Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  I used to be among the crowd

  You’re in with

  The least commercially successful of the three singles, “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” was also, musically, the closest to the pop-rock sounds then topping the charts. With its cymbal figure, aggressive guitar licks, and catchy chorus it sounds like the British beat of the Animals or Them. Unlike the earlier singles, this was a seduction song, with Dylan trying to win the favors of the woman in question by savaging her current lover. It was jokier and gentler, but Ochs was right to see its kinship with “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Positively 4th Street.”

  The targets of the singer’s contempt in these songs are charged with the great sin in the Dylan mid-sixties universe: substituting pretense, artifice or image for the raw unpredictability of life: “You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you.” The rival lover in “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” is one of Dylan’s straw men of academic lifelessness: “With his businesslike anger and his bloodhounds that kneel . . . He just needs you to talk or to hand him his chalk.” Once cast down, humbled, these people will learn how unreal and unimportant were the props they used to assert their superiority over others.

  Emotions in these songs are unprettified (“You’d rather see me paralyzed”); the exultant, taunting conclusions of “Like a Rolling Stone” (“ You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal”) or “Positively 4th Street” (“what a drag it is / To see you”) offer no quarter to the vanquished. Marrying vindictive glee to the adrenalin kick of rock ’n’ roll, Dylan here elevated the put-down to an art form. In this respect he might be seen as a forerunner of the aggressively insulting strand of hip-hop. But, in Dylan, the snarling arrogance always carried undertones of anxiety and doubt.

  In “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Positively 4th Street,” the wheel of fortune has turned. Dylan has risen to the top—and revels in it—and those who mocked or spurned him have plummeted. But there is nothing permanent here. In a whirligig society, eminence is precarious. That’s why the most important lesson is that “when you ain’t got nothin’ / you got nothin’ to lose.” In “Like a Rolling Stone,” the disinvestment in society ’s trappings that Dylan counseled in “My Back Pages” or “To Ramona” or “It’s Alright Ma” becomes the actual fate of the person addressed by the singer—there are no more “alibis.” This fate is both a comeuppance, a fitting revenge, and a potential liberation.

  In all of these songs there is an element of self-portraiture and self-address. The rival lover of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” could be Dylan himself:Preoccupied with his vengeance

  Cursing the dead that can’t answer him back

  In “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Napoleon in rags” (ridiculed for “the language that he used”) is surely a Dylan cameo. The song only attains its full poignancy when one realizes it is sung, at least in part, to the singer himself: he’s the one “with no direction home.” Dylan’s declaration that he doesn’t owe anything to anybody is, of course, a defensive ploy, an attempt to insulate himself from betrayal or disappointment, or indeed the changes in fashion and fortune that seemed to be coming thick and fast in these years. “Like a Rolling Stone” is at one and the same time a self-aggrandizing construction, an exercise in bluster, and an astonishingly candid confession.

  It’s evident from these songs that Dylan was more hurt by criticism than he liked to let on. Out of his retreat from the movement, his break with former associates, and his thin-skinned reaction to critics, Dylan fashioned rich, robust works of art. But they are no more or less the “authentic” Dylan than the self-abnegating songs of social protest. The posture of rude resentment was as much a mask as the Woody Guthrie accent had been. Dylan poured into and through the mask—and by means of the mask—the same sense of commitment, confrontation, and danger that had made him stand out among the folksingers. The emerging teenage audience heard it and identified with it. Bruce Springsteen recalled the moment precisely:The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind: “Like a Rolling Stone.” My mother—she was no stiff with rock ’n’ roll, she liked the music—sat there for a minute, then looked at me and said, “That guy can’t sing.” But I knew she was wrong. I sat there and I didn’t say nothing but I knew that I was listening to the toughest voice that I had ever heard. It was lean and it sounded somehow simultaneously young and adult.11

  Whatever you say, don’t say it twice

  If you find your ideas in anyone else, disown them

  The man who hasn’t signed anything, who has left

  no picture

  Who was not there, who said nothing:

  How can they catch him?

  Cover your tracks.

  —Bertolt Brecht, “Handbook for City-Dwellers”

  You arrive in London. You’re besieged by the press. The first question you’re asked is: “What is your message for young people?” You are yourself a young person, incomplete, still in formation. The world around you is changing rapidly and you’re not sure what to make of it all. Under the circumstances, Dylan’s answer—“Keep a good head and always carry a lightbulb”—seems as fitting as any.12

  The young Dylan sought fame as determinedly as any ambitious entertainer. But fame quickly became a burden and a terror to him. From the moment that Newsweek exposed the new Woody Guthrie as a Jewish college dropout from Minnesota (and not the vagabond orphan he had claimed to be), Dylan recoiled from the media. He certainly craved and sometimes enjoyed the attention. But he bridled as they dubbed him a protest singer. He winced as they hailed him as the voice of a generation. From the beginning, he refused to smile for the cameras. From the beginning, he was jealous of his autonomy and reluctant to play the media game. Like Woody Guthrie in the Rainbow Room, Dylan faced an industry that seemed bent on stealing his soul.

  As one of the first youth celebrities of the television era, Dylan’s predicament was unenviable. Put yourself in his place. You don’t recognize the pictures of you painted in the media. You don’t know who this Bob Dylan is that people keep asking you about. You want to have fun, seek out thrills, hang with friends, have adventures, be selfish, be loved, but now all this must be done in the glare of the spotlights—all the growing and doubt and experiment. All kinds of people have expectations of you. You’re asked to explain and justify everything, but you can’t because you’re winging it, moving restlessly forward on intuition and inspiration, and as far as you’re concerned it’s perfectly obvious what you’re doing.

  Dylan wanted to be merely an individual, and for the songs to speak for themselves. He longed to slough off the burdens of representation foisted on him by the media and the movement alike. He was desperate to reclaim his personal identity from the public sphere—not least because nothing true, nothing authentic, could survive in that sphere. Ironically, his very restlessness and elusiveness, his disregard for categories, made him ever more representative of his era and his generation. And that further complicated his search for authenticity. It seemed this was a race without a finishing line.

  The inadequacy of language and the difficulties of communication in a corrupt society were already themes in his earlier work, but between 1964 and 1966, they move to the center of the canvas. The ineffability of personal experience haunts “Gates of Eden”:At dawn my lover comes to me

  And tells me of her dreams

  With no attempts to shovel the glimpse

  Into the ditch of what each one means

  At times I think there are no words

  But these to tell what’s true

  And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

  What stood outside the gates of Eden was nothing less than the entire social order, and certainly the media. In his battle to reclaim a self from nascent celebrity culture, Dylan engaged in these years in a running joust with the press. Bombarded by obtuse, unhip, clich�
� questions, or often, questions that were perfectly fair but for which he simply had no answers, he was by turns flippant, taciturn, jocular, enigmatic, surly, playful. Who was his favorite folk singer? “Peter Lorre.” Was he in good health? “I don’t see well on Tuesdays.” Was he married? “If I answered that I’d have to lie to you.” At times, he turned the press conference into a form of performance art. But witty or rude, it was all an elaborate defense mechanism. A way of speaking from behind the veil of protective silence: I got my dark sunglasses,

  I’m carryin’ for good luck my black tooth.

  Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’,

  I just might tell you the truth.

  It was also an act of protest, a dadaist challenge to a reductive social order. It was a protest against labels in an era in which labels proliferated, as Dylan himself explained in the Biograph notes:Like the term beatnik or hippie. These were terms

  made up by magazine people who are invisible who

  like to put a label on something to cheapen it. Then

  it can be controlled better by other people who are

  also invisible.13

  In this light, “Ballad of a Thin Man” looks like one of the purest songs of protest ever sung. In “The Times They Are A-Changin’” Dylan had warned the older generation: “don’t criticize / What you can’t understand.” In “Ballad of a Thin Man,” the wall of incomprehension between the conscious vanguard and mainstream society has become impenetrable. Despite their reputation for tantalizing obscurity, the lyrics seem to me plain enough. The song’s starting point is Dylan’s take on the media, its interest in and inability to comprehend him and his music.

  You walk into the room

  With your pencil in your hand

  You see somebody naked

  And you say, “Who is that man?”

  You try so hard

  But you don’t understand

  Just what you’ll say

  When you get home

  From here, Dylan reworks his favorite duality: the forces of lifelessness versus the enlightened few. The cryptic drama enacted around Mr. Jones subverts his identity and exposes his hollowness. He is the man who hands in his ticket to “go watch the geek” only to discover that he himself is viewed by others as “a freak.” He is the man whose assumptions are derived from books, from newspapers, from academia, from anywhere but life itself. He has to use his “contacts” to get the “facts” when “someone attacks” his “imagination;” and he’s one of the well-heeled liberals Dylan thought he was attacking at the ECLC dinner:. . . they already expect you

  To just give a check to

  Tax-deductible charity organizations

  No one but Dylan would or could have turned the phrase “tax deductible charity organizations” into a rock ’n’ roll howl, an irresistible sing-along punch line. The song is a nihilistically impish attack on the acceptance of a spoon-fed, prepackaged, and safely homogenized reality. It sneers at those who refuse to dare, to cross boundaries, to taste the forbidden rawness of life. Only recently have critics picked up on the sprinkling of homosexual hints in the song, though they seem rather obvious. A man is offered a bone; a sword swallower clicks his high heels, says, “here’s your throat back thanks for the loan”; a man is told he is a cow and asked for his “milk”; not to mention those lumberjacks in verse four. No one should be too surprised at finding a gay subnarrative in Dylan’s work of this period. He certainly knew gay men in the Village; Allen Ginsberg had made little secret of the sexual attraction he felt toward Dylan. In any case, the gay masquerade, the reference to another hidden subculture, a world obscured and protected by an exclusive code, reinforces the main drift of the song.ab

  There’s a long-running debate about who Mr. Jones really was, but the anonymity is part of the point. Mr. Jones is anone who stands baffled, inert, a cipher, in the face of outlandish reality. The spooky organ riffs (elegantly elaborated by Garth Hudson when Dylan unleashed this pointed tune on critical audiences during his 1966 tour) suggest junky Hollywood horror, a suitably mordant accompaniment to this deliberately disjointed “ballad.” The sardonic refrain—“something is happening but you don’t know what it is”—seemed deeply alien to the spirit of “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” but was not unrelated to it. Here too a demarcation was being celebrated, part generational, part political, part cultural. Only here new elements—the demarcations between private and public, between what can and cannot be named—are superimposed. The refrain epitomized the hip excluvisity that came naturally to those young people who saw themselves as having possession of a deeper insight than those around them. Disgusted by the old, excited by the new, frustrated by their inability to be heard and understood, elated by their discovery of others who shared their feelings, they wanted to be part of an underground. Dylan’s music offered them a passport to it. “Ballad of a Thin Man” is the anthem of an in-group, a self-identified minority. Dylan wrote it out of sense of besieged isolation, but to a growing audience his music offered mutual discovery and a sense of inclusion. To young people, in the end, the message was clear enough.

  In February 1965, SNCC activists meeting in Atlanta had been stunned when Bob Moses, the most universally respected figure in the organization, announced that it was “time to leave.” Warning that SNCC leaders were becoming creatures of the media, he looked at Lewis, Stokely Carmichael, Forman, and did not spare himself. “My name is no longer Bob Moses,” he finished. “I am Bob Parris now.” (Parris was his middle name.) Then he walked out of the meeting. Those remaining behind sang “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” A year later, Moses/Parris left the country. 14

  “Until 1964, ‘the movement’ had depended upon its own people to carry information from place to place,” Julius Lester observed. “Meetings were small, ‘movement’ publications few and people depended upon direct contact with each other to keep informed and since there were always a fair number of people in motion, this was not difficult.” But in the mid-sixties, Lester noted, “the media became more and more prominent as the carriers of ‘movement’ information . . . the ‘movement’ took advantage of the media’s new interest in it and began to consciously use and eventually depend upon the media to be the agent for information rather than depend upon its own people and organs.”15 As a result, the ties of accountability that bind leaders to movements were weakened; images and catchphrases took precedence over ideas and organization.

  The underground community into which Dylan’s mid-sixties music offered initiation was bound together not only by an exclusive jargon but also by a privileged, near incommunicable but somehow tangible political vision.

  The contempt for authority is omnipresent in these songs. Whether it’s employers, cops, politicians, preachers, or generals, they are always both dangerous and preposterous. In “Desolation Row,” “the blind commissioner” is “in a trance / One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker / The other is in his pants.” In “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” “all the authorities / They just stand around and boast / How they blackmailed the sergeant-at-arms / Into leaving his post . . .” In “I Want You,” “The drunken politician leaps / Upon the street where mothers weep” and in “Memphis Blues Again,” “the senator came down here / Showing ev’ryone his gun, / Handing out free tickets / To the wedding of his son.”

  In particular, the state and its agents—DAs, judges, deputy sheriffs, even the coast guard—are portrayed as arbitrary and violent forces erupting into the life of the individual. “The riot squad they’re restless / They need somewhere to go . . .”It was definitely a symptom of the times that this young man who had known primarily comfort and success should display such a predilection for persecution fantasies:Look out kid

  It’s somethin’ you did

  God knows when

  But you’re doin’ it again

  Retrospectively, it’s surprising that the Newport audience failed to recognize “Maggie’s Farm” as a song of political protest.ac True, there were
no explicit topical references, no comfort noises for the movement. But the song is laced with antiauthoritarian venom, class and generational resentment. One of its sources is “Down on Penny’s Farm,” a sharecroppers’ lament that Dylan would have heard on the Harry Smith Anthology:You go to the fields

  And you work all day,

  Till way after dark, but you get no pay,

  Promise you meat or a little lard,

  It’s hard to be a renter on Penny’s farm.

  Dylan had already filched the song’s chorus (“It’s hard times in the country, / Down on Penny’s farm”) for his early “Hard Times in New York Town,” but what surfaces in “Maggie’s Farm” is the Anthology tune’s complaint against expropriated labor. Though Dylan knew little of the world of work, he kept a jaundiced eye fixed on it. In this song, wage labor appears as a prison propped up by ideology (“she talks to all the servants about man and god and law”) and the state (“the national guard stands outside his door”). Its fury is aimed not just at the employing class but at the work ethic and the subordination of the human personality to employment. Like other Dylan songs of this period, “Maggie’s Farm” is an antagonistic encounter between the aspirations of the individual and a grotesquely dehumanized society.

  Well, I try my best

  To be just like I am,

  But everybody wants you

  To be just like them.

  They say sing while you slave and I just get bored.

  I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.

  Conformity to social expectations had always been a satirical target in bohemian subcultures. But in Dylan’s songs of the mid-sixties, that conformity has become more insidious, more subtly pervasive, and more lethal to the human spirit. In “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” the experience of growing up is depicted as an empty ritual designed to produce compliant servants of the system:Ah get born, keep warm