Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  In all of its strangeness, the song mocks orthodoxies and confining loyalties of every kind—loyalties to religion, sex, science, romance, politics, medicine, money—which the singer has rejected. The least mysterious verse (although it is mysterious enough) comes next to last. Crammed aboard the damned Titanic, the people are oblivious to what is happening; instead, they shout an old reliable left-wing folkie tune (made popular by the Weavers), “Which Side Are You On?” T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, respectively the author and the editor of The Waste Land, struggle for command of the ship; but it is all a laugh to the calypso singers; and down beneath the dreamlike sea where lovely mermaids flow, and where (simple) fishermen hold (simple) flowers, thoughts of Desolation Row are unnecessary. Neither strait-minded politics nor modernist high art will save the ship from crashing and going down.

  In 1985, a review of mine for the Village Voice of Kerouac and Friends, Fred McDarrah’s collection of photographs and articles related to the Beats, mentioned how writers and critics have differed over when and why the Beat generation disappeared. Soon after the piece was published, Al Aronowitz, whom I’d never met and never would, phoned to inform me that the Beat generation died the minute that he introduced Ginsberg to Dylan in my uncle’s apartment. Self-dramatizing though he was, Aronowitz had a point—for by the time Dylan recorded “Desolation Row,” he had found his way out of the limitations of the folk revival, having reawakened to Beat literary practice and sensibilities and absorbed them into his electrified music. He had thereby completed (according to Ginsberg himself) a merger of poetry and song that Ezra Pound had foreseen as modernism’s future. Thereafter, it would be Ginsberg who sought artistic enlightenment from Dylan, turning his long-line verse into musical lyrics, and at times even becoming—as he did during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975—the willing mascot he had initially feared he might become. At the beginning of the 1970s, Ginsberg persuaded Dylan to collaborate on some studio recordings, the best of which, “September on Jessore Road,” would not be released until 1994, a few years before Ginsberg’s death. Finally, Ginsberg would partially fulfill what one punk rock musician from the 1980s called his firm desire “to be a rock star,” by working with, among others, Joe Strummer of the Clash and Paul McCartney.45*

  The changing of the guard, though, had occurred between when Aronowitz said it did in late December 1963 and the recording of “Desolation Row” a little more than eighteen months later. On the day he made Another Side in June 1964, Dylan recorded a version of a new song, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but he wisely decided it was too important to include on an album completed in a one-off session. He played the song twice at the Newport Folk Festival in late July, to rapturous applause and cheers. And by the middle of autumn, he had written two more compositions that sang of bread-crumb sins and of walking upside down inside handcuffs, which completed the transition. He tried out the new songs on the road in Philadelphia, Princeton, Detroit, and Boston. Then, on Halloween night in New York City at Philharmonic Hall, he sprang them on an audience that included Allen Ginsberg (who had brought along with him Gregory Corso)—and, coincidentally, this author.

  * Baez, too, would have sympathized with the idea of a Sacco and Vanzetti tribute, and would even have had songs of her own to contribute—a three-part composition, “The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti,” and “Here’s to You,” all composed for the Giuliano Montaldo film Sacco e Vanzetti, which had been released in 1971.

  * Ginsberg later misremembered meeting Dylan on the same night that Dylan gave his controversial speech accepting the Tom Paine Award from the left-wing Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. In fact, they met nearly two weeks later—but the controversy was still fresh in Dylan’s mind. See below, pp. 67–69.

  * Trilling had passed through a brief intense attraction to the Communist Party as a young man in the early 1930s, going so far as to sign a public statement endorsing the party’s presidential ticket in 1932. But he never actually joined the CP, and by 1934 he openly opposed the party, though he would remain sympathetic to leftist ideas for some years thereafter.

  * Ginsberg and the others had hoped that Jack Kerouac would also read from his work, but Kerouac spent the evening in his refuge in Northport, Long Island, where he had bought a house with the proceeds from On the Road and lived with his mother, Gabrielle.

  * Ginsberg did, though, always insist on the close links between Dylan and what he called an older generation of “bohemian or Beat illumination.” Waldman writes: “In many of my own conversations with Ginsberg he forged, even pressed (being the legend builder he was) the ongoing link of Dylan to the Beats. As he was dying, he regretted there was no opportunity to do an ‘Unplugged Ginsberg’ session with Dylan, as he had hoped.” (In fact, MTV had actually planned an “Unplugged Ginsberg” program.) In one sense, Ginsberg was anointing Dylan; in another, he was making sure nobody forgot how Dylan was really an extension of himself, Kerouac, and the other Beats. Once a salesman, always a salesman.

  * The reference here was to the Third Avenue Elevated Railway, a part of Manhattan’s subway system, which was demolished in May 1955.

  * Readers have also noted that Desolation Angels speaks of “Housing Project hill,” a line that turns up in another song on Highway 61 Revisited, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” which begins with an evocation of being lost during a rainy Easter time in the Mexican border town of Juárez. The music critic Bill Flanagan reports having a conversation around 2001 with the novelist Robert Stone in which Stone (who was part of the crowd surrounding Ken Kesey and the Beat legend Neal Cassady) reminisced about Cassady’s exile in Mexico and claimed that there was no better account of that time and that place than “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.”

  * At a reading at Princeton University on February 12, 1996, Ginsberg called to the stage the film director Gus Van Sant, who happened to be in town and happened to play the guitar; Van Sant duly accompanied Ginsberg’s reading/performance of “The Ballad of the Skeletons,” which Ginsberg had recently recorded with McCartney.

  PART II: EARLY

  3

  DARKNESS AT THE BREAK OF NOON:

  The Concert at Philharmonic Hall, New York City, October 31, 1964

  On Halloween night 1964, a twenty-three-year-old Bob Dylan spellbound an adoring audience at Philharmonic Hall in New York. Relaxed and high-spirited, he sang seventeen songs, three of them with his guest Joan Baez, plus one encore. Many of the songs, although less than two years old, were so familiar that the crowd knew every word. Others were brand-new and baffling. Dylan played his heart out on these new compositions, as he did on the older ones, but only after a turn as the mischievous tease.

  “This is called ‘A Sacrilegious Lullaby in, in D minor,’ ” he announced, before beginning one of the first public performances ever of “Gates of Eden.”

  He was the cynosure of hip, when hipness still wore pressed slacks and light brown suede boots (as I remember he did that night). Yet hipness was transforming right onstage. Dylan had already moved on, well beyond the knowing New Yorkers in the hall, and he was singing about what he was finding. The show was in part a summation of past work and in part a summons to an explosion for which none of us, not even he, was fully prepared.

  Bob Dylan at Philharmonic Hall, New York City, on October 31, 1964. (photo credit 3.1)

  The times seemed increasingly out of joint during the weeks before the concert. The trauma of John F. Kennedy’s assassination less than a year earlier had barely abated. Over the summer, the disappearance in Mississippi of the young civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, and the recovery of their beaten and murdered bodies, had created traumas anew. President Lyndon Johnson managed to push a civil-rights bill through Congress in July 1964; by early autumn, it seemed as if he would trounce the archconservative Barry Goldwater in the coming election and usher in an updated New Deal. But in August, Johnson received a congressional blank check to escalate American involvement in the Vietnam con
flict. On a single day in mid-October, the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, was overthrown and Communist China exploded its first atomic bomb. A hopeful phase of the decade was quickly winding down, and a scarier phase loomed.

  Dylan’s style and his art were changing too, with an accelerating and bewildering swiftness befitting the times. As early as the summer of 1963, he had put the folk establishment on notice in “For Dave Glover,” a prose poem he was asked to write for the Newport Folk Festival program, asserting that, although he had great respect for the older folk songs and their traditions, he would write new songs as he liked, for himself and his friends. In January 1964, he complained in a letter to Broadside magazine about the pressures and guilt that had come with his growing fame. Out of the blue, a letter then appeared in Broadside from Johnny Cash, praising Dylan as “a Poet Troubadour” and bidding the world to “SHUT UP! … AND LET HIM SING.”1 But the din around Dylan had barely begun. In late July, his performances at the Newport Folk Festival of new material, including “Chimes of Freedom,” followed, two weeks later, by the release of Another Side of Bob Dylan, badly shook the older folk-music establishment. In Sing Out! magazine, Irwin Silber published “An Open Letter to Bob Dylan,” complaining that Dylan’s “new songs seem to be all inner-directed now, inner probing, self-conscious—maybe even a little maudlin or a little cruel on occasion.”2 Noting, with a familiar left-wing combination of vagueness and menace, that he was not alone in his disquiet, Silber warned Dylan not to turn into “a different Bob Dylan than the one we knew.” (Dylan responded by instructing his manager, Albert Grossman, to inform Sing Out! that he would no longer send the magazine his songs for publication.)

  Little did Silber know that Dylan was not simply becoming different; he had also been listening to the Beatles. But neither did Dylan’s approving fans, for whom Dylan remained the great folk-music star, no matter what he sang. At Newport, Dylan stuck almost entirely to playing his new songs, including one he introduced to an afternoon workshop session as “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, Play a Song for Me”—and the response was enthusiastic. Amid what the Top 40 disc jockeys hyped as the English rock invasion, led by the Beatles, Dylan still stood onstage alone, singing and playing with nothing more than his acoustic guitar and rack-clamped harmonica. When he wasn’t alone, he performed, at Newport and elsewhere, with Joan Baez, whose presence and endorsement of Dylan’s new songs banished any doubts about their legitimacy. Dylan’s politics actually hadn’t disappeared, as Silber charged, but only become less preachy and much funnier, as in the joke-saga “Motorpsycho Nitemare” on Another Side. Dylan had always sung intensely personal songs. His most powerful political material often involved human-sized stories, like “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” And amid the disorientation of late 1963 and 1964, who was to say that a turn to introspection was out of place?

  The Beatles, with their odd chords and joyful harmonies, were exciting, but what was “She Loves You” compared to the long-stemmed word imagery in “Chimes of Freedom”? Who else but Dylan would be brainy enough and with-it enough to toss off allusions in his songs to a Fellini film and Cassius Clay? To his fans—among whom, as a self-centered precocious thirteen-year-old, I counted myself one—he may have been evolving, but so were we. The Bob Dylan we now heard and saw seemed basically the same as the Bob Dylan we knew, only better.

  That Dylan’s management booked Philharmonic Hall for its star’s biggest show of the year, on Halloween night, was testimony to his allure and growing stature. Opened only two years earlier as the first showcase of the neighborhood killer Robert Moses’s new Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) was, with its imperial grandeur and bad acoustics, the most prestigious auditorium in Manhattan—and for that matter in the entire country. Within two years of the release of his first album, Dylan’s New York venues had shot upward in cachet (and farther uptown), from Town Hall to Carnegie Hall and now to the sparkling new home of Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. When the expectant audience streamed out of the old mosaic-tiled IRT subway stop at Sixty-sixth Street, and then crammed into the cavernous gilded theater, it must have looked to the uptowners (and the ushers) like a bizarre invasion of the beatnik, civil-rights, ban-the-bomb young.

  Philharmonic Hall. (photo credit 3.2)

  As if to make sure that we knew our place, a man appeared onstage at showtime to warn us that there would be no picture taking or smoking permitted in the house. Then, like Bernstein striding to his podium, Dylan walked out of the wings, no announcement necessary, a fanfare of applause proclaiming who he was. He started the concert, as he normally did, with “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Here we all were, the self-consciously sensitive and discerning, settling in—at a Dylan show like any other, whatever the plush surroundings.

  Two hours later, we would leave the premises and head back underground to the IRT, exhilarated, entertained, and ratified in our self-assured enlightenment, but also confused about the snatches of lines we’d gleaned from the strange new songs. What was that weird lullaby in D minor? What in God’s name is a perfumed gull (or did he sing “curfewed gal”)? Had Dylan really written a ballad based on Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon? The melodies were strong, and the playing on the “darkness” song had been ominous and overpowering, but it had all moved so fast that comprehension was impossible. It had turned into a Dylan show unlike any we’d ever heard or heard about. And in our programs, there was Dylan’s latest prose poem, “Advice for Geraldine on Her Miscellaneous Birthday,” which warned that if one crossed the line, people will “feel / something’s going on up there that / they don’t know about. revenge / will set in.” The piece concluded with a string of injunctions, some serious, some comic, some Dada-esque: “beware of bathroom walls that’ve not / been written on. when told t’ look at / yourself … never look. when asked / t’ give your real name … never give it.” Way ahead of his listeners, Dylan was already mulling over sentiments, thoughts, and even lines that would one day wind up in “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

  Thanks to an excellent tape, finally released in its entirety to the public as a compact disc forty years later, it is possible to appreciate what happened that night—not just in what Dylan sang, but in what he said, and in the amazing audible rapport he had with his audience.

  The show was divided in two, with a fifteen-minute intermission. The first half was for innovation as well as for some glances at where Dylan had already been. Two of the most pointedly political older songs, interestingly, had never been issued on record, but the audience knew them anyway, or at least knew about them, and responded enthusiastically.

  Back in May 1963, Dylan had been booked on The Ed Sullivan Show, the premier Sunday night television variety program, where Elvis Presley had made three breakthrough appearances seven years earlier and had agreed, on the final show, to be shown performing only from the waist up. The downtown Irish traditional folk group the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem had appeared on Sullivan twice, vastly enlarging their following. (They played Philharmonic Hall a year before Dylan did.) The Limeliters, the Lettermen, the Belafonte Folk Singers, and other mainstream folk acts had also performed on Sullivan’s program; in March 1963, Sullivan hosted the popular Chad Mitchell Trio. For Dylan, an edgy topical singer, playing The Ed Sullivan Show would mean huge exposure. He chose as his number the satirical “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues.”

  (For readers too young to remember: the John Birch Society, which still exists, was notorious as a hard-right political group that saw Communist conspiracies everywhere. The Chad Mitchell Trio had enjoyed a minor hit with its own mocking song, “The John Birch Society,” in 1962.)

  Bob Dylan in rehearsal for The Ed Sullivan Show prior to his walkout on May 12, 1963. (photo credit 3.3)

  Upon hearing Dylan’s selection at the rehearsal, just before airtime, a CBS executive got cold feet and, over Sullivan’s objections, ordered him to sing som
ething less controversial. Unlike Presley, Dylan would not be censored, and he refused to appear. Word of his principled walkout burnished Dylan’s reputation among his established fans, old and young. Little did we know that the song had also been dropped, along with three others, from the original version of Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

  Dylan included the banned number on his 1964 Halloween program. It required no introduction, as its notorious identity is revealed early in the song’s first verse, but Dylan wanted to make a point, and so he introduced it, with a mixture of defiance and good humor, as “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues”—a title that now to us seemed to cover the craven mainstream media as well as the right-wing extremists who were thumping their tubs for their favorite, Senator Goldwater. It was a thrilling moment for the audience, getting to hear what CBS had forbidden the nation to hear while also exulting in our own political righteousness. It also sustained Dylan’s connection—and our vicarious one—to the left-wing moral dramaturgy surrounding the right-wing 1950s blacklist, which had carried on for some key figures long after Senator Joseph McCarthy had fallen in disgrace. “Got a shock from my feet that hit my brain / Them Reds did it, the ones on Hootenanny,” Dylan sang—a jokey slap at the ABC-TV officials who had banned Pete Seeger from appearing on their weekly show that had capitalized on folksinging’s new popularity (and had recently gone off the air), and a note of support for Joan Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and others who had boycotted the show in protest.