Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  Short pants, romance, learn to dance

  Get dressed, get blessed

  Try to be a success

  Please her, please him, buy gifts

  Don’t steal, don’t lift

  Twenty years of schoolin’

  And they put you on the day shift

  The proletarianization of the white-collar, college-educated work-force was a theme of sixties left theory, as was a renewed interest in Marx’s critique of the human alienation inherent in wage labor. To some extent, these trends reflected a wider effort to locate an agent of change to fill the void left by what appeared to be a politically passive industrial working class. It also reflected a sixties tendency—visible in both the United States and Western Europe—to cast the relatively privileged in the role of the dispossessed. If middle-class white boys were going to sing the blues, they had to have the blues, and how were they going to get them? They didn’t know the lash of factory or field, but they still felt the discontents of a society in which their own lives seemed to be prefabricated. In “Maggie’s Farm,” the energy with which Dylan throws himself into single combat with the bosses seems to obviate doubts about the authenticity of his posture. Indeed, it establishes its own authenticity by its ferociously direct mode of individual declamation. Dylan doesn’t write about the travails of the workplace, he places himself in direct confrontation with it. The refusal in the refrain—“I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more”—is much wider than the one in “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” (“I will not go down under the ground”). For Dylan, the whole system of social inducements is a con, a ruse to secure obedience and extract labor. People subscribe to it only out of a fear of life and freedom, as he’d argued in “It’s Alright Ma”:For them that must obey authority

  That they do not respect in any degree

  Who despise their jobs, their destinies

  Speak jealously of them that are free

  Dylan sees the worship of Mammon as the core sickness of his society. It filters into and devalues all human intercourse. In “It’s Alright Ma” he rants against commercialization: those “human gods” who “Make everything from toy guns that spark / To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark.” The sin is to seek ownership, to transform the ample and unpredictable flood of life into a commodity. Outside the Gates of Eden, “Relationships of ownership / They whisper in the wings;” in the “kingdoms of Experience” (an apt reference to Blake) “paupers change possessions / Each one wishing for what the other has got.” Mammon, like the state, is to be held in contempt: “They asked me for some collateral / And I pulled down my pants.”

  In “Masters of War,” Dylan had argued succinctly that the worship of Mammon-bred war. And war and violence in general remain nullifying horrors in Dylan’s mid-sixties dystopia. However, they have here become both generic and immediate. Chaos and destruction are not confined to foreign fields; in “On the Road Again,” they intrude into everyday life:Well, there’s fist fights in the kitchen

  They’re enough to make me cry

  The mailman comes in

  Even he’s gotta take a side

  Even the butler

  He’s got something to prove

  Then you ask why I don’t live here

  Honey, how come you don’t move?

  This is capitalist society racked by the war of all against all. It is also, specifically, American capitalist society. In Dylan’s songs of the mid-sixties, social patriotism is replaced by a sour distrust of that dangerous construct called America. The alternative America of the folk revival has vanished from sight. In “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”—a hyped-up talking blues full of slapstick surrealism—the contempt for the very idea of America and its vaunted special place in the human family is lacerating and unforgiving. On the album cut, the first take is aborted by Dylan’s hysterical giggle, which effectively sets the scene for a social journey so disorienting and disturbing that laughter seems the only suitable response. The song begins with Dylan “riding on the Mayflower” under the leadership of Captain A-Rab—blending the national foundation story with a tip of the hat to Melville’s epic:“I think I’ll call it America”

  I said as we hit land

  I took a deep breath

  I fell down, I could not stand . . .

  What Dylan finds in his new world is a society of paranoia, violence, and treachery. Every effort he makes to communicate with its denizens gets him into ever deeper trouble:Well, I rapped upon a house

  With the U.S. flag upon display

  I said, “Could you help me out

  I got some friends down the way”

  The man says, “Get out of here

  I’ll tear you limb from limb”

  I said, “You know they refused Jesus, too”

  He said, “You’re not Him . . .”

  Even the movement that promises an alternative to the country’s dog-eat-dog brutality proves useless. Dylan runs into “a building / Advertising brotherhood” only to discover that “it was just a funeral parlor.” The song’s finale is an unequivocal kiss-off to America:But the funniest thing was

  When I was leavin’ the bay

  I saw three ships a-sailin’

  They were all heading my way

  I asked the captain what his name was

  And how come he didn’t drive a truck

  He said his name was Columbus

  I just said, “Good luck.”

  You can hear the breakdown of social patriotism once again in the raucous and macabre “Tombstone Blues,” an assault on jingoism and militarism that reaches beyond “With God on Our Side;” it’s not so much a public critique as a public reproduction of a private vision of a society corrupted at its core by hypocrisy and warfare. In the first verse, we learn that “The city fathers they’re trying to endorse / The reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse”—our rulers forever reinventing the founding patriotic myth, which is also a legend of war. Dylan assures us that the town “has no need to be nervous.” But clearly, that’s not the case, for it’s “Jack the Ripper who sits / At the head of the chamber of commerce.” The chorus is as raw as anything in seventies punk:Mama’s in the fact’ry

  She ain’t got no shoes

  Daddy’s in the alley

  He’s lookin’ for some food

  I’m in the kitchen

  With the tombstone bluesad

  The existence of class exploitation and poverty is bluntly asserted, with no frills. Here Dylan is the disaffected offspring of working-class parents, gazing in disbelief and impotent rage at the social elite that rule over them. The unchanging desperation of the parents’ daily lives is a counterpoint to the cruel antics of the rich and powerful. Verses three and four are probably the closest Dylan comes in this period to a statement about the horrors of Vietnam. Verse three begins with the loyal John the Baptist torturing a thief, then asking “his hero” (his god), the commander-in-chief (at this time President Lyndon Johnson), “Is there a hole for me to get sick in?”

  The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly

  Saying, “Death to all those who would whimper and cry”

  And dropping a bar bell he points to the sky

  Saying, “The sun’s not yellow it’s chicken”

  Verse four opens on a scene of biblical slaughter, where the king of the Philistines “saves” his soldiers by putting “jawbones on their tombstones” and flattering their graves. He “puts the pied pipers in prison and fattens the slaves / Then sends them out to the jungle.” Desert might have been more in keeping with the Biblical setting, but in 1965, it was the jungle that American soldiers were being sent to. In that jungle, Dylan’s warriors turn barbarous: “Gypsy Davey” (a wastrel figure borrowed from Woody Guthrie) “with a blowtorch he burns out their camps.” And it’s all “To win friends and influence his uncle.” Who might or might not be Uncle Sam.

  Underlying the songs of the mid-sixties is a conviction that public life as a whole is a savage, obscene c
harade. In this context, expressions of national pride or purpose are nothing but the self-serving lies of a debauched elite.

  The story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac is told in Genesis, chapter 22. For no reason other than to test his servant’s loyalty, God orders Abraham to murder his only son. And for no reason other than to demonstrate his loyalty, Abraham agrees and sets out on the grim task. At the final moment, as the father is about to slaughter the son, an angel intervenes to offer a sacrificial ram in the son’s place. Meditating on the ancient text as an example of a distinct mode of “representing reality,” the polyglot literary critic Erich Auerbach noted the abrupt, mystery-laden character of the narrative, in which much is left unexplained, and much implied. The story is pregnant with meanings, and cries out for interpretation. 16 In traditional Christian exegesis, the sacrifice of Isaac was a prototype of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. “For the lord so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.” But artists have often responded uneasily to the pat teleology of that version. Caravaggio highlighted the anguish of Isaac, depicting the sacrifice as a violent assault with sexual overtones. Rembrandt was also fascinated by the story. In a late etching of compact power he dwells on the moment of deliverance: an angel of strength and gentleness enfolds both the ravaged, bewildered father and the innocent victim-son.

  In Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, the sheer ethical and emotional impossibility of Abraham’s situation gives rise to a meditation on the individual’s relationship to the absolute, and a critique of the inauthentic social and spiritual existence of bourgeois Europe. For Kierkegaard, the sentimental stress on the “happy ending” deprived the story of its grandeur and significance. But in lifting the individual out of history, he ended up, inin his own way, condescending to a barbarous tale from a barbarous age. An opposite tack was chosen by Wilfrid Owen in his poem, “The Parable of the Old Men and the Young.” The biblical tale is retold, succinctly, but with the props of World War I at hand: the “fire and iron” and “the parapet and trenches.” When the Angel arrives with “the Ram of Pride” to take Isaac’s place, Abraham rejects the offer. The poem ends:. . . the old man would not so; but slew his son

  And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

  The generational indictment would have been recognized and immediately attractive to Dylan, though there’s no reason to think he ever read Owen. Dylan encountered the Abraham and Isaac story in the course of his Jewish education, where it would have been presented as one of the dramatic highlights of the Old Testament, a tale of how God demands much from His chosen people, but in the end, at His own time and bidding, redeems all. However, in the aftershock of the European Holocaust, it wasn’t at all clear to many Jews of Dylan’s generation that God would ever stay the executioner’s hand. (Here’s where Zionism entered, offering the appearance of a redemptive denouement.) In “With God on Our Side,” he’d charged human agents with self-righteously appropriating the right to slaughter, but in the opening, supercharged verse of “Highway 61 Revisited,” he goes back to Genesis and puts the spotlight on God Himself (or one version of Him):Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”

  Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”

  God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”

  God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but

  The next time you see me comin’ you better run”

  Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”

  God says, “Out on Highway 61.”

  This is a rewrite of Genesis 22:1-3, and nearly as economical. In the informal and contemporary diction, there’s a note of satire from the first. The song kicks off with a shrill police whistle, a demented hoot signaling both a mock emergency and manic party-making. With the galloping boogie-woogie of Al Kooper’s piano in the background and Mike Bloomfield’s spiky guitar commentaries, Dylan fires out the words in rapid syncopated succession, each one clear and arch, and recasts the drama as part minstrel show, part jive dialogue, and part Punch and Judy.

  The god who snarls, “kill me a son,” is a lazy, down-home version of the cruel, vengeful, jealous God of the Old Testament, the Urizen deity whom Blake wanted to overthrow from the seat of religion and the state (and the Moloch whom Ginsberg cursed). There’s nothing here to hint of the coming of an angel of deliverance—these were the days when Dylan could not abide a happy ending. The overall tone is one of disbelief—at the cruelty of the sacrifice and the wanton arbitrariness of an authority that would demand it. Crucially, bewilderment has grown so intense it has prompted a protective emotional detachment, or at least the appearance of one. Dylan’s work of this period is saturated with the hip recoil from the horrors of public life, not least the incomprehensible waste of war and violence. The characteristic rhetorical question is: Just how crazy can this scene get? A cool hysteria prevails. It is the tension between that distancing recoil and the relentlessly engaged energy of rock ’n’ roll (and Dylan’s own high-strung, endlessly fidgeting personality) that gives the song power and depth, and makes this unorthodox take on the biblical tale so shockingly vivid.

  In Dylan’s version, the locale of sacrifice has shifted from the land of Moriah to Highway 61, an American Grand Trunk Road, running from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border, for much of the way following the course of the Mississippi. In its northern reaches, it passes not far from Duluth; in Dylan’s youth its icy, empty stretches claimed many a speeding teenage driver.ae Crucially, Highway 61 links the land of “North Country Blues” to the setting of “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” It crosses the Mississippi Delta and leads to Memphis—the first stage of the great African-American migration from rural to urban, a trek that gave the world the blues, R&B, rock ’n’ roll, and soul. Dylan knew Highway 61 from his visit to Greenwood and from the old blues songs themselves (“I started school one Monday mornin’, baby, I throwed my books away / I wrote a note to my teacher, Lord, I’m gonna try 61 today . . . Lord, if I have to die, baby, fo’ you think my time have come / I want you to bury my body, out on Highway 61”). He knew it was not only a route of escape and opportunity, but a venue of sacrifice and exploitation, a place where the human spirit was bought and sold, and where the individual was isolated. It’s far from Woody Guthrie’s limitless highway and closer to Robert Johnson’s infernal crossroads.af

  In the second verse, we learn that Highway 61 is where those who have been stripped bare by “the Welfare Department” are directed—at gunpoint. In the third, it’s where patriotic hucksters with Runyanesque names like “Mack the Finger” and “Louie the King” try to flog “forty red white and blue shoe strings / And a thousand telephones that don’t ring.” And in the fourth verse, a helter-skelter parody of biblical genealogy, the mad pedantry of racial classification (“my complexion, she said, is much too white”) leads to a suggestion of incest—“the second mother was with the seventh son / And they were both out on Highway 61.” In the final verse, Highway 61 is the place where war becomes a commodified spectacle:Now the rovin’ gambler he was very bored

  He was tryin’ to create a next world war

  He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor

  He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before

  But yes I think it can be very easily done

  We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun

  And have it on Highway 61.

  The song links the sacrifice of Isaac to the present-day nexus of media, money, and warfare. The military-industrial complex he’d damned in “Masters of War” has become a military-industrial-entertainment complex. Highway 61 is now not only a place of pointless suffering and cruelty, it’s also a locus of commercial interchange; it’s the public sphere twisted by the parasitic PR industry. It’s a place where the worth of human beings is relentlessly annihilated. Judging by the trappings, it’s something like contemporary America. And where does Dylan himself figure in that imagined country? His father was Abe Zimmerman; if he’s associated with the �
�Abe” in the first verse, then Dylan becomes the sacrificial victim. No doubt Dylan, the Isaac-figure, the artist whose soul was being packaged and purchased, saw himself as one of the victims of Highway 61, even as in singing about it he made as clear a protest against its death logic, the logic of Abraham’s sacrifice, as he had in “Let Me Die in My Footsteps.” Only now the protest was made for its own sake, with no hope of changing anything. A grim entertainment, a jocose lifeline spun from a pitiless reality.

  I saw pale Kings, and Princes too

  Pale warriors, death pale they were all;

  They cried, La Belle Dame sans Merci

  Thee hath in thrall

  —John Keats, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”

  I mistreated my baby

  But I can’t see no reason why

  Anytime I think about it

  I just hang my head and cry

  —Robert Johnson, “When You Got a Good Friend”

  Cameron Crowe said that Dylan in the sixties wrote “songs about the politics of love.”17 That’s apt. There’s a preoccupation with claim and counterclaim, with status and power, with accusation and self-justification. There is also a wide range of emotions at work in these songs—many of them decidedly unattractive, few of them generous or affectionate, all of them intensely wrought.

  Initially, what Dylan brought to the love song was a greater realism and candor. “We never did much talkin’ anyway . . . you just kind of wasted my precious time . . .” Songs like “Don’t Think Twice,” “One Too Many Mornings,” “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “All I Really Wanna Do” are self-consciously modern. Dylan is boldly claiming new ground in the frank treatment of emotion and male-female relationships. He’s the standard bearer of a hip awareness, a vanguard sensibility that rejects the one-size-fits-all romantic typology familiar from pop music. In Dylan’s “songs about the politics of love,” sex, companionship, friendship, romance, interdependence are carefully discriminated, but also in flux. The lyrics castigate insincerity and demand honesty. But they are also remarkable for their self-deception and evasiveness.