Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  Everywhere it is written—in bullet holes and amputations, in shell shock and mushroom clouds, in brainwash and shrink-wrap—that political science is a clenched fist, that power flows from the mouths of guns, that bloodlust and servitude are coded in our genome, and that obedience or death is the inevitable trajectory of narrative. But there is another way to read this atrocious past century: the view from Gandhi’s spinning wheel, in which, against tyranny and exploitation, occupation and oppression, popular movements of tens of thousands withhold their consent. They refuse, secede, mobilize, challenge, humiliate, disrupt, and disobey. And their principled civil disobedience—tactical, strategic, improvisatory, sometimes even whimsical—creates the very wherewithal of a civil society. When Václav Havel and his friends wrote a new social contract in 1989 in the Magic Lantern Theater in Prague, on a stage set for Dürrenmatt’s Minotaurus, they weren’t reading Prairie Fire. Nor were the students from Charles University, dressed comically as Young Pioneers in red kerchiefs, white blouses, and pigtails, calling themselves the Committee for a More Joyful Present, who joined these jailbird intellectuals when they were depressed and weary: “We have come,” the students said, “to cheer you up—and make sure you don’t turn into another politboro.” And so the students gave to all the members of Havel’s plenum little circular mirrors to examine themselves as they wrote the future of the Czech Republic to the music of the Beatles—in order to be on the lookout for you know whom.

  Blowing His Nose in the Wind

  1

  Bob Dylan wrote “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” in the summer of 1962, in a matter of minutes, on Wavy Gravy’s typewriter, after reading William Blake. “That song kind of roared right out of the typewriter,” Wavy Gravy remembers. “It roared through him the way paint roared through van Gogh.”

  Wavy Gravy, in case you are wondering how to become a Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream flavor, was the Merry Prankster who introduced young Dylan to everybody hip in Greenwich Village in the early sixties, from Allen Ginsberg to Lenny Bruce to Thelonius Monk. He was also heard to whisper, during Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, “I hope he’s over quick, Mahalia Jackson’s on next.” And he later served as master of ceremonies at the 1969 Woodstock music festival. Bob Dylan actually happened to be living in Woodstock at the time of this pep rally, but chose to perform instead on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England, for fifty thousand dollars plus expenses—although he would manage to make it to Woodstock the Sequel, in 1994, for six hundred thousand dollars.

  Anyway, Wavy Gravy’s 1962 intuition of afflatus accords with Dylan’s own. “The songs are there,” the boy genius told Sing Out! “They exist all by themselves just waiting for someone to write them down.” If “Hard Rain” painted itself, “Like a Rolling Stone” would come to him in 1965 like “a long piece of vomit.” To Robert Shelton he explained in 1966 that “anytime I’m singing about people and if the songs are dreamed, it’s like my voice is coming out of their dream.” Much, much later, after being baptized in the Pacific Ocean, a born-again Bob would credit God. And then vandals stole the handle.

  Given that I’m about to contribute to the literature of hyperventilation on the overwrought occasion of Dylan’s sixtieth birthday, you ought to know where I stand. Because Joan Baez loved him a lot, I have to assume that he is not as much of a creep as he so often seems. But I’m entitled to doubts about anybody whose favorite Beatle was George. And don’t tell me it’s all about the music. The whole Dylan package has been marketed as attitude; wrapped in masks. Music is about music. Biographies are about behavior. Caring about the music is what makes our interest in the behavior more than merely prurient. If you’d really rather not have known that Pythagoras hated beans, Spinoza loved rainbows, and Ingmar Bergman was a lousy father, you’re a better person than I am, although we both have a long way to go before we’re as good as Joan Baez.

  2

  I wish that for just one time

  you could stand inside my shoes

  You’d know what a drag it is

  to see you

  Think of David Hajdu’s Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña as A Little Night Music scored for dulcimer and motorcycle. Or a pas de quatre, with wind chimes, love beads, and a guest-appearance entrechat by Thomas Pynchon. As Hajdu, whose biography of Billy Strayhorn, Lush Life, is an ornament of jazz lit, rotates among his principals until at last they settle down to play house in Carmel and Woodstock, he is such an ironist among blue notes, so knowledgeable about their performing selves on stage, in bed, and in our mezzotinted memories, that he seems almost to be whistling scherzos. So we follow Bobby Zimmerman, aka Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham, a Russian-Jewish college dropout who left Minnesota to look for Woody Guthrie, and Richard Fariña, an Irish-Cuban altar boy from Flushing, Queens, who majored in literary ambition at Nabokov’s Cornell, as they advance their careers by sleeping with Joan Baez and her sister Mimi, the singing daughters of a Mexican-American physics professor who trained Cold War military engineers. And Hajdu also knows precisely where to stop the music, just this side of lapidary, in 1966, when a matched pair of motorcycle accidents—a zygotic twinship—killed off Fariña two days after the publication of his only novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, and sent the substance-abusing Dylan into the first of his many gnomic seclusions.

  This countercultural Les Liaisons Dangereuses began on a Greenwich Village street corner in 1961, when an unknown Fariña said to a little-known Dylan, “Man, what you need to do, man, is hook up with Joan Baez. She is so square, she isn’t in this century. She needs you to bring her into the twentieth century, and you need somebody like her to do your songs. She’s your ticket, man. All you need to do, man, is start screwing Joan Baez.” To which an insouciant Dylan replied: “That’s a good idea—I think I’ll do that. But I don’t want her singing none of my songs.” It would end twenty-five years later—after Richard had dumped his first wife, Carolyn Hester, to get as close as he could to Joan by courting and marrying her teenaged sister Mimi; after Bob used Joan to get famous and then did everything he could think of to ridicule and degrade her, to which she responded with a love song, “Diamonds and Rust,” that would have shamed any other cad this side of Dr. Kissinger’s princely narcissism; after Vietnam, Watergate, and Ronald Reagan—when Brother Bob saw the Widow Mimi for the first time since Richard’s death, and sought to comfort her with these apples: “Hey, that was a drag about Dick. It happened right around my thing, you know. Made me think.”

  And love is just a four-letter word.

  Postdocs in Dylanology will most appreciate Hajdu’s revisionist account of Newport in 1965. He blames the boos on a lousy sound system in worse weather. How could anyone have been surprised at Dylan’s plugging himself in, when his new album, Bringing It All Back Home, with its hit single, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” had been on the charts for four months, and you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing “Like a Rolling Stone”? Assistant professors of Gravity’s Rainbow will be delighted to hear from Tom Pynchon, who was a buddy of Richard’s at Cornell, and best man at his wedding to Mimi in Carmel, to which he hitchhiked from Mexico because he didn’t have a driver’s license, and agreed to be interviewed for Hajdu’s book by fax, and is quoted not only in a blurb for Been Down So Long (“This book comes on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by two hundred kazoo players with perfect pitch”), but also in a personal note to the needy author:

  But to you, wild colonial maniac, about all I can say is holy shit…. This thing man picked me up, sucked me in, cycled, spun and centrifuged my ass to where it was a major effort of will to go get up and take a leak even, and by the time it was over with I know where I had been.

  If you want comparisons, which you don’t, I think most of Rilke.

  For those of us who are amateurs—that is, those of us who still enjoy the great songs but are inclined
to believe that there are whole decades of Dylan more interesting to read about in Greil Marcus (“What is this shit?”) than to listen to on our speaker systems—Postively 4th Street is a cohort story. I like cohort stories: about Partisan Reviewers, Abstract Expressionists, or the Beats; the New York Brat Pack and the Chinese Misties. I think it’s terrific that young singers and songwriters, like young writers and artists, fester together in seedy nests or move in herds like thick-skinned ungulates across the inky savannahs of the culture, dodging potshots from the great white hunters at Establishment media. So what if they hurt one another while the rest of us are waiting to see which one turns into a unicorn? My favorite Positively scene is when Bob, Joan, Richard, and Mimi visit Henry Miller, the Tropic of Cancer himself rusticating in Pacific Palisades, whom only Richard has read. Henry, of course, wants either Baez (or both), but has to settle for playing Ping-Pong with Mr. Tambourine Man.

  I also love their cover stories: Dylan, who grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, with fine china, crystal glass, sterling silver cutlery, a spinet piano, and a chandelier, whose father bought him a pink Ford convertible and a Harley, whose only real job ever in the real world was as a busboy one summer at the Red Apple Café in Fargo, North Dakota, told everybody in Manhattan that he had been raised in foster homes, had Sioux Indian blood, sang for his supper in carnivals from age fourteen, played piano on early Elvis records, picked up guitar licks from a New Mexico blues musician named Wigglefoot, wrote songs for Carl Perkins in Nashville, and earned walking-around money as a Times Square hustler. Fariña, whose father was a toolmaker and whose first job out of college was at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, working on the Shell Oil account, advised the credulous that his father was a Cuban inventor and his mother an Irish mystic, that he had been born at sea, and had run guns for Castro, and had sunk a British sub for the IRA, and had been expelled from Cornell for leading a riot, and slept with a loaded .45 under his pillow in case of assassins.

  Haven’t we all fudged our résumés? But who knew that organized folksinging, like organized labor, organized religion, and organized crime, could be a medium of upward mobility?

  3

  They’ll stone you when you’re riding in your car

  They’ll stone you when you’re playing your guitar

  But I would not feel so all alone

  Everybody must get stoned

  Think of Howard Sounes’s Down the Highway, on the other hand, as a surveillance tape. Or maybe a transcript of the black-box audio recovered from the crash site of the never-ending tour bus. Either lumbering way, it wants to be exhaustive, like a commission report or a Dreiser. (An American Tragedy comes to mind.) British journalist Sounes, who has also written a biography of Charles Bukowski, tracks Dylan from the four-year-old who used to entertain his family with a rousing rendition of “Accentuate the Positive” to the sixty-year-old who has authorized himself to sing “Forever Young” in a television commercial for iMac Apple computers. And besides mentioning every book, record, gesture, arrangement, or idea that Dylan ever stole in his lordly passage from Hard Rain to Sweet Jesus, Sounes will also name the names of every girlfriend, fraternity brother, business associate, disordered groupie, and discarded mentor or buddy; every musician at every gig or recording session; and every influence from Buddy Holly, Hank Williams, Little Richard, Muddy Waters, and Jimmy Reed, to James Dean and Marlon Brando, to Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Odetta, to Gunsmoke’s Matt Dillon and Graceland’s Elvis and the Beatles and St. Augustine.

  Most of this you probably already knew from previous biographies by Anthony Scaduto, Robert Shelton, Bob Spitz, and Clinton Heylin, whose ferociously opinionated Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades has just been “revisited” and updated for the birthday party and is lots more fun than Sounes. But some of it you didn’t—such as his second marriage to one of his African American backup singers, Carolyn Dennis, to legitimize his sixth child, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan. Moreover, after interviewing everybody in the vicinity at the time, Sounes suggests that Dylan’s famous 1966 motorcycle accident might not have been as medically serious as previously supposed, but more of an excuse to drop out, sober up, and recharge, after Highway 61, Blonde on Blonde, and all that hash and all those amphetamines in Australia.

  In fact, while heavy drinking seems to have been Dylan’s biggest problem most of his career—he finally quit in the midnineties—1966 is associated in both books with everything from pot to speed to LSD and maybe even heroin, leaving Dylan “skeletal and green.” (There is even a theory that “I Want You” in Blonde on Blonde was “about heroin” rather than a woman.) While we burned Dylan for fuel, he seems to have been running on fumes. The 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue, to which Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepard, Joni Mitchell, and Stevie Wonder signed on, though they can’t be blamed for Renaldo and Clara, sounds in Sounes like a coke bust waiting to happen to a tabloid. And by Thanksgiving 1976, when the Band let Martin Scorsese film The Last Waltz, they even had a backstage snorting room, painted white and decorated by noses cut out of Groucho Marx masks, with a tape of sniffing noises. Hajdu tells us that in 1964 and 1965, while Dylan was typing those “prose poems” that eventually added up to Tarantula, he got by on black coffee and red wine. But to compose what Baez thought of as his increasingly nihilistic songs, he chain-smoked marijuana. It’s an odd division of labor enticements—sort of like Jean-Paul Sartre’s staying sober to write his novels and Les Mots, whereas, for philosophy, he was usually doped up on a compound of aspirin and amphetamines called corydrane, stoning himself to kill God.

  So now ask yourself if Dylan’s notorious indifference to the niceties of cutting a record, to the relative merits of a multitude of sessions musicians, to the desires and opinions of his fans and audience, to whether he had any business on a stage, taking their money, when he was wired out of his skull, or in a recording studio, martyrizing thugs like Joey Gallo; combined with his disdain for former colleagues, ex-friends, and previous incarnations, contempt for other artists like Harry Belafonte and Theodore Bikel who cared about causes he could no longer use, like civil rights, and surliness unto Road Rage; even his unintelligible weirdness on such public occasions as his accepting the Tom Paine award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Union in November 1963 with a monologue that empathized with Lee Harvey Oswald—“But I got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt in me,” which must be what inspired Jerry Rubin, five years later, to proclaim that “Sirhan Sirhan is a Yippie!”—well, ask yourself if some of this might have owed as much to chemicals as it did to authenticity. Elvis envy! Don’t think twice.

  Still, for those of us who aren’t Dylanologists, there is much in Down the Highway that is wonderfully surprising. Did you know that Dylan’s first song was about Brigitte Bardot? That his favorite film is Shoot the Piano Player, with Charles Aznavour? That his favorite artist is Marc Chagall? That his first wife had been a Playboy bunny? That Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols seems not to have liked him? That Tiny Tim was a member of his Woodstock entourage? That after Jesus he took up sailing and boxing? That, with Bob’s help and some high-grade pot, Paul McCartney not only discovered the meaning of life but also wrote it down? “There are seven levels.”

  It takes a lot to laugh; it takes a train to cry.

  4

  The geometry of innocence flesh on the bone

  Causes Galileo’s math book to get thrown

  At Delilah…

  Joan Baez, or so Hajdu quotes her mother, “always thought she was ugly.” Even on Mt. Auburn Street in Cambridge in 1958, in her own mind “I was still the girl the kids used to taunt and call a dirty Mexican,” so “pathologically insecure about her appearance” that she mugged at cameras in self-defense, and so self-conscious about what she imagined to be the small size of her breasts that she always wore a light floral jumper over her bikini. Joan Baez? I saw her with my own eyes in Cambridge in 1958, after I’d heard her with my own ears one warm spring night when “All My Trials” came through the wind
ow into the basement of the college newspaper on Plympton Street. It was the purest voice I’d ever heard, like listening to the wild blue yonder. And when I rushed out to see what such a voice looked like, she was, of course, beautiful beyond the speed of light. And still is, like her fellow pacifist Aung San Suu Kyi.

  This is the woman that Dylan and his coke-addled cohort chose to humiliate on camera in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Dont Look Back, on their 1965 concert tour of England. She is also made to symbolize, in both these books, a phony folkie subculture which Dylan, of course, would rile and rock and raunch and roll. “The virgin enchantress,” Hajdu calls her, as well as “Glinda, the Good Witch of the North.” How precious her flock, those middle-class flower children of a Harvard-educated twelve-string banjo like Pete Seeger. What poseurs, like a bunch of Bambis at some hootenanny salt lick, or a seminar on creative nonviolence at a Quaker meeting of vegetarian carpenters. Over such a quilting bee, the hermit-monk Dylan would ride roughshod, not sidesaddle, on his Golden Calf—the Biggest of Boppers.

  According to Hajdu the Newport Folk Festival in 1959 was “a popular summer attraction for the suburban leisure class of the postwar boom economy.” And “the nascent discontent on college campuses” in 1962 was “a mobilization in the name of political and moral principle that was also a fashion trend and a business opportunity.” And, by 1965 at Newport, if Baez and Dylan weren’t around, “no one poolside seemed to know which way to point his lounge chair.” Actually, I remember sleeping on the beach because we couldn’t afford a motel.