Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  Adorno’s theory was carved out in response to the defeat of revolutionary hopes and the triumph of fascism in Europe. Though he lived on to 1969, he never altered the main thrust of his critique. The real social content of popular music, he insisted, was determined not by singers and songwriters but by the manner in which it was produced and consumed. What he called “regressive listening” was, for Adorno, the hallmark of a bankrupt age. The appeal of popular music rested on “standardization” (the familiarity of genres), simplistic repetitive structures, “comfortable and fluent resolutions.” In order to reproduce itself, and sustain listeners in the illusion that they ever heard anything genuinely new, popular music promoted “pseudo-individuation”—minor stylistic embellishments. In fact, “the liquidation of the individual is the real signature of the new musical situation.”

  To Adorno, the youth obsession with rhythmic music was symptomatic of a society where the possibilities of genuine collective action or individual autonomy had been all but blotted out. “Their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded.” He mocked the “jitterbugs,” whose very appellation had been “hammered into them by the entrepreneurs to make them think that they are on the inside. Their ecstasy is without content.” The enthusiast for popular music was merely “the prisoner who loves his cell because he has been left nothing else to love.”19

  Thanks to recorded music and radio, the culture industry subordinated all forms of musical expression to its overriding dictates.

  It forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years. The seriousness of high art is destroyed by speculations about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it as long as social control was not yet total. 20

  Dylan would seem to invalidate Adorno. His work demonstrated the capacity of popular music to crack open the social monolith, to alter individual perceptions, to stimulate resistance. He made the familiar a vehicle for the unfamiliar.

  Adorno’s vision was restricted because he placed a model derived exclusively from the European art-music tradition at the center of his aesthetic universe. In doing so, he discounted not only the folk and popular musics of the West but also the “classical” musics of non-Western peoples. In a way, his demand for a disjuncture from the social mechanism was more radical and uncompromising than Dylan’s. But Adorno treated popular culture as an undifferentiated mass (he would say that people like me are seduced by the veneer of differentiation). His vision of the culture industry as a force pressing remorselessly downward on atomized individuals left no room for resistance, for forces (however disparate, limited or contradictory) pressing upward.

  Adorno also discounted the complex impact of the new popular access to traditional music. Through recordings, artists of Dylan’s generation could select and permutate from a wider range than their forebears. In doing so, and in renovating popular music through this activity, they fulfilled the hopes Harry Smith had expressed in his Anthology notes. Dylan was never merely an automaton, an extension of the phonograph, absorbing and reproducing the newly available traditions. He brought to these traditions a critical perspective. That perspective was profoundly shaped by the mass movements of his era. So although the source elements and musical structures of Dylan’s art may have been familiar, that art was aesthetically fresh. It allowed the genuinely new—the ideas and feelings generated by a distinct historical experience—to flood into the commercial arena.

  Yet the resonance of Adorno’s vision has grown since his death. The culture industry—now more commercially and globally integrated—does seem something of an all-devouring protean force, insinuating its products into the daily lives of billions. It appears able to appropriate with ease even the most incendiary creations. Dylan himself seems to have come to agree with Adorno. In his usually acid comments on the music business, he’s noted the homogenizing and sanitizing role of the big corporations and repeatedly complained that whenever the industry gets its hands on anything challenging, anything authentic, it neutralizes it. He saw earlier than many that the putative counterculture would be easy meat for this industry. Many of his dadaist stratagems were designed to shake his audience out of the habit of “regressive listening.” Ironically, and unknowingly, Dylan smuggled into popular music much of Adorno’s avowedly elitist critique. You can hear it running through songs from “It’s Alright Ma” to “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.”

  Like the British Communist Party, Adorno saw in popular music a means by which working-class youth were integrated into a system that oppressed them. But Adorno did not share the party’s view that this was an expression of “cultural imperialism.” For him, the problem was not that commercial music would make the new generation slaves of America but that it would make them slaves of the commodity fetish in general. His antidote to the poison of a mass culture that pacified workers was not the recovery of national or folk heritage, but a pursuit of the intransigently avant-garde, the last redoubt of musical freedom. By Adorno’s own admission, however, that freedom was impotent: it could not shift the current imbalance of social forces.

  Adorno seems to have prophesied the dilemma that loomed ever larger for Dylan as the sixties wore on. The new audience’s “revolts against fetishism only entangle them more deeply in it. Whenever they attempt to break away from the passive status of compulsory consumers, they succumb to pseudo-activity.” In what might serve as a sour epitaph on Dylan’s music, Adorno proclaimed that “popular music . . . mummifies the vulgarized and decaying remnants of romantic individualism.”21

  Everybody must get stoned. It’s one of Dylan’s most plainspoken lines, almost a slogan. It’s unlikely it would get the airplay now that it did in late 1966. Dylan has always been coy about drug-taking, and given the prevailing wind on drugs from official America in the last three decades, that’s not surprising. Still, he’s the man who turned the Beatles on. The drug experience is there, in the songs, not merely in arcane references (“her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls”) but also as a kind of running subtheme.

  The impact of drugs on the modern sensibility can be traced from at least the time of De Quincey, who was awed by “the apocalypse of the world inside me” induced by opium. For Baudelaire, taking hashish expressed a (self-defeating) “longing for the infinite.” For Walter Benjamin, “hashish, opium or whatever else can give an introductory lesson” in what he called “profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration.” For Mezz Mezzrow, the Brooklyn-Jewish jazz musician, “smoking muggles” (joints) and being “a viper” (a cannabis consumer) was about existing “in another plane and another sphere . . . we liked things easy and relaxed, mellow and mild, not loud or loutish.” For Allen Ginsberg, the New Jersey-Jewish intellectual, cannabis and hallucinogens were “stimulators of perception,” instruments for “the augmentation of the senses” and “the exploration of modes of consciousness.” (“I was somewhat disappointed later on,” said Ginsberg, “when the counterculture developed the use of grass for party purposes rather than study purposes.”)22 For Dylan, the Minnesota-Jewish, folksinging college dropout, drug-taking was all these things, and more.

  In the sixties, recreational drug usage underwent an exponential increase, and became widespread in communities where it had hitherto been unknown. In general, the new market for drugs arose out of a desire to escape, not so much from the daily harshness of wage labor as from the uniformity and emptiness of a preplanned existence. Its spread reflected, in part, the same intersection of social insurgency with changing consumer demographics that shaped Dylan’s sensibility and music.

  The old Left had recoiled from the druggy hipsterism of the bebop musicians, and they recoiled from the druggy hipsterism of Dylan in the mid-sixties. Ginsberg was not alone in constructing a counter-argument that embraced drug-taking (of certain kinds) within a radical social vision. Indeed, the era was remarkable for the
sheer weight of ideology and elevated motive foisted upon this particular form of pleasure-seeking. While the notion that drugs could or would be an instrument of social liberation now lacks force, it would be wrong to underestimate the political character that drug-taking (of certain kinds) took on at this time.

  Drugs were in the forbidden zone. That was a key part of their initial attraction. To white kids, they were associated with black experience. What was on offer here was risk, release, transcendence, authenticity, harmless pleasure—all at relatively little cost, especially for those with time on their hands and money to spend. Nonetheless, it should be remembered that taking drugs, especially in those days, made you an outlaw. Smoke a joint and a wall of antagonism rose up between you and the state. That antagonism was a powerful material and psychological reality. It lies behind the persecution complex that races through “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which starts its hyperventilating progress with Johnny “in the basement / Mixing up the medicine” and Dylan “on the pavement / thinking about the government”:Maggie comes fleet foot

  Face full of black soot

  Talkin’ that the heat put

  Plants in the bed but

  The phone’s tapped anyway

  Maggie says that many say

  They must bust in early May

  Orders from the D. A.

  Look out kid

  Don’t matter what you did

  Walk on your tip toes

  Don’t try “No Doz”

  Paranoia was a key word in the counterculture and in its construction of the drug experience. At the wrong time or place, taking drugs was a ticket to a state of unbridled apprehensiveness (see Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). Social reality itself became threatening. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re not being persecuted. Social reality was threatening. As the decade wore on, drug charges were increasingly used to harass political dissidents (among the more well-known victims were John Sinclair and John Lennon).

  Incurring the potential wrath of the state reinforced a sense of social isolation among drug users but it also forged a communal bond. “I would not feel so all alone” was the consolation Dylan offered. In smoking a joint or dropping a tab of acid you became one of the underdog soldiers of the night. You became part of a community, with its own protective jargon and quicksilver references, not a few of them culled from Dylan’s work. That made you feel special, privileged, one of the cognizant minority. But unlike the coded drug references of earlier subcultures, unlike the ghettoized bebop generation, the drug-related songs of the second half of the sixties—including Dylan’s—reached out to ever wider layers of the population. As more people experimented with drugs, more people broke the code. But it never ceased to be a code, for all its popularity; indeed, the codedness was—as with the obscurity—part of the appeal.

  Apart from “Mr. Tambourine Man” (the prototype for a thousand trippy anthems), Dylan’s presentation of the drugs experience is decidedly ambivalent. The drug-taking he’s writing about is less hippie than punk: it’s about speed and smack and pills as much as hallucinogens and weed, about compulsion as well as escape. The drug fiends in “Desolation Row” sound like miserable souls: “sexless patients” trying to blow up Dr. Filth’s “leather cup,” the “local loser . . . in charge of the cyanide hole.” In the final verse of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” there is a sense that the singer has found himself out of his depth, trapped in a murky medium that leaves him both exposed and isolated:I started out on burgundy

  But soon hit the harder stuff

  Everybody said they’d stand behind me

  When the game got rough

  But the joke was on me

  There was nobody even there to call my bluff

  In “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” “the rain-man” offers Dylan “two cures”—“Texas medicine” and “railroad gin.”

  An’ like a fool I mixed them

  An’ it strangled up my mind,

  An’ now people just get uglier

  An’ I have no sense of time.

  Hardly a paean to the delights of drug-taking, yet there’s no moralism. The same perplexed, impotent ambivalence underpins even the deliriously unserious “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.” With its rudimentary lyrics, honky-tonk piano, debauched vocal, trombone and tuba strutting and slurring like a drunken marching band, this track is a marvelous one-off, even in Dylan’s catalogue. It’s a comic charade in which the singer paints himself as a helpless victim: “They’ll stone you when you’re trying to be so good.” “They” (friends? enemies?) appear to be inescapable and ubiquitous. Getting wrecked is here depicted as an involuntary, entirely passive experience. It’s something that just sneaks up on you; an ambush by an uncontrollable and arbitrary force. The same self-mocking abdication of personal irresponsibility was celebrated jokily in the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics. For Dylan, however, the languorous ethos takes on a more desperate edge. Getting stoned is not something you choose to do but that you’re driven to do by the madness of ordinary life and your inability to master it. “They’ll stone you and then say you are brave,” but Dylan is not so sure. For Dylan, part of the attraction was the surrender of the will, the submission to his own weakness.

  Of course, “getting stoned” carries a double meaning. The use of the active voice—the verb to stone—invokes the biblical punishment. It’s what happens to the woman taken in adultery and the heretic alike, the turning of the community against a nominated outcast. It happens in the midst of daily life—at work, at play, every time you step on the public stage, every time you step off it—and it happens to everyone. It’s as inexplicable and as insistent as the drugs ambush. In “Rainy Day Women,” transcendence and persecution are inextricably mixed. As in other Dylan songs of the period, personal freedom and social fatalism appear as matched distorting mirrors.

  When Dylan and his electric band played Berkeley in early December 1965, the singer handed Allen Ginsberg a fistful of free tickets, which Ginsberg distributed to poet friends like Michael McClure and Gary Snyder as well as to novelist-turned-LSD-dispensing Merry Prankster Ken Kesey and the Hell’s Angels bikers he was courting at the time. At a party afterward, Dylan gave Ginsberg the cash to purchase a state-of-the-art, battery-operated, reel-to-reel tape recorder—so that the poet could dictate his words while on the road. The tape recorder proved a vital tool in the composition of what was to become The Fall of America, published in 1972. 23

  That collection begins with Ginsberg “speeding through space” listening to “Radio the soul of the nation” where he hears “Bob Dylan’s voice on airways, mass machine-made folksong of one soul.” In “Hiway Poesy: L.A.—Albuquerque—Texas—Wichita,” which he composed on tape at the end of January 1966, he also tunes into the Kinks and the Beatles, Barry McGuire’s crass Dylan-simulation “Eve of Destruction” and, distressingly, Barry Sadler’s pro-war hit, “The Ballad of the Green Berets.”

  What patriot wrote that shit?

  Something to drive out the Indian

  Vibrato of Buffy Sainte-Marie?

  Doom call of McGuire?

  The heavenly echo of Dylan’s despair

  Before the silver microphone

  in his snake suit

  a reptile boy

  disappearing in Time—

  soft shoe dancing on the Moon?

  Two weeks later, Ginsberg composed “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” which he described as “big Shelleyan poem ending Vietnam war—wrote it on tape machine betwixt Lincoln and Wichita.”24 The poem is a restless collage of mid-American impressions: billboards, small towns, farms, factories, wastelands through which courses the mind-splitting horror of Vietnam. With the “American eagle beating its wings over Asia,” on the home front “students awaken trembling in their beds / with dream of a new truth warm as meat / little girls suspecting their elders of murder / committed by some remote control machinery.” For Ginsberg, the war is the ultimate expression of long-e
ntrenched, life-denying currents in American culture:Carry Nation began the war on Vietnam here

  With an angry smashing axe

  Attacking Wine—

  Here fifty years ago, by her violence

  Began a vortex of hatred that defoliated the

  Mekong Delta . . .

  Against and within this dehumanized, war-deranged America, the poet raises his voice, bard-like, to bring into being a new America, purged of violence and materialism:I lift my voice aloud

  Make mantra of American language now

  here declare the end of the War!

  Ancient days’ illusion!—

  And pronounce words beginning my own

  millennium.

  And his heart is lifted as he hears Dylan’s voice—the voice, he thinks, of a new America—reaching out to him through the desolate spaces:Oh at last again the radio opens

  Blue Invitations!

  Angelic Dylan singing across the nation

  “When all your children start to resent you

  Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?”

  His youthful voice making glad

  The brown endless meadows

  His tenderness penetrating aether

  Soft prayer on the airwaves . . .

  “Wichita Vortex Sutra” proved to be Ginbserg’s major work of the sixties, and one of the most ambitious and sustained attempts to address the America of the Vietnam years in poetry. It was published in April 1966 in The Village Voice, and soon after appeared in the Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, and Peace News in Britain. The poetic style that had seemed esoterically experimental in the fifties had become a popular protest vehicle in the sixties. As Ginsberg’s repeated invocations of him suggest, Dylan was the fulcrum of that transition. He was also, in Ginsberg’s vision, the dividing line between war-making, money-mad, puritanical America and its nascent alternative, the forerunner of a “return to the original religious shamanistic prophetic priestly Bardic magic!”25 Yet, while Ginsberg was celebrating Dylan as the elfin incarnation of a new consciousness, Dylan felt himself impotent and immured.