Dylan finished his set with “I Ain’t Got No Home,” one of Guthrie’s dust-bowl ballads of the late thirties, which borrows its tune from “This World Is Not My Home,” a Baptist hymn popularized by the Carter Family. Guthrie, who had been inclined to religious mysticism in his younger days, here turned the consolations of other-worldliness upside down. The result was a grim-minded protest against the earthly dispossession of the poor by the rich.
I was farmin’ on the shares, always I was poor
My crops I’d lay away into the banker’s store
My wife she took down and died upon the cabin floor
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.
Dylan and The Band turn the song into a keening lamentation. “Police make it hard wherever I may go,” the singer wails, as if the rich man’s cops were forever dogging his steps. Guthrie, of course, had considerably more first-hand experience of police cruelty than Dylan. Nonetheless, Guthrie’s insistence on the subservience of state agents to economic power haunts the younger man’s work, running through “Donald White” and “Hattie Carroll” to “John Wesley Harding” and “The Drifter’s Escape.” In Dylan’s songs of the mid-sixties, the theme is elaborated as a multidimensional metaphor. Singing Guthrie’s words at Carnegie Hall, as the decade nears it climax and conclusion, Dylan reminds himself and his audience of the metaphor’s foundation in an enduring social reality.
“Dylan manifests a profound awareness of the war and how it is Daffecting all of us,” wrote Jon Landau (later Bruce Springsteen’s producer) in his review of John Wesley Harding. “This doesn’t mean that I think any of the particular songs are about the war or that any of the songs are protests over it. All I mean to say is that Dylan has felt the war, that there is an awareness of it contained within the mood of the album as a whole.”22
By early 1968, the war had claimed nearly 30,000 U.S. lives. South Vietnam had been devastated by four years of brutal counterinsurgency. There were more than half a million U.S. troops in the country. The bombing was relentless. It was hard not to “feel the war.”
There is a single direct reference to Vietnam in Dylan’s work of this period. It comes in the liner notes for Bringing It All Back Home written in early 1965:a middle-aged druggist
up for district attorney. he starts screaming
at me you’re the one. you’re the one
that’s been causing all them riots over in
vietnam. immediately turns t’ a bunch of
people an’ says if elected, he’ll have me
electrocuted publicly on the next fourth
of july.
When he toured Australia in early 1966, Dylan was quizzed about his views on the war—the Australians had sent troops to back the Americans—but kept ducking the question. When a reporter finally asked if he didn’t have any feelings at all on the subject, he said, “Sure I have a feeling about war, about Vietnam. My thoughts lie in the futility of war, not the morality of it.” At a press conference later in the tour, he offered a more flippant line.
Q: What do you think about the Vietnam War?
Dylan: Nothing. It’s Australia’s war.
Q: But Americans are there.
Dylan: They’re helping the Australians.23
In February 1968, as John Wesley Harding—sans hype—moved up the album charts, the Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive. It brought them to the gates of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, but at terrible human cost. Militarily, they were soon dislodged from the cities of the south and thrown back into the countryside. Politically, the gain proved incalculable. Back in the U.S., the credibility of the war makers tumbled. Opposition widened and sharpened. Eugene McCarthy’s primary challenge to LBJ attracted substantial student support, and his unexpectedly strong showing in New Hampshire hastened the president’s decision not to seek reelection. The more radical elements, however, remained convinced that McCarthy and his ilk had little to offer. Even as some young people were taking their first tentative political steps in identifying with McCarthy, others were striding beyond liberalism. Their numbers multiplied in response to the events that toppled over one another during the following months. The assassination of Martin Luther King was followed by a wave of violent rebellion in the inner cities. The SDS-led student occupation of Columbia University in April became a foretaste of the events in Paris in May. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June fueled the sense of a society out of control, and also, for the moment, terminated the liberal Democratic option. SDS’s ranks now swelled to include 100,000 students nationwide. 24
By the summer of 1968, black and student unrest in the U.S. was clearly seen and felt to be part of a global insurgency. Whether Dylan liked it or not, in many parts of the world he was heard as the voice of dissident America. He was certainly one of the reasons why European youth, overwhelmingly hostile to the US war, did not at any stage repudiate American popular culture. In the U.S., no matter how firmly Dylan disclaimed any representative function, his voice was heard more than ever as the voice of and for the social crisis that everyone now agreed was gripping the country by the throat.
As for the man himself, he remained silent as John Wesley Harding quickly became his bestselling album yet. In July of 1968, however, he decided to grant an interview, not to the national media, but to Sing Out!, the left-wing folk magazine that had championed his early music and passionately debated his development, and was now broke. The interview was conducted by two of Dylan’s old friends from the Village, John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers and Happy Traum, the banjo and guitar player who was editing Sing Out! and living not far from Dylan in Woodstock. Cohen was deferential and seemed uncritically excited by everything Dylan said. In contrast, Traum was preoccupied with something Dylan hadn’t said. He asked his old friend: “Do you foresee a time when you’re going to have to take a position?” “No,” Dylan replied. That wasn’t good enough for Traum, and at several points in the lengthy interview he returns to the subject.
Traum: I think that every day we get closer to having to make a choice.
Dylan: How so?
Traum: I think the events of the world are getting closer to us, they’re as close as the nearest ghetto.
Dylan: Where’s the nearest ghetto?
Traum: Maybe down the block. Events are moving on a mass scale.
Dylan: What events?
Traum: War, racial problems, violence in the streets.
Dylan remains unresponsive and unimpressed, but Traum reminds him of the Columbia students and their struggle against “the masters of war.”
Traum: They’re trying to overcome the people ruling them, and they are powerful people who are running the show. They can be called the establishment, and they are the same people who make the wars, that build the missiles, that manufacture the instruments of death.
Dylan: Well, that’s just the way the world is going.
Traum: The students are trying to make it go another way.
Dylan: Well I’m for the students, of course, they’re going to be taking over the world. The people who they’re fighting are old people, old ideas. They don’t have to fight, they can sit back and wait.
Traum: The old ideas have the guns, though.
It’s when Traum turns to the specific question of the Vietnam War, and the stand that ought to be taken against it, that Dylan really bridles.
Traum: Probably the most pressing thing going on in a political sense is the war. Now I’m not saying any artist or group of artists can change the course of the war, but they still feel it their responsibility to say something.
Dylan: I know some very good artists who are for the war.
Traum: Well I’m just talking about the ones who are against it.
Dylan: That’s like what I’m talking about; it’s for or against the war. That really doesn’t exist. It’s not for or against the war. I’m speaking of a certain painter, and he’s all for the war. He’s just about ready to go over there himself. And I can compr
ehend him.
Traum: Why can’t you argue with him?
Dylan: I can see what goes into his paintings, and why should I?
Traum: I don’t understand how that relates to whether a position should be taken.
Dylan: Well, there’s nothing for us to talk about really.
Even that brush-off does not deter Traum, who insists on challenging Dylan’s position and finally elicits from him a sharp rebuke:Traum: My feeling is that with a person who is for the war and ready to go over there, I don’t think it would be possible for you and him to share the same values.
Dylan: I’ve known him a long time, he’s a gentleman and I admire him, he’s a friend of mine. People just have their views. Anyway, how do you know I’m not, as you say, for the war?25
And that was the extent of Bob Dylan’s contemporary public comment on his government’s war in Vietnam, a war that took two million lives and blighted many more.au
In Dylan’s nonposition on Vietnam, there’s an element of sheer perversity, a desire to tweak and challenge his audience and his followers, a disinclination to give people what they might expect from him. But the wariness of categories here seems more than ever a protective mask, a means of dodging the issue. What’s frustrating is not that Dylan vacillated or displayed the same confusion felt by millions of others, but that he was so reluctant to work at the problems, so lazily satisfied with facile evasions (in contrast to the demands he placed on himself as an artist). An irascible disposition to pose awkward questions is to be cherished, but those who ask awkward questions must also have the patience to listen to complex answers, and when it came to politics, Dylan, at this stage, did not. He resisted the temptation to swim with the youth tide, to accept voguish answers, but he did not resist the temptation to surrender to answerlessness. In this intellectual retreat, he was not alone, as impatience with the status quo too easily and too often translated into impatience with the intricate and long-term demands of movement building.
As a public figure and a private citizen, Dylan failed the test Vietnam posed to all Americans. He did turn away and pretend that he just didn’t see—or rather, he claimed that he saw too much, too far, too deeply, and that therefore it was impossible, inauthentic, for him to speak out. That was a posture. Out of his disdain for fashion, for simplistic dualities, out of his anxieties about getting it wrong and finding himself out of his depth, out of his fear of the cost that taking a stand might exact—not least in the public hatred it would unleash upon him—he turned away, as surely as one of the citizens in his “Clothes Line Saga.”
Nonetheless, in his songs, Dylan had already spoken of Vietnam. “John Brown,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Hard Rain,” “Masters of War,” “With God on Our Side,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Tombstone Blues,” “All Along the Watchtower”: as the decade advanced, these songs sounded more prophetic and pain-ridden.
“‘We’re a Winner’ is a song with a message,” Curtis Mayfield explained in January 1968, “a message to all, and yet basically to the black masses of people . . . things move slowly but with the movement we’re a winner.”26 The message made many radio executives uncomfortable. Nor did it sit that easily with the label, ABC, from which Mayfield and the Impressions soon decamped. Mayfield was twenty-six years old. He knew the kind of music he wanted to make, why he wanted to make it, and whom he wanted to make it with and for. In the coming years, his black-owned and managed Curtom label would release a series of densely orchestrated, socially conscious singles.
“We’re a Winner” blended a positive response to the new black nationalism with the optimism of earlier years. “There’ll be no more Uncle Tom / at last that blessed day has come.” After King’s assassination, Mayfield’s writing took on a more somber tone, and greater political realism, but remained rooted in the humanistic ideology of the civil rights movement. Like King, Curtis tried to bridge the gap between the moderates and the militants, between a necessary black pride and a more inclusive politics. He was not afraid to lecture the separatists. In 1969 the Impressions released “Mighty, Mighty, Spade and Whitey,” an appeal to a movement in crisis:Your black and white power
Is gonna be a crumbling tower
And we who stand divided
So goddamn undecided
Give this some thought
In stupidness we’ve all been caught
The harsher mood could also be heard that year in Nina Simone’s “Revolution”: “I’m here to tell you about destruction . . .” The album on which this featured also included smoking covers of three Dylan songs: “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” and “I Shall Be Released.” Soon after, Simone wrote “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” ruefully recalling her younger self and the changed circumstances that faced her successors:Young, gifted and black
How I long to know the truth
There are times when I look back
And I am haunted by my youth
Oh but my joy of today
Is that we can all be proud to say
To be young, gifted and black
Is where it’s at
Two years later, Aretha Franklin turned the song into a major hit. Simone, in the meantime, had moved to Europe, following Bob Moses into voluntary exile.
Curtis Mayfield’s first solo album, Curtis, appeared in 1970. Musically and lyrically, it was more adventurous than anything he’d attempted with the Impressions. The richly textured sound was anchored in a deep, funky pulse. And politics were everywhere. The first single from the album was the apocalyptic “If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Gonna Go.” It’s an indication of how widespread and deep-going the sense of social crisis had become in these years that it darkened the vision of even a dedicated optimist like Mayfield. Nonetheless, he remained committed to a music of uplift. The solo album also included the alternative anthem, “Miss Black America,” “Move On Up,” which recapitulates motifs from “Keep On Pushing” and “We’re a Winner,” and the remarkable “We People Who Are Darker than Blue,” a song that ought to be listened to by anyone who thinks that the only true voice of the black power era was one of aggressive nihilism. In “Keep On Keeping On,” from his 1971 follow-up album, Roots, Mayfield sings: “Everybody gather round and listen to my song, I’ve only got one. . . .” He wasn’t embarrassed to reiterate his core theme—the inspirational gospel politics of “People Get Ready,” the message of struggle sustained, survived, redeemed, over many years and indeed many generations.
Mayfield’s work was part of an efflorescence of social comment in black popular music. After so many years of hesitation and silence among the soul stars, the dam broke. Between 1968 and 1973, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, the Temptations, Bobby Womack, Stevie Wonder, Edwin Starr, and others produced a rich seam of what can only be described as protest music—songs replete with topical references and a partisan appeal—wrought to a degree of musical sophistication undreamt of by the folkies. Of course, this wasn’t music for rallies or marches; it was music to dance to.
The hip-hop artists of the nineties ransacked the records of this period; Mayfield is said to be the most sampled of all, a tribute to his fecund musical imagination. Over his grooves, a new generation laid down hard-hitting social comment laced with a revived black nationalism. But they did so in the absence of a mass movement. As a result, authenticity—“keeping it real”—remained highly problematic in the hip-hop world. For some, authenticity was salvaged through gun-toting gangsterism or misogyny. Aggressive postures were certainly more common than active involvement in black communities. But that’s what the industry wanted, and it had grown far more ruthlessly expert in appropriating and marketing the authentic than it had been in Dylan’s time.
Soon after the Sing Out! interview, a national television audience witnessed a Dylanesque nightmare come alive on the streets of Chicago. While the Democratic National Convention nominated Vice President Humphrey over antiwar candid
ate Eugene McCarthy, the riot squad grew restless. Police assaulted and teargassed demonstrators, journalists, delegates and bystanders. McCarthy had advised his own supporters to stay away, and the mobilization for the Chicago demonstration was in the hands of the Yippies, SDS, and others on the far Left. The turnout of 10,000 was relatively small, but that did not lessen the symbolic impact of the confrontation between countercultural radicals and Mayor Daley’s storm troopers. In an effort to draw young people to the protests, and to up the symbolic stakes, the Yippies spread rumors that Dylan—or the Beatles or the Stones—would be appearing. In the end, Phil Ochs found himself performing “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” in Grant Park amid flaming draft cards, encircling police, and cries of “off the pigs” from zealots and provocateurs alike. The protesters moved off toward the convention center. There, under the gaze of the television cameras, they were met by a ferocious police attack, to which they responded by chanting “the whole world is watching!”av It was five years to the day since the March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington. 27
The events in Chicago were traumatic for Ochs. “Chicago’s going to come everywhere in the western hemisphere,” he said a few months later. “We’ll all get to meet Mayor Daley in person. One way or another, Chicago was very exhilarating at the time and then very sad afterward. Because something very extraordinary died there, which was America .”28 The cover of his next album, Rehearsals for Retirement, featured a tombstone with the words Phil Ochs (American) Born El Paso Texas Died Chicago Illinois. Commercially, the album was a flop. Harassed by the FBI, appalled at the war and the violence at home, uncertain of his own role as singer and activist, he experienced the first bouts of the depressive illness that drove him to suicide in 1976. “America used to be the melting pot,” he said in 1969. “Now the pot is boiling over.” Convinced that somehow he had to find a way to speak directly to working-class Americans, he tried to reinvent himself as a Presley-style rock ’n’ roller, gold lamé suit and all. The transition was much more artificial than the one Dylan unveiled at Newport, and though it led to a similar clash with the expectations of previously devoted fans, it did not succeed in reaching a new audience. The ironically titled Greatest Hits album of 1970 made not the slightest dent in the now huge rock ’n’ roll market. On one song on the album, “Chords of Fame,” Ochs warned his successors:I can see you make the music
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