But when there’s too much of nothing,
Nobody should look.
Dylan is overwhelmed by the totality of the past, the impossibility of the genuinely new. It seems that in stasis there is no peace. (It’s also bad for the character: Too much of nothing “can turn a man into a liar” and “just makes a fella mean.”) The same sense of unease is given comic treatment in the delightfully indecipherable “The Mighty Quinn, (Quinn The Eskimo).”
Nobody can get no sleep,
There’s someone on ev’ryone’s toes
But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here,
Ev’rybody’s gonna wanna doze
The escape theme is turned around again in “Nothing Was Delivered,” where the singer appears to be keeping someone hostage. The lyric could be addressed to anyone who has promised something and failed to deliver it (politicians, drug-dealers, advertisers, Dylan himself ). Over the Fats Domino-style piano, the singer flatly, soberly explains that the time for paying debts has come.
Now you must provide some answers
For what you sell has not been received,
And the sooner you come up with them,
The sooner you can leave.
Prices have to be paid, promises redeemed, and no one is going anywhere until they are. As in a number of the Basement Tapes, there is a dramatic contrast between the menacing deadpan verse and the full-throated down-home chorus.
Nothing is better, nothing is best,
Take care of yourself and get plenty of rest.
The longing for peace, community, and simple fellow-feeling was common ground with the summer of love. But Dylan did not share the shallow optimism of the flower children, or their embrace of an ethic of irresponsibility, or the hopes of imminent transformation that in some ways they shared with the angry radicals. He looks at human affairs here from a safe distance, but remains troubled by them. The sense of resignation is never complete in any of these songs. They are the songs of a man at rest, but uneasily so.
The song titled “Clothes Line Saga” on the official Basement Tapes album was originally labeled “Answer to Ode.” In late August, the Beatles “All You Need Is Love” was knocked off the number-one spot in the charts by a curious song by the unknown Bobbie Gentry, “Ode to Billie Joe.” Gentry was born in Choctaw County, Mississippi, not far from Greenwood, and her song opens on a landscape familiar to Dylan:It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day
I was out choppin’ cotton and my brother was balin’ hay
And at dinner time we stopped and we walked back to the house to eat
And mama hollered at the back door “y’all remember to wipe your feet”
The pointless precision of the date lends the song a documentary feel. In Dylan’s reply, he adopts the same technique:It was January the thirtieth
And everybody was feelin’ fine.
The dogs were barking, a neighbor passed,
Mama, of course, she said, “Hi!”
Dylan recognized in the Gentry song the use of the vocal mask that gives nothing away, that only hints at ominous truths. The surface banality stands in piquant contrast to a hidden tragedy. Indeed, the song was a hit partly because it implied that our problems, social and personal, were more troubling than we liked to admit. In Dylan, the banality itself becomes sinister; the mask becomes a trap. The uncanny normalcy paraded before us by the narrator is straight out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—accurate in all details, yet utterly lifeless.
In Gentry’s song, the secret sore weeping under the surface of daily routine is that “Billy Joe Mcallister jumped off the Tallahatchie bridge.” The song only hints at why this happened and how the narrator was involved (an unwanted pregnancy is the usual interpretation). It’s a private tragedy, a hidden disgrace. In Dylan’s reply, the “secret” that troubles the placid surface of daily routine is a highly public one:“Have you heard the news?” he said, with a grin,
“The Vice-President’s gone mad!”
“Where?” “Downtown.” “When?” “Last night.”
“Hmm, say, that’s too bad!”
“Well, there’s nothin’ we can do about it,” said the neighbor,
“It’s just somethin’ we’re gonna have to forget.”
“Yes, I guess so,” said Ma,
Then she asked me if the clothes was still wet.
The vice president in 1967 was Hubert Humphrey, the Minnesota politician whose liberal credentials had been eroded by his role in the exclusion of the MFDP at Atlantic City and by his support for the Vietnam War. It’s inconceivable that Dylan did not have him in mind. In addition, the “Vice-President” serves as one of Dylan’s generic authority figures, like the “blind commissioner,” the “drunken politicians” and the senators who pop up in the mid-sixties songs; only now his antics elicit no disbelief. There is no struggle against futility. And that is the problem. In “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Dylan asked: how can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see? In “Clothes Line Saga,” he tells a tale of those who see and hear but still turn away, their senses blighted by the continuum of normalcy. The song meanders to a close by way of a line that is the antithesis of every sentiment expressed by Dylan since he’d first picked up a guitar: “Well, I just do what I’m told.” At which point, the singer returns to the family house and shuts “all the doors.”
It was a bleak social vision against the fevered backdrop of the summer of ’67. In this chilling tale of imperturbable American complacency, and in his intuitive sense that most Americans remained disengaged from the unfolding horrors of the age, Dylan proved more acutely aware of the real challenges facing the insurgents than many of those leading the charge. In “Clothes Line Saga,” America escapes behind a closed door, and responds to the madness and betrayals of public life by shutting them out, citing impotence and cultivating amnesia.
Among the more self-conscious pieces of Americana on the tapes is “Down In the Flood,” whose starting point is the blues response to the Mississippi’s menacing habit of periodically breaching its banks. The harrowing flood of 1927, which displaced hundreds of thousands of African-Americans, inspired three songs Dylan knew well: Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues,” Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Rising High Water Blues,” and Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere.” In all of them, the singer confronts a force of nature, a community is overwhelmed. “Down in the Flood”’s invocation of a collective tragedy takes us back to Dylan’s earliest work, not least his songs about the bomb. But the body of the song is preoccupied with unnamed individuals who seem to be in dispute about the desirability, practicality, and fairness of making a bid to escape the rising waters. As in many of the Basement Tapes, the mythic is offset by the anti-mythic. In the enigmatic chorus only one fact is salient: sometimes choices are imposed and prove to be irrevocable.
Oh mama, ain’t you gonna miss your best friend now?
Yes, you’re gonna have to find yourself
Another best friend, somehow.
Here natural disaster serves as a metaphor for social disorientation, collective memory fragments—events are filtered through a haze, experienced as both immediate and remote. For all their jokiness and deliberate inconsequence, the Basement Tapes are permeated by a sense that loss is real, that not “everything can be replaced,” “life is brief,” “lost time is not found again.”
“Take care of all your memories”
Said my friend Mick
“For you cannot relive them . . .”
In the past, Dylan had spoken glibly about his own mortality, as a kind of justification for doing his own thing. The accident and the violent flux of the times seem to have shifted his mood. In the Basement Tapes, there’s an echoing sorrow, a shrouded intensity that feels like the brooding underside of all the extreme manifestations of the era.
In the soaring chorus of “This Wheel’s On Fire,” the out-of-control driver races toward his doom in an ecstasy of rock ’n’ roll. As he detaches himself from the careen
ing imminence of the violent present, he reaches into the past. Each verse begins and ends with the phrase, “If your memory serves you well.” But what is being summoned to memory? Only the plan to meet again, fragments of past interaction, a few bright, palpable, inexplicable details (“I was goin’ to confiscate your lace / and wrap it up in a sailor’s knot / and hide it in your case”) flashing out from a general murkiness.
And after ev’ry plan had failed
And there was nothing more to tell,
You knew that we would meet again,
If your mem’ry served you well.
It was little more than a year since the same artist had insisted “please don’t let on that you knew me when.” The man who was so eager to outgrow the past, who sloughed off identities and relationships with a change in the season, and who had celebrated that freedom in song, is now prophetically intoning: “you knew that we would meet again”—and it doesn’t matter whether that’s in the here or the hereafter. The past surrounds us, clings to us, but we only see it and know it when it’s too late.
The same frail balance between the yearning for freedom and a sense of predestined tragedy swells up inside “I Shall Be Released,” the fragmentary Basement Tape destined to become a global standard. Repeated renditions have made the song robustly anthemic, but in its original incarnation it’s sung by Dylan and Richard Manuel with a tremulous frailty, as if the singing were an effort to keep fear and exhaustion at bay. It’s a song of simplicity and beauty that manages to be immensely evocative in its short span. Somehow its sheer sketchiness conjures up the poignancy of the desire for release and the immutable reality of confinement. It echoes with anonymous injustices committed through eons. While Dylan brings us close to the nameless, faceless narrator, at the same time he wraps this immediacy in a longer view, a cyclical view of freedom and incarceration that seems to take in the course of a whole lifetime. The result reinforces the sense that here, as elsewhere in the Basement Tapes, the yearning for freedom is also a yearning for oblivion, for death, for immersion in the setting sun.
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east.
Any day now, any day now,
I shall be released.
The first person narrator speaks from a prison cell. Prison—and more broadly the cruelty of the criminal justice system—is a leitmotif in Dylan’s work, from “The Ballad of Donald White,” through “The Walls of Red Wing,” “Hattie Carroll,” “Percy’s Song” (“He ain’t no criminal / And his crime it is none, / What happened to him / Could happen to anyone”), “Seven Curses,” “Chimes of Freedom,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” and beyond. On one level, “I Shall Be Released” is a prisoner’s lament. Certainly, many who’ve found themselves incarcerated have heard it and sung it that way.an But prison here is also, of course, a metaphor—for an oppressive social order or for corporeal life itself. It was precisely this kind of flexibility of metaphor than made it possible to turn gospel songs into freedom songs. In this composition, Dylan takes the hunger for deliverance that fills both the gospels and the freedom songs and detaches it from religious or political teleology.
They say ev’ry man needs protection,
They say ev’ry man must fall.
We are all weak and fallible; we all aspire to some greater freedom, some less oppressive daily existence. In the third and final verse, the prisoner discovers that in his loneliness he is not alone:Standing next to me in this lonely crowd,
Is a man who swears he’s not to blame.
All day long I hear him shout so loud,
Crying out that he was framed.ao
When David Riesman’s sociological study of the modern American character, The Lonely Crowd, appeared in 1950 it became a bestseller and put its author on the cover of Time magazine. The phrase “the lonely crowd” was, in fact, invented by the publishers, and does not appear in the book, but its paradox captured the growing unease about the fate of the individual in a mass society. For Dylan’s purposes, all that mattered was the title, not the book. The members of the “lonely crowd” are locked up in individual cells, and yet they share the same grievances and the same aspirations, and live in the same prison. The wistful reaching for the ineffable that animated “Blowin’ in the Wind” is very much at the core of “I Shall Be Released,” as in other Basement Tapes, but it’s been inverted. The indefinitely hopeful has given way to the indefinitely sorrowful. The historical opportunity that could be plucked out of the wind has been spent, and is now a thing of the past—haunting the present. In his earlier guises, Dylan had made ancient modes (folk, blues) sound contemporary; here he made contemporary feelings and experiences sound ancient.
Throughout 1967, Phil Ochs was a familiar figure at antiwar rallies. Three years after “Talking Vietnam,” he’d composed a string of songs about the war—“White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land,” “We Seek No Wider War,” “Cops of the World”—and was more preoccupied than ever by American militarism. Like nearly everyone else in the movement, however, he was touched by the psychedelic moment. That year he released Pleasures of the Harbor, using backing musicians, studio effects, and more personal and archly poetic material. “In such an ugly time the true protest is beauty,” he wrote in the liner notes. Yet Ochs was impatient with the counterculture. In “Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends” he jibed at the new self-indulgence.
Smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer,
But a friend of ours was captured and they gave him thirty years
Maybe we should raise our voices, ask somebody why
But demonstrations are a drag, besides we’re much too high
Later in 1967, Ochs unveiled his newest antiwar composition, “The War is Over,” a song that reflects the febrile mixture of fantasy and despair that characterized the movement during this period. It was inspired by a suggestion Allen Ginsberg had made to a reporter from the Los Angeles Free Press—that the paper should do what he’d done in “Wichita Vortex Sutra”: declare that the war was over. Ochs even staged his own War Is Over rally in New York City’s Central Park that autumn. All this irritated the veteran Trotskyist and tireless antiwar organizer, Fred Halstead: “It made me angry at the time because what we all needed in those days was some inspiration to hold on and reach out, not advice on how to put the problem out of mind. There was already too much of that in a variety of forms.”16 Ginsberg defended his chosen tactic. The aim was to “make a magic phrase which will stick in people’s consciousnesses like a rock, just as the phrase domino theory—another phrase that stuck in people’s consciousnesses like a rock—got them all confused. So once somebody gets up and says it, that precipitates the awareness, the same awareness of the same desire to end the war, in lots of other people . . .”17
Ginsberg’s aim was to disturb the complacency that allowed Americans to live with the ongoing atrocity of the war. Ochs’s song was more ambivalent. It opens with the ghostly image of “silent soldiers on a silver screen” accompanied by fifes and drums and fanfares, the accoutrements of weaponized patriotism. By the time it reaches its end, the martial tempo has been exposed as a death march:. . . So do your duty, boys, and join with pride
Serve your country in her suicide
Find the flags so you can wave good-bye
But just before the end even treason might be worth a try
This country is too young to die . . .
Ochs still cloaked his call for “treason” in the language of social patriotism, but his desperation was growing. The militarized forward motion of the song’s musical setting suggests the impersonal relentless-ness of the war. It lambastes not only its cruelty and waste, but our own ability to live with it. Even protest has become a ritual: Angry artists painting angry signs
Use their vision just to blind the blind
Poisoned players of a grizzly game
One is guilty and the other gets to point the blame
Pardon me if I refrain<
br />
How to break through this sterile charade? If the battle against the warmongers was fought out in our own consciousness, as not only Dylan but many others at the time had suggested, then perhaps it could be won there as well. Marx turned Hegel on his head to found dialectical materialism; in the hallucinatory year of 1967, there seemed plenty of people keen to turn Marx himself on his head, and declare that consciousness determines being. In October, thousands of young people surrounded the Pentagon in a widely publicized collective effort to “levitate” the physical embodiment of the war machine. The final lines of “The War Is Over” indicate that, for Ochs, this is clutching at straws, though he also seems to be saying that all we have to clutch at is straws.
The gypsy fortune teller told me that we’d been deceived
You only are what you believe
I believe the war is over
It’s over, it’s over
The refrain is less an exercise in wishful thinking or some Zen mastery of matter by mind than an anguished lament over the widening gulf between desire and reality.ap
In October and November 1967, Dylan visited Nashville to record twelve new songs. None of them had been played in the basement. None of them had choruses. And none of them had guitar solos.
When John Wesley Harding was released in early 1968, it stood in stark contrast to current trends. In place of the multilayered, unabashedly electrified sound that had swept all before it in recent years, Dylan offered an austere, stripped-down alternative, a minimalist ensemble of bass, drums, and acoustic guitar, punctuated by low-key harmonica interludes. Even the monochrome cover seemed a rebuke to the color-spattered fashions of the day.aq In the songwriting, there was a new economy. It was as if Dylan had moved beyond the prolix romanticism of Blonde on Blonde into a severe classicism. The imagery was pared back. The florid and extraneous were excised. For the first and only time in his career, Dylan completed most of the lyrics before starting work on the tunes. As he made clear in interviews at the time, he was consciously trying to write with restraint and precision. “There’s no hole in any of the stanzas. There’s no blank filler. Each line has something.” Allen Ginsberg, with whom Dylan discussed the change of style, confirmed, “There was to be no wasted language, no wasted breath. All the imagery was to be functional rather than ornamental.”18
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