Why Bob Dylan Matters Read online

  And Orpheus himself, the Thracian priest with his long robes,

  keeps their rhythm strong with his lyre’s seven ringing strings,

  plucking now with his fingers, now with his ivory plectrum.

  And faithful poets whose songs were fit for Apollo

  those who enriched our lives with the newfound arts they forged

  and those we remember well for the good they did mankind.

  —Virgil, Aeneid 6, tr. Fagles

  In 1945, T. S. Eliot wrote an essay titled “What Is a Classic?” devoted to Virgil, and to why the Aeneid became a classic over time. In 1948, when Eliot received his Nobel Prize in Literature, he must have been pleased to see Virgil’s line of poetry, and the image, on the medal. What Eliot wrote of Virgil as classic in his essay could apply equally to his own work The Waste Land, the classic of modernist poetry, or to the work of Bob Dylan:

  [Virgil] was, if any poet ever was, acutely aware of what he was trying to do; the one thing he couldn’t aim at, or know that he was doing, was to compose a classic: for it is only by hindsight, and in historical perspective, that a classic can be known as such.

  This is a book about Bob Dylan, the genius of my lifetime in his artistic use of the English language, and of its song traditions—just as surely as Eliot was the poetic genius of the first half of the twentieth century. It is mildly ironic that Dylan has acquired this status. After all, the mention of Eliot in his 1965 song “Desolation Row”—a song he also sang on the Stockholm waterfront on the evening of the medal award—had an iconoclastic ring to it:

  And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot

  Fighting in the captain’s tower

  While calypso singers laugh at them

  And fishermen hold flowers

  In that song, Dylan may seem to be on the side of the calypso singers and fishermen, situated like them

  Between the windows of the sea

  Where lovely mermaids flow

  And nobody has to think too much

  About Desolation Row

  As readers have noted, not only does Dylan name Eliot and Pound; in Eliot-like fashion his verse allusively builds on the ending of Eliot’s first great poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (124–31):

  I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

  I do not think that they will sing to me.

  I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

  Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

  When the wind blows the water white and black.

  We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

  By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

  Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

  Even though he seems in “Desolation Row” to distance himself from the two modernist poets, even as he alludes to one of them, like it or not, and like T. S. Eliot, Bob Dylan has also become an icon and a classic. Over that he has no control.

  This is also a book about how Dylan’s genius has long been informed by the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome, and why the classics of those days matter to him and should matter to all of us interested in the humanities. We live in a world and an age in which the humanities—the study of the best that the human mind has risen to in art, music, writing, and performance—are being asked to justify their existence, are losing funding, or are in danger of losing funding. At the same time, those arts seem more vital than ever in terms of what they can teach us about how to live meaningful lives. The art of Bob Dylan, no less than any other works produced by the human mind in its most creative manifestation, can be put to work in serving and preserving the humanities.

  In his final work, On Moral Duties, written in 44 BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman statesman, orator, writer, and thinker, wrote: “I am a human. I consider nothing connected to humanity to be alien to me.” For Cicero, thinking about justice and correct action in difficult times is a hallmark of humanistic thought, as is having empathy for the human condition. That was a mark of Cicero, and it is a mark of the focus on humanity that is at the core of Dylan’s art. Dylan’s art has long enriched the lives of those who listen to his music, through a genius that captures the essence of what it means to be human.

  2

  TOGETHER THROUGH LIFE

  As was the case for many who came of age in the mid-1960s, my first Dylan experience centered on issues of social justice. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” with my school chorus in New Zealand. This song, from Dylan’s first original album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, was my first, true introduction to Dylan’s music, though I was already familiar with the chart-topping version sung by the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary. When we sang Dylan’s version in chorus, I remember being somewhat put off by the “addition” of the words “Yes ’n’ ” before each of the questions, absent from the version I had hardwired from the radio—“Yes ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail?” and so forth. I recall pointing this out to the chorus director, who was clearly an early Dylan fan. He insisted that we sing the Dylan version, and I soon came to share his preference.

  We could sing this song and make it our own back then in New Zealand because it belonged to no one time or place, but rather was right for any time or place as a cry for justice and peace. A few years later, in 1969, “Blowin’ in the Wind” would take on a new and more immediate meaning for me, as I participated as a member of HART (Halt All Racist Tours), a student organization protesting the New Zealand rugby tours of apartheid South Africa. Now the song’s reach had expanded, beyond the U.S. civil rights struggle that was its original backdrop. It was also about Nelson Mandela and others, sentenced by the apartheid regime to life imprisonment with hard labor on Robben Island—within clear sight of the pleasant beaches of Cape Town. Before 1967, New Zealand had been sending racially selected teams to play against whites-only rugby teams in South Africa. Then Maori players were allowed to play with the status “honorary white.” “Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head / Pretending he just doesn’t see?”—those lines easily came to mind as I joined those marches. In these years the song also became an anthem as we demonstrated against my country’s symbolically important and militarily insignificant involvement in Vietnam: “Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly / Before they’re forever banned?”

  “Blowin’ in the Wind” worked pretty well for those occasions, as it had for the seminal civil rights protest March on Washington on August 28, 1963, there sung not by Bob Dylan, but by Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan himself sang two songs from his as-yet-unreleased album of that year, The Times They Are A-Changin’, first “When the Ship Comes In,” accompanied by Joan Baez, and then on his own, “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” In spite of its historical role at moments such as these, “Blowin’ in the Wind” can’t now, and couldn’t then, simply be labeled a protest song. From his first known performance of the song, in April 1962 at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, Dylan struggled to free it from such categorization. Here’s the way the songwriter—that’s what he was, it needs to be stressed, not a protester—introduced the song back then:

  This here ain’t a protest song or anything like that, ’cause I don’t write protest songs. . . . I’m just writing it as something to be said, for somebody, by somebody.

  Too late. As the Roman poet Horace (65–8 BC) put it, “Once it’s let loose the word flies off and can’t be called back.” Dylan couldn’t call back the song, but he soon stopped singing it in concert. He only performed it a handful of times during the decade in which it had become an anthem, including a memorable performance for his debut at the Newport Folk Festival on the evening of July 26, 1963. The memory of that show would help to fuel a sense of betrayal in the minds of folk and protest song purists not only at the next Newport festival in 1964, when Dylan opted not to play the song, but especially and finally at Newport in 1965, when he traded his traditional solo acoustic performance for one backed by Mike Bloomfield’s electric guitar. T
hings had already changed at Newport the previous year, when Dylan played new, still-unreleased songs “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the latter showing how astonishingly complex and poetic his language and song had become. The lyrics of “It Ain’t Me, Babe” almost seemed to be directed to fans who had come expecting a repeat of “Blowin’ in the Wind” from the year before: “Go ’way from my window / Leave at your own chosen speed / I’m not the one you want, babe / I’m not the one you need.” The end of the refrain, “It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe,” in hindsight, came across as a warning of what would happen at the next year’s festival, on July 25, 1965. That evening, with Bloomfield’s howling electric guitar riffs coming out of the darkness of the stage, alternating at times line by line with Dylan’s singing, Dylan delivered the message: “Well I try my best / To be just like I am / But everybody wants you / To be just like them / They say sing while you slave and I just get bored / I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.” The acoustic Dylan that folk fans loved hadn’t gone away, but the song they had heard and loved two years before was silenced for the time being. Something else was happening that many folk purists, particularly older ones, along with those in the antiwar movement, were just not ready for. The songs of those years, culminating in the “thin wild mercury music” of Blonde on Blonde, as Dylan himself described it, had entered another universe. In just fifteen months, from March 22, 1965, to May 16, 1966, Dylan recorded and released three albums—Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde—that would establish and perfect the entirely new genre of folk-rock, a convenient label, even if it was not to Dylan’s liking.

  As the years went on, for people who stopped following Dylan’s new music, who booed at the concerts of 1966 and were radicalized by the deepening involvement in Vietnam, Dylan was frozen in time, only those few songs relevant to what now mattered. He was useful as a protest singer, joined at the hip to that acoustic version of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “Masters of War,” the other great song on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan that was adopted as a protest anthem, was addressed directly to those who build the weapons and send the young men to die for the wars from which they profit. Like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” it created an indelible association in the minds of those who would head off to Vietnam. Dylan’s disclaimer about not writing protest songs made back in 1962 at Gerde’s hadn’t worked. His music, powerful from the beginning, would take on a life of its own. Dylan didn’t turn up at the protest marches of 1965 and later to sing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” but singers like Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and others unknown and without fame would take over for him, at marches, in student unions, in student apartments, wherever the antiwar movement was to be found, in the United States, in Auckland, and throughout the world. As student protest leader Todd Gitlin put it: “Whether he liked it or not, Dylan sang for us. . . . We followed his career as if he was singing our songs.”

  Seven years after those songs came out, as Dylan relates in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, it was the message, not the music, that the media and general public recalled. By 1970 he had been off the road for four years, trying to dodge the demands of those who wanted him to return either to the antiwar song or to the sound and the lyrics that he had invented in 1964–66, the true basis of his musical fame by that point. After Dylan stopped touring in 1966, now raising his family with Sara Dylan in Woodstock and New York City, and writing very different music, as we’ll see, he still couldn’t get away from the old labels. In his memoir, Dylan recalls receiving his honorary degree from Princeton University in June 1970, annoyed at being labeled “the conscience of America”:

  “Though he is known to millions, he shuns publicity and organizations preferring the solidarity of his family and isolation from the world, and though he is approaching the perilous age of thirty, he remains the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of Young America.” Oh Sweet Jesus! It was like a jolt. I shuddered and trembled but remained expressionless. The disturbed conscience of Young America! There it was again. I couldn’t believe it! The speaker could have said many things, he could have emphasized a few things about my music.

  For Dylan, it is the art of the song that matters. And song has powerful effects, especially when it responds to human conflict, to perceived injustice, to oppression. It is through song that we give depth to the sentiments for which mere speech is at times of crisis insufficient. And the more perfect the song, the more authentic the singer becomes in the minds of those who hear the song. How can a songwriter who creates songs with such fundamental and persuasive messages not believe those messages? That has always been the shackle from which Dylan has struggled to free himself. The message of a handful of Dylan’s songs was what lingered in the consciousness of those who had heard them and had been involved, on one side or the other, for or against the war in Vietnam. To this day, the attitude of anyone old enough to have had a position on that war probably lines up pretty well with what they think of Bob Dylan the man, even after all these years.

  “Blowin’ in the Wind” is part of Dylan’s poetry and art, exquisite in its classical structure and form. The song is written in three verses, each with three questions, each question extending over two lines, and each followed by the same answering couplet:

  How many roads must a man walk down

  Before you call him a man?

  Yes, ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail

  Before she sleeps in the sand?

  Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly

  Before they’re ever banned?

  The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind

  The answer is blowin’ in the wind

  How many years can a mountain exist

  Before it’s washed to the sea?

  Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people exist

  Before they’re allowed to be free?

  Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head

  Pretending that he just doesn’t see?

  The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind

  The answer is blowin’ in the wind

  How many times must a man look up

  Before he can see the sky

  Yes, ’n’ how many ears must one man have

  Before he can hear people cry?

  Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows

  That too many people have died?

  The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind

  The answer is blowin’ in the wind

  The urgent refrain that supposedly provides an answer really gives no answer at all, but rather creates its own questions: “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind / The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” Is the wind blowing the answer away from us, never to be heard, or blowing it toward us, about to right the injustices of those nine urgent questions? Roman critics had a saying, “The art of poetry is to not say everything.” That is precisely what Dylan’s refrain does, indeed what much of Dylan’s art does; it implants the possible answer in our imaginations, and the rest is up to us.

  It is the height of irony that Dylan’s main fear about how the song would be labeled may have lain elsewhere. One of his earliest and most famous interviews took place in May 1963, on Studs Terkel’s radio show on WFMT in Chicago. The young Dylan was in town to play at a local club, the Bear. Not included in Terkel’s 2005 published collection of interviews, And They All Sang, and therefore not to be found in Jonathan Cott’s The Essential Interviews, the following exchange took place in the lead-up to Dylan’s closing song and may be heard on a tape of the show:

  ST: What’s one way to sign off . . . a signing-off song?

  BD: Sign-off song, let’s see. Hmm. Oh, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” there’s one I’ll sing you.

  ST: Isn’t that a popular song, that’s a popular song, I believe.

  BD: God, I hope not.

  ST: By “popular” I mean in a good sense. A l
ot of people are singing it.

  BD: Oh, yeah.

  After an eight-year hiatus, the song came back twice on August 1, 1971, in Dylan’s afternoon and evening performances at the Concert for Bangladesh. “Blowin’ in the Wind” returned to his setlists for good in January 1974. By then Watergate and Nixon were more in his fans’ consciousness, and the song, obviously not a pop song, could finally take its place in his repertoire as part of his art in performance. I heard Dylan sing the song twice in 2016, in Boston in July and in Clearwater, Florida, in November and twice again in June 2017, on each occasion as the first of the two encores to close his concerts, its regular place in setlists of recent years—and he has now sung it at more than 1,400 concerts, a world away from the acoustic version recorded by the twenty-one-year-old Dylan. The song is still urgent in its questions, but it can’t, couldn’t ever, be attached to any one historical event or condition.

  The same goes for “Masters of War,” in terms of its enduring resonance. Dylan had performed the song 884 times by the end of 2016. Vietnam had become a dim backdrop by this time even in the minds of baby boomers, but the masters of war (“You that build the death planes / You that build the big bombs”) never really go away. They were close at hand when Dylan performed acoustic versions of “Masters of War” in Australia and New Zealand in early 2003, including on March 15, when millions of demonstrators in those two countries and across the globe took to the streets urging two politicians not to proceed. American president George W. Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair had for months been building the case for bringing war to Iraq. I myself heard the song in those months reflecting on how relevant its message seemed, forty years on. After the bombs started falling on Baghdad on March 18, and in concerts for the rest of 2003, Dylan stopped playing the song. We’ll never know why, but perhaps Dylan felt that would make it too overtly a “protest song,” the old label. It returned the following year, however, and stayed on setlists until November 23, 2010, when it disappeared, so far for good, except for one performance on October 7, 2016, at the Desert Trip music festival in Indio, California, a weekend extravaganza where some of those particular fans would have expected to hear the song, along with hits by Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Roger Waters, and the Who.