Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  The New York Times headlined its editorial on Woodstock: NIGHTMARE IN THE CATSKILLS. Tut-tutting about the “colossal mess” of the transient metropole in the mountains, the Times conceded that “the great bulk of the freakish-looking intruders behaved astonishingly well. They showed that there is real good under their fantastic exteriors.” Like the “Negroes” at the March on Washington, these outsiders had somehow defied a stereotype, and offered reassurance, as well as challenge, to middle-class whites.

  Meanwhile, Dylan, lured by a huge fee and the chance to escape the Woodstock mania, flew across the Atlantic to appear at the Isle of Wight festival—an appearance that the New York Times deemed worthy of a front-page report. It was his first visit to Britain since the fraught concerts that ended the 1966 tour. Now the audience came not to bait him, but to worship at his feet. His remarks to the press were inoffensive and unrevealing; his set was regarded as spiritless and anticlimactic; he spent nearly all his time with his fellow superstars, and flew back home at the first opportunity.

  The disintegration of SNCC and SDS by the end of the 1960s left me with what I consider a genuine posttraumatic disorder.

  —Staughton Lynd, 1998

  As an organization, SDS never recovered from the fractious convention of June 1969. The Weathermen brought in the Panthers to bait PL, but after one Panther made a remark about “pussy power” the lines of contest were chaotically redrawn. Amid PLers waving the Little Red Book and chanting Maoist slogans, Bernardine Dohrn led a walkout of the non-PL majority. There were now two SDS “national centers,” neither of them meeting the needs or even speaking the same language as the bulk of those who had been attracted to the organization in recent years.

  The Weathermen called for direct action on the streets of Chicago in the autumn. They hoped to replicate the previous year’s dramatic youth-police confrontations—and their radicalizing impact. HOT TIME: SUMMER IN THE CITY, OR I AIN’T GONNA WORK ON MAGGIE’S FARM NO MORE ran the headline in New Left Notes. But they couldn’t follow up the catchphrases with anything more substantial—intellectually or organizationally. No more than a few hundred joined the Days of Rage in October. 42

  In contrast, less than a month later, three-quarters of a million turned up in Washington to protest against the war, supplemented by another 200,000 in San Francisco. There was no Dylan, of course, but the crowd was happy to listen to John Denver, Mitch Miller, Arlo Guthrie, the cast of Hair, and Pete Seeger, who led the protesters in chorus after chorus of Lennon’s “Give Peace A Chance.” The demonstration was not without tensions. The liberals who had largely eschewed the antiwar movement now sought to place themselves at its head and renewed their efforts to purge it of radicalism. Yippies and others led a militant radical breakaway march to the Justice Department, where they were met by tear gas. Neither the liberals nor the new “revolutionaries” had much to say to the vast crowd that they hadn’t heard before, nor did they offer any means of turning this extraordinary outburst of popular protest into something enduring. Nonetheless, the scale and diversity of the marches made it clear, not least to Nixon himself, that the antiwar movement now represented a huge social force. Plans to escalate the conflict—including the deployment of nuclear weapons—were put on hold.43

  The movement that SDS helped initiate had now reached truly mass proportions—but the remnants of SDS were not interested. They issued an invitation to select individuals to join a mid-December “war council” in Flint, Michigan. “We have to create chaos and bring about the disintegration of pig order,” they declared, and merrily embraced the “vandals” label stuck on them by the media after the Days of Rage, once again quoting “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “the pump don’t work cause the vandals took the handles.” At Flint, the Weathermen declared themselves for “armed struggle,” voted to dissolve SDS and move “underground.”44 It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them to take a vote among the 100,000 young people spread across the country who still thought they were SDS members. In the end, the message to the rest of the movement was that you did need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows and that they—the SDS vanguard—were the meteorological experts.

  On March 6, 1970, three Weather members died when an accidental blast tore apart a lower Manhattan townhouse they had turned into a bomb factory. A decade after students had nonviolently sat-in in Greensboro, the townhouse explosion seemed to suggest that the protest impetus had spent itself in self-destructive madness.ax As ever, the critics who prophesize with their pens spoke too soon. When Nixon announced the U.S. “incursion” into Cambodia on April 30, the protests that followed were the most widespread and sustained of the entire war. They touched virtually all sections of society—including GIs—but it was among students that they enjoyed greatest support and were most intense. Sixty percent of the country’s college students went on strike, joined by large numbers from high schools and even junior highs. The national guard was sent to twenty-one campuses in sixteen states. Four students were shot dead at Kent State in Ohio and two at Jackson State in Mississippi. In the months to come, Nixon was forced to retreat; Kissinger bemoaned his yielding to “public pressures.”45

  Even as most of the high-profile leaders thrown up during the previous decade stood disorientated on the sidelines, more people—not least large numbers of working-class people—engaged in political protest. It was during 1969 to 1971, after both SDS and SNCC had imploded (and with Dylan wrapped in silence and banality) that antiwar sentiment, coupled with countercultural habits and identities, sank deep into white working-class communities. It was this development, reflected in the swelling mutiny among the GIs, that finally brought the war to an end.46

  The shaping character of the sixties in the United States was the unevenness of the development of political consciousness. That was true both of the movement itself and of the society it sought to address. Julius Lester wrote in the summer of 1969:We refer to “the movement” as if it were a political monolith. But what we now call “the movement” bears little resemblance to what we called “the movement” in 1963. In the early sixties, the “movement” consisted of SNCC, CORE, and SCLC in Afroamerica, SDS, various socialist groups and peace groups in America. . . . Today, “the movement” is no longer an identifiable political entity, but we still refer to it as if it were. It is more a socio-political phenomenon encompassing practically all of Afroamerica and a good segment of the youth of America . . . The political perspective of someone who has been in “the movement” since 1960 (and how many are left?) was, of necessity, going to be different from that of one who entered in 1968 . . . The “movement” veteran had a sense of “movement” history, having lived it. The “movement” neophyte did not. As far as he was concerned, “the movement” began when he became aware of it. 47

  In 1970, in some places, the spirit of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” was just catching on. For many it was still fresh and even frightening. Meanwhile, bitter GIs gave “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Positively 4th Street” new meanings; disillusioned organizers nodded over “My Back Pages;” stoned kids spaced out to Blonde on Blonde; new pastoralists in flight from the cities embraced the Basement Tapes and John Wesley Harding; huge numbers continued to get off on the unearthly rock ’n’ roll of the mid-sixties masterpieces, whose antiauthoritarian politics now seemed second nature to many. At this moment, in Dylan’s music, there was something for (and against) everyone.

  Nashville Skyline was followed by the execrable Self Portrait—released in 1970—which finally demolished the myth of Dylan’s artistic infallibility. Dylan later referred to the late sixties and early seventies as his period of “amnesia,” when he forgot how to do what he had once done with such startling facility—write original songs.

  Throughout the sixties, Dylan had seen himself as an uncompromising truth-teller, even when he was questioning assumptions about the very nature of truth. But that onerous vocation wavered at the decade’s end, and as an artist
he was able to rise to its demands only intermittently thereafter. Having confronted the crisis of prophecy in John Wesley Harding, it seemed as if Dylan, for many years, could find no way around or through it.

  The impetus that had taken Dylan from his first album through to John Wesley Harding had come to an end; there would never again be the sense that his albums comprised an unfolding succession of artistic-philosophical visions and revisions. The thread that had bound Dylan to his era and his audience—even when he was castigating both severely—had snapped. Nonetheless, it was extraordinary that an artist and a social eruption should be so persistently, and paradoxically, bound together for so long.

  In June 1970, Dylan was awarded an honorary doctorate by Princeton University. David Crosby, who joined Dylan’s entourage for the ceremony, recalled the day:When we arrived at Princeton they took us straight into a little room and Bob was asked to wear a cap and gown. He refused outright. They said, “We won’t give you the degree if you don’t wear this.” Dylan said, “Fine, I didn’t ask for it in the first place.”48

  Eventually, Dylan donned the regalia and accepted his degree. He wrote about the experience in “Day of the Locusts” (the title lifted from Nathanael West’s novel of Hollywood corruption).

  I put down my robe, picked up my diploma,

  Took hold of my sweetheart and away we did drive,

  Straight for the hills, the black hills of Dakota,

  Sure was glad to get out of there alive.

  Forever uneasy in the role assigned to him, Dylan was still grappling with the authentic, still looking—like Woody Guthrie in the Rainbow Room—for salvation in some distant, imagined America. Only by 1970, that hope had come to seem little more than a musical gesture.

  CHAPTER 5

  Corruptible Seed

  The pangs of eternal birth are better than the pangs of eternal death.

  —William Blake

  John Hammond completed his generation-spanning run of “discoveries” when he signed the twenty-three-year-old Bruce Springsteen to Columbia in 1972. In many respects, Springsteen’s work over the ensuing decades adhered much more closely to Hammond’s idea of a democratic people’s art than Dylan’s ever did. At times Bruce seemed like a one-man popular front. He even made “This Land Is Your Land” a staple of his live act.

  Initially hailed as the new Dylan, Springsteen showed more resilience than many in surviving the tag and overcoming the hype. Though his work is unimaginable without the foundations Dylan laid, its development reflected different times and a different personality. Musically, Springsteen remained within the popular idioms fashioned in the sixties; if punk represented the final, self-annihilating outburst of innovation within the white rock tradition, then Springsteen might be seen as the great conservator of that tradition, an artist with wide appeal but few musical progeny.

  In the mid-seventies, Springsteen was hailed for returning rock to its roots. Not only in his musical style, but in his selection of themes: gang fights, teen tragedies, fast cars, doomed rebellion. “We sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream.” In an industry of glitzy artifice, Springsteen seemed the real thing. But not everyone was convinced. The erstwhile White Panther John Sinclair penned a damning review of Born to Run. “Springsteen’s are not songs of direct experience . . . they are tales of a mythic urban grease scene . . . a script for a third-rate television treatment of delinquent white youngsters of the slums.” The Springsteen boom, Sinclair insisted, rested on illusions carefully nurtured by his corporate and media champions. It was “easy to convince well-heeled young college students of today, desperate for an identity separate from that of their despicable parents, that what they are seeing and hearing is the true reflection of the young thugs of the worser parts of town, whose dead-end existence is somehow more exciting than their own.”1

  There’s an element in Sinclair’s criticism that still rings uncomfortably true. The people in Springsteen’s audiences have very rarely been the people he was singing about. His early dramatis personae did owe more to West Side Story than to autobiographical realities. But that didn’t preclude Springsteen from using these inherited types to express his own feelings of loneliness and defeat, elation and camaraderie, or his audience from responding to them. His outlaws, rejects and stragglers, populating a vividly imagined landscape largely ignored by mainstream entertainers, gave form to hungers and frustrations difficult to name but nonetheless real in a society that relentlessly celebrated success.

  From the beginning Springsteen demonstrated a most un-Dylanlike warmth and capacity for empathy. Like many others, he worked his way through music to politics. It was only after his first flush of big-time success in the mid-seventies that he began to read seriously about his society and its history. In particular, he explored the Vietnam War, during which he’d come of age, and its impact on working-class Americans. On its release in 1984, “Born in the USA”’s bitter, grunt’s eye view of the war challenged the morning-in-America jingoism of the Reagan presidency. That didn’t stop Reagan trying to claim the song for his crusade. Of course, Reagan’s advisers hadn’t done their homework; a quick glance at the lyrics makes it plain that this is a song about how a nation betrayed its own children by sending them off to kill and die in a foreign war. But Reagan’s team were able to mistake this national nightmare for a national dream because the rousing rock chorus could be interpreted that way. The packaging of the album—stars and stripes to the fore—also facilitated the mishearing. In a nationalist environment, the song’s dissonance was lost. And it wasn’t just Reagan. For more than a few of Springsteen’s fans, the song is a sing-along, air-punching anthem. The singer has tried to reclaim “Born in the USA” by performing it solo with acoustic guitar. His bare-bones presentation of the lyrics is an effort to combat the regressive listening that Adorno claimed would make any real revolt within popular music impossible.

  As he’s grown older, Springsteen has presented his cast of working-class waifs and strays, hard-drivers, abandoned mothers, and small-time criminals with greater realism and less romance. But throughout his work, he’s tended to understand these people not as members of a class spanning nations, not as strugglers within a system, but as an American tribe, indeed, as the real American tribe.

  A late-blooming interest in Woody Guthrie, combined with anonymous, exploratory journeys through the United States, led in 1995 to The Ghost of Tom Joad, a mainly solo and acoustic album. In some ways, it was as bold a shift in tone, and as commercially unpredictable, as any of Dylan’s prodigious sixties leaps. These were topical songs and they registered an unmistakable protest against the current order. But they were neither strident nor satirical. (Unlike Dylan, Springsteen rarely mixes humor with serious material.) The melodies are delicate and Springsteen approaches them gingerly. The massed electric guitars, booming rhythms, and theatrical gestures that filled stadiums coast-to-coast were replaced, for the moment, by a subdued, lone voice that demanded a focus on the words and the tales they told.

  These were tales of globalization. The protagonists were migrant laborers and victims of deindustrialization, the multiethnic successors of Guthrie’s dust bowl refugees. Springsteen’s album was a realistic and humane response to a mighty event: the influx of workers from across the Third World that has transformed U.S. society in recent decades. The heroes in these songs struggle against a vast, inhuman and often inscrutable economic order. By attending to the details of their survival mechanisms, material and psychic, Springsteen opens up an alien experience to his listeners. He also portrays xenophobia as a self-defeating reflex. Whether you’re born in the USA, in Vietnam, or in Latin America, you’re a victim of the same world-embracing system. In The Ghost of Tom Joad, Springsteen aligned himself with the Guthrie of “Deportees” and the Dylan of “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” He seemed to be reaching out beyond the confines of social patriotism.

  In the title track, the final verse paraphrases Guthrie’s “Tom Joad,” which was itself
a paraphrase of Henry Fonda’s valedictory speech in John Ford’s movie of Steinbeck’s book.

  Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ a guy

  Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries

  Where there’s a fight ’gainst the blood and hatred in

  the air

  Look for me Mom I’ll be there

  The Ghost of Tom Joad seemed a belated vindication of some of the long-standing claims made by Springsteen admirers. He was at last fulfilling his role as a working-class troubadour, a dissenting voice of conscience, honesty, and compassion. In 2000, Springsteen made good on his promise to stand witness “wherever there’s a cop beatin’ a guy” in “(American Skin) Forty-One Shots,” whose subject was the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, by New York City police. The song bravely reminded listeners that no matter how much they’d like to deny it, racism remained a defining quality of American experience. “It ain’t no secret my friend / you can get killed just for living in your American skin.” The lyrics provoked a degree of hostility to which Springsteen was unaccustomed. Neither the NYPD nor the New York Post were pleased. At concerts it became clear that some of Bruce’s devoted fans felt the same way.2 In a letter to a local newspaper, Springsteen responded to the controversy in a half-bewildered tone. To him, the song was just another one of “the questions” he’d been asking throughout his career. “As Americans, who are we? What kind of country do we live in, do we want to live in? I always assume there’s an audience out there willing to think deeply about the ideas in the work I do. It’s one of the things that keeps me probably closer to the heart of what we’re about—we ‘Americans.’”3 Springsteen’s decision to place scare-quotes around the national denominator indicated that in the wake of the Diallo killing, and the new globalized world order he’d written about in Tom Joad, he felt he was dealing with a problematic category.