Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  on America

  Kerry and

  on “Like a Rolling Stone,”

  signing of

  Sinclair on

  on Vietnam

  “Star Spangled Banner,”

  Starr, Edwin

  Steinbeck, John

  Stevenson, Teofilo

  “Stones in My Passway” (Johnson)

  Stravinsky, Igor

  “Street Fightin’ Man” (Rolling Stones)

  “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” (Dylan)

  lyrics of

  Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

  Lester on

  Student Peace Union

  Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

  at Columbia University

  end of

  impact of

  “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (Dylan)

  lyrics of

  “Sugar Baby” (Dylan)

  Sweet Honey in the Rock

  Sweetheart of the Rodeo (Byrds)

  “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” (Dylan)

  “Talking Vietnam” (Ochs)

  Tarantula (Dylan)

  “Tears of Rage” (Dylan)

  television

  the Temptations

  Terry, Sonny

  Tet Offensive

  Tharpe, Rosetta

  “That’s All Right Mama” (Crudup)

  Thieves

  “Things Have Changed” (Dylan)

  “This Land is Nobody’s Land” (Hooker)

  “This Land is Your Land” (Guthrie)

  “This Little Light of Mine,”

  “This Train (Is Bound for Glory)”

  “This World Is Not My Home,”

  Thompson, Hunter S.

  Till, Emmett

  “Time Has Come Today,”

  “Times They Are A-Changin” (Dylan)

  lyrics of

  Times They Are A-Changin (Dylan)

  Tindley, Charles

  “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” (Simone)

  “To His Coy Mistress” (Marvell)

  “To Ramona” (Dylan)

  lyrics of

  Tom Paine Award

  “Tombstone Blues” (Dylan)

  lyrics of

  “Too Many Martyrs” (Ochs)

  Town Hall

  Townshend, Pete

  Trains

  Traum, Happy

  Trotskyism

  Trotskyist Workers League

  “Union Sundown” (Dylan)

  United States

  culture in

  University of Mississippi

  “Vacant Chair,”

  Van Ronk, Dave

  Vanguard

  Venonen, Kiko

  Vietnam War

  demonstrations against

  Dylan on

  protests against

  Springsteen on

  Village Voice

  the Village. See Greenwich Village

  Vincent, Gene

  “Visions of Johanna” (Dylan)

  lyrics of

  Voting Rights Act

  Wadleigh, Michael

  Wallace, George

  Wallace, Henry

  “The Walls of the Red Wing” (Dylan)

  “Wanted Man” (Dylan)

  Warhol, Andy

  Warner Brothers’

  “The War is Over” (Ochs)

  lyrics of

  Washington D.C.

  protests in

  Washington, Denzel

  Watergate

  Wavy Gravy

  WBAI

  “We People Who Are Darker than Blue” (Mayfield)

  “We Seek No Wider War” (Ochs)

  “We Shall Not Be Moved,”

  “We Shall Overcome,”

  the Weathermen

  in Chicago

  in Flint

  foundation of

  tactics of

  Weavers

  Weill, Kurt

  Wells, Mary

  “We’re a Winner” (Mayfield)

  We’re Only in it For the Money (Mothers of Invention)

  cover art of

  West, Nathanael

  “The Wheel’s on Fire,”

  lyrics of

  “When the Ship Comes In” (Dylan)

  lyrics of

  “ Where Have All the Flowers Gone” (Seeger)

  “Which Side Are You On?”

  “White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land” (Ochs)

  White, Bukka

  White Heat

  White, Josh

  “White Rabbit” (Jefferson Airplane)

  “Whiter Shade of Pale” (Procol Harum)

  Whitman, Walt

  “Who Be Kind To” (Ginsberg)

  “Who Killed Davey Moore?” (Dylan)

  the Who

  “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (Ginsberg)

  “Wicked Messenger” (Dylan)

  Wilkins, Roy

  Williams, Hank

  Dylan on

  Wilson, Tom

  Wine, Alice

  “With God on Our Side” (Dylan)

  lyrics of

  Wobblies

  Womack, Bobby

  women

  Wonder, Stevie

  “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (the Who)

  Woodstock Festival

  counterculture and

  Dylan on

  thirtieth anniversary of

  working class

  World War I

  World War II

  “Worlds Apart” (Springsteen)

  Yarrow, Peter

  Yippies

  “You Ain’t Goin Nowhere” (Dylan)

  “You Get Used to It” (Mitchell)

  Young, Izzy

  Young, Neil

  “Youngstown” (Springsteen)

  Zantzinger, William

  Zappa, Frank

  on counterculture

  Zimmerman, Abe

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mike Marqusee is the author of a number of groundbreaking books on politics and popular culture, including the award-winning Redemption Song, Anyone But England and War Minus the Shooting. He writes on a wide variety of current and historical topics for publications in the United States, Britain, and South Asia. Born and raised in the U.S., he has lived in London since the 1970s.

  Also by Mike Marqusee

  Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties

  War Minus the Shooting:

  A Journey through South Asia During Cricket’s World Cup

  Anyone But England: An Outsider Looks at English Cricket

  Defeat from the Jaws of Victory: Inside Kinnock’s Labour Party

  (with Richard Heffernan) Slow Turn, a novel

  a In The Threepenny Opera, the scrubwoman Jenny dreams of a pirate ship that will sail into harbor, lay waste the rich and comfortable, and leave her to decide who shall live or die. In Chronicles, Dylan describes it as “a wild song. . . a nasty song . . . [T]here was no love for people in it. . . . I took the song apart and unzipped it.”

  b The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose acronym, SNCC, was always pronounced snick.

  c John D. Rockefeller, founder of the dynasty.

  d In his early sets, Dylan included a zestfully silly rendition of Guthrie’s “Car, Car,” replete with engine noises. In March 2003, in Baghdad, the same song was performed for Iraqi children by the seventy-two-year-old Yorkshire folksinger Karl Dallas, who had stationed himself in the city as a “human shield” against the impending U.S.-British bombardment. “Not only do they join the brr-brr chorus,” Dallas noted, “they also sing ‘riding in my car’ with impeccable American accents.”

  e The actor and singer Burl Ives appeared at left-wing rallies and benefits in the thirties and forties. He recorded union songs with Pete Seeger and became a sponsor of People’s Songs. White began his career in South Carolina as a blues guitarist, a follower of Blind Lemon Jefferson. In New York City in the late thirties, he transformed himself into a si
lky and sophisticated nightclub entertainer. During this period, he was promoted by both Lomax and Hammond, worked with the Almanacs, formed a friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, and was ubiquitous at left-wing events. He resurfaced as a regular on the folk revival circuit of the early sixties, but many would not forgive his HUAC testimony; he was never invited to play at Newport, though he was on stage with Dylan at the March on Washington.

  f A song from Harry Smith’s Anthology.

  g Although he played “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” frequently over the coming months it was left off Freewheelin’ and only released in 1991 on the Bootleg Series. About the same time, Dylan wrote a poem in Young’s notebook, “Go Away You Bomb” (“I hate you cause you make my life seem like nothin’ at all”).

  h The other enduring hit of that summer was Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party” (“. . . and I’ll cry if I want to”).

  i Francis Child, a Harvard professor, published his five-volume English and Scottish Popular Ballads between 1882 and 1898. It became the founding canon of folk song.

  j The English folklorist Cecil Sharp (1859-1924) started the Morris dance revival and collected traditional ballads in the British countryside. Between 1916 and 1918 he visited southern Appalachia, where he found variants of old English and Scottish folk songs long forgotten in their native lands. “I should say that they [the white people of the mountains] are just exactly what the English peasant was one hundred or more years ago,” he wrote. “They are happy, contented, and live simply and healthily, and I am not at all sure that any of us can introduce them to anything better than this.”

  k In 1969, Peggy Seeger penned “I Wanna Be an Engineer,” one of the earliest musical expressions of the new wave of feminism (published first in Broadside).

  l And beyond. In the 1983 “Sweetheart Like You,” he writes:They say that patriotism is the last refuge

  To which a scoundrel clings

  Steal a little and they throw you in jail

  Steal a lot and they make you king

  m The song was recorded by Pete Seeger, though not by Dylan himself. His unique Town Hall performance can be heard on the Official Bootleg Series, 1991.

  n “I got a woman in Jackson, I ain’t gonna say her name / she’s a brown-skinned woman / but I love her just the same”—Dylan in “Outlaw Blues,” January 1965.

  o Highlander was reestablished, and still flourishes.

  p A fragment is included in Don’t Look Back.

  q As it happened, the killer of Medgar Evers, the wealthy and well-connected Byron de la Beckwith, was not “only a pawn in their game.” In the mid-sixties, two all-white juries acquitted him of the crime. In February 1994, he was finally found guilty and at the age of seventy-three was sentenced to life in prison.

  r Zantzinger continues to deny his culpability in Carroll’s death, and has told Dylan biographers that the song libels him.

  s In 1968, Silber reconsidered Dylan: “Dylan did desert—not us but an outmoded style of values which had become unequal to the task of reclaiming America. ‘This land is not your land,’ Dylan told us in 1965. But some of us raised on the songs of Guthrie and Seeger . . . were not ready to accept the revolutionary implications of Dylan’s statements . . . Dylan is our poet—not our leader.”

  t About the same time Dylan was writing “My Back Pages” and “To Ramona,” a group of SNCC women activists issued a historic challenge to sexist practices within SNCC itself—and came up against a barrage of male mockery. Many of the criticisms made by the SNCC women echo Dylan’s grievances against the movement: it did not practice what it preached, it exploited its adherents, its leaders were trapped within their own egos. Like Dylan, but with different purposes and to different effect, the SNCC women were redrawing the boundaries between the personal and the political. The moment that produced Dylan’s apostasy also contained the seeds of the women’s movement that was to stride boldly forward at the end of the decade.

  u In Chronicles, Dylan comments again on this moment: “‘We Shall Overcome’ was the spiritual marching anthem of the civil rights movement. It had been the rallying cry for the oppressed for many years. Johnson interpreted the idea to suit himself. He was not as homespun as it seemed.”

  v At the last minute the Russian Andrei Voznesensky and the Cuban Pablo Fernandez, under pressure from their governments, withdrew from the event, as did the Chilean Communist Pablo Neruda, who was said to be concerned that Ginsberg might take off his clothes.

  w In 2003, Mitchell altered the line to “Tell me lies about Iraq.”

  x Shortened in performance to: “We sit here stranded though we all do our best to deny it.”

  y An extended prose work (though subtitled Poems); written in 1964-65, published in 1971.

  z Dylan flubs this lyric on Bringing It All Back Home.

  aa A reference to Woody Guthrie’s rendition of “Jesse James”:Now a bastard and coward called little Robert Ford,

  He claimed he was Frank and Jesse’s friend,

  Made love to Jesse’s wife and he took Jesse’s life,

  And he laid poor Jesse in his grave.

  The people were surprised when Jesse lost his life,

  Wondered how he ever came to fall,

  Robert Ford, it’s a fact, shot Jesse in the back,

  While Jesse hung a picture on the wall.

  “No wonder folks likes to hear songs about the outlaws,” Guthrie commented, “they’re wrong all right, but not as half as dirty and sneakin’ as some of our so-called ‘higher-ups.’”

  ab For Huey Newton’s reading of the song, see page 223.

  ac The song’s political punch endures. In Britain in the early eighties, it made an apposite anthem for those resisting Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal authoritarianism and supplied the title for cartoonist Steve Bell’s long-running, anti-Tory lampoon.

  ad In the published lyrics, it’s “a fuse” that Daddy’s looking for. But on the record, he’s searching for more organic sustenance.

  ae “I always felt like I started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere from it, even down into the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions.” —Dylan on Highway 61 in Chronicles.

  af From Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads”:I went to the crossroads, fell down on my knees

  Asked the Lord above, have mercy now, save poor Bob if you please

  Standin’ at the crossroads, tried to flag a ride

  Didn’t nobody seem to know me, everybody pass me by

  Standin’ at the crossroads, baby, the risin’ sun goin’ down

  I believe to my soul now, po’ Bob is sinkin’ down

  ag Male R&B chauvinism may be the starting point for “From a Buick 6,” but it’s worth noting that the song reaches into less charted realms. As in many of Dylan’s compositions of this period, erotic attachments become existential conundrums.

  ah One source for the title of the song may be Rimbaud’s poem “Ma Bohème”—whose second verse has been translated: “My only pair of breeches had a big hole. A dreamy Tom Thumb, shelling out rhymes on my path. My inn was at the sign of the Great Bear. My stars in the sky made gentle rustling noises.”

  ai A line derived from Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s version of “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground”—on of the Anthology’s most mysteriously abstract songs:No, I don’t like a railroad man

  The railroad man, he’ll kill you when he can

  And drink up your blood like wine

  aj In the nineties, the pop-flamenco guitarist Kiko Venonen released a mellifluous and danceable cover of “Memphis Blues Again,” with the full lyrics translated into Spanish. As a young man in fascist-governed Spain of the late sixties and early seventies, Venonen had discovered and been transformed by Dylan’s music. In the mid-70s, he led an influential hippie-punk band that blended Spanish folk with American pop. Throughout his career, Venonen has remained a socialist and a critic of the music industry.

  ak Robbie Robertson, Rick Dank
o, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson toured with Dylan; Levon Helm, the drummer, stayed at home. His place was taken by Mickey Jones.

  al C.P. Lee’s bracing Like the Night: The Road to the Manchester Free Trade Hall recreates the context, the experience—and the joy, for those who were wise or innocent enough to relish Dylan’s new music.

  am Not With My Wife You Don’t!

  an “I Shall Be Released” served as an anthem for the campaigns to free the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, and other victims of miscarriages of justice in Britain in the eighties.

  ao The lyric sung by Dylan and Manuel on the Basement Tapes is different:Now yonder stands with me in this lonely crowd

  A man who swears he’s not to blame

  All day long I hear his voice shouting so loud

  Crying out that he was framed

  ap In late 2002, as war against Iraq loomed, Yoko Ono filled commercial billboards in U.S. cities with the message: War is Over . . . if you want it. Lennon and Ono’s 1969 bed-in for peace owed much to Ginsberg’s prophetic politics, though Lennon’s relationship with Ginsberg was much less comfortable than Dylan’s.

  aq The two men standing next to Dylan on the cover are Bengali baul musicians who had been visiting Albert Grossman at Woodstock and playing and partying with Dylan and The Band. Their unexplained presence here is one of the very few references in Dylan’s work to non-Anglophone musical traditions.

  ar Bonnie and Clyde, released a few months after John Wesley Harding, addresses many of the same themes: the romance and moral ambivalence of the outlaw, the role of the press, the ambiguity of legends. Like Dylan’s work of this period, it’s also involved in excavating—with the tools of the late sixties—an American past of hard times and stark class divisions.