Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  But this command for clarity in extremis is wrapped up in enigma. Communication is urgent and necessary but it remains problematic. At the song’s end, apocalypse is imminent. In the Bible, the growl of the wild cat and the howl of the wind are harbingers of the end of times, the fall of Babylon (both can be found in the Book of Revelations, but then, so can almost anything). Critics are right to note the influence of the Bible in Dylan’s work of all periods, but it was only later that this interest acquired a mystical or formally religious significance. What grabbed the young Dylan about the Bible was what grabbed him about folk and blues: its archaic and resonant language, the metaphorical power that enabled it to speak of a deeper experience, a more abiding mystery, than the language of newspapers and magazines. A visitor to Woodstock found two books on Dylan’s table: a Bible and a volume of Hank Williams’s lyrics.

  Apocalyptic themes can be found in Dylan’s work from the beginning, whether it’s the nuclear apocalypse of “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” the egalitarian revolution hymned in “When The Ship Comes In” or the history-galvanized revelation in “Chimes of Freedom.” Often the language used to evoke the apocalypse is biblical, but in Dylan’s work of the sixties apocalypse is a social category: a response to the bomb, the imminence of social transformation, the impossibility of social transformation, the cataclysm of war. The wind that howls at the end of “All Along the Watchtower” is the same storm of history that blows through “When The Ship Comes In,” “Chimes of Freedom,” and “Farewell Angelina.” But here, history is no longer vindication or revelation or unbearable chaos; it’s a universal and inescapable judgment. Its action, however, takes place offstage. Its contents are unspecified. Instead, the song loops back on itself. We’re left with the joker and the thief in urgent discussion. The circularity of the song’s structure continuously brings us back to the same moment, to the fact that there’s no “way out of here.” In medias res is not only the song’s method but the state it evokes. It gives us history lived on the brink of destruction and revelation. This tautly constructed, self-contained, gnomic song vibrates with impending doom. Soon after the album’s release, Hendrix took that vibration and orchestrated into a rock Götterdämmerung. With its slouching vocal and three dramatically crafted guitar solos, his “All Along the Watchtower” may be the most insightful and original of all Dylan covers. (Dylan approved and in the seventies adopted Hendrix’s arrangement for his own performances.) Hendrix’s single rode high in the charts in late 1968 and was heard far away in Vietnam, where GIs felt they knew exactly what the song was about.

  Among Dylan’s dramatis personae, jokers and thieves are generally unheroic outcasts, impish misfits, scavengers, surviving on the margins. Here they are disembodied voices from an interior discussion. And what they are discussing is the appropriate response to an outside world of chaos, injustice, and violence. There’s another Old Testament prophecy, this one from the Book Ezekiel, that may be relevant:But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman’s hand.

  In the whispered exchange of the joker and the thief, you can hear the dilemmas of those charged with keeping the conscience of the nation—and preserving their own sanity—in time of war. As elsewhere in John Wesley Harding, the democratic-prophetic burden seems a tragic one. “Let us not talk falsely now,” but who could possibly do justice to the truth? And if someone could, would anybody listen?

  John Wesley Harding gave the impression of an artist who had replaced the phantasmagoric glimpses of Blonde on Blonde with a clear apprehension of unchanging realities. But it was only an impression. Dylan was, after all, a mere twenty-six years old, and realities were shifting around him at a baffling velocity. The album was not and could not be an old master’s final summation. It was, rather, an arrested moment, as Dylan sought to refine the lessons of previous years. Nor, for all its stylistic coherence, is the album entirely sustained. Though “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” is a favorite with many Dylanologists, it’s a contrived allegory that teases and baffles but ultimately bores. (Nonetheless, the little neighbor boy “with his guilt so well concealed” who mutters “nothing is revealed” is a clue to the rest of the album.) Similarly, “As I Went Out One Morning” fails to satisfy. There is nothing here but allegory, and a not very illuminating one at that. It’s an episode revolving around another belle dame sans merci, who is encountered when Dylan goes out “to breathe the air around Tom Paine’s.” If this alludes to the ECLC fiasco of late 1963, then its main point of interest must be that in the last line of the song it is Paine who apologizes to Dylan. (You’d think it would be the other way around.) If one discounts this bloodless exercise, the only love songs on John Wesley Harding are the two upbeat, pedal-steel-backed country numbers with which the album concludes. They’re charming and wonderfully crafted tunes, but utterly without shading. Both songs are simple statements of unconditional submission to love and family. It didn’t look like it at the time, but they were portents of artistic decline.

  In Chronicles, Dylan confirms his distaste for the late-sixties and his anguished estrangement from the era he had helped to shape:The events of the day, all the cultural mumbo jumbo were imprisoning my soul—nauseating me . . . the mounting of the barricades, the government crack-down . . . the lying noisy voices—the free love, the anti-money system movement—the whole shebang . . . didn’t want to be in that group portrait . . .

  The repulsion Dylan felt towards both sides in the polarized cultural battles of the day was shared by another artist who “didn’t want to be in that group portrait” but, retrospectively, occupies a place in its front ranks. In late 1967, Frank Zappa spent several months in the studio with his band, The Mothers of Invention, crafting his third album, We’re Only In It for the Money. The record was as dense as John Wesley Harding was spare, but equally marked by a skepticism towards the fashions of the hour. Zappa was an early apostle of west coast avant-gade rock ’n’ roll “freakery,” reveling in (and advertising) the judgment of an industry magnate who declared that his music had “no commercial potential.” Like other white guitarists of the era, he had schooled himself in the blues, but to the usual sources he added modernist classical music and an inclination to Lenny Bruce-style confrontational satire. In “Plastic People” and “Status Back Baby,” he had savaged high school mores and offered theme tunes for the most sneeringly alienated teens of the day. In Only Money, he broadened his canvas, and trained his mockery on his own audience.

  The album’s cover (conceived by Zappa and executed by Cal Schenkel) parodies the collage Peter Blake created for Sergeant Pepper. Where the Beatles had appeared in brightly colored military band uniforms, with the group’s name spelled out in a neat floral arrangement, the unprepossessing Mothers dressed in hideously frilly women’s dresses and their name was spelled out in roughly chopped fruit and vegetables. Blake’s artwork featured an array of pop culture icons, including Dylan, whose place was taken on the Only Money variant by Lee Harvey Oswald. The possibility that this was a reference to Dylan’s ECLC shocker is enhanced by the fact the executive producer of Only Money (and of Zappa’s other 60s albums) was Tom Wilson, who had produced Dylan’s work from Freewheelin’ up to and including Like A Rolling Stone. (Wilson also appears on the Only Money cover).

  Like Sergeant Pepper, Only Money is a sonically intricate studio production. It is also a frenetic attack on the ethos of the earlier album and the psychedelic clichés it spawned. Zappa’s anger is aimed simultaneously at philistine, reactionary America and at the counterculture that claimed to offer an alternative to it. The album’s title struck at the core pretense of the new rock industry—the claim to have transcended pop commercialism—as is made clear in one of the babbling monologues that wind in and out of the album’s carefully orchestrated mayhem:I can’t wait for my rock ’n’ roll record t
o come out and all the teenagers will start to buy it . . . When my royalty check comes I think I’m going to buy a Mustang . . .

  Only Money mixed Chuck Berry, Stockhausen, jazz, Hollywood soundtracks, Brecht and Weill, heavy metal guitar, jazz, doo-wop, surf music, commercial jingles, unidentifiable noises, arcane references, off-key singing, electronic distortion and driving rock rhythms. Often Zappa’s parodies of pop genres are more infectious than the originals. But he never allows his compositions to come to the expected conclusion; he’s constantly disrupting his own music, challenging and disturbing his listeners. Surveying the contemporary U.S., Zappa is mesmerized and appalled:American way

  Try and explain

  Scab of a nation

  Driven insane

  On the album’s opening track, Zappa mocks the media-promoted drop-out mythos:What’s there to live for?

  Who needs the peace crops?

  Think I’ll just drop out

  I’ll go to Frisco, buy a wig

  And sleep on Owsley’s flooras

  . . . I’m hippy and I’m trippy

  I’m a gypsy on my own

  I’ll stay a week and get the crabs

  And take a bus back home

  I’m really just a phony but forgive me cause I’m stoned

  While Zappa is nauseated by the “psychedelic dungeons popping up on every street,” he’s also enraged by the parental insensitivity that bred the countercultural reaction:Ever take a minute to show a real emotion

  In between the moisture cream and velvet facial lotion

  Ever tell your kids you’re glad that they can think

  Ever say you loved ’em? Ever let ’em watch you drink?

  Ever wonder why your daughter looked so sad?

  It’s such a drag to have to love a plastic mom and dad

  “All your children are poor unfortunate victims of systems beyond their control,” he declares, “a plague upon your ignorance and the gray despair of your ugly life.” But for Zappa, the “flower punks” pose no threat to mainstream society because they mirror its sickness: “Hey punk, where you going with those beads around your neck? / I’m goin’ to the shrink so he can help me be a nervous wreck.” In “Absolutely Free,” he parodies drug anthems like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds;” the title deliberately blurs the line separating an advertising slogan from a statement of personal liberation. The all-male chorus moans “freedom, freedom,” a demand that for Zappa has become merely an echo of brain-dead consumerism. And the “love ethic” of the counterculture is portrayed as yet another corporate ruse to exploit unthinking young people—one which leaves them dangerously ill-equipped to deal with the rage of a violent society:I’ll buy some beads . . . some feathers and bells and a book of Indian lore . . . I will ask the chamber of commerce how to get to Haight Street and smoke an awful lot of dope. I will dance around barefoot . . . I will love everyone, I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street . . .

  Like Dylan, Zappa viewed the dreams of freedom celebrated over the airwaves and in the underground press as facile self-indulgence. He saw consumerism and conformity recreated under the guise of rebellion. In John Wesley Harding, Dylan stepped back from the turmoil of the era and tried to fix its dilemmas through a long lens. In Only Money, Zappa plunges the listener into the maelstrom. The album was teen pop turned inside out, subversion subverted. Zappa’s bohemian anti-bohemianism was extremist by nature, but it could not be sustained, and his achievements in the wake of Only Money were fitful. He was and remained a libertarian, a devotee of individual freedom who was perpetually irritated at the uses to which individuals put that freedom. In the seventies and eighties, he descended too often into lazy pastiche and crass sexism. Still, amid the cynicism of Only Money, he produced a song of gentle charm that challenged the counterculture to practice what it preached:There will come a time when everybody who is

  lonely will be free

  To sing and dance and love

  There will come a time when every evil that we

  know will be an evil

  That we can rise above

  Who cares if hair is long or short or sprayed or

  partly gray

  We know that hair ain’t where it’s at

  There will come a time when you won’t even be

  ashamed if you are fat!

  The millennial promises of The Times They Are A-Changin’ continued to haunt even those who sought to resist them.

  On January 20, 1968, Woody Guthrie’s friends and followers gathered in Carnegie Hall to celebrate his legacy and raise funds to combat the disease that killed him. The benefit concert had been catapulted into the headlines by the announcement that Bob Dylan—who had not appeared in public since his motorcycle accident—would be among the performers.

  For Dylan, it was a reunion with old associates from the folk scene: Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Jack Elliott, Odetta, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton. Interwoven with their performances of Guthrie classics was a prose narrative written by one-time Almanac Singer Millard Lampell and recited by leftist actors Robert Ryan and Will Geer—the latter had worked and traveled with Guthrie in the thirties and forties, and makes an appearance in Bound for Glory.at Dylan paid homage to his early role model in his own manner. He brought The Band with him to Carnegie Hall, and together they played three Guthrie numbers in a highly unorthodox style—a rough-edged rockabilly with soulful harmonies and aggressively jerky guitar solos. It was the ensemble’s only public performance in anything like the mode of the Basement Tapes—a dramatic contrast with the cutting-edge sound that had characterized their last public appearances. It was still electric and it still rocked, but in place of the immediacy and modernity of 1966 was a package that felt remote, plangent, archaic. Dylan’s singing is sometimes shaky, as if he’s still in the Catskill basement conducting one of his meandering private meditations on a favorite old tune. But overall, it’s a gutsy and original performance, treating the Guthrie originals with dignity but not reverence, and notable, not least, for Dylan’s choice of songs.

  Having long since mastered Guthrie’s wide-ranging repertoire, Dylan could have selected any number of Woody’s more playful or personal compositions, but alighted instead on three songs that were explicitly political in intent and rooted in American history. He opened with a raucously upbeat version of “The Grand Coulee Dam,” one of the Columbia River songs Guthrie wrote in early 1941, when the Bonneville Power Administration brought him up to the Pacific Northwest to sing the praises of the federally funded hydroelectric project—and counteract the hostile propaganda of the big private power companies. This song celebrates both the American landscape and the intervention of the federal government in that landscape. It evokes the power and majesty of the “that King Columbia River” as it “comes a-roaring down the canyon to meet the salty tide” and the perils humans have faced “In the misty crystal glitter of that wild and windward spray” (which sounds like a phrase from “Mr. Tambourine Man”). Dylan shouts out the lines as if he was trying to be heard above the rush of the great waters. He seems to relish their untameable restlessness. But he throws himself equally into the following verses, explaining how “Uncle Sam took up the notion in the year of thirty three” to harness the river’s energy for “the factory and the farmer and for all of you and me” (and to help build “a flying fortress to blast for Uncle Sam”).

  There’s no tension here between nature and human society. The singer addresses the Columbia like a brother: “River, while you’re rolling you can do some work for me.” These days, mega-dams like the Grand Coulee are criticized for their ecological and social costs, and protest singers in the third-world countries where these dams are now built are more likely to condemn than to praise them. Of course, the giant private companies, having found World Bank-sponsored big dam projects highly lucrative, have also changed their tune. What seems to fire Dylan in the Guthrie song is its spirit of celebration, its happy merger of lyrical pantheism and social patriotism. Its Ne
w-Deal optimism may be worlds apart from his own political temper at this moment but Dylan refuses to mock or undermine the song; he honors Guthrie by plunging into it with unsentimental vigor.

  Dylan’s next choice was “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,” a paean to FDR that Guthrie wrote after the president’s death in 1945. It’s a one-dimensional eulogy of the rich kid crippled by polio who became the champion of the poor, the enemy of the “money-changin’ racket boys,” and, fitfully, the great hope of the popular front. Dylan tactfully omitted the telltale verses about the Allies’ wartime conferences at Yalta and Tehran:He didn’t like Churchill very much . . .

  He said he didn’t like DeGaulle or Chiang Kai-Shek

  Shook hands with Joseph Stalin, says: “There’s a

  man I like!”

  As Dylan and The Band recreated it in 1968, the song is less a tribute to a lost political leader than a mournful memorial of a vanished era and ethos. They drag out the refrain, “This world was lucky to see him born,” with a quivering, weary bewilderment, as if facing up to the blank impossibility of such heroes reappearing in their own times.