe distance, to the appalling events Dylan shares with them. But he warns them to wait, to withhold their knee-jerk response, and thus creates the dramatic and political platform for the devastating final verse.

  The last act of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” is played out in the courtroom. Dylan had already written pityingly of the human costs of an inhumane judicial system in “Donald White,” “Seven Curses,” and “Percy’s Song.” In “Hattie Carroll” he hammers away at the august claims of the judiciary, the spectacle designed “to show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level,” that “the ladder of law has no top and no bottom.” And with a flourish of plain statement, reveals them all to be hollow, when the judge:. . . handed out for penalty and repentance

  William Zanzinger with a six month sentence

  Dylan then swoops, one last time, into the refrain, reversing the second line: “Bury the rag most deep in your face, for now is the time for your tears.” The song pivots on this ending: driving home the complicity of the law, the power of wealth and its hold on the state, the institutional basis of the injustices suffered by individuals. At the same time, it challenges listeners to examine their own part in a system capable of such routine cruelty and hypocrisy.

  As Ochs recognized, “Hattie Carrol” had wrought the protest idiom to a new level of formal achievement—one that strengthened its political impact. The melody is a simple fragment set to three-quarter time, recycled over metronomic strumming. Using this regularity as a springboard, Dylan cleverly varies the verse structure, elongating the narrative unit and heightening the suspense. The first verse has six lines of exposition before reaching the refrain. The second has seven. The third has eleven. The climactic fourth also has eleven—and is bolstered by the introduction, for the first time in the song, of end rhyme: half-rhymes in level/gavel, caught’em/bottom, before the ringing full rhyme on the punch line: repentence/sentence. Meanwhile, Dylan’s guitar stutters, pauses and hastens, accenting key moments in the narrative.

  Like “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “Masters of War,” and “With God on Our Side,” “Hattie Carroll” points to the systemic nature of the problems that agitated growing numbers of young people. It does so without for a moment taking its eyes off specific individuals in a specific setting. The subsequent fate of Billy Zantzingerr would seem to bear out Dylan’s analysis of why and how Hattie Carroll died. In 1991, Zantzinger was convicted by a Maryland court of collecting more than $60,000 rent on rural shanties that lacked indoor plumbing or sanitary outhouses, and which in many cases he no longer even owned. The victims were almost all poor black people. Zantzinger faced a possible jail term of twenty-five to fifty years for the offenses. In the end, he was sentenced to eighteen months—on a work-release program—and fined $50,000.82

  The world’s great age begins anew,

  The golden years return

  The earth doth like a snake renew

  Her winter weeds outworn

  Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,

  Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

  —Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hellas

  The Carnegie Hall audience that applauded “Hattie Carroll” was also treated to the premiere of “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Already, in “When The Ship Comes In,” unveiled at the March on Washington, Dylan had dared to envision an all-encompassing change, a historic vindication of the oppressed and their movement. In the new song, he presented that change, that vindication, as imminent and inevitable. Most importantly, he asserted that the instrument of change was to be a generation—Dylan’s generation: “Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.” He seems to have been clear about what he was doing:This was definitely a song with a purpose. I knew exactly what I wanted to say and for whom I wanted to say it to. You know, it was influenced by the Irish and Scottish ballads. . . . Come all ye bold highway men, come all ye miners, come all ye tender-hearted maidens. I wanted to write a big song, some kind of theme song, ya know, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way. . . .83

  Later, when the song became a millstone around his neck, Dylan disparaged it as something he wrote because it was what people wanted to hear. It’s true that such a neat fit between artist and audience should always rouse suspicions. It’s also true that the song’s triumphalism was not reflective of Dylan’s fickle mood of this period, and it cannot be found in the other songs he wrote at the time (the delicately pained “One Too Many Mornings” and the lushly pantheistic “Lay Down Your Weary Tune”). Because means and ends seem so precisely joined in “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (and because the song is so familiar), it’s easy to miss what an extraordinary composition it is, for all its irritating qualities.

  Like “When The Ship Comes In,” it uses the Biblical language of prophecy and redemption to invoke a great secular victory (the last ver
se derives from the Gospel of Mark, 10:31: “But many that are first shall be last; and the last first”—Jesus’ pledge to the poor). However, it lacks the humorous glee and the element of self-conscious fantasy that enliven the earlier song. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” seems animated by the conviction that right will prevail over might, that the tide of social justice is ineluctable. Who needs God when you’ve got history on your side? However, this is no Marxist determinism. The song’s lyricism derives less from its assertion of collective invincibility than from the tender confidence of its enormous—but elementary—ambitions.

  In a sense there’s less of Dylan here than in his other protest songs. It’s rare indeed to find him subordinating himself so entirely to the larger movement. Nonetheless, the artist is there in the song’s confrontational energy and sweeping vision of a final judgment. As in “When The Ship Comes In,” social change is depicted as a violent storm: “You better start swimmin’ / Or you’ll sink like a stone” . . . “it’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls.” Dylan embraces the irresistible whirlwind, and relishes the day when it will expose all that is hollow and false. In Biblical style, he issues a prophetic warning against complacency; he reminds the powerful that ultimately they are impotent.

  The song sets a lyric of paratactic rigor and simplicity to a tune that is buoyant but also vulnerable. For all its brash self-confidence, it is careful to say “please” to its elders—even as it warns them not to obstruct the movement for change. Here, senators and congressmen are treated with a reverence that was soon to be replaced in Dylan’s work by savage contempt. The media are less fortunate:Come writers and critics

  Who prophesize with your pen

  And keep your eyes wide

  The chance won’t come again

  And don’t speak too soon

  For the wheel’s still in spin

  It was the unexpected achievements of the civil rights movement that made this statement and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” possible and even plausible. The song blends arrogance with innocence, an individualist ethical appeal (“lend a hand”) with a faith in collective action, ambitious radicalism with liberal naïveté. In doing so it expresses the consciousness of its moment precisely.

  Dylan was never an activist. He absorbed his politics, like much else, by osmosis. His contribution to the movement was limited to a small number of personal appearances, a few donations—and the songs. These, however, were an inestimable gift.

  CHAPTER 2

  Not Much is Really Sacred

  We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman’s billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail!

  —Henry David Thoreau

  On December 13, 1963, three weeks after the Kennedy assassination, Dylan arrived at the Hotel Americana in New York City to attend the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee’s annual Bill of Rights dinner. The ECLC had been formed in 1951 to defend the Smith Act victims—the Communist Party leadership—when the established civil liberties groups, spooked by the Cold War purge, shied away. Each year it presented its Tom Paine Award to a champion of the cause. In 1962, Bertrand Russell had been the recipient. In 1963, the prize went to Bob Dylan.

  During the course of the evening Dylan drank heavily. When he got to the rostrum, he improvised a speech that managed to offend just about everyone in the house.1 “It’s took me a long time to get young and now I consider myself young and I’m proud of it,” he told the 1,400 paying guests, among them veterans of countless campaigns for free speech and social justice. “It’s not an old people’s world.” He wanted “to see faces with hair on their head . . . I look down to see the people that are governing me and making my rules—and they haven’t got any hair on their head—I get very uptight about it.”

  So far, his audience indulged him, greeting the young man’s impudence with self-conscious laughter. When he mentioned Woody Guthrie, they applauded, but Dylan reminded them: “It has sure changed in the time Woody’s been here and the time I’ve been here. It’s not that easy any more. People seem to have more fears.” He went on to question, indirectly but unmistakably, whether the traditions, experience and guiding assumptions of the Left had any value at all.

  I’ve never seen one history book that tells me how anybody feels. . . . And it don’t help me one little bit to look back . . . there’s no black and white, left and right to me anymore . . . I was at the March on Washington up on the platform and I looked around at all the negroes there and I didn’t see any negroes that looked like none of my friends. My friends don’t wear suits. My friends don’t have to wear any kind of thing to prove they’re respectable negroes.

  In the course of the speech, Dylan declared himself in favor of free travel to Cuba, a sentiment that may have pleased most of those present but would have terrified his record executives. He also announced that he was accepting the award on behalf of SNCC and James Forman, whose perilous face-to-face confrontation with racism, he later explained, made him impatient with the comfortable detachment of middle-class do-gooders. For Dylan, the incandescent purity of SNCC’s struggle in the South had exposed the emptiness not only of traditional politics, but of the entire discourse of American democracy. But in his efforts to divide the authentic from the inauthentic and to place himself on the right side of that line, he stumbled into the peroration that really got him into trouble that night: I’ll stand up and to get uncompromisable about it, which I have to be to be honest, I just got to be, as I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where, what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit that I too—I saw something of myself in him.

  The young singer was vigorously booed by his elders. At that moment, to speak ill of the dead president—worse yet, to identify with his killer—was to breach the most daunting taboo in America, a taboo that neither the old Left nor the liberals were prepared to violate. (Interestingly, it was the same taboo that Malcolm X had breached two weeks earlier, in the “chickens coming home to roost” crack that precipitated his final split with Elijah Muhammad.2) Dylan’s impromptu identification with Oswald was a blunt instrument enabling him to register a sense of alienation that had gone way beyond disquiet over racism and nuclear arms. It was also in keeping with Dylan’s fondness for the outlaw conceit that crops up throughout the history of popular culture and on which he was to perform increasingly complex variations in the songs he composed during the rest of the decade.

  Dylan’s rant wrecked the ECLC’s fund-raising pitch, and left his hosts and most of the guests fuming. Within days, Corliss Lamont, the doughty civil libertarian and chairman of the ECLC, had dispatched a letter to the organization’s members defending the choice of Dylan as award recipient:. . . it is urgent to recognize the protest of youth today and to help make it understood by the older generation. Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie, the cultural antecedents of Bob Dylan, were not appreciated by their society until they were very old. We think that it would be better to make the effort now to comprehend what Bob Dylan is saying to and for the youth.

  Under the circumstances, it was remarkably generous. Lamont enclosed the text of a lengthy verse message Dylan had sent to the ECLC, in which he reiterated his respect for the organization and tried to explain what he had meant and what he had felt at the Bill of Rights dinner:it is a fierce heavy feeling

  thinkin something is expected of you

  but you dont know what exactly it is . . .

  it brings forth a wierd form of guilt

  He makes a point of paying his respects to the old Left, but in terms that indicate the distance that separates him (and his generation) from them:I’m speakin now of the people I’ve met

  who were strugglin for their lives an other peoples’

  lives in the thirties an forties an the fifties

  an I look t their times

  I reach out t their times

  an, in a sense, am jealous of their times<
br />
  The tone of address is humble throughout, but in the end Dylan declares, “I do not apologize for being me nor any part of me.” He offered to make up any losses the ECLC had incurred because of his behavior, but never made good on the promise.

  Soon after the ECLC debacle, Dylan dropped in on a meeting of the SDS national council in New York City.3 He was joined by another unexpected celebrity guest, Alger Hiss, a ghost from the old Left—cheered by the seventy activists present as a martyr of the anticommunist crusade they were rapidly outgrowing. For them, Hiss was an outcast figure, like Dylan, and their welcoming him had little to do with their feelings about the New Deal, the popular front, or the Soviet Union. This small gathering of young, white, politically engaged, mainly middle-class students felt that they were at the cutting edge of a new mood among young people, a mood reflected in Dylan’s music. His appearance in their midst seemed to confirm their status as its vanguard. If Dylan showed, they knew they must be on to something.

  The singer listened in silence to a debate about the organization’s plans for community organizing. The students wanted to move beyond proclamations; they wanted to leave the shelter of academia behind. They would go into the ghettos, live among the poor and share their poverty. “Community organizing” would be the tool with which they would build “an inter-racial movement of the poor.” The radicals were searching for an organic link to a downtrodden America that would give flesh to the hazy but potent vision epitomized by the Port Huron Statement. Their political restlessness was, in part, an expression of the search for authenticity that had also coursed through the folk revival, and found an icon in the consciously constructed persona of Bob Dylan. “Students and poor people,” wrote Tom Hayden, one of the architects of the new SDS strategy, “make each other feel real.”4