Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  At the time, country and western was viewed as the antithesis of the counterculture, the epitome of the unhip. Nashville was the embodiment of ultrapatriotic, right-wing America, socially, politically and culturally conservative. Dylan himself had long known that this image was a caricature, that country music was haunted by voices of discontent and alienation. He harboured a secret fondness for Jimmie Rodgers, one of the earliest white, working class performers to achieve commercial success by raiding black vocal styles. He had gown up on Hank Williams, had absorbed his lyrical artistry, and been moved by his songs of exultation and isolation: “When I hear Hank sing, all movement ceases,” he commented, “The slightest whisper seems sacrilege.” Though Williams is hailed as the father of country and the grandfather of rock ’n’ roll, he referred to himself as a folk singer, and his understanding of the genre was close to the credo of authenticity to which both Lomax and Dylan subscribed. “Folk music is sincere,” he said in 1952, a few months before his early drink and drug-induced death, “There’s nothing phoney about it. When a folk singer sings a sad song, he’s sad. He means it.” It was this strand of confessional rawness within the country idiom that touched Dylan in his youth (and to which he has paid frequent tribute in later years).

  Dylan knew that the rockabilly rebels of the mid-fifties (Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins) were but one step removed from Nashville orthodoxy. And he had been a Johnny Cash fan even before the two met at the Newport Festival in 1964—where Cash, like other artists, was re-packaged as a “folk singer.” He described Cash’s early hit, “I Walk The Line,” as “one of the most mysterious and revolutionary [songs] of all time, a song that makes an attack on your most vulnerable spots. . . . He sounds like he’s on the edge of fire, or in the deep snow, or in a ghostly forest. . . .” Cash himself had been among the first artists from outside the folk milieu to recognize Dylan’s genius. Like Sam Cooke, he felt pushed by Freewheelin’ to extend his range, to tackle more explicit social matter. He covered “Don’t Think Twice,” “It Ain’t Me Babe,” and “Mama, You Been on My Mind.” He also recorded a series of thematically unified albums, including, in 1964, Bitter Tears, an opus on the injustices suffered by Native Americans (mainly covers of songs by Broadside veteran and Dylan favorite Peter La Farge). In 1968, Cash scored huge commercial hits with two live albums, one recorded in Folsom Prison and one in San Quentin. Here he brought the spirit of angry protest—mellowed by humour and religiosity—into the grim habitat of some of America’s most desperate human beings:San Quentin, I hate ev’ry inch of you.

  You’ve cut me and have scarred me thru an’ thru.

  And I’ll walk out a wiser weaker man;

  Mister Congressman why can’t you understand?

  In 1969, Cash was at the height of his success; that year he outsold even the Beatles, and hosted his own weekly network television show (on which Dylan appeared). He enjoyed pop chart success with the excruciating novelty song “My Boy Sue” and with “The Lonely Voice of Youth,” in which he sentimentalized the younger generation even as Dylan himself was doing his best to run away from it. In 1971, he composed his own anthem, “Man in Black,” in which, echoing both “Chimes of Freedom” and “With God on Our Side,” he declared his social mission:I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,

  Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town,

  I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his

  crime,

  But is there because he’s a victim of the times. . . .

  I wear it for the sick and lonely old,

  For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,

  I wear the black in mournin’ for the lives that could

  have been,

  Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.

  And, I wear it for the thousands who have died,

  Believin’ that the Lord was on their side.

  This was the kind of explicit political declaration that Dylan himself had long since grown wary of. Yet in Cash’s hands it carries conviction. His sympathy for the poor and the outcast became one of his trademarks, but the radicalism was always mingled with social conformity and audience-soothing sentiment. He could follow up “San Quentin” with the jingoistic “Raggedy Flag,” which would have made Guthrie cringe even at the height of his patriotic fervor during the war-time popular front.

  Dylan’s producer, Bob Johnston, had played rhythm guitar on some of Cash’s studio albums, and he had already induced to Dylan to record both Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding in Nashville. When Dylan returned to Nashville in early ’69, bereft of creative ideas, Johnston persuaded Cash to join him in the studio. Cash not only admired Dylan’s work; he felt a gentle compassion for the younger man’s troubled spirit. He knew that Dylan was in crisis, stymied by the weight of expectation and media attention. In Nashville, he offered him brotherly acceptance and support. Dylan repaid it by writing “Wanted Man”—in which he subordinated his own artistic personality to generate a convincing Cash pastiche.

  However, the results of their studio collaboration were largely unsatisfactory, as was the album that emerged from Dylan’s Tennessee foray. For some, Nashville Skyline, with its smooth country instrumentation, mellow lyrics and fruity vocals, was Dylan’s most attractive production to date; certainly it sold better than any of his previous releases. But for all the attempts to find some higher wisdom in its paeans to domestic bliss and homey pleasures, the reality was that too much of Nashville Skyline was bland and complacent—faults no one would have associated with previous Dylan creations. The tougher country tradition of which Cash himself was an avatar was entirely absent. There was no hint of the icy despair of Hank Williams in “Alone and Forsaken” or “Mansion on the Hill,” nor the soaring affirmation of “Jumbalaya” or “I Saw the Light.” Instead, listeners were treated to a charade: the restless one pretending to be at rest. The fickleness and rawness that characterised Dylan’s treatment of erotic relations in the past was replaced by unqualified assertions of enduring love and loyalty, frequently couched in abject cliches: “Love is all there is, it makes the world go round.” “You can have your cake and eat it too,” he claimed, without the ironic coloring that might have made this wishful thinking poignant. To some extent, the sparseness of invention was masked by the excellence of the arrangements and the professionalism of the accompanists. Some songs (“Lay Lady Lay,” “I Threw It All Away,” “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”) are certainly better written and more enjoyable than others (“Country Pie,” “Peggy Day”). But as a whole, the album is an exercise in deliberate banality (not to mention, at less than half an hour total running time, a rip-off for the consumer). Dylan himself admitted many decades later: “I quickly recorded what appeared to be a country-western record and made sure it sounded pretty bridled and house-broken . . . for the public eye, I went into the bucolic and the mundane as far as possible.”

  Yet despite its artistic weaknesses and fan-snubbing perversity, the album proved hugely influential. The rendezvous of Greenwich Village and Nashville was to have a lasting impact on both country and rock. This fusion had already been wrought to greater artistic effect in the Flying Burrito Brothers’ Gilded Palace of Sin, in which former Byrds Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman blended urban and rural, black and white, the soberly straight and the spacily psychedelic, romantic entanglement and social comment. The result—dubbed “cosmic American music” by Parsons—was a masterpiece, now acknowledged as seminal, but neglected at the time. It took Dylan’s widely-publicized Nashville adventure, and the chart success of the album he produced there, to alert the marketing men to the fusion’s commercial potential—and to persuade the youthful rock audience that country was worth listening to.

  However, this new awareness was a mixed blessing. Country music came to be seen as the white counterpart of soul, and equated with a more authentic America, one counterposed to urban decadence, foreign influences, and innovatory cultural politics. Its virtues were po
rtrayed as the virtues of tradition: simplicity, humility and lack of pretension. But the notion that country music or Nashville was free of pretension or posturing is so preposterous it’s astonishing (though revealing) that so many continue to believe it. The image of unvarnished righteousness and roughneck sincerity was calculated and packaged for mass consumption. Nashville, like Broadway, was a regional industry that became a national touchstone. Where Broadway sold itself to the wider market as the epitome of urban sophistication, Nashville exploited its identification with down-home ruralism. The latter was no less cynical, and no more authentically American, than the former.

  The hippie capitalists who organized the Woodstock Festival of Music and Art in August 1969—those “three days of music and peace” advertised in the underground press—traded heavily on Dylan’s cachet. The festival was scheduled to take place not at Woodstock but at Walkill, some forty miles away, before it was moved another twenty miles further afield to Bethel. “The place name Woodstock,” Kopkind explained, “was meant only to evoke cultural-revolutionary images of Dylan.”35 Some three weeks before the festival, one of the key organizers, Michael Lang, made a pilgrimage to the real Woodstock and appealed to the reclusive master to take the stage that had been set for him. “We met in his house for a couple of hours,” Lang recalled. “I told him what we were doing and told him, ‘We’d love to have you there.’ But he didn’t come. I don’t know why.”

  As he made clear to friends, Dylan never had any intention of gracing the festival with his presence. The hippies had already penetrated his rural idyll and he felt himself besieged, physically and psychologically, by the counterculture he’d helped to propagate. “The Woodstock festival,” he told Rolling Stone in 1984, “was the sum total of all this bullshit. And it seemed to have something to do with me, this Woodstock Nation, and everything it represented. So we couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get any space for myself and my family.”36

  Even as it promoted the festival, the underground press baited the entrepreneurs behind it. “Rock Imperialists Make Plans for Woodstock” ran the headline of one Liberation News Service dispatch, which argued that “the revolutionary energy of rock ’n’ roll is a response to oppression” and warned that the establishment was out to seize that energy. Abbie Hoffman and friends threatened to mount demonstrations against the promoters—until they kicked in $10,000 for food and medical provision and agreed to the construction of a “Movement City” on the festival site.37

  The argument of the radicals was true as far as it went. Without the movement, there would be no counterculture; without the counterculture, there would be no music and no market for it. Above all, this music made claims to be something more than a commercial product. It belonged not to the record companies but to the constituency that had created it. It was their instrument and if others were going to exploit it, then a tax would be levied—by those people claiming to represent the movement and the generation. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing is simply that the promoters gave in, that the headline-grabbing cultural radicals had sufficient leverage at this moment to extract concessions.

  But just how meaningful were those concessions? Movement City was set up about a quarter of a mile from the main stage. There, SDS, Newsreel (an alternative news collective), the Yippies, Hog Farmers, the underground press, and various good causes made camp several days before the festival itself began. Hoffman and Paul Krassner mimeographed thousands of flyers urging festival-goers not to pay the admission charge. These proved redundant. The flimsy barriers were quickly swept aside by the swelling numbers and those who’d purchased tickets in advance need not have bothered. No one who made it to Woodstock was going to be kept out—not least because of the shared sense, invoked by both promoters and radicals, that the music was already owned by the people coming to hear it.aw

  Despite his irritation, Dylan remained a presiding spirit at Woodstock, potent in absentia, as he had been these last three tumultuous years. Wavy Gravy, Dylan’s old comrade from the Village (as Hugh Romney he’d emceed at the folk clubs), was not only master of ceremonies but chief link-man with the Hog Farm Collective, who supplied vital last-minute food, first aid, and security for the 400- 500,000-strong encampment. Joan Baez, perceived as a hangover from the first half of the decade, introduced the assembled multitude to Robinson’s and Hayes’s “Joe Hill,” (which she introduced as “an organizing song”) and finished her set with “We Shall Overcome,” thus bringing a touch of both the popular front and the civil rights movement to the gathering. Country Joe also brought the spirit of protest to Woodstock. That he prefaced his “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag,” more grimly pertinent than when it had been released two years previously, with the “Fish cheer”—leading the crowd in chanting the letters F-U-C-K—said a great deal about how the mood had changed from earlier periods. The hopefulness and sobriety of both Newport and the March on Washington had been replaced by bitter despair and ebullient self-indulgence. The same shift in tone could be heard in Arlo Guthrie’s performance of his new dope trafficker’s epic, “Coming Into Los Angeles.”

  Among the performers at Woodstock were a string of artists whose work was unimaginable without the explorations made by Dylan earlier in the decade: the Incredible String Band, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful Dead, Joe Cocker (who sang “I Shall Be Released”), and, of course, The Band, who played “Tears of Rage” and “This Wheel’s On Fire.” Most of all, wrapping up the festival with an historic performance, there was Jimi Hendrix. His metal-mangled, punk-majestic assault on “The Star Spangled Banner” says more about the festival and the moment than the utopian anthem penned by Joni Mitchell. Hendrix’s treatment of the national war song (which might be taken as a coda to his version of “All Along the Watchtower”) was rich in aching, exultant ambiguity, and quite indecipherable outside the Sturm und Drang of America in the late sixties. It partook, as surely as the folk revival, in the romance of America, but it was a romance that had turned contentious and bitter. In Crosstown Traffic, his masterful study of Hendrix, Charles Shaar Murray writes:The ironies were murderous: a black man with a white guitar; a massive, almost exclusively white audience wallowing in a paddy field of its own making; the clear, pure, trumpet-like notes of the familiar melody struggling to pierce through clouds of tear-gas, the explosions of cluster-bombs, the scream of the dying, the crackle of the flames, the heavy palls of smoke stinking with human grease, the hovering chatter of helicopters . . . it depicts, as graphically as a piece of music can possibly do, both what the Americans did to the Vietnamese and what they did to themselves.38

  Social patriotism had been transmuted into an inescapable nightmare. As for Movement City, Abe Peck of the Chicago Seed described it as “a desperate leftist island amid the rock ’n’ roll rabble, full of sterile meetings on how ‘we’ could organize ‘them’ . . .” On the second night, after the Who had stormed through “Pinball Wizard,” Abbie Hoffman staggered on stage to call for support for John Sinclair, the self-styled White Panther and prophet of “the guitar revolution” who had just been imprisoned for ten years for possession of a couple of joints. An irritated Pete Townshend bumped Hoffman on the head with his Gibson. (Townshend later described the act as “the most political thing I ever did.”) Abbie wandered offstage, but if he was perplexed by the non-response to his appeal for Sinclair, it didn’t stop him celebrating “the birth of the Woodstock Nation” as “the death of the American dinosaur.” Hoffman’s attempt at a leftist appropriation of the festival (and indeed of the generation, now transformed into a “nation within a nation,” just like “the black colony”) produced a bestselling book but, in the long run, it was a puny effort compared to the corporate exploitation of the event via record and film, and more recently DVD. In Michael Wadleigh’s hugely successful movie, released in 1970 to greater acclaim than the festival itself, all images of and references to Movement City, SDS, Newsreel, and the Yippies were excised.39

  Lik
e Newport, Woodstock showcased a counterculture defining itself in reaction to the dominant culture—even as the latter sought to exploit and package the former’s achievements. The numbers were far greater, as was the money involved, but the old quest for authenticity was still at its heart, though it had become less demanding. Puritanism had been replaced by hedonism; immediacy was preferred to history. Woodstock posed the question that radicals had been debating since the mid-sixties: was the new rock audience—the audience that Dylan helped to fashion—a living community with a political ethic or was it just a new consumer demographic, united by nothing but the music? Was Woodstock itself a moment of collective self-discovery, the self-identification of a new social body, or was it merely the identification by capital of an audience ripe for exploitation?

  On the Left, there were divided responses. Hoffman and an army of zeitgeist chasers were quick to adopt the festival as a model for a new society, a new America that had miraculously gestated inside the womb of the old. The Weathermen found in Woodstock confirmation of their thesis—the straw they clutched at in their rage and impotence—that American youth were becoming a revolutionary constituency, shedding their investment in the old world and ready to build the new, without compromise. Others were doubtful. “A ritual consecrated to consumption,” sneered a member of the SDS first generation, Todd Gitlin. Irwin Silber was pleased to see how the young people “shed for a few days those hard protective shells which most Americans have created for themselves” but warned that Woodstock was “a ‘revolution’ the ruling class could live with.”40 Linking the festival experience to the unfolding struggles that had shaped the decade, Kopkind wrote: “For people who had never glimpsed the intense communitarian closeness of a militant struggle . . .Woodstock must always be the model of how good we will all feel after the revolution.”41 But in the meantime, he warned, its impact would be more double-edged:The new culture has yet to produce its own institutions on a mass scale; it controls none of the resources to do so. For the moment it must be content—or discontent—to feed the swinging sectors of the old system with new ideas, with rock and dope and love and openness. Then it all comes back, from Columbia Records or Hollywood or Bloomingdale’s, in perverted and degraded forms.