Wicked Messenger Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1 - The Whole Wide World is Watchin’

  CHAPTER 2 - Not Much is Really Sacred

  CHAPTER 3 - Little Boy Lost

  CHAPTER 4 - The Hour Is Getting Late

  CHAPTER 5 - Corruptible Seed

  NOTES

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Also by Mike Marqusee

  Copyright Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is a revised and expanded edition of the book originally published in 2003 as Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan.

  I am indebted to a number of friends who read the manuscript in various stages and offered valuable comments: Anthony Arnove, Jane Ashworth, Terry Conway, Richard Ehrlich, Steve Faulkner, Gabriel Furshong, Alan Goode, Tony Graham, Randy Ostrow.

  Thanks also to Jane Barrett, Jeremy Corbyn, John Davies, Michael Letwin, Dave Lubell, Jeff Marqusee, Martin Morand, Charles Shaar Murray, Jane Shallice, Irwin Silber, Steve Wagg for ideas, sources, and suggestions.

  My friend Colin Robinson commissioned and published the first version of this book. I remain in his debt for encouragement and advice.

  Tom McCarthy at Seven Stories Press provided invaluable guidance for this revised and expanded edition. I am also grateful to Anish Vanaik and Aditya Sarkar for enriching my view of Dylan’s art.

  Finally, Liz Davies has been living with Dylan’s voice wafting through our shared home for many years. Much more difficult, she has been living with my babbling about the man and his music from early morn to late at night. Without her to share the enthusiasm, the discoveries and the doubts, there wouldn’t be much point. She knows too much not to argue or to judge.

  INTRODUCTION

  Where do you want this killing done?

  —Bob Dylan, 1965

  When Bob Dylan performed “Masters of War” at concerts in the United States of America in the weeks after September 11, 2001, members of the audience punctuated the song with lusty shouts of “Death to Bin Laden!” It seems some of them heard the protest-era favorite as an indictment, not of America’s military-industrial complex, but of its enemies in the war on terror.

  It is unlikely Dylan will ever tell us what he meant in singing this song at this moment. Enigma has long been his stock-in-trade. After all, he never really told us what he thought about the Vietnam War. However, it is worth noting that Dylan also chose to play “Masters of War” at the 1991 Grammy ceremony, in the middle of the Gulf War waged by the first president Bush, and again on the eve of the presidential election of 2004.

  Any song or work of art that survives its historical point of origin is liable to ironic transmutations. Unanchored in an environment of shared meanings, it can even be turned into its opposite. Is there a better example of the power of modern capitalism to appropriate expressions of resistance than the adoption of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” as an advertising jingle by mega-accountants Coopers and Lybrand?

  I can’t remember when I first encountered Dylan. I know that becoming aware of him was conjoined with taking my first steps as both a political agent and a self-conscious consumer of cultural goods. By the time I was fourteen in 1967, I had heard most of the albums Dylan had released by then, was familiar with his legend and convinced that he was the cutting edge of advanced cultural consciousness, the acme of cool. I knew that he had defied critics, blazed a trail, crashed on a motorcycle, and gone into retreat. I tried to write Dylanesque poetry.

  For a kid who was more comfortable with books and ideas than with social interaction, but who was nonetheless turned on by and desperately wanted to be part of the “something” that was “happening,” Dylan was a talisman. I loved the visceral thrust of Dylan’s music, as well as the fact that it left much to ponder over. Dylan was a bridge spanning my own contradictory impulses. On the one hand, the world was clearly riddled with injustice. Those who sought to challenge it were righteous; I wanted to be one of them. On the other hand, the world was also clearly full of beautiful, tantalizing, surprising things; I wanted to experience them. I gobbled up poetry and movies and paintings and music—and also news from an increasingly violent society and from the movement dedicated to changing it. I wanted somehow to reconcile these two spheres of existence, the personal and the public, and like others of the time performed some prodigious mental gymnastics in my efforts to do so. My sixties experience—not least listening to Dylan—set me off, perhaps too often, looking for the aesthetic in the political and the political in the aesthetic.

  In the sixties, I was, however, given one immeasurable gift. I witnessed and was part of a rapid and unexpected mass radicalization. The assumptions saturating Cold War America were challenged with a vigor and headlong insurgency that no one had predicted. That process opened dizzying vistas of transformation—social and personal. This was a curse as well as a blessing. To be young at such times is not always, contrary to Wordsworth, “very heaven.” In the sixties in the United States of America, to be young was to be constantly challenged, frequently insecure, often frightened; it was to be torn by multiple desires, thrown into the cauldron of history ill-prepared, and often ill-guided.

  In tracking Dylan’s febrile motion through the decade, I’ve recalled my own wayward developing consciousness of those days. But I’ve also relied on what has come after—politically and personally. When I arrived in England in 1971, I found that Dylan, along with the counterculture of which he seemed an integral part, provided a common frame of reference. In fact, Dylan’s record sales have always been proportionately higher in Britain than in the United States.

  The American sixties are part of the global sixties. Remove one from the other and the equation changes, the dynamic that made the era alters. However, the American sixties do remain distinctive. What made them so was the political culture in which they unfolded. This culture was marked by the weakness of socialist traditions, especially within the labor movement, the absence of mass parties, the centrality of racial oppression, the widespread belief in America’s exceptional destiny and identity, and the reality that America had become an empire that dared not speak its name. Above all, it was in the U.S. that the global trends of consumerization and media-saturation were most advanced. The association of sixties rebellion with the power of images, symbols, and cultural products emanates from this American experience. Ironically, American capital helped disseminate dissident American culture around the world, and wherever people could get their hands on it, they made their own use of it. The music Bob Dylan made in the sixties has long outgrown its national origins, just as it has outlived its era, but to understand it, to make best use of it, you need to trace its roots in both time and place.

  However you measure Dylan’s subsequent achievements (and they are substantial), they do not enjoy the same umbilical relation to the turmoil of the times as the work of the sixties. This is a body of song tied to the unfolding political and cultural drama of its era in a way that the later work is not. Tracing the thread that binds Dylan’s art to its rapidly shifting environment is this book’s primary purpose. However, in reading the songs in their musical and political context, I don’t see them as transparent reflections of the times but as expressive objects fashioned by an individual in response to those times. Dylan was not a passive lightning rod, an impersonal conductor of great historic currents. Rather, he was a navigator of those currents.

  The sixties played out in miniature many of the soul-shaking extremes of other eras of upsurge and reaction—aspiration, frustration, missionary zeal, and crippling self-doubt. It’s rare, however, to find so much of this historical experience com
pressed into the work of a single artist. Few ages of social change have been as well-served artistically as the American sixties were by Dylan. His songs give us the political/cultural moment in all its dynamic complexity.

  As Dylan’s lifetime record/tape/CD sales pass the thirty-five million mark, it’s well to remember that he is outsold not only by the 100-million-topping Beatles and Presley, but also by Prince, Madonna, Elton John, Michael Jackson, the Eagles, Aerosmith, and Kenny Rogers. What matters in the history of popular culture, in the end, is not merely how many people buy a product but what that product means to them, the role it plays in their lives, its shaping power over their imaginations. Popular culture is not an undifferentiated mass. Both aesthetic and political engagement with it demand that we make discriminations and judgments. One of the lessons of Dylan’s art in the sixties is that under the right circumstances, the producers and consumers of popular culture engage in the most lively and contentious manner in the making of discriminations and judgments. To fail to do so is to condescend to the genre, the performer, the audience, and the era.

  My aim is not to claim Dylan for a cause. I do, however, aim to examine Dylan’s work in its time partly in order to serve a cause: to draw inspiration, lessons, and warnings. I wrote this book with the hard rain headed Iraq’s way. Many of the young antiwar activists I’ve met in recent months know Dylan’s work and see him as an artist of protest—despite the fact that he turned his back on political engagement nearly forty years ago. Sometimes I think they are too daunted by the sixties. Self-indulgent celebration of our generation and of Dylan does them no favors. The legacy of the era is rich, but only if it’s examined critically.

  During the period covered by this book Dylan released nine albums, wrote hundreds of unreleased songs, gave countless live performances, and astounded his followers with a swift succession of stylistic, political, and personal transmutations—from folk neophyte to protest singer to rock ’n’ roll poet to wise old country sage. The changes were real and hectic. But in what follows I’ve also emphasized the continuities. This is an integral body of work produced by a single artist, recognizable through all his adventures.

  This book tells the story of an artist and a movement, a story of interlocking and ultimately unresolved personal and social crises. It’s a story that unfolds through what might be called an extended, multilayered historical moment. Looking back on the decade at the end of the sixties, Julius Lester was struck by the distance that had been traveled.

  To go from sit-in demonstrations at lunch counters in the south to the Black Panther Party, from pacifist demonstrations against nuclear testing to a mass anti-war movement, from the beat generation to a cultural revolution is a ten-year journey almost beyond comprehension. Yet, this is the journey which has been made.1

  Lester himself covered many miles: starting the decade as a folk singer, he ended it as a black nationalist, later converted to Judaism and became a prolific writer of children’s books. The journey was never even-paced or straightforward, nor did everyone start at the same point, follow the same route or end up at the same destination. There were no maps. It was easy to lose your way. Dylan offered a signpost: “To live outside the law you must be honest.” But as no one knew better than Dylan, it was hard advice to follow.

  The ideas, impulses, and prejudices I absorbed in the sixties have determined many of the choices I’ve made, and many of those I’ve avoided. I’ve never succeeded in balancing the aesthetic and the political. Nonetheless, as I am a hopeless case, I suspect I’ll go on trying to do so, no matter how frustrating the results. This book is part of that effort.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Whole Wide World is Watchin’

  Every honest man is a prophet. He utters his opinion on private and public matters.

  —William Blake

  At noon on August 28, 1963, the Washington, D.C., police announced that 200,000 people had gathered in the city to join the March for Jobs and Freedom. For hours after that, many more continued to stream in from all corners of the country. There were twenty-one chartered trains and hundreds of buses backed up for miles on the routes leading to the capital. Among the demonstrators were tens of thousands of whites—union stalwarts, students, intellectuals, leftists. But mostly the marchers were black, and large numbers were from the South. They poured into the streets singing the freedom songs that had kept up their strength through the last, brutal years of the frontline struggle against Jim Crow. “Woke up this mornin’ with my mind set on freedom . . .” Suddenly, the spirit of the mass meetings that had inspired and coordinated the wave of direct action against American apartheid in hundreds of southern towns was being carried into the streets of the nation’s capital and broadcast live on network television. Rejoicing in their numbers, revelling in the discovery that they really were part of a great movement, the marchers, of all colors, were bound together by a vital intuition: you weren’t as alone as you had so often felt back in your Mississippi hamlet, your college campus, your factory, or your folkie coffeehouse.1

  As the demonstrators assembled, they were entertained by a troupe of folksingers stationed at the foot of the Washington Monument. Joan Baez sang “Oh Freedom.” Odetta sang “I’m On My Way.” She was soon joined by Josh White, the smooth-voiced black folkie with a long history of left-wing connections (in the thirties, White had fronted a blues band called the Carolinians, one of whose members was march organizer Bayard Rustin).2 Together, Odetta, White, Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary sang “Blowin’ in the Wind”—the wistful anthem whose recording by the folk trio had surprised everyone by reaching number two in the pop charts earlier in the summer.

  Then the twenty-two-year-old author of this unlikely hit single, tousled, slight, tense, took his turn at the microphone. He stood before the greatest mass mobilization of African-Americans ever seen and, without comment, sang two songs. Both were recent compositions, unfamiliar to his audience and even to his fellow folksingers. Both were perfectly in tune with the occasion, and at the same time decidedly different from anything sung by anyone else that day.3

  The first was “When the Ship Comes In,” in which Dylan celebrates a great eruption (“the seas will split . . . the shoreline will be shaking”) that will usher in the day when “the sun will respect / Every face on the deck,” “the fishes will laugh” and even “the rocks on the sand / Will proudly stand.” In this jaunty vision of inclusive, unqualified liberation—unfolding as “the whole wide world is watchin’”—the “ship” may serve as a metaphor for many things, but there can’t be much doubt that on this day, and in this era, it symbolized that complex of insurgent social forces commonly dubbed, among participants, “the Movement.”

  In its promise of an egalitarian future and its use of Biblical phraseology, the song shared ground with the “dream” that Martin Luther King expounded later that afternoon in the speech that came to epitomize the March on Washington and eventually an entire epoch of African-American politics and culture. However, Dylan’s new song also struck a note alien to King’s commitment to reconciliation and forgiveness, his belief that ultimately the civil rights movement would convert its enemies. The last two verses depict a different kind of triumph:Oh the foes will rise

  With the sleep still in their eyes

  And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’

  But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal

  And know that it’s for real,

  The hour when the ship comes in.

  Then they’ll raise their hands,

  Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands,

  But we’ll shout from the bow, “your days are numbered.”

  And like Pharaoh’s tribe,

  They’ll be drownded in the tide,

  And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered.

  The spur for this joyously humane but also gleefully vindictive paean had been a petty snub. Weeks before the march, Dylan had been turned away by a hotel receptionist who had failed to re
cognize the scruffy, uncommunicative folksinger. After Baez showed up and straightened out the confusion, Dylan sat down in his room, remembered Brecht and Weill’s Pirate Jenny,a and wrote “When the Ship Comes In,” turning petulance into poetry (not for the first or last time).

  The spur for the next song he sang was also a recent one, but much graver—the assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers on June 12 in Jackson, Mississippi, only hours after President Kennedy had announced his intention to seek new civil rights legislation. Where “When The Ship Comes In” skipped ethereally, “Only a Pawn in Their Game” marched with harsh and funereal determination. The focus of the song is not, in fact, Medgar Evers (though justice is done to the slain leader in the majestic line, “they laid him down like a king”) but the man who shot him, and above all the political system that generated the murder. With its rap-like rhyming and tautly measured explication, the song is driven forward by a contained rage. It insists that we feel the singer’s anger, but it demands more than that.

  The South politician preaches to the poor white man,

  “You got more than the blacks, don’t complain.

  You’re better than them,

  You been born with white skin,”

  They explain . . .

  On a day when everyone else was singing about freedom and deliverance and unity, Dylan was outlining a class-based analysis of the persistence of racism—and the central weight of white-skin privilege within the American polity.

  The summer of 1963 was the apogee of the folk-music craze. Dylan, Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary were its biggest names—but they still meant little to most of the marchers, whose response to the singers was merely polite. What really excited the crowd was the arrival in their midst of the movie stars (Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Burt Lancaster) and the prospect of hearing gospel queen Mahalia Jackson sing later in the afternoon (in this Dylan seems to have agreed with them). After Dylan finished his two songs, he remained at the microphone to join the other folksingers in backing up his friend Len Chandler (one of the few black faces on the Greenwich Village scene) on “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” The whole troupe—Peter, Paul and Mary, Baez, Dylan, Odetta, Josh White, and the SNCCb Freedom Singers—finished the midday entertainment with “We Shall Overcome,” the acknowledged anthem of the movement.