Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  The artistic ambition and desire for personal autonomy that fueled Dylan’s rejection of politics fueled Mayfield’s embrace of them. The historical moment that severed Dylan from the movement brought Mayfield closer to it. As Dylan renounced the duties of political protest, Mayfield shouldered them. He did so with humility and determination, and while remaining within a commercial framework and a popular musical idiom. “Our purpose is to educate as well as entertain,” he said cheerfully in 1965. “Painless preaching is as good a term as any for what we do.”21

  Dylan began writing “Mr. Tambourine Man” in New Orleans in February 1964 and premiered it in London in May, but decided to leave it off Another Side, recorded in August. The song was his most ambitious and original to date, and it’s revealing that Dylan—who usually preferred to dash off a tune and record it without further ado—nursed and refined the song for more than eight months before deciding to release one of the many versions recorded in January 1965 at the Bringing It All Back Home studio sessions.

  Dylan has explained that the title is a reference to Bruce Langhorne, the black guitarist who provided studio backing for many a folksinger. Langhorne liked to sport an outlandishly large Turkish tambourine, and this image was the starting point (but little more) for Dylan’s sensuously fantastic journey on the “magic swirlin’ ship.”22 Fittingly, Langhorne himself provides the chiming guitar accompaniment on the album version of the song—his calm embellishment of Dylan’s flowing lyrics helping to emphasize the touching evanescence of the vision conjured up by the song.

  In “Mr. Tambourine Man” Dylan stretched himself as he had never done before, entered new artistic territory and created a landscape distinctively his own. Yet the song is also atypical of the master in its unbroken gentle yearning, its lack of bitterness, its unashamed, unironic pursuit of transcendence. The song evokes the dawn (“the jingle-jangle morning”) that comes at the end of the long day’s journey into night, when “evenin’s empire has returned into sand”—and the feeling of joy in a momentary suspension of the quotidian. It captures the delicious sway of surrendering one’s individual will and one’s awareness of grubby realities:I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade

  Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way,

  I promise to go under it.

  This surrender leads the singer to an anonymous but somehow limitless landscape where “but for the sky there are no fences facin’”—a place where he is alone, at peace, and free to explore an infinite inner labyrinth:Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind,

  Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,

  The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,

  Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.

  Dylan invites us to join him in a realm purged of “all memory and fate,” where both past and future have been pushed aside in favor of a lingering immersion in a fleeting present: “let me forget about today until tomorrow.” “Mr. Tambourine Man” is the cry of an urban man seeking joy and revelation in splendid isolation from the crowd. But the picture postcard self-portrait with which it concludes is naïve, even narcissistic, as he gazes on the figure he cuts from afar:Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one

  hand waving free,

  Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands

  Here Dylan is imagining himself, as so many young people have, as the last man, the only man, and nature’s child. A paean to escapism, “Mr. Tambourine Man” ushered in a period in which escape and its problematic nature became a thematic preoccupation. The collision of resistance from below with a long consumer boom unleashed longings for the infinite among classes of people who previously would not have been able or willing to pursue them. It was an appetite that could never be fully satisfied, either politically or personally.

  Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal . . . it proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more . . . Publicity, situated in a future continually deferred, excludes the present and so eliminates all becoming, all development. Experience is impossible within it.

  —John Berger23

  At his Halloween concert in New York on October 31, 1964, Dylan premiered “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”—longer, more obscure, more complex than any of his previous works. The novelty of its imagery, delivery, and form blinded many at the time to the plain fact that “It’s Alright Ma” was as much a protest song as anything else Dylan had written: a sweeping vision of a corrupt and dehumanized society and the fate of the sensitive, autonomous individual within it.

  “That’s All Right Mama,” written by Mississippi bluesman Arthur Big Boy Crudup, had been Elvis Presley’s first hit record in 1955. (Dylan recorded his own version in 1962, but never released it.) Its final verse has a Dylan-like petulance: I’m leaving town, baby

  I’m leaving town for sure

  Well, then you won’t be bothered with

  Me hanging ’round your door

  Well, that’s all right, that’s all right,

  That’s all right now mama, anyway you do.

  In Dylan’s song, the refrain carries much of the same sense of fragile defiance, but the experience out of which it arises, and the language in which it’s described, occupies territory unhinted at in Presley’s teenage erotica. The song opens with “darkness at the break of noon” (Milton by way of Koestler), a total eclipse, and an instant conclusion (“there is no sense in trying”). The guitar picking is restrained but determined, its dark impetus driving the song forward, as relentless as the flow of imagery and the hammering rhymes.

  The second verse barrels through threats, bluffs, scorn, “suicide remarks,” “the fool’s gold mouthpieces,” and “the hollow horn” that plays “wasted words” toward the aphorism that sums up so much of Dylan’s sixties art: he not busy being born is busy dying. Here, as throughout the song, Dylan is reworking and deepening the life/death polarity he first deployed in “Let Me Die in My Footsteps.”

  “It’s Alright Ma” is a sweeping condemnation of a society in which the holiness of life is denied, a shameful society where “Goodness hides behind its gates.” A society of hypocrisy about sex and love and labor and power, a society governed by “human gods” who “Make everything from toy guns that spark / To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark” and for whom the beautiful, the creative is “Nothing more than something / They invest in.” At the heart of this society is what Marx (certainly not Dylan) called the commodity fetish—and its ideological handmaiden in mass society, the advertising industry.

  Advertising signs that con

  You into thinking you’re the one

  That can do what’s never been done

  That can win what’s never been won

  In a society dominated by commodities, all public discourse has grown corrupt. The power of money has rendered all social communication inauthentic:. . . money doesn’t talk, it swears

  Obscenity, who really cares

  Propaganda, all is phony

  As for the movement that claims to challenge this society, it merely enacts its rituals and feeds its power. Protest is “just one more person crying.” Those who “say don’t hate nothing at all / Except hatred” are part of the game, as are the sad characters “on principles baptized / To strict party platform ties / Social clubs in drag disguise.” The outspoken dissenter expresses nothing but his own powerlessness (“Outsiders they can freely criticize / Tell nothing except who to idolize”).

  While one who sings with his tongue on fire

  Gargles in the rat race choir

  Bent out of shape from society’s pliers

  Cares not to come up any higher

  But rather get you down in the hole

  That he’s in.

  Is that an oblique self-portrait? A PR hustler, a TV demagogue, a movement fire
brand? The point is that those who comment on society are themselves the product of that society. Inauthenticity and life denial permeate our every gesture. There is no escape from the corruption and emptiness of the public sphere—except in the autonomous individual consciousness.

  “It’s Alright Ma” is filled with a Gramscian conviction that the most insidious means of domination are those that secure the “spontaneous consent” of the dominated. It’s a song about “the mind-forged manacles” that Blake heard clanging as he walked the streets of London in 1792. But Dylan is without either Gramsci’s or Blake’s abiding belief in collective human agency and capacity. His critique of the repressive, omni-invasive character of mass culture is here as harrowing and all-inclusive—and nearly as pessimistic—as Adorno’s. Nonetheless, the monstrous totality of social domination is by no means the whole of this song. Dylan defiantly asserts his autonomy and survival as an individual. It isn’t an easy struggle.

  You lose yourself, you reappear

  You suddenly find you got nothing to fear

  Alone you stand with nobody near . . .

  The liberating lesson is that “it is not he or she or them or it / That you belong to.” The only way to escape from social control is to disinvest in society and in society’s judgment.

  But I mean no harm nor put fault

  On anyone that lives in a vault

  But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him.

  Human freedom remains a reality in this song, though it is menaced on all sides. In the final verse, the confrontation between self and society is entirely antagonistic—and unresolved.

  My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards

  False gods, I scuff

  At pettiness which plays so rough

  Walk upside-down inside handcuffs

  Kick my legs to crash it off

  Say okay, I have had enough

  What else can you show me?

  Dylan is defiant to the end. The song concludes with a proud but despairing declaration of his own subversiveness:And if my thought-dreams could be seen

  They’d probably put my head in a guillotine

  But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only.

  Consciousness is the battleground on which Dylan now plants his standard. His music of the next two years would be a sustained assault in that battle. Politics had been injected into the theater of consciousness and consciousness had become the theater of liberation. It seemed the most daunting challenge the radicals had yet posed themselves. But part of its appeal was that it was, in fact, easier ground to fight on. In Dylan’s case, the perception of the scale and depth of society’s dishonesty issued in (or justified) a repudiation of all forms of political engagement. Nonetheless, the rage of “It’s Alright Ma” against a commodified universe—and determination, somehow, to preserve a human autonomy within it—seems as apposite today as ever.

  By early 1965, SNCC had been organizing for two years in the town of Selma in central Alabama. White resistance to attempts at black voter registration had taken ever more violent form, culminating in the police killing a local youth during a demonstration in February. On March 7, one thousand nonviolent demonstrators gathered to march the fifty-four miles to the state capital, Montgomery, to demand an end to the assault on their rights. As they crossed the Pettus Bridge spanning the Alabama River, they were attacked by local police and state troopers; John Lewis was beaten unconscious and hospitalized, along with eighty others. Television cameras broadcast the images of white law enforcement officials clubbing, kicking, and tear-gassing nonresisting blacks.

  In the greatest outpouring of national support the southern civil rights movement was ever to enjoy, protests and pickets spread across the country. Calls for voting rights legislation echoed in Congress and editorial columns.24 King and other leaders entered the fray. On March 10, a crowd of three thousand, led by King, gathered to make another attempt to cross the Pettus Bridge; once again the marchers were met by troopers and police. They were not aware that in a last-minute deal with the federal government, King had agreed to lead an orderly retreat. Confrontation was avoided, but as they followed their leaders back to base, SNCC activists sang the movement favorite, “Ain’t Gonna Let No One Turn Me Round,” with bitter irony.

  The events in Selma forced Lyndon Johnson’s hand. He appeared on television on March 15 to announce a new voting rights bill—and concluded his speech with the words, “we shall overcome.” King and Lewis, watching the speech in a Selma hotel, were moved. Jim Forman was not. He dismissed the phrase as a “tinkling empty symbol” and later said, “Johnson spoiled a good song that day.”25 In his Biograph interview of 1985, Dylan seems to recall this controversy. Talking about the cooptation of rock ’n’ roll, he says:It’s like Lyndon Johnson saying we shall overcome to a nationwide audience, ridiculous . . . there’s an old saying, “if you want to defeat your enemy, sing his song” and that’s pretty much still true.26u

  After the president’s announcement, a federal court granted a permit for a Selma-to-Montgomery march and federal marshals were assigned to protect it. Supporters, black and white, poured in from around the country. Len Chandler was among them, and his chant was adopted by the marchers: “Pick ’em up and lay ’em down, all the way to Selma town.” Just outside their destination, they were treated to an outdoor concert featuring, among others, Nina Simone, Odetta, Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Tony Bennett, and Leonard Bernstein. (In Philadelphia, the Impressions joined artists from Motown in a Freedom Show to raise money for the march—the first major coming out of the soul stars for the movement.) Fifty thousand joined the next day’s triumphal march into Montgomery. Wallace kept out of sight. Hours later, Viola Liuzzo, a white supporter from the North, was shot dead while driving back to Selma.

  The Selma actions were the last united initiative of the civil rights movement. The backstage tensions of the March on Washington were now visible to all. Among the young activists, there was an increasing impatience with nonviolence and the integrationist mantras of the early sixties. There was widespread distrust of the older leaders, including King, and criticism of their media status. Where King seemed to want to rouse the conscience of the country, SNCC wanted to rouse and organize poor blacks. One by one, it seemed, their allies had let them down.

  To many in SNCC, the forward march of the civil rights movement had been halted, not only on the streets of southern towns, but at a deeper level. Formal, legal equality, it emerged, was not the same as real freedom. One week after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law, a violent uprising swept through the Watts district of Los Angeles. After six days, it was suppressed by the national guard; thirty-four people were killed and thousands were arrested. There were other outbreaks in Cleveland, Chicago, and New York City.

  The battles of the first half of the decade had expanded the aspirations and deepened the frustrations of young black people. There was a greater confidence in the resources of the black community and a greater cynicism toward the intentions of the white. As SNCC and CORE turned toward black nationalism, and the words of Malcolm X (assassinated earlier in the year) reverberated through black America, white supporters of the movement were forced to reexamine themselves and their role. If the black activists were going to lead and mobilize the black community independently of whites, what did that leave the whites to do? Some black activists suggested they should look to organizing their own community, as the black activists were doing. But what was their community? Where were its boundaries? What language did it speak?

  In March 1965, Allen Ginsberg was in Prague—having been deported from Cuba—watching a rock’n’ roll band. The music and the musicians filled him with political hope and erotic longings: “Because the body moves again, the / body dances again, the body / sings again.”27 After visits to the Soviet Union and Poland, he returned to Prague in the first week of May. The government had permitted the revival of a “folk custom”—actually a nineteenth-century invention
—in which the students of Prague elect a king of May. In itself, this was somewhat controversial: May Day was the international workers’ day, not a feudal hangover. In keeping with the folkloric and festive occasion, the students dressed in turn-of-the-century attire, bowler hats and all. But as far as the authorities were concerned, the quaint ritual turned into a dangerously subversive saturnalia when an independent-minded crowd of 100,000 jubilantly elected Ginsberg to the ancient honor. The visiting poet paraded—drunkenly, joyously—through the streets, declaiming his gospel of liberation. The episode was one of the first public sightings of the spirit that infused the Prague Spring of 1968, and it’s significant that both rock ’n’ roll and American Beat poetry fed into that brief flowering.

  On May 7, Ginsberg was deported to Britain. On the plane to London he wrote “Kral Majales,” in which he unashamedly blends political critique with self-celebration. “Communist and Capitalist assholes tangle and the just man is arrested or robbed or had his head cut off. . . . I am the King of May, which is the power of sexual youth. . . . And tho’ I am the King of May, the Marxists have beat me upon the street . . . and deported me from our Kingdom by airplane.” In a self-mocking but prophetic touch, he added: “and I am the King of May, tho’ paranoid, for the Kingdom of May is too beautiful to last for more than a month.”28

  In London, Ginsberg joined Dylan’s entourage. The singer was in England for his third visit, the one chronicled in D.A. Pennebaker’s mesmerizing documentary, Don’t Look Back. Ginsberg can be seen in the background during the innovative opening sequence, in which Dylan, standing in an alley adjacent to the Savoy Hotel, holds up a series of placards inscribed with catchphrases from “Subterranean Homesick Blues” while the song plays on the soundtrack. Dylan was still performing solo, with acoustic guitar, and still singing many of his protest classics. He had already recorded and released the rock ’n’ roll tracks on Bringing It All Back Home, though these were as yet little known in Britain. Once again, he was in transition. Pennebaker’s film shows Dylan slyly interrogating fans, friends, hangers-on, would-be interviewers, and his own growing celebrity. One of its running jokes is Dylan’s nonresponse to questions about the rise of Donovan, the singer-songwriter who was being hailed as a homegrown English Dylan. The two finally meet at a party in Dylan’s hotel suite, where Donovan gives an impromptu performance of his winsome “To Sing for You,” whose debt to Dylan’s early work is painfully obvious. Dylan replies by playing a charging, confident, steely “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” a song he’d written earlier in the year.