Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  Compared with “Hattie Carroll,” Dylan’s single “George Jackson,” appearing eight years later, marked a huge decline. Dylan apparently dashed off the song and recorded it instantly in November 1971, after reading an account of the jailed black Marxist militant’s death in a prison shoot-out three months earlier. Whatever information he had about what happened, Dylan, plainly, was sincerely moved, less by the story’s politics than by its broader human dimensions. Yet the song is a trifle, and may even be worse than a trifle. Musically, the bright, upbeat melody sounds almost ghoulish when it carries insincere lines like “They killed a man I really loved / Shot him through the head.” Although Dylan took literary license with the story of Hattie Carroll (including melodramatic touches that enraged the song’s protagonist, William Zantzinger, for the rest of his life), the changes did not mar the song’s artistry. By contrast, the ellipses and sentimentalism in “George Jackson” are the stuff of agitprop, and so is the song’s concluding grand cliché about the world being divided between prisoners and guards.* “George Jackson” did mark the first time Dylan recorded an offending four-letter word—“He wouldn’t take shit from no one”—which may have been calculated partly to instigate radio stations into censorship. If so, it worked, as station directors beeped out the offensive word on the air—but no great uproar ensued and the First Amendment survived.

  Dylan himself seems to have had second thoughts about “George Jackson,” and he has never performed it in public. “Hurricane” did not fare much better, in the long run. Just prior to the Rolling Thunder tour, Dylan said he hoped Carter would be freed in ninety days: “That’s our slogan, ninety days or we fight.”9 The tour would end its first leg six weeks later in a gigantic benefit performance for Carter, dubbed “The Night of the Hurricane,” at Madison Square Garden, and at the start of the new year the revue recapped the benefit in Houston. Carter, meanwhile, won an appeal for a new trial in 1976—later than the ninety days Dylan had vowed, but a victory. A second jury, though, convicted him for a second time and again sentenced him to life in prison. The New Jersey Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 1982. Three years later, a federal judge overturned the conviction; New Jersey authorities decided it was unfeasible to mount a third trial; and more than twenty years after the murders, Carter, finally free, relocated to Toronto, Canada, where he still resides. By the time Carter left prison, though, Dylan had long since abandoned any public interest in the case; indeed, as of the end of 2009, he had not performed “Hurricane” in concert for well over thirty years, since the Houston benefit at the start of 1976.

  Coming five years after Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the trial in New Haven of the Black Panther Bobby Seale, and more than a year after Nixon’s resignation over Watergate, “Hurricane” sounded stale as a political provocation. Yet, just as with “George Jackson,” Dylan’s simple sincerity was hard to question. He easily (perhaps all too easily) construed Carter much as he had Jackson—as a tough, politically aware black man who, deep down, was a literate, beautiful soul and who had been locked up by a rigged and racist legal system. And there was an additional angle—for even though Dylan defended Carter’s innocence, the aura of robbery, violence, and prison also struck the old ballad chord of the charming romantic outlaw, from Robin Hood to Pretty Boy Floyd. It was the same romance that led Dylan to write another song for Desire that glorified the brief life and violent death of the Brooklyn mobster Joey Gallo, a convicted racketeer and gang boss who read Victor Hugo and Albert Camus and who built close ties to black gangsters.

  “Hurricane” is vastly inferior to “Hattie Carroll” and “Only a Pawn,” but aesthetically an improvement over “George Jackson.” With considerable poetic license, the song describes the murders and Carter’s trial (based on assertions that remain hotly disputed to this day); it alleges that the local police conspired to pin the crime on Carter (based on similarly disputed evidence); and it vows to clear Carter’s name and get the authorities, somehow, to give him back the time he has served in prison. Dylan’s lyrics feature street slang—“stir” for “prison,” “heat” for “police”—and “shit” reappears, along with “sonofabitch.” The song divides the ghetto into a world of white cops and black victims. There is some interesting wordplay, as in the lines “We want to put his ass in stir / We want to pin this triple murder on him / He ain’t no Gentleman Jim,” with “murder” broken down into “murder” in order to preserve the meter and with the close of the line syncopated and elided—sung as “deron him”—to emphasize the rhymes. But “Hurricane” is notable mainly for its visual imagery, which, when combined with sound effects, lyrical and instrumental, gives the song the feel of a crime-thriller film treatment.

  “Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night / Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall”: these are stage directions, or lines from a movie script, written in the present tense, and not the usual start of a crime ballad or any other kind of song. With “Hurricane,” the influence of the song’s coauthor, the theater director Jacques Levy, becomes perfectly obvious. At one level, “Hurricane” is a legal brief, recounting one event after another from the viewpoint of Carter’s defense, capped with a lawyerly summation: “Rubin Carter was falsely tried.” At another level, it is Dylan’s testament to Carter’s essential goodness. But throughout, it is a graphic drama, describing a dead man lying in a pool of blood, Patty Valentine’s shriek of “My God, they killed ’em all,” police cars screeching, their “red lights flashin’ / In the hot New Jersey night,” a film noir scene of the cops putting the screws to a petty thief to get him to testify falsely. Whereas “George Jackson” (like “Emmett Till” before it) ended in a trite abstraction, “Hurricane” ends with a movie shot—“Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties / Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise.”

  Dylan and his troupe were taking risks with his audience. Having acted out whatever “Ices” was (it turned out to be “Isis”), having brought to the stage “Bob Dylan and Joan Baez,” having offered rewrites of some of his greatest songs, Dylan was now reinventing what used to be called topical song, adding a musical movie to the revue’s playbill. And although the audience could not know it, he was making a real movie as well, on the stage and off.

  Dylan’s fascination with the films he had seen at his family’s Lybba Theater in Hibbing did not end with his self-invention as a folksinger. On one of the early surviving tapes of him playing in Minneapolis, Dylan brags about some photographs of him in a turtleneck shirt (taken by the mother of his pal Dave Whitaker’s wife, Greta), saying that they make him look “just like Marlon Brando, uh, James Dean!” In the Village, he and Suze Rotolo saw classic as well as new-wave European films at the Art Theater on Eighth Street.10 (Rotolo remembers that they both loved François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, but couldn’t make heads or tails out of Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad.) The songs that first made him famous included numerous playful references to Anita Ekberg, Elizabeth Taylor (and Richard Burton), Sophia Loren, and Brigitte Bardot (about whom he once said he wrote his very first song in Hibbing). Early in 1965, Dylan joked with the TV talk-show host Les Crane about the film he was supposedly writing with Allen Ginsberg, the cowboy horror flick in which he would play his own mother. And that spring, in England, the rising filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker shot the footage for a full-length documentary about Dylan.

  Pennebaker had worked with Richard Leacock and others in the shop of Robert Drew, a Life magazine journalist turned filmmaker, where the aesthetic and technical essentials emerged for the fly-on-the-wall technique that became known as cinema verité. In 1963, the Drew Associates shot their finest film, Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, covering from very different angles the momentous desegregation of the University of Alabama. Assigned to the film crew working in Tuscaloosa, Pennebaker captured on film, behind the scenes, the tense events that led to Governor George C. Wallace’s famous effort to thwart the courts and the Kennedy administration with his
“stand in the schoolhouse door,” followed that same day by Wallace’s capitulation.

  Approached by Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, Pennebaker (who knew just a little about Dylan) agreed, on a hunch, to film the singer during a string of concert appearances in England, and he began work on what became Dont Look Back. The movie would bear all of the distinguishing features of cinema verité—unrehearsed, candid footage, filmed with small, unobtrusive cameras—as well as some innovations. (These included the now famous, highly staged opening scene, suggested by Dylan himself, of the soundtrack playing “Subterranean Homesick Blues” while the performer held up and tossed away, more or less in sync, cue cards of words and phrases from the song’s lyrics.) Shot in black and white during an eleven-day, six-city tour in April and May, Dont Look Back captures several aspects of life on the road, from frenzied post-concert stage-door departures to Dylan jousting with journalists. Above all, though, as its title suggests, the film is about Dylan on the edgy cusp of change.

  Although he was hearing rock and roll in his head, Dylan was still playing an all-acoustic show, much as he had at Philharmonic Hall the previous October—now bored with his material but, ever the professional, giving it his best. In the film, he inhabits the same world as Joan Baez, Donovan, and the Irish balladeer Dominic Behan (whose name gets mentioned by Jack Elliott’s old sidekick Derroll Adams), but he also dismisses them. Dylan is on the move, far beyond where some of his fans wished he would stay, and although he has not yet arrived at his next destination, it will be closer to the world of Allen Ginsberg. The “Subterranean Homesick Blues” opening—where Ginsberg stands in the background, gripping a long staff, looking like a Blakean Jewish prophet, and with Dylan’s sharp-witted hipster friend Bob Neuwirth acting as Ginsberg’s interlocutor (or perhaps disciple)—is one tip-off. Another is a brief scene of Dylan, in his Ray-Ban shades and black leather jacket, marveling at a London shopwindow filled with electric guitars, followed by a quick cut to Dylan backstage, banging out on a piano the chords of what sounds like an early version of “Like a Rolling Stone.”

  After he expressed some initial horrified concerns at a prerelease screening of Dont Look Back, Dylan saw the film again the following evening and pronounced it perfect. Yet he was also turning serious about his own ideas on cinema. Pennebaker and his camera crew accompanied Dylan to Britain to film his “electric” tour the following year, and Pennebaker sensed, joyously, that everything, indeed, was different. (“He was having such a fantastic time,” Pennebaker recalls.11 “He was jumping around like a cricket out there. The whole scene had changed instantly. It was a different kind of music.”) But now Dylan rejected Pennebaker’s rough cut of a film contracted to ABC Television, gathered up Pennebaker’s original reels, and went his own way, joined by Pennebaker’s fellow cameraman and filmmaker, Howard Alk.

  Alk had been a founding member of Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe and an impresario, with Albert Grossman, of a folk club, the Bear (where he first met Dylan in 1962)—and he was now becoming an important experimental filmmaker in his own right. Working broadly in the verité style, Alk would in time tackle subjects that ranged from the tumultuous Democratic National Convention in 1968 to the peregrinations of the wandering, visionary minstrels in West Bengal known as the Bauls.* More drawn to radical politics than was Pennebaker, Alk also had his own ideas about filmmaking. Pennebaker always had dramatic intentions—“Really, I’m trying to be Ibsen,” he once told an interviewer—but he aimed to dramatize what he thought of as real things happening to real people, without enacting or writing them out beforehand.12 Alk was more open to intervention and less strictly tied to real things, and he saw film as a place where truth met fiction—and where he could blend improvised staginess with cinema verité.

  Over the winter of 1966–67, Dylan and Alk recut Pennebaker’s footage of the 1966 tour into what became the first half of Eat the Document, a stylized reimagining of the drug-fueled concertizing and its attendant frolics, with intercuttings that became little commentaries on dogs and women, prophets and policemen—all punctuated by footage of Dylan playing with the Hawks. (Although rarely credited, Robbie Robertson edited the film’s more conventionally organized second half.) Eat the Document lacks a clear narrative line. Staged or at least semi-staged scenes appear like mini-happenings (including an encounter in a room and on a patio at the Hotel George V in Paris between a jaded, fake-mustachioed Dylan and a pixieish young French woman who speaks not a word of English). It is a chaotic film that appears to be about chaos, in the spirit of Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses. Here, as Dylan saw it, was a filmic version of where he had arrived out of the crisis that Pennebaker had depicted in Dont Look Back.

  By the time he dreamed up the Rolling Thunder Revue nearly a decade later, Dylan had also tried his hand as a film actor, with shaky results. As early as 1962, he agreed to play the starring role in a BBC teleplay, Madhouse on Castle Street, but he was so awkward in rehearsals that his part got cut, and he simply played a few songs. Dylan’s experience with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid ten years later was similarly frustrating. Having been commissioned to write music for the film, Dylan showed up on the set in Durango, Mexico, forced by MGM studios on the director Sam Peckinpah, by now legendary for his violent films of the mythic Old West, and was given the role of Alias, a close pal of Billy, who was played by Kris Kristofferson, who had come a long way since his studio janitor days. (Interestingly, Dylan’s role came from the same novel that Aaron Copland had used for his ballet: Walter Noble Burns’s Saga of Billy the Kid, published in 1926.) Dylan received no assistance from Peckinpah, and amid unforeseen difficulties between the director and the studio, Dylan’s part dwindled down to a few lines and some amusing Chaplinesque turns. Some of the music that Dylan provided, especially “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” survived, but not his acting. Still, Dylan yearned to act in films as well as to make them.

  From the start of the Rolling Thunder experiment, Dylan had a movie in mind, and he brought along a camera crew headed by Howard Alk. On the surface, it would be a third “tour” film, following those of 1965 and 1966, which included plenty of concert performances along with offstage material. But now the action behind the scenes (as well as in the concerts) would be scripted, a drama instead of a documentary—and instead of reinforcing the persona of Bob Dylan, as Dont Look Back had done, this film would attempt to undermine and finally shatter Dylan’s public image. The celebrated artist would die and be reborn, as in one of Dylan’s new songs. The three-ring-circus conceits of the concerts, especially the masking and the whiteface, would work in sync with the movie. (Indeed, some of the conceits were invented, and others later improvised, with the movie in mind.) Whereas Pennebaker had filmed Bob Dylan and his entourage waiting for drama to break out, there now would be a very different story with very different, fictional characters who only looked like Bob Dylan and his entourage. It would all emerge, three years later, as Renaldo and Clara.

  When Sam Shepard signed on to the tour as writer, he believed that he would be composing a conventional dramatic script, and Dylan has said this is what he originally had planned. But any sense of formal boundaries or genres quickly broke down once the shooting began. Dylan later remarked that about one-third of Renaldo and Clara “is improvised, about a third is determined, and about a third is blind luck.”13 There are elements in the film of cinema verité, of John Cassavetes–like situational spontaneous drama, and of the mini-happening experimentation of Eat the Document. There are also elements of the avant-garde European filmmaking of the 1930s and after that had first made a strong impression on Dylan in the early 1960s.

  Renaldo and Clara, despite Dylan and Alk’s densely plotted symbolism, is incoherent. It seems, at times, to be a film about a troubled couple—Robert and Sara?—being tracked by one of Renaldo’s former lovers, the Woman in White, played by Joan Baez. But Renaldo and Clara unfolds in odd fits and starts, like a dream. (Dylan had, of course, already written several comic, s
urreal dream songs, and he has said that Renaldo and Clara actually is a dream, not his own, but Renaldo’s.) Logical progressions advance and then take wing. Faces and names get reshuffled. (A figure who looks like Ronnie Hawkins appears as Bob Dylan, and Ronee Blakley plays Mrs. Dylan—except when she appears in one caustic scene as another man’s wife.) Then, suddenly, there are scenes that bear some resemblance to the world as we think we know it. (The most direct of these pick up where Dont Look Back left off, showing Baez confronting Dylan about their old romance. The most amusing are recurring shots of David Blue smoking a cigarette and playing a visceral game of pinball, while he reminisces about Dylan and the folkie days in the Village.)

  With its long sequences of pre-concert technical preparations, and with its improvised domestic quarrels, man-on-the-street interviews about Hurricane Carter, and protracted takes of attempted pickups, Renaldo and Clara seems to go on forever, even though, at just under four hours, it is about only half the length of a good night’s sleep. Still, Dylan insists that the film has a thematic core: “naked alienation of the inner self against the outer self … integrity … knowing yourself.”14 And it certainly has a theatrical core that is deeply connected to the theatrics of the Rolling Thunder Revue.

  When Dylan first encountered Sam Shepard just before the touring began, he asked the playwright if he had ever seen the films Children of Paradise and Shoot the Piano Player.15 (Shepard confessed he had, although it had been a while.) Both are films about performers under stress, but Children of Paradise in particular would remain one of the templates for Renaldo and Clara long after Shepard’s job description had changed from writer to bit-part actor. And Children of Paradise’s impact on Dylan had everything to do with timing. Dylan had closely watched Truffaut’s films since the early 1960s. Children of Paradise, though, was one of Norman Raeben’s favorites, and it was Raeben who introduced the film to Dylan, at some point after they met in 1974. The lessons on experimenting with time, perspective, and texture that had helped produce “Tangled Up in Blue” influenced Dylan’s thinking about film as well.