Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  The next year, Dylan released Blood On The Tracks, his most substantial achievement of the seventies and perhaps his most thematically coherent album. After a long silence, he had rediscovered his voice—in the pain of a ruptured marriage and the irresolvable conflict between his desire for safety and his hunger for freedom. The album includes recollections of a more hopeful time (“There was music in the cafés at night / And revolution in the air”), but has little to say about the contemporary public sphere, except to imply that it is a morass (with a nod to Woody Guthrie): “Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull, / From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.” Ginsberg called it a “rhyme that took in the whole nation.”4 Dylan then hit the road again with the Rolling Thunder Review, a more sparky and experimental outing than the wooden tour with the Band. He assembled a cast of performers reflecting his various influences and life phases (Joan Baez, Jack Elliott, Allen Ginsberg, Roger McGuinn). But amid the theatrical self-revelation, Dylan himself appeared on stage wearing white face paint.

  In 1979, Dylan embraced Christian fundamentalism. For many fans who’d stuck with him through previous changes, this was the final fall from grace. Nonetheless, his first Christian album, Slow Train Coming, outsold all his previous releases. His writing and singing skills were sharp as ever. The vision they served, however, was bleakly judgmental. In this, of course, the work of the Christian period follows a familiar Dylan vein. The apocalyptic Manichaeism of “Gotta Serve Somebody” can also be heard in “When The Ship Comes In.” What’s missing is any hint of generosity, any sympathy for human vulnerability. The search for the authentic had led to submission to a higher power. The prophet of freedom had surrendered to dogma and dour fatalism, like Wordsworth in his Sonnets in Praise of Capital Punishment (to be fair, Dylan’s evangelical songs are far more palatable than Wordsworth’s Tory verse).

  Dylan’s religious conversion put him once again in the vanguard—of a reactionary backlash. The years 1979 and 1980 ushered in the era of Thatcher and Reagan. On Slow Train, Dylan inveighed against “All that foreign oil controlling American soil . . . Sheiks walkin’ around like kings, wearing fancy jewels and nose rings / Deciding America’s future . . .” But even as right-wing Christian politics became a force in the land, Dylan’s visible commitment to Christianity waned. In 1983, he returned to topical song with the overtly social patriotic and protectionist “Union Sundown” and the bewildered Zionist apologia, “Neighborhood Bully,” a defense of Israel’s airstrike on an Iraqi nuclear facility. He also recorded, but did not release, “Julius and Ethel,” a tribute to the Rosenbergs, Communists executed for espionage in 1953 despite the best efforts of the ECLC. Dylan had not forgotten the old Left.

  Someone says the fifties was the age of great romance;

  I say that’s just a lie, it was when fear had you in a trance

  Another, far more remarkable song recorded at those 1983 sessions and not released was “Blind Willie McTell.” This is less a tribute to the sweet-toned minstrel who composed “Statesboro Blues” than an invocation of the historical experience behind the blues as a whole—and a meditation on its meaning in our times. It’s also a testament to the enduring importance of African-American struggle and song in Dylan’s inner landscape. In a series of images both compact and multidimensional, he takes us on a journey through history: slavery ships, plantations burning, chain gangs yelling, “charcoal gypsy maidens” who “can strut their feathers well,” the poverty-stricken twenties beau with “bootleg whiskey in his hand.” In the final verse, Dylan muses bleakly:

  Well, God is in heaven

  And we all want what’s his

  But power and greed and corruptible seed

  Seem to be all that there is

  “Blind Willie McTell” is at once monumental and fragile. It’s a summation of Dylan’s relationship to a tradition that lay behind his entire career. It also suggests that the only mission left for the artist is to sing the blues—to bear witness to the tragedy of the times.

  In 1985, Dylan appeared at the Live Aid concert for Ethiopian famine relief. At the time, pundits were quick to suggest that this event might represent a new outpouring of social consciousness among both pop musicians and their audience. So it seemed natural that Dylan, still more associated with the sprit of protest than any other artist, should feature prominently. Musically, his performance was a shambles. Politically, it was as perverse as his outburst at the ECLC in 1963. He played “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” then told the huge global television audience:I’d just like to say that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they could just take a little bit of it—maybe one or two million maybe—and use it, to pay the mortgages [that] some of the farmers here owe the banks.5

  Though this remark inspired Willie Nelson to launch Farm Aid, it annoyed nearly everyone else. Bob Geldof, the principal motivator of the event, said Dylan’s comment displayed “a complete lack of understanding of the issues raised by Live Aid.” Dylan tried to explain his views to Mikal Gilmore:It’s almost like guilt money. Some guy halfway around the world is starving so, okay, put ten bucks in the barrel, then you can feel you don’t have to have a guilty conscience about it. Obviously, on some levels it does help, but as far as any sweeping movement to destroy hunger and poverty, I don’t see that happening.6

  The Live Aid fiasco was quintessential Dylan. His statement was tactless and convoluted and at the same time symptomatic of his abiding awareness of homegrown poverty. He had always been wary of the ease with which we give to abstract victims in remote parts of the world while ignoring suffering in our own midst. Above all, the Live Aid ramble was a response to his own discomfort about the authenticity or otherwise of this charitable but very glamorous event.

  Somehow Dylan’s reputation has survived his antics and inconsistencies, as well as the unappeasable hunger of the times for the “new.” As the nineties progressed, he enjoyed a revival in esteem and sales. He produced quirky, enjoyable albums and recast himself as a folk and blues fundamentalist, with a voice rendered authentically gritty by decades of alcohol, tobacco, fame, and money. He was Grammied, Clintoned, and Poped. Even his bootlegs became “Official.” But he remained capable of surprise.

  In late Dylan, the cyclical view of history, his taste for little lessons in the vanity of human wishes, is sometimes glib, but when self-interrogation supplants self-pity, he can still create deeply unsettling songs: “Not Dark Yet,” “Things Have Changed,” “Cold Irons Bound,” “High Water,” “Sugar Baby.” These bleak compositions display a social and historical scope that Harry Smith would have recognized and admired.

  I’m standin in the gallows with my head in a noose

  Any time I’m expecting all hell to break loose

  People are crazy, times are strange

  I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range

  I used to care but things have changed

  The journey from “The Times They Are A-Changin’” to “Things Have Changed” is undeniably a long and painful one—a lifetime’s worth of bitter experience. But both songs are recognisably the work of the same artist mining the same musical vein. In both, the individual is pitted against overwhelming powers in the midst of an apocalyptic social storm. And both stand as ferocious warnings against the complacency inculcated by consumer culture.

  The day after the U.S. and Britain launched their war on Iraq, I headed for the local high street where our antiwar group had agreed we would rendezvous to make our protest. There I found a group of about twenty adults, all very subdued. The war we had done our best to forestall was now a reality. Then from down the street we heard them coming. Shouting, chanting, laughing—there must have been 200 of them, children who had walked out from the nearby secondary school, many no more than twelve or thirteen years old. They carried handmade signs saying Bush and Blair, You Don’t Care, No Blood for Oil, and Make Love Not War. They picked up our antiwar banner, swept past the adults and struck off down the busy street
, tying up traffic and pushing leaflets through drivers’ windows. Their ranks were soon swelled by groups from other schools. In the end, I’m told the kids marched all the way to Parliament Square—a four-mile hike.

  There were similar events all over Britain. Some newspapers denounced the schoolkids’ protest as the work of outside agitators. Commentators questioned whether these children really understood the complex issues. Surely this was merely a passing fad. (“How much do I know / To speak out of turn / you may say that I’m young / You may say I’m unlearned . . .”) But the young people pricked the conscience of more than a few adults. We had been told that now the war had started, the debate was over; these kids refused to worship the accomplished fact.

  I don’t know if I’m smart but I think I can see

  When someone is pullin’ the wool over me

  Like the young Dylan, they were claiming the right to speak and to act, to shape the world they would inherit. Tagging along behind their exuberant protest, it struck me that the sixties might someday come to seem merely an early skirmish in a conflict whose real dimensions we have yet to grasp.

  Although Dylan still rails against attempts to associate his persona with the social movements of the 60s, in the early years of the 21st century he consciously revisited the era and his own role in it, though not in song.

  Masked and Anonymous, the feature film released to critical derision in 2003, is set in a vaguely sketched military-corporate dictatorship, a society plagued by poverty, guerrilla war, state terror and media manipulation. Dylan plays a legendary singer-songwriter named Jack Fate, who is sprung from jail in order to play a benefit concert on network television. The benefit is said to be to “help the real victims of this revolution”—but no one knows exactly who these victims are, what cause the revolution is supposed to advance or whose interests the concert really serves.

  Strikingly, Masked and Anonymous revisits the big political themes of Dylan’s most ambitious work of the 60s: the corruption of money and state-power, the cycle of rebellion and betrayal, the use and abuse of spectacle, the complicity and impotence of the artist-witness. It’s a muddled parable of insurgency and counter-insurgency, of authenticity and appropriation. The film’s title is taken from a monologue delivered by an animal wrangler (played by Val Kilmer) in which he compares human beings unfavourably to other species: “Human beings alone with their secrets, masked and anonymous, no one truly knows them.” It’s a paradoxical title because Dylan here plays a character clearly based on himself, performs his own songs with his own band, speaks lines from a script which he authored (under pseudonyms) and which repeatedly evokes his own career, the legends surrounding it and the cultural reference points of the 1960s (the benefit concert is described as a combination of “Woodstock, Altamont, the Beatles at Shay, Live Aid and Elvis’s comeback”). For an artist who harps on about his need for privacy and his unknowability, who for decades has treated his personal cult with disdain, it’s extraordinarily self-referential.

  Artistically, however, the film is inert. None of the action, none of the relationships seem real. Both plot and characters are contrived in pursuit of an allegory that never takes on a life of its own. As a story-teller, Dylan is an anecdotalist or a balladeer; he works in archetypes and subjectivities, and those are difficult to reconcile with the naturalism of the feature film genre. The dialogue is stilted and portentous. For all its self-reference, Masked and Anonymous feels remote and impersonal. There’s an emotional emptiness at its core, epitomized by Dylan’s affect-less face, which throughout the film remains, indeed, imperturbably masked and curiously anonymous.

  Only the music communicates. The film kicks off with an energetic cover of “My Back Pages” by a Japanese rock band and ends with a heart-felt, late-career Dylan rendition of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” In the middle, he and his band perform a sweetly mournful version of “Dixie” and a ten-year-old black girl sings “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” unaccompanied. There’s a doom-laden “Down in the Flood” and Articolo 31’s witty, rhythmic re-mix of “Like a Rolling Stone.”

  But just what is “Dixie,” the anthem of the Confederacy, of slavery, of Jim Crow, of the dogged white supremacist resistance to the civil rights movement, doing in this list? At first glance it seems a typically perverse Dylan whim, a gesture thrown in to wrong-foot his audience. But while it is certainly that, it is also—like most Dylan perversities—more than that. The song was written on the eve of the civil war by Daniel Decatur Emmett, a white man who performed in blackface. Dylan’s interest in minstrelsy had already been evinced in “Love and Theft,” whose title he borrowed from a book on the minstrel tradition by Eric Lott. It also crops up at the climax of Masked and Anonymous when Jack Fate is visited by the ghost of an old-time minstrel star (played by Ed Harris in blackface) who explains how he paid a price for speaking out against the dictatorship: “I was the only one in a position to say anything. Everybody else was too scared. I had a show. I had a forum. So I spoke out . . . they said it was an accident . . . suicide . . .” It’s strange to find the minstrel cast as a truth-telling martyr, since minstrelsy is all about wearing a mask, about exploiting someone else’s identity. It’s the ultimate inauthenticity, especially in the context of film preoccupied with a genre (rock ’n’ roll) and a career (Dylan’s) haunted by a deeply problematic relationship between white and black. Yet minstrelsy is also about pretending to be something you’re not in order to express how you really feel; the mask is not only protective, it’s expressive, a paradox to which Dylan’s whole career bears witness, from the days when he first adopted his Woody Guthrie persona.

  In the film, Dylan plays “Dixie” to a multi-racial audience that listens in sober silence before bursting into appreciative applause. As he performs it, the song is a lament for something lost, for the passing of a world more innocent, more homely, more authentic than our own. It’s a haunting tune, yet there’s no denying that it also carries on its back the weight of the ugliest realities of U.S. history; it cannot be rendered historically innocent (as Supreme Court Chief Justice Rehnquist discovered when he sang it at a lawyers’ conference in 2000). Here another paradox emerges. Emmett was not a southerner; he supported the north in the civil war and was dismayed to find his song adopted by the enemy, an experience that may have resonated with Dylan.

  One of the core themes of Masked and Anonymous is precisely the way in which songs can be made to serve purposes other than those for which they were created. The network presents Jack Fate with a play-list that is an anthology of 50s and 60s anthems of rebellion: the Rolling Stones’s “Street Fighting Man,” the Beatles’ “Revolution,” the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” Lieber and Stoller’s “Riot in Cell Block No. 9,” Neil Young’s “Ohio,” Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams,” and Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock.” Revolution and Won’t Get Fooled Again are, of course, openly cynical about those who preach and profit from revolt—and therefore as much an intrinsic part of the era as the songs which celebrate revolt. The playlist is another reminder of the ease with which rebellion can be packaged and sold back to the masses, the propensity of the corporate establishment to appropriate its apparent antagonists. As the decades have passed, it seems harder than ever to live outside the law and stay honest.

  The artist’s nemeses in Masked and Anonymous include promoters, politicians and especially the media, personified in the film by a character named Tom Friend, a sneering, cynical journalist played by Jeff Bridges and described as “a leech, a bleeder, a two-faced monster, a spy.” In a remarkable diatribe—one of the film’s few gripping passages—Friend peppers a non-responsive Jack Fate with unanswered, unanswerable questions about the 1960s.

  What about the Mothers of Invention, Zappa, there’s a guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer. . . . He let it all hang out. What about you? You ever let it all hang out? . . . What about Hendrix? Remember Hendrix at Woodstock? I’m just curious. You weren’t there, wer
e you, you weren’t at Woodstock . . . Why? Where were you?

  Friend then throws Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” in Dylan’s face as if it were a rebuke: “What was he saying, Jack? What was that all about? Revolution? . . . You could hear tears in every note he played, saying love me, love me. I’m not a traitor, I’m a native son . . . you could hear that cry around the world.” All this seems anything but “masked and anonymous,” yet it also remains impenetrable; the questions hang in the air, a challenge to both Dylan and his audience. What cannot be doubted, however, is that the entire passage is powerful testimony to Dylan’s own sense of his complex and inextricable linkage to the riptides of the 60s.

  That linkage is also evoked by one of the film’s few tender moments, the solo performance of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” by the little girl referred to only as “Mrs Brown’s daughter.” She sings the lyric with solemnity and no trace of cynicism, and is listened to in silent, reflective reverence. It’s a touching rendition, evoking the fragility as well as the endurance of our hopes for ourselves and our society. The decades seem to have stripped the song of its brashness and endowed it with a deeper nuance. Irritatingly, Dylan nearly kills the scene by over-dubbing a commentary: “All of us are trying to kill time, but when all’s said and done, time kills us”—a specimen of Dylan’s defensive banality at its worst.

  The film’s climax is the storming of the concert by para-militaries as a new dictator launches a new wave of repression—to the accompaniment of a jangling “Cold Irons Bound” delivered with sang-froid by Dylan and his band.

  There’s too many people, too many to recall

  I thought some of ’m were friends of mine; I was