Bob Dylan

by Andy Gill

  Elsewhere, small-minded, gray-flanneled citizens are shocked by biker molls, impotent paupers chase materialist goals, industrialized cities remain impervious to babies’ cries, secretive kingmakers determine power relations and “friends and other strangers,” in an elegant twist on the notion of resignation, “from their fates try to resign.” Throughout, the catalogue of hardship and debasement is recurrently wiped clean at the end of each verse, rendered meaningless by the looming specter of the Gates Of Eden. Finally, the narrator is woken from his nightmare visions by his lover, who, like the beatific woman of ‘Love Minus Zero/ No Limit’, reports her own dreams without trying to decipher them; perhaps, he thinks, that is the best way to deal with his own visions, which seem somehow truer, more revealing of life, than strict narrative interpretations. After all, as he concludes, “there are no truths outside the Gates Of Eden.”

  With its ponderous delivery, methodical strumming and bare arrangement—the only embellishment is a single windswept wheeze of harmonica planting a full-stop at the end of each verse—‘Gates Of Eden’ is the closest Dylan had come to an outright sermon since ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’-’; but compared with the clarity of that song’s well-targeted attack, this one offers only a troubling perception of general unease, a glimpse of a hell which we may already inhabit.

  At almost six minutes long, the song was the perfect B-side partner for ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, adding extra layers of dense imagery to the A-side’s oblique character-assassination, and making it, at nearly 12 minutes in total, by far the longest single that had ever been released—a factor which added to the perception of Dylan as a serious young man with a lot to say.

  IT’S ALRIGHT, MA

  (I’m Only Bleeding)

  Though more direct in its imagery, ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ shares the same sense of societal entropy as ‘Gates Of Eden’. But rather than disguise his critique behind clouds of allusion, here Dylan unsheathes his verbal dagger and plunges it squarely into the breast of contemporary American culture, in lines requiring little or no deciphering. The title itself is a sly multiple pun, recalling both Dylan’s own ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ and ‘That’s All Right, Mama’, the Arthur Crudup song which provided Elvis Presley with his breakthrough first single.

  The opening image, of “Darkness at the break of noon,” echoes the title of Arthur Koestler’s anti-communist novel Darkness At Noon, suggesting that the human spirit can be cast into shade just as much by the rampant consumerism of a capitalist society in which manufacturers can make “everything from toy guns that spark/To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark,” as by the dead hand of communism. Corporate America and its Madison Avenue advertising industry thought-police, the song claims, are just as effective as communist brainwashing and show-trials in determining peoples’ attitudes and mapping out their psyches.

  There follows a catalogue of capitalist shame in 15 verses, punctuated by four cautionary choruses. As with ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, many lines were subsequently abstracted as slogans of the burgeoning counterculture: “Money doesn’t talk, it swears” became the favored catchphrase of any scuffling hustler on the wrong end of a deal, while “even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked” was pronounced with grim glee at the time of Richard Nixon’s resignation. Most tellingly of all, “he not busy being born is busy dying” offered an update of the theme of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’-’ in which the target was switched, from the old and out-of-touch, to the young listeners themselves: only through the perpetual rebirth of new experience, the song suggested, could the pervasive entropy be staved off.

  Like ‘Gates Of Eden’, the stripped-bare backing offers little distraction (or protection) from the words, which cut through the parade of hypocrisy and deceit like a machine-gun. Following the descending chord-sequence as it spirals abjectly away down the plughole, Dylan’s deadpan, declamatory delivery here is surely one of the most potent precursors of rap, though the occasional tug of nihilism glimpsed in lines like “There is no sense in trying” and “I got nothing, Ma, to live up to” is nowhere near as hopelessly final as the nihilism of contemporary hip-hop culture.

  Despite this, ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ was undoubtedly one of the songs to which Joan Baez was referring when she criticized Dylan’s supposed nihilism and lack of what she saw as “commitment” during this period. She later admitted that, in the sour aftermath of their split, she couldn’t listen to his records from this period very often; if she had, she might have recognized that, far from abandoning the search for a solution to society’s problems, Dylan was laying the groundwork for that decade’s momentous changes of heart and mind with songs like ‘It’s Alright, Ma’.

  IT’S ALL OVER NOW, BABY BLUE

  As with his last two albums, Dylan chooses to close Bringing It All Back Home with a song casting off old allegiances, bidding farewell to attitudes and acquaintances that have slipped irrevocably from his orbit as he spins off in a new direction. Some thought it was written about Bob’s blue-eyed old friend Paul Clayton, though Dylan later denied this. The inspiration, he claims in the annotations for the Biograph box set, came from a much more innocent source, the Gene Vincent song ‘Baby Blue’, which had stuck in the back of his memory since he used to sing it back at Hibbing High School. “Of course,” he adds with droll superfluity, “I was singing about a different Baby Blue.”

  We can well imagine that this different Baby Blue is likely to have been Joan Baez, judging by the retinue of dispossessed orphans, empty-handed painters and pestering vagabonds whose fates occupy so much of her concern. Alternatively, it could be a self directed piece, the singer coming to terms with the enormous changes taking place in his life and career, drawing new inspiration from the I Ching (“take what you have gathered from coincidence”), and attempting to escape from the pursuing hordes of followers and imitators “standing in the clothes that you once wore.” This last line would take on a devastating pertinence when, in a scene captured in the Don’t Look Back documentary of Dylan’s May 1965 tour of England, he played the song for Donovan during a party in his suite at the Savoy Hotel.

  Whoever the song’s subject is, its resigned finality is streaked with tremendous pain and sadness, reflecting the strength of the ties being broken. Finally, after all the images of traumatic sunder, the song concludes with the invocation to “Strike another match, go start anew”—Dylan’s own acknowledgment that, whatever the pain involved, this end is but the start of a new chapter.

  HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED

  Things continued to move fast for Dylan. After the release of Bringing It All Back Home, he played a few more American shows before departing in late April for Britain, for the tour that would be featured in Donn Pennebaker’s revealing documentary Don’t Look Back. At the time, Dylan was far more popular in Britain than he was in America, and the film captures the adrenaline rush of fame better than any subsequent attempt.

  “I wanted to hear him sing, and I wanted to watch him with people,” Pennebaker told me. “Beyond that, I had no expectations. It’s the process of being there that’s interesting. The one sure thing in life is that you never know what’s going on in somebody’s head—that’s what the novel was invented for. You can’t point a camera at someone and find out what’s in their head. But it does the next best thing: it lets you speculate. The process of looking, if you look sharply and well, is a stunning process—people make lifetime generalizations based on a glance, and I think in a sense that’s what the camera’s doing with Dylan. And that’s probably the best you can hope for.”

  “With Dylan, what you see is what you get,” Pennebaker believes. “And for everybody who says, ‘You really savaged that bastard,’ somebody else says, ‘God, he’s wonderful, I love him.’ It’s clear that people see what they set out to see. And I’m no different—I guess I tried to make that film as true to my vision of him as I could make it. But as a storyteller, I wanted there to be stori
es in it.”

  Pennebaker had been introduced to Dylan’s people by Sara Lowndes, and was immediately intrigued when Dylan and Neuwirth tried out their assassin routine on him. “I recognized instantly, when I met Dylan and Neuwirth, that they had the same sense about what they were up to as we did about what we were up to, which was a kind of conspiracy,” he recalled. “We felt as if we were out conning the world in some kind of guerrilla action and bringing back stuff that nobody recognized as valuable and making it valuable.”

  Accompanied by an entourage including sidekick Bob Neuwirth and an increasingly estranged Joan Baez, Dylan cut through the country like a whirlwind, from his first press conference on arrival at Heathrow—where he carried an outsize light bulb and answered the inevitable question about his “message” with the advice, “Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb”—through his none-too-private life at the Savoy Hotel, and on to his concerts in provincial cities like Sheffield, Liverpool and Leicester. Significantly, the brief moments of concert footage are vastly outweighed by the fascinating backstage cinema-verité, which features, a drunken Alan Price opening a bottle of Newcastle Brown on a dressing-room piano; Dylan losing his rag when a glass is thrown out of a window at a party in his Savoy suite; Bob Neuwirth and Dylan ruthlessly mocking Joan Baez; Albert Grossman and UK promoter Tito Burns playing off two television companies against each other; and Dylan verbally cutting a variety of interviewers and sundry other inquisitors into shreds.

  One of the more enjoyable aspects of the film is the running gag about Donovan, the young Scottish Dylan imitator who was experiencing his first flush of success with the single ‘Catch The Wind’. Everywhere he went in Britain, Dylan kept coming across Donovan’s name, in the papers, on peoples’ lips, and even announced over the concert-hall PA systems at his shows. At his Leicester concert, he made fun of his imitator’s omnipresence by altering a line of ‘Talkin’ World War III Blues’ to “I turned on my radio—it was Donovan,” adding as an afterthought, “Whoever Donovan is…” Later on, the two troubadours would meet at Bob’s hotel, in a crushing scene during which Donovan played Bob his song ‘To Sing For You’, and Bob responded in kind with ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’. Nevertheless, Dylan liked Donovan enough to let him sleep on the floor of his suite for a few nights, during which time he helped (along with Baez and Alan Price) in the writing of the lyric cards which Bob would discard during the film’s famous opening scene. Other visitors to the suite—though not filmed—included The Beatles, who spent an afternoon of cheery badinage in the company of Dylan, Ginsberg and Neuwirth. (Dylan later reciprocated by visiting the Lennons’ home.)

  During his stay, Dylan made a drunken attempt at recording a version of ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’ with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, but the session proved unfruitful, to put it mildly—after a single verse and chorus, Dylan shouted at producer Tom Wilson, “Fade it out! Fade it out!”; then, when the music stopped, “Didja fade it out?” Equally as amusing was the message he taped for Columbia Records’ Miami Sales Convention—“Hi! Thanks for selling so many of my records! I’ll see you next year in New York. God bless you.”

  Unfortunately, the tour ended on something of a low note, with Dylan having to spend several days in hospital with a viral complaint. By the time he returned to America, in early June, The Byrds’ version of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ was heading for the top of the charts. A couple of weeks later, he went into the studio to start recording his next album, beginning with ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. Before any further sessions could take place, however, he was booked to appear on the Sunday evening show at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he stunned the crowd by appearing with an electric band comprised of members of the Butterfield Blues Band, a hot young outfit from Chicago.

  Sam Lay, who had played on many of Howlin’ Wolf’s classic Chess tracks, was the band’s drummer. “The first time I played with Dylan was at the Newport Festival,” he recalls. “I don’t think we even rehearsed for it! He wanted to try the electric sound, but the people didn’t go for that. It was a stormy reception, without a doubt. When they’re used to that acoustic sound and all of a sudden you break out with all that power and stuff, people don’t like that. They weren’t exactly liberal-minded that day!” After only three songs—‘Maggie’s Farm’ and the live debuts of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and ‘It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry’—during which the sound quality was allegedly so bad few could make out the shape of the songs, let alone their lyrics, the band were booed off; but Dylan was persuaded to return with his acoustic guitar, to play ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and, pointedly, his swansong to the Festival, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’. Some among the crowd considered this a victory.

  Pete Seeger, who was infuriated by the electrical intrusion into what he considered his own personal acoustic oasis (but who would later succumb, like everyone else, to the lure of amplification, by recording an album with The Blues Project), had crassly opened that night’s show with the sound of a new-born baby crying, asking the evening’s artists to sing to that baby to tell it what kind of a world it would grow up in. Ironically, of all the performers, only Dylan’s supercharged electric approach offered anything approaching an accurate representation of the world to come.

  So it was too with Highway 61 Revisited, which was completed at three or four days’ more sessions on the cusp of July and August. Impressed by John Lennon’s mansion during a visit there, Dylan had gone out and bought himself a 31-room house upon his return to America, where he holed up and wrote the rest of the album. (Within a year, he had put the place up for sale and moved back into Albert Grossman’s place, explaining to Robert Shelton, “I don’t believe in writing some total other thing in the same place twice. It’s just a hang-up, a voodoo kind of thing… I just can’t stand the smell of birth. It just lingers, so I just lived there and tried to go on, but couldn’t.”) The new material was mostly of a piece: streamlined, sardonic, surrealistic and bulging with raw blues power, particularly as rendered by his new studio band. “I can’t tell you how disorganised it was,” says organist Al Kooper of the sessions. “Highway 61 has a very raw edge to it, because half the people involved were studio musicians, and half weren’t, so it’s got that rough thing which Dylan loves.”

  “I’ve stopped composing and singing anything that has either a reason to be written or a motive to be sung,” Dylan explained to Nat Hentoff in a Playboy interview later that year. “What I’m going to do is rent Town Hall and put about 30 Western Union boys on the bill. Then there’ll really be some messages!” This was, however, so much jesting: Dylan hadn’t really stopped offering messages, only obvious ones. His new messages were more a matter of implication and inference than direct statement, and needed more deciphering than his old ones. Highway 61 Revisited, for instance, suggests that ours is an absurd world navigable only from the position of an outsider—from which vantage one may, like Chaplin, attack life’s drawbacks with wit and clowning; brute reality is consequently dismissed as “useless and pointless knowledge,” compared with the life of the spirit. As Dylan acknowledged around this time, “Philosophy can’t give me anything that I don’t already have.”

  Released at the end of August, just as the colossal ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ was sending shockwaves through the music industry, Highway 61 Revisited followed the single into the Top Five on both sides of the Atlantic. Though the rear sleeve featured the singer’s now familiar stream-of-consciousness beatnik screed, the front offered the clearest indication yet that Dylan’s folkie days were but a distant memory. With Neuwirth’s lower half visible behind him dangling an SLR camera on its strap, a sleek, epicene Dylan sits on the steps of a white-fronted building, fixing the viewer with an enigmatic expression that’s neither smile nor frown, but some gestalt combination of both. His blue and pink silk shirt is unbuttoned to reveal a white Triumph Motorcycle T-shirt underneath. The hand clutching his sunglasses, however, has clearly not been near the business end of
a motorbike engine in quite some time. If there was a cooler person on the planet—Beatles and Stones included—no one had told Bob Dylan.

  No one had told the old folkies, either. They were still too busy singing ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ to realize just how much the times had actually changed. Dylan’s switch to rock’n’roll triggered off a furious correspondence in the letters columns of Sing Out! magazine between detractors and supporters of the new style, not all as prescient as one Loren D. Schwartz, who pointed out that “The oral tradition you so cherish is now in the hands of Top 40 radio. It is its logical heir… Dylan is bringing his personal distillation of hundreds of years of liberal and enlightened thought to the youth of America and the world in the greatest number possible… His drive, I’m sure, is not to ‘create art’, but to communicate at all costs and to as many as will listen. The fact is, he has caught the general ear while you have yet to be heard above a whisper.”

  Others were less impressed. “Dylan is to me the perfect symbol of the anti-artist in our society,” pontificated traditional singer Ewan MacColl, with no discernible trace of irony, in Melody Maker. “He is against everything—the last resort of someone who doesn’t really want to change the world… I think his poetry is punk. It’s derivative and terribly old hat.” Some could even get it wrong while getting it right, such as Sing Out! editor Irwin Silber, who wrote of the “essentially existentialist” philosophy of Highway 61 Revisited: “Song after song adds up to the same basic statement: Life is an absurd conglomeration of meaningless events capsuled into the unnatural vacuum created by birth and completed by death; we are all living under a perpetual sentence of death and to seek meaning or purpose in life is as unrewarding as it is pointless; all your modern civilization does is further alienate man from his fellow man and from nature.” True enough, of course—but it’s exactly this emptiness and absurdity that furnishes the freedom which gives the album its unique potency.