by Sean Wilentz
Davey Moore following his bout with Sugar Ramos at the Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, March 21, 1963. Although he recovered consciousness, Moore slipped into a coma in his dressing room and died four days later. (photo credit 3.4)
“Who Killed Davey Moore?” the other older political song, was about the death of a young featherweight boxer who, after losing a title bout to Sugar Ramos in Los Angeles in 1963, fell into a coma and died. The incident sparked public debate about whether boxing should be banned in the United States. It also inspired the political songwriter (and Dylan’s rival) Phil Ochs to compose a narrative song, describing in detail the flying fists and pouring sweat inside the ring and the “money-chasing vultures” and blood-lusting fans outside it. Dylan’s musical take on the episode was at once simpler—a reworking of the ancient “Who Killed Cock Robin?” theme—and more complex, pointing out the many people who bore responsibility for Moore’s death and reciting their lame excuses.
On the concert tape, the audience’s instant adulatory reaction stands out most of all. As soon as Dylan sings “Who killed …,” the cheering starts. Although Dylan had not released a recording of the song, he had been performing it in concert as early as his Town Hall show in April 1963, less than three weeks after Davey Moore died. It was a time when a folksinger, at least this one, could have a song achieve familiarity without even putting it on a record, let alone getting it played on the radio.
Another response to “Davey Moore” also stands out on the tape, when Dylan comes to the song’s line about boxing no longer being permitted in Fidel Castro’s Cuba and elicits scattered but determined applause. Maybe some of the Sing Out! old guard were in the audience—momentarily, if just momentarily, relieved and encouraged.* Certainly there were younger people there, the Red-diaper babies and other political types, who still wanted to hold on to Dylan as the troubadour of the revolution.
Dylan, however, would not be typecast as anything, and even his rendering of “Davey Moore” pulled in other directions. “This is a song about a boxer,” he said before he sang it. “It’s got nothing to do with boxing; it’s just a song about a boxer really. And, uh, it’s not even having to do with a boxer, really. It’s got nothing to do with nothing. But I fit all these words together, that’s all.” The irreverent introduction undercut solemnity, even though some people wanted and expected and even demanded solemnity. (Others in the audience did not, and made that clear in their impromptu badinage with the singer.) Dylan’s laughter in the middle of his introduction even sounded intoxicated. Was he drunk on Beaujolais—we all knew from one magazine story or another that Dylan drank Beaujolais—or maybe, even cooler (this was 1964, and some of us were very young), had Dylan been smoking pot? (It would only come out much later that he had already moved from Burgundy on to much harder stuff than marijuana, including his first LSD trip back in April.) Perhaps he was intoxicated in a different way, giddy from the hall and the affectionate crowd and the joy of playing Lincoln Center. No matter: his mellow, at times merry mood was infectious, and it had nothing to do with sermonizing.
It did, however, have something to do with sex. Nobody in the audience had yet heard “If You Gotta Go, Go Now,” and its rollicking monologue of a sly, self-aware, take-it-or-leave-it seduction sent everybody into stitches. Coming after “Gates of Eden,” it was a bit of comic relief, but hip comic relief. In the song, the singer knows very well that the object of his affections is no virgin. Casual sex is no longer taboo; the repression surrounding this part of life has lifted. But what Presley had done with his body and his voice, Dylan was doing with his words—coy, conversational, and comical, feeding the youth conspiracy of candid pleasure (and pleasant candor) but with jesting, gentle persuasion.
Sometimes, the audience knew Dylan’s words better than he did. Nearing the end of the show’s first half, Dylan strummed his guitar but completely forgot the next song’s opening line. As if he were still performing at the Gaslight down in Greenwich Village, or at a Newport festival workshop, and not in serious Philharmonic Hall, Dylan asked the audience to help him out, and it did. On the tape, two voices, unmistakably New York voices, carry above all the others, one rapidly following the other with the cue: “I can’t understand …” The song, “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met),” had appeared on Another Side less than three months earlier, but his fans knew it so well that it might have been “Pretty Peggy-O.” (It may even have been more familiar to most of the audience than “Pretty Peggy-O.”) Dylan, a master of timing, did not miss a beat, picked up the line, and then sang the song flawlessly.
Dylan interspersed these funny moments with his new masterpieces, “Gates of Eden” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” calling the latter “It’s Alright, Ma, It’s Life and Life Only,” and he performed “Mr. Tambourine Man” for the first time in New York. These songs have become such iconic pieces over the intervening decades, their twisting images so much a part of a generation’s subconscious, that it is difficult to recall what they sounded like when heard for the first time, and in concert. Dylan knew that they were special, and that they would fly over his listeners’ heads the first time around. He even joked about that onstage. (On the tape, some laughter greets Dylan’s announcement of “It’s Alright, Ma,” as if the song title were a put-on, and he pipes up, “Yes, it’s a very funny song.”) During these performances, the audience was utterly silent, trying at first to catch all the words, but finally bowled over by the intensity of both the lyrics and Dylan’s playing, even when he muffed a line. We would not get the chance to figure the songs out for another five months, when they appeared on Bringing It All Back Home—and even then it would take repeated listening for any of it to make sense. At the time, it just sounded like demanding poetry, at times epic narrative, proving once again that Bob Dylan was leading us into new places, the exact destination unknown but still deeply tempting.
Dylan did not waste any words of introduction to “Mr. Tambourine Man” even though he’d yet to release it on record. (The truncated rock version by the Byrds, which became a number one hit on the Billboard singles charts, did not appear until the following April, two weeks after Dylan finally released his own version on Bringing It All Back Home.) But enough of the audience had heard the song, at Newport or perhaps at one of the shows leading up to this one, so that its opening words brought an outburst of applause. The rest of us, uninitiated, sat back to wonder how lyrics about weariness and stripped senses could fit such a delightful, dancing melody.
It turned out to be a song of Dylan singing again to his muse. He had done so in one of his earliest compositions—“Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song”—but now he called out to an abstract figure—“Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man”—and wanted a song played to him. Dylan would later point to an oversized Turkish tambourine, played by Bruce Langhorne, as an inspiration, but neither Langhorne nor anybody else any longer served Dylan as Guthrie had done. He was weary, unable to keep a grip, but also unsleepy, and with no particular place to go, he would follow the musical figure to his “magic swirling ship,” out to the inspired windy beach beyond crazy sorrow.
Like all of Dylan’s compositions, “Mr. Tambourine Man” contained bits and pieces gathered from hither and yon. Dylan himself had alluded in an interview to Federico Fellini’s film La strada (The Road), in which an innocent, sprightly young woman falls into the clutches of a brutish he-man performer; much later, the brute, alone, learns that the woman has died, and the film ends with him sobbing uncontrollably on a beach.* Dylan aficionados have located some specific references, including the words “jingle jangle,” which appear on a recording by the hip British comic monologist Lord Buckley, whom Dylan is known to have enjoyed. Finally, though, the song is not a direct translation of anything else; it is about precisely what it says it is about—an artist, at his wit’s end, looking for respite from his distress if only for a night, and turning to a shadowy musical spirit to play him a song that he will follow.
The other two new songs showed where his muse had taken him, and they were more obscure—as they remain. The title of “It’s Alright, Ma” evoked Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right, Mama,” one of the first songs that Elvis Presley recorded in Memphis—but the reference certainly didn’t occur to me at the time, and probably didn’t to more than a few others. Instead, the title got a laugh, then Dylan joked about it being a funny song, and then he began hammering dropped-D tuning runs in a minor key which announced that something dark and sinister was about to come. The opening line swipes the title of Koestler’s novel about Communism’s stupid cruelties, but changes it so that darkness arrives not simply at noon but at the break of noon. The break of noon? Dawn cracks and breaks, and in Ginsberg’s “Howl” doom cracks on the hydrogen jukebox. But noon doesn’t break—except that now it did, making the darkness at noon sound all the scarier.
Bob Dylan playing “Mr. Tambourine Man” in its first public performance, at the Newport Folk Festival on July 24, 1964. (photo credit 3.5)
The song didn’t seem to have anything to do with Koestler’s book, and its opening verses about “the handmade blade” and “the fool’s gold mouthpiece” made it difficult to understand what the song actually did have to do with. But some startling images and proclamations, restating Dylan’s escape from folk-revival pieties, carried listeners along: “He not busy being born / Is busy dying”; “While others say don’t hate nothing at all / Except hatred.” One line leaped out, about how even the president of the United States must sometimes stand naked. After Vietnam, Watergate, and the long age of Reagan that followed, the line has brought predictable, beery anti-authoritarian cheers from concertgoers. But nobody cheered in 1964—nobody knew it was coming—and the line was actually perplexing, given our assumption that the incumbent was the good guy in the upcoming presidential election. The rest of the song charted dishonesties, blasphemies, and hypocrisy in American life in a manner more like Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” than like any folk song ever written. The hypnosis that is modern advertising, the fake morals that limit sex but bow down to money, the rat-race society that twists people into meanness and conformity: Dylan had written a song of Ginsberg’s Moloch, exposing the human corruption and self-delusion that had driven the best minds mad. What hopeful sound there is comes from a solitary individual, directed at another individual—but the words are trembling, distant, unclear, seeking a human and humane connection, and they are directed at someone who is asleep. The subversive singer is tolerated only because he keeps his truly dangerous thought-dreams under wraps. Otherwise, he’d probably get his head cut off.
“The Gates of Eden,” as he called it that night, took us furthest out into the realm of the imagination, to a point beyond logic and reason. Like “It’s Alright, Ma,” the song mentions a book title in its first line, but the song is more reminiscent of the poems of William Blake (and, perhaps, of Blake’s disciple Ginsberg) than it is of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, vaunting the truth that lies in surreal imagery.
After an almost impenetrable first verse, the song approaches themes that were becoming familiar to Dylan’s listeners. In Genesis, Eden is the paradise where Adam and Eve had direct communication with God. According to “Gates of Eden,” it is where truth resides, without bewitching illusions. And the song is basically a list, verse after verse, of the corrosive illusions that Dylan would sing about constantly from the mid-1960s on: illusions about obedience to authority; about false religions and idols (the “utopian hermit monks” riding on the golden calf); about possessions and desire; about sexual repression and conformity (embodied by “the gray flannel dwarf”); about high-toned intellectualism. None of these count for much or even exist inside the gates of Eden.
The kicker comes in the final verse, where the singer talks of his lover telling him of her dreams without any attempt at interpretation—and that at times, the singer thinks that the only truth is that there is no truth outside the gates of Eden. It’s a familiar conundrum: If there is no truth, isn’t saying as much really an illusion, too, unless we are all in Eden? (“All Cretans are liars,” says the Cretan.) What makes that one truth so special? But the point, as the lover knows, is that outside of paradise, interpretation is futile. Don’t try to figure out what the song, or what any work of art, “really” means; the meaning is in the imagery itself; attempting to define it is to succumb to the illusion that truth can be reached through human logic. So Dylan’s song told us, as he took the measure in his lyrics of what had begun as the “New Vision,” two and a half miles up Broadway from Lincoln Center at Columbia, in the mid-1940s. Apart from Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso may have been the only people in Philharmonic Hall who got it.
I can’t recall much about the intermission, except that a goodly number of people were smokers and there was a rush to the entry hall for a fifteen-minute nicotine break. (Too young to smoke, and seated in the top tier, I didn’t stray downstairs.) The evening’s second half brought us back to familiar ground: songs from Freewheelin’ and The Times They Are A-Changin’, including what has proven to be one of Dylan’s most enduring ballads, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” a song of contained outrage so expertly written that it has outlived almost all of the era’s other finger-pointing songs. Then came three duets with Joan Baez, she sporting at least part of the time a plaid Glengarry cap. (Baez also sang “Silver Dagger,” accompanied by Dylan on the harmonica.) Dylan and Baez—the king and queen of the folk movement, known to be lovers—had been performing together off and on for well over a year. Baez had brought Dylan to the stage during several of her concerts, including one at Forest Hills in August, and now Dylan was returning the compliment. They sang of desire, rejected and requited, and American history, their harmonizing ragged in places, but with an ease between them that further mellowed the mood even as it upped the star wattage onstage.
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan at Philharmonic Hall, New York City, October 31, 1964. (photo credit 3.6)
Plenty has been made since about Dylan and Baez’s relationship in these years, some of it unflattering to one or the other or both of them. Much as the Kennedys’ Camelot would have its debunkers, so the magical kingdom we conjured up around Bob Dylan and Joan Baez would come crashing down. Nearly forgotten, however—but captured on the Philharmonic tape, even in that night’s laid-back, knockabout performances—have been the rich fruits of their singing collaborations. Joan always seemed, onstage, the earnest, worshipful one, overly so, in the presence of the Boy Genius, and Bob would sometimes lightly mock that earnestness, as he did between songs at the Philharmonic. But when singing together, they were quite a pair, their harmony lines adding depth to the melodies, their sheer pleasure in each other’s company showing in their voices.
When I listen to the Philharmonic tape, my favorite duet is of the then-unreleased song “Mama, You Been on My Mind.” Baez sings “Daddy” instead of “Mama.” Then, during one of the brief instrumental interludes, she interjects a “shooka-shooka-shooka, shooka-shooka”—nothing one would expect from the folk queen, something more like pop or rock and roll or even rhythm and blues than folk music. Was our Joan listening to the Beatles, too? I don’t recall hearing it this way at the time, but now it sounds like another little portent of things to come.
Dylan closed, solo, with his encore. Shouted requests filled the air, for “Chimes of Freedom,” for anything, even for “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” “God, did I record that?” Dylan joked back, basking in the revelry. “Is that a protest song?” He chose “All I Really Want to Do,” another crowd-pleaser from Another Side. He seemed to start out with an attitude, his voice rising, half snapping near the end of the opening line—“I ain’t looking to com-PETE with you”—but he settled into a kind of emphatic exuberance. Was this a cryptic envoi to Joan Baez? (If it was, she didn’t get it, and maybe Dylan didn’t either, not fully.) Was it an envoi to us, or the part of us that wanted to make of Dylan, in our own way, something more than
he could possibly be? Or was he just itching to plug in to an amp and play rock and roll?
During the first half of the concert, after singing “Gates of Eden,” Dylan got into a little riff about how the song shouldn’t scare anybody, that it was only Halloween, and that he had his Bob Dylan mask on. “I’m masquerading!” he joked, elongating the second word into a smoke-ringed laugh. The joke was serious. Bob Dylan, né Zimmerman, brilliantly cultivated his celebrity, but he was really an artist and singer, a man behind a mask, a great entertainer, maybe, but basically just that—someone who threw words together, astounding as they were. The burden of being something else—a guru, a political theorist, “the voice of a generation,” as he facetiously put it in an interview some years ago—was too much to ask of anyone.3 Indeed, it missed the whole point as he was laying it out in his songs, which was that the songs themselves were what mattered, their words and images alone. We in the audience were asking him to be a leader and more, but Dylan was slipping the yoke. He certainly enjoyed the fame and fortune that had headed his way. But beyond a certain level of acceptance, all he really wanted to do was to be a friend, if possible, and an artist writing and singing his songs. He was telling us so, but we didn’t want to believe it, and wouldn’t let him leave it at that. We wanted more.