Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  Whoever stubbornly insists on his mere so-being, because everything else has been cut off from him, only turns his so-being into a fetish. Cut off and fixed selfness only becomes, all the more, something external.

  —Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity

  The climax of “Desolation Row” is a brutal vision of persecution in which social control is depicted as a form of torture.

  Now at midnight all the agents

  And the superhuman crew

  Come out and round up everyone

  That knows more than they do

  Then they bring them to the factory

  Where the heart-attack machine

  Is strapped across their shoulders

  And then the kerosene

  Is brought down from the castles

  By insurance men who go

  Check to see that nobody is escaping

  To Desolation Row

  Here, the state, the ideologues, the forces of money (“the superhuman crew”) conspire to distort and destroy the living human being. In the song’s final lines Dylan howls:Right now I can’t read too good

  Don’t send me no more letters no

  Not unless you mail them from

  Desolation Row

  “Desolation Row” is a refuge and an annihilation, the exclusive abode of authenticity, the haunt of those who have stripped themselves—or been stripped of—all social investments. Communication outside its confines is suspect at best. Dylan recorded the song days after the Newport imbroglio, along with “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” another study of displacement and immobility. Here Dylan finds himself stranded in some hazily illuminated, sour-and-stale border town limbo land. In this song, however, he seems to wallow in his predicament:I cannot move

  My fingers are all in a knot

  I don’t have the strength

  To get up and take another shot

  And my best friend, my doctor

  Won’t even say what it is I’ve got

  “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” captures the picaresque wanderings of a tiny individual amid a world of giant forms. There’s something in it of the poignancy of the gate-crasher bewildered at the welcome he has received and edgily awaiting his inevitable exposure and expulsion. ah He’s seduced and soon disillusioned by sex and drugs, fame and fortune—all of them only dimly apprehended as they swim in and out of his ken. He learns how inconsequential he is: “Don’t put on any airs when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue.” He observes the dangers surrounding him. His friend Angel “looked so fine at first” but after the local law got through with him “he left looking just like a ghost.” Dylan’s Tom Thumb stumbles through this fuzzy fantasy land with a kind of louche wariness.

  If you’re lookin’ to get silly

  You better go back to from where you came

  Because the cops don’t need you

  And man they expect the same

  Not a darkly threatening environment, but a treacherous one from which, in the final, bleary-eyed lines, he posits an escape to firmer ground.

  I’m going back to New York City

  I do believe I’ve had enough

  One of the glories of this song is its creation of a viscous, opaque medium in which forward movement (if that’s what it is) is felt as a drifting backward. It’s a prolonged moment of suspension. There’s a similar kind of drowning rock ’n’ roll in “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” recorded six months later. Here thwarted escapism blends with a sense of impending doom. “Can this really be the end?” Dylan leans back and belts out the chorus; he seems to be (almost) enjoying the experience. The song begins with an enigma: the silence of the ragman (“I know that he don’t talk”) and a foregone conclusion: though the singer’s prison may be a soft one (“The ladies treat me kindly”), “I know I can’t escape.” Communication is impossible—“the post office has been stolen / and the mailbox is locked.” And forget about riding the rails because “the railroad men just drink your blood like wine.”ai In verses four and five, we get a glimpse of what Dylan is trying to get away from: Grandpa is crazy and violent and the senator is a reckless opportunist. But once again, Dylan’s bid to escape is foiled:An’ me, I nearly got busted

  An’ wouldn’t it be my luck

  To get caught without a ticket

  And be discovered beneath a truck.

  Neither drugs (verse seven) nor sex (verse eight) extricate him from his limbo. In the finale, his thoughts turn again to New York and his companions from the Village—the “neon madmen” carefully assembling their latest constructions on Grand Street—and contrasts their (apparently) purposeful activity to his own stalled inertia: An’ here I sit so patiently

  Waiting to find out what price

  You have to pay to get out of

  Going through all these things twice

  In “Memphis Blues Again,” urban and rural, tradition and innovation are held in a churning stasis. The mysteriously impassable distance between Mobile, the Gulf Coast oil town, and Memphis, the great honey pot on the Mississippi, is the distance between depression and elation, isolation and community, anonymity and recognition, fatalism and freedom. The journey from one to the other is constantly obstructed, and in the end, like the circles of the ragman, returns to its starting point.aj

  Dylan’s definitive treatment of “strandedness” is “Visions of Johanna,” a song he wrote in November 1965. Unlike most of the material on Blonde on Blonde, he brought it to the studio as a finished composition. It has always been recognized as a major work, and it boasts one of the most intoxicating and suggestive of all Dylan openings:Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet?

  We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it

  “Visions of Johanna” covers a vast terrain: sex, drugs, politics, aesthetics, philosophy. It’s a song of great intimacy and epic scope. It explores a world of heightened definition and intensified indefiniteness—brilliance and murk. Dylan finds himself here most definitely “back in New York City”—a flickering, electric, ghostly cityscape.

  And the all-night girls who whisper of escapades out on the D train

  We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight and ask himself if it’s him or them that’s insane

  Dylan here is addicted to his own myopia—a fog of detachment that provides a safe haven—and at the same time pained by a piercing clarity: an unmediated experience that is “too concise and too clear.” The visions of Johanna have not merely “conquered my mind”; they “have now taken my place.” As the song builds, the internal rhymes seethe, the lyric flows and ebbs over the melody, adding to the incantatory, phantasmagoric effect. Who’s Louise? Who’s Johanna? If the artist needed us to know he would have left more clues. They are objects of desire and yearning, and of judgment and illusion. It is their elusiveness and unreality that’s the point. “How can I explain?/Oh it’s so hard to get on...” And he offers us a fleeting self-portrait: “Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously / He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously.”

  In “Visions of Johanna” Dylan is stranded between extremes: between total freedom and abject slavery. Events have now spun not only beyond control but beyond comprehension. The sheer metamorphic intensity of reality makes it impossible to apprehend. Yet the hunger for the authentic remains unappeasable.

  The peddler now speaks to the countess who’s pretending to care for him

  Sayin’, “Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him”

  In the final verse there’s an implied reckoning:The fiddler, he now steps to the road

  He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed

  On the back of the fish truck that loads

  While my conscience explodes

  The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain

  And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain

  Explod
ing consciences provide the finishing touch in several Dylan compositions of this period. “Maggie’s Farm” climaxes with the cry:I got a head full of ideas that are driving me insane

  “From a Buick 6” comes to a similar screeching halt:Well, you know I need a steam shovel mama to keep away the dead

  I need a dump truck mama to unload my head

  In the last verse of “Tombstone Blues,” Dylan watches helplessly as someone else goes mad:Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain

  That could hold you dear lady from going insane

  The individual locked inside his or her own consciousness confronts a catastrophically deceitful and exploitative social reality. The contradiction between the autonomous self and organized society seems un-resolvable. That is the crisis that Dylan is trying to fight his way out of in these songs. The enemies are too fierce, too cunning, too ubiquitous—too internalized. Nonetheless, Dylan continues to insist, in his inimitably convoluted fashion, that freedom and authenticity are out there. They’re real. But they come at a price.

  On Blonde on Blonde, Dylan made the familiar deliriously strange. He took inherited idioms and boosted them into a modernist stratosphere. “Pledging My Time” and “Obviously Five Believers” adhere to blues patterns that were venerable when Dylan first encountered them in the mid-fifties (both begin with the ritual Delta invocation of “early in the mornin’”). Yet like “Visions of Johanna” or “Memphis Blues Again,” these songs are beyond category. They are allusive, repetitive, jaggedly abstract compositions that defy reduction. In “Pledging My Time,” the universe and the singer’s consciousness have been radically destabilized. “I got a poison headache but I feel alright,” Dylan declares before explaining that a hobo “stole my baby and he wanted to steal me.” The lyrics are icy but Dylan pours fear, anxiety, spite and despair into the harmonica. The climax hints at a dark betrayal that is both portentous and frighteningly devoid of meaning:They sent for the ambulance

  And one was sent

  Somebody got lucky

  But it was an accident

  The words and the tune echo Robert Johnson’s “Come On In My Kitchen” and the Mississippi Sheikhs’ “Sittin’ On Top of the World,” demonstrating yet again Dylan’s roots in the music of the past. But they also confirm that Dylan—especially the Dylan of the 60s—can never be boiled down to his sources. The quotations are not dropped in for the benefit of scholars or connoisseurs. They are building blocks with which Dylan constructs an autonomous entity, shimmering with the multi-faceted crisis of shifting times.

  “Obviously Five Believers” thuds along in classic Chicago blues style but tantalizes and teases the listener: there’s a “black dog barkin’ outside my yard”Yes, I’d tell you what it means

  If I just didn’t have to try so hard

  Amid aggressively jangling guitar and wailing harmonica, Dylan shouts his paired blues couplets:Don’t let me down

  Don’t let me down

  I wont’ let you down

  I won’t let you down

  No I won’t

  In these songs of committed delirium, Dylan found his own up-to-the-minute counterpart to the “elemental” mysteriousness he admired in the work of Robert Johnson and the Anthology bards. In “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” he sweetened the prismatic, elliptical style with a rock ’n’ roll tune as infectiously innocent as the best of Lennon and McCartney. The music struts and swaggers while Dylan aches and lectures. You can find an allegory of sexual frustration and masturbation here (“I’m just sitting here beating on my trumpet . . . I got the fever down in my pockets”) or the tale of a heroin addict hungering for his fix (“I waited for you when I was half-sick . . . I waited for you inside the frozen traffic”). In either case, Dylan finds himself simultaneously locked in and locked out: “I can take him to your house but I can’t unlock it/ You see you forgot to leave me with the key . . . I been in jail when all the mail showed / That a man can’t give his address out to bad company.” Most striking of all, in the midst of this wistful, puzzled, deliciously silly song, Dylan issues the stunning aphorism:To live outside the law you must be honest

  The phrase is a prophetic warning to the movement, to the counterculture, to a generation and its successors—and to himself (“now anyone can be like me, obviously”). People tend to forget the leering follow-up line, as Dylanesque in its way as the oft-quoted aphorism:And I know you always say that you agree

  After recording Blonde on Blonde, Dylan embarked on a “world tour ”—Australia , Sweden, Denmark, Britain, Ireland, and France—which turned into a sustained confrontation with the media and with his audience, or part of it. The antagonism of Newport became ritualized. Even, it’s said, organized—by leftist folk clubs and British Communist Party members.26

  During this tour, Dylan made some of his greatest music, and surely some of the most powerfully expressive rock ’n’ roll ever. Backed by the musicians who were later to become known as The Band,ak he explored his new sound to the limit. The sense of embattlement drove Dylan to ecstatic heights as a performer. The musicians, astonished by the audience aggression, followed his lead. Robertson’s guitar became a second voice, answering Dylan’s vocals, trading nuances, sarcasm, and euphoria.

  Thanks to the Official Bootleg series, the legendary Manchester Free Trade Hall performance of May 17, 1966 (for years known on unofficial bootleg as the Royal Albert Hall gig), complete with the “Judas!” heckle, is now readily accessible.al Taken together, the two components of the show—a full acoustic set preceded the intermission, after which Dylan returned to plug in—display the stunning range, power, and subtlety of Dylan’s art at this moment.

  May 24, 1966, was Dylan’s twenty-fifth birthday. That night he and his band appeared on stage at the Olympia Theatre in Paris before an enormous American flag. This seems to have distressed the audience more than the loud rock ’n’ roll. There were cries of “U.S. Go Home!” (Drummer Mickey Jones says the flag was Dylan’s idea. )27 Oblivious, or rather, putting great effort into making himself appear and feel oblivious, Dylan ploughed on with his highly public exploration of an interior landscape. In London on May 27, he finished the tour at the Albert Hall. The booing and denunciation from a section of the audience were by now familiar. After ripping through “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” Dylan paused to explain:This is not English music you’re listening to. You haven’t really heard American music before. I want to say now that what you’re hearing is just songs. You’re not hearing anything else but words. You can take it or leave it. If there’s something that you disagree with that’s just great. I’m sick of people asking what does it all mean. It means nothing.

  He proceeded to roll out “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” When that came to an end, someone shouted, “Play protest songs!” To which Dylan replied:Oh come on, these are all protest songs. Aw, it’s the same stuff as always. Can’t you HEAR?

  He followed that up with “Ballad of a Thin Man.”28 Despite the booing, there were many present who could “hear.” As in the same venue a year earlier, when Ginsberg had preached to the International Poetry Festival, a new layer was being added to British youth culture. Within months, this culture would provide a home for Jimi Hendrix, a womb from which the unknown African-American R&B virtuoso would emerge as psychedelic rock ’n’ roll shaman, with a sound (and a hair-style) that owed not a little to Bob Dylan.

  On June 8, 1966, James Meredith, whose admission to the University of Mississippi had detonated the white riot in Oxford four years earlier, launched a one-man Memphis-to-Jackson “march against fear.” Within hours, he was gunned down (though not killed) by another “bullet from the back of a bush.” Activists from all wings of the movement vowed to complete his march. But as they did so, discord was constant, with the militants of SNCC and CORE—both now all-black organizations—at loggerheads with Martin Luther King and the NAACP. The marchers also faced the usual harassment from local officials and white vigilantes. On June 16, Stokely Carmichael, who had
recently replaced John Lewis as SNCC national chairman, was arrested in Greenwood. On his release, he told a rally: “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested. I ain’t going to jail no more. We been sayin’ Freedom Now for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start sayin’ now is ‘Black Power!’” The slogan coursed through the country, galvanizing some and antagonizing others.29

  Weeks later, King, making good on his pledge to bring the civil rights campaign to the cities of the North, led a march through a segregated neighborhood in Chicago. He was spat at and stoned by white mobs. “I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today,” he told the press. 30 In November’s elections, the white backlash took another stride forward—epitomized in Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial victory in California. The effect of the backlash was not to moderate black or student demands, but to intensify them, as their alienation from the dominant forces reached a new pitch. At the top, the movement was fracturing; at the base it was spreading into virgin territory. “By the fall of 1966,” wrote Julius Lester, “the movement which had once been composed of a few political organizations was becoming a separate society, with its own newspapers, its own lifestyle, its own morality. It became like a huge river with people jumping in at every point along its banks. . . .”31