Bob Dylan (7 page)

He wasn't, but the idea clearly appealed to Barnett, who made a strident speech in defense of the principle of segregation on the pitch at half-time of the Ole Miss–Kentucky football game on September 29, as he announced to roars of appreciation that he loved Mississippi, her people and her “customs”—a veiled reference to racism. At the same time, he was indeed cutting a deal with the Kennedys, who had threatened to make the negotiations public on national Television. Meredith, he suggested, could be registered late on Sunday night, September 30; and so, while 300 federal marshals acted as decoys, surrounding the administration building, that evening the black would-be student was smuggled into a campus dormitory. The double-crossing Barnett then announced that the defenders of the Southern way of life had been overpowered, triggering the build-up of an angry mob.

That night, President John F. Kennedy made a televised speech urging the students to comply with the law: “The honor of your university and state are in the balance,” he said. “Let us preserve both the law and the peace and then, healing those wounds that are within, we can turn to the greater crises that are without, and stand united as one people in our pledge to man's freedom.”

Stirring words these may have been, they made little impression on the white students who were, even as he spoke, pelting stones at the federal marshals, who responded with tear-gas. Reluctantly, Kennedy called out the National Guard, but not before the racist students had been joined by older rioters who brought guns, with which they shot 30 marshals and bystanders, killing two people. In all, 300 people were wounded. The battle raged all night but by dawn it was, literally, academic: James Meredith had been registered as a student at Ole Miss. Not, of course, that deeply
ingrained racist attitudes were changed overnight: the troops remained in Oxford until Meredith graduated in the summer of 1963.

The stand-off became one of the emblematic events of the civil rights struggle, and Dylan's rapid response to it—the song was first published in the November 1962 issue of
Broadside
magazine—illustrates the journalistic efficacy of the topical protest song. As he was recording it in early December, John Hammond was trying to persuade Don Law, head of Columbia's Nashville operation, that Dylan ought to be recording with the hot musicians down in Nashville. “You have to come up and hear this Dylan kid,” he told Law, who dropped by the studio just as Dylan was doing ‘Oxford Town'. After listening a while, Law turned to Hammond and said, “My God, John, you can never do this kind of thing in Nashville. You're crazy!”

One of the last songs to be recorded for the
Freewheelin'
album, it seems likely that this talking blues was written to replace the ‘Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues' which had so frightened the Columbia executives. If this is true, the result is very much a net gain: partly improvised in the studio, this is a far superior piece to its bigot-baiting predecessor, whose narrow-focus concerns lay more in the past of the McCarthyite communist witch-hunts than the more pressing problems of the Sixties. ‘Talkin' World War III Blues', by comparison, zeroed in on a couple of more pertinent contemporary issues: America's growing fascination with psychoanalysis that had enabled Alfred Hitchcock to have a hit movie
(Psycho)
based on a specious psychoanalytic theme; and the looming specter of nuclear annihilation, which would soon be coming to a head with the Cuban Missile Crisis. There was also room left in the song for a few offhand side-swipes at things like the gratuitous materialism of automobile adverts (“Cadillac… good car to drive after a war”), and the pitiful state of Tin Pan Alley pop, which was rapidly approaching its nadir at the time (between January and April 1963, when this track was recorded, such giants as Steve Lawrence, Paul & Paula, The Rooftop Singers and Little Peggy March had topped the American charts). The communist witch-hunt theme of ‘Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues' was telescoped into a one-line aside, which is just about what it deserved.

First registered as ‘Corrine Corrina' by Bo Chatman, Mitchell Parish and J.M.Williams in 1932, this lilting blues had been recorded several times by such artists as Blind Lemon Jefferson and most notably on several occasions by Big Joe Turner, before its revival in the early Sixties.

Dylan's version is of a completely different stripe from Turner's good-natured R&B swing, not least through the addition of a verse about having “a bird that whistles… a bird that sings,” adapted from Robert Johnson's ‘Stones In My Passway'. Dylan was at the time clearly fascinated by the mercurial Johnson—an earlier, unreleased solo take of the same song also featured fragments from the legendary bluesman's ‘Me And The Devil Blues' and ‘Hellhound On My Trail', too. Subsequently, he attributed the song's style to another, more mellifluous blues legend, Lonnie Johnson (no relation to Robert), who shares with T-Bone Walker the pioneer status of “inventor of the electric blues.”

“I was lucky to meet Lonnie Johnson at the same club I was working and I must say he greatly influenced me,” Bob admitted later. “You can hear it in ‘Corrina, Corrina'—that's pretty much Lonnie Johnson. I used to watch him and sometimes he'd let me play with him.”

The song features one of Dylan's more beguiling vocal performances, a wistful lamentation in which the depths of his heartbreak are signaled by the gentle falsetto catch in the throat that recurs in the last line of each verse. The inspiration is obviously Suze's absence. The album version is all that resulted from three otherwise largely unproductive sessions with a full backing band, although another take, marked by a wheeze of harmonica on the intro and a more strident harmonica solo in the break, was released prior to the album, as the B-side of ‘Mixed Up Confusion'.

Coming toward the end of a largely downbeat album of protest songs and lovelorn blues, this jaunty adaptation of a song originally written by the Texan country bluesman Henry Thomas offers a more light-hearted, breezy expression of Dylan's pain over his absent woman. It's a swaggering performance, which best exemplifies Dylan's understanding of the blues as a means of cathartic healing, as explained in the sleevenote to
Freewheelin
': “What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time, they were standing outside of them and could look at them. And in that way, they had them beat.”

First recorded for the November 1962 issue of
Broadside
magazine, this comic talking blues trifle closes the album almost as an afterthought, as if the stage performer in Dylan realizes how intense the album is as a whole, and wants to “leave 'em laughing.” He wouldn't be so concerned to do this on later records, but here he goofs around with a cast that includes Yul Brynner, Charles De Gaulle, President Kennedy and several of the world's most beautiful women, to no particular end. Politically incorrect by today's standards, this light-hearted account of Dylan's womanizing does, however, prefigure some of his later work in its tone of blithe nonsense: for one who was being increasingly painted as the serious young spokesman of a generation, Dylan seems determined in this song to keep open his options on different modes of meaning. Or in this case, meaninglessness.

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN'

In the few short months between the release of
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
in May 1963 and
The Times They Are A-Changin'
in January of 1964, Bob Dylan became the hottest property in American music, stretching the boundaries of what had previously been viewed as a largely collegiate folk music audience. His third album would establish him as the undisputed king of protest music, even if as he was being crowned, Dylan was beginning to experience grave misgivings about both that type of song, fame in general and his own position as reluctant leader of a movement—misgivings which grew when, as he was recording
The Times They Are A-Changin'
that November, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. From this point onwards, he would be harder to pin down, both in his songs and in person. “Being noticed can be a burden,” he explained later. “Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.”

There would be significant changes on the personal front, too. Following his first liaison with Joan Baez following the Monterey Folk Festival, rumors quickly spread about the nature of their relationship, placing further stress on his already strained relations with Suze, though she initially doubted that his ego would cope with Baez's fame. “Bobby couldn't love Joan Baez,” she told friends. “He couldn't love
anybody
that big!”

For both parties, this new affiliation was probably motivated as much by career considerations as anything more romantic, blossoming later into a more emotional or sexual connection. For Dylan, the advantages of teaming up with the Queen of Folk were
obvious, given that her reputation and audience were both bigger than his; for her part, Baez recognized songwriting genius when she heard it, and she had heard it when her manager sat her down and made her listen to an acetate of demos Dylan had recorded for his publishers, Witmark. This, she realized, was a talent that far outstripped all his contemporaries. “He wrote songs that hadn't been written yet,” she said later. “There aren't very many good protest songs. They're usually overdone. The beauty of Bobby's stuff is its understatement.”

The Newport Folk Festival, held over the weekend of July 26-28, 1963, was effectively Bob Dylan's coronation. He dominated the gathering, being name-checked constantly as performers covered his songs, and made several appearances of his own—a solo slot on the Friday night, followed by a group encore of ‘We Shall Overcome'; a topical-song workshop event on the Saturday; and a guest slot during Joan's Sunday performance to duet on ‘With God On Our Side', followed by another group encore, this time of ‘This Land Is Your Land'. Every mention of his name was applauded by the audience, eager to acclaim the new star. Meanwhile, backstage and back at the Victory Motel where a coterie of young performers were staying, Dylan had begun to take on the character of a star, strolling around playing with a bullwhip which his rowdy friend Geno Foreman had brought him. It was as if he were assuming command of the genre, cracking the whip on the old guard.

Much to Suze's chagrin, following the festival Dylan accepted an offer of a guest slot on Joan Baez's summer tour, for which Grossman ensured he was paid more than the headline star. After recurring arguments about the state of their relationship, Suze finally moved out of the 4th Street apartment, shortly before Joan and Bob appeared at the August 28 March On Washington, at which Martin Luther King made his celebrated “I Have A Dream” speech. Bob took solace by making visits to Albert Grossman's place near Woodstock in upstate New York. A few weeks later, he took some more time out at Joan's place in Carmel, where he spent his days reading, writing and swimming. It may have seemed idyllic but, he later revealed, they never really talked that much. And though they remained in relatively close contact for a few more years, before too long they both realized they were too different to be together: to Bob, Joan was just too much of a clean-cut, straight-arrow goody-goody; and she, for her part, couldn't bear the nasty, spiteful tone that began to creep into his songs through 1964 and 1965. “Unlike other people, about whom I think I have some kind of sense,” Joan explained three decades later, “I never understood him at all. Not a tweak.”

Joan, however, wasn't the only one mistaken in her view of Dylan. The “spokesman of a generation” began to realize that this new position, foisted upon him by one magazine article after another, was actually more of an imposition, as assorted political groups attempted to make claims on his time. In July, his friend Theodore Bikel had persuaded him to fly down to Greenwood, Mississippi, to perform at a voter-registration drive organized by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, or “Snick”) to increase the black vote in the state. Dylan was pleased to help out a cause he believed in, and he got on well enough with the local farm workers, but not for the first time, he found himself surrounded by activists who seemed to want to lecture him about his responsibilities to the civil rights movement—as if he hadn't shown his commitment by going down there in the first place! And after Joan Baez's concert at Forest Hills, New York, he had been buttonholed at the post-gig party by Clark Foreman, head of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC), who had made him listen to a recording of some screenwriter's speech about the social responsibility of writers! Who needed
that?

What he wanted to do most in the world—write and sing songs—was increasingly being viewed as something in which other people felt they had a say. Plus, Dylan had started to be regarded as some kind of oracle, as if he had all the answers—which was flattering, certainly, but also worrying. Besides which, he was beginning to hate being typecast as just a “protest singer.” “Man, I don't write protest songs,” he claimed. “I just react. I got all these thoughts inside me and I gotta say ‘em.” And not all of these thoughts were exclusively about injustice. Some of them were about himself. “Because Dickens and Dostoevsky and Woody Guthrie were telling their stories much better than I ever could,” he told one newspaper, “I decided to stick to my own mind.”