But if today’s Beatles can’t speak to today’s realities, it’s also hard to imagine that today’s popular music could speak with such weight and force without yesterday’s Beatles. Let’s put it another way: Imagine no Beatles. Imagine they had never happened, had never participated in modern history. Their accomplishments, as I mentioned earlier, were many: from signifying not only that the most massive population of youth in history was about to find new dreams, new purposes, new identity—and in time, new causes and beliefs—to helping establish that rock & roll was now a protean and important art form. This isn’t to say that the Beatles were the first people who proved that popular music forms could be “art” (Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Hank Williams, and Elvis Presley had already proved that point long before), nor is it to say that they raised rock to new sophisticated levels that transcended what it had once been (some people believed this, maybe even some Beatles believed it, but to their credit, the latter moved past that fallacy fast). Instead, it is to say that the Beatles’ growth—in union with Bob Dylan’s innovations—made plain that pop was a field willing to extend its own aesthetic by incorporating modifications from other disciplines, and that a rock & roll song was capable of expressing truths as complex and consequential as anything to be found in contemporary literature or film. And it was the Beatles who as the 1960s rose and fell, inevitably epitomized that era’s longing for ideal community. Later, when the band fell apart in such messy fashion, the Beatles also served as a metaphor for the disintegration of that dream.
But perhaps the single most important thing the Beatles accomplished was to follow through on a trend that had been started years earlier by jazz, country-western, and rhythm & blues artists, and carried farther by early rock & rollers like Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry. The music these people made had one quality in common: It was the sound of those who had been shut out of the American dream and denied entry into the “respected” arts. In the 1940s and 1950s, it was easier to keep these people out—in fact, in the 1950s, many of the early rock & roll heroes met with systematic and continuous attempts to resist the disruptions they were bringing into mainstream culture. The Beatles never met with the same sort of hindrance because they were seen, at first, as eccentric in charming and wholesome ways that helped offset the horror that had settled on America in the aftermath of John Kennedy’s murder. We needed something different—something outside ourselves, our culture and history, and our own pain. By the time adult moral and political reaction began turning against the group—in the late 1960s, when Lennon declared the band “more popular than Jesus,” and when the group members began to experiment with drugs and to speak out against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam—it was too late to undo what the Beatles had enabled. The Beatles had not just entered but had also transmuted the mainstream; in doing so, they made it open to countless other outsiders and insurgents. There are forces still reeling from that turbulence. Such critics as former drug-war czar William Bennett, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former presidential candidate Bob Dole, and the late author Allan Bloom have all railed against the cultural convulsions of the 1960s, and have announced it is time to roll back its influence. But all the protesting and moralizing in the world will never be able to undo the glorious rupture that the Beatles—and their many compatriots—effected in modern arts and modern times.
The Beatles are history—as in: past, out of here, gone, yesterday. The Beatles are also history in the sense of having helped remodel a time and its people, and in the sense of opening up so many conceivabilities. Imagine that this hadn’t happened. Subtract everything from today that resulted from how this band exploded that epoch. Chances are, most of the artists’ stories that follow in this volume may never have developed in quite the same way that they did, or may not have meant as much. Chances are—because the Beatles reclaimed the promise that pop songs could work as both disruption and epiphany—you might not even hear rock & roll as the force of revolution and revelation that it has been heard as for these last few decades. And you know that would be an awful hole in our history. Don’t you?
subterranean: bob dylan’s passages
Something about that movie, though, that I just can’t get it out of my head
But I can’t remember why I was in it, or what part I was supposed to play
All I remember about it was, is Gregory Peck and the way that people moved
And a lot of them, they seemed to be looking my way.
BOB DYLAN
“BROWNSVILLE GIRL”
It was one of the odder moments in the history of televised rock & roll.
Bob Dylan had been invited to play at the 1991 Grammy Awards ceremony, on the occasion of receiving the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences Lifetime Achievement Award. In theory, these prizes are bestowed to acknowledge a performer’s invaluable contribution to the modern history of popular music. In Dylan’s case, though, it was a ludicrously belated recognition: Though he had affected both folk and popular music more than almost any other figure in American culture, Dylan hadn’t been honored—by NARAS, nor most of the established music industry for that matter—during the period of his greatest innovations, a quarter-century before. Indeed, in 1965—the year that Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone” and transfigured rock & roll—the Grammy for Record of the Year was awarded to “A Taste of Honey,” by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. Dylan himself would not receive a Grammy until 1979, for “Gotta Serve Somebody.”
Maybe Dylan was thinking about this when he took the stage that night. Or maybe he had other matters on his mind. In any event, on this occasion, Bob Dylan proceeded to behave precisely like Bob Dylan. Accompanied by a motley rock & roll outfit, he delivered a snarled, throttled version of his most embittered anti-war song, “Masters of War,” and did so during the peak season of America’s adamant support for the Bush Administration’s Persian Gulf War. It was a transfixingly weird performance: Dylan sang the song in a flat, rushed voice—as if he realized that no matter how passionately or frequently he sang these words, it would never be enough to thwart the world’s appetite for war—while the band behind him blazed like hellfire. For days after, critics would debate whether the performance had been brilliant or embarrassing (why bother to protest a war, some asked, when the song’s lyrics couldn’t even be deciphered?), but this much was plain: Dylan’s appearance was also the only moment of genuine rock & roll abandon that the Grammy Awards had witnessed in years.
Moments later, a deliriously amused Jack Nicholson presented Dylan with his Lifetime Achievement Award. Dylan, dressed in a lopsided dark suit, stood by, fumbling with his gray curl-brim fedora and occasionally applauding himself. When Nicholson passed the plaque to him, Dylan looked confused. “Well, uh, all right,” he said, fumbling some more with his hat. “Yeah. Well, my daddy, he didn’t leave me too much. You know, he was a very simple man. But what he told me was this: He did say, ’Son . . . ’ ” And then Dylan paused, rubbing his mouth while silently reading what was written on the plaque, and then he shook his head. “He said so many things, you know?” he said, and the audience tittered. “He said, ’Son, it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you. And if that happens, God will always believe in your own ability to mend your ways.’ ”
After that, nobody was laughing much. Dylan gave a final tip of his hat, spun on his heels, and was gone. One more time, Bob Dylan had met America, and America didn’t really know what to make of him.
THE FIRST TIME I met Bob Dylan was in the autumn of 1985—the day he showed up at my front door. He looked like I hoped and feared he would: That is, he looked like Bob Dylan—the keen, fierce man who once tore apart known views of the world with every new song he delivered.
What brought Dylan to my door was simply that we had an interview to do, and since he had to come to Hollywood anyway that day, he figured we may as well do it at my place. While this certainly made the me
eting more thrilling for me, it also made it a bit scarier. More than twenty years of image preceded Dylan on that day. This was a man who could be tense, capricious, and baffling, and who was capable of wielding his image—and temper—at a moment’s notice in a way that could stupefy and intimidate not only interviewers, but sometimes friends as well.
What I found instead was a man who didn’t seem too concerned with brandishing his image, even for a moment. He offered his hand, flashed a slightly bashful smile, then walked over to my stereo, kneeled down, and started to flip through a stack of some records on the floor—mostly music by older jazz, pop, and country singers. He commented on most of what he came across. “The Delmore Brothers—God, I really love them. I think they’ve influenced every harmony I’ve ever tried to sing. . . . This Hank Williams thing with just him and guitar—man, that’s something, isn’t it? I used to sing those songs way back, a long time ago, even before I played rock & roll as a teenager. . . . Sinatra, Peggy Lee, yeah, I love all these people, but I tell you who I’ve really been listening to a lot lately—in fact, I’m thinking about recording one of his earlier songs—is Bing Crosby. I don’t think you can find better phrasing anywhere.”
That’s pretty much how Dylan was that afternoon: good-humored and gracious, but also thoughtful in his remarks. And sometimes—when talking about his Minnesota youth, or his early days in the folk scene under the enthrallment of Woody Guthrie—his voice grew softer and more deliberate, as if he were striving to pick just the right words to convey the exact detail of his memory. During these moments he lapsed sometimes into silence, but behind the sunglasses (which he never removed), his eyes stayed active with thought, flickering back and forth, as if reading a distant memory.
For the most part, though, sipping a Corona beer and smoking cigarettes, he seemed surprisingly relaxed as we talked that afternoon. He grew most animated when he talked about a video shoot that he had done a short time before to promote his most recent album at that time, Empire Burlesque. At Dylan’s request, the shoot had been done under the direction of Dave Stewart, who was then a member of Eurythmics. “His stuff had a spontaneous look to it,” said Dylan, “and somehow I just figured he would understand what I was doing. And he did: He put together a great band for this lip-sync video and sets us up with equipment on this little stage in a church somewhere in West L.A. So between all the time they took setting up camera shots and lights and all that stuff, we could just play live for this little crowd that we had gathered there.
“I can’t even express how good that felt—in fact, I was trying to remember the last time I’d felt that kind of direct connection, and finally I realized it must have been back in the 1950s, when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, playing with four-piece rock & roll bands back in Minnesota. Back in those days there weren’t any sound systems or anything that you had to bother with. You’d set up your amplifiers and turn them up to where you wanted to turn them. That just doesn’t happen anymore. Now there are just so many things that get in the way of that kind of feeling, that simple directness. For some reason, making this video just made me realize how far everything has come these last several years—and how far I’d come.”
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, in late spring 1986, my conversations with Dylan continue.
It is just past midnight, and Dylan is standing in the middle of a crowded, smoke-laden recording studio tucked deep into the remote reaches of Topanga Canyon, outside Los Angeles. He is wearing brown-tinted sunglasses, a sleeveless white T-shirt, black vest, black jeans, frayed black motorcycle gloves, and he puffs hard at a Kool while bobbing his head rhythmically to the colossal blues shuffle that is thundering from the speakers above his head.
“Subterranean,” he mutters, smiling delightedly.
Sitting on a sofa a few feet away, also nodding their heads in rapt pleasure, are T-Bone Burnett and Al Kooper—old friends and occasional sidemen of Dylan. Several other musicians—including Los Lobos guitarist Cesar Rosas, R & B saxophonist Steve Douglas, and bassist James Jamerson, Jr., the son of the legendary Motown bass player—fill out the edges of the room. Like everyone else, they are smiling at this music: romping, bawdy, jolting rock & roll—the sort of indomitable music a man might conjure if he were about to lay claim to something big.
The guitars crackle, the horns honk and wail, the drums and bass rumble and clamor wildly, and then the room returns to silence. T-Bone Burnett, turning to Kooper, seems to voice a collective sentiment. “Man,” he says, “that gets it.”
“Yeah,” says Kooper. “So dirty.”
Everyone watches Dylan expectantly. For a moment, he appears to be in some distant, private place. “Subterranean,” is all he says, still smiling. “Positively subterranean,” he adds, running his hand through his mazy brown hair, chuckling. Then he walks into an adjoining room, straps on his weatherworn Fender guitar, tears off a quick, bristling blues lick and says, “Okay, who wants to play lead on this? I broke a string.”
Dylan has been like this all week, turning out spur-of-the-moment, blues-infused rock & roll with a startling force and imagination, piling up instrumental tracks so fast that the dazed, bleary-eyed engineers who are monitoring the sessions are having trouble cataloging all the various takes—so far, well over twenty songs, including gritty R & B, Chicago-steeped blues, rambunctious gospel, and raw-toned hillbilly forms. In part, Dylan is working fast merely as a practical matter: Rehearsals for his American tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers start in only a couple of weeks, and though it hardly seems possible in this overmeticulous, high-tech recording era, he figures he can write, record, mix, and package a new studio LP in that allotted term. “You see, I spend too much time working out the sound of my records these days,” he had told me earlier. “And if the records I’m making only sell a certain amount anyway, then why should I take so long putting them together? . . . I’ve got a lot of different records inside me, and it’s time just to start getting them out.”
Apparently, this is not idle talk. Dylan has started perusing songs for a possible collection of new and standard folk songs and has also begun work on a set of Tin Pan Alley covers—which, it seems safe to predict, will be something to hear. At the moment, though, as Dylan leads the assembled band through yet another roadhouse-style blues number, a different ambition seems to possess him. This is Bob Dylan the rock & roller, and despite all the vagaries of his career, it is still an impressive thing to witness. He leans lustily into the songs’ momentum at the same instant that he invents its structure, pumping his rhythm guitar with tough, unexpected accents, much like Chuck Berry or Keith Richards, and in the process, prodding his other guitarists, Kooper and Rosas, to tangle and burn, like good-natured rivals. It isn’t until moments later, as everybody gathers back into the booth to listen to the playback, that it’s clear that this music sounds surprisingly like the riotous, dense music of Highway 61 Revisited—music that seems as menacing as it does joyful, and that, in any event, seems to erupt from an ungovernable imagination. Subterranean, indeed.
IF THERE WAS any central message to Bob Dylan’s early music, perhaps it was that it isn’t easy for a bright, scrupulous person to live in a society that honors the inversion of its own best values, that increasingly turns from the notions of community and democracy to the twisted politics of death and abundance. To live through such times with conscience and intelligence intact, Dylan said in his music, one had to hold a brave and mean mirror up to the face of cultural corruption.
These days, of course, the politics of corruption and death are doing just fine, and are fairly immune to any single pop star’s acts of sedition. But back in the fevered momentum of the 1960s, when he first asserted himself, Dylan had a colossal impact on the changing face of American culture. In that decade’s early years, folk music (which had been driven underground in the 1950s by conservative forces) was enjoying a popular resurgence, inspired by the (on the surface) wholesome success of the Kingston Trio (though there was nothing wholesome about the
ir 1958 number 1 single, “Tom Dooley”—a century-old song, recounting the true story of a man hanged for knifing his girlfriend). Under the influence of Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary, folk was turning more politically explicit, and was also becoming increasingly identified with civil rights and pacifism, among other causes. But it was with the young nasal-toned, rail-thin Bob Dylan—who had moved from Minnesota to New York to assume the legacy of folk’s greatest hero, Woody Guthrie—that 1960s’ folk would find its greatest hope: a remarkably prolific songwriter who was giving a forceful and articulate voice to the apprehensions and ideals of the emerging restless generation. With “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” Dylan penned songs about racial suffering and the threat of nuclear apocalypse that acquired the status of immediate anthems, and with “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” he wrote an apt and chilling decree of the rising tensions of the coming era. “Come mothers and fathers/Throughout the land,” he sang, in a voice young with anger and old with knowledge, “And don’t criticize/What you can’t understand/Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/Your old road is/Rapidly agin’/Please get out of the new one/If you can’t lend your hand/For the times they are a-changin’.”
In those first few years, Dylan was already beginning to transform the possibilities of popular songwriting—opening up the entire form to new themes and a new vernacular that were derived as much from the ambitions of literature and poetry as from the traditions of folk music. (In 1963, Peter, Paul, and Mary had two Top 10 hit singles written by Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”) But Dylan would soon go on to change all of what popular music might do. Inspired by both the popularity and the inventive song structures of the Beatles—who had exploded on America’s rock scene in early 1964—Dylan was feeling confined by the limited interests of the folk audience, and by the narrow stylistic range of folk music itself. After witnessing the Beatles’ breakthrough, and after hearing the rawer blues-based rock being made by the Animals and Rolling Stones, Dylan realized it was possible to transform and enliven his music, and to connect with a broader and more vital audience in the process. (When the Byrds scored a June 1965 number 1 hit with their chiming folk-rock cover of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” it only further convinced him.)
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