Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  Dylan returned to the United States exhausted and in poor health. Albert Grossman had already booked him into a sixty-four-day U.S. tour. Publishers, film producers, reporters, and fans were all waiting, expecting something more from him. Then, in late July, driving along a back road near his manager’s home in Woodstock, Dylan was thrown from his motorcycle and injured. How badly injured is a matter disputed by biographers, but what’s not in doubt is that the accident gave Dylan a respite, an excuse to retreat from public life.32 “Truth was,” he confessed in Chronicles, “I wanted to get out of the rat race.” But the accident also enhanced his mystique. For this child of Hank Williams, Robert Johnson, James Dean, and Buddy Holly, a youthful death, a death on the wing—on a motorcycle, no less—would have been all too iconic. And if anyone was headed for an early grave, it did seem to be Bob Dylan: no one could burn with such fire and not be consumed in the flames. He was indeed hurtling headlong through history, exhausted by the rapid transformations—personal, cultural, political—in the five and a half years since his arrival in Greenwich Village.

  Yet Dylan did not expire on the highway, and his tortured umbilical link with the social conflicts of his age was yet to be severed.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Hour Is Getting Late

  “To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution”—in other words, poetic politics? “We have tried that beverage. Anything, rather than that!”

  —Walter Benjamin, Surrealism

  After the motorcycle accident, Dylan went into retreat. He would not tour again for eight years. Between the release of Blonde on Blonde in May 1966 and John Wesley Harding early in 1968, as far as the public was concerned, there was only silence. Yet during those extraordinary months, Dylan was as much a presence as an absence.

  In the summer of 1967, the counterculture that had been in gestation for years in obscure corners of American society emerged into mass consciousness. In the media, it was named, celebrated, condemned, analyzed, caricatured, sensationalized. Vast numbers of mainly but by no means exclusively white middle-class youth were touched by it, in varying degrees, or somehow identified with its generational amalgam of music, drugs, sexual freedom, antiwar, antiracist and anticommercial sentiments. Dylan was one of its touchstones, and that year the pop-art profile of him by Milton Glaser appeared on dormitory walls and in suburban bedrooms. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” was three and a half years old, but it seemed much more apt now than it had in 1963, when it was a brash boast, a rallying cry for a self-righteous minority. As for “Everybody must get stoned,” those lyrics didn’t seem so obscure anymore. It was from this time on that the feeling spread among growing numbers of young people that wherever their head was at, Dylan had been there before.

  The hunger for authenticity had taken a new turn; it was no longer to be found in tradition or immersion in a cause, but in the release of inhibitions, in self-expression and communal joy. The search for community, for a bond beyond the social mechanism, as in the folk revival and the civil rights movement, persisted, but was now transposed to a less clearly defined constituency. The most political expressions of the counterculture—the Human Be-in in San Francisco, the underground press, the Diggers, the Yippies—consciously sought to wed collective action and personal liberation, social protest and hedonism. The alacrity with which oppositional styles—including a taste for Dylan—spread among white youth convinced some on the Left that the millennium was at hand.

  Even at the time, the hippie, faux innocence was fatuous. “I’m younger than that now” without the plaintive lilt. At a Legalize Pot rally in London’s Hyde Park in July, Adrian Mitchell addressed the flower-bearing teenagers: “These flowers are for love. Good.”

  But is it a vague gas of love

  Which evaporates before it touches another human being

  Or is it a love that works?

  He told them they needed “A love so hot it can melt the armaments / Before they melt the entire country of Vietnam.”1 In the end, the self-conscious turn to the gentle and childlike could not withstand a reality that was anything but. For the summer of 1967 was also Vietnam summer, when 20,000 young volunteers took to the door-knockers across the U.S. to argue the case for an end to the war. Finally, two years on from the launch of the all-out U.S. assault, the demonstrations at home began to swell. In the spring, 100,000 rallied in New York, led by Martin Luther King; in the autumn, even more marched in Washington. But the rising tide of protest was accompanied by a rising sense of horror, a feeling of desperation. Paradoxically, the scale of the marches seemed to increase the sense of futility: so many people on the streets, and still they didn’t listen. The 400,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam at the beginning of the year increased to half a million by its end. Hundreds of GIs were being killed each week and many more maimed or wounded. For the Vietnamese, it was incalculably worse.

  And the summer of 1967 was the summer of insurrection, violence, and death in American cities. In the black ghettoes, the aspirations and political consciousness engendered by the civil rights movement smashed up against the daily frustrations of poverty, joblessness, bad housing, rotten public services, and brutal policing. The federal government that had failed its people in the South was now dispatching them to die in Vietnam. That summer witnessed blazing disorder in fifty-eight cities, in the course of which police and national guards took forty-three black lives in Detroit and twenty-four in Newark.

  Reflecting on why he had been booed by angry black youth at a meeting in Chicago, Martin Luther King explained:For twelve years I, and others like me, had held out radiant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream . . . I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had soared. They were now booing because they felt we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream they had so readily accepted turn into a nightmare.2

  So amid the euphoria of ecstatic rock ’n’ roll and communal self-discovery, it was not at all strange for Andrew Kopkind, consistently one of the era’s most sensitive observers of the radical Left, to observe: “To be white and radical in America this summer is to see horror and feel impotence.” The bankruptcy of the establishment had been revealed as never before: “the old words are meaningless, the old explanations irrelevant, the old remedies useless.” The only hope was that “The wretched of this American earth are together as they have never been before, in motion if not in movement.”3

  It was in 1967 that SDS completed its long, tortured repudiation of liberalism. In a speech given to the spring national council, the organization’s national secretary, Greg Calvert, explained that liberals were those who “acted for others” whereas “radicals or revolutionaries” were acting for themselves, engaged in a struggle for their own freedom that was at the same time a struggle for systemic social transformation. Calvert defined SDS’s tasks in language that might have described the Dylan of Highway 61 Revisited: “For SDS, organizing people is detaching them from American reality. When we break them out of that reality, that America, they begin to see their own lives, and America, in a new way . . . the process, really, is to allow the real person to confront the real America.”4

  Students and youth came to be seen as oppressed in their own right. To many, then as now, the comparison seemed disproportionate. But it struck a chord; it tapped into the same sense of unspecified alienation, that same lust for autonomy and authenticity that Dylan’s music articulated. A top-selling SDS badge of the time promoted draft resistance with the slogan Not with my life you don’t—parodying the title of one of that year’s more lamentable Hollywood comedies.am With the first serious clashes between white antiwar demonstrators and police—in Los Angeles in June and in Oakland in October—some radicals began talking about “white riots” to complement the actions in the black ghettoes. On the Left, there was increasing agreement
that the time had come to move “from protest to resistance.”

  By the autumn, SDS had acquired a 30,000-strong following on some 250 campuses around the country. Its numerical strength had grown tenfold in two years—a measure of the upsurge in student radicalism, and SDS’s own unique role as its vehicle and vanguard.5 Carl Davidson described the SDS campus shock troops of 1967 as follows: “younger members, freshmen and sophomores, rapidly moving into the hippy, Bobby Dylan syndrome. Having been completely turned off by the American system of compulsory miseducation, they are staunchly anti-intellectual and rarely read anything unless it comes from the underground press syndicate.”6

  In Playboy, Paul Goodman anatomized the Dylanesque soul of the new student radical:Their solidarity based on community rather than ideology, their style of direct and frank confrontation, their democratic inclusiveness and aristocratic carelessness of status, caste or getting ahead, their selectivity of the affluent standard of living, their effort to be authentic and committed to their causes rather than merely belonging, their determination to have a say and their refusal to be processed as standard items, their extreme distrust of top-down direction, their disposition to anarchist organization and direct action, their disillusion with the system of institutions . . .7

  For a brief moment it did seem to many that collective action and individual self-expression, the political and the cultural, could be merged to build a potent social movement. Staughton Lynd recalled: “For white radicals it was a time of politics of affirmation rather than politics of guilt.” Wallace Stegner, however, was more doubtful; the young radicals, he wrote, “often seem to throb rather than think.”8

  In popular music, the experimental vein opened by mid-sixties Dylan was now being mined with gusto by others. In the spring, the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper. The San Francisco groups unveiled the psychedelic sound. Hendrix took Dylan’s rock ’n’ blues poetry to orgiastic heights. It was the year of “White Rabbit,” “Light My Fire,” “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” among a crop of songs marked by druggy references, obscure lyrics, and exotic sounds. In June, the first Monterey Pop Festival—self-consciously modeled on Newport—featured Hendrix’s sprawling, guitar-drenched cover of “Like a Rolling Stone.” The festival was the dawn of what soon became known as “progressive rock”—rock infused with the sense of experiment, artistic seriousness, and sensory exploration that Dylan had introduced in his mid-sixties masterpieces. At Newport itself, Arlo Guthrie debuted his draft-dodger epic, “Alice’s Restaurant,” to an enthusiastic reception, and Country Joe and the Fish were cheered for their antiwar “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag.” Both songs brimmed with political satire, and were topical in the best Newport tradition, but both were also marked by their mordant jokiness. The killing machine had become too real, too omnipresent, and gallows humor felt like the only reasonable response. Again, Dylan’s work stands behind both songs.

  This was also the summer of Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair).” No sooner had the counterculture been identified by the media than it was packaged and promoted as a product. Time made “the new generation” its “man of the year” and praised it for its commitment to “the western ethos—decency, tolerance, brotherhood.” The fashion, film, music, and advertising industries all vied to exploit the new market. Adorno would have smiled bitterly at the ease with which political resistance was transformed into a packaged aesthetic experience—into a lifestyle, a term that enters common usage in this period. So instantaneous was the commodification of the new ethos that at the end of the summer countercultural radicals were already staging a “death of hippie” demonstration in a forlorn effort to cast off the identity fashioned for the insurgents by the media. The irony that the new mass anticonsumerism was propagated by the instruments of consumerism was clear to many at the time; perhaps less clear was that this irony had its roots in the characteristic contradictions of American sixties culture. The youth rebellion of the era was itself, in part, the product of the commercial society against which it rebelled. The insurgent response was buried deep inside the very structures that it shook: even Leave It to Beaver had Eddie Haskell.

  Just as big business saw big profits in the nascent counterculture, sections of the Left were also staking a claim, with greater historical entitlement, but in the end with considerably less success. The Yippies—a designation that both mocked and exploited facile media labels—launched themselves on the world in the autumn of 1967. They were the most high profile of many left-based attempts to harness the inchoate politics of the counterculture. Tellingly, they relied almost exclusively on the media to do this. Abbie Hoffman and his comrades proved adept at exploiting television, radio, and newspapers to subvert establishment assumptions; their guerrilla marketing was cheap and cheerful and it had an impact way beyond the confines of the activist Left. But it was always problematic.

  The recognized leaders of radicalized American youth in the late sixties were anointed by the media; their leadership was exercised largely through symbolic gestures, images, and catchphrases. There were no mass organizations to which they were accountable, and little real dialogue between the highly visible vanguard and the volatile, rapidly swelling army of dissident students and young people. There were many slogans—some of them incisive and inspiring—but little ideology or program. “The secret of the yippie myth is that it’s nonsense,” wrote Jerry Rubin, proudly, in Do It! his 1970 bestseller; “its basic informational statement is a blank piece of paper.”9 It was, more than ever, year zero for many on the American Left. The consequent political vacuum was to be filled in the years to come, alternately, by the liberal Democrats (the McCarthy and McGovern presidential campaigns) and by a bewildering variety of dogmatic ultraleftisms.

  Nonetheless, thanks to the confluence of all these trends—thanks to the movement and the media—individual gestures of rebellion did take on powerful political implications, and in some cases did lead to active political engagement. In the charged circumstances of the times, choices over hair, dress, and music came to mean more than they had in the past or would in the future. They referred to something larger than the lone teenage consumer; for many, they referred to and represented the embrace of a great social movement.

  Dylan later described 1967 as “the season of hype.”10 He was singularly unimpressed by the claims being made for the counterculture, the new generation, the new rock, and the New Left. These were all claims that had been lodged in his earlier work, which may have been one reason why the ever-restless one responded to the psychedelic outburst with wary cynicism. It was also one reason why, throughout this period, even as he sat in silence and rural isolation, the mystique of Bob Dylan continued to spread and intensify. His entire back catalogue sold as never before. In August 1967, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde all went gold. Columbia issued a Greatest Hits album to fill the void left by Dylan’s retreat; within six months, it too went gold. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back was released, introducing the Dylan persona to far more people than had actually seen the man perform live. Thanks to the season of hype, Dylan’s work was lapping over ever wider social circles.

  During the summer of 1967, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale met with their colleagues in a house in San Francisco to create a new newspaper, The Black Panther. As they worked through the nights honing their message, one record played repeatedly in the background, Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man.” Seale recalled:This song Bobby Dylan was singing became a very big part of that whole publishing operation of the Black Panther paper. . . . This record became so related to us, even to the brothers who had held down most of the security for the set. The brothers had some big earphones . . . that would sit on your ears and had a kind of direct stereo atmosphere and when you got loaded it was something else! These brothers would get halfway high, loaded on something, and they would sit down and play this record over and over and over, especially after they began t
o hear Huey P. Newton interpret that record.

  Moved by the song but puzzled by the lyric, Seale had asked Newton, “What the hell is a geek?” Newton explained that a geek was a circus performer who ate live chickens:He doesn’t like eating raw meat or feathers but he does it to survive. But these people who are coming in to see him are coming in for entertainment, so they are the real freaks. And the geek knows this so during his performance, he eats the live chicken and he hands one of the members of the audience a bone, because he realizes that they are the real freaks.

  For Newton, the geek-freak interplay carried potent race and class overtones:What Dylan is putting across is middle class people or upper class people who sometimes take the afternoon off and put their whole family into a limousine and they go down to the black ghettoes to watch the prostitutes and watch the decaying community. They do this for pleasure. . . . people who are disadvantaged . . . they’re not interested in them coming down for entertainment. But if they’ll pay them for a trick, then they’ll tolerate them, or else they’ll drive them out of the ghettoes. This song is hell. You’ve got to understand that this song is saying a hell of a lot about society.11

  The summer of ’67 was a time of hope and energy for the Panthers. In May, the hitherto obscure group of revolutionary black nationalists had seized the media spotlight when its members marched onto the floor of the California State Assembly in Sacramento brandishing guns. (In fact, they had intended to sit in the gallery, but got lost en route.) At the time, the party could claim only seventy-odd members, all of them in two West Coast chapters. But they were brash, confident, convinced that they themselves could and would find the key to unlock the black revolt. In marrying ghetto-based community organizing, black pride, the language of anti-imperialism, and the policy of armed self-defense, they believed they had resolved the movement’s mid-decade impasse. Infiltration, repression, egomania, media addiction, and the cult of the gun had not yet turned the party’s internal life into a maelstrom of feuds and personal abuse. In the wake of the Sacramento stunt, they worked to forge links with (and revitalize) the remnants of SNCC, but they weren’t seeking leadership from other quarters; they intended to take the initiative and provide it themselves.