Bob Dylan – Almost Seventy and Young at Heart

Soon he will be touring in China, a man more or less my age who has been out there, in the world, for years: far from any place like Hibbing, the place he hails from. Far from home? “No direction home”, we once heard. “You can’t go home again”: another poetic mind knew it, too. From a certain moment, there is no turning back any more. And we start feeling at home everywhere, even in once seemingly Red China. Or Los Angeles, for that matter. Or a hotel room, a friend’s place, a joint that we come to, to sing our song, or chant a poem. Home… Not something charged with intense feelings of belonging any more, as in childhood. And yet, there are the sudden moments of warmth experienced, and of being a part of humanity, among a small crowd of two, of three, a dozen, twenty, or more than that…

He discovered folk music, discovered Guthrie very early, listening to radio stations while still in Hibbing. Like Guthrie, he knew so soon

“that men are men
[…]
an’ that men have reasons
for what they do
an’ what they say”

while adding, no doubt for a reason,

“an’ every action can be questioned”.

The reason, the commitment, and the doubt that comes with it – it’s all there, in these few lines. 

Awake minds shy away from every kind of ‘religious’ certainty that what they do and stand for and see as an issue worth standing up for cannot be put in doubt. The John Birchers of the time when he, Dylan, wrote the text I’m quoting from (Outlined Epitaphs), didn’t have those qualms perhaps. And while they may have feared or hated those who refuse to simplify things, they needed so much to find and experience human warmth and friendliness. Yes, of course. And the sensitivity of women and men who try to grasp what turns a man into a “staunch patriot” and a “Cold warrior.” 

But cannot the same be said of certain folks who see themselves as liberals, or as people that cherish ideas of the Left? Of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, agnostics? 

Like Guthrie, Dylan wrote songs and still writes songs that are the songs of a man who has a reason. It’s strange, he referred to such reason as that unwritten and yet known “book of Man” that the older singer songwriter and bard of the people had “carried” for a while. Yes, Guthrie,

“for he just carried a book of Man
an’ gave it t’me t’read awhile
an’ from it I learned my greatest lesson”.
You see what he’s saying? From it, that metaphorical book of Man, not from Guthrie. The humanity that Guthrie had at heart was concrete, it was the American people that suffered the effects of the Great Depression. It was the people, the populace, that finds itself nailed so often to a cross of gold. In the 1890s. In the 1930s, And again today.

Guthrie’s songs were still alive when we heard them in the sixties and early seventies, and they are still alive when we hear them now. But they turn our eyes and minds and hearts back to the past, and in that sense and to some extent away from today, from our time. In the 1960s it was apparent, to an awake mind like Dylan that these were no longer 

“the hungry thirties” when people like Woody “blew in […] t’ New York an’ sang for dimes
on subway trains 
satisfied at a nickel fare
an’ passin’ the hat
an’ hittin’ the bars
on eights avenue
an’ makin’ the rounds
t’ the union halls”

When Bob was perhaps romantizicing the experience of Guthrie “blowing into New York”, he did not romanticize his own experience at all, as he “blew into” New York town aka Big Apple:

“[…] when I came in
the fares were higher
up t’ fifteen cents an’ climbing
an’ those bars that Woody’s guitar
rattled… they’ve changed
they’ve been remodeled
an’ those union halls
like the cio
an’ the nmu
come now! can you see ‘em
needin’ me
for a song
or two”

There is no need to comment this. We all know why Herbert Marcuse saw potential for change, at the time, above all in disempowered, unjustly treated minorities and in the women’s lib movement.

Bob Dylan did not get involved without a reason in the civil rights movement. Nor was his involvement atypical for college kids and young college drop-outs embracing values that echoed John Steinbeck, Dos Passos, the sense of history that informed a film like Grapes of Wrath.  And  of course the songs of the Great Depression. 

Dylan was in a sense one of them, one of those young people who got involved in the civil rights movement. Were they liberals? Leftists? Idealists? None of these labels help us very much if we do not attempt to grasp, at the same time, the existential commitment of the young civil rights workers who headed South. And at the same time the summer camp atmosphere, the longing for boundless freedom that filled these kids – usually young men and women with a “middle class” background.  It was no mirage, it was real, this sense of freedom as they climbed on buses that took them to Alabama, to Mississippi, to Arkansas. It implied an escape from parental control and from  the often inane discipline of institutions (no matter whether we think of the army, schools, universities or some recently found work-place, often inside the bureaucratic apparatus). But it also was an experience that brought them in contact with American realities that they had known up to that point mainly from textbooks. It brought them into contact, the hard way. With racism. Police dogs. Officers who did not welcome them. 

Dylan went down South not to “perform” and promote his music but in order to be there. Being present was necessary. His guitar, his voice were what pens and paper were to journalists if they came and supported the struggle. His tools. His weapons? If you prefer militaristic language, yes. But I think he wouldn’t have said, “my weapons”.

A song like Only a Pawn in Their Game lets us understand how nuanced and conscious Dylan’s apprehension of racism in the South was. It was clear to him –  and his song tried to make it clear to whoever  cared to listen and pay attention to it –  that the particular racism  that Black Americans encountered was most deeply entrenched among poor whites who were compensating an inferiority complex buttressed by their poverty, minimal education, general ignorance and low social status. In America’s class society, they needed somebody to look down on, to blame. Somebody they could take it out on, venting their anger and frustration. The political establishment, especially in the U.S. South, relied on their votes and used and fanned their racist prejudice, diverting aggression from worthier targets: from unjust social structures that the broad majority of “Blacks” and “Whites” suffered from.

Yes, Dylan was right: it was the average politician in the South who told “the poor white man,
‘You got more than the blacks, don’t complain,
Your better than them […].’”

And it was the entire phalanx, “the deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors […] the marshalls and cops” who functioned so well, preserving the status-quo and earning their secure salaries while doing so.

“But the poor white man’s used in the hands of them all like a tool.
He’s taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
‘Bout the shape that he’s in
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game.”
 

The concern with racism and lynchings haunted this American poet and singer songwriter in more than one song. It is starkly present in a song called The Death of Emmett Till.

Dylan sings,

“Some men they dragged him to a barn and there they beat him up.
They said they had a reason, but I can’t remember what. 
They tortured him and did some thing too evil to repeat. 
There were screaming sounds inside the barn, there was laughing 
                                                    [sounds out on the street. 

Then they rolled his body down amidst a bloody red rain 
And they threw him in the waters wide to cease his screaming pain. 
The reason that they killed him there, and I’m sure it ain’t no lie, 
Was just for the fun of killing him and to watch him slowly die.” 

The intensity of the pain and the outrage felt by the writer of the lines just quoted, as the murder of a young Chicago boy visiting relatives down South became known, is very present in the lyrics and in the way Dylan sings these lines. Emmett Till, not aware of social conventions in the Southern community he was visiting in the 60s, had dared to look at a “White” woman, rather than bowing his head down low. Perhaps he had even whistled, seeing her pass by. It cost his life; “white” guys had been determined to “teach him a lesson” (and by implication, all the other “Blacks” in the community).

Perhaps it was to some extent that note of commitment which echoed in songs like Only a Pawn in Their Game and The Death of Emmett Till that attracted me to the music of Bob Dylan when I discovered it.

Living it Europe, it was thanks to the New York Times and TIME magazine, since 1961, that I had followed the news concerning the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, the free speech movement in  Berkeley. Having been attuned to pop music, then Jazz, then briefly to country music (Flatt and Scruggs, Hank Williams, etc.) played on AFN, I discovered folk music since about 1963-64.  It was at that time that I started to listen to and care for Mississippi John Hurt, Cisco Houston, Rambling Jack Elliott, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.  I bought a song book done by Alan Lomax, and I came across Woody Guthrie singing Grand Coulee Dam, This Land is My Land and other great songs. I heard Leadbelly’s voice on the radio, listened to East Texas talking blues and to the first songs protesting against the war – songs by Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs… Much of it played on BFBS by Murray Kash.  It was only a bit later that I heard Joan Baez on the radio. And then, also, Bob Dylan.

I was stunned. I loved her way of singing, but that nasal twang typical of Dylan, that use of the throat’s, in fact the body’s potential to produce a rich experience of timbre struck me as even more surprising and beautiful. It erased the tarnish, the glossy polished surface typical of the rendition of pop singers. You sense it when you listen to Peter, Paul and Mary singing Blowing in the wind, and then listening to Dylan. Perhaps it was because I had been already attuned to other folk singers that I was bound to love it.

I still love to rediscover that special way of singing that reminds me faintly of Blues singers, in –  say –   the young Dylan’s rendition of Corinna, Corinna. There is that slow, clear-cut accompaniment of the guitar. The rough edge of the voice that suddenly can take a sharp turn, reaching a high note. It’s not just the text, it is even more so his way of singing that transports a sadness that is existential. Collective in the sense that the experience of loss, of grieving when a loved one has left for good is shared by so many. Folk music quite typically embraces such collective or shared experiences, and the personal, idiosyncratic rendition of Dylan doesn’t diminish this quality but, on the contrary, lets us feel it more intensily.

Do you remember the middle part of the song? In the version copyrighted in 1962, it’s the second of three “stanzas”. He adds more, varies it, but never mind. In that stanza , the imagery is naïve, simple, and typical of a folk song.
It goes,

“I got a bird that whistles,
I got a bird that sings.
I got a bird that whistles,
I got a bird that sings.
But I ain’t a-got Corinna,
Life don’t mean a thing.”

Hearing Dylan sing this, he seems to me like a bird that whistles.
And I find the observation of Joyce Carol Oates confirmed, who described his voice as “raw, very young”, adding that hearing it, it was to her “…as if sandpaper could sing.” She’s wrong of course when she says it was a “seemingly untrained voice”, unless you take the “seemingly” serious. He obviously had learned a lot from singers that weren’t in the mainstream, singers close to folk and blues and even perhaps bluegrass traditions. But he wasn’t trained in the way singers of classical music are trained, or singers of  operettas; and it is clear that their mastery of the voice and their “accomplished” renditions have set standards for Western pop music, too: by and large standards that tended to make it sterile and boring. At least up to the moment when the dominance of that paradigm waned and when blues began to “infect” popular music.

When Dylan performed Idiot Wind in the mid-1970s, his looks had changed, the charm and boyishness perhaps as youthful and fresh as ever, but there was a harder edge to the way he was singing.
It was less clear, less pure, in the way his folksong-like rendition of Corinna, Corinna had been ‘pure’. It was closer to rage, closer to rock music influences, too, perhaps.

Alan Ginsburg, in conversation with a Peter Barry Chowka, has noted that lines like
“Idiot wind
Blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol”

are “absolutely at the height of Hart Crane-type poetics.”

Like Brecht, like a lot of poets in fact, Dylan incorporated quotes and allusions to words written by others. The reference to the Grand Coulee Dam is evoking Guthrie’s song, but to bring together that dam in the Far West and the Capitol in Washington, D.C. in the same line evokes the  vastness, the wide space of the American continent, and to have the wind that sweeps across this continent circle the protagonist’s (or the poet’s?) skull is tantamount to the production of a grotesquely surreal image. Indeed, an idiot wind that rushes across the rockies and plains, in order to engulf a single poet in its whirring maelstrom-like eddy of insane air. Indeed an image of the confused, dizzying times that for brief moments hold us, again and again, in their dizzying grip.

Dylan’s epic ballads, for instance The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,
can do without such imagery, it is true.
The information transported is concise, nothing excess, so to speak; and the rendition, calm and in the way of a cantastorie.

“William Zanzinger, who at twenty-four years
Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres
With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
And high office relations in the politics of Maryland,
Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders”,

we hear about the murderer who killed a a fifty-one year old kitchen maid in a Baltimore hotel. 
And this 
“With a cane that he twirled around his diamong ring finger”.

The story, gathered perhaps from an account in a newspaper, has been reduced to the bare essential. It speaks for itself. Superficial “ornamental” details would only diminish it. The details that are given by Dylan elucidate, in a sober, factual way, what happened.

Is it that I loved the cantastorie, the teller of news that are often withheld from the people or that would go unnoticed or that would be forgotten as soon as the newspaper editors change the topic and highlight another scandal or affair? Yes, because he is close to the people, a bard of the people, the so-called common folks. But I also love, in Dylan, the singer of sad love songs, of despair, and the inventive experimenter.

The Times They Are A-Changing, is the title of a fairly early song written by Dylan. The times have indeed been changing. The days when hunger was a thing of the nineteen thirties in the U.S. (or in Europe, for that matter) are over. Dylan, the poet and singer-songwriter, has not ceased to change, either. Being often too broke, changing places, working in different places and also different countries, I have not bought many of his records, and for many years lived without record player, tape recorder, walkman, radio and television set. It is difficult for me to know what he is doing and to find an opportunity to listen to his music. Sometimes I hear a song he sings, on my brother’s radio, and I know he is still the same great singer and sensitive poet. As his 70th birthday approaches, he is getting ready to sing in front of a young and not-so-young Chinese public. I can sense already the idiot wind engulfing him and those who assemble to listen to him. Let the wind herald a new springtime, a new hope, while we embrace each other, promising each other that this world will not remain a place called desolation row.

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