by Lee Marshall
During 1964 and early 1965, Dylan’s persona began to transform. He generally became more hip, wearing dandyish clothes in place of the folk singer’s uniform of jeans and work boots. The tension between Dylan and his audience increased when, in March 1965, Dylan released Bringing It All Back Home. Its first side was recorded with an electric backing band, which outraged many in the folk fraternity. In May, Dylan toured the UK as a solo folk performer, mixing his new work like ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ with his older protest work.
On his return from the UK, Dylan penned and recorded a new song, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. Recorded with a full band, the song, with its sweeping sound, has become emblematic of Dylan’s career. It gave Dylan his highest chart placing (number two) and is regarded as one of the most important songs ever recorded. Dylan played it, along with two other songs from his forthcoming album, Highway 61 Revisited, at the Newport Folk Festival in July. By playing with an electric band at this most sacred of folk events, Dylan deliberately broke the unwritten rules of the folk revival. He outraged many of the organisers and was booed by the audience, providing one of the most dramatic performances in rock history.
The conflict between Dylan and his audience continued for the rest of 1965 and on his 1966 world tour. In these shows, Dylan would play the first set solo with an acoustic guitar. These performances were well received. After a break, he would return supported by The Band and play an electric set culminating in ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. Everywhere Dylan played these electrified performances were booed by the audience and Dylan argued with hecklers. These shows soon took on a mythical quality, available for many years on bootleg before the ‘Royal Albert Hall’ concert (actually from Manchester) was officially released in 1998.
Albums and major events
November1963 Newsweek publishes an article that reveals Dylan’s conventional upbringing in Hibbing
February 1964 Three weeks road trip from New York to San Francisco, during which Dylan first hears the music of The Beatles
May 1964 First public performance of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’
July 1964 Newport Folk Festival
August 1964 Another Side of Bob Dylan
March 1965 Bringing It All Back Home
May 1965 UK tour (documented in the film Don’t Look Back)
June 1965 Moves out of New York to Woodstock
June 1965 Writes and records ‘Like A Rolling Stone’
July 1965 Plugs in at the Newport Folk Festival
August 1965 Highway 61 Revisited
November 1965 Marries Sara Lowndes
April–May 1966 World Tour (documented in The Bootleg Series volume 4)
May 1966 Blonde and Blonde
* Goldmann denies this is his intention, accepting that only ‘certain exceptional individuals’ could create great works of art and stating that ‘nobody would dream of denying that literary and philosophical productions are the works of their authors’ (1975:43).
* In a scripted interview in 1965, Dylan was asked whether Guthrie was his greatest influence. He replied ‘I don’t know that I’d say that but, for a spell, the idea of him affected me quite much’ (Jack Goddard interview).
* He was found guilty in 1961 and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment, though this was overturned on appeal.
* Marqusee suggests that Dylan’s politics came ‘largely from records’ (2003:50).
* Most of Dylan’s influences clearly come from the 1950s, and it has been noted in many biographies that the young Dylan was interested in movies. In his historical account of film stardom, Richard Schickel suggests that the 1930s–1950s era of Hollywood history can generally be described as an era of ‘normality’ in which, rather than scandal or excess, stars seemed to be normal, just like you and me, only richer. Acting was seen as a noble trade (2000:65–87). This idea runs deep in Dylan’s conception of his own work and has become a notable element of his explanations for the Never Ending Tour – presenting himself merely as a craftsman doing his work and providing for his family.
4
ROCK STARDOM: RECONCILING CULTURE AND COMMERCE
The apex of the folk revival of the early sixties came at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1963. On the final night of the event, Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary linked arms and led the audience through renditions of ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’. Two years later, the same festival provided the site for the symbolic end of the revival, as Dylan outraged the organisers and was booed by the audience for playing with an electric backing band. After that performance, ‘what had been understood as folk music would as a cultural force have all but ceased to exist’.1
Dylan’s Newport 1965 performance is probably the most discussed performance in the history of popular music. Biographically, the performance can be seen as part of a process – beginning at least as early as February 1964 when Dylan began writing ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, and continuing at least as far as May 1966 when Dylan was booed by British audiences on the last leg of his 1966 world tour. In terms of rock historiography, however, this single act – plugging in at Newport – is used to symbolise the closing of one chapter and the opening of another, both in terms of Dylan’s own career and with regard to popular music as a whole. Dylan ‘going electric’ is a foundational moment in popular music history.
Accounts of Dylan’s shift from acoustic to electric music usually concentrate on what Dylan did to popular music – making it literate and giving it a social conscience. While Dylan may have been a folk star, the folk revival was still only a small section of popular music and, so the story goes, it is only when Dylan changes musical forms that his true effect is felt. These narratives are key elements of Dylan’s star-image. For example, Peter Wicke argues that ‘by [going electric] Dylan had shown a way forward which was not only followed by many former folk musicians but which placed rock music in contexts which led its development to follow increasingly political criteria’2 while Mike Marqusee states that ‘Dylan opened up an established form to a range of words, references, experiences, moods, and modes not previously associated with it’.3 Now, I’m not about to begin arguing against such a position, but I do want to approach it in a slightly different (though not wholly original) way. The above quotes imply that Dylan moved from ‘folk’ into a pre-existing ‘rock’ music which opened the genre up to new possibilities. My suggestion is that rock did not exist before Dylan’s shift to electric music. All of the contemporaneous media reports on Dylan’s shift to an electric band that I have seen refer to him playing not ‘rock’ but ‘rock and roll’. Rock and roll was a label that described a teenage music assumed to be good for dancing and little else. There are references to a new type of ‘folk-rock’ but no mentions of ‘rock music’. Rock has a long history in popular music as a verb (e.g. ‘Rock Around The Clock’, or ‘Rock Me Baby’) but at this time it did not exist as a noun that classified a form of music. Dylan was seen to have become a rock and roll (or, derogatively and synonymously from a number of disgruntled fans, a pop) performer; it is only afterwards (at least 1967, maybe even later) that it is presented as a shift from ‘folk’ to ‘rock’. So when I say that Dylan going electric was a foundational moment, I mean it literally. Dylan was the catalyst for the formation of a new type of popular music, one that dominated the mainstream for at least the next decade. Dylan’s mid-sixties albums ‘inspired a new sort of writing, rock criticism, and a new sort of pop fan, the pursuer of meaning rather than pin ups’.4
Making such a statement means considering ‘rock’ in a slightly unconventional way because it concentrates on ideology rather than musical structure. Obviously, electrical instrumentation existed in popular music prior to 1965 and so, while Dylan’s mid-sixties albums are musically distinctive, they are not necessarily genre-forming. But, while it might seem a perverse claim, ‘rock’ is not really about music. As Lawrence Grossberg explains, ‘although an account of rock cannot ignore it
s musical affectivity, it is also the case that rock cannot be defined in musical terms. There are, for all practical purposes, no musical limits on what can or cannot be rock’.5 This is why albums as differently sounding as Nashville Skyline and Street Legal can both be considered ‘rock’. Instead of viewing rock as a particular genre we need, following Keightley, to view it as a musical culture.6 The distinctive characteristic of rock culture is that it is generated from within the mainstream:
Unlike jazz and folk . . . rock’s history cannot be understood in terms of processes of crossover. At the outset, there is no ‘elsewhere’ from whence rock is taken and then ‘mainstreamed’, no ‘outside’ or place apart from the mainstream that might serve as rock’s birthplace. For all of rock’s appropriation, modification or outright theft of African-American, agrarian, or working-class musical cultures, it is not itself a form of crossover, nor a subculture incorporated by the dominant culture, nor a counterculture (the term most associated with rock politics in the 1960s). Rock may wear subcultural clothes, identify with marginalised minorities, promote countercultural political positions, and upset genteel notions of propriety, but from its inception it has been a large-scale, industrially organised, mass-mediated mainstream phenomenon operating at the very centre of society.7
Rock emerged in the mid-sixties as a way of stratifying mainstream musical consumption, as a means of creating higher and lower levels of popular music. The basis of rock is the claim that certain elements of popular music are worthy of being taken seriously in their own right. Rather than merely assuming a difference in quality between serious/classical music and light/popular music, rock functions to differentiate between serious, worthwhile popular music (rock) and trivial, lightweight popular music (pop). As such, whether someone is defined as ‘rock’ or not is a question to be addressed not musically but in terms of ideology (how else can John Wesley Harding be considered rock?). This means that, in particular, ideas of authenticity are crucial. The notion of authenticity is complex and contradictory and its surface forms change over time. It is, however, underpinned by consistent ideological roots: rock tends to be defended on two grounds. Firstly, a ‘folk ideology’ supports the idea that rock is music produced by a specific social group and that rock stars thus represent that group. Secondly, an ‘art ideology’ presents the idea that rock stars are creative individuals expressing their unique personal vision through their work.8
The centrality of these ideologies of authenticity for rock’s attempts to stratify the mainstream is the reason that Dylan is the foundational figure in rock culture. Dylan’s shift to electric music brought to the mainstream the political authority and communal links of his folk past while his songwriting skills offered the exemplar of what could be achieved artistically within the new form. In a recent book, Bernard Gendron discusses how rock music came to be accepted as a legitimate artistic form. His claim is that The Beatles are the key figures in this process, arguing that the critical acclaim of their later albums is the key force behind rock’s critical acceptance.9 Gendron underplays Dylan’s role in this process, suggesting that ‘the story of Dylan’s canonization does not coincide as neatly with that of rock as does The Beatles’10 because a) Dylan had cultural legitimacy before moving into rock music; and b) Dylan was absent from rock’s cultural high point in 1967. I shall deal with the latter point in the next chapter – Dylan was actually a considerable presence on the rock scene in 1967 – but the point he makes about Dylan’s previous cultural authority is both true and, in my view, the key reason for the rise of The Beatles’ legitimacy that Gendron takes as his subject. Gendron points out that The Beatles were critically dismissed as juvenile on their first tour to America in 1964, yet by the summer of 1965 were beginning to be taken seriously as artists. My argument is that Dylan’s earlier stardom and his electrified output in 1965 helped teen music acquire a legitimacy that became the hallmark of rock culture. I am not suggesting that Dylan single-handedly ‘invented’ rock – what Dylan achieved could not have occurred without a range of other musical and social factors being in place, including the emergence of The Beatles in 1964 – but his stardom provided a catalyst for a range of social and cultural ideas to coalesce within rock culture. This is why Greil Marcus can claim that, in 1965, ‘Bob Dylan seemed less to occupy a turning point in cultural space and time than to be that turning point’.11
DYLAN, ROCK AND TRANSITION
In 1965, Bob Dylan was the coolest person on the planet. Not just popular (though popular he certainly was: in September of that year, 48 of his songs were recorded by other artists and 8 of his songs were in the Top 40, 4 of them sung by him), but cool. He dressed immaculately, without ever seeming contrived; his hair became increasingly uncontrolled and somehow still managed to look perfect; he held court with icy wit and implacable nerve; he played mind games to destroy journalistic triviality; he wore sunglasses even when indoors and, as one journalist wrote in 1966, even when ‘he removed his dark glasses as a bonus to the cameramen, [he] somehow managed to look exactly the same’. In 1965, he was the only person to give the impression that he knew exactly what was going on, always two steps ahead. If one compares the TV interviews of The Beatles, The Stones and Dylan in 1965, the difference is telling: whereas The Beatles and Stones may have engaged in some slightly childish wordplay in response to interviewers, they were essentially well-behaved boys keen to make a good impression. Dylan treated journalists like they were plankton (in his second national TV performance, Dylan constantly called his interviewer, Les Crane, ‘Less’). He seemed to manifest a particular aura: aloof and happening, it is no wonder that both The Beatles and The Stones were in awe of Dylan whenever they met.
My argument is that Dylan was the first real Rock Star. His razor-sharp hipness in 1965 and the strung-out excesses of 1966 laid down the prototype for this new social role. Some of the substance of Dylan’s new star-image was rooted in his public persona developed as a folk star but his image in 1965–6 is clearly a different type of star-image. We need to ask, therefore, what enabled his image to take on new meanings. Dylan’s stardom is not merely led by his artistic output or force of personality. The star-image also acts as a limit on what the star can and cannot do (for example, Schickel discusses how Ingrid Bergman was the subject of a scandal when she had an affair because such behaviour did not correspond to her star-image).12 It prescribes acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, what music can be released and what cannot. Early in 1963, Dylan recorded a number of tracks with an electric backing band with the intention of releasing one ‘electric side’ on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It was eventually decided to release an album made up almost exclusively of acoustic material performed solo. While we could just see this as an individual decision made by Dylan, it was actually structured, not only by his manager Albert Grossman and his record label, but by wider audience expectations, by what his particular star-image meant. Dylan’s fairly fixed image as a folk star placed limits on what Dylan could do.
Dylan did eventually release an album with one electric side in 1965 – Bringing It All Back Home. We thus need to investigate what changed to enable him to pursue this direction. To my mind, the most significant event is the publication of an article in Newsweek magazine on 4 November 1963. The article had been sought by Dylan’s publicist and record company but it turned into something very negative, accusing Dylan of hypocrisy:
He says he hates the commercial side of folk music, but he has two agents who hover about him, guarding his words and fattening his contracts. He scorns the press’s interest in him, but he wants to know how long a story about him will run and if there will be a photograph.13
The article even propagated a rumour (still occasionally heard today) that Dylan bought rather than wrote ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’. By far the most significant element of the story, however, was that it was the first to publicise Dylan’s normal background:
He has suffered; he has been hung up, man, without bread, without a chick, with t
wisted wires growing inside him. His audiences share his pain, and seem jealous because they grew up in conventional homes and conventional schools. The ironic thing is that Bob Dylan, too, grew up in a conventional home, and went to conventional schools.14
The article publicised his birthname, pointed out that his parents were in New York to see his next show, and even interviewed his younger brother.
Dylan was furious about the article; it marked the starting point of his lifelong antagonistic relationship with the press. The irony is that although Dylan was furious with the exposé, it probably served him well in the long run because it removed the fixity of his star-image.15 Without the article it is difficult to see a way in which Dylan’s renunciations of his protest material would not also have been a renunciation of the whole meaning of the star-image ‘Bob Dylan’. If ‘Bob Dylan’ meant only one thing then taking it away would have reduced Dylan’s significance as a star, effectively signifying a withdrawal from the public sphere, a retirement.* By exposing his ‘real identity’, however, the Newsweek article opened up new possibilities for Dylan’s stardom. Given the private/public signifying split in stardom, discussed in chapter 2, the revelations added a new depth to Dylan’s star-image. It made Dylan ‘the person’ seem considerably more complex than before, and fitted an ideology of upward mobility that implied people could transform their circumstances through strength of will. The article actually made it easier for Dylan to play games with his public identity because the nature of the game was now public and ‘being played with the audience’s full knowledge. The mask could be worn in public and could be publicly displayed as a mask’.16 The idea of ‘Bob Dylan’ suddenly became a lot more complicated and a lot more playful.
This ‘opening up’ of the Dylan persona is crucial for the rapid transformation of Dylan’s stardom in the mid-sixties but it has also been the mainstay of Dylan’s star-image ever since: crucially, Dylan’s stardom developed so that ‘“Bob Dylan” stand[s] not for any imposed role but for the very act of resistance to imposed roles’.17 Thus a key media portrayal of Dylan revolves around his indefinability and his unwillingness to be defined (for example, Malcom Jones opens his 1995 Newsweek article with ‘the one sure thing about Bob Dylan is that there is no sure thing’ while on its release Jon Pareles described Time Out Of Mind as ‘a typical Dylan album only because it eludes expectations’).