Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  It’s a-many a friend that follows the bend,

  The jugglers, the hustlers, the gamblers.20

  Well, I’ve spent my time with the fortune-telling kind

  Following them fairgrounds a-calling.

  Dylan has returned to the circus images repeatedly over the years, vividly in “Ballad of a Thin Man” and most recently in the various sideshow scenes in his film Masked and Anonymous, in his interviews included in the Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home, and in an interview posted on Dylan’s official Web site in conjunction with the release of Together Through Life in 2009. In the latter, Dylan talks of a boyhood, still outside the reach of mass media, when he was drawn to “the traveling performers passing through”:

  The side show performers—bluegrass singers, the black cowboy with chaps and a lariat doing rope tricks.21 Miss Europe, Quasimodo, the Bearded Lady, the half-man half-woman, the deformed and the bent, Atlas the Dwarf, the fire-eaters, the teachers and preachers, the blues singers. I remember it like it was yesterday. I got close to some of these people. I learned about dignity from them. Freedom too. Civil rights, human rights. How to stay within yourself.

  By 2009, Dylan, knowingly or not, was mixing other allusions with his carnival reveries—Atlas the Dwarf and Miss Europe probably come out of Juvenal’s Satires—but then again, the late Roman Empire was a circus, too.

  Always, it has been the midway freaks, mystics, novelty acts, and conjurers that most captivated Dylan—the sword swallowers, the fortunetellers, the geeks. These are circus people who may be bent and misshapen, maybe, but who are also talented and very smart, who can get up onstage and, as he told Gooding, “wanna make you have two thoughts,” getting you to believe that they don’t feel bad about themselves but also getting you to feel sorry for them.22 It is magic and these are illusions, but they are also dead real, playing around with identities, perception, self-perception: which is to say, they are psychological insight made into entertainment, and vice versa.

  The Rolling Thunder Revue was, finally, that kind of a many-layered entertainment, featuring intense performances by Bob Dylan unlike any he had ever given before or would ever give again. The theater of the mind in his old songs became flesh and then got fleshed out even more, partly in the assembly of acts, but above all in Dylan’s own singing and dancing and miming—insistent, driven, attentive to stagecraft in ways that Dylan never had been, renewing the old and, at his best, making the new sound old. And then, in a flash, like the circus—or like the meaning one thought was taking shape in a Dylan song, the meaning that for an instant seemed so concise and so clear—the revue was gone, vanished, never to be exactly the same way again, heading for another joint, or for a dusty old theater that looked a lot like the Lybba, the past permuting and combining with the present.

  And the future? Dylan led the revue on a second leg that traveled through the South in 1976, featuring the same basic band and many of the same costars (including Joan Baez, but not Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who was brusquely replaced with Kinky Friedman). Yet with the Dylans’ marriage entering its nasty, terminal phases, and with the novelty of the gypsy caravan worn thin, the frivolity and magic of the New England tour faded away. The mélange still produced some fine music—some of which turns up on the album Hard Rain, including a searing reworking of “Maggie’s Farm”—but without the multilayered theatrics and overpowering performances of the previous year. Even though Dylan told Baez, at the second tour’s conclusion, that he planned to keep the revue going forever, the future would be a very different proposition.

  As the decade wound down, Dylan’s art jumped into an entirely new phase, another seemingly utter break from his past that shocked and infuriated many of his devotees. And this time, Dylan would finally undermine his persona, as neither the Rolling Thunder Revue nor Renaldo and Clara ever managed to do. Yet the all-American carny would never be too far from Dylan’s imagination. And in time, he would circle back to a shrewd, blind Georgia artist from the 1930s and 1940s—a novelty act of a kind, a bit of a freak—who as a boy had lit out with the circus (or who later claimed that he had) and who grew up to sing the blues like nobody else.

  * Published in the September/October 1940 issue of Partisan Review, “June 1940” concluded: “It is summer again, the evening is warm and silent. / The windows are dark and the mountains are miles away. / And the men who were haters of war are mounting the platforms. / An idiot wind is blowing; the conscience dies.” Although in keeping with what was the Communist Party line at the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact, the poem in fact reflected a broader antiwar view, common among intellectuals who had come of age in the disillusioned decades after World War I, and who did not want to see the United States again involved in an imperial European war. Kees, a Nebraskan who visited New York in 1940 and moved there in 1943, frequented left-wing anti-Stalinist literary circles that included Lionel Trilling and Dwight Macdonald, among other Partisan Review writers, but he later turned to painting, and became a notable figure among the early abstract expressionists of the so-called New York school. Kees’s involvement in music composition and criticism deepened after he relocated to the San Francisco Bay area in 1950, where he mysteriously disappeared five years later. Thanks to Nina Goss for the reference.

  * Dylan has also claimed that Raeben’s influence had by then added new strains to Dylan’s marriage to Sara. “Needless to say, it changed me,” he told Pete Oppel. “I went home after that and my wife never did understand me ever since that day. That’s when our marriage started breaking up. She never knew what I was talking about, what I was thinking about, and I couldn’t possibly explain it.” Dylan quoted in Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard, A Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of “Blood on the Tracks” (New York, 2004), 39.

  * Dylan and Jacques Levy’s song “Hurricane” states that, at the time of the murders, Carter was “Number one contender for the middleweight crown.” In fact, Carter did fight the reigning middleweight champion, Joey Giardello, for the title, but at the end of 1964, and he lost in a unanimous decision. Never ranked higher than number three by Ring magazine, Carter suffered a rapid fall-off after the Giardello fight, losing four out of five matches against top contenders in 1965, and losing three of his six fights in 1966, including his final bout, less than two months after the murders, against Juan “Rocky” Rivero. Carter, well past his prime, had by then slipped to number nine in the Ring ratings.

  * On the other hand, Dylan almost completely changed the lyrics of “If You See Her, Say Hello” during the opening show in Florida of the second leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue, in 1976. What had once been a wistful song of separation and loss became an embittered diatribe, the singer hoping he will have the strength to spurn his ex-lover when she (inevitably) returns, and including such nastiness as: “If you’re makin’ love to her / Watch it from the rear / You never know when I’ll be back / Or liable to appear.”

  * If Dylan did improvise the changes in New Haven, he liked them enough to stick with them, more or less, during his handful of subsequent performances of “Tangled Up in Blue” on the tour. Listen, for example, to the version recorded just over a week later in Boston, on the official Sony/Legacy Recordings release Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue.

  * Interestingly, Dylan’s true-life “protest” ballads did not include his best-known antiwar songs. Although it is often linked to the Cuban missile crisis, he first performed “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” in September 1962, a few weeks before the crisis, and Dylan took pains to deny that it had anything to do with nuclear fallout. “Masters of War” was an imprecation, and not, strictly speaking, a “topical” song; “John Brown,” a ballad reminiscent of Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar novel of 1939, Johnny Got His Gun, was wholly fictional.

  * The song tells of Jackson’s imprisonment, at age eighteen, for a seventy-dollar armed robbery of a gas station, but says nothing about his previous run-ins with the law, nor about his alleged participation in the killing of a prison
guard in 1970, nor about the foiled violent effort, shortly thereafter, to free three San Quentin inmates, a spectacular incident led by Jackson’s younger brother, Jonathan, that ended in the slaying, by police, of a judge taken hostage, two of the prisoners, and young Jackson. Nor was Dylan bothered about the contested facts surrounding George Jackson’s death. Instead, the song takes for granted and then romanticizes the version of events propagated by left-wing publicists and intellectuals at home and abroad, including Michel Foucault and Jean Genet, who called Jackson’s death a “political assassination.” Although Dylan, working from his gut, crafted his response in human and not political terms—and although, as ever, he was an artist, not a political spokesman—the song amounted to a strangled piece of political advocacy.

  * The greatest of the Baul singers, Purna Das, turned up with one of his fellow Bauls, Lakshman Das, as well as with Dylan and a local Woodstock stonemason, Charlie Joy, in the photograph on the cover of John Wesley Harding in 1968. Alk’s film Luxman Baul’s Movie, completed three years later, was financed with funds raised by Albert Grossman (who first brought the Bauls to Woodstock) and featured a voice-over by Grossman’s wife, Sally.

  6

  MANY MARTYRS FELL:

  “Blind Willie McTell,” New York City, May 5, 1983

  I wonder,” John Lomax asked Blind Willie McTell, “I wonder if, if you know any songs about colored people havin’ hard times here in the South.”1

  It was a bright morning in Atlanta, in early November 1940, still warm enough to keep the windows open. Lomax and his second wife, Ruby, had come to town the day before on one of their field recording trips for the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress, coordinated by the archive’s assistant in charge, John’s son Alan Lomax. As they drove around the city at dinnertime, Ruby spotted a guitarist singing and playing outside a whites-only drive-in barbecue restaurant, the Pig ’n’ Whistle. They were unfamiliar with McTell and his recordings, but a friend had tipped them off that while in Atlanta, they should try to find him. And they had. For a payment of one dollar plus cab fare, the singer agreed to meet the Lomaxes at nine the next morning in their room at the Robert Fulton Hotel and perform into their acetate disc recorder.

  McTell showed up right on time, and over the next two hours he played more than two dozen songs—one of the most remarkable field recording sessions in the history of American music. The early going, though, was difficult. McTell began by announcing a medley of spirituals. “I will demonstrate how the mothers and fathers used to wander about their work,” he said, “when they used to sing those old-fashioned hymns”—his tone oddly formal, like a folklore instructor, befitting a recording session for the Library of Congress. When the medley was done, John Lomax announced the singer’s name, the place, and the date, in a cultivated accent still marked by his Texas upbringing, but then he presumed to call the tune, requesting the songs about colored people and hard times.

  Blind Willie McTell recording for John and Ruby Lomax in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 5, 1940. (photo credit 6.1)

  “Well,” McTell replied, “that’s all songs that have a reference to our old people here. They hasn’t very much stuff of the people nowadays, because they’re …”

  Lomax, impatient, broke in.

  “Any complainin’ songs, complainin’ about the hard times and sometimes mistreatment of the whites? Have you got any songs that talk about that?”

  No, McTell said at once, he had no such songs, “not at the present time.” Those were songs of another era, but now “the white peoples is mighty good to the southern people, as far as I know.” The qualifying last five words came out emphatically, after a tiny pause.

  John Lomax’s portable recording equipment, undated. (photo credit 6.2)

  Lomax would not be deterred.

  “ ‘Ain’t It Hard to Be a Nigger, Nigger,’ do you know that one?”

  “That’s not … in our time,” McTell said. He did have a spiritual, “It’s a Mean World to Live In,” but it still made no reference to the hard times.

  Lomax, unfazed, asked McTell why it’s a mean world to live in; McTell replied that it’s not altogether, and that the song “has reference to everybody.”

  “It’s—it’s as mean for the whites as it ’tis for the blacks, is that it?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  Lomax thought he caught the singer squirming.

  “You keep movin’ around like you’re uncomfortable, what’s the matter, Willie?”

  McTell immediately said that he’d been injured in an automobile accident the night before, nothing serious, no one got hurt, just got a little shook up is all, still sore—an unlikely story. Then, after a break, the next sounds on Lomax’s acetate are of McTell playing his twelve-string guitar and singing “Boll Weevil” in his sweet, lilting tenor—a song that at least bordered on a hard-times blues.

  Read one way, Lomax’s conversation with McTell is a tense social transcript from the Jim Crow South. Lomax, the overbearing if well-intentioned white visitor, wants musical documents of poverty and racial oppression. The request may connote obliviousness on his part, as well as a condescending sympathy for blacks, but it is nevertheless rude and insulting, demanding that the singer violate basic, unspoken southern norms that should have been familiar to anyone reared in Texas. McTell knows much better than to say anything against white people, let alone sing it, to a white man with even the hint of a southern accent and his wife, especially if the man is some sort of government official and a recorder is running. Although McTell makes it clear that he knows the kinds of songs that Lomax wants to hear, he would never play them under these circumstances, even under duress—but to say as much and explain why would also violate the Jim Crow norms by making them explicit. Lomax’s insistence unsettles and embarrasses McTell, but the singer hangs in there and dissembles, while he slyly slips in phrases—“as far as I know”—that covertly disclose the truth. God, after all, is his witness.

  But there is another, very different way to understand the conversation. John Lomax, the archivist and collector, certainly wants what he wants, but Blind Willie McTell simply doesn’t have it. The music that McTell knows best and prefers to perform carries no overt or even hidden social or political meaning. There are no old-fashioned sorrow songs about the black man’s plight in his regular repertoire (and certainly not on his records, even though they are intended for the black “race record” market). His songs are up-to-date, and they are about sadness in love and gladness in love, drinking too much, benign nonsense, God, gambling, violence (much of it involving blacks attacking or killing other blacks), honoring life and death. For the Library of Congress, he will perform a little of each.

  To be sure, McTell does play music from earlier times for the Lomaxes, including a remorseful blues from sometime between 1908 and 1914—“back in the days when the blues started being original,” he says—but mainly the older material is sacred music that is timeless and relevant to all of God’s children, even though traditionally sung by rural blacks. McTell may well be heeding the submissive Jim Crow etiquette code, especially when Lomax pushes. But then again, McTell is not a sharecropper or big-city laborer; he is a professional performer in a growing southern city. He lives within the iron structures of segregation, yet even though he was blind, he must have known his skin was brown and that he thus had white ancestors. As a youth, he had benefited from the generosity of a kindly white man in his country hometown, and now he is making a very decent living playing music for whites as well as blacks and getting recorded commercially. For a black Atlantan in 1940, this amounted to a comparatively easy experience with white people—while taking their money—which may help to explain McTell’s bemusement at Lomax’s fixation on the “complainin’ songs.”

  In any event, McTell is an artist as well as a performer, and his songs are about meanness and joy on both sides of the color line—with “reference to everybody”—and not just in hard times. Lomax doesn’t quite
get it.

  Whichever reading of the conversation is correct—and elements of both probably are—the initial tension dissipated after McTell sang “Boll Weevil,” and the rest of the recording session went smoothly. McTell performed spirituals and murder ballads, songs about falling in and out of love, folk songs, ragtime, and a long, rollicking number about the deathbed wishes of a hard-hearted crapshooter. Lomax backed off and relaxed, getting into the expansive spirit of McTell’s music. Now and then, he and his wife interjected comments, including questions about where McTell came from and where he had been. The archivists wanted to find out all they could about the blind, roundish, clear-toned man who picked his guitar superbly.

  Lomax dutifully took it all down in the notes for his archive field report, praising McTell’s “excellent” guitar playing but sounding unenthusiastic about his singing. That report, along with the Lomaxes’ recording, lodged Blind Willie McTell’s music in an inconspicuous corner of the official world of folk-song collecting. Yet even though he would never be completely forgotten, McTell would have to be rediscovered by blues enthusiasts, again and again, over the next twenty years. The full importance of his session with the Lomaxes would only begin to become clear during the 1960s. By then, McTell himself was dead.

  During the second week of April 1983, Bob Dylan joined the Dire Straits guitarist and vocalist Mark Knopfler, the former Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor, and three other top musicians to begin recording his new album at a reclaimed Con Edison facility, the Power Station, on the far West Side of midtown Manhattan. Nearly two years had passed since Dylan’s last album recording session, for the undeservedly ill-fated Shot of Love, and having moved on from what would be remembered as his Christian phase, he had a good deal riding on this new effort. He devoted almost all of the first day to one of the new songs that loomed largest, “Blind Willie McTell,” sometimes called just “Blind Willie.” After several false starts and eight instrumental run-throughs (one of them complete), the group started working in earnest—yet even though two complete takes resulted, they were unsatisfactory. “Blind Willie McTell” got shelved temporarily, to be attempted again at later sessions.