Talking to the activists during a recess in proceedings, Dylan expressed an interest in working on one of the new projects. But, as Todd Gitlin recounts in his memoir of the sixties, “Dylan warned us to be careful—of him.” He told them about the ECLC affair, explaining how he “went crazy” after seeing “these bald-headed, pot-bellied people sitting out there in suits.” Clearly, Dylan assumed the SDSers would share his generational prejudice, and they did. “He was half warning us, half apologizing for his bad-boy behavior,” recalls Gitlin, who also reports that Dylan offered to sing benefits for SDS.
Nothing came of that offer, nor of Dylan’s interest in the community-organizing projects. Over the next year, he was to move decisively away from political activism and topical song. But even as he did so, his notoriety as a protest singer, and his identification with the movement, gained new impetus from the release, in January 1964, of his third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’—whose cover boasted a gritty monochrome photo of a cropped-haired, severe-looking Dylan, reenforcing his image of no-frills integrity and political commitment. However, the final track on the album—composed and recorded at the end of October 1963, some weeks after the other tracks—was a tantalizingly autobiographical song of self-justification called “Restless Farewell”:Oh ev’ry foe that ever I faced,
The cause was there before we came.
And ev’ry cause that ever I fought,
I fought it full without regret or shame.
Note that Dylan insists that the “causes” are real and enduring and that his commitment to them had been authentic. But he then suggests that his engagement with them must be fleeting:But the dark does die
As the curtain is drawn and somebody’s eyes
Must meet the dawn.
And if I see the day
I’d only have to stay,
So I’ll bid farewell in the night and be gone.
The song is often seen as Dylan’s conscious valedictory to politics, but the muddled ideas, aspirations, anxieties and gripes that surface in his Bill of Rights rant, in his apologia to the ECLC, and in his brief encounter with SDS suggest a more uncertain, contradictory and anguished process. His break from the Left was never the total caesura both Dylan and some of his biographers have made it out to be. Clearly, Dylan was increasingly coming to see the protest singer identity as a personal burden and creative straitjacket. And he made it clear that he felt himself unqualified for—indeed terrified by—the role both the movement and the media had cast him in. But even as he beat a retreat from politics, the political environment continued to shape his songs and his personal vision. As he railed against the movement, his music remained entangled in its fate.
In early February 1964, Dylan embarked on a long, wayward, drug-enhanced road trip from New York to California—an attempt to live at firsthand the literary high jinks of On the Road.5 In Harlan County he visited striking coal miners. In North Carolina, he paid homage to the elderly Carl Sandburg, whose twenties compendium, The American Songbook, had been one of his earliest sources, and whose entire oeuvre was an exercise in social patriotism. In Atlanta he played a gig at the mainly black Emory University and enjoyed a reunion with Bernice Johnson Reagon. In Mississippi he met up with Bob Moses and Tom Hayden. He made it to New Orleans for a drunken immersion in the Mardi Gras—where he jotted down some lines that were to evolve in the coming months into “Mr. Tambourine Man.” He proceeded to Dallas where he haunted Dealey Plaza. In Colorado he stopped off at Ludlow, site of the 1913 massacre of strikers commemorated in the Woody Guthrie ballad, and then moved on to Denver, spiritual home of Kerouac’s driver-hero Dean Moriarty. On the night Cassius Clay deposed Sonny Liston as world heavyweight champion in Miami, Dylan performed his first major West Coast gig, at the University of California at Berkeley, which was to be convulsed by the Free Speech Movement later that year. He seems to have been reviewing his sources in American history and literature, and even paying homage to that alternative America beloved of the folk revival.
In the course of this trip, Dylan composed “Chimes of Freedom,” often described as both his last protest song and the first of those songs comprised of “chains of flashing images” (Dylan’s phrase) that make up the heart of his sixties canon. It’s a transitional work, and as such suggests that the break between the protest-era Dylan and the Dylan that followed may be less absolute and abrupt than it seemed at the time. Trapped in a thunder storm, Dylan and a companion take shelter in the doorway of a church. As the church bells ring out in the night, sight and sound collide in a single revelatory moment, a social epiphany in which a vast cast of the dispossessed and oppressed appear and are embraced.
Each verse begins with four lines adumbrating a single conceit (at some length and often with needless convolution): the fusing of thunder, lightning, and church bells. It’s a self-conscious exercise in the “disarrangement of the senses” recommended by Rimbaud and the French symbolists whom Dylan was reading at the time. As Michael Gray has pointed out, Dylan borrows the phrase cathedral evening from a line in a poem by the American surrealist and Beat favorite Kenneth Patchen.6 In comparison with the plainspoken rigors of the protest songs, the writing here is both more prolix and more compressed, and bristles with a new poetic ambition. The poetry is still forced (by the end of the year, Dylan could pull off this kind of hybrid imagery with startling fluidity). Nonetheless, the freeze-frame suspense of the first half of each verse is the platform for the outflow of empathy in the second half.
Dylan was fond of invoking the elements—like any would-be poet groping for a big effect. But here there’s something more specific at work. These are the “chimes of freedom” and freedom at this time and in this place was a word that belonged to the civil rights movement. The phrase recalls the freedom songs and the emancipatory rhetoric of “The Hammer Song.” This is the clash and flash of contemporary history, a metaphor for a social experience; it’s the same storm he sang about in “When The Ship Comes In,” but it no longer promises the vanquishing of authority and the vindication of a movement. Instead, within its garish son et lumière, Dylan elaborates a simple quatrain he first jotted down at the time of the JFK assassination: “strikin’ for the gentle / strikin’ for the kind / strikin’ for the crippled ones / an strikin’ for the blind.”
In “Chimes of Freedom,” this device is turned into an extended litany—eighteen lines in total—inspired by the bardic cataloguing of Whitman and Ginsberg, though without their brash moral self-confidence. Politically, it follows on from the systemic critique hinted at in “Hattie Carroll,” “Pawn in Their Game,” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” The focus here, however, is not on condemning or transforming the system, but on the system’s victims, those it persecutes and those it ignores or discards, the “underdog soldiers in the night,” whom he names and celebrates. He starts with the SNCC workers he’d met in Greenwood (“the warriors whose strength is not to fight”) and the “refugees on the unarmed road of flight,” but ranges much further afield: “the guardians and protectors of the mind,” poets and painters unappreciated in their day, single mothers (“the mistreated mateless mother”—not, in those days, a figure often discussed in public), “the mistitled prostitute” and the “misdemeanor outlaw.” At the song’s conclusion, his purview expands to include all “the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse” and “every hung-up person in the whole wide universe.”
It was Dylan’s most sweeping vision of solidarity with all those marginalized by a monolithic society. But it was also an attempt to locate himself and his personal dilemmas within a wider context. The chimes of freedom toll not only for “the rebel” but also for “the rake,” not to mention “the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale” and those who are “condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting.” In his vulnerability and disaffection, Dylan sees himself here as one of many: the great crew of mixed-up, flawed humanity. But this is a fleeting vision, vouchsafed by the lightning
and thunder of a historical juncture—the song does not posit any collective triumph for its heroes. On the contrary, these are “the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed.”
Within six months, Dylan had dropped the song from his act—though he continued singing other protest classics for another six months after that. The Byrds included a truncated version on their first album. Roger McGuinn’s resounding twelve string neatly illustrated the title and the band’s harmonies soared through Dylan’s ever-varying refrain. (Another, more forgettable rock version of the song appeared that same year on the album issued by celebrity spawn Dino, Desi and Billy.) Dylan himself returned to the song—along with so many others in his sprawling back catalogue—during the Never Ending Tour of the nineties. He performed it, poorly, at Bill Clinton’s first inaugural. Nonetheless, “Chimes of Freedom” has enjoyed a more inspiring after-life than many of Dylan’s anthems. In 1988, Bruce Springsteen played it with the E Street Band to promote an Amnesty International tour commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights. Like the Byrds, Springsteen omitted the third and fourth of the six verses, but he brought a commitment and depth of feeling to the song’s message that Dylan himself could rarely summon. (Weirdly, the awkward lines invoking lightning, thunder, and bells sound in Springsteen’s mouth very much like the self-consciously imagistic efforts on his own early albums.) Springsteen gropes for and somehow finds the pulse of compassion that guides the song, and in doing so drives home not only the obviously apposite salute to “each unharmful gentle soul misplaced inside a jail” but Amnesty’s core concept—the universality of human rights.
Springsteen went on to play “Chimes of Freedom” on the tour itself, where he was joined by, among other luminaries, the Senegalese mbalax master, Youssou N’Dour. This exquisite vocalist recorded his own version of the song for his album Womat in 1994: translating the intricate verses into Wolof and French, weaving them into a complex rhythm that manages to be both delicate and robust. In this alien setting, the song unveils its true majesty, reaching across borders, musical and cultural. N’Dour belongs to the first generation of postcolonial Africans; he came of age in the seventies, and, as a socialist, has seen hopes shattered and ideals betrayed on a scale far greater than the disappointments that alienated Dylan from politics. For N’Dour, covering “Chimes of Freedom” was simultaneously a political gesture and a commercial crossover bid, which only reemphasizes Dylan’s singular role and the strengths of the song as a meeting-point of diverse experiences.
Sometimes I’m thinkin’
I’m too high to fall.
Other times I’m thinkin’ I’m
So low I don’t know
If I can come up at all.
—“Black Crow Blues,” 1964
In May 1964, Dylan returned to England. Freewheelin’ was in the UK top twenty, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” was out as a single and for the first time he found himself the object of frenzied teenage adulation. Since his first visit, sixteen months earlier, British popular music had been transformed, and that transformation was beginning to echo in the U.S. The Beatles, and soon after, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Who, and others introduced a new generation of white Americans to the pleasures of loud, rhythmic, soulful music; in doing so, they freely acknowledged the black American roots of their style, opening up new careers for the likes of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Like John Hammond, they reminded white America that the African-American contribution lay at the center of its popular art. This was a lesson Dylan already knew well. From the first, he liked the new British rock ’n’ roll; it showed that the old formulas could be imaginatively reworked, and that white kids would spend unprecedented sums of money on this kind of sound—at least when it was made by white people.
It was to take him more than a year to adapt it fully to his own artistic uses. During this period, sticking with acoustic guitar and harmonica, he extended the range and complexity of his lyrics. In England he debuted “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe” (the London Times interpreted the “no, no, no” refrain as a reply to the Beatles “yeah, yeah, yeah”). After the concerts, he visited Paris, Berlin, and Greece. During this trip, he worked on the songs that were to comprise his next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, which he recorded on his return to New York in June. “There aren’t any finger-pointin’ songs in here,” he told Nat Hentoff during a break in the sessions. “Me, I don’t want to write for people anymore—you know, be a spokesman. From now on, I want to write from inside me . . . the way I like to write is for it to come out the way I walk or talk . . . the bomb is getting boring because what’s wrong goes much deeper than the bomb . . . I’m not part of no movement. . . . I just can’t make it with any organization . . .”7 Far from patching up the breach with the Left he had opened at the ECLC dinner, Dylan seemed intent on widening it.
At Newport that summer, his new songs—“All I Really Want to Do,” “To Ramona,” “Mr. Tambourine Man”—baffled many in the audience. Some critics compared him unfavorably to the new protest laureate, Phil Ochs. Irwin Silber penned a famous “open letter to Bob Dylan” published in Sing Out! in November.
You seem to be in a different kind of bag now, Bob—and I’m worried about it. I saw at Newport how you had somehow lost contact with people. It seemed to me that some of the paraphernalia of fame were getting in your way. You travel with an entourage now—with good buddies who are going to laugh when you need laughing and drink wine with you and ensure your privacy—and never challenge you to face everyone else’s reality again. . . . Your new songs seem to be all inner-directed now, inner probing, self-conscious—maybe even a little maudlin or a little cruel on occasion. And it’s happening on stage, too. You seem to be relating to a handful of cronies behind the scenes now—rather than to the rest of us out front. . . .
As a socialist, Silber was concerned not only with the specific case of Bob Dylan but with the political questions it raised for the movement.
We are all responsible for what’s been happening to you—and to many other fine young artists. The American Success Machinery chews up geniuses at a rate of one a day and still hungers for more. Unable to produce real art on its own, the Establishment breaks creativity in protest against and nonconformity to the System. And then, through notoriety, fast money, and status, it makes it almost impossible for the artist to function and grow. It is a process that must be constantly guarded against and fought.8
Silber later acknowledged the futility of a public appeal to an artist to follow a particular aesthetic path.s But he was prescient in identifying the cost that celebrity would exact from Dylan, and the impact it was bound to have on his music. The disappointment reflected in the open letter is an index of the value placed on Dylan’s contribution. After the cultural and political constrictions of the fifties his breakthrough in the protest idiom seemed a precious achievement. Silber’s letter precipitated an impassioned debate on the pages of Sing Out!, where the venerable arguments about the social responsibility of the artist and the varying claims of the personal and the political were restated (on all sides) with a highly unacademic urgency. Interestingly, Dylan was defended by two of the more politically engaged performers of the era, Ochs and John Sinclair (“Dylan has begun to go beneath the surface . . .”).9 The explanation for his retreat from politics offered by Dylan himself shortly after Newport 1964 is riddled with political analysis.
All I can say is politics is not my thing at all. I’m not really part of any society, like THEIR society. Any cat that’s very evidently on the outside, criticizing their society, because he is on the outside, he’s not in it anyway, and he’s not gonna make a dent . . . it ain’t gonna work. I’m just not gonna be part of it. I’m not gonna make a dent or anything, so why be part of it by even trying to criticize it? That’s a waste of time. The kids know that . . . the kids today, by the time they’re twenty-one, they realize it’s all bullshit. I know it’s all bullshit.10
Il
logical, arrogant, and self-indulgent, yes, but completely of its time. Indeed, as the American sixties wore on, these kinds of tangled, anguished responses to the whole question of political activity were heard ever more frequently.
Despite the victory of the Civil Rights Act, for the activists on the ground the reality seemed one of deadlock and reaction. In early 1964, the openly segregationist presidential campaign of Alabama governor George Wallace gobbled up more than 30 percent of the vote in Democratic primaries in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Maryland. The power of the race card had been revealed; the white backlash had begun (rolling into our own day). Yet at this stage only 5 percent of eligible blacks in the state of Mississippi were permitted to vote.
The Mississippi Summer Project of 1964 was Bob Moses’s master plan for busting open the dungeon of the Deep South. At first, his proposal to recruit white northern students to provide a protective shield for a black voter registration drive was met with ambivalence. There were complaints that the media cared only for white people’s suffering, and that this strategy would make black people yet more dependent on white goodwill. But during the spring of 1964, Moses and his SNCC colleagues toured the North and signed on a dedicated band of young whites. At training sessions, the new recruits were impressed with the challenges they would face. “Don’t come to Mississippi this summer to save the Negro,” Bob Moses told them. “Only come if you understand, really understand, that his freedom and yours are one.” He offered no quick victories: “Maybe all we’re going to do is live through this summer. In Mississippi, that will be much.”11
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