by Sean Wilentz
As usual, Aaron Copland’s “Hoe-Down” signaled the start of the show. For the very first time, though, I realized that thanks to a television commercial by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association that used “Hoe-Down” as its theme, an entire generation of Americans now instantly connected that music to steak and hamburger. “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner,” one young woman chortled to her companions when “Hoe-Down” commenced. It was a harmless comment, which could have registered a certain surprise and discomfort at hearing classical music during the folk festival. Still, if that’s how the young heard Copland’s music, how would they, or their children, come to hear Bob Dylan? It certainly would have discouraged the good-natured Copland, and might be a sign that Dylan’s ideas about the coming reign of virtual culture may be true. Unhappy thought.
Dylan’s fake beard and wig turned out to be much like a costume he would wear in the video of a new song, “Cross the Green Mountain,” written on commission for an epic film about the Civil War, Gods and Generals, financed by Ted Turner. Focused on the years of fighting before the battle of Gettysburg, and especially on the exploits of the Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, the movie had a decided pro-southern tilt, both in the proportional time it devoted to the two sides and in its heavy-handed efforts to place slavery and antislavery at the margins of the conflict. Dylan’s song and the video are much more ambiguous. The video centers on scenes of army camp life; sometimes it is a Union camp and sometimes Confederate. It features Dylan silently acting the role of a mysterious man (wearing the top hat that had been one of his signature accoutrements since the 1960s) who floats around and among the soldiers, witnessing horrible death, laying a daguerreotype at the headstone of one of the fallen. (Two members of Dylan’s touring band at the time also appear, the guitarist Larry Campbell as a preacher saying prayers over the dead and the bassist Tony Garnier as a man dressed in civvies, a rifle slung over his shoulder.) The grave Dylan visits happens to be that of a Virginia cavalryman, but otherwise the video depicts the suffering and boredom of war on both sides.
That evenhandedness was another sign of how much had changed since the evening concert in Newport in 1963, when Dylan’s encore turned into the equivalent of a civil-rights rally. Dylan has long been fascinated by the Civil War, not simply as a political struggle, but as a human experience, and over the decades he became an expert reader on the war’s military history. He had come to see human folly as well as cowardice and courage in both of the contending armies, but mainly he came to see the gruesome evil of a nation at war with itself—both sides praying to the same God, both sides doing ungodly things. It was not how the civil-rights movement had understood the war, and “Cross the Green Mountain” was light-years away from “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “We Shall Overcome.” Dylan’s new song said nothing about slavery but instead spoke of the war as a “monsterous dream” in which something came out of the ocean and swept through “the land of / The rich and the free”—an apocalypse as frightening as any in the biblical books of Daniel or Revelation, but with no hint of salvation. And it is all the more frightening because it is gentle and funereal, made even sadder by Larry Campbell’s country mountain fiddle line—a tender song about the corruption of rotting flesh and perverted morals.
In some respects, the song’s greatest interest—although not sufficient for Dylan to include it in his collected lyrics—was literary. In thinking over the project, Dylan clearly reimmersed himself in the poetry of the Civil War era, from both sides, and the effects were obvious in the lyrics of “Cross the Green Mountain.” Some critics—lodging early complaints in what would become a rising chorus of fury—seized on how the song lifted a line from the poem “Charleston” by the almost completely forgotten Confederate poet Henry Timrod. But Dylan’s borrowings were actually much more extensive. “Cross the Green Mountain” included lines and images from sources that ranged from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Henry Lynden Flash’s “Death of Stonewall Jackson,” and Nathaniel Graham Shepherd’s “Roll-Call,” to Frank Perkins and Mitchell Parish’s jazz standard from 1934, “Stars Fell on Alabama.” In the next-to-last verse, Dylan condensed an entire Walt Whitman poem, “Come Up from the Fields, Father,” about the news of a young man’s falling in combat reaching home, into a single, compact eight-line stanza, and he took a phrase from Whitman’s original to boot. The immediacy of death throughout the song brings to mind works of the time such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Killed at the Ford,” and there is even a line about “Heaven blazing in my head” that echoes Yeats’s poem about the onset of World War II, “Lapis Lazuli.” The sophisticated borrowing-and-transforming method that Dylan had refined for “Love and Theft” served again for his movie-song project, although he now confined himself largely to the verse of the 1860s.
Henry Timrod, 1867. (photo credit 9.6)
Knowing about none of this, all that the audience at Newport could see was Dylan’s latest disguise, which looked like his most bizarre costume yet—perhaps a parody of his friend Kinky Friedman’s Texas Jewboys. Yet despite the high jinks and mishaps, Dylan and the band still gave a singular show, crisscrossing the past and the present with what looked like a carefully chosen collection from Dylan’s songbook. “Maggie’s Farm” might have struck Dylan as too obvious; in any case, he skipped it. But the first half-dozen songs he played after opening with “The Roving Gambler” amounted to a set list of greatest hits from roughly 1965, starting with “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” and “Desolation Row” and including a few numbers he hardly ever played anymore, above all “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Positively 4th Street.” At times, the music really sounded a little like July 1965, except played with much tighter chops than the barely rehearsed Paul Butterfield band members plus Al Kooper back then, and in new arrangements.
After “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” Dylan and the band jumped to the present with “Cry a While.” Later, they played “Summer Days.” But these were the only two songs that came from “Love and Theft”—and the most recent of all the others was “Tangled Up in Blue.” On paper, the set, with songs such as “Girl from the North Country,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” looked like a Dylan golden-oldies show for baby boomers. Dylan knew his audience.
Yet thanks in part to Dylan’s rearrangements of his old material—and thanks to the skills of Campbell, Sexton, Garnier, and the drummer, George Recile, possibly Dylan’s best touring band aside from the Band—it was possible to hear the show very differently. Just as he did night after night on the road, Dylan took his audience on a tour of the traditions he had been making his own for forty years and more, including whole chunks of American music that had barely shown up during the rest of the festivities, including rockabilly (“Summer Days”), political song (“The Times They Are A-Changin’ ”), good-time pedal-steel country music (“You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”), slide-guitar blues (“Cry a While”), and whomping, diabolical rock and roll (in a brilliant reinvention of “The Wicked Messenger”). Not all of the performances were up to the occasion—Dylan’s harmonica playing was too often uninspired, and many of the instrumental entrances were ragged—but despite that, the music alone lifted the festival out of its narrow confines.
The most powerful and poignant moment came after the regular set ended with “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” as the unshadowy sun, just starting to set, turned the great granite stonework of Fort Adams from gray to amber. Dylan, his fake locks damp now, looking like one of the diminutive Russian aviators from the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, came back with the band for the encore and lit into one of the most joyous versions of “Not Fade Away” I have ever heard, in the Grateful Dead’s arrangement. The ghosts of Buddy Holly and Jerry Garcia started chasing the ghosts of Mississippi John Hurt and Son House and Clarence Ashley, all conjured up by the Prospero onstage, all back in Newport.
At one point, while going through the ritual of introducing the b
and, Dylan paused for half a second, looking as if he just might say something to mark the occasion, as if the words were coming to him, as Dick Waterman had thought would happen. If he was to say anything, he would say it now, and for a moment, beneath his getup, Dylan seemed to be thinking it over.
But instead he smiled and twitched and went back to playing, letting his masked theatrical speak for itself, an entire festival in just one act.
* The album was the first that Dylan decided to produce by himself, under the pseudonym Jack Frost. He was especially interested in using recording techniques and equipment long since displaced in most studios.
* For a fuller discussion of these matters, including legal definitions of plagiarism, see this page.
* And this hardly exhausts the possibilities. As of 2009, there were more than two hundred known recordings of “The Lonesome Road,” by artists as disparate as Lonnie Johnson, the Boswell Sisters, and Tab Hunter.
* The Washington Temperance Society (known familiarly as the Washingtonians) was founded in 1840 by a group of Baltimore workingmen who sought a less preachy and censorious alternative to the existing anti-liquor movement. During its meteoric heyday, the society enlisted untold thousands of members and pioneered some of the principles and practices later refined, with enduring effect, by Alcoholics Anonymous. My thanks to Nina Goss for the Lincoln reference.
* In his revised official book of lyrics, published well after “Love and Theft” was released, Dylan spelled the name as George Lewis. Unless he is referring to the jazz clarinetist from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s—which makes no sense in this context—the name is perfectly random. My guess is that Dylan originally had Lewes in mind but that, after the fact, he decided to go with Lewis just to keep his admirers and critics alert.
* The Brothers Four, although disdained in the snobbier hip folk circles for their frat-house, crew-cut, white-bread style, were and are accomplished musicians, with a knack for recording great songs, old and new. Like Koerner, they came up with their own adaptation of “Duncan and Brady,” which they called “Brady, Brady, Brady.” In 1964, they were performing a strong version of Pete Seeger and Joe Hickerson’s antiwar anthem “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” as well as Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice.” In May 1965, only weeks after Dylan recorded “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the Brothers Four released their cover version, beating the Byrds by a month.
10
BOB DYLAN’S CIVIL WARS:
Masked and Anonymous, July 23, 2003, and Chronicles: Volume One, October 5, 2004
After the critical triumph of “Love and Theft” in 2001 and Dylan’s return to Newport a year later, he began turning out fresh work like a man possessed. Not a year passed over the ensuing seven when he failed to produce something of significance, including two albums of original music; a large retrospective of previously unreleased recordings; an album of traditional carols and pop Christmas songs; the first volume of his memoirs, Chronicles; a full-length feature film; a three-and-a-half-hour television documentary, directed by Martin Scorsese, about his early life and career; a major museum exhibition in Europe of his sketches and gouaches (with clear artistic debts to Norman Raeben); and Theme Time Radio Hour with Your Host Bob Dylan, the most original radio show to appear on the air in recent memory. Dylan also received two Grammys, a Prince of Asturias Award, an honorary degree from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and a Pulitzer Prize special citation. All the while, he performed, on average, more than a hundred shows a year, and never fewer than ninety-seven—a punishing schedule almost unheard of these days for an artist of Dylan’s stature and renown, let alone one who was past sixty.
While he did not come close to the astounding creative intensity of 1962–66—no artist his age could possibly have replicated that experience—Dylan enjoyed the most productive phase of his career since that time, as he extended and explored the inventiveness sparked by his reawakening in the early 1990s. He also consolidated the latest incarnation of his public image, now carefully constructed as a wizened cultural elder statesman, an icon of musical Americana who still had plenty left to say, do, and sing, before it got too late. His new work hardly received universal acclaim. Listeners caught on to his method of writing and playing as, in the critic Jon Pareles’s words, “the emissary from a reinvented yesterday,” which at once had made him more comprehensible and created new controversies.1 But Dylan kept moving on, pursuing ambitions old and new, compelled by some combination of forces to push himself as hard as he could for as long as he could.
One of the old ambitions that Dylan rekindled was to make a film to match his musical style and literary visions. The result, in 2003, received one of the worst critical drubbings of his career—a predictable outcome, in retrospect, though one that said something about the state of mainstream film criticism as well as about the manifest shortcomings of Dylan’s movie.
Masked and Anonymous is a manic film about the death agonies of one America and a chilling portent of the birth of a new one. The dying America is the one that, briefly, made Bob Dylan famous—and now aging embittered men and women of that era try to do what they once thought would make the world better. They’ve had that idea of making the world better crushed out of them, but they carry on anyway, without much hope or reason, resigned to futility. Others of their generation keep on hustling, living by their lying wits, talking on because it’s the only way they can make sure they’re not dead. There are still tendrils of beauty in this America—a battered old guitar, a little girl singing an old song about changing times—but they’re not going to make it. The times have changed, they are blasted, and things will get ten times worse.
The film is layered, moves abruptly from one layer to the next, is filled with visual quotations and allusions, and thus is difficult to comprehend on a single viewing. Some of the themes are immediately recognizable to anyone who has attended to Dylan’s earlier work: politics, religion, the mass media, celebrity, entertainment, betrayal, and fate. The materials from which it is constructed are also Dylan’s materials: circus performers, the blues, vaudeville-style jokes and puns, the Bible, old movies, Gene Pitney’s song “Town Without Pity,” the down-and-out, Shakespeare. And it is constructed out of Bob Dylan himself: one layer of Masked and Anonymous, shot along some forlorn, lack-love, vagrant avenues in Los Angeles, is a film called Desolation Row Revisited.
But there are less obvious themes and layers as well. The film is set, it says, “somewhere in America,” but it is a country that looks and feels more like a borderland between the United States and a generic Central or South American dictatorship. A civil war rages between the dying maximum leader’s government and a guerrilla insurgency, although the lines between the two are not at all clear and nobody seems to remember anymore what the fighting is all about. Uncle Sweetheart, a hustler played wonderfully by John Goodman, recruits an imprisoned former rock star named Jack Fate—Dylan’s character—to play a benefit concert for the vaguest of beneficiaries. But behind the stories that unfold about the concert is an important backstory, developed in flashes. Fate is actually the caudillo’s son who has shared a mistress (played by Angela Bassett) with his father, causing estrangement (and, it seems, Fate’s incarceration). The path is clear for the leader’s adoptive son, Edmund (played by Mickey Rourke), to take over once the old man dies. The fractured references are to King Lear. Jack Fate, at this level, is a stand-in for Shakespeare’s Edgar, and the caudillo for the Earl of Gloucester, and the film’s Edmund, like the Edmund in Lear, stands by a new and ruthless code of power. The difference is that, in Dylan’s film unlike Shakespeare’s play, an unrepentant Edmund appears to triumph outright. An old order that was harsh enough gives way directly to a far harsher new one.
Another literary layer in the film is American and dates from the years that led to the historical Civil War. Almost all of Bob Dylan’s work gets scrutinized as a possible allegory, and Masked and Anonymous, packed with aural and visual clues, certainly invites such scrutiny.
Is it allegorical? The answer is: not exactly. Anyone looking, at any level, for exact and consistent correspondences between characters, things, and symbols, on the one hand and history or current events, on the other, will be disappointed. But the allusions, gestures, and hints all do pile up. In this way, Masked and Anonymous, like many of Dylan’s songs, operates as pop sensibility in an American tradition of high allegory going back at least to Melville’s Moby-Dick. (Melville, 1851: “I had some vague idea while writing it, that the whole book was susceptible of an allegoric construction, & also that parts of it were.”)2
Jack Fate, played deadpan by Dylan, has some of Ishmael’s detached, fish-eyed, all-observant qualities, and, like Ishmael’s in the novel, Fate’s inner dialogue—sometimes philosophical, sometimes more like reverie—provides the film with its running narration. The herky-jerky plot of Masked and Anonymous touches on things we know happened, from the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. to the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, but just barely, describing a doomed America that is not exactly any America we know, but one that, like the Pequod, seems about to be splintered and swallowed up in a vortex.* And Dylan is trying to draw some sort of connection between that time and our own—as if they are more alike than anyone sees.
In composing their script, Dylan and his writing partner, the film’s director, Larry Charles, were mindful of numerous historical artifacts from Melville’s America during the years and decades that preceded Fort Sumter. Confronted by a pair of official thugs, Uncle Sweetheart greets them as “the dark princes, the democratic republicans, working for a barbarian who can scarcely spell his own name”—lifting a phrase that the antislavery former president John Quincy Adams used to describe the slaveholder Democratic Republican president, Andrew Jackson, in 1833.3 In the original script, the evil Edmund gives a long speech that repeats, almost word for word, Jackson’s warning in his Farewell Address of 1837 about dangerous subversive forces afoot in the land, driven by “cupidity [and] corruption”—the scapegoats, the film says, for justifying repression.4 Late in the story, as Dylan’s Jack Fate prepares to take the stage, Ed Harris appears in full blackface as the strangely solid ghost of a banjo-playing minstrel, who imitates the subversive imitators superbly, and explains to Fate the lethal consequences that can come from performing the truth about the powers that be. In one of the most affecting of the other musical performances that punctuate the film, Dylan’s character, asked to play “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Ohio,” or some other classic rock protest number, performs “Dixie.” It is as if Dylan/Fate is saying, “You want a protest song, a rebel song? Okay, I’ll give you one; I’ll give you the real thing.” Yet the connection runs deeper, because “Dixie” was written by the blackface minstrel Dan Emmett in 1859 and, to Emmett’s dismay, got picked up by the Confederacy and turned into its virtual national anthem. Dylan borrowed from an academic study of black minstrelsy for the title of “Love and Theft”; a related study, by the cultural historian Dale Cockrell, describes those who perform “charivari” entertainments like the minstrel shows as “masked and anonymous.”5
