Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  The antipolitics of “My Back Pages” and “To Ramona” is only one expression of the changing artistic personality revealed on Another Side. In “All I Really Want to Do,” Dylan assures the object of his erotic pursuit that he does not want to “analyze, categorize” her. In “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” he rejects a lover because she insists on casting him in a prefabricated mold; she is unwilling to accept his weaknesses (and philandering). “Everything inside is made of stone,” he declares, a tremendous line whose power lies in its self-evident untruthfulness. What “It Ain’t Me, Babe” poignantly champions is human fallibility, or, rather, Dylan’s fallibility. As in the antipolitical songs, his immediate personal needs dovetail with a repudiation of attempts to pigeonhole human desires or reduce individual identities. On this album, it’s not only dogmatism but often intellect itself that seems the enemy. “Spanish Harlem Incident” sounds like a good title for a protest song, but in fact it’s a hymn to ephemeral sensuality—charged, perhaps naively, with racial implications. As in many white fantasies, the black woman is “too hot for taming.” Dylan is self-conscious about his whiteness:The night is pitch black, come an’ make my Pale face fit into place, ah, please!

  The fantasy figure embodies a groping for a reality beyond the stifling categories of social norms: the singer needs to touch the woman “So I can tell if I’m really real.” Dylan’s search for the authentic always carried complex racial implications, as it did (and does) for many white people. In 1964, he told Robert Shelton:It’s not that I’m pessimistic about Negroes’ rights, but the word Negro sounds foolish coming from my mouth. What’s a Negro? I don’t know what a Negro is. What’s a Negro—a black person? How black? What’s a Negro? A person living in a two room shack with 12 kids? A lot of white people live in a two room shack with 12 kids. Does this make them Negro? What’s a Negro—someone with African blood? A lot of white people have African blood. What’s a Negro? An Ethiopian kind of thing? That’s not Negro—that’s ancient religious pajama-riding freaks. I’ve got nothing against Negro rights. I never did. Anybody who is taught to get his kicks off a superiority feeling—man, that’s a drag.17

  Shelton did Dylan a favor by keeping these comments to himself—they would have alienated a lot more people than his ECLC rant. They display Dylan’s uneasiness with categories in general, and might be seen as an early attempt at deconstructing racial identity. But they are also an example of the masked racial unease that snaked through sections of the counterculture, as hip white youth took to using words like spade and even nigger in an attempt to bolster their street cred. This posture was, in part, a reaction against the cloying sentimentality of early civil rights rhetoric, but it was also a fearful attitudinal maneuver, a defensive ploy by members of a generation forced to confront the grievances of a people with whom most had little direct contact, and whose challenge inspired, provoked, and threatened them.

  Of course, many on the Left saw Dylan’s turn from politics as little more than opportunism. They were reeling from an abrupt and painful repudiation. After all, Dylan hadn’t put that much time or energy into trying to change things before he decided it wasn’t worth the effort. And this recantation hadn’t been forced upon him by any inquisition. So was it “just for a handful of silver he left us? / Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat?,” as Browning asked of Wordsworth. Was it, as suspected by some on the Left, Albert Grossman’s appetite for the big time? Or Dylan’s narcissistic vanity?

  Clearly, the ambitious artist that was stirring inside Dylan feared being stereotyped as a protest singer and servant of good causes. And he would have been aware—if only through Woody Guthrie’s experiences—of the Left’s bad habit of grabbing on to creative artists and trying to program their output. In that light, Dylan’s repudiation of the movement appears as an act of wilful self-liberation, a necessary step in his artistic evolution. But if that’s all it had been, if it represented nothing more than a private maneuver, it wouldn’t have produced so much in the way of lasting music; it wouldn’t have touched and continued to touch others.

  The moralism of the American Left in these years—embodied in both the civil rights and peace movements—was indeed wearing. The stern challenge to bear witness against injustice, whose echoes fill “Blowin’ in the Wind,” seemed to leave little room for private indulgence. Dylan’s response should be seen as part of a political battle to clear space for the personal, a battle fought as much within as against the Left.t Like other young people, Dylan had been alerted by a dramatically shifting social environment to the greater richness of his own inner life, and, like others, he wanted the freedom to explore that mysterious and enticing landscape.

  Dylan’s political disillusionment resonates with historical parallels. His spiritual kin can be found among artists and intellectuals from other generations scorched by the flames of social revolt, from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Koestler and The God That Failed. You can hear something of “My Back Pages” in Yeats’s “Meditation in Time of Civil War:”We had fed the heart on fantasies

  The heart’s grown brutal from the fare

  More substance in our enmities than in our loves

  In Dylan’s case, the trajectory that yields this perspective is extraordinarily telescoped. He makes a huge amount out of what was, by historic standards, a brief, largely secondhand experience. The point, however, is not the depth or detail of his personal political commitment, but its grip on his imagination; the emotional violence of Dylan’s reaction against the movement was a measure of the importance it once held for him.

  Dylan’s turn away from politics was to become a recurring motif of the era, as wave after wave of young people engaged in and were scorched by political activity. Strange as it may sound when speaking of such a politically polarized era, this shift from the public to the personal was to prove a defining moment in the American sixties. In reaction to the sheer velocity of events, the agonizing ebb and flow of struggle, an antiauthoritarian antipolitics emerged. It’s remarkable that the sense of futility should be so widely felt and expressed in what is viewed, in retrospect, as an era of inexorable progress. Of course, at the time there seemed nothing inexorable about it. In light of the obstacles thrown in their way, the forces of change seemed puny and inadequate. Dylan’s songs trace a familiar movement from messianic expectation to cynical defeatism. However, as in many of his love songs, the sense of futility seems to set in even as the note of conquest is sounded.

  In retrospect, Dylan’s premature political disillusionment reflected not only the stresses of revolt and reaction, but also the relentless packaging of experience and identity in a consumer society. For Dylan and many others, one level of consciousness seemed to be quickly superseded by another; if you stayed at one level too long you risked being as obsolete—and as inauthentic—as last year’s fashions. Thus, Dylan helped make activism cool, and he helped make it uncool.

  The songs of Dylan’s apostasy belong especially to those who have remained politically engaged. They’ll resonate with any activist who’s ever been fed up to the back teeth with “the corpse evangelists,” or feared that he or she was becoming one of them; with anyone exhausted by the posturing, dogmatism, and millennial self-confidence to which the Left is prone; with anyone who has felt used and abused in the struggle; anyone who has wondered about his or her own motives and the motives of his or her comrades; anyone reeling from the disappointment of a strike or a campaign or a grand strategy (the failure of the revolution to arrive or the realization that the would-be leaders of the revolution are no better than the rest); anyone who has ever yearned for some release from the demanding effort to match action to belief. In many years of political activism, I’ve more than once binged on the Dylan of this period, and relished his emotive attack on a movement that so rarely lives up to its claims.

  Political engagement requires a degree of certainty—about public realities and the impact of public actions—and there are times when sustaining that degree of certainty is diff
icult in the extreme. Yet, as Dylan himself had pointed out in his earlier songs, our rulers thrive on our uncertainties (“the words that are used for to get the ship confused . . .”); we have to work constantly to reestablish our own right to speak and act. (That’s why many are drawn to political sects; people need reenforcement to go against the grain.) And while it’s an error to make a religion of struggle and sacrifice, it’s an illusion to think the world can be improved without them. Sadly, Dylan’s apostasy did prove a forerunner of much that was to come—a flood tide of post-sixties political recantations and personal reinventions.

  Within a year of writing “Chimes of Freedom,” Dylan no longer wanted any part of the storms of social change. In the dryly mournful “Farewell Angelina” (recorded during the Bringing It All Back Home sessions of January 1965 but left off the album), he openly declares his desire to escape from a society in crisis:The machine guns are roaring

  The puppets heave rocks

  The fiends nail time bombs

  To the hands of the clocks

  Call me any name you like

  I will never deny it

  Farewell Angelina

  The sky is erupting

  I must go where it’s quiet.

  The political drama being played out around Dylan is the necessary and compelling context for the endless dreams of escape that fill the songs that followed his protest period. Throughout the sixties, Dylan is writing both within the historical tide and against it.

  Throughout Mississippi Summer, the activists found solace in music. “Beyond the freedom songs,” John Lewis recalled, “we had the music on the radio to see us through the summer. All those hours driving all those miles in all those cars went a little bit easier with the rhythms coming out of those dashboard radios. Popular music always had its place right beside the protest songs. . . .” The activists were stirred by Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street,” Mary Wells’s “My Guy,” but perhaps most of all by the Impressions’ “Keep on Pushing.”18

  By 1964, the Impressions had enjoyed a string of hits in both R&B and pop charts, and had established themselves as the leading exponents of Chicago soul, a polished blend of gospel harmonies, brass, strings, and rhythm guitar, both wistful and danceable. Their creative pulse was supplied by singer-guitarist-composer-arranger Curtis Mayfield, who was a year younger than Dylan. Raised by a single mother in Chicago’s Cabrini Green projects, Mayfield knew poverty and the ghetto firsthand. Through the church, he imbibed the living gospel tradition, and from his mother an early acquaintance with poetry, notably the verse that Paul Laurence Dunbar—the son of a fugitive slave—had published in the early twentieth century.19

  From the age of fifteen, Mayfield worked as a full-time musician. With the Impressions in the early sixties, he forged a sound that was as smooth and gentle as Dylan’s was harsh and challenging. In contrast to the dominant male R&B tradition, Mayfield’s love songs—like Sam Cooke’s and Smokey Robinson’s—were tinged with vulnerability and self-doubt. (“Gypsy Woman,” the Impressions’ hit of 1961, may have been in Dylan’s mind when he wrote “Spanish Harlem Incident.”) Mayfield was a musical craftsman of both delicacy and power. He brought the succinct wit of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley to the swirling emotions of the black church.

  In the first half of the sixties, most R&B and soul performers steered clear of direct involvement or public association with the civil rights movement. That task was left to the folkies, the jazz vanguard, and the Hollywood celebrities. For the emerging black soul stars, authenticity came cheap; their struggle was for survival; they were avowedly and unashamedly commercial artists. For many, a hit record was the difference between penury and a modest degree of comfort. There were already so many barriers between themselves and the wider marketplace that the notion of erecting even more exercised little appeal. Politics was considered the kiss of death—far more risky for blacks than for whites. But the unfolding drama of the civil rights movement transformed both the soul stars and the environment in which they worked. Mayfield had listened to the freedom songs and he knew that Dylan and the folkies had achieved commercial success with politically tinged material. He may also have remembered one of Dunbar’s Lyrics of Lowly Life:Keep a-pluggin’ away

  When you’ve rising storms to quell

  When opposing waters swell

  It will never fail to tell

  Keep a-pluggin’ away

  Mayfield asked himself: “Why does it always have to be a love song?” “Keep on Pushing,” recorded in Chicago in March 1964, became the first of the “message” songs he was to continue to write until his death in 1999. At first glance, its lyrics seem even barer of explicit topical reference than “Blowin’ in the Wind.” In summoning fortitude in the face of tribulation, it recalls countless African-American spirituals. But it makes no mention of God or heaven and in its context—the summer of 1964—its politics were plain.

  Now look a yonder

  What’s that I see

  A great big stone wall

  Stands there ahead of me

  But I’ve got my pride

  And I’ll move on aside

  And keep on pushin’

  The activists found themselves humming this song because it gave them something they could not do without. What sustained the movement was precisely the sensation that it was in movement—that this was a collective advancing toward a destination. Mayfield calls on his listeners not to be daunted by the challenges facing them, while also acknowledging how hard their task is, how much patience has already been spent. “Keep on Pushing” established Mayfield as one of the era’s great comforters and consolers, an artist of hope, a banisher of despair, but by no means an escapist. Amiri Baraka, who had recently decamped from the Village to Harlem, and turned from Beat bohemian to black nationalist, observed that, for black people, “Keep on Pushing” “provided a core of legitimate social feeling, though mainly metaphorical and allegorical.”20

  In October 1964, the Impressions returned to the studio to record Mayfield’s second social anthem, the sublime “People Get Ready.” Dylan admired the song, and recorded it in a Basement Tapes session in 1967 and again for a film soundtrack in 1989.

  People get ready, there’s a train a comin’

  You don’t need no baggage, you just get on board

  All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin’

  You don’t need no ticket, you just thank the lord

  The train carrying passengers to deliverance is a gospel music archetype. It appears, most famously, in “This Train (Is Bound for Glory)”—which gave Woody Guthrie the title of his book, and which had been recorded by numerous black gospel choirs, as well as Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Big Bill Broonzy. Dylan sang it in his early folk sets, and it was to be a popular item in the Wailers’ early repertoire. Though the lyrics vary, they all insist that on “this train” there’s room only for the righteous. “This train don’t carry no gamblers / No two-bit whores or midnight ramblers.”

  In Mayfield’s song, the train is still “the train to Jordan” but it is also the movement—like the ship in Dylan’s “When The Ship Comes In.” And its company is as all-embracing as Dylan’s in “Chimes of Freedom.” This train is “picking up passengers from coast-to-coast.” Though Mayfield jettisons the moralistic demands of the old gospel song, his vision of salvation is not quite all-inclusive. “There ain’t no room for the hopeless sinner / who would hurt all mankind just to save his own; / have pity on those whose chances grow thinner / there is no hiding place against the kingdom’s throne.”

  You can find train imagery in Dylan’s work of all periods, and the gospel train itself makes a dramatic reappearance in the Christian songs of 1979-80. In his mid-sixties songs, however, trains are symbols of loneliness and transience, disappearing into enigmatic distances. In “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” he moans: “The conductor he’s weary, / He’s still stuck on the line . . .” and of course, as the song title says, “It Takes a Train t
o Cry.” In 1999, Bruce Springsteen revisited “This Train” in “Land of Hope and Dreams,” and, in the spirit of both Guthrie and Mayfield, he welcomes on board just about all those who’d been kept off in the gospel original (sinners, drinkers, whores). But the train here is merely a means of escape; it’s not going anywhere. It’s the train of rock ’n’ roll, of the musical camaraderie that in Springsteen’s vision fills the void left by the decline of mass movements.

  “People Get Ready” was born in and speaks to a different experience. Like the gospel standards, the freedom songs, and the folk anthems, it engages in a collective address and promises a collective deliverance from a social agony. It was to be three years before power to the people became a common catchphrase; Mayfield’s language anticipates that development, but note how much more intimately he uses the populist rhetoric. He talks directly to “people,” not indirectly about “the people.” The delicate vocals tremble with the sacrifices of generations, balanced by a steady determination to remain generous of spirit. The guitar solos (which influenced Robbie Robertson) are poignantly muted. This isn’t a facile optimism, but a resilience that fully knows the travails of the past and those to come.

  Like Dylan’s, Mayfield’s work is a bridge between the early and late sixties, between innocence and sophistication. “Keep on Pushing” and “People Get Ready,” along with Sam Cooke’s posthumously released “A Change Is Gonna Come,” inaugurated a period during which increasingly hard-hitting social commentary emerged as a staple of black popular music. At this point, Mayfield was already something of a one-man industry. In addition to his work with the Impressions, he was writing and arranging for a variety of other Chicago soul artists. From 1965, he concentrated increasingly on developing his own sound and securing greater artistic and financial independence. That turn in his career is unimaginable without the stimulus of the civil rights movement.