by Bob Dylan
I had been singing a lot of topical songs, anyway. Songs about real events were always topical. You could usually find some kind of point of view in it, though, and take it for what it was worth, and the writer doesn’t have to be accurate, could tell you anything and you’re going to believe it.
Billy Gashade, the man who presumably wrote the Jesse James ballad, makes you believe that Jesse robbed from the rich and gave to the poor and was shot down by a “dirty little coward.” In the song, Jesse robs banks and gives the money to the destitute and in the end is betrayed by a friend. By all accounts, though, James was a bloodthirsty killer who was anything but the Robin Hood sung about in the song. But Billy Gashade has the last word and he spins it around.
Topical songs weren’t protest songs. The term “protest singer” didn’t exist any more than the term “singer-songwriter.” You were a performer or you weren’t, that was about it—a folksinger or not one. “Songs of dissent” was a term people used but even that was rare. I tried to explain later that I didn’t think I was a protest singer, that there’d been a screwup. I didn’t think I was protesting anything any more than I thought that Woody Guthrie songs were protesting anything. I didn’t think of Woody as a protest singer. If he is one, then so is Sleepy John Estes and Jelly Roll Morton. What I was hearing pretty regularly, though, were rebellion songs and those really moved me. The Clancy Brothers—Tom, Paddy and Liam—and their buddy Tommy Makem sang them all the time.
I got to be friends with Liam and began going after-hours to the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street, which was mainly an Irish bar frequented mostly by guys from the old country. All through the night they would sing drinking songs, country ballads and rousing rebel songs that would lift the roof. The rebellion songs were a really serious thing. The language was flashy and provocative—a lot of action in the words, all sung with great gusto. The singer always had a merry light in his eye, had to have it. I loved these songs and could still hear them in my head long after and into the next day. They weren’t protest songs, though, they were rebel ballads…even in a simple, melodic wooing ballad there’d be rebellion waiting around the corner. You couldn’t escape it. There were songs like that in my repertoire, too, where something lovely was suddenly upturned, but instead of rebellion showing up it would be death itself, the Grim Reaper. Rebellion spoke to me louder. The rebel was alive and well, romantic and honorable. The Grim Reaper wasn’t like that.
I was beginning to think I might want to change over. The Irish landscape wasn’t too much like the American landscape, though, so I’d have to find some cuneiform tablets—some archaic grail to lighten the way. I had grasped the idea of what kind of songs I wanted to write, I just didn’t know how to do it yet.
I did everything fast. Thought fast, ate fast, talked fast and walked fast. I even sang my songs fast. I needed to slow my mind down if I was going to be a composer with anything to say.
I couldn’t exactly put in words what I was looking for, but I began searching in principle for it, over at the New York Public Library, a monumental building with marble floors and walls, vacuous and spacious caverns, vaulted ceiling. A building that radiates triumph and glory when you walk inside. In one of the upstairs reading rooms I started reading articles in newspapers on microfilm from 1855 to about 1865 to see what daily life was like. I wasn’t so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and rhetoric of the times. Newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, the Brooklyn Daily Times and the Pennsylvania Freeman. Others, too, like the Memphis Daily Eagle, the Savannah Daily Herald and Cincinnati Enquirer. It wasn’t like it was another world, but the same one only with more urgency, and the issue of slavery wasn’t the only concern. There were news items about reform movements, antigambling leagues, rising crime, child labor, temperance, slave-wage factories, loyalty oaths and religious revivals. You get the feeling that the newspapers themselves could explode and lightning will burn and everybody will perish. Everybody uses the same God, quotes the same Bible and law and literature. Plantation slavecrats of Virginia are accused of breeding and selling their own children. In the Northern cities, there’s a lot of discontent and debt is piled high and seems out of control. The plantation aristocracy run their plantations like city-states. They are like the Roman republic where an elite group of characters rule supposedly for the good of all. They’ve got sawmills, gristmills, distilleries, country stores, et cetera. Every state of mind opposed by another…Christian piety and weird mind philosophies turned on their heads. Fiery orators, like William Lloyd Garrison, a conspicuous abolitionist from Boston who even has his own newspaper. There are riots in Memphis and in New Orleans. There’s a riot in New York where two hundred people are killed outside of the Metropolitan Opera House because an English actor has taken the place of an American one. Anti–slave labor advocates inflaming crowds in Cincinnati, Buffalo and Cleveland, that if the Southern states are allowed to rule, the Northern factory owners would then be forced to use slaves as free laborers. This causes riots, too. Lincoln comes into the picture in the late 1850s. He is referred to in the Northern press as a baboon or giraffe, and there were a lot of caricatures of him. Nobody takes him seriously. It’s impossible to conceive that he would become the father figure that he is today. You wonder how people so united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies. After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. It’s all one long funeral song, but there’s a certain imperfection in the themes, an ideology of high abstraction, a lot of epic, bearded characters, exalted men who are not necessarily good. No one single idea keeps you contented for too long. It’s hard to find any of the neoclassical virtues, either. All that rhetoric about chivalry and honor—that must have been added later. Even the Southern womanhood thing. It’s a shame what happened to the women. Most of them were abandoned to starve on farms with their children, unprotected and left to fend for themselves as victims to the elements. The suffering is endless, and the punishment is going to be forever. It’s all so unrealistic, grandiose and sanctimonious at the same time. There was a difference in the concept of time, too. In the South, people lived their lives with sun-up, high noon, sunset, spring, summer. In the North, people lived by the clock. The factory stroke, whistles and bells. Northerners had to “be on time.” In some ways the Civil War would be a battle between two kinds of time. Abolition of slavery didn’t even seem to be an issue when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter. It all makes you feel creepy. The age that I was living in didn’t resemble this age, but yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way. Not just a little bit, but a lot. There was a broad spectrum and commonwealth that I was living upon, and the basic psychology of that life was every bit a part of it. If you turned the light towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature. Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write.
I crammed my head full of as much of this stuff as I could stand and locked it away in my mind out of sight, left it alone. Figured I could send a truck back for it later.
Down in the Village nothing seemed wrong. Life was not complex. Everybody was looking for openings. Some would get ’em and then they’d be gone and others never did. Mine was coming, but not just yet.
Len Chandler, a classically trained musician from Ohio, was on the bill with me at the Gaslight and we got to be friends. We’d usually hang out either up in the card room between sets or sometimes over at the Metro Diner near 6th Avenue. Len was educated and serious about life, was even working with his wife downtown to start a school for under-privileged children. His thing was writing topical songs, and his inspiration would come from the newspapers. He usually put new words to old melodies but sometimes created his own melodies.
One of his most colorful songs
had been about a negligent school bus driver in Colorado who accidentally drove a bus full of kids down a cliff. It had an original melody and because I liked the melody so much, I wrote my own set of lyrics to it. Len didn’t seem to mind. We’d drink coffee and look through the daily newspapers left behind on the counter to see if there was song material in any of it. After seeing the newspapers at the New York Public Library, these papers seemed almost threadbare and dull.
France was in the news and had exploded an atom bomb in the Sahara Desert. France had just been booted out of North Vietnam by Ho Chi Minh after one hundred years of colonial rule. Ho had seen enough of the French. They had turned Hanoi, the capital city, into the “brothel-studded Paris of the orient.” Ho kicked them out and would now be going to get his supplies from Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. The French had been plundering the country for years. The press reported Hanoi was grubby and cheerless, that the people dressed in Chinese shapeless jackets and you couldn’t tell the difference between the men and the women—everybody rode a bicycle and did calisthenics in public three times a day. The newspapers made it sound as if it were a weird place. The Vietnamese might have to be straightened out—might have to send some Americans over there.
Anyway, France had now brought themselves into the atomic age and there were movements springing up to ban the bombs, French, American, Russian and otherwise, but this movement also had its detractors. Reputable psychiatrists were saying that some of these people who claimed to be so against nuclear testing are secular last judgment types—that if nuclear bombs are banned, it would deprive them of their highly comforting sense of doom. Len and I couldn’t believe this stuff. There’d be articles about things like new modern-day phobias, all with fancy Latin names, like fear of flowers, fear of the dark, of height, fear of crossing bridges, of snakes, fear of getting old, fear of clouds. Just any old thing could be frightening. My big fear was that my guitar would go out of tune. Women were speaking out in the news, too, challenging the status quo. Some were complaining that they were told that they needed and deserved equal rights. Then when they got them, they were accused of becoming too much like men. Some women wanted to be called “a woman” when they reached twenty-one. Some sales girls, or women, didn’t want to be referred to as “salesladies.” In churches, too, things were shaking up. Some white ministers didn’t want to be labeled “the Reverend.” They wanted to be called just plain “Reverend.”
Semantics and labels could drive you crazy. The inside story on a man was that if he wanted to be successful, he must become a rugged individualist, but then he should make some adjustments. After that, he needed to conform. You could go from being a rugged individualist to a conformist in the blink of an eye.
Len and I thought this stuff was idiotic. Reality was not so simple and everybody had their own take on it. Jean Genet’s play The Balcony was being performed in the Village and it portrayed the world as a mammoth cathouse where chaos rules the universe, where man is alone and abandoned in a meaningless cosmos. The play had a strong sense of focus, and from what I’d seen about the Civil War period, it could have been written one hundred years ago. The songs I’d write would be like that, too. They wouldn’t conform to modern ideas. I hadn’t begun yet writing streams of songs as I would, but Len was, and everything around us looked absurd—there was a certain consciousness of madness at work. Even the photos of Jackie Kennedy going in and out of revolving doors at the Carlyle Hotel uptown, carrying shopping bags of clothes, looked disturbing. Nearby at the Biltmore, the Cuban Revolutionary Council was meeting. The Cuban government in exile. They had recently given a news conference, said that they needed bazookas and recoilless rifles and demolition experts and that those things cost money. If they could get enough donations, they could take back Cuba, the old Cuba, land of plantations, sugarcane, rice, tobacco—patricians. The Roman Republic. In the sports pages the New York Rangers had beaten the Chicago Blackhawks 2 to 1, and Vic Hadfield had scored both goals. Our tall Texan vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was quite a character, too. He’d flipped out and got angry at the U.S. Secret Service—told them to stop fencing him in, stop shadowing him, following him around. Johnson grabs guys by the lapels and squeezes the back of their heads to make a point. He reminded me of Tex Ritter—seemed simple and down to earth. Later, when he became president, he used the phrase “We shall overcome” in a speech to the American people. “We Shall Overcome” was the spiritual marching anthem of the civil rights movement. It had been the rallying cry for the oppressed for many years. Johnson interpreted the idea to suit himself, rather than eradicate it. He was not as homespun as it seemed. The dominant myth of the day seemed to be that anybody could do anything, even go to the moon. You could do whatever you wanted—in the ads and in the articles, ignore your limitations, defy them. If you were an indecisive person, you could become a leader and wear lederhosen. If you were a housewife, you could become a glamour girl with rhinestone sunglasses. Are you slow witted? No worries—you can be an intellectual genius. If you’re old, you can be young. Anything was possible. It was almost like a war against the self. The art world was changing, too, being turned on its head. Abstract painting and atonal music were hitting the scene, mangling recognizable reality. Goya himself would have been lost at sea if he tried to sail the new wave of art. Len and I would look at all this stuff for what it was worth, and not one cent more.
One guy who kept reappearing in the news was Caryl Chessman, a notorious rapist whom they called the Red-Light Bandit. He was on death row in California after being tried and convicted of raping young women. He had a creative way of doing it—strapped a flashing red light to the top of his automobile and then pulled the girls over to the side of the road, ordering them out, hauling them into the woods, robbing and raping them. He’d been on death row for quite a while making appeal after appeal, but his last appeal had been final and he was scheduled to go into the gas chamber. Chessman had become a cause célèbre and luminaries had taken up his plight. Norman Mailer, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, Robert Frost, even Eleanor Roosevelt were calling for his life to be spared. An anti–death penalty group had asked Len to write a song about Chessman.
“How do you write a song about a pariah who rapes young women, what would be the angle?” he asked me as if his imagination was actually on fire.
“I don’t know, Len, I guess you’d have to build it slowly…maybe start with the red lights.”
Len never did write the song, but I think someone else did. One thing about Chandler was that he was fearless. He didn’t suffer fools, and no one could get in his way. He was powerfully built, like a linebacker, could kick your silly ass from here to Chinatown, could probably break anybody’s nose. He had studied economics and science, and had it down. Len was brilliant and full of goodwill, one of those guys who believed that all of society could be affected by one solitary life.
Besides being a songwriter, he was also a daredevil. One freezing winter’s night I sat behind him on his Vespa motor scooter riding full throttle across the Brooklyn Bridge and my heart just about shot up in my mouth. The bike was speeding on the crisscrossed grid in high winds, and I felt like I could have gone overboard at any time—weaving in and out of the night’s traffic, it scared the lights out of me—sliding all over on the iced-up steel. I was on edge the whole way, but I could feel that Chandler was in control, his eyes unblinking and centered steadfast. No doubt about it, heaven was on his side. I’ve only felt like that about a few people.
When I wasn’t staying at Van Ronk’s, I’d usually stay at Ray’s place, get back sometime before dawn, mount the dark stairs and carefully close the door behind me. I shoved off into the sofa bed like entering a vault. Ray was not a guy who had nothing on his mind. He knew what he thought and he knew how to express it, didn’t make room in his life for mistakes. The mundane things in life didn’t register with him. He seemed to have some golden grip on reality, didn’t sweat the small stuff, quoted the Psalms and slept with a pistol near his b
ed. At times he could say things that had way too much edge. Once he said that President Kennedy wouldn’t last out his term because he was a Catholic. When he said it, it made me think about my grandmother, who said to me that the Pope is the king of the Jews. She lived back in Duluth on the top floor of a duplex on 5th Street. From a window in the back room you could see Lake Superior, ominous and foreboding, iron bulk freighters and barges off in the distance, the sound of foghorns to the right and left. My grandmother had only one leg and had been a seamstress. Sometimes on weekends my parents would drive down from the Iron Range to Duluth and drop me off at her place for a couple of days. She was a dark lady, smoked a pipe. The other side of my family was more light-skinned and fair. My grandmother’s voice possessed a haunting accent—face always set in a half-despairing expression. Life for her hadn’t been easy. She’d come to America from Odessa, a seaport town in southern Russia. It was a town not unlike Duluth, the same kind of temperament, climate and landscape and right on the edge of a big body of water.
Originally, she’d come from Turkey, sailed from Trabzon, a port town, across the Black Sea—the sea that the ancient Greeks called the Euxine—the one that Lord Byron wrote about in Don Juan. Her family was from Kagizman, a town in Turkey near the Armenian border, and the family name had been Kirghiz. My grandfather’s parents had also come from that same area, where they had been mostly shoemakers and leatherworkers.