Bob Dylan

by Lee Marshall

  Keightley cautiously points out that: ‘since rock emerges in the overlapping of a number of musical cultures, however, rock does not simply adopt folk ideology wholesale. Rather, because of crucial differences in the age profiles of their respective audiences and due to diverging attitudes toward success and popularity, rock adapts key aspects of folk ideology.’37 Keightley is wary of a simple transposition of folk ideology into rock because whereas rock is most obviously associated with youth, the folk revival was intergenerational. Such a contention is substantially correct – the folk revival did include many who had participated in the folk revival of the 1930s – but is also lacking because it does not consider the content of the folk revival in sufficient detail. As already discussed, the folk revival was itself split on generational lines, as younger musicians such as Dylan reflected changing folk sensibility to politics, individuality and commercialism. Thus the new generational consciousness described in the previous chapter as underpinning the folk revival is also used by Grossberg to explain the emergence of rock culture:

  the rupture which separated youth from adults was not a matter of ideology or interpretation. It was a crisis in the relation between affect and signification, in the [impossibility] of investing in the meanings and values offered to them . . . An affective uncertainty . . . gradually became the common discourse of youth. It is not that youth did not live the ideological values of their parents; rather, they found it impossible to represent their mood, their own ‘affective’ relationship to the world, in those terms and to seriously invest themselves in such values.38

  What does happen in the emergence of rock is that this affective sensibility becomes more widespread and its constituency spreads far beyond the limits of the folk revival. This means that the nascent rock culture became more firmly associated with youth than its folk prototype. This relationship between rock and youth was used to justify rock’s status as a form of folk music. The ideology of folk is that the music is generated by a particular community and thus reflects communal experience. In rock culture, the community was understood to be a new generation who shared a common set of experiences, values and beliefs, and rock music was understood as the authentic expression of that generation, created by people who were part of that community. Such an idea is obviously rooted in the folk music revival already discussed.

  Rock’s rootedness in the folk revival enables it to maintain a specifically political dimension. It was assumed that the content of rock songs dealt with the same issues of injustice and critique as the protest genre, but in a distinctive way. Street argues that, in contrast to folk music: ‘Rock’s politics . . . emerge in its understandings of private states in public life; and as a result, its politics will have distinct focus and style. They will be concerned with how the individual encounters the world; and they will be interested in comprehending and sympathizing with the individual, not berating or lecturing them.’39 Such a position is once again a little too black and white as a detailed view of the folk revival shows that it already contained tendencies towards individual experience that became dominant in rock. A focus on how the individual encounters injustice clearly exists in Dylan’s early work in the folk revival. In Dylan’s post-folk work, however, there is an intensification of such currents as ‘consciousness [became] the battleground on which Dylan now plant[ed] his standard . . . Politics had been injected into the theatre of consciousness and consciousness had become the theatre of liberation’.40 A conception of the authentic individual self and the liberation of that self become the centre of political concern within rock culture as notions of individual experience become entangled with the wider themes of transcendence and transitoriness: ‘The impersonal demands of politics create the illusion that one has an investment in society [but] one is nothing and one owns nothing: recognizing that is the only starting point for real freedom and authenticity, the only way to escape social control, to recapture yourself.’41 A radical rejection of conventional politics is necessary to liberate the authenticity of the individual. Whereas protest songs can present issues in the manner of conventional political discourse, the emphasis on individual consciousness in rock means that rock songs can generally be characterised by an absence of conventional political analysis.42 Indeed, Wicke is critical of this tendency in rock, arguing that ‘the supposed protest character of rock’s musical appearance relieved it of the necessity of taking a clear political position in its lyrics’.43 This highlights the key issue that ties politics and community together within rock’s folk ideology – the way that rock culture, by its very existence, was inherently political. Rock’s position in the social structure made a rock song political regardless of its musical content. This is why affiliating oneself with rock was a social statement, invested with political significance, and why the folk ideology could be used to promote the notion of a ‘rock community’, a social group brought together by a shared generational consciousness that was expressed through a specific form of music.* Even if, in the end, rock was more the result of differing affective experiences of the young and old rather than any major ideological shift, it certainly seemed as though a major ideological shift was occurring, and that there existed a major clash of values between the old and the youthful. To align oneself to rock culture, therefore, to invest meaning in the values of rock as a way of transcending the present, was itself a political act.

  BOB DYLAN, THE ULTIMATE ROCK STAR

  Dylan’s Newport 1965 performance is often presented as a revolutionary break from folk music. Such claims, and the reifying of a specific performance serve a particular function in justifying broader claims of the revolutionary nature of rock music. They also serve to obscure the continuities between the folk revival and rock culture. Most significant of these continuities is the manner in which rock culture adopted the mass culture critique inherent within folk discourse. The rediscovery of folk music emerged within a wider concern about the spread of mass culture and its supposedly stupefying effects on its audience. Such ideas underpin the folkies’ response to Dylan’s electrified performance. When Robert Shelton offered support for Dylan’s new music, George Wein, the festival’s technical director retorted, ‘you’ve been brainwashed by the recording industry!’44

  Rather than merely ‘selling out’ to rock and roll, however, Dylan’s shift precipitated those same ideas developing within the rock and roll mainstream. Dylan used ‘those aspects of the pop process that the folk world had defined itself against in the 1950s – not just the use of amplified instruments, but the trappings of stardom, packaging and promotion’45 to show the possibilities that popular music offered. The ideology of rock thus emerged as a way of stratifying popular music into a layer of serious music that represented individual sensibility and communal experience (rock) against lower strata subject to all the commercial manipulation and trivial meaning that the folkies so despised (pop). Rather than polemicising against popular music, rock polemicises within popular music.46 Both the art and the folk ideologies of rock are ways of measuring rock music against the commercial mainstream, of acknowledging the possibility of serious music within the mass media. As Keir Keightley points out, it is actually this supposed seriousness, and not the alleged recklessness and anti-rationality of rock music, that endows it with its oppositional qualities.47

  Ideology is not merely a way of describing the world in which we live, it is a way of dealing with the tensions of our lived experience, of ironing out the contradictions and ruptures of the modern world. It works to conceal tensions and this is the case with both strands of rock ideology. The folk basis for rock music, like the communal claims of the folk revival, is delusional. As Frith points out,48 the problem with the claim is its circularity: rock music is a folk music because it is a genuine expression of a specific community, but that community only exists through its use of rock music. What exists is not a community but an audience: a mass market that tries to reject the very thing that constitutes it. As Wicke states, rock music is ‘the express
ion of a community which rock itself had first established as it became commercially successful’.49

  There are similar contradictions inherent in the artistic justification of rock as serious music. Two issues are worth noting. Firstly is the contradiction between expressing oneself and being heard. This is not the same as the conventional discussions of selling out but is, rather, recognising the fact that within a commercial medium, a singer’s message, however self-expressive, will only be heard if it is commercially popular. Thus, for a record to be an artistic success (to reach people, to communicate), it needs to be a commercial success too. Dylan was aware of this, saying that ‘you have to be hip to communicate. Sure, you can make all kinds of protest songs and put them on a Folkways record. But who hears them? The people that do hear them are going to be agreeing with you anyway’ (Paul Robbins interview, 1965). The second contradiction inherent in the art ideology is that rock is a mass-mediated form. As such it is collectively produced – technicians, recording artists, producers, record labels all contribute to the making of a song. Wicke argues that ‘in this context music as the individual expression of an outstanding personality is de facto impossible. Rock is a collective means of expression’.50 The emphasis upon individual self-expression as a key feature of rock music serves to mask its collective production and thus diminish its commercial origins (this is something rock shares in common with all cultural production).51

  There are thus at least three ways in which rock ideology is contradictory. Firstly, there is the contradiction between folk community and mass audience – the rock audience defines itself as a folk community even as it is constituted through its role as a mass audience. Secondly, there is the contradiction between the art ideology and the collective, commercial enterprises that actually go into the production of a song. Finally, there is the contradiction between the art ideology and the folk ideology; the ‘paradox of representing community with a type of music which is supported by the musician’s individuality and the creative realisation of his personality’.52 What is interesting, however, is not just to show up these core features of rock as ‘false’ but, rather, to consider the ways in which these contradictions somehow held together, relatively successfully, in rock culture. One way that it is achieved is through stardom. Frith points out that the strength of the rock argument depends on a few individual stars, those who were artists or represented their community despite the industry.53 This is true but does not fully reveal the full significance of stardom. Through individuals coming to represent and embody particular ideas, beliefs, groups and affective sensibilities, stardom functions to relieve contradictory tendencies by reducing ‘the cultural meaning of events, incidents and people to their psychological makeup’.54 The contradictions inherent in the social structure itself can be reduced to the contradictions of an individual personality. Thus an analysis of any star has to question what social roles that individual’s stardom plays:

  No matter where one chooses to put the emphasis in terms of the stars’ place in the production/consumption dialectic of the cinema [or music], that place can still only be fully understood ideologically. The questions, ‘Why stardom?’ and ‘Why such-and-such a star?’ have to be answered in terms of ideology – ideology being, as it were, the terms in which the production/consumption dialectic is articulated.55

  It is in this way that we can see the importance of Dylan to rock music. Dylan is the uber-rock star in 1965 and 1966 because he manages to hold in balance all of the contradictions of the rock ideology. For a perfect moment, Dylan’s ‘absolute coherence’ as a star personality unites the contradictory elements of self, community and commerce: an individual who rejects politics in favour of inner-consciousness yet still manages to be political; an artist who follows his own unique vision regardless of the consequences yet found new audiences and commercial success; a self-conscious artist speaking for no one except his own self yet upheld as the leader of a youth movement. For about sixteen months, Dylan embodied the values of the emerging rock culture in a way no one else ever has. The coalescing of all these contradictory aspects can be seen in this journalist’s description of Dylan in 1965:

  His visionary lyrics to guitar have made him the spokesman for a whole restless, rebellious generation. . . . To his fans Bob Dylan means the ultimate in far-out, the untouchable, the incorruptible, the uncompromising – the man who sees through the Image Makers and the Mass Market and the Big Sell. . . . Dylan’s evocative imagery may make him the 1960’s answer to the romantic poets of the past.56

  Such a perfect ideological fit is rare, and unsustainable for long periods – the structural conflicts concealed by stardom are real, and will inevitably surface at some point in a particular star’s career. For those stars that really do manage to hold contradictions in balance for a time, the fall from grace can be spectacular, laced with accusations of betrayal or failure to maintain the ideal. This is what happened in Dylan’s case. That mid-sixties Dylan has become beatified as the ultimate example of rock authenticity. ‘The Sixties’ and ‘Bob Dylan’ with his ‘thin, wild mercury sound’ stand as markers of an unattainable goal. This has proved difficult for later rock stars expected to live up to these models of authenticity (including several labelled as ‘new Bob Dylans’). It has also been the structuring principle of Bob Dylan’s subsequent stardom.

  Snapshot:The retiring father

  The strains of the 1966 tour and the rock and roll lifestyle were clearly taking their toll on Dylan. In July 1966 he had a minor motorcycle accident near his home in Woodstock. The injuries caused by the accident were used as a reason to cancel all of his scheduled appearances, as well as leading to the delay or cancellation of a number of other projects. He then spent time with his family convalescing. Publicly, however, Dylan just disappeared from the popular music scene during this time. For the best part of twelve months, very few people knew what Dylan was doing, whether he was permanently crippled or if he would ever record again.

  Right at the end of 1967,Dylan released JohnWesley Harding. Its pared down acoustic sound was a dramatic change in direction both from his previous albums and from the mainstream psychedelic rock sounds of the era. Dylan followed this with Nashville Skyline,an album of country songs, in 1969, and Self Portrait,an album mainly of covers, in 1970. This latter release received scathing criticism. Dylan released New Morning soon afterwards, which was viewed with relief as a ‘proper’ Dylan album.

  The late sixties is characterised by Dylan’s attempt to lessen the burdens created by his stardom. As the new decade began, Dylan remained relatively quiet. In 1974, however, he returned to centre stage, releasing the album Planet Waves and embarking on a major tour with The Band, who had backed him on the infamous 1966 tour. Sell-out crowds responded enthusiastically. The mid-seventies are Dylan’s most commercially successful spell. Planet Waves, Blood On The Tracks – often held as his greatest work – and Desire reached the top of the charts, but Dylan’s private life at this time was troubled. The two Rolling Thunder Revue tours undertaken in 1975 and 1976, and the content of these mid-seventies albums, display a troubled performer and songwriter. After a few years of trauma, Dylan finally divorced in 1977. He spent the majority of this year editing Renaldo And Clara. The footage for this four-hour film was recorded during 1975’s Rolling Thunder Revue and the sensitive subject matter meant that the work was clearly important to Dylan: he engaged in a series of major interviews to explain his aims in making the film. Despite this, the film was critically ravaged.

  Albums and major events

  July 1966 Motorcycle accident

  May–August 1967 Spends much time recording withThe Band in Woodstock. The recordings from these sessions become known as The Basement Tapes

  December 1967 John Wesley Harding

  January 1968 Performs at Woody Guthrie Memorial Concert

  April 1969 Nashville Skyline

  August 1969 Isle of Wight festival

  June 1970 Self Portrait

  O
ctober 1970 New Morning

  May 1973 Pat Garret And Billy The Kid (film)

  July 1973 Pat Garret And Billy The Kid (soundtrack)

  January 1974 Planet Waves

  Jan–Feb 1974 US Tour (documented on Before The Flood)

  January 1975 Blood On The Tracks

  Oct–Dec 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue (documented on The Bootleg Series volume 5)

  January 1976 Desire

  Apr–May 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue (documented on Hard Rain)

  June 1977 Bob and Sara Dylan get divorced

  January 1978 Renaldo And Clara

  * Dylan did, in fact, take a decision to retire in May 1965, immediately following the British tour documented in the film Don’t Look Back. This decision was surely the outcome of the tension between Dylan’s star-image – still very much a freewheelin’ folk singer in the UK – and his own desire to move forwards musically.

  * The investiture of rock with political significance was initially promoted not from within rock culture but rather from the attacks it elicited from outsiders ‘both in public and institutional discourses . . . and in the domestic relationships within which rock’s audience was being shaped’ (Grossberg, 1992:147). It is only later in the decade, as youth became more self-consciously radical, that rock culture became more clearly politicised from within (Frith, 1983:51). This had a significant impact on Dylan’s stardom and is discussed in the next chapter.