Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  The following February, Dylan appeared on Les Crane’s nationally broadcast, late-night TV talk show, dressed not in his customary suede and denim but in a modish suit and performing with an accompanist, Bruce Langhorne, who played an acoustic guitar with an electronic pickup. Between songs, Dylan bantered with Crane about a collaboration he had undertaken with Ginsberg—“sort of a horror cowboy movie,” Dylan deadpanned, that Ginsberg was writing and he was rewriting, and that would take place on the New York State Thruway.32 “Yeah?” asked Crane, who seemed to get the put-on but was willing to play it straight. “Are you gonna star in it?”

  Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Barbara Rubin, Bob Dylan, and Daniel Kramer backstage at McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey, September 1964. (photo credit 2.14)

  Dylan: Yeah, yeah, I’m a hero.

  Crane: You’re the hero? You play the horrible cowboy?

  Dylan: I play my mother (audience laughter).

  Crane: You play your mother? In the movie?

  Dylan: In the movie. You gotta see the movie (audience laughter).

  Three months later, Ginsberg appeared in the movie that Pennebaker was making about Dylan. By then, Columbia had released Bringing It All Back Home, its back cover illustrated with photographs taken by Daniel Kramer in Princeton, including one of Ginsberg wearing Dylan’s trademark top hat and another of Rubin massaging a weary Dylan’s scalp. To top it off, and seal the symbolism, a small photo showed Dylan smiling impishly, wearing the same top hat Ginsberg was wearing in the first picture. The two shared an odd 1960s bohemian crown, with intimations of Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. And just in case the message wasn’t clear enough, Dylan wrote in the album’s liner notes:

  i have

  given up at making any attempt at perfection

  the fact that the white house is filled with

  leaders that’ve never been t’ the apollo

  theater amazes me.33 why allen ginsberg was

  not chosen t’ read poetry at the inauguration

  boggles my mind / if someone thinks norman

  mailer is more important than hank williams

  that’s fine.

  In early December, in San Francisco, Dylan stopped by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s bookstore, City Lights, where Ferlinghetti was staging what came to be called the Last Gathering of Beat poets and artists (five years after the “funeral” at Robert Cordier’s apartment). A dozen or so Beat writers turned up, including Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and Michael McClure. Dylan, who had by now released “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” and was touring with his backup musicians, would play that evening at the Masonic Auditorium, having performed the previous two nights at the Berkeley Community Theater. He had had fun the day before at a press conference where Ginsberg asked a hipster question: “Do you think there will ever be a time when you’ll be hung as a thief?” (Dylan, taken aback momentarily, smiled and replied, “You weren’t supposed to say that.”)34 Now he would mingle with Ginsberg and Ginsberg’s friends at one of the Beat scene’s literary headquarters, accompanied by his band’s lead guitarist, Robbie Robertson. The two musicians headed straight for the store’s basement in order to avoid the crush of fans and not to intrude on what Dylan thought ought to be entirely the Beats’ occasion. When the hubbub subsided, Dylan posed for some pictures in the alley that adjoined the store, alongside McClure, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Robertson, and Orlovsky’s brother, Julius.

  Dylan had thought that some photographs of him with the poets might look good on the cover of the album he had just begun recording, which would become Blonde on Blonde. Even though the pictures, some of them made by the young photographer Larry Keenan, did not appear on the album, they would be widely reproduced in books as well as future Dylan record releases, affirming Dylan’s place among the poets and theirs with him.

  The Beats’ gathering over, and the concert done, Dylan headed south with Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and McClure, riding in Ginsberg’s Volkswagen van (bought with the proceeds from a Guggenheim Fellowship) to San Jose, to meet up with the band for another concert before finishing off the tour with concerts in Pasadena and Santa Monica. Dylan had given Ginsberg a gift of six hundred dollars, enough to purchase a state-of-the-art, portable Uher tape recorder. (Ginsberg, in gratitude, taped one of Dylan’s concerts in Berkeley, as well as approving members of the audience, to show Dylan that the hostility his new electric music had received from reviewers was undeserved. Rebutting charges that Dylan had sold out his fans, Ginsberg later remarked: “Dylan has sold out to God.35 That is to say, his command was to spread his beauty as widely as possible. It was an artistic challenge to see if great art can be done on a jukebox.”) Dylan also presented McClure with an Autoharp, on which the poet would soon be composing in what was, for him, an entirely new kind of sung verse.

  Outside City Lights Books in San Francisco, December 5, 1965, stand Robbie Robertson, Michael McClure, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Julius Orlovsky (partially hidden), and unidentified photographer. (photo credit 2.15)

  Then Dylan flew back to New York to resume work on his new album and prepare for a grueling tour of the continental United States, Hawaii, Australia, Europe, and Britain, which would culminate in his historic concerts at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester and at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Ginsberg, after a brief trip to Big Sur, returned to Los Angeles (where he met the Byrds and the record producer Phil Spector), then took off in the van headed east. Orlovsky drove; Ginsberg dictated poetry into the Uher recorder, which he had called, musician-style, his “new ax for composition.”36 As the Volkswagen gyrated between Lincoln, Nebraska, and Wichita, Kansas, Ginsberg compressed radio announcements, highway advertising signs, pop lyrics of the Beatles, the Kinks, and Dylan, always Dylan, and the bleak farming landscape into verse, and composed, as taped spoken stanzas, the lengthy “Wichita Vortex Sutra”—one of his greatest poems and, along with Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, the most powerful literary response to America’s mounting military intrusion in Vietnam.

  Dylan and Ginsberg’s friendship was close and respectful but also complicated, as the New York poet Anne Waldman has explained. Fifteen years Dylan’s senior, Ginsberg was hardly old enough to be a father figure, but Dylan sometimes cast him that way, as the patriarch of the entire hip cultural family. (In the film he made from the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, Dylan actually had Ginsberg play a role named Father.) Yet Dylan garnered by far a larger audience with his music than Ginsberg did with his poems, and Ginsberg became such a devotee of Dylan’s that, during the Rolling Thunder tour, Waldman recalls, members of the troupe “joked that Ginsberg was Dylan’s most dedicated groupie.”37 Ginsberg’s homosexuality and obvious desire for Dylan added an additional layer of tension and even curiosity. Certainly, by the 1970s, Dylan had eclipsed Ginsberg as a cultural, and countercultural, star; at times, especially during the Rolling Thunder Revue, Ginsberg seemed practically to be nipping at Dylan’s heels, wanting but never quite reaching the aura of rock-and-roll adulation and glory. At these moments, Dylan, and not Ginsberg, seemed to be the more powerful man in the friendship, the older brother if not the father. On Dylan’s part, Waldman writes, there was “a bit of taunt and tease in the relationship whose intimacy I notice[d] Ginsberg deeply enjoy[ed].” And, one might add, there was a bit of pathos on Ginsberg’s part.

  Still, in their odd tandem, Dylan and Ginsberg helped each other complete transitions into new phases of their careers after 1963. Part of the transitions had to do with image. Masters of self-protection and media presentation, Dylan and Ginsberg entered into, if only tacitly, a mutual-reinforcement pact. By the time they met, Dylan was already on the move artistically, yet that move had its risks. Trading in the soulful, Steinbeckian leftishness depicted in his portrait by Barry Feinstein on the cover of The Times They Are A-Changin’ was bound to confuse and even offend a portion of Dylan’s young pro-civil-rights, ban-the-bomb folkie base, as well as the folk-reviv
al old leftists. The falloff became obvious when Dylan’s second album of 1964, Another Side of Bob Dylan—which included the completed “Chimes of Freedom”—did not crack the Top 40 on the sales charts. (By contrast, The Times They Are A-Changin’ had broken in at number twenty on the charts.)

  Having Ginsberg as his visible ally helped Dylan negotiate the shift, as well as his return to rock and roll on the three albums that followed Another Side in 1965 and 1966. To be sure, Ginsberg and the Beats, with their mysticism, sexual frankness, and individualism, were politically unreliable as far as the Popular Front veterans were concerned. And some of the Beats (though not Ginsberg) shared a resentful view that the folk musicians, Dylan included, had shoved them aside at the very beginning of the 1960s.* But Ginsberg was enough of a leftist to satisfy the younger folkies. (Joan Baez—Dylan’s lover through part of this period, and disconcerted at Dylan’s growing detachment from politics—asked Ginsberg and McClure late in 1965 to act as Dylan’s conscience.) As a cultural revolutionary, antibourgeois seer, and antagonist of the academy, Ginsberg commanded respect on the left. Above all, Ginsberg stood for literary seriousness, on a level far above what even the most talented folkie lyricist, let alone rock and roller, could hope to attain.

  Dylan, meanwhile, helped Ginsberg make his transition from Beat generation prophet to a kind of older avatar of the late-1960s counterculture—for the poet, a new kind of fame. If Dylan did not open the doors to the widest pop markets, he beckoned to audiences that no poet of the traditional sort could hope to reach—baby boomers, fully twenty years younger than the Beats, who listened to Top 40 radio and crammed into places like Orchestra Hall in Chicago and Carnegie Hall in New York to hear their hero Dylan perform. Apart from Andy Warhol, no artist on the New York scene in 1964 and 1965 was as shrewd a molder of his pop public image as Dylan—and for Ginsberg, himself a great self-publicist and promoter of his poet friends, the association with Dylan was one of the catalysts that transformed him into a celebrity emblem, young America’s wild-haired poet.

  None of this means that the connection between the two men was merely or even mainly about cultural marketing. Ginsberg wrote only a few brief verses in 1964 (complaining, in one of them, about the distracting telephone, “ringing at dawn ringing all afternoon ringing up midnight,” and callers hoping to cash in on his celebrity), but in his poem of Prague in 1965, “Kral Majales,” written during the unexpected flight to London where he immediately linked up with Dylan, he sprang to life as one of the Just Men who denounced lying Communists and lying capitalists, and who was chosen King of May “which is the power of sexual youth.”38 Later, Ginsberg talked seriously with Dylan about future joint projects, possibly including a record album of Ginsberg’s mantras.

  In one of the culminations of “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” Ginsberg, having already declared the Vietnam War over but still hearing the blab of the airwaves about death tolls and new military operations, wrote of how, at last, the radio bade new promise:

  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.39

  Typescript of an early draft of Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” 1966. (photo credit 2.16)

  Five years later, Ginsberg would finally record with Dylan, performing mantras, William Blake songs that he had put to music, and at least one song that Dylan and Ginsberg wrote together. Ginsberg would, for the rest of his life, see Dylan’s work (and not the Beat generation jazz experiments he linked to Patchen and Kenneth Rexroth) as aligned with his own practice of vocalizing poetry, in a vernacular, idiomatic, self-expressive form.

  Dylan, for his part, was determined to make his own artistic break from the topical, folkie Left when he recorded Another Side in a single afternoon and evening on June 9, 1964, telling the journalist Nat Hentoff, “There aren’t any finger pointing songs in here … From now on, I want to write from inside me … for it to come out the way I walk or talk.”40 Combined with a renewed attachment to Rimbaud, which he had affirmed to his friends months earlier, Dylan’s dedication to writing from within—to capturing what Ginsberg had called, nearly twenty years earlier, “the shadowy and heterogeneous experience of life through the conscious mind”—placed him within the orbit of the Beats’ spontaneous bop prosody even before he returned to playing with a band on electric guitar.

  Dylan’s transition, although rapid, was not flawless. Another Side—written amid a coast-to-coast concert tour, riding with friends and exploring the country in a station wagon; followed by his final breakup with Suze Rotolo; followed then by his first concert tour of Britain and a trip through Europe that ended in a village outside Athens—contains the occasional poetic clinker. (From “Ballad in Plain D”: “With unseen consciousness, I possessed in my grip / A magnificent mantelpiece, though its heart being chipped.”) The album is not uniformly successful in its experiments with what Ginsberg described as “join[ing] images as they are joined in the mind”—efforts influenced by sources as diverse as Japanese haiku and what T. S. Eliot called the “telescoping of images.”41,42 “Howl” had evoked “horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams”* and “the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox”; Dylan’s “My Back Pages”—a strong, expressionist song about looking back and moving on—offers apprentice images of “corpse evangelists” and “confusion boats.”

  Still, Another Side was, by any measure, an artistic breakthrough. Typing and scribbling on notepad paper from London’s Mayfair hotel, Dylan composed lyrics in bursts of wordplay, including little narratives and collage-like experiments. Writing on the other side of what would eventually become the lyrics for “To Ramona,” he tried out little riffs, some of which would turn up in “I Shall Be Free No. 10,” and some of which would be discarded. (The latter included a pair of couplets set off in alternating lines, one on the left about getting his monkey to do the dog atop a lumberjack log, the other on the right, about joining Ingmar Bergman in singing “Blowing in the Wind,” written out as if each couplet was coming in from a different side of a set of earphones.) In their finished form, the album’s simpler songs of love and anti-love—sung to the cracked-lipped Ramona, to the gypsy fortune-teller of Spanish Harlem, and about the unnamed watery-mouthed lover who turns him into a one-night stand—show an inventiveness in language, narration, and characters far more sophisticated than anything on Freewheelin’. Whatever its slips, “My Back Pages” contains interesting turns about “half-wracked prejudice” and ideas as maps, along with its unforgettable chorus about being younger than before.

  Above all, there is “Chimes of Freedom”—an expansion of the free verse lines that Dylan had written about the day President Kennedy died, but reworked into a pealing of thunder and lightning for all the world’s confused and abused, one dazzling image following another: “majestic bells of bolts” supplanting clinging church bells in “the wild cathedral evening,” flashing, tolling, striking, tolling, as “the sky cracked its poems in naked wonder.” Making music out of nature’s sights and sounds had attracted Dylan before, in his mystical song “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” (just as Jack Kerouac tried to render the ocean’s roar as poetry in his book Big Sur, published in 1962). But in “Chimes of Freedom,” strong metaphors replace similes; sight and sound uncannily merge in the flashing chimes; and a simple story of a couple crouching in a doorway turns into a hail-ripped carillon—and a song of tender empathy as well, far outside the old politics of left and right, black and white.

  A year later, Dylan divulged his indebtedness to the Beats. In March 1965, the same month that Columbia Records released Bringing It All Back Home, with its encomiums to Ginsberg, Kerouac published Desolation Angels, his last great novel of his experiences inside the Beat generation circle. Part of the Duluoz cycle, the book
covered events and developments in 1956 and 1957: Ginsberg’s unveiling of “Howl,” the San Francisco Renaissance, Kerouac’s growing disillusionment with his Beat friends, his bringing his mother out to California from Lowell and then his plunge into the weirdness and mystery of impoverished Mexico, only to have his Beat friends, the Desolation Angels, catch up with him. In early August, Dylan recorded “Desolation Row” for his sixth album, Highway 61 Revisited, and the correspondences with Kerouac, beginning with the title, were too exact to be coincidental.

  Various readers have plucked out lines in the novel—Kerouac’s descriptions of the poet David D’Angeli (Philip Lamantia) as “the perfect image of a priest” or of all the authorities who condemn hot-blooded embracers of life as sinners, when, in fact, “they sin by lifelessness!”—that turn up verbatim or nearly so in Dylan’s song.* The ambience of “Desolation Row” is reminiscent of Kerouac’s Mexico, a mixture of cheap food and fun (and ladies for hire) but with “a certain drear, even sad darkness.”43 After the recording of the song was done, Dylan suddenly decided to add a swirling, Tex-Mex acoustic guitar run, played by the visiting Nashville sideman Charlie McCoy, which dominates the track’s sound. Later, asked at a press conference to name Desolation Row’s location, Dylan replied, “Oh, that’s someplace in Mexico.”44 Decades after that, when he returned to play the Newport Folk Festival in 2002, Dylan and his band performed “Desolation Row” in the style of a Mexican border song.

  “Desolation Row” presents a kind of carnival (the critic Christopher Ricks calls it a “masque”) of fragments, shards of a civilization that has gone to pieces, in a modernist tradition that runs from Eliot’s Waste Land to Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Curious listeners have had a field day claiming particular references in every line, beginning with the very first, “They’re selling postcards of the hanging.” Clearly, some would have it, this alludes to the Hanged Man tarot card that turns up in the opening section of The Waste Land; not at all, others retort, it’s about a notorious lynching that occurred in Dylan’s birthplace, Duluth, in 1920, when his father was just a boy, and when, indeed, postcards of the two hanged blacks were made and sold as souvenirs. Who knows? With its repeated images of drowning and the sea—in references to the Titanic, Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Nero’s Neptune, Noah’s ark and the great rainbow—the song almost certainly echoes The Waste Land’s repeated invocations of death by water. But no matter. Here on “Desolation Row” (conceivably a Beat-influenced updating of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row) it is enough to see the characters from the Bible, Shakespeare, folktales, the circus, and Victor Hugo, most of them doomed, as well as Albert Einstein disguised as a noble outlaw, sniffing drainpipes and reciting the alphabet—strange sights and sounds, but all too real, everything a symbol of itself, viewed by the singer and his Lady looking out on it all, detached, from inside Desolation Row.