Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  “Baby Blue” (the sobriquet is taken from a Gene Vincent song) opens with an urgent injunction: “you must leave now, take what you need . . .” The song’s subject is departure, moving on, restlessness raised to a principle. In an impermanent world, it advises us to travel light, to be prepared to jettison friends, lovers, mentors, influences, even one’s own identity.

  Leave your stepping stones behind something calls for you

  Forget the dead you’ve left they will not follow you

  In “Baby Blue,” the outside world is in a state of metamorphosis: “the sky too is folding over you” . . . “the carpet too is moving under you.” In each verse there’s a figure offering a gnomic warning: the orphan with his gun, the “empty-hand painter,” the lover “who’s just walked out your door,” the vagabond “who’s standing in the clothes that you once wore.” All carry the same mysterious message: if you don’t move on, you will become an alien to yourself.

  What is it that’s “all over now”? Whatever you believe has sustained you—the movement, folk music, your lovers, home, reputation, bank balance. In “Baby Blue,” Dylan seems to whisper a prophetic reminder of the transience of social status, the flimsiness of the nooks and niches we cling to. Freedom here isn’t a social aspiration or static utopian condition. It’s a reality that must be seized, the bedrock of our lives that we hide from ourselves. In “Baby Blue,” Dylan hints at a truth both fundamental and elusive, one that we live with minute by minute, but which slips through our fingers when we try to close our fist around it: the paradox of selfhood in a world of flux.

  At the end of the film, Dylan, basking in his Albert Hall triumph, sits in the back of a limo with manager Albert Grossman and sidekick Bob Neuwirth. Grossman quietly informs Dylan that a British newspaper has dubbed him an “anarchist.” Dylan is surprised but somehow pleased (“Give the anarchist a cigarette,” he barks). Grossman explains that they’ve picked this label “because you don’t offer any solutions.” Dylan wonders why they haven’t called him a Communist: “In England Communists aren’t . . .” he begins, and Neuwirth finishes the thought: “In England it’s cool to be a Communist.” Dylan rejoins: “I don’t think it’s cool to be an anarchist though.”

  Dylan and his entourage seem to be dimly aware that Britain’s political culture was not the same as America’s. In particular, Dylan knew that Britain had been spared the experience of McCarthyism, the historical watershed that had orphaned the American Left. But he also sensed and took satisfaction in the fact that in Britain too he had somehow transgressed a well-guarded cultural frontier.

  After Dylan’s departure, Ginsberg remained in London, reveling in the pop music and avant-garde art scene. In June he played a leading role in the International Poetry Incarnation at Albert Hall, an event that helped define—and boost the profile of—the emerging British counterculture.29 To the organizers’ surprise, 7,000 people responded to some last-minute publicity. And they didn’t look or act like the people who usually attended poetry recitals. They listened to scores of poets that day, among them Christopher Logue, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Adrian Mitchell, and Michael Horovitz.v The Times Literary Supplement conceded that the organizers had “made literary history by a combination of flair, courage and seized opportunities.” Their aim, however, was not merely to promote new talent, but to “affirm a purely poetic space,” to awaken the sleeping Albion, to gather the dissident tribes.30 “It wasn’t the beginning of anything,” Adrian Mitchell explained in 1966, “it was public proof that something had been accelerating for years.” It was time for poetry “to bust down all the walls of its museum/tomb and learn to survive in the corrosive real world.” One of the stimuli for this development was Dylan’s work, which had already blurred the boundaries between poetry, popular music, and politics.

  At the Albert Hall, Mitchell was the best received of the British poets. His poem, “To Whom It May Concern,” with its stinging refrain, “Tell me lies about Vietnam,”w “was rewarded with the biggest ovation of the evening,” according to Edward Lucie-Smith’s jaundiced report in Encounter. Mitchell also recited “You Get Used to It,” a poem whose starting point was an image from Selma. (“If you’ve spent all your life in hell or Alabama / You get used to it.”) The young people at the Albert Hall had been following events in the United States, they had been stirred by the civil rights movement and outraged by the war on Vietnam. Mitchell used those distant experiences to challenge a British audience in a language that was both popular and politically charged.

  Ginsberg was the presiding spirit here, as in Prague. “Arch-celebrant, with flowing beard mantic hair radiant eyes hand-pointing drunken bear arms,” Michael Horovitz called him, “navigating our course in the persona of a too-long exiled biblical prophet.”31 The visiting American recited a new poem, “Who Be Kind To,” in which he poured forth the tender impressions of his recent travels. “The Liverpool Minstrels of Cavernsink / raise up their joyful voices and guitars / in electric Africa hurrah . . . Twist & / Shout, and / Gates of Eden are named / in Albion again.” The long years of isolation were coming to an end. Ginsberg had found an audience among a new generation. This generation, on both sides of the Atlantic, had been prepared for his poetry and his message by the work of Bob Dylan. “Tonight let’s all make love in London,” he cried, “. . . the new kind of man has come to his bliss.”32

  CHAPTER 3

  Little Boy Lost

  A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift—

  A love in desolation mask’d—a Power

  Girt round with weakness—it can scarce uplift

  The weight of the superincumbent hour

  —Shelley, “Adonais”

  Between late 1964 and his motorcycle accident in the summer of 1966, Dylan created a body of work that remains unique in popular music. Drawing on folk, blues, country, R&B, rock ’n’ roll, gospel, British beat, symbolist, modernist and Beat poetry, surrealism and Dada, advertising jargon and social commentary, Fellini and Mad magazine, he forged a coherent and original artistic voice and vision. I’ve been listening to these records since shortly after they came out, and nearly forty years on, I still find them fresh and full of surprises. Their beauty retains the power to shock and console.

  The creative firestorm was brief but intense. Even in the midst of it, Dylan’s art was in flux. During these twenty months there’s a movement away from the public domain interrogated in Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited toward the more intimate universe explored in Blonde on Blonde. There’s also a growing verbal and structural complexity, an ever more fluent and open syntax, an increasing integration of words and music and indeed of all the source elements. Throughout, there’s an expanding and intensifying artistic ambition. Dylan could not stand still. He was compelled—by the interaction between social upheavals and inner demons—to explore to the limit the new genre he was creating.

  The language of these songs sometimes achieves an intoxicated richness. Their eclectic vocabulary and range of reference were (and remain) exceptional in what was considered a medium for the unsophisticated. Dylan purges his style of the archaism and stilted poetic diction inherited from the folk tradition. The language is highly idiosyncratic, but entirely up-to-date. The songs are sprinkled with arresting images, epithets, verbal paradoxes. The flow of association yokes together the most heterogeneous ideas (as a skeptical Dr. Johnson said of the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets): “Her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls,” “The motorcycle black Madonna / Two-wheeled gypsy queen.” Without strain, he juxtaposes rarefied imagery with the casually demotic: “you used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat / Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat / Ain’t it hard, when you discover that / He wasn’t really where it’s at?” This is a poetic language that blends an almost effete verbal elaboration with blues rawness, intense specificity with delirious abstraction, the vivid with the vague:The guilty undertaker sighs,

  The lonesome organ grinder cries,
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  The silver saxophones say I should refuse you.

  The cracked bells and washed-out horns

  Blow into my face with scorn,

  But it’s not that way,

  I wasn’t born to lose you.

  I want you, I want you,

  I want you so bad

  We tend to forget what an amazing achievement it was to create a popular lyrical idiom that could encompass “tax deductible charity organizations,” a “leopard-skin pill box hat,” “an Egyptian ring that sparkles before she speaks,” “brown rice, seaweed and a dirty hot dog.” Dylan opened up an established form to a range of words, references, experiences, moods, and modes not previously associated with it.

  One of the trademarks of mid-sixties Dylan is the profusion of proper nouns—historical, legendary, literary, and invented. Sometimes they name places (Mobile, Juarez, Grand Street, “Housing Project Hill,” “some Australian mountain range,” Highway 61, Desolation Row) but more often people: Paul Revere, Belle Star, Jack the Ripper, Jezebel, John the Baptist, Galileo, Delilah, Cecil B. DeMille, Ma Rainey, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Casanova, Einstein, Nero, Cain and Abel, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ophelia, Dr. Filth, Mack the Finger, Sweet Melinda, Georgia Sam, Louise and Johanna, Queen Mary, Queen Jane, the Queen of Spain, and of course, Mr. Jones and Captain A-Rab. It’s as if the historical specificity of topical song were turned on its head. The aim there was to tie the song to events in the real world; the aim here is to make an unreal world sound as if it’s real and vice versa. This is the experience of history recast as phantasmagoria.

  In February 1965, as Dylan entered the studio to record Bringing It All Back Home, the U.S. launched a campaign of systematic aerial bombardment against North Vietnam. The operation, code named Rolling Thunder (it’s not clear whether Dylan was aware of this when he gave the same name to his 1975 touring “revue”) would go on for eight years, during which time the U.S. would drop more ordnance than was dropped in the entire course of World War II. At the same time, the buildup of U.S. combat forces began in earnest. By July 1965 there were 100,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. By the end of the year their numbers doubled, and over the following year they doubled again. In November 1965, the U.S. death toll in Vietnam reached the one thousand mark—and would multiply by a factor of forty over the next four years.

  The first major national demonstration against the Vietnam War was called by SDS in April 1965.1 Attempts to bring together a broad coalition that would include the established ban-the-bomb groups and Democratic Party dissidents as well as student radicals and the old Left foundered when the moderates feared the demonstration would appear soft on communism. To everyone’s surprise, 25,000 turned up—mainly white students. Phil Ochs sang “Love Me, I’m A Liberal,” scolding the erstwhile allies who had tried to undermine the demonstration, and was cheered. Ochs was joined on the platform by SNCC’s Bob Moses, who linked the government’s policies in Mississippi to those in the Mekong Delta. SDS president Paul Potter argued that “the people of Vietnam and the people on this demonstration are united in much more than a common concern that the war be ended. In both countries there are people struggling to build a movement that has the power to change their condition. The system that frustrates these movements is the same. All our lives, our destinies, our very hopes to live, depend on our ability to overcome that system.”2

  In the wake of the march, a fresh wave of student activists joined SDS, which had now broken formally with its parent body. Unlike the SDS founders who had drawn up the Port Huron Statement, many of whom were red-diaper babies from the Northeast, the new recruits hailed mainly from the Mid- and Southwest and came from working-class backgrounds. Jokingly, they referred to their own advent as “prairie power”; under the impact of the black insurgency and the war in Vietnam, these innocent children of the postwar boom and a conformist culture had leapt from conservatism over liberalism into radicalism. They wore cowboy boots and smoked dope. They were Dylan’s people.3

  The year zero mentality freed this New Left of inhibitions that had dogged their predecessors, it gave the young people confidence, and promoted an experimental spirit. But it also left them rudderless, without historical perspective, prone to hyberbole and apocalyptics, swinging wildly from liberal to ultraleft and back again. “SDS compressed a lifetime of politics into a handful of years—or rather, it was compressed into us,” Todd Gitlin wrote of this time. “We were force-fed history.”4 That telescoping of historical experience is ingrained in Dylan’s songs.

  As a result of the experiences in the first half of the decade, the youth vanguard’s ambitions had been widened and its frustrations deepened; extended vision went hand in hand with quickened impatience. And through much of the second half of the decade, this vanguard—both black and white—was preoccupied with “naming the system” and coming up with a means to overturn it. As Dylan put it in “Alternatives to College” (a prose work of 1964):You wondering why there is no eternity & that you make your own eternity and why there is no music & that you make your own music & why there are no alternatives & that you make you own alternatives

  In year zero, radicals had to start from scratch, and Dylan was hardly alone in insisting that the quest was about much more than politics as conventionally defined. In its search for liberation, black nationalism highlighted cultural identity and historical recovery. Among small groups of white youth (including veterans of Mississippi Summer) a self-identified counterculture was taking shape, still largely hidden from public view, mingling political radicalism and personal experiment—including experiment with sex and drugs. In 1965, the “underground press” emerged when the Berkeley Barb and the East Village Other hit the streets, appealing to tiny and isolated minorities that had begun to see themselves as embryonic communities. Both papers combined political commitment with a lively and decidedly partisan interest in popular culture (Dylan was to become staple fare for them). Day by day, collective action and personal self-expression, the two defining strands of the American sixties, became more intricately intertwined, one alternately chafing and strengthening the other.

  Those who seek formal perfection will always find Dylan, even at his mid-sixties best, irritating. Clive James once wrote that the best Dylan song is never as good as its best verse, and the best verse is never as good as its best line. It’s true, Dylan is uneven. In almost all the songs there are phrases, or whole verses, that are clumsy or pointless. There is an occasional reliance on formulaic filler—though far less so than is usual in popular song. Dylan in these years was carried forward by an onrushing stream of inspiration; others, less fecund, would have paused to revisit and re-edit. The rough edges are, in any case, part of the Dylan package; he’s the kind of artist whose genius is unimaginable without them. In the incomparable body of work he produced between late 1964 and mid-1966, serendipity is very much one of his compositional principles. Prompted by a cursory acquaintance with surrealist theory, a lot of drugs, and a search for meaning in an absurd, arbitrary universe, Dylan embraces the accidental and intuitive. His work throughout this period is full of extempore discoveries made in the course of the creative process. He free associates—with a will.

  No one can doubt that the Dylan of these years was in love with rhyme. It’s everywhere in these songs, pouncing, bouncing, bursting, underscoring and highlighting, registering surprise, doubt, and delight. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is propelled by a mad rush for rhyme. It’s an obvious forerunner of hip-hop, but also a descendant of the “rude railings” of the (highly urbane and politically sophisticated) sixteenth-century English poet John Skelton:For though my rhyme be ragged

  Tattered and jagged

  Rudely rain-beaten

  Rusty and moth-eaten

  If ye take it well therewith

  It hath in it some pith

  Although he was certainly unaware of it, Dylan makes frequent use of “Skeltonics”—short, irregular lines in which rhyme is the only fixed principle.
In “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” the end rhymes bounce and rattle like ping-pong balls. In later songs, rhyme is interwoven more subtly with other elements but it is almost always prominent: an essential part of a literary grammar as energized, as syncopated as the rock ’n’ roll music in which it is embedded. End rhyme is supplemented by internal rhyme, assonance, consonance, alliteration; indeed, the breakdown of the lyrics of these songs into discrete lines on the page is somewhat arbitrary; at Dylan’s best the rhymes are experienced in the song as a flow of shifting accents and emphases.