Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  On June 21, before the bulk of the white student volunteers had reached the state, three young civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner, were murdered. Chaney was a Mississippi black man and CORE activist. Schwerner was a northern white leftist, who’d been working for CORE in the South for several years. Andrew Goodman was a neophyte—one of the white youth recruited and trained by SNCC only months earlier. The cost of Mississippi Summer was daunting. Besides the dead, there were 1,000 arrests, 80 beatings, 35 church burnings, 30 bombings, 35 shootings. The FBI agents sent into the state spent more time investigating the civil rights activists than tracking down the killers. J. Edgar Hoover attacked SNCC and the Mississippi project as red fronts.12

  Of course, there were red (socialist, Marxist) ideas surfacing in discussions among the young Mississippi volunteers, along with many other ideas—about black nationalism, third world liberation, sex and drugs. Mississippi Summer was a laboratory, one of the points of confluence that shaped the decade. It was racked with tensions—between black and white, locals and outsiders, leaders and would-be leaders, believers in nonviolence and advocates of self-defense—but it was undeniably creative.

  Moses’s target was August’s Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, where he aimed to challenge and replace the all-white official state delegation. Despite the violence, the activists succeeded in signing up 80,000 black people to the newly founded Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. They elected their own multiracial delegation and sent it to Atlantic City. Fannie Lou Hamer, the sharecropper now serving as vice chair of the MFDP, presented its case to the national party’s credentials committee:If the Freedom Democratic party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?13

  Lyndon Johnson was scandalized by Hamer’s tone, and determined to keep the MFDP out and the official delegation in. Civil rights activists came under huge pressure from their erstwhile liberal patrons to accept a compromise—whereby they would have two nonvoting delegates seated along with the white supremacists. In defiance of the blandishments of King and the threats of the NAACP, Hubert Humphrey, and Walter Reuther, the MFDP delegates voted overwhelmingly to reject the deal; they were excluded from the convention. After all the suffering of the previous months, it was a bitter defeat. Bob Moses left Atlantic City vowing never to speak to a white man again. Nor was he the only one to suffer shell shock in the wake of Mississippi Summer. “As far as I’m concerned, that was the turning point of the civil rights movement,” said John Lewis. “We had made our way to the very center of the system. We had played by the rules, done everything we were supposed to do, had played the game exactly as required, had arrived at the doorstep and found the door slammed in our face.”14

  As a student at Ohio State, Phil Ochs set out on his musical career performing in local coffeehouses as one of the Singing Socialists.15 He then dropped out of college and headed for Bleecker Street, arriving a year after Dylan. The Broadside team welcomed him and he was soon supplying the magazine with a flow of new topical songs—more than forty in eighteen months. At Newport in 1963, while Dylan dominated the main stage, Ochs made an impression at the topical song workshop with “Too Many Martyrs,” his own response to the Medgar Evers killing (it also includes a reference to Emmett Till).

  Too many martyrs, too many dead

  Too many lies, too many empty words we’ve said

  This was in 1963, and there were many empty words still to be spoken, and many martyrs still to be made. Already, the impatience and the anger rise up within the lament, just as they do in Dylan’s early music. But Ochs was always a very different creature from Dylan. For a start, he was a much keener reader of the newspapers than Dylan, and, unlike Dylan, had a genuine intellectual curiosity about politics. His first album, All the News That’s Fit to Sing, was released in early 1964, on the heels of Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’. There are songs about automation and unemployment, unjust imprisonments, poverty and slums, a tribute to Woody Guthrie and the Guthrie-like “Power and Glory,” an appeal to reclaim America for American ideals (“her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom”). Ochs’s undoubted social patriotism was, however, always inflected with an informed internationalism. The first album also includes attacks on militarism, an appeal for free travel to Cuba, a song about a Mexican peasant revolutionary, a satire on the missile crisis and “Talking Vietnam,” the first musical protest against the embryonic war—composed half a year before the Gulf of Tonkin incident. He flays the cynicism of U.S. policy in supporting the corrupt south Vietnamese regime (“southeast Asia’s Birmingham”) and propping up “Diem-ocracy—rule by one family and 15,000 American troops.”

  In the course of 1964, as Dylan withdrew from current events, Ochs rushed to embrace them, in song and action. He responded to the Harlem riot—the first of the decade’s major inner-city rebellions—with “In the Heat of the Summer,” where he mourned the violence but also saw it as an expression of political desperation: “We had to make somebody listen.” Ochs traveled south to take part in Mississippi Summer, and unleashed his social patriotic disgust in “Here’s To The State of Mississippi” (“Oh, here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of / Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of”). In “Links On the Chain” he sang about the historical failure of the labor movement to support the struggle for black freedom. Long before it was fashionable, he sneered at the selective service system in “Draft Dodger Rag,” whose jauntily cynical satire anticipates Country Joe’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag.”

  These songs made Ochs the star of Newport 1964, where he became “the new Dylan”—the first of many cursed with that tag. Broadside declared him “the most important voice in the movement.” One Newport reviewer described the contrast between the committed Ochs and the introverted Dylan as “meaning vs. innocuousness, sincerity vs. utter disregard for the tastes of the audience; idealistic principle vs. self-conscious egotism.” But Ochs had no interest in this rivalry, and vigorously defended Dylan. “To cater to an audience’s taste is not to respect them.” Ochs remained a staunch champion of Dylan’s genius and his right to pursue his artistic destiny. Dylan was less generous. In private, he needled Ochs, telling him he was “a journalist, not a songwriter,” and that his music was “bullshit . . . you’re just wasting your time.”16

  Ochs’s songs were never as multilayered as Dylan’s, and always more reliant on topical reference for their impact. As a singer and performer his range was narrow. But he wrote with wit, intelligence, and passion. He believed that songs and singers could and should make a difference.

  His moment proved brief, but he made good use of it. Through the mid-sixties, Ochs sustained a musically conservative but politically radical critique of U.S. policy at home and abroad. In “Santo Domingo,” he denounced the invasion of the Dominican Republic (at a time when concern over this action was confined to a minute minority). He responded to the student revolt at Berkeley that autumn with the wryly impudent “I’m Going to Say it Now.” Toward the end of the year, he declared his independence from the war machine in “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore,” his most successful anthem. Like Dylan’s “With God on Our Side,” this song takes the form of a revisionist historical survey of U.S. military adventures, but is more precise in locating the political forces that motivate them:Now the labor leader’s screamin’ when they close the missile plants,

  United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore,

  Call it “Peace” or call it “Treason”

  Call it “Love” or call it “Reason”

  But I ain’t marchin’ any more.

  In January 1965, while Dylan was putting the finishing touches on Bringing It All Back Home, Ochs returned to their once common theme, the death of Medgar Evers, only to use it as a laun
ching pad for an attack on onetime allies as politically charged as Dylan’s was musically and poetically. “I cried when they shot Medgar Evers / Tears ran down my spine . . . But Malcolm X got what was coming / He got what he asked for this time / So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal.” For Ochs, the liberals’ desire for a comfortable life, their fear of radical change, led in the end to collusion with imperial war, racism, and domestic repression.

  I cheered when Humphrey was chosen

  My faith in the system restored

  I’m glad the commies were thrown out

  of the AFL-CIO board

  I love Puerto Ricans and Negros

  as long as they don’t move next door

  So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

  At this time, liberal Democrat support for civil rights and for the nascent antiwar movement was regarded by many as a precious asset. Here Ochs was going out of his way to offend important allies. (Though his approach was soft-edged compared to the version Jello Biafra recorded in the nineties.) Later that year, Ochs returned to the theme—the necessary parting of the ways between liberals and radicals—in “The Ringing of Revolution.” In a live recording, he introduced the new song to the audience by describing it as a movie in which “John Wayne plays Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson plays God. I play Bobby Dylan, the young Bobby Dylan.” It was an uneasy joke. Ochs had been crowned as the king of protest when Dylan vacated the throne. But he was more aware than most that the movement was changing, and that the challenges to politically engaged artists were becoming more daunting.

  One of the extraordinary things Dylan does in his post-protest songs is to offer a critique of politics itself as a field of human endeavor. In the midst of a wave of mass political radicalization, he interrogates the political as a category. No song on Another Side distressed Dylan’s friends in the movement more than “My Back Pages,” in which he transmutes the rude incoherence of his ECLC rant into the organized density of art. The lilting refrain—“I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now”—must be one of the most lyrical expressions of political apostasy ever penned. It is a recantation, in every sense of the word. Usually, political apostates justify themselves by invoking the inevitable supersession of youth and rebelliousness by maturity and responsibility. (“He who is not a radical when young has no heart,” an old saying goes, “he who remains a radical when old has no head.”) Dylan reverses the polarity. The retreat from politics is a retreat from false and stale categories and acquired, secondhand attitudes. The antidote is a proud embrace of innocence and spontaneity. The refrain encapsulates the movement from the pretense of knowing it all to the confession of knowing nothing.

  In the song’s opening verse, Dylan ridicules his earlier, protest-phase self. With the “crimson flames” of indignation roaring in his head, he had set out on “flaming roads / Using ideas as my maps”: . . . “Rip down all hate,” I screamed

  Lies that life is black and white

  Spoke from my skull.

  So much for the simplistic love vs. hate duality on which so much of the early civil rights and peace movement rhetoric relied (never much to Dylan’s taste). But Dylan now switches from his own erstwhile naïveté to an attack on the dead culture of political activism: “memorizing politics / Of ancient history” (the sagas of the old Left). He pours bile on the “self-ordained professor” who:Too serious to fool

  Spouted out that liberty

  Is just equality in school

  The critique here is that the politically engaged lack the humor and playfulness that were always important to Dylan. But the verse also suggests that their definition of liberty/freedom is too abstract—a mere slogan. There is also a reference to the movement’s preoccupation with school desegregation and its limitations; there’s more to freedom—the kind he’d been singing about in “Chimes of Freedom”—than integrated schools. As so often at this point in Dylan’s evolution, his argument with the movement is partly that its definition of the political doesn’t go far enough, isn’t radical enough, partly that it is in itself a prison, a restraint, and partly that it is pompous and lame and no fun at all.

  “Equality,” I spoke the word

  As if a wedding vow.

  Ah, but I was so much older then,

  I’m younger than that now.

  Although in some way freedom remains, at this moment, within Dylan’s lexicon, it seems equality is out. Here he can sound like a reactionary sniffily rejecting egalitarian ideologies, or Blake denouncing “mechanistic Deism,” or a streetwise cynic who’s wary of abstractions and the people dedicated to them. In the end, most of all, it is the inner cost of political activism that Dylan rejects; its certainties, its Manichaeism, are a betrayal of his own identity and autonomy: “I’d become my enemy / In the instant that I preach.” Dylan is alarmed by the discovery of authoritarianism at the heart of the challenge to authority—and within himself. It’s not only the repressive self-righteousness of the Left that angers Dylan. He’s groping after something more:Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats

  Too noble to neglect

  Deceived me into thinking

  I had something to protect

  The impersonal demands of politics create the illusion that one has an investment in society—a theme sounded later that year in “Gates of Eden,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” 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. In the final lines Dylan wallows in existential confusion:Good and bad, I define these terms

  Quite clear, no doubt, somehow.

  The song ends with Dylan mocking his own incoherence. It’s a cry of disorientation—and an acceptance of that condition in defiance of others’ expectations. Yet in this song of recantation, there is continuity. The inadequacy of liberal responses to America’s growing social crises is the premise here as much as it is in “Hattie Carroll.” And the assertion of youth’s right to speak out—from “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” to “The Times They Are A-Changin’”—is extended and deepened. Youth must reject the categories inherited from the past and define its own terms. Indeed, youth itself has become the touchstone of authenticity. A tremendously empowering notion for the generation whom it first infected, but also, as it turned out, a cul-de-sac, and less of a revolutionary posture than it seemed at the time.

  It’s been suggested that “To Ramona” is really addressed to Freedom Singer Bernice Johnson Reagon, whose own sustained political commitment did not stop her from defending Dylan’s choice of a different path. While it’s always a mistake to treat Dylan’s lyrics as part of an autobiographical roman à clef, this song does comes into greater focus if one reads it as addressed to a youthful veteran of the civil rights movement—someone wounded in the battle, psychologically, and taking a rare respite from the front line. “I can tell you are torn / Between stayin’ and returnin’ / On back to the South.” Dylan’s declaration that “there’s no use in tryin’ / T’ deal with the dyin’” refers to the losses endured on the civil rights front lines—losses that Dylan had been writing about for several years. The song is one of Dylan’s seduction songs; like Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” it is an elaborate argument for the woman addressed to have sex with him. The song emphasizes the physicality of the attraction—Ramona’s “cracked country lips” and “magnetic movements”—but in the course of his appeal Dylan delivers an attack on the movement to which the object of his affections has dedicated herself—as if it were his rival in love. He tells her she has chained herself to an illusion:It’s all just a dream, babe,

  A vacuum, a scheme, babe,

  That sucks you into feelin’ like this.

  An illusion propagated by charlatans out to exploit her:I can see that your head

  Has been twisted and fed

  By worthless foam from the mouth.

 
; You’ve been fooled into thinking

  That the finishin’ end is at hand.

  For Dylan in 1964, there was no imminent victory on hand for the civil rights movement; the promised nonviolent triumph over the forces of injustice had turned into a prolonged and bloody endurance test. He then asks the woman to evaluate herself in light of her own professed political beliefs:I’ve heard you say many times

  That you’re better ’n no one

  And no one is better ’n you.

  If you really believe that,

  You know you got

  Nothing to win and nothing to lose.

  As in “My Back Pages,” Dylan is claiming that any sense of investment in society—even through the movement to change it—is deluded. And those “forces and friends” that say otherwise are bent on controlling and appropriating people like Ramona and Dylan himself:They hype you and type you,

  Making you feel

  That you must be exactly like them.

  The severity of Dylan’s assault on the activists and their pretensions is, however, undercut by the song’s gentle country waltz melancholy. It is clear that Dylan too has nothing to offer; he admits “deep in my heart / I know there is no help I can bring.” This is one romantic suit he knows from the start he will not win.