A couple weeks ago, I published the first part of an essay on Bruce Springsteen and his musical/political influences. Here’s the second part.
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II. Bob Dylan.
David Remnick of The New Yorker has been browsing the Booman Tribune “Diaries” section recently. Or at least it appears that way, given that his wonderful profile of Bruce Springsteen, published in this week’s issue, shares many of the sources and conclusions of my previous diary. I mean, there are a few differences. Remnick did manage to score an interview with Springsteen himself… well, multiple interviews… plus interviews with the rest of the E Street Band… and manager Jon Landau… and Remnick visited Springsteen and Patti Scialfa’s home… and he got to see Springsteen and the band rehearse, and perform, and hang out backstage, and… well, all that’s neither here nor there. The point is, the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker now clearly owes me a couple of royalty payments. Or at least a year’s subscription.
In any case, here’s what Remnick has to say about Bob Dylan’s effect on a young Springsteen:
By 1972, Springsteen was fronting a band and writing songs to be performed solo. He wasn’t a big reader at the time, but he was so consumed by Bob Dylan’s songs that he read Anthony Scaduto’s biography. He was impressed by Dylan’s coming-to-New York saga: the snowstorm arrival, in 1961, from the Midwest; the pilgrimages to Woody Guthrie’s bedside at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital; the first appearances at Café Wha? and Gerde’s Folk City; and then the audition for John Hammond, the legendary Columbia Records executive. This was what he wanted, some version of it.
Springsteen got that audition he wanted with John Hammond, and like his hero Dylan, it landed him a record deal with Columbia. Springsteen has remained on the Columbia label for his entire career, and Dylan for most of his (in fact, Dylan today insists on being introduced at his concerts as “Columbia Recording Artist Bob Dylan!”)
What can we make of this mildly obsessive tribute paid by Springsteen to his hero Dylan? How does it speak to the deeper connection between the work of these two musicians? More importantly, for the purposes of this essay, to what extent did Dylan’s “anti-establishment” qualities rub off on Springsteen? How sound is BooMan’s statement that Springsteen “really isn’t quite as anti-establishment as [Dylan]”? That last question is the easiest one to answer: BooMan is right. Bob Dylan is unequivocally more anti-establishment than Bruce Springsteen. Indeed, more than any of Springsteen’s “Godfathers,” Dylan is anti-establishment to his very core. It is the defining quality of his entire body of work and his artistic persona. One simply cannot imagine his music without it.
I’ll expand on these claims later in this diary. But let me step back here for a moment. You can probably already tell that I’m a huge Dylan fan, and there’s nothing more annoying than a Dylanite babbling on and on about the greatness of “Bob.” Especially to those folks who have yet to appreciate his greatness, i.e. who could not care less about this weird old relic of the 60’s that nowadays likes to dress up like an antebellum plantation owner and still hasn’t learned how to sing!
For those readers that don’t know or care much about Bob Dylan, allow me to recite to you one of rock foundational stories, the so-called “Dylan goes electric” controversy. Most rock music fans have heard at least part of it, but it’s worth reviewing in full here. The basic plot goes like this: in the early 1960’s, during an unprecedented explosion in the popularity of folk music in America, Dylan came to fame as the greatest young songwriter of the Greenwich village folk scene. Dylan’s astonishingly passionate songs like “Masters of War”, “The Times They Are A-Changin'”, and “Blowin’ In The Wind” were anthems of the folk revival, and folkies saw the 23-year old Dylan, along with co-generational phenom Joan Baez, as almost religious figures.
But then came Dylan’s appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, a split-off from the famous Newport Jazz Festival and a precursor to the big outdoor music festivals that would become popular later in the decade. On the night of July 20, 1965, when a leather-jacketed Dylan started playing “Maggie’s Farm” on his Fender Stratocaster, it served as an announcement to his fanbase that he was leaving behind the folk scene for the shatter and crack of rock and roll. Folkies considered rock a despicable, corrupt, “sell-out” style of music, and felt deeply and personally betrayed by Dylan’s embrace of it.
The reason the folkies responded so intensely to Dylan’s move was because folk music of that time was deeply intertwined with progressive politics, and folksingers like Dylan, Baez, Phil Ochs, and Pete Seeger were seen as “speaking” for the progressive left in a very real way. It’s hard to think of any equivalent figures today, but try to imagine that rather than of all us logging onto the Internet to read BooMan, Digby, and Atrios’s blogs, we instead sat cross-legged on the ground in large groups, on college squares and public lawns, while BooMan, Digby, and Atrios sang us deeply earnest protest songs on their acoustic guitars. In other words, even though folk music was just music, progressives took this shit very seriously.
Thus, the folkies saw the “new” electric version of their idol Dylan as pretty much The Greatest Sell-Out of All Time: a betrayal on the level of Benedict Arnold, Brutus, or even Judas Iscariot. The folkies expressed their displeasure at Dylan during his subsequent world tour by catcalling and booing throughout his performances. This phenomenon came to a head on May 17, 1966 at Dylan’s “Royal Albert Hall” performance (actually performed not in London, but at the Manchester Free Trade Hall). In reaction to a round of heckling that was captured on film, Dylan and his band lunged into an absolutely enraged version of “Like A Rolling Stone”:
Combined with the earlier Newport brouhaha, this is one of the great moments in rock history, on the level of the The Who blowing up their equipment on TV, or Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock. It crystallized rock’s angry, rebellious, answer-to-no-one attitude like few other events. It was a moment of pure cultural liberation – radical yet unassailably cool, and channeled by a kind of sound that, as Bruce Springsteen likes to say, left Dylan’s audience with their “backs hurting, voices sore, and sexual organs stimulated.”
So, I think that even if you don’t like Dylan’s music you can still sense the power and the glory of that moment, even though it happened almost 50 years ago. But why? Why do we, especially those of us on the political left, still care so much about that moment, and about Dylan’s cultural achievements in general? One big reason is, of course, Dylan’s strong early ties to the left through the folk movement. And another reason is because Dylan’s personal politics, like most of his artistic peers’, almost certainly lean left:
Dylan performed at several concerts to raise money for liberal causes–hunger in Bangladesh in 1971 and in Ethiopia in 1985, and the Farm Aid concert to raise money for U.S. family farmers later in 1985. In 1991, upon receiving the lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Recording Artists and Performers, while U.S. troops were fighting in Iraq, Dylan performed his “Masters of War.” On election night 2008, Dylan was playing a concert at the University of Minnesota. As Barack Obama’s victory was announced, Dylan said, “I was born in 1941. That was the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. I’ve been living in darkness ever since. It looks like things are going to change now.” Then, deviating from his usual live encore of “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan played “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
A third reason is that Dylan’s primary audience – white Baby Boomers – have absolutely dominated the cultural discussion in this country for the past 30 or 40 years. And a fourth and most important reason is, of course, because of the incredible emotional power and technical genius of Dylan’s songs. But I’d like to submit a fifth reason. I think Dylan remains an important part of the left’s cultural life because his anti-establishment persona reflects the ideal political attitude of the modern American left.
What I mean by “ideal political attitude” is that from the Vietnam War era up until very recently, we on the left have deliberately framed ourselves – in a very personal, emotional way – as being against “the Establishment.” According to this line of thinking, “the Establishment” is the group of bloodthirsty fools that locked us into a long nuclear stalemate, and then lied to the country in order to trap us in two more pointless, tragic wars. “The Establishment” is the “cracker senators” that viciously defended racial apartheid for 100 years after Lincoln freed the slaves, and then, only under the full moral condemnation of the world, replaced it with a less direct economic apartheid. “The Establishment” is the Don Drapers of the world, staunchly oblivious to the gender pay/opportunity gap and resistant to any expansion in women’s sexual autonomy. And today, “the Establishment” is personified by “the banksters” those unaccountable Wall Street titans, corporate juggernauts, and their Congressional stooges who wrecked our economy and now are actively trying to gut what’s left of the middle class.
What honest progressive would ever want to be associated with this horrible class of people? Thus, for two generations now progressives as a class have sought to tried to resist political assimilation into the Establishment at all costs. “Don’t be a sellout!”, “Fuck the Man!”, “DIY”, “Occupy!”, and all that. The left took these beliefs to heart just at the moment that Bob Dylan exploded onto the national stage. And in Dylan, we found our perfect anti-establishment hero: the artist who told those naïve folkies (ironically, the last truly hopeful leftie subculture before Vietnam injected a kind of permanent cynicism and paranoia into the liberal mainstream) – soon to be replaced by the idiot, bourgeois “Mr. Jones’s” of the world – that he was going to “play it fucking loud” whether they liked it or not.
Whether or not this anti-establishment attitude was a healthy one for the left to adopt I’ll leave for another diary. But I do believe it’s a major reason the modern left identifies so strongly with Dylan and his music. That said, it’s still not quite enough to justify my earlier claim that Dylan is the most anti-establishment of Springsteen’s “Godfathers”. Here’s my thinking on that:
* Dylan’s anger. One of the more peculiar aspects of Dylan’s work is that he happens to be the greatest writer of “fuck you” songs since, well, ever. What’s a “fuck you” song? Pretty much what you’d think: Dylan lashing out at some person or group he’s angry at with the full force of his musical genius. The blogospheric equivalent of this would be something like if you were talking to Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and Christopher Hitchens, at a party hosted by Hunter S. Thompson, and you somehow managed to grievously insult all four of them at once, and the next day they co-published an op-ed in the Huffington Post that tore you a black hole of a new asshole in the most literate and personal of terms.
To me, that would still be better than getting targeted by a Dylan “fuck you” song!
Here’s a few examples. “Like A Rolling Stone” is probably Dylan’s (and the) ur-“fuck you” song. It’s not Dylan’s first, but it basically set the standard for the genre, at least within the rock idiom. “Ballad of a Thin Man” (above) would be my choice for second place. But Dylan has plenty of other great screeds too. Consider “Positively 4th Street”:
No, I do not feel that good
When I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a master thief
Perhaps I’d rob themAnd now I know you’re dissatisfied
With your position and your place
Don’t you understand
It’s not my problemI wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment
I could be youYes, I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
You’d know what a drag it is
To see you
“Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”:
I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell
But goodbye’s too good a word, gal
So I’ll just say fare thee well
I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don’t think twice, it’s all right
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your mouth
Blowing down the backroads headin’ south
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe
Just brutal, huh? And that’s the lyrics alone. As the “Royal Albert Hall” performance shows, Dylan can channel a simply staggering amount of rage through his music too. So the lesson here is, avoid getting on Dylan’s bad side at all costs, lest you end up like this guy:
Now if that’s not anti-establishment assholery of the highest level, what is? Of Springsteen’s other “Godfathers”, and Springsteen himself, only Johnny Cash comes close to matching Dylan’s venom. But Dylan far outflanks Cash in terms of both his artistic longevity and overall quality of output, “fuck you” songs and otherwise. And I also think that Cash’s conservative country values (which I’ll talk about in a later post) prevented him from ever really embracing his inner musical viciousness to the extent that Dylan did.
* Dylan’s refusal to satisfy audience expectations. Dylan is also famous for pretty much refusing to ever do what his audience wants him to do. In fact, that’s a big part of his mystique. Whatever Dylan does, you know it’s going to be surprising, provocative, and tied to a great soundtrack. These have been Dylan’s most consistent artistic qualities throughout his long career.
The “going electric” controversy is the most well-known of Dylan’s subversions of expectations. What’s funny today about that event is that it’s hard to find a music fan who wouldn’t take Dylan’s side of the argument in retrospect. And not just because nowadays (in no small part due to Dylan) we’re automatically primed to take the artist’s side in these sorts of debates. It’s also because when you look at that old footage of Dylan v. the folkies, the latter just come off as so boring and close-minded, and almost laughably earnest.
We can look back at this footage and see that Dylan beats the folkies when he goes electric because he is so much more fun than them. The folkies bitch and moan about how they’ve been betrayed by their idol, who is apparently too weak or personally comprised to stay “true” to the music and the movement, unlike them. It’s that same old sad, angry, holier-than-thou routine we lefties always go through: we spend more time policing the boundaries of debate and eating our own than we do actually getting out there and changing the world.
Meanwhile, Dylan travels around the globe playing some of the greatest rock music ever, with the third-coolest backing band ever, and for laughs he gets stoned with the Beatles in Swingin’ London.
(Actually, Lennon claimed years later that he had been “nervous as shit” around Dylan, though it looks like at least Dylan enjoyed himself.) But seriously, whose party would you rather be invited to? And who do you think won that cultural battle, which the folkies decided to gin up in the first place?
Dylan’s unpredictable moves haven’t always ended in such triumph. But he really doesn’t seem to care how people react to his work, apparently so long as it meets his own obscure standards of artistic quality. None of the other “Godfathers” share that trait. Woody Guthrie was much less interested in his own development as an artist than he was in effecting real-world social change through his music. Johnny Cash was deeply embedded in the conservative country music tradition, and he never left it, which meant he had much less leeway to embark on radically new artistic paths than Dylan did. Pete Seeger, much like his compadre Guthrie, seems to see his music primarily as a vehicle for social change, and like Guthrie, he probably has never had quite enough musical talent to successfully pull off major 180° artistic turns like Dylan did.
Bruce Springsteen comes the closest to matching Dylan’s kind of shapeshifting artistic evolution. That’s probably because, unlike his other Godfathers, Springsteen’s songwriting talent nearly matches Dylan’s. But unlike Dylan, Springsteen has always been highly attuned to the needs of his audience. This is, after all, a man who says he pulled back on writing “happy songs” in the early 90’s because “the public didn’t like [them].” And Springsteen has inherited the mantle of “hardest working man in show business” from James Brown because of the incredible show he puts on, the core of which is his intense connection to his audiences. Whereas the quality of Dylan’s performances since late 70’s has been, er, how shall I put it… erratic.
So to me, it’s clear that Dylan as an artist is more anti-establishment than any of the Godfathers or Springsteen, or almost any other broadly popular rock musician for that matter. But what about Dylan as a human being?
* Dylan is anti-establishment by his very nature.
I’m going to wrap up this diary shortly, and I think it’s appropriate to do so on the subject Dylan’s personal biography, or at least his audience’s perception of it. As you might have guessed, Dylan’s had a strange life. He was born and raised in Nowheresville, USA – aka Hibbing, Minnesota – part of that vast swath of isolated, pre-Interstate Highway System, pre-Information Age communities that rock critic Greil Marcus called “The Old, Weird America.”
I’ve often wondered if our perception of Dylan being somehow mysterious and unknowable doesn’t just reflect the fact that he emerged from the snowy, existential blankness of 1950’s Hibbing. While Dylan doesn’t seem to harbor any particular ill-will towards his family or the rural society he grew up in, they doesn’t seem to have had any discernible effect on him either. Once Dylan left Hibbing for Greenwich Village at the age of 19, he cast off whatever previous identity he’d operated under and changed his name from Robert Alan Zimmerman (his birth name) to “Bob Dylan”. Dylan described his thinking at that time in a (typically cryptic) 2004 interview:
“You’re born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.”
“Wrong names, wrong parents” – how many people do you know who would say something like this? But even then, to his Greenwich Village friends, Dylan didn’t seem to have a concrete, continuous identity. As Liam Clancy put it in Martin Scorsese’s Dylan documentary No Direction Home (sorry, no link, but it’s streaming on Netflix):
“In Old Irish mythology, they talk about the shape-changers. He changed voices, he changed images. And it wasn’t… necessary for him to be a definitive person. He was, he was a receiver. He was… he was possessed. And… he articulated what the rest of us wanted to say, but couldn’t say.”
Dylan’s not an alien being; he’s just a person (a realization his audience finally seemed to accept some time in the late 1990’s). But at least outwardly he’s never appeared tied to any particular personal identity in the way that most of the rest of us are. And I think that strange inner blankness is also what gave him the absolute fearlessness required to move a thousand miles East and become the folkie philosopher-king; then abandon the folk scene to go electric; then abandon the rock scene to go country with The Band; then write the rawest and greatest divorce album ever; then become a born-again evangelical Christian (yes, that actually happened); then a 1980’s washout (probably not his choice); then a Traveling Wilbury; and finally a late-career cowboy/medicine show man/goofball national treasure.
Dylan’s body of work is anti-establishment, in the sense of fiercely resisting all categorization, because Dylan himself isn’t tied to any particular identity. And on that level, few broadly popular artists of any era match him. Maybe Michaelangelo, Shakespeare, Picasso, plus a handful of others (and yes I include Dylan in that group – he’s one of the all-time greats). But that’s really it.
It’s different with Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen is very much tied to a particular place and identity: he’s the troubadour of the troubled, post-1960’s American working class, with the New Jersey shoreline serving as the stage for his elegiac stories of love, pain, and hope. Springsteen’s been through a lot of changes over the course of his career, yet he’s never seemed as resistant to artistic categorization as Dylan. Maybe that’s because Springsteen’s audience never really saw him as a mystical prophet in the way that, for years, much of Dylan’s audience truly saw Dylan. In the end, Bruce has always been one of us. He’s a guy you feel like you could actually get to know if you were both neighbors living on Ocean Avenue. Dylan? Never. He’s the mysterious figure who lives way out in the woods and only comes to town twice a year, to buy a hundred pounds of yeast and some copper line. You might get a couple enigmatic phrases out of him before he disappears for another 6 months, but no more.
Dylan, I think, has always resisted personal and artistic categorization because that’s just his nature. But he probably also had to do so to thrive as an artist, and to survive the intense adoration of his audience. Few artists have ever taken such a stand and succeeded as magnificently as Dylan. That’s a testament to his genius. But I think it also signifies the anti-establishment, punk rock heart that still beats within his chest.
Two songs to end this diary. First, one of my favorites, Dylan and the Band live in 1972 with “When I Paint My Masterpiece”:
Second, the subject of my next diary in this series, The Man In Black himself, Mr. Johnny Cash. Here’s Cash and Dylan playing music together for the first of many times. Dylan later recalled his initial meeting with Cash as “the high thrill of a lifetime”:
It’s not their best performance together, but man, what I wouldn’t give to stick my head inside that room!