Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  In these years Dylan plays with and varies the basic verse structures more than at any other period in his career. He complicates the prosody; there’s an amazing, accordion-like expansion and contraction of the lyric within the melody. In “Visions of Johanna,” the twenty-two-syllable line:Sayin’, “Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him”

  is sung over the same number of measures as the sixteen syllables ofWe sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny itx

  and “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face” occupies the same place and space in its verse as “Oh, it’s so hard to get on” does in its. Nonetheless, for all his daring, Dylan remains within the repeated verse structure, the bedrock of popular music. And without the verse structure, without the disciplines of popular music, Dylan usually flounders, as readers of Tarantulay will know. It’s significant that although Dylan embarked on a number of literary projects between 1963 and 1965, he abandoned them all after hitting his stride in “Like a Rolling Stone.” He’d found the medium he needed; there was no need for the poems, stories, and plays he was ill-equipped to write.

  From his early days in the Village, part of Dylan’s appeal was his skill as a storyteller. His approach to storytelling was always, however, somewhat off-beat; he liked shaggy dog stories, inconclusive anecdotes, and picaresque meanderings. In one sense, in the songs of the mid-sixties, he gives up on narrative altogether: the ballad form demands a coherence and tidiness that is incompatible with what he’s seeing and feeling. He can no longer tell the story straight because any story told straight is a false one. Reality assaults the singer as a series of disjointed epiphanies, discomfiting eruptions of the inexplicable and inhuman:Well, I woke up in the morning

  There’s frogs inside my socks

  Your mama, she’s a-hidin’

  Inside the icebox

  Your daddy walks in wearin’

  A Napoleon Bonaparte mask

  Then you ask why I don’t live here

  Honey, do you have to ask?

  Dylan appears here as both mesmerized spectator and unwitting partisan in an ongoing freak show. (These songs helped shape the prose Hunter S. Thompson unleashed on the world a few years later.) The mood and the method are carnivalesque: “The circus is in town.” Appearances are without substance; events are no longer linked by causal connections or rational hierarchies; they take the form of a procession of the gaudy, grotesque, and sentimental.

  As a child, Dylan fantasized about circuses and carnivals; when he first came to New York, he told friends he had worked as a fairground barker. He relished the hallucinatory masquerade of the Mardi Gras. He found the carnivalesque turned to serious artistic purposes in the films of Fellini, where it is both wistful and disturbing, an invocation of lost innocence and an alienated recoil from modernity. In Dylan, it is more frequently the latter, though both are there. What’s interesting is that Fellini and Dylan, modern, self-conscious artists, turned to folk culture for an aesthetic absent from the formal narrative techniques of their genres. (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Lorca, and Ensor had all been there before them.)

  As you listen to these albums, the images, characters, tropes sail past in a strange ether. They’re experienced as free-floating metaphors, signifiers uprooted from the signified. These songs often feel like allegories but they cannot be decoded as such. Who are “the neon madmen” and why are they climbing the bricks on Grand Street? As I.A. Richards observed, the truly poetic metaphor is never merely illustrative or decorative; it is “a borrowing between and intercourse of thoughts.” In mid-sixties Dylan, tenor and vehicle interact; it is usually impossible to extract one from the other, but the metaphorical resonance he achieves is undeniable.

  In ceremonies of the horsemen,

  Even the pawn must hold a grudge.

  Or:All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home

  All your reindeer armies are all going home.z

  Or:They’re selling postcards of the hanging

  They’re painting the passports brown

  Unpacking any of these lines is time-consuming, but not as daunting as some have claimed. Take they’re selling postcards of the hanging: the phrase conjures up the cold-hearted transformation of suffering into commodified spectacle; it sets capital punishment at the heart of a venal, media-dominated society; and it also refers to Dylan himself, to the media bent on exploiting him, and to his own willingness to market his pain in his songs, to expose himself to public view. It’s an instantly evocative opening to a complex song, “Desolation Row,” within which the line finds its wider and richer meaning.

  While these admittedly difficult songs are more intelligible than has sometimes been made out, there’s no doubt that the Dylan of this period revels in obscurity: My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums,

  Should I leave them by your gate,

  Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?

  Not to mention “Upon the beach where hound dogs bay / At ships with tattooed sails” or “jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule.” The fact that no Dylan fan can see these lines without singing them, ritualistically, like a mantra memorized from a foreign language, treasured, understood as a whole, gnostically, indicates that obscurity can itself be a means of communication. The sense that Dylan’s songs contained coded messages to be deciphered by the hip cognoscenti, the inaccessibility that so upset Irwin Silber, actually made these songs powerfully attractive. Anything too upfront, too transparent, too easily accessible, could not be trusted.

  All these people that you mention

  Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame

  I had to rearrange their faces

  And give them all another name

  Of course, Dylan sells the package, obscurities and all, by the sheer conviction of his singing, which in this period displays a dynamic and tonal control he was never to surpass. (In Don’t Look Back, he boasts to the Time reporter that he can hold his breath three times as long as Caruso.) David Bowie called it a “voice like sand and glue.” This voice encompasses wild changes in tone and mode: from magisterial put-downs to aching longings, from melancholy lamentation to hysterical glee. It swoons and carps and pouts; it is sardonic, exultant, sensual, raunchy, philosophical, and yet it always remains a seamless entity. It deftly interlaces the increasingly complex verses within a sonically expanded tapestry.

  In these mid-sixties masterpieces, the style is inextricable from the substance. They lead us through a distinctive poetic landscape that is unmistakably the property of an individual artist—hence the sixties neologism Dylanesque. Paradoxically, this very private landscape powerfully reflected a shared social reality, a reality of insurgency and reaction, and was understood as such at the time, subliminally and by inference, among a growing audience.

  Dylan’s electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965 was to become, in Clinton Heylin’s words, “the most written about performance in the history of rock.”5 And not without cause. Dylan’s clash with the constituency from which he’d emerged, including individuals who’d sponsored his early career, was high Oedipal drama, marked by over-reaction on all sides. The moment was resonant. It was the fulcrum of the American sixties, as the early unity and idealism of the civil rights movement gave way to division and pessimism, the war in Vietnam intensified, and domestic opposition began to grow. The first glimmers of the counterculture were visible and the media was discovering that rebellion could sell. These interlinked trends infused Newport that July; they lie behind both Dylan’s aggressively boundary-blurring sound and the divided response to it.

  The day before Dylan’s performance, there had been a backstage incident that foreshadowed the clash to come. Alan Lomax had given a grudging introduction to a session by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, whose electrified instruments he was known to disapprove of. As he came offstage, he was confronted by an enraged Albert Grossman, who was hoping to manage the Butterfield band. The two men w
ere soon grappling in the dirt. As a result, the Festival board voted to ban Grossman from the event, but had second thoughts when it realized that kicking out Grossman might mean losing his clients, including Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary.

  The Lomax-Grossman undercard bout carried much of the same symbolic import as the headline clash—Dylan versus (a section of) the Newport audience. Lomax was regarded by many as the incarnation of the Festival’s values and historic roots. His work as an archivist, musical anthropologist, and proselytizer had made the folk revival possible. His field recordings and anthologies were foundation stones of Dylan’s art and sensibility. Years later, Dylan paid tribute to him as “one of those who unlocked the secrets of this kind of music”—folk music in all its varieties. But in 1965 it was Grossman, not Lomax, who was in Dylan’s corner. The smugly imperturbable entrepreneur was already widely resented at Newport, where many viewed him as a moneychanger at loose in the temple precincts. This year, his boy Dylan had grown bigger than the event itself; the singer-songwriter’s every move drew crowds and cameras and created logistical chaos. Even before Dylan stepped on stage, there was a sense that the fragile ethos of the Festival was under threat.

  On the bootleg recording of the Newport appearance, Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary) can be heard introducing Dylan to an ecstatic audience: this was “the face of folk music to the large American public,” the man who had brought to it “the point of view of a poet.” The groan of disappointment from the crowd when they are warned that Dylan has “only a limited time” to perform gives some notion of the expectations he aroused. But on that late Sunday afternoon Dylan confronted the 15,000-strong Newport throng as an alien. The ascetic blue jeans and work shirt had been discarded in favor of pointy leather boots, eye-popping polka dots, and dark shades. He seemed to some to be re-inventing himself as a Beatlefied dandy. Backed by members of the Butterfield band, augmented by Al Kooper on organ, he played three songs: “Maggie’s Farm” (released earlier that year on Bringing It All Back Home), “Like a Rolling Stone” (just released as a single), and an early version of what was soon to become “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” (which would be included on Highway 61). Accounts of his performance and the audience’s reaction are numerous and conflicting. The bootleg shows Dylan on the top of his form, and while the rhythm section sometimes stutters, the performance as a whole is fresh and convincing. Mike Bloomfield’s guitar crackles and Dylan’s singing is artful and fluid, each phrase lovingly shaped. Nonetheless, Dylan’s electric music met with the vocal disapproval of a large number of people at Newport (there’s no agreement on how large a number). What’s more, several prominent Festival figures made it clear that they abhorred the noise that Dylan was making. Those sixteen minutes of raging rock inaugurated a period of public conflict between Dylan and part of his audience, a drama that was to be played out in the U.S. and Europe over the coming year.

  “ You couldn’t understand a goddamn word of what they were singing,” Pete Seeger complained, years later.6 The poor mix and the unrehearsed ensemble have been blamed for the new sound’s rocky reception. But there’s no doubt that the sheer volume was an issue, as it was to be at the Manchester Free Trade Hall ten months later. Dylan wanted to play loud music, and for the same reasons that many in the years (decades) to come wanted to hear it: the visceral thrill. To the sober-minded side of the folk revival, the hedonism was alien. The meaning resided, at least in part, in the words, and they wanted to hear them. But the volume was part of Dylan’s search for a bigger sound in more ways than one: he wanted his art to be an intense experience for all concerned, a discharge of hectic energy, a musical whole that was more than a lyric set to a tune. This was a music of emotional extravagance that the staid Newport format could not accommodate.

  Of course, in going electric, Dylan was also trying to follow the new British bands up the charts. The scope for a commercial breakthrough had been confirmed by the success of the Byrds’ folk-rock version of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” one of the hits of the summer. The market for rock-tinged music played with electric guitars, bass and drums was clearly larger than the market for solo acoustic folk. But the accusation of sellout was and remains curious. Usually, selling out implies a compromise with popular taste, a watering-down, a sinking to a lower common denominator. But Dylan’s border-busting sound of 1965 was nothing if not challenging—to radio DJs as much as to folk conservatives. “Like a Rolling Stone,” released four days before Newport, was twice the length of a standard single. The language and imagery were far richer, more recondite than was customary on mainstream radio. Most importantly, the temper of the new songs was deliberately provocative. Dylan didn’t sugarcoat the pill. He lacquered it with astringent.

  Dylan’s daring should not be underestimated. Here was an artist who abandoned a recognized niche not for facile populism but for an adventurous and demanding style, and somehow managed to find a new mass audience for it. When the bebop innovators moved away from swing-era conventions, they found themselves in an avant-garde wilderness. Dylan helped create a new audience by challenging, even offending, his existing one. For all the mixed motives, the intellectual confusion, it took guts and vision to pull this off. It also took the right mix of social circumstances, not least those upheavals from below that supplied both Dylan and his audience with the self-confidence to smash through established categories.

  History vindicated Dylan, and in short order. “Like a Rolling Stone,” booed at Newport, became a huge hit, detonating an explosion of ambition and experiment in the pop genre. Dylan himself proceeded to create his most majestic and complex work, proving that he could reach a mass audience without compromising his vision. “It was an artistic challenge to see if great art can be done on a jukebox,” Allen Ginsberg observed, “and he proved it can.”

  Newport ’65 is a cautionary tale for the Left. It’s a tale of a movement for social change blinded by dogmatism and orthodoxy, unable to embrace an original and challenging contribution. It’s a tale of the dangers of condescending to popular culture, of the folly of fetishizing a genre. It’s a tale of how a would-be counterculture, in seeking to program the artist, unknowingly emulated the dominant culture it sought to challenge. The people’s champions, aiming to conserve the people’s music, ended up ossifying it—and failed to recognize the authentic popular expression they were looking for when it took an unexpected form.

  To this day, Lomax, Seeger, and their allies get a rough ride from many Dylan fans, as if their offense were fresh. But their objections to the new music were not as groundless, philistine, or shortsighted as some would claim.

  It’s important to understand what seemed so precious to the old guard, so worth preserving, and why Dylan going electric threatened it. The Newport Festival was a nonprofit enterprise with a social mission. It provided a then rare showcase not only for hard-hitting topical songs but also for neglected black and working-class artists. It acted as a link between the southern civil rights movement and the folk community of the urban North. Lomax, Seeger, and the like had suffered under McCarthyism, when the values of the popular front seemed to have been extirpated from American life. To them, Newport represented a cracking open of a long-closed door, a precious seed; it needed to be given appropriate nurture.

  Also on the bill with Dylan that evening was Fannie Lou Hamer—the eloquently blunt MFDP militant who so affronted Johnson and Humphrey. It was only possible to have someone like Hamer on the Newport platform because the Festival organizers could safely assume that the audience would share a political as well as a musical ethic. Indeed, to them, the two were one. They conceived the folk audience, and specifically the Newport crowd, not merely as an aggregate of consumers, but as a participatory community. They believed, not without reason, that this was a community whose bonds—based on shared values—would dissolve if it was invaded by market forces. And they identified these forces with teen-oriented rock ’n’ roll. In keeping with a long Romantic tradition o
f hostility to technology—the vehicle of impersonal social dominance—they regarded amplified and studio-crafted music as inauthentic. In this context, as Oscar Brand, a veteran of the first folk revival, explained, “the electric guitar represented capitalism.”

  Lomax had been the pioneer of folk as a living tradition. He had responded positively to skiffle. As early as 1958, he had included rock ’n’ roll in a presentation of American folk music. He had long been aware that the “folklore movement can have dangerous potentialities.” It could be used to promote nationalist and racist ideas; it could be “petrified by improper use in education.” In the “creative process of folklore . . . there may be many versions of a song, every one of which is as ‘correct’ as every other.” Yet Lomax found Dylan’s music of 1965 decidedly incorrect.

  For Lomax, it was the democratic character of the folk tradition that made it live.

  One might say that every folklore item has been voted on by a broad electorate, an audience free to choose, reject or alter according to his lights. The teller of tales or the singer of songs often affects community taste by his own style of performance; he may stoutly defend his own version as the only correct one; but he is always conscious, as few cultivated artists can be, of the needs and preferences of his audience. He is of his audience.7

  That intimate relationship, that accountability of artist to audience, would not be possible when artist and audience were mediated almost exclusively by commerce, large corporations, and the electronic media. Years later, Lomax remarked:We now have cultural machines so powerful that one singer can reach everybody in the world, and make all the other singers feel inferior because they’re not like him. Once that gets started, he gets backed by so much cash and so much power that he becomes a monstrous invader from outer space, crushing the life out of all the other human possibilities. My life has been devoted to opposing that tendency.