Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  That a rock ballad written by an introverted white boy from Hibbing should mesmerize this would-be ghetto vanguard, forged out of poverty and violence, is a testament not only to Dylan’s art, but also to the era that shaped it. The Panthers were a political response to many of the same tides that shaped Dylan’s artistic arc: the successes and frustrations of the civil rights movement, the bankruptcy of Vietnam War liberalism, a distrust of academic or formal discourses, and a commitment to authenticity and the language of the street. They shared Dylan’s rage at being patronized, as well as his contempt for middle-class liberals who let other people get their kicks for them. They had rejected “America” as a racist entity—and aligned themselves, nominally at least, with those people of color outside the United States who were resisting the U.S. government. For them, the bards of social patriotism—not to mention the prophets of peace and love—held little appeal. In contrast, Dylan’s confrontational energy, his uncompromising assertion of his own autonomy, exerted an immediate emotional and intellectual attraction. Newton and his friends were determined to decipher his code, and make his song their own.

  The Panthers took from Dylan’s song what they needed. Newton’s reading of the lyric—characteristically blending the excitement of intellectual discovery with dogmatic self-certainty—may have been singular and obsessive, but it was also apt. Dylan’s carnivalesque satire was an anthem for outsiders who had declared themselves insiders, a trenchant riposte to an uncomprehending, exploitative gaze; it was not at all far-fetched to see America’s race- and class-divide looming behind it. After all, it was African-American culture that provided the template for the protective shell adopted by white bohemia—that shell which Dylan inserts between himself and Mr. Jones.

  The Panthers found in Dylan’s art a locus for their own rage, and an analysis of white exploitation of black experience. Sadly, there was a prophetic warning in Huey Newton’s interpretation of the lyric that he and his comrades failed to heed. Increasingly, they were too willing to play the geek, metaphorically chomping off live chicken heads for the benefit of the white media.

  Meanwhile, the artist who had vowed “I will not go down under the ground” had burrowed into a basement in the Catskills. There, for several months in mid-1967, Dylan conducted a communal musical workshop, an experimental laboratory in which melodies, lyrics, rhythms, instrumentation, and voices could be swapped and varied and reshaped according to the whims and moods of the participants. Crucially, there was no album-making agenda; no business pressure. This was a private affair. And in that privacy, Dylan and his colleagues—Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, and Levon Helm (i.e. The Band)—found freedom. The freedom to plagiarize and to improvise, to say everything or to say nothing, to leave experiments incomplete, to indulge whims. The freedom to play. This is music liberated by its sheer inconsequentiality.

  In their full glory, the Basement Tapes comprise 160 recordings of more than 100 individual songs. The vast majority are covers: forgotten pop hits from the fifties, country ballads from the thirties and forties, folk revival standards, blues, rockabilly, bluegrass, songs by John Lee Hooker, Hank Snow, Johnny Cash. It’s a rich and idiosyncratic selection of American people’s music (the sole non-American number is Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble Bee”). In among the covers are a score of Dylan originals, mingling easily in this motley company. Even The Band couldn’t be sure, when Dylan brought them an unfamiliar tune, whether it was one of his own or something retrieved from his vast interior storehouse of popular song.

  The Dylan originals on the Basement Tapes boast a startling profusion of memorable hooks and melodies. Song after song features swelling, emotion-choked choruses that are both instantly accessible and impenetrably mysterious. The verses, in contrast, are often wayward, half-told anecdotes, passing impressions, verbal fragments. The eerie disparity between the incomplete, elliptical narratives and the cosmic sense of loss and longing proved seductively and enduringly intriguing.

  For five years—the first half of his twenties—Dylan had been in the van, racing ahead, sustaining a precarious balance on the crest of a wave. But at the very moment when avant-gardism was sweeping through new cultural corridors, Dylan decided to dismount. The dandified, aggressively modern surface was replaced by a self-consciously unassuming and traditional garb. The giddiness embodied, celebrated, dissected in the songs of the mid-sixties had left him exhausted. He sought safety in a retreat to the countryside that was also a retreat in time, or more precisely, a search for timelessness. The basement sessions have the air of soothing a fever—the fever of incessant innovation that Dylan had embodied for a few eventful years. Vindictiveness and righteous indignation have been replaced by a more reflective and less judgmental temper.

  And remember when you’re out there

  Tryin’ to heal the sick

  That you must always

  First forgive them.

  In the Basement Tapes, Dylan is once again writing against the times, though also very much from within them. The songs might even be interpreted as a running critique of the ephemeral delusions of the summer of love. They are delicately balanced between absurdity and grandeur, laughter and terror, brooding fatalism and the lingering taste of freedom.

  Inevitably, this private creative moment soon became public. Basement Tape tunes were quickly covered by Peter, Paul and Mary, Manfred Mann, Flatt and Scruggs, the Byrds, and, of course, The Band themselves on Music From Big Pink. More significantly, unlicensed copies of the tapes circulated widely. Within two years the Basement Tapes had become the first mass-distributed bootleg. The laid-back, down-home sound proved a trendsetter (by no means always a positive one). What Dylan and his friends were doing in the privacy of the basement, without purpose or plan, somehow reflected the needs and mood of a broader public mesmerized and discomfited by a series of titanic social clashes.

  From the moment the Basement Tapes began seeping out into the world, their musical language struck many as distinctively and self-consciously “American.” Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson both described what they were doing in Woodstock as making “American music.” This thesis is at the core of Greil Marcus’s study of the Basement Tapes, Invisible Republic, where he argues that the tapes are an invocation and exploration of “the old, weird America” whose idiosyncratic voices had been assembled in Harry Smith’s Anthology.

  While the “Americanness” of the music is something that almost everyone claims to hear, it is exceedingly difficult to define. Specific allusions are few and far between. The cast of characters and the landscape may suggest an “invisible republic,” but perhaps less so than in the mid-sixties albums. Marcus locates the Basement Tapes’ Americanness not so much in scattered lyric references as in the musical backdrop and the tone of voice—the flat, wary, masked tone that he associates with America’s paradoxical historic development. While his book—easily the most thoughtful meditation on the meaning of Dylan’s music—goes a long way to defining this tone, it does remain elusive.

  Marcus argues that Smith’s Anthology is unified by intimations of a “perfectly, absolutely metaphorical America—an arena of rights and obligations, freedom and restraints, crime and punishment, love and death, humor and tragedy, speech and silence . . .”12 The American “arena” is here so widely drawn that almost any cultural product, from any nation, could qualify for inclusion. As so often in American writing about American popular culture, there is an America-shaped hole at the heart of the analysis. What the songs in Smith’s Anthology have in common is that they were produced, initially, by and for working-class people, and mainly outside the great urban centers. Why then should Americanness be presumed to be their primary binding agent? Are these songs really any more American than Broadway or Hollywood show tunes? Only, of course, if you redefine America as essentially a rural and small-town entity. And that mythology freezes America, removes it from history, and makes it a plaything for repression and empire.


  As Dylan himself was fleetingly aware, “America” is a selective construction; in the end, like other nation-states, the U.S. is defined more by the conflict and interaction among its constituent elements than by any lowest common denominator. The critical resort to national identity explains little and obscures the fact that many of the Anthology songs more closely resemble the folk art of foreign societies than Hollywood or Tin Pan Alley or rock ’n’ roll. The modal scales employed by Dock Boggs can be heard in Celtic, Middle Eastern or South Asian music. As Alan Lomax had noted in the fifties, when he made field recordings of Sicilian peasants, folk art was a global phenomenon, largely outside the harmonic rules that governed both western classical and commercial popular music. The American category on which Marcus, along with so many others, relies is as restrictive and reductive as the political categories against which Dylan rebelled. In the end, Marcus commits the very sin with which he charges Lomax and the popular front: he homogenizes a variegated tradition in pursuit of a political vision. That vision may be darker, more fatalistic than anything Lomax (or Harry Smith) would have endorsed, but it is, no less than theirs, the product of ideology and historical experience.

  Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that in the basement Dylan and his colleagues were trying to reestablish a relation to a tradition from which they felt severed. The songs are saturated with memory and loss, though what is being remembered or lamented is usually unspecified and unclear. Marcus argues that: . . . every American harbor[s] a sense of national ending . . . a great public event locked up in the silence of the solitary. For any American it is a defining moment; no promise is so precious as in the moment one knows it can never be kept, that it belongs to the past. In 1967, in the basement of Big Pink, this event was in the air . . . 13

  This is mythology, but it does capture the mood of the Basement Tapes. The starting point in these backward-looking songs is a sense of discontinuity. Dylan turns to the past—to those things which are or seem to be permanent—out of a fear and disgust with contemporary society and its succession of passing whims. It’s an escape from history into history. For Dylan it was clearly no longer year zero.

  We carried you in our arms

  On Independence Day,

  And now you’d throw us all aside

  And put us on our way.

  Opening with a patriotic allusion and a parental grievance, “Tears of Rage” turned “The Times They Are A-Changin’” upside down. Here, generational alienation is presented from the parent’s viewpoint:Now, I want you to know that while we watched

  You discover there was no one true

  Most ev’rybody really thought

  It was a childish thing to do

  The naively disillusioned daughter to whom the song is apparently addressed seems not to be listening. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” is a public rallying call; “Tears of Rage” is a private howl of grief. The power of the chorus—“tears of rage, tears of grief ”—lies in part in the sense that no one will hear, that no one can fathom the narrator’s tragedy. “Why must I always be the thief?” he asks plaintively. Why am I always cast in this role: the criminal, the accused, the outcast? Marcus notes that Dylan sings on this track with “an ache deep in the chest, a voice thick with care.” In “Tears of Rage,” love has been forfeited; guilt and betrayal are mutual. “Oh what kind of love is this / which goes from bad to worse?” The song is haunted by the feeling that patriotic solidarity, national identity, intergenerational bonds have all been dissolved, both sometime in the remote past and immediately, in the here and now. There’s no popular-front optimism in the America of the Basement Tapes. (Woody Guthrie is a ghost, but only one of many.) There’s no faith in progress, democracy or the people. The music certainly evokes an American heritage, but it is a darker one than the sentimental banalities of either the television jingoists or the social patriots.

  In the Basement Tapes, America is a hermetic enclosure. It’s a construction outside of which Dylan never steps. Having abandoned year zero, Dylan now sees the same grand tragedies, the same small comforts, repeated cyclically. When, a year later, an interviewer mentioned the deaths of Kennedy and King and the war, Dylan responded: “We’re talking now about things which have always happened since the beginning of time. The specific name or deed isn’t any different than that which has happened previous to this. Progress hasn’t contributed anything but changing face and changing situations of money and wealth.”14 This is the conservative, antimodernist Dylan who can be traced back to the folk revival. But the cyclical view is distinctly post-accident. It is also, as laid out by Dylan in the interview, glib. In the songs it has power because it’s not a ready-made, self-serving philosophy but an incomplete, pain-riddled vision, not a cheap answer, but a more radical posing of the question.

  The Basement Tapes are filled with the sound of young men singing like old men. Young men who had prematurely acquired a ruminative sense of a lost past. Rudderless and adrift in an unstable and violent present, they longed for the enduring, for musical modes and lyric moments beyond fashion and hype. In an age of relentless neologism, the attraction of the Basement Tapes was their timeless quality. However, as Marcus notes, “there is no nostalgia in the basement recordings; they are too cold, pained, or ridiculous for that. The mechanics of time in the music are not comforting.”15 Retreat may be a palliative, but it is not a cure.

  The freedom of the Basement Tapes allowed Dylan to indulge his appetite for nonsense to the full (Robertson described the sessions as “reefer run amok”). The playfulness, the casual, improvisatory approach (to music-making and to daily life) can be heard in the dry babble of “Tiny Montgomery”:

  Scratch your dad

  Do that bird

  Suck that pig

  And bring it on home

  In the Basement Tapes, Dylan adopts a relaxed attitude toward the grotesque, the bizarre, the inexplicable. The encounter with the surreal inanity of the mundane is more equable, more accepting than before; the jokiness is less manic, less defensive. It’s as if the artist found it a relief not to have to be serious about anything at all. He could be chirpily bucolic in “Apple Suckling Tree” and jauntily bathetic in “Please Mrs. Henry” (“I’m down on my knees, and I ain’t got a dime”). He mocks his own inertia and impotence, but with a much gentler touch than in Blonde on Blonde. In place of that album’s strangled urgency, Dylan adopts a laconic humor, a deadpan tone that speaks of resignation and self-preservation in the face of absurdity and betrayal.

  Escape and escapism are among the dominant themes of the Basement Tapes, but there is always an ambivalence—about the possibility, desirability or permanence of escape. In the mournful “Goin’ to Acapulco,” the boys sing the chorus, “goin’ to have some fun,” like men facing a prison sentence. The verse offers only a wry, self-protective renunciation:Now, if someone offers me a joke

  I just say no thanks.

  I try to tell it like it is

  And keep away from pranks.

  “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” appears to celebrate bucolic retreat: “Oh, oh, are we gonna fly / Down in the easy chair!” But on closer inspection it proves to be a curious kind of retreat. Where the chorus hymns an escape that offers both elation and safety, the verses elaborate the paradox of a static journey. In a stark reply to his own “Baby Blue,” Dylan sings:Pick up your money

  And pack up your tent

  You ain’t goin’ nowhere

  Here, shelter from the storm is found in forging a connection to something deeper and more lasting.

  Strap yourself

  To the tree with roots

  It’s not surprising that this tune became a key track on the Byrds’ influential Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the album that first ploughed the country-rock furrow. Still, it remains altogether more arch and discomfiting than the paeans to rural verities that were to become commonplace as the sixties turned into the seventies. In the last verse, the drawled seriocomic delivery moves dreamily from the frustrati
ons of the world conqueror, Genghis Khan, to what sounds like a lazy person’s revision of a freedom song:We’ll climb that hill no matter how steep

  When we come up to it

  The sense that there may be something ghastly lurking in the back-woods, a void at the heart of the retreat, fills “Too Much of Nothing.” In the plangent chorus, there seems to be a reference to T.S. Eliot’s wives (“Say hello to Valerie, say hello to Vivien”). The poet of dread-filled stasis certainly has a place in this song. The easygoing shuffle of the tune contains a subterranean foreboding:Now, too much of nothing

  Can make a man feel ill at ease . . .

  As the singer’s anxiety levels rise, so do organ and guitar in the background. The song reaches a climax of constrained panic: Now, it’s all been done before,

  It’s all been written in the book,