Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  On January 26, 1961—a day or two after Dylan first arrived in New York and played at the Café Wha?—Copland narrated a performance of The Second Hurricane, the children’s opera he had composed and Orson Welles had staged in 1937, at a Composers’ Showcase held at the Museum of Modern Art. It was the beginning of what would be another good year. Copland received various honors in 1961, including the prestigious Edward MacDowell Medal for contributions to American arts and letters from the MacDowell Colony. The American Ballet Theatre mounted a well-received production of Billy the Kid; a new Copland chamber piece, Nonet, had its first performance at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington; and President Kennedy hosted a youth concert on the White House lawn that featured a performance of “Hoe-Down.” There was also an official announcement that the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, would offer the debut of a newly commissioned Copland work on the opening night of the new Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in the fall of 1962. In addition, a few days after the opening, the Philharmonic would perform Lincoln Portrait, with the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, onstage as the narrator.

  By then, almost certainly, Dylan had heard Copland’s music. Like Copland, he would go on to slough off charges of sell-out commercialism and reshuffle the very terms on which American music could be composed and comprehended, mingling Petrarch, Donizetti, and Herman Melville with Hambone Willie Newbern, appealing to a mass audience without sacrificing his own vision. And forty years later in 2001, after an American catastrophe, Dylan would turn to Copland’s “Hoe-Down” to set his own concerts in motion.

  Dylan’s art, though built from the songs of others, would be all his own. After starting out in Hibbing by banging out Little Richard songs on the piano, he began his musical writing in Guthrie-esque style and then entered into every other folk-music style he could lay his hands on. Copland, by contrast, was first inspired to become a composer by the Polish composer, pianist, and national patriot Ignacy Paderewski and went on to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. Still, Copland’s musical world in 1930s New York led, directly and indirectly, to Dylan’s in 1960s New York. And Copland’s amalgamating art, in time built partly out of old cowboy ballads and mountain fiddle tunes, anticipated Dylan’s in ways that help make sense of both men’s achievements.

  By the time that Dylan, the high-school rock and roller turned songwriter-bard, began to make his mark, Copland had become the amiable patriarch of the American classical music establishment and had moved away from the Left, and so the connections were missed. But the aging master could still write with feeling about “the moral fervor” of “the depression-haunted thirties” that Dylan heard in Woody Guthrie. And the young Aaron Copland had been more like the young Bob Dylan than his older persona suggested.

  Aaron Copland in Paris, circa 1920s. Bob Dylan during sound check prior to his concert at Philadelphia’s Town Hall, September 1964. (photo credit 1.12) (photo credit 1.13)

  In the late summer of 1924, Copland, still in his initial dissonant, modernist phase, finished his very first symphony. The premiere performance, given the following January at Aeolian Hall in Manhattan by the New York Symphony Orchestra, was conducted by Walter Damrosch—who, at the concert’s conclusion, turned to the shaken audience and announced that “when the gifted young American who wrote this symphony can compose, at the age of 23, a work like this one, it seems evident that in five years more he will be ready to commit murder.”31 Dylan’s earliest Greenwich Village admirers were similarly stunned when his own songs began pouring out of him after he settled in New York. And in less than four years, at the age of twenty-three, Dylan would be ready to play Philharmonic Hall.

  * Copland also had an interesting indirect connection to the show. Welles—all of twenty-two years old and already a celebrated prodigy when Cradle debuted—was not a political radical, yet he was drawn to Blitzstein and his score, and was fascinated by the possibility of directing a musical play. His fascination deepened when, in April 1937, he briefly staged, for the Henry Street Settlement, a new children’s opera, The Second Hurricane, composed by Aaron Copland.

  * In some program notes, Copland wrote simply that the version of what he called “a square dance tune called ‘Bonyparte’ ” which he used for “Hoe-Down” could be found in the Lomaxes’ anthology. See Copland to Louis Kaufman, Nov. 1, 1945, Aaron Copland Collection, Library of Congress.

  * When Leonard Bernstein asked Copland why he, of all people, had turned to the twelve-tone system, Copland replied, “Because I need more chords. I’ve run out of chords.” Bernstein was later put in mind of Paul Simon’s telling him that when he met Bob Dylan for the first time in the early 1960s, Dylan’s first sentence had been “Hey, you got any new chords? I’ve run out of chords.” Another coincidence.

  * People’s Songs was in effect succeeded by the more overtly doctrinaire leftist People’s Artists group. In 1951, the new group undertook the publication of Sing Out! magazine, co-founded and edited by the former executive director of People’s Songs, Irwin Silber, whose criticisms of Dylan’s work in 1964 played a part in the singer’s break with the radical political folk-song establishment.

  2

  PENETRATING AETHER:

  The Beat Generation and Allen Ginsberg’s America

  Aaron Copland’s first important musical project after Billy the Kid was to write the score, in 1939, for a film by the innovative director Lewis Milestone, made from John Steinbeck’s novella about hard-luck migrant workers in California, Of Mice and Men. Copland had been trying to break into film work since 1937 but was still known in Hollywood as a composer of modernist art music and hence was considered too difficult for American moviegoers. Thanks in part to his good friend Harold Clurman of the Group Theatre, who had relocated to Hollywood, and inspired in part by Virgil Thomson’s film work, Copland finally got his foot in the door, received the Steinbeck assignment, and produced a score in his new style of “imposed simplicity” (although without the obvious borrowing from folk music or cowboy songs). The film won immediate critical praise, as did Copland’s accessible adaptation of modernist techniques—including, daringly for the time, dissonance—to his score’s wide-open, pastoral evocations. The following year, Copland’s music for Of Mice and Men earned him two Academy Award nominations and the National Board of Review Award.

  Original poster for Lewis Milestone’s film version of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, 1939. (photo credit 2.1)

  Late one night in 1940, Jack Kerouac, not yet out of high school, saw Milestone’s film—possibly in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, but most likely in Manhattan’s Times Square—and left the theater envisaging phantoms flitting out of sight beneath the streetlamps. The movie, as well as the ghostly aftermath, stuck with him, particularly its rackety opening scene, carried along by Copland’s dramatic music. Fifteen years later, Kerouac described it in the “54th Chorus” of his large clutch of poems Mexico City Blues:

  Once I went to a movie

  At midnight, 1940, Mice

  And Men, the name of it,

  The Red Block Boxcars

  Rolling by (on the Screen)

  Yessir

  life

  finally

  gets

  tired

  of

  living—

  Twenty years after Kerouac wrote those lines, on a crisp scarlet-ocher November afternoon at Edson Cemetery in Lowell, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg visited Kerouac’s grave, trailed by a reporter, a photographer, a film crew, and various others (including the young playwright Sam Shepard).1 Dylan had performed the night before at the University of Lowell, on a tour of New England with a thrown-together troupe of new friends and old, including Ginsberg, which called itself the Rolling Thunder Revue. Ginsberg, who became excited when the tour buses reached the city, met up with some of Kerouac’s relatives and drinking buddies and tried to immerse Dylan’s entourage in Kerouacian lore. Shepard, who had join
ed the troupe ostensibly to write the screenplay for a movie Dylan planned to make of the tour, duly recorded in his travel log the names of real-life Lowell sites described in the Duluoz Legend—Kerouac’s collective, Faulknerian name for the autobiographical novels, revolving around his fictional alter ego Jack Duluoz, that constituted the main body of his work. But at Edson Cemetery, Ginsberg recited not from Kerouac’s prose but from poetry out of Mexico City Blues, including “54th Chorus”—invoking specters, fatigue, mortality, Mexico, and John Steinbeck’s boxcar America, while he and Dylan contemplated Kerouac’s headstone. And when Dylan included footage of the event in the film he made in and about the Rolling Thunder tour, yet another complicated cultural circuit closed, linking Kerouac listening to Copland and watching Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in 1940 with the scene at Kerouac’s grave in Renaldo and Clara in 1977.

  Sam Shepard, Bob Dylan, and Allen Ginsberg at Jack Kerouac’s grave, Edson Cemetery, Lowell, Massachusetts, November 3, 1975. (photo credit 2.2)

  Dylan knew the poems, Ginsberg later claimed. “Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul in 1959,” Dylan told him.2 “It blew my mind.” It was the first poetry he’d read that spoke his own American language, Dylan said—or so Ginsberg said he said. Maybe, maybe not. Without question, though, Dylan read Mexico City Blues and was deeply interested in Beat writing before he left Minneapolis for New York. (Like other Beats and hipsters, his friend Tony Glover ordered a paperback copy of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch from France, where it had been published by Olympia Press in Paris in 1959 as The Naked Lunch—uncertain whether the book, deemed obscene by American authorities, would clear customs. The book indeed arrived, and Glover lent it to Dylan, who returned it after a couple of weeks.) And Dylan’s involvement with the writings of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the rest of the Beat generation is nearly as essential to Dylan’s biography as his immersion in rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and then Woody Guthrie. “I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemian, Be Bop crowd, it was all pretty much connected,” Dylan said in 1985.3 “It was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti … I got in at the tail end of that and it was magic … it had just as big an impact on me as Elvis Presley.”

  Dylan’s connection to Kerouac was mainly artistic. After he arrived in New York, he now says, he quickly outgrew the raw, aimless, “hungry for kicks” hipsterism personified by Neal Cassady’s character, Dean Moriarty, in On the Road. Aimlessness would never suit Dylan. And by the time Dylan had begun making a name for himself, Kerouac had begun his descent into the alcoholism and paranoia that would kill him in 1969, at the age of forty-seven. Dylan never met him. But he still loved what he called Kerouac’s “breathless, dynamic bop phrases,” and always would.4 He could relate to Kerouac as a young man from a small declining industrial town who had come to New York as a cultural outsider more than twenty years earlier—an unknown bursting with ideas and whom the insiders proceeded either to lionize or to condemn, and, in any case, badly misconstrue. Now and then, over the years to come, recognizable lines and images of Kerouac’s would surface in Dylan’s lyrics, most conspicuously in the song “Desolation Row.”

  Dylan’s continuing link to the Beat generation, though, came chiefly through his friend and sometime mentor Allen Ginsberg. Dylan’s link with Ginsberg dated back to the end of 1963, a pivotal moment in the lives and careers of both men. Thereafter, in the mid-1960s, the two would complete important artistic transitions, each touched and supported by the other. On and off, their rapport lasted for decades. And in 1997, in New Brunswick, Canada, Dylan would dedicate a concert performance of “Desolation Row” to Ginsberg, his longtime comrade, telling the audience it was Allen’s favorite of his songs, on the evening after Ginsberg died.

  As with Dylan’s connection to New York’s Popular Front folk-music world, his connection with the Beats had a complicated backstory. The origins of the Beat impulse, like those of the folk revival, dated back much further than the 1950s, let alone the 1960s, to the days of Dylan’s childhood in Duluth and Hibbing. For all the obvious differences between the Beats and the folk-music crowd—the Beats’ affinities were with the arts of Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake, and Charlie Parker, and not Anglo-American backwoods balladry—the Beat writers found themselves, early, locked in conflict with some of the same liberal critical circles around Partisan Review that decried, for different reasons, the folksy leftism of the Popular Front, including its high- or middlebrow version in Aaron Copland’s music. Out of that conflict emerged Beat artistic ideas that Dylan admired, remembered, and later seized upon when he moved beyond the folk revival. Even though Dylan invented himself within one current of musical populism that came out of the 1930s and 1940s, he escaped that current in the 1960s—without ever completely rejecting it—by embracing anew some of the spirit and imagery of the Beat generation’s entirely different rebellious disaffiliation and poetic transcendence. Dylan in turn would make an enormous difference to the surviving, transformed Beats, especially Ginsberg, each influencing the other while their admirers forged the counterculture that profoundly affected American life at the end of the twentieth century.

  Although they were distinct and in many ways antagonistic, the folk revival and the Beat scene shared certain ancestral connections in the Depression-era Left, and this may help explain why the liberal critics thought the Beats were so contemptible. Jack Kerouac’s feel for some of the texture of lower-class life and for what he called “the warp of wood of old America”—his appreciation of “the switching moves of boxcars” in Steinbeck, Milestone, and Copland’s Of Mice and Men—provided one set of similarities.5 Along with several others in the Beat orbit, including Ginsberg, Kerouac joined the left-wing National Maritime Union in order to ship out with the merchant marine. (Working at the NMU’s headquarters on Sixteenth Street was Ginsberg’s troubled mother, Naomi.) On the West Coast, Gary Snyder brought some of the traditions of Pacific north-woods radicalism into his Zen poesy. But the most powerful link was through Ginsberg, who would always be the most political of the Beat writers. In his poem “America,” which he wrote in 1956, soon after the McCarthy Red Scare, Ginsberg confessed that he had sentimental feelings for the Wobblies, described being brought as a boy to Communist-cell meetings, and chanted in praise of the anarchist martyrs of the 1920s Sacco and Vanzetti. The allusions were not merely historical.

  Ginsberg’s readers know about his mother, Naomi, the loyal Communist who took him to those cell meetings, as immortalized in his poem “Kaddish.” But Naomi’s was not the only left-wing political influence inside the Ginsberg household. Ginsberg’s father, Louis, taught high school in Paterson, New Jersey, and was an accomplished mainstream lyric poet whose verses appeared in the New York Times and other respectable places. In his youth, though, the elder Ginsberg, then a Eugene V. Debs socialist, published poetry in Max Eastman’s Masses and its successor, the Liberator. He then gravitated, in the late 1920s, to a loosely organized association called the Rebel Poets, co-founded by the “proletarian” novelist Jack Conroy (who wrote The Disinherited and was an influence on, among others, John Steinbeck and Richard Wright). Louis did not join his wife in the Communist Party, which added to his air of moderation. Yet, like his fellow New Jersey poet William Carlos Williams and other non-Communists, he published work in the Communist-leaning monthly New Masses. And he shared in the widespread outrage that led him to contribute a poem, “To Sacco and Vanzetti,” to a commemorative volume published in 1928, shortly after the two convicted anarchists were executed.

  Hints of the Beats’ left-wing genealogy lasted through the 1960s and beyond—thanks, again, chiefly to Allen Ginsberg—and it made some difference to Dylan, who, whatever his thoughts about politics and political organizations, never lost his attraction to rebels and outlaws. The day after the Rolling Thunder Revue left Lowell, Ginsberg wrote a letter to his father:

  Beautiful day with Dylan, beginning early afternoon visiting Kerou
ac’s grave plot & reading the stone …—We stood in the November sun brown leaves flying in wind & read poems from Mexico City Blues … Dylan wants to do some scene related to Sacco & Vanzetti when we get to Boston.6

  Boston’s symbolic significance needed no explication between son and father: Sacco and Vanzetti had been executed there in 1927, for the murder they allegedly committed in nearby South Braintree seven years earlier. It is plausible that Dylan kindled to the idea of performing “some scene” about them—a reprise, perhaps, of one of Woody Guthrie’s song tributes on his album Ballads of Sacco and Vanzetti, composed and recorded in 1946–47 at the prompting of Moe Asch, though not issued until 1960. But nothing came of the idea. By the time the Rolling Thunder Revue reached Boston, Joan Baez, one of the troupe’s stars, had even ceased singing the Alfred Hayes–Earl Robinson anthem, “Joe Hill,” about the Wobbly organizer and songwriter executed in 1915—a song she had featured at earlier stops during her allotted solo portion of the show.* Baez and Dylan did share the vocal on “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” Dylan’s rewrite of “Joe Hill.” Traces of the old radical America persisted, long after Dylan had moved beyond writing topical songs. But Dylan had transformed those traces completely, as he transformed everything.