Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  There are also numerous films and DVDs, apart from Dylan’s own films and D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back, that portray Dylan’s life, or some portion of it. The most searching of these, even though it only covers the years through mid-1966, is Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (Spitfire Pictures, 2005).

  CHAPTER ONE: MUSIC FOR THE COMMON MAN

  The most thorough biography of Copland is Howard Pollack’s discerning Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (1999; Urbana, Ill., 2000). Another essential title, especially on the themes covered in this chapter, is Elizabeth B. Crist, Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland During the Depression and War (New York, 2005). See also Jennifer DeLapp, Copland in the Fifties: Music and Ideology in the McCarthy Era (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1997). There is a fine selection of Copland’s letters, Elizabeth B. Crist and Wayne Shirley, eds., The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland (New Haven, Conn., 2006), although this should be supplemented by the rich body of material in the Library of Congress’s Aaron Copland Collection, some of which can be perused online at memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/copland/index.html Copland’s own writings are best sampled in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Aaron Copland: A Reader: Selected Writings, 1923–1972 (New York, 2004). Useful critical interpretations of Copland’s music include Neil Butterworth, The Music of Aaron Copland (New York, 1986); and Gail Levin and Judith Tick, Aaron Copland’s America: A Cultural Perspective (New York, 2000). See also the essays in Peter Dickinson, ed., Copland Connotations: Studies and Interviews (Woodbridge, U.K., 2002), which also provides two interviews with Copland; and Carol J. Oja and Judith Tick, eds., Aaron Copland and His World (Princeton, N.J., 2005).

  On Marc Blitzstein, see Eric A. Gordon, Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein (New York, 1989). Blitzstein’s papers and manuscripts are kept at the Division of Archives and Manuscripts, State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison. There is no available recording of Brecht on Brecht, but Dylan listened to the recording of the 1954 Theatre de Lys production of The Threepenny Opera, now available on compact disc from Decca Broadway Recordings. An exceptional, if expensive, collection of Lotte Lenya’s complete recorded works has been released on eleven CDs by the estimable Bear Family label, entitled Lotte Lenya: Her Complete Recordings from 1929–1975.

  On the cultural history of the Popular Front in the United States, the most comprehensive secondary source is Michael Denning’s Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1997). See also, on the 1940s, the chapter about music in FDR’s America in Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York, 2007). On both the modernist Composers’ Collective of the early to mid-1930s and the pro-Communist folk-song movement of the later 1930s and the 1940s, including Pete Seeger’s People’s Songs group, see Robbie Lieberman, “My Song Is My Weapon”: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture (1989; Urbana, Ill., 1995); and Richard A. Reuss with JoAnne C. Reuss, American Folk Music and Left Wing Politics, 1927–1957 (Lanham, Md., 2000). On Charles Seeger, see Ann M. Pescatello, Charles Seeger: A Life in American Music (Pittsburgh, 1992).

  On the folk revival and its origins, see Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); Ronald D. Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940–1970 (Amherst, Mass., 2002); and Dick Weissman, Which Side Are You On? An Inside History of the Folk Music Revival in America (New York, 2005). More particular perspectives on the revival appear in Alan Lomax, Selected Writings, 1934–1997, ed. Ronald D. Cohen (Oxford, 2003); and David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? The Ballad of Pete Seeger (New York, 2008). On Dylan’s boyhood and teenage years, in addition to the basic biographies, see Dave Engel, Just Like Bob Zimmerman’s Blues: Dylan in Minnesota (Amherst, Wis., 1997).

  1 “progress from [the] ivory tower”: Carl Sands [Charles Seeger], “Copeland’s [sic] Music Recital at Pierre Degeyter Club,” Daily Worker, March 22, 1934.

  2 “the silliest thing I did”: Copland quoted in Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (1999; Urbana, Ill., 2000), 276.

  3 “a splendid thing”: Seeger quoted in ibid., 275.

  4 “Many folksongs are complacent”: Seeger (as Carl Sands) quoted in Robbie Lieberman, “My Song Is My Weapon”: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture (1989; Urbana, Ill., 1995), 30.

  5 “It began when Victor”: Copland to Israel Citkowitz, Sept. 1934, Aaron Copland Collection, Library of Congress; also in The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland, eds. Elizabeth B. Crist and Wayne Shirley (New Haven, Conn., 2006), 105–6.

  6 “The summer of 1934”: Pollack, Copland, 278.

  7 “The opening night”: Aaron Copland, “In Memory of Marc Blitzstein (1905–1964),” MS, Copland Collection; published in Perspectives of New Music 2, no. 2 (Spring–Summer, 1964), 6–7.

  8 “social drama”: Pollack, Copland, 181–82.

  9 “to the mongrel commercialized interests”: Diamond to Copland, June 15, 1939, Copland Collection, cited in ibid., 190.

  10 “too European”: Copland quoted in Pollack, Copland, 125.

  11 “rather wary”: Aaron Copland, “About Billy the Kid,” n.d. [circa 1950], MS, Copland Collection.

  12 “I have never been”: Aaron Copland, “Notes on a Cowboy Ballet,” in Aaron Copland: A Reader: Selected Writings, 1923–1972, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York, 2004), 239–40.

  13 “hopelessly involved”: Aaron Copland, Ibid.

  14 “It’s a rather delicate operation”: Ibid.

  15 “stammering version”: Albert H. Tolman, “Some Songs Traditional in the United States,” Journal of American Folk-Lore 29 (April–June 1916), 189.

  16 “severe” music: Arthur Berger, “Copland’s Piano Sonata,” Partisan Review 10, no. 2 (March–April 1943), 187–90. Copland remained good friends with Berger despite their differences and wrote to Berger in characteristic good humor after he “came upon” Berger’s Partisan Review essay. “I like to think,” Copland remarked, “that … I have touched off for myself and others a kind of musical naturalness that we have badly needed—along with ‘great’ works.” Copland to Berger, April 10, 1943, Copland Collection; also in Crist and Shirley, Selected Correspondence, 153–54.

  17 “the speeches of Henry Wallace”: Thomson quoted in Elizabeth B. Crist, Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland During the Depression and War (New York, 2005), 193.

  18 “mid-cult”: Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” in Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (New York, 1962), 37.

  19 “The conventional concert public”: Aaron Copland, “Composer from Brooklyn: An Autobiographical Sketch” (1939, 1968), in Kostelanetz, Copland: A Reader, xxvi.

  20 “one of America’s”; “straightforward without being banal”: Martin Bernstein, An Introduction to Music (1937; New York, 1951), 430, 432.

  21 “is dissolved in personal lyricism”: Joseph Machlis, The Enjoyment of Music: An Introduction to Perceptive Listening (New York, 1955), 600.

  22 “a democratic American artist”: Aaron Copland, “Effect of the Cold War on the Artist in the U.S.,” speech delivered to the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, New York, March 27, 1949, MS, Copland Collection.

  23 “each fiat”: Aaron Copland, Music and Imagination (1952; Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 75.

  24 “a representative selection”: Life, April 4, 1949.

  25 “had never thought of myself”: Copland in Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, 83rd Cong., 1st sess., 1953 (Washington, D.C., 2003), vol. 2, 1267–89, quotations on 1268, 1277, 1284.

  26 “exactly as if”: Copland quoted in Pollack, Copland, 516.

  27 “ ‘Morning Anthem’ ”: Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York, 2004), 272.

  28 “nasty song”: Ibid., 275.

  29 “
far away from”: Ibid., 276.

  30 “the moral fervor”: Copland, “In Memory of Marc Blitzstein.”

  31 “when the gifted young American”: Damrosch quoted in “Nadia Boulanger, Organist, Appears,” New York Times, Jan. 12, 1925. This quotation, rendered in several different forms in subsequent biographies and critical studies, has commonly been taken as an effort by Damrosch to placate restive members of the audience who were offended by Copland’s music. But the original article in the Times offered a very different account of what happened after Damrosch spoke: “A loud laugh went through the audience and up in his box the young American”—Copland—“laughed as loudly as the rest and applauded the sentiment.”

  CHAPTER TWO: PENETRATING AETHER

  General appraisals of the Beat generation include Bruce Cook, The Beat Generation (New York, 1971); Bill Morgan, The Beat Generation in New York (San Francisco, 1997); John Tytell, Naked Angels: The Life and Literature of the Beat Generation (New York, 1976); Ann Charters, ed., The Beats: Literary Bohemianism in Postwar America, Parts I and II, vol. 16 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit, 1983); Edward Halsey Foster, Understanding the Beats (Columbia, S.C., 1992); Steven Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944–1960 (New York, 1995); Ann Charters, Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation? (New York, 2001). The most useful anthology of Beat writings is Ann Charters, ed., The Portable Beat Reader (New York, 1992), but see also Donald M. Allen, ed., The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 (New York, 1960); LeRoi Jones, ed., The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America (New York, 1963); Seymour Krim, ed., The Beats (New York, 1960); and Elias Wilentz, ed., The Beat Scene (New York, 1960). Selections of critical essays can be found in Lee Bartlett, ed., The Beats: Essays in Criticism (New York, 1981); and Kostas Myrsiades, ed., The Beat Generation: Critical Essays (New York, 2002). A blend of contemporary writings about the Beats and Fred McDarrah’s fine photographs appears in Fred W. McDarrah and Timothy S. McDarrah, comps., Kerouac and Friends (1985; New York, 2002).

  The standard edition of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry is Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947–1997 (New York, 2006). Of special importance is Bill Morgan, ed., The Letters of Allen Ginsberg (New York, 2008). The best biographies are Barry Miles, Ginsberg: A Biography (New York, 1989); and Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg (New York, 1992). On Ginsberg and his work, see also Jane Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America (New York, 1968); and the essays in Lewis Hyde, ed., On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984). On Jack Kerouac, Ann Charters’s pioneering biography, Kerouac: A Biography (1973; New York, 1994), should be supplemented with Dennis McNally, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America (New York, 1979); and Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (New York, 1983). Of particular importance, both on Kerouac and on the Beat scene, is Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters (Boston, 1983). The film Pull My Daisy, directed by Robert Frank and with a score by David Amram, is available on DVD in the first volume of Robert Frank: The Complete Film Works, released by Distributed Art Publishers.

  On the literary and political worlds of the so-called New York Intellectuals, there are several places to start: Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York, 1986); Hugh Wilford, The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution (New York, 1995); and Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987).

  Most of Lionel Trilling’s important works remain in print, but of special relevance to this chapter is The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950; New York, 2008). See also the excellent posthumous collection The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays, Leon Wieseltier, ed. (New York, 2000). A full biography has yet to be written, but for a unique perspective on Trilling’s life and work, see Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling (New York, 1993). Useful studies of Trilling’s criticism include William M. Chace, Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics (Stanford, Calif., 1980); Robert Boyers, Lionel Trilling: Negative Capability and the Wisdom of Avoidance (Columbia, Mo., 1977); Mark Krupnick, Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism (Evanston, Ill., 1986); and the essays in John Rodden, ed., Lionel Trilling and the Critics: Opposing Selves (Lincoln, Neb., 1999).

  On Ginsberg and Trilling’s fraught relations, see Robert Genter, “ ‘I’m Not His Father’: Lionel Trilling, Allen Ginsberg, and the Contours of Literary Modernism,” College Literature 31, no. 2 (2004), 22–52; and Adam Kirsch, “Lionel Trilling and Allen Ginsberg: Liberal Father, Radical Son,” Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 2009), poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_kirsch2.php.

  1 “Once I went to a movie”: Jack Kerouac, “54th Chorus,” in Mexico City Blues (242 Choruses) (1959; New York, 1994), 54.

  2 “Someone handed me”: Dylan as quoted in Allen Ginsberg, introduction to Jack Kerouac, Pomes All Sizes (San Francisco, 1992), 2.

  3 “I came out of the wilderness”: Dylan quoted in Cameron Crowe, liner notes to Biograph (1985).

  4 “breathless, dynamic bop phrases”: Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York, 2004), 57.

  5 “the warp of wood”: Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler (1960; New York, 1994), 38.

  6 “Beautiful day with Dylan”: Ginsberg to Louis Ginsberg, Nov. 4, 1975, in The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, ed. Bill Morgan (New York, 2008), 383.

  7 “He had declared”: Ginsberg in Lawrence Grobel, Endangered Species: Writers Talk About Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives (New York, 2001), 169.

  8 “In the early years”: Ginsberg quoted in Alfred G. Aronowitz, “Portrait of a Beat,” Nugget, Oct. 1960, in Kerouac and Friends, comp. Fred W. McDarrah and Timothy S. McDarrah (1985; New York, 2002), 106.

  9 “a kind of intellectual calisthenic”: Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950; New York, 2008), 183.

  10 “the value of individual existence”: Lionel Trilling, “Art, Will, and Necessity,” in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays, ed. Leon Wieseltier (New York, 2000), 511.

  11 “moral realism”: Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 219.

  12 “unaffected by moral compunction”: Ginsberg to Trilling, Sept. 4, 1945, quoted in Robert Genter, “ ‘I’m Not His Father’: Lionel Trilling, Allen Ginsberg, and the Contours of Literary Modernism,” College Literature 31, no. 2 (2004), 37.

  13 “an absolutism”: Trilling to Ginsberg, Sept. 11, 1945, quoted in ibid., 38.

  14 “cheap trick”: Ginsberg to John Hollander, Sept. 7, 1958, in Morgan, Letters of Allen Ginsberg, 215.

  15 “the shadowy and heterogeneous”: Ginsberg to Trilling, Dec. [?], 1948, quoted in Genter, “ ‘I’m Not His Father,’ ” 43.

  16 “It’s my old school”: Ginsberg to Ferlinghetti, March 6, 1959, quoted in Barry Miles, Ginsberg: A Biography (New York, 1989), 260.

  17 “goddamn anarchist”: Asch quoted in Peter D. Goldsmith, Making People’s Music: Moe Asch and Folkways Records (Washington, D.C., 1998), 4.

  18 “silly milly”: Ted Joans, “I Love a Big Bird,” in Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker, ed. Robert G. Reisner (1962; New York, 1977), 117.

  19 “We all play”: Monk quoted in Dylan, Chronicles, 95.

  20 “jazz snob”: Van Ronk remark in No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, directed by Martin Scorsese (Spitfire Pictures, 2005). See also Dave Van Ronk, The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir (New York, 2005).

  21 “I tried to discern”: Dylan, Chronicles, 94.

  22 “listening to Ray Charles blues”: Allen Ginsberg, “Kaddish,” in Collected Poems, 1947–1997 (New York, 2006), 217.

  23 “There used to be”: Scott Cohen, “Bob Dylan Not Like a Rolling Stone Interview,” Spin, Dec. 1985, reprinted in Younger Than That Now: The Collected Interviews with Bob Dylan, ed. James Ellison (New York, 2004), 223.

 
24 “the French guys”: Ibid.

  25 “jail songs”: Bob Dylan, “11 Outlined Epitaphs,” liner notes to The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964), www.bobdylan.com/#/music/times-they-are-changin.

  26 “to enlist the romantic dream”: Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Esquire, Nov. 1960, www.esquire.com/features/superman-supermarket-6.

  27 “there’s only up and down”: “Transcript of Bob Dylan’s Remarks at the Bill of Rights Dinner at the Americana Hotel on 12/13/63,” www.corliss-lamont.org/dylan.htm.

  28 “Allen was really”: Aronowitz quoted in Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades: Take Two (London, 2000), 139.

  29 “I might become his slave”: Ginsberg quoted in Miles, Ginsberg, 334.

  30 “the colors of friday were dull”: Dylan quoted in Heylin, Behind the Shades: Take Two, 143.

  31 “Okay. Are there any poets”: Dont Look Back: A Film and Book by D. A. Pennebaker (New York, 1968), 113.

  32 “sort of a horror cowboy movie”: Television interview with Les Crane, The Les Crane Show, Feb. 17, 1965, transcript available at Giulio Molfese’s Web site, Bread Crumb Sins, www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/65-feb17.htm.

  33 “i have”: Bob Dylan, liner notes to Bringing It All Back Home (1965), www.bobdylan.com/#/music/bringing-it-all-back-home.

  34 “Do you think”: Jonathan Cott, ed., Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews (New York, 2006), 63.

  35 “Dylan has sold out to God”: Ginsberg quoted in Heylin, Behind the Shades: Take Two, 223.

  36 “new ax for composition”: Ginsberg quoted in Miles, Ginsberg, 381.