Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  ’Cause you carry a guitar

  God help the troubadour

  Who tries to be a star

  So play the chords of love, my friend

  Play the chords of pain

  If you want to keep your song,

  Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t play the chords of fame

  Perhaps the singer-songwriter niche was never the best showcase for Ochs’s talents and commitments. He might have flourished in musical theater, if there had been a musical theater sufficiently vibrant and radical to accommodate him.

  In August 1968, the Beatles told their fans just what they thought about the latest ideological fashion in “Revolution,” a put-down of violent political posturing (with typical sixties volatility, John Lennon would soon recant and recast the message). The underground press cried Judas, but Irwin Silber asked. “Whoever said the Beatles were revolutionaries in the first place? The record companies, the press agents, the promoters, the managers—the whole greedy crew of artful dodgers who figure you can peddle revolution along with soap and cornflakes and ass and anything else that can turn over a dollar.”29

  In November 1968, Columbia Records (Dylan’s label) ran a series of full-page advertisements in the underground press—then reaching hundreds of thousands of potential customers—showing long-haired protesters locked in a police cell, surrounded by placards displaying the slogans Music is Love, Grab Hold, and Wake Up. Above the image ran the bold strap: But the Man Can’t Bust our Music. The small text explained: “the establishment’s against adventure and the arousing experience that comes with today’s music” but “the man can’t stop you from listening.”30

  The Columbia campaign assumed that the best way to sell the new music was to emphasize its oppositional nature, as long as one was careful not to mention anything specific that people might be opposed to (notably the war). Other large corporations followed suit. But some six months later, Columbia and the rest cancelled the campaign and withdrew their advertising from the underground press. They claimed that they had been embarrassed by the tasteless and prurient material that often surrounded their ads. They may also have been influenced by an FBI memo that warned that the ads “appear to be giving active aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States.”31 In any case, they set out to find other means of reaching record-buying kids.

  Music From Big Pink, The Band’s evocative debut album, was released in mid-1968. Initially, the group attracted attention because of the link with Dylan: they had backed him in 1966, their album included three previously unreleased Dylan songs (Basement Tapes masterpieces “I Shall Be Released,” “Tears Of Rage,” and “This Wheel’s On Fire”), and its cover was graced with a charming fauxnaif painting by the master himself. But in Music From Big Pink, and even more in their second album, titled simply The Band (released in October 1969), this ensemble of idiosyncratic talents created a distinctive sound-world that exercised its own powerful appeal.

  The Band’s special mission was to explore the terrain first glimpsed in the Basement Tapes. In their self-presentation and musical style they were consciously anti-psychedelic; they were counter-countercultural—but never in such a way that anyone would confuse them with the dominant culture itself. They were anything but unhip.

  They found authenticity in a lost America of toil and sweat, in the regional, the handmade, the eccentric. Far from rejecting the past, they embraced it, as if it held the only safety and salvation. Their Americana—and it really doesn’t matter that four of the five were Canadian—was not the familiar stuff of social patriotism. No national unity, no collective inheritance is celebrated here; instead, we are offered portraits of individuals prey to huge, uncontrollable forces and invocations of fleeting moments of peace and camaraderie.

  “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” from the second album, is one of the very few pop songs of this period even to mention organized labor (“I work for the union . . .”). However, it’s a decidedly ambivalent treatment of the subject. The song’s story line is obscure, but the meaning, as Greil Marcus said, is in the singing: “just listen to the worry in his voice.” What’s realized so potently in this song is the rising anxiety of an individual facing impending catastrophe. Despite its promises (“your hard times are about to end”), the union, it seems, cannot tame nature or fate.

  The second album also included a song that was to become a standard: “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” How strange that this lament for the fall of the Confederacy should touch and stir the white rock ’n’ roll audience in 1969—only a few years after television screens had been filled with images from Birmingham and Selma. Stranger still that, in 1971, the song should supply Joan Baez with her biggest commercial success.

  Robertson has explained that the song was inspired by a conversation with Levon Helm’s father, and his salutation, “the South shall rise again.” This unexpected resuscitation of the Confederacy springs from The Band’s fascination with the “real America,” the America that had not been slicked down and brightly packaged. It reflected their deliberately counter-fashionable sympathy with the redneck nation sneered at by students and intellectuals. But its deeper matter, and its appeal, went beyond that. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is a lamentation that seems to well up from deep inside a defeated nation. It is a song about the curse of war and especially the price that working-class people always pay for war. It is haunted by that sense of historical loss Greil Marcus speaks of. It resounds with echoes of the Vietnam War.

  Chicago and the other dramatic events in America that year were part of a global chain reaction. Just as in the U.S., insurgencies had been gestating elsewhere, and now—under the overarching impact of the struggle between the U.S. and Vietnam—they exploded into the open. Britain, Germany, and Japan all witnessed large antiwar demonstrations, student strikes and occupations, and street battles between protesters and police. In France and Italy, there was all that and more—including industrial action on a scale not seen in decades. Student uprisings played a role in changing governments in both Pakistan and Belgium. In Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring was crushed by the Soviet invasion. Maoist youth launched the Naxalite rebellion in India. And in Mexico City, the Olympic games were preceded by the massacre of 300 student protesters by the police and army.

  In that context, revolutionary rhetoric seemed less far-fetched than at any time since before World War II. “The Times They Are A- Changin’” was no longer a wistful prophecy but an accurate description of a global reality. Or was it? In the U.S. presidential election that autumn, the prowar Nixon beat the prowar Humphrey by a narrow margin, with the even more prowar Wallace picking up 13 percent of the popular vote. And most of those who voted for either Humphrey or Nixon agreed with Wallace that the protesters in Chicago didn’t get half what they deserved. But while the electoral landscape seemed to defy the Left’s assumptions of the day, it did not confirm the Right’s either. In Arkansas, for example, voters backed Wallace for president, liberal Republican Winthrop Rockefeller for governor, and reelected to the Senate one of the most persistent and high-profile critics of U.S. foreign policy, William Fulbright. People were in motion, and one of the errors of the Left was to construct too great a political and cultural gap between the enlightened ones (themselves) and the rest of the population, who were never merely the uniform “silent majority” Nixon and Agnew claimed to champion. Dylan had articulated this “them and us” dichotomy as fiercely as anyone. In John Wesley Harding, even as it was becoming the dominant psychology on the Left and the counterculture, he had drawn back from it. Others did not.

  The whole raison d’être of the New Left had been exposed as a lot of hot air, that was demoralizing. I mean, these kids thought they were going to change the world, they really did. They were profoundly deluded. I used to talk to them, to the hippies, yippies. I understood their mentality as well as anyone could. But things like Altamont, things like Kent State, the election of Richard Nixon, the fact that the war just kept
going on and on and on, and nothing they did could stop it.

  —Dave Van Ronk

  The SDS national convention held in Chicago in June 1969 was to be the organization’s last. Two thousand delegates attended. They had all seen the special issue of New Left Notes with its banner headline YOU DON’T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO KNOW WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS, a quote from Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Underneath the headline was a lengthy statement drawn up by individuals from the SDS national leadership and the Columbia chapter, which had risen to prominence as a result of the previous year’s occupation. This statement argued that in the context of the increasingly bloody worldwide struggle against imperialism “white mother country radicals” had to take a new step. If they were really to be of assistance to the Vietnamese and the black liberation struggle—epitomized for SDS by the Black Panthers—they had to become “revolutionaries.” And to them, being a revolutionary was about engaging in direct physical confrontation with the power of the state and the war machine.

  The Weathermen, as the supporters of the statement became known, spurned alliances with “reformists” (anyone to their right) and labor unions, presumed to be irredeemably corrupted by racism and imperialism. Instead, they looked to “youth” as the only constituency within white America that could or would initiate far-reaching change. Youth, even middle-class youth, had little investment in the capitalist system, which was experienced as alien and repressive. The evidence for this was to be found in the manifest radicalization of ever-growing swathes of young people (not only college students) and above all in the phenomenal spread of the counterculture.

  For the Weathermen, Dylan was a handy weapon in the factional battle that had preoccupied them for the last year. In early 1968, a small Marxist-Leninist outfit called Progressive Labor had entered SDS—thanks to its antiauthoritarian deletion of the old social democratic proscription of Communists. PL espoused a stridently class-reductionist style of Marxism, opposed the new black nationalism, advocated a “worker-student alliance,” disparaged the counterculture, and insisted that its male members keep their hair short and wear “straight” clothes. You wouldn’t have thought they would make headway in SDS, with its individualist ethos and ideological agnosticism. But it was precisely those qualities that made SDS easy prey to PL’s organizational discipline and its members’ apparent facility—and dauntingly absolute certainty—in deploying Marxist categories.

  So the Weathermen used Dylan to show up PL’s unhipness, to mock its vanguardism, and to suggest that it was all talk and no action. But they also tried to fight PL with its own weapons—indulging in Leninist jargon in a manner that SDS’s first generation and their Prairie Power successors would have found grotesque. Alongside Dylan they quoted Lin Piao (“Long Live the Victory of the People’s War”). In coming out for “revolutionary communism” and a strategy of violent confrontation they bid farewell to the Port Huron Statement and indeed to much that had made SDS distinctive and attractive.32

  Behind the crisis in SDS lay the realities, both heady and harsh, of the growing radicalization of youth and the growing frustration at the movement’s inability to stop the war. According to Gallup, in the spring of 1968, 8 percent of students called themselves “radical or far left” (a 100 percent increase over the previous year); 16 percent agreed with the statement “the war in Vietnam is pure imperialism” (a year later, that would rise to an astonishing 41 percent). Sixty-nine percent classified themselves as “doves.” Fortune revealed that half of all college students thought the U.S. was a “sick” society.33

  In June 1969, SDS seemed to be at the height of its resonance with youth. But as a result of the experiences of the decade now coming to an end, the organization remained unstable. It was two years since the radicals had turned “from protest to resistance.” While the former had continued to expand the latter had remained mainly symbolic—because physically stopping the war machine was beyond the capacity of the movement, and way beyond anything organized labor was prepared to contemplate. At the same time, the Nixon administration was harassing dissidents and taking repressive measures that convinced some that “fascism” was at hand. Seven years after Port Huron, the SDS leaders in the Weather faction were still looking for a way to move outside the student ghetto, still looking for a force that could rise to the imminent moral challenge, still uncomfortable with their comfortableness. In battling PL, they saw themselves as the true inheritors of the SDS lineage, and their claim was a reasonable one.

  Coupled with the strident but sketchy “anti-imperialist” analysis was the familiar discourse of authenticity. The call to direct action and personal transformation (not least rejection of the comforts of middle-class existence), however changed in tone, was an elaboration on the early emphases of the civil rights and peace movements, as was the notion that movements of opposition should somehow prefigure the society they were trying to build. And their belief that where vanguards led others would surely follow derived from the experience of the last nine years, during which, from Greensboro on, small numbers of brave people had been shown to be forerunners of great changes.

  Like Dylan at the ECLC dinner, the Weathermen had decided that any investment in the social order disarmed its opponents. They wanted to expose themselves to the dangers from which they were protected—as students, as intellectuals, as putative members of the middle class, as Americans—and to test just how much their beliefs and their politics really meant to them. Nonviolence had been sold to them as both principle and tactic—so they rejected it as both principle and tactic. The power of SNCC’s commitment to direct action in the South was transmuted into a worship of action, including violent action, for its own sake, and a sneering insistence that nothing else was authentic. The liberal utopianism of the early sixties had not been abandoned so much as it had turned darkly apocalyptic. The gentle political urgency of “Blowin’ in the Wind” had been given a savage twist.

  What made Weather and much of the late-sixties Left different from their SDS forebears was their adoption of the jargon of Leninism and their uncritical devotion to foreign revolutions. This desperate reaching out to forces and ideas seen to lie beyond America’s borders has earned the undying ire and ridicule of many. But even in this, the Weathermen continued to reflect the distinctiveness of the American sixties. America remained exceptional—only now, that exceptionalism was defined as a national barbarism and sickness. Apart from seeking the approval of the Vietnamese and the Cubans, there was little interest in dialogue with the Left in other societies. As far as the Weathermen were concerned, no one really had anything to teach them, including the oppressed in whose name they were prepared to destroy and be destroyed. In their anti-intellectualism, the Weathermen were at their most distinctively American, and quite at odds with the global culture of the Left, even at that time. Their internationalism could express itself only as a negation, not least of the rhetoric of social patriotism, which, for all of them, still formed an emotional hinterland. In their prostration before the Panthers or the Vietcong, the white radicals professed revolutionary humility and self-abnegation; but there was more than a touch of arrogance and self-promotion in their posturing. They believed they were the youth leaders the media said they were. They accepted the media’s narrative of what had been happening in America over the last decade—a narrative comprised of symbolic images, dramatic confrontations, and charismatic leaders. And they devised their strategy accordingly.

  For all their folly, the Weathermen—though never numbering more than a few hundred—did embody a more widespread mood, which was why people followed their antics with such fascination, and why many young people identified with them without approving of their actions or having the least intention of following their example. “Weatherman is a vanguard floating free of a mass base,” Kopkind observed. “But there’s more to it than that. What appeal Weatherman has comes in part from its integration of the two basic streams of the movement of the sixties—political mobilizat
ion and personal liberation.”34

  I didn’t like country music either. . . . All the wildness and weirdness had gone out of country music. . . .

  —Chronicles, Volume I

  One of the most bizarre and unexpected apparitions in a year when public life took on an increasing surreal quality was the re-emergence of Bob Dylan in the spring of 1969 in the guise of a crooning country and western singer. Since the release of John Wesley Harding in early 1968, his admirers had wondered how the master would respond to the tumultuous events that followed. What would he have to say about “the revolution”? The kids had been surging through the streets, apparently inspired by Dylan’s music. But Dylan himself had sunk into silence. Not merely public silence, as in the eighteen months following the motorcycle accident (in fact, one of his most fecund periods); after recording John Wesley Harding he wrote nothing for more than a year. Under contractual pressure to produce an album, he returned to the studio in February 1969, with hardly a new song in his head; the result of a series of haphazard sessions was Nashville Skyline.