Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  With that point in mind, declaring Dylan a post-Beat may seem to have certain credence. It places him within a broader tradition without signing him up to the central credo, a set of philosophical ideas that had peaked by the mid-1950s and pre-dated Dylan’s emergence, even from his teenage phase. So it was with some surprise when, in 1992, the grande dame of Beat history, Ann Charters, placed Bob Dylan within the Beat family itself when she produced her edited volume The Portable Beat Reader, a digest of Beat writing. For this respected commentator – the first to produce a biography of Kerouac in 1973 – to cite Dylan, at least by implication, as a core figure in the movement, was not only brave but also charged with meaning. It proposed that Beat was not a merely descriptive term whose potency had largely evaporated as the 1960s commenced, but one that could still be pinned to the most important solo singer-songwriter of the epoch even if his debut album did not emerge until 1962.

  How does she make this case? Charters draws attention to Dylan’s resistance to studio re-takes quoting the singer thus: ‘I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That’s terrible.’5 In his ‘insistence on spontaneity’, Charters sees the Beat spirit alive and well. Further she cites Joseph Wenke who proposes that the singer shares ‘the Beats’ attitudes toward social authority, politics, and drugs, emphasizing the primacy of the self and rejecting institutionally prescribed norms’.6 Charters further supports this by suggesting that in the decade following his emergence, Dylan ‘continued to be influenced by the Beats – through his reading, through his association with […] Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure, and by his visions of himself as a solitary creative artist in the rebellious and liberating atmosphere of the 1960s, which the Beats partly inspired and helped to sustain’.7

  Wenke adds extra perspective, too, in his longer biographical account of the artist, saying:

  Throughout his career Dylan has shared with the Beats the aesthetic assumption that true artistic expression is the result of a spontaneous outpouring of the soul and that revision often leads to over-refinement and falsification. In addition he is indebted to the Beats for having combined poetry with music, thus creating an audience that was ready to respond to unconventional lyrics sung to rock accompaniment, a combination folk-music purists were unwilling to accept […] Finally, and most important, from the beginning of his rock period, the style of Dylan’s most characteristic lyrics unmistakably reveals that Beat poetry was a strong influence on him as he developed into the most provocative and imaginative lyricist of his generation.8

  So let us think about the various ways in which this relationship was forged and built over around a decade and a half, the period when Dylan arguably produced his most important recorded work – from his signing to Columbia Records and his debut record, through Civil Rights engagement to his amplification at Newport, from the motorcycle accident to the Isle of Wight and then an epic return to form in the shape of Blood on the Tracks in 1975, followed by the Rolling Thunder Revue, a celebrated live project and a much less praised, cinema verité movie document that emerged from the months of that concert odyssey.

  For Dylan’s initial Beat associations, we need to return to the very close of the 1950s as the would-be English student, having graduated from Hibbing High School in June 1959, enrolled at the University of Minnesota. Says Richard Williams: ‘The best thing about Minneapolis was the access to a ready-made coffee-house social life, most of which was centred on a district called Dinkytown. This is where the local Bohemians […] congregated. They were the last flowering of the Beat Generation, the sort of people still fired by Jack Kerouac and Lenny Bruce, Zen and Existentialism; still holding jazz-and-poetry concerts and happenings; still wearing baggy sweaters and goatees; mimicking the Greenwich Village of the early fifties (itself a mimicry of the Left Bank).’9

  Dylan played the bars and coffee shops and increasingly became drawn to the fringes where the poets and the loners, the writers and drop-outs spent their time. Such was the appeal of this semi-subterranean zone that it was not long before his university studies were essentially neglected. He comments: ‘I suppose what I was looking for was what I read about in On the Road – looking for the great city, looking for the speed, the sound of it, looking for what Allen Ginsberg called the “hydrogen jukebox could this be world” .’10 By the autumn of 1960, his days as a student were over and it was the university of life, the academy of alternative literature and the realm of the folk singer, that was increasingly driving him on. Dylan later remembered the Dinkytown scene: ‘There was unrest … frustration … like a calm before a hurricane … There were always a lot of poems recited … Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti … I got in at the tail end … and it was magic … every day was like Sunday.’11

  At the very start of 1961, Dylan left behind the Midwest of his home, his family and his abandoned studies and headed for a bitter-cold, frozen-out New York City where he hoped to make music, yes, but also connect with a number of singers he knew only by their recordings. In his autobiographical Chronicles, Dylan said: ‘I was there to find singers, the ones I’d heard on record – Dave Van Ronk, Peggy Seeger, Ed McCurdy, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Josh White, The New Lost City Ramblers, the Reverend Gary Davis and a bunch of others – most of all to find Woody Guthrie.’12 Some of these people he would quickly meet up with – via Dave Van Ronk he even gained a prestigious spot at the Gaslight as he found his feet as a newcomer performer in Greenwich Village – yet amid the hubble bubble of the folk scene – thriving in some ways as the tourists came to listen, clandestine in others in the more secret corners of Izzy Young’s Folklore Center – Dylan scoured the radio for music that excited him, stimulated his ears and his mind.

  He liked some Ricky Nelson, Roy Orbison for certain, yet he was also clearly seeking something of substance, something under the radar, that the literary life of Dinkytown had previously furnished for him. He found a heap of human stories in his new home of New York City but still sought meaning below the bustling surface, yet the radio appeared bland and shallow. ‘The On the Road, “Howl” and Gasoline13 street ideologies that were signalling a new type of human existence weren’t there, but how could you have expected it to be?’ Dylan asks. ‘45 records were incapable of it.’14

  Early on in Chronicles, there are small chinks of light that hint at Dylan’s continuing concern with the Beats. He mentions the jazz musician, and close Kerouac associate, David Amram and the poet Ted Joans as characters who might wander the Village streets, past the bars and cafés that the singer was either performing in or taking a break in between sets. And he compares a fellow singer on the scene, Bobby Neuwirth, as reminiscent of Neal Cassady, a man able, like Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty, to ‘talk his way out of anything’.15 But he also makes the point that ‘[t]he Beats tolerated folk music but they didn’t really like it. They listened exclusively to modern jazz, bebop.’16 In that respect, Dylan’s remark was close to the truth yet it is intriguing that he declares an interest himself in the musical style the Beats most espoused. He states: ‘I’d listen to a lot of jazz and bebop records, too. Records by George Russell or Johnny Cole, Red Garland, Don Byas, Roland Kirk, Gil Evans […] I tried to discern melodies and structures. There were a lot of similarities between some kinds of folk music and jazz.’17 He even recalls a day-time encounter with Thelonious Monk, sitting at the piano in the Blue Note. ‘We all play folk music’, Monk had said to Dylan.18

  Yet, if Dylan’s musical universe was quite eclectic, he hints that the literary heroes that may have sparked his fire in Dinkytown just a year or so before had begun to lose their allure. Not yet 20, the singer’s teenage world-view was being modified, it appeared, by the maturing power of the big city. ‘Within the first few months that I was in New York,’ he explains, ‘I’d lost my interest in the “hungry for kicks” hipster vision that Kerouac illustrates so well in his book On the Road. That book had been like a bible to me. Not anymore, though. I still loved the breathless dynamic bop poetry phras
es that flowed from Jack’s pen, but, now, that character Moriarty seemed out of place, purposeless – seemed like a character who inspired idiocy. He goes through life bumping and grinding with a bull on top of him.’19

  John Hammond, the great talent-spotter of twentieth-century American music, would soon encounter the new arrival in the city and take a fancy to his sound and style. Signing him to Columbia Records, Hammond would oversee the release of Dylan’s eponymous debut in March 1962 – a gathering of covers with a smattering of originals, including the deeply autobiographical ‘New York Talkin’ Blues’ and ‘Song for Woody’, his touching homage to his principal musical hero Woody Guthrie – and, even if the premiere album did not set the world alight, it would be a platform on which to build. By the time of his second album in May 1963, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Dylan’s folk sensibilities, and with his increasingly personal, self-composed and politically tinged compositions to the fore, had been adopted by the burgeoning Civil Rights movement and he would appear on the stage at the event that would form the historic climax of the March on Washington, on 26 August 1963, that great rally for racial quality attended by some 250,000 marchers, when Martin Luther King delivered his ‘I have a dream’ speech. Yet, before 1963 was out, dramatic changes were afoot. President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November while campaigning in Dallas was the most tragic of all but, for Dylan, the killing would have personal reverberations beyond mere grief.

  Invited to accept the Tom Paine Award of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in New York for his Civil Rights endeavours, Dylan was drunk and far from gracious during the evening’s proceedings. He made snide remarks about the older faces in the audience and then added comments – about issues of race, politics and class and about the assassination itself – that outraged. ‘There’s only up and down,’ he said, adding: ‘I’m trying to go up, without thinking of anything trivial such as politics.’ He mentioned the Washington march and stated: ‘I looked at all the Negroes there, and I didn’t see any Negroes that looked like none of my friends. My friends don’t wear suits.’ But it was his lack of respect for the late president that inflamed most. ‘I got to admit,’ he said, ‘that the man who shot President Kennedy […] I don’t know exactly what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I, too – I saw some of myself in him.’20

  Drink-fuelled rhetoric aside, it seems evident that some of the political zeal that fuelled the Dylan motor had begun to retreat. Some say he considered that a gunman could be aiming his sights at him at a time when temperatures were running high – particularly in the South, as the Freedom Rides of the early decade made symbolic challenges to the white racist strategies of those deeply traditional, and once slave, states often leading to bloody violence – in the debate about racial status and opportunity. But perhaps the singer had also embarked on one of those decisive and dogmatic shifts that have marked his career over many years: when Dylan appears to have finally found his cultural niche and the press have pigeonholed him as a folk interpreter, electric rocker or a country musician, as a politico or a Jew or as a Christian, he frequently performs a striking volte face to throw the media off the scent.

  Whatever drove this shift – fear, boredom, a psychological claustrophobia, or mere caprice – a meeting he would make as the year finally faded would certainly help set the songwriter on a fresh and distinctive course over the next few years. It would prompt a change in his approach to writing songs, it would cement his aura as an autonomous artist rather than a contracted troubadour singing songs for a particular and narrow audience or at the behest of a label, and underlie his increasingly apolitical nature, separating him, in most respects, from the countercultural fury that would fire the latter years of the 1960s, particularly that surrounding the ongoing war in Vietnam and the various forces of revolt – from the hippies to the Yippies and Black Panthers and the Weather Underground – that would transform the non-violent struggle of the earlier period into a time of direct action, civil disobedience, angry street protest and even conspiratorial terror.

  Whom did Dylan befriend? Well, it was his first face-to-face encounter with Allen Ginsberg, set up by the always-proactive New York Post music and culture journalist Al Aronowitz, that would prove significant indeed. We have already touched upon the various signs of Dylan’s Beat sympathies as late adolescent and novice music-maker, and the singer makes first published reference to Ginsberg on the sleeve notes of the album The Times They are a-Changin’. Says Gray: ‘Dylan mentions Ginsberg in an early poem: a section of the 11 Outlined Epitaphs that made up Dylan’s sleevenotes for his third album.’21

  But here now was a crucial development: an actual link to the one of the principal names of the movement, one that arose at ‘a pivotal moment in the lives and careers of both men’.22 Gray comments that ‘Ginsberg, perhaps more than any other individual writer of the Beat Generation, opens up for Dylan, and for his whole generation, a bright, babbling, surreal, self-indulgent, sleazy, intensely alert modern world no predecessor had visited’.23 The initial in-the-flesh encounter was, for sure, a connection each would value to the end of Ginsberg’s life in 1997.

  Aronowitz, who had written about the Beats and was, by now, also writing about Dylan, heard of a party that 8th St Bookshop co-owner Ted Wilentz was hosting in New York on Boxing Day, 1963, at which Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky would be present. Aronowitz, playing intermediary, also made sure that Dylan was invited, and poet and songwriter made contact. ‘Allen had never spoken to Dylan before’, says Michael Schumacher, ‘but he […] was familiar with his music […] Dylan displayed a sense of social consciousness that Allen found admirable.’24 The pair, he adds, ‘seemed to be travelling on the same path – to the extent that Dylan was now playing his folk and blues-flavoured music in some of the same venues that Allen had used for his poetry readings only a few years before. And Ginsberg was delighted to be introduced to the musician.’25

  Says Ted’s son, Sean Wilentz:

  At [Ted] Wilentz’s apartment, Ginsberg and Dylan discussed poetry and, according to Aronowitz, Ginsberg came on sexually to Dylan. Dylan, unfazed, invited Ginsberg to join him on a flight to Chicago where he was scheduled to play at the august Orchestra Hall the following night. Ginsberg declined, worrying he recalled, that ‘I might become his slave or something, his mascot’.26

  Schumacher explains that the early basis for the Ginsberg-Dylan association was ‘mutual admiration’ even if they had quite different personality traits. While Dylan was ‘an elusive personality, sometimes withdrawn and sometimes egotistical, always changing, as hard to grasp as mercury’, Ginsberg was ‘gregarious and inquisitive’. But the two ‘shared a common interest in poetry and music, and their initial encounter was a positive one’, he states.27 In fact, Scobie, in his Ginsberg profile at the Dylan website Expecting Rain, says that the association of poet and singer is, subsequently, often characterised as one akin to father and son. Yet he makes the interesting point that, although they appeared to be of two quite different eras, their birth-dates were only 15 years apart, a chronological fact that actually undermines such a parent-child notion.28 The timing of their breakthrough work – Ginsberg’s first published collection, Howl and Other Poems in 1956, only pre-dating Dylan’s eponymous debut album by six years – skews the generational lens still further, as the poet was a mature 30 when he made his name initially while the singer was only 20. Speaking of ‘Howl’, the epic cornerstone of Ginsberg’s debut collection, Gray states: ‘There is not one line from this huge, sprawling poem that cannot claim to be the deranged, inspired midwife of Dylan of the mid-1960s’29 but he adds that the process was also two-way. ‘Dylan’s achievement has included the remarkable fact of his being able to turn right round and become a major influence on Allen Ginsberg.’30

  Soon after the Wilentz party, Dylan would conceive one of his most important songs to date, ‘Chimes of Freedom’, which saw him apply a lyrical technique which would be later described as ‘cha
ins of flashing images’.31 Wilentz argues that such an approach marked ‘both Dylan’s reconnection to Beat aesthetics and the transformation of those aesthetics into song. In the two years that followed Ginsberg and Dylan influenced each other, as both men recast their public images and their art’.32 It is surely not inconsequential either that the sleeve notes of The Times They are a-Changin’ – Beat-like verse richly strewn with name-checks from Guthrie to Robert E. Lee and Piaf and Modigliani – would be echoed on subsequent album covers, too, enigmatic poetic statements or idiosyncratic reflections in the mode of journal entries and signed by Dylan himself.33 Yet it is not without irony that at a point Ginsberg was becoming, if anything, even more politicised – his long-term poetic concerns with honesty, peace and freedom now galvanised in an increasingly high-profile public role, in which the media took an increasing interest – Dylan would find the solace of his own personalised lyric-writing a way to distance himself from the more obvious frontline campaigns, as the Civil Rights struggle segued into an anti-war one from around 1965.