Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  Chronicles is haunted by this moment of rupture. The musical magpie who stole from everyone was to have his own self purloined, ripped from his grasp even as he was creating it. His inner world was invaded; he became a prisoner of others’ definitions. Reading the book one feels that Dylan never fully recovered from this trauma. It aches with the pathos of Dylan’s life. He mourns for that transient moment when self and world freely and creatively interacted (before they became irretrievably antagonistic), for a bohemian oasis that was both experimental (unlike his home life in Hibbing) and innocent (unlike the hyped-up late 60s counterculture) and for the young man he was then, lost forever behind the fault-line of celebrity. His memoir is entirely silent about the critical time-span (1962-67) during which the rupture occurred. He circles the wound, touches it gingerly, finds it’s still tender, then shuffles away. He exposes it, then covers it up.

  This rupture generated Dylan’s greatest music and is in some ways its subject—a subject to which he seems to return compulsively, in both his songs and occasional public statements. He keeps trying avenues of escape but they all lead back to the same crisis—the crisis embodied in his arc of development from 1962-67, that historical and personal moment that remains for Dylan (on the evidence of Masked and Anonymous and Chronicles) both beginning and end.

  Buried in the sometimes rambling anecdotage of Chronicles is an eerie, tight-lipped, squint-eyed reference to one of the stand-out episodes in Bound for Glory. It’s 1970 and Dylan, besieged by the counterculture, takes refuge in (of all places) the Rainbow Room in mid-Manhattan, which he describes as safely off “the hip circuit” and presumably the last place Dylan would be expected to turn up (but nonetheless a public place). To add to the unreality of the scene, the performer on that evening turns out to be Frank Sinatra Jr., a dull replica of a singular artist, whom, nonetheless, Dylan hails as an authentic: there was “nothing faked or put-on or ritzy about him,” Dylan says, “there was a legitimacy about what he did, and he knew who he was,” which, at that moment, is more than Dylan can say for himself. Sinatra Jr. tells Dylan about his father’s support for civil rights and how he “had always fought for the underdog—that his father felt like one himself.” But then Frank Jr. adds, without explanation: “How do you think it would make you feel . . . to find out that the underdog had turned out to be a son of a bitch?” At which point Dylan gazes out “the wall of windows” and comments enigmatically: “You could see the spectacular city view. From sixty floors up, it was a different world.”

  In the cognate passage in Bound for Glory Guthrie is being told how he should be costumed as a hillbilly or a Pierrot, when his attention wanders: “I let my eyes drift out the window and down sixty-five stories where the town of old New York was standing up living and breathing and cussing and laughing down yonder across that long island. . . .”8 It had been thirty years since Guthrie had sung: “Well this Rainbow Room’s a funny place ta play / Its a long way’s from here to th’ USA.” Now Dylan inhabited a world where the boundaries between the authentic and the inauthentic had become hopelessly obscured. There could be no escape from the Rainbow Room, no hope of rooting oneself in that unvarnished, un-slicked up, un-calculating world that Guthrie celebrated and Dylan hungered for. Dylan narrates this bizarre anecdote with a straight-face (his “nothing is revealed” posture) but as the ironies multiply, the reader is left with a sense of sorrowful emptiness; it’s an admission that Dylan himself cannot find a way out of the conundrum of celebrity. The chasm between Bound for Glory and Chronicles seems unbridgeable.

  “You know something about yourself nobody else does . . . it’s a fragile feeling that if you put it out there somebody will kill it. So it’s best to keep that all inside.”

  —CBS interview, 2004

  Dylan has long complained about people like me, who presume to decode his mystery. He sees us as part of that army of noisy intruders trespassing on his private domain. But the complaint might easily be reversed. Dylan has burrowed into our flesh and lodged in our minds. For four of my five decades, his words, images, tunes have been swimming through my head, rising up from the depths at unexpected moments. The electric violin on desolation row. The pill box hat that balances on her head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine. Breadcrumb sins. People who read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall. The Englishman who said fab. The ghost of electricity howling in the bones of her face. The orphan crying like a fire in the sun. Her Jamaican rum and when she did come. The hard rain forever falling. The answer forever blowin’ . . .

  Dylan continues to stir my emotions and stimulate my intellect, to console, inspire and challenge me. And I continue to challenge him, to query and refuse and refute, “to argue and to judge,” but not, I hope, harshly or unfairly. Which makes me only one of many engaged in a lifelong inner dialogue with this man we’ve never met, a fact that Dylan himself would like to wish away, but is the greatest testimony to the enduring power of his art. Somehow I’m still catching up with Dylan, still digesting the lessons of the 60s. There are few artists I feel so intimate with—and whom I’m so driven to contest. Even as I embrace his art and his voice, I want to tell him what he’s overlooked, where he’s gone wrong, why I cannot accept his conclusions. In this contest there’s no resolution, no victory or defeat. I can’t imagine anything less Dylanesque than abject submission to his greatness; those Dylan fans who approach his work in uncritical reverence seem to me to have missed its true prophetic challenge.

  In his great music of the 60s, Dylan rebelled against the neat compartmentalization of the aesthetic, political and personal. In subsequent decades, he seemed at times to yearn for the safety of the categories he had shattered. Yet his constant insistence that he is merely a singer of songs betrays an unease. Dylan himself has repeatedly testified to the life-changing power of song, one of the simplest yet most mysterious of art-forms. As his mentor Harry Smith illustrated in his Anthology fifty years ago, songs are both the products of the society that gave them birth and capable of surviving beyond that society. So whether Dylan likes it or not, being “merely” a singer of songs—songs that speak to their time and then outlast it—is a daunting vocation.

  “He not busy being born is busy dying” was always a demanding wisdom. As Dylan himself made clear in the 1960s, it was never just a matter of changing your style or donning a new mask or adopting a ready-made new identity. He has often seemed to want to set that wisdom aside; after all, if there really is nothing new under the sun, if history is cyclic, then the injunction to keep being born loses its force. Yet Dylan couldn’t stop himself from setting out again and again on a quest for renewal. The restlessness that marked Dylan from the outset and runs through his entire career has its sources not only in his own psyche but in the historical conjuncture from which his work sprang. His point of departure admitted no ultimate safe harbour.

  The regurgitation of the 60s as a set of cultural commodities that can be carried in the pocket like songs on an iPod betrays the lessons the era actually has to teach us, the lessons embedded in Dylan’s music: that the sources of resistance are unpredictable, that struggles unfold according to a contradictory logic, that history refuses to conform to anyone’s preconceived scenarios. In a world dominated by multinational corporations and the overweening power of a single nation-state, his protest against the commodification of human experience, his intransigent defence of his (and our) irreducible, awkward humanity, feels more urgent and pertinent than ever.

  We live in a media-saturated age in which hugely potent but remote social forces seek to exploit our every emotional vibration, and anyone who thinks they’re immune is dreaming. In that context, the artist who created “Chimes of Freedom,” “It’s Alright Ma,” “Gates of Eden,” “Desolation Row,” “Visions of Johanna,” “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” and “The Wicked Messenger” speaks to us from out of the maelstrom of the 1960s with a heightened intensity. In the society of the spectacle, his insight that witnesses are ac
complices remains precious. As I watched the U.S. and Britain lay waste to Fallujah on my television screen while daily life continued uninterrupted around me, I thought of “Clothesline Saga,” “All Along the Watchtower,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” and “Blowin’ in the Wind”: “How many times can a man turn his head/ pretending he just doesn’t see?” I also thought of “When The Ship Comes In” and how one day “like Goliath, they’ll be conquered.” I’ve been waiting a long time for that day but I remain persuaded, despite setbacks, that it’s worth the wait, and the struggle. And Dylan’s music has helped me not only survive but negotiate that wait and that struggle.

  In his greatest work of the 60s, Dylan articulates the abiding dilemma of life under consumer capitalism: how you can truly own yourself in a world where everything appears as a commodity for purchase. He seeks relentlessly to escape that dilemma, but never quite succeeds. Dylan’s work of the 60s is permeated by yearnings for authenticity and autonomy. Though much mocked and deeply problematic, these yearnings remain indispensable—and profoundly threatening to a social order in which huge resources are devoted to what Noam Chomsky calls “the manufacture of consent.” The self-ownership of which Dylan’s 60s songs speak is antithetical to the egoistic consumerism propagated by the neo-liberal economic order. It’s tougher, more demanding, because the kind of freedom that lies at its heart is not the freedom to buy what you like but the freedom to become, to generate yourself in a world that wants to fix you like a butterfly in a glass case. It’s a course of both vertiginous terror and delirious joy and it promises no neat conclusion. There’s no point of rest. Unless, of course, one succumbs to the death-in-life of Mr. Jones or the superhuman crew. The revolt against categories turns out to be internal as well as external, spiritual as well as political, and never-ending.

  In September 2004, Secret Service agents were dispatched to a high school in Boulder, Colorado, to investigate a threat against the president’s life. They were acting on complaints made by the mother of a student who claimed on a local radio talk show that her daughter had heard a local band performing in a talent show sing: “George Bush, I hope that you die, and your death will come soon” and “I’ll stand over your grave till I’m sure that you’re dead.” Apparently, the band’s cover of “Masters of War” (plus the fact that at one time it had dubbed itself “Tali-band”) was enough to spur federal officials into action. In the era of the war on terror, it seems Dylan’s song retains an essential edge of danger.

  At a frighteningly tender age, Dylan discovered that the hardest yet most reliable wisdom—the precarious wisdom of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”—is fleeting. Even as we try to formulate it, it slips through the fingers, because none of us can quite absorb our own impermanence. That’s why the highway is for gamblers. And who can blame Dylan that at times he grew weary of risk-taking and took shelter in banality and conservatism?

  Dylan’s 60s music has been packaged and repackaged, along with its era, but it eludes the death grip of academia and the banality of the corporate media. It still exudes the spirit and the pain of human liberation. It still asks demanding questions of anyone who wants to change society—or just survive within it as a free human being. “There must be some way out of here.” Dylan may never have found it, but that doesn’t mean he can’t help the rest of us on the journey.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1 Julius Lester, “To Recapture the Dream,” in Takin’ It to the Streets: A Sixties Reader, eds. Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 632.

  Chapter One: The Whole Wide World Is Watchin’

  1 For accounts of the 1963 March on Washington see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-64 (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1988), 869-887; Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1990 ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), 213-227; David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988), 281-286; and John Lewis with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 213-227.

  2 Elijah Wald, Josh White: Society Blues (New York: Routledge, 2002), 160.

  3 For Dylan at the March on Washington see Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (London: New English Library, 1986); Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades: The Biography—Take Two (London: Viking, 2000), 125; Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (London: Doubleday, 2001), 140; and David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 182-183.

  4 Branch, 880.

  5 George Frazier, “Whose Civil Rights?,” Boston Herald Traveler (August 30, 1963).

  6 Hajdu, 182-183.

  7 See Bob Dylan interview by Cameron Crowe, notes for Bob Dylan: Biograph (Columbia Records, 1985).

  8 Heylin, 73.

  9 Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (London: Peter Smith, 1983; first edition, 1951).

  10 Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory (New York: Plume, 1983; first edition, New York: EP Dutton, 1943), 177-178.

  11 Ibid., 287.

  12 Ibid., 290-297.

  13 Pete Seeger, as quoted on http://www.woodyguthrie.de/.

  14 Woody Guthrie, notes in Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, compiled by Alan Lomax (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999; first edition, New York: Oak Press, 1967), 342.

  15 Richard A. Reuss with Joanne C. Reuss, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927-1957 (London: Scarecrow Press, 2000), 210.

  16 Ibid., 138-139.

  17 Alan Lomax, Selected Writings 1934-1997, ed. Ronald D. Cohen (New York: Routledge, 2003), 57.

  18 Ibid.

  19 Ibid., 92-93.

  20 Guthrie manuscript (February 23, 1940), reproduced on http://www.woodyguthrie.de/this11.html.

  21 See Charles Shaar Murray, Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century (London: Viking, 1999).

  22 Reuss, 159.

  23 Lomax, Selected Writings, 89.

  24 Ibid.

  25 For the best account of the Almanac Singers and the politics of the first folk revival, see Reuss, 147-178.

  26 Ibid., 150.

  27 Ibid., 168.

  28 Ibid., 253.

  29 As quoted in Paul Allen Anderson, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 237. Anderson’s chapter, “Jazz Criticism in the Swing Era,” considers Hammond’s Spirituals to Swing concert in depth.

  30 See “A Booklet of Essays, Appreciations and Annotations Pertaining to the Anthology of American Folk Music, edited by Harry Smith,” included in the reissue of the Anthology by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Washington, D.C. (1997).

  31 Harry Smith, original notes published with the Anthology of American Folk Music, included in Smithsonian Folkways Reissue, 2.

  32 “A Booklet of Essays,” 59.

  33 Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 146-148.

  34 Lomax, Selected Writings, 195.

  35 Poem reproduced at http://www.bobdylanroots.com/folklore.html.

  36 Biograph notes, 30-35.

  37 Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge, 2003), 3-6.

  38 Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York: The New Press, 2002; first edition, New York: Pantheon, 1993), 12-17.

  39 Heylin, 99-100.

  40 “A conversation with Dave Van Ronk,” David Walsh (May 7, 1998), on World Socialist Website: http://www.wsws.org/arts/1998/may1998/dvr-m7.shtml.

  41 The Bosses’ Songbook—Songs to Stifle the Flames of Discontent, ed. D. Ellington and D. Van Ronk (New York: Richard Ellington, 1959), as quoted in Reu
ss, 267. See also: http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/sinners/EllingtonDick.htm.

  42 “From ‘The Izzy Young Notebooks,’” in The Bob Dylan Companion: Four Decades of Commentary, ed. Carl Benson (New York: Schirmer Books, 1998), 4.

  43 Sing Out! interview, as quoted on http://www.culcom.net/~shadow1/interviews.htm#interview2.

  44 Lewis, 187.

  45 As quoted in Craig Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000), 12.

  46 On freedom songs, see Branch, 290, 531-32; Werner, 11-15; Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations (London: UCL Press, 1998), 202-203, 269-271. Also Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs (Smithsonian/Folkways CD SF 40032.)

  47 We Shall Overcome: The Song That Moved a Nation, video, 1989. Producers: Jim Brown, Ginger Brown, Harold Levanthal, and George Stoney; Director: Jim Brown.