Bob Dylan (8 page)

His mind could be a lonely place, however, particularly for one with such a natural aversion to crowds. Even at Newport, Dylan had seemed scared by his growing fame, telling friends, “The attention is too much commotion for my body and head.” He had long since realized the value of autobiographical fictions in protecting his real self from unwelcome attention, spreading all kinds of misinformation about himself ever since his earliest days in New York. None of his friends was unduly bothered by this, but they saw a streak of paranoia developing in Dylan around this time, possibly inculcated by Grossman, who assiduously stoked the notion of the “Dylan mystique” and encouraged Bob to think of himself as someone special, apart from the general run of performers. As if he
needed any evidence that this was the case, there was an edge of adulatory hysteria about Dylan's triumphant Carnegie Hall solo concert on October 12, which concluded with him having to be whisked away from a crowd of screaming teenagers who thronged the stage door. By the end of the year, he would write, in a poetic letter to
Broadside
magazine explaining the pressures of his life: “I am now famous by the rules of public famiousity… it snuck up on me an' pulverized me… I never knew what was happenin'.”

Things all came to a ghastly head in December, when Dylan was invited to accept the ECLC's Tom Paine Award at a gala dinner at the Americana Hotel in New York. It was a great honor, the kind he couldn't really refuse—the previous year's recipient had been Bertrand Russell, the philosopher and anti-nuclear campaigner—but Dylan's discomfiture was apparent from the start. “I looked down from the platform and saw a bunch of people who had nothing to do with my kind of politics,” he told Nat Hentoff later. “They were supposed to be on my side but I didn't feel any connection with them.” The audience was substantially made up of older liberals, balding veterans of the Thirties left-wing struggles and victims of the McCarthyite communist witch-hunts of the Forties and
Fifties, but for the occasion, they had dressed up to the nines in furs and jewels. Dylan drank heavily and, when the time came for him to accept his award, he had to be collected from the men's room, somewhat the worse for wear.

His acceptance speech was disastrous, a nightmarish ramble which managed to offend just about everybody. He thanked them for the award on behalf of “everybody that went down to Cuba” because they were, like him, young people. “I only wish that all you people who are sitting out here tonight weren't here and I could see all kind of faces with hair on their head and everything like that,” he burbled, “because you people should be at the beach.” That drew a few laughs, so he warmed to his theme of hair, or lack of it: “Old people, when their hair grows out, they should go out. And I look down to see the people that are governing me and making my rules, and they haven't got any hair on their head. I get very uptight about it.”

From there, he drifted on to the subject of race—“There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there's only up and down, and down is very close to the ground. And I'm trying to go up without thinking of anything trivial such as politics”—and his Negro friends, and then back to Cuba and then, in a classic
faux pas
, arrived by a roundabout route at the subject of Kennedy's assassination. “I have to be honest, I just have to be,” he assured his audience, “as I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don't know exactly… what he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I, too, I saw some of myself in him… I got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt in me. Not to go that far and shoot…” By this time, the appalled silence had turned to a chorus of boos and hisses, which Dylan tried to counter by garbled recourse to the Bill Of Rights and free speech, before he was hustled off the stage and out of the place.

The audience was outraged. Was this youth
really
saying that he sympathized with the assassin? Why had he, of all people, been given the prestigious Tom Paine Award? Was
this
what the ECLC had sunk to? After the speech, the customary donations for the organization were taken from the audience. The depth of the crowd's anger can be gauged by the $6,000 drop on the previous year's donations.

When he sobered up, Dylan was torn between remorse and a desire to explain, and so composed a poem, entitled
A Message
, which he sent to the ECLC. In it, he outlined the circumstances surrounding the speech, and offered to make up to the organization any losses it may have
sustained. His reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, he implied, was as a metaphor for the times, not a direct reference to the assassination: “…if there's violence in the times then/there must be violence in me/I am not a perfect mute/I hear the thunder an I can't avoid hearin' it…” It was some way short of an apology, and left intact his unflattering comparisons of the complacent old liberal audience with his young activist friends. A benefit concert was subsequently agreed, then postponed as Dylan's commitments snowballed over the ensuing years. Despite Clark Foreman's several attempts to collect on the offer of remuneration, Dylan never made up for the lost donations.

It was against a background of personal and public upheaval that Dylan went into the studio in August and October 1963 to record his aptly-titled third album. Where
Freewheelin'
had changed shape between its early sessions, which featured predominantly traditionally-influenced material, and its later sessions, as Dylan's songwriting matured, he was determined to record all original material, and mostly “finger-pointing” protest songs that reflected the social tenor of the times.

The same problems that he had experienced with John Hammond's production, however, recurred with Tom Wilson. Primarily a jazz producer, Wilson was uncertain about the qualities that made for a good folk performance. As a company man he was under pressure not to let the sessions take too long. Dylan felt that he wasn't getting the feedback he needed and that Wilson was settling for inadequate takes. There was no chance of replacing him: the record company dictated that the job be done by a company producer.

Bob invited his friend Paul A. Rothchild, who produced Elektra's folk artists (and who would go on to produce many of The Doors' albums), to visit the studio and sit in front of the console where, unseen by Wilson, he would signal through the control-room window to Dylan if another take was required. With the weight of Rothchild's experience behind him, Dylan felt more secure when challenging his producer's opinions. Notwithstanding the problems, the sessions passed quickly, just three days in August and another two in October furnishing the bulk of the tracks,
with another, final session hastily scheduled to record ‘Restless Farewell' at the end of the month.

The album was released on January 13, 1964, in a sleeve with a rear taken up with a sequence of “11 Outlined Epitaphs,” a series of poems in which Dylan dealt with his past, poetry, politics, accusations of plagiarism, the opinions of critics and the position in which he now found himself. The front cover, featuring Barry Feinstein's photo of a frowning Dylan in an open-necked shirt, told no lies about the album's contents. Compared to the smiling lovers of the
Freewheelin'
sleeve, this one spoke of grit and integrity, pain and hardship, injustice and truth. The intervening nine months, it said, had brought little to laugh about.

The reviews of the album were, to use a critical euphemism, “mixed,” with some critics put off by its incessant gloom, while others applauded the artistry and concern—but Dylan's work had by now assumed a power and momentum of its own that rendered any criticisms redundant. The album cemented his reputation as the era's pre-eminent voice of protest, even as he was turning his back on that arena.

The title-song of his third album effectively restated the message of Dylan's disastrous Tom Paine Award speech—that the old should get out of the way and let the young have their say—but in a manner that caused less offense to his audience, which was, in any case, rather younger than that at the award dinner.

The most explicit of what Dylan called his “finger-pointing” songs, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin'' is a deliberate anthem, in both intention and execution. It is steeped in a self-conscious gravitas, from the earnest sanctimony of Dylan's delivery to the archaic cast of the introductory lines, which carry the same air of impending declamatory moralism as Mark Anthony's “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” speech from Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar
, and which Dylan claimed were influenced by Irish and Scottish ballads such as ‘Come All Ye Bold Highwaymen' and ‘Come All Ye Tender Hearted Maidens'.

It's the battle-hymn of the new republic of youth, bursting with images of overturned order. The lines about the loser winning, and the
slow becoming fast, echo the air of patient inevitability in such biblical promises of revolution as the Sermon on the Mount's suggestion that the meek would inherit the earth, and the lines from the Book Of Ecclesiastes which Pete Seeger adapted for ‘Turn, Turn, Turn' (also echoed in the chorus of Dylan's ‘Percy's Song', which was recorded at the same session and originally intended for inclusion on
The Times They Are A-Changin
'). The climactic line about the first later being last, likewise, is a direct scriptural reference, to Mark 10:31: “But many that are first shall be last, and the last first.”

The hypnotic delivery, and the references to curses being cast and wheels (of fate) still spinning, reinforce the sense of irrevocable historical momentum, as it applied to the changes then sweeping through the consciousness of Western youth. It would be five years before the student protest movement that grew out of the civil rights struggles of the early Sixties would make its presence felt abroad, with riots in Paris and demonstrations in London, but the song's few specifically American references, to senators and congressmen, didn't prevent it from becoming the pre-eminent international anthem of the emergent youth culture.

The song's effectiveness resides in its dialectical union of personal and collective drives: each individual, it suggests, must make his or her own choice—but that choice could only be to join the rising tide of change, or be “drenched to the bone” by it. Conversely, aligning oneself with a tide of change should only be done through personal deliberation, not through herd instinct. Collectivity, Dylan implies, does not absolve one from individual responsibility.

For Dylan himself, the song's central message was brought into frighteningly sharp, yet confusing, focus by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Friday, November 22, 1963. The next night, Dylan began a concert in upstate New York with the song. “I thought, ‘Wow, how can I open with that song? I'll get rocks thrown at me,'” he later told biographer Anthony Scaduto. “But I had to sing it, my whole concert takes off from there. I know I had no understanding of anything. Something had just gone haywire in the country, and they were applauding that song. And I couldn't understand why they were clapping or why I wrote that song, even. I couldn't understand anything. For me, it was just insane.”

In 1994, Dylan demonstrated just how much the times had changed when he allowed the accountants Coopers Lybrand to use a version of the song in a commercial.

In its attempt to raise sympathy for the plight of poor farm-workers, the windblown fatalism of ‘Ballad Of Hollis Brown' represents perhaps the last gust of Woody Guthrie's direct influence on Dylan's songwriting. It's a vivid enough portrait of desperate rural poverty, with dark, looming portents in the images of dry wells, blackened grass, diseased horses and encroaching rats, but the intimations of pre-determined destiny in the final two verses' “seven breezes,” “seven shots,” “seven dead” and “seven new people born” undercut the song's impact as a social statement: is Dylan suggesting the farmer's awful plight was completely foredoomed in some way? And if so, doesn't that downgrade the tragedy?

The song is one of the least effective of Dylan's protest vignettes, not least for its weakness regarding causation: though the South Dakota farmer may have had a run of bad luck, it's ultimately hard to feel that much sympathy for someone reckless enough to have five children—one,
we learn, a baby—which he clearly cannot support. In the end, Hollis Brown appears not just dirt-poor and tragic, but stupid, feckless (in letting his farm deteriorate in such a manner), ruthless and spiteful (in shooting his family, making them pay the price of his incompetence). As a heart-tugger on behalf of country folk, the song failed.

‘Ballad Of Hollis Brown' did, however, come into its own later in Dylan's career, when it was one of the songs he performed at Live Aid, July 13, 1985, where he explained, “I thought that was a fitting song for this important social occasion… I'd just like to say that I hope that some of the money that's raised for the people in Africa, maybe they could take just a little bit of it—maybe one or two million maybe—and use it, say, to pay the mortgages on some of the farms, that the farmers owe to the banks.” It was a typically contrary Dylan gesture, cutting through the event's overpowering air of smug self-satisfaction with a reminder that capitalism was quite happy to chew up its own heartland as well as the Third World.

This elegiac anti-war ballad was one of the most popular and widely-performed of Dylan's protest pieces in the early Sixties. Its mournful tune—taken from Irish writer Dominic Behan's rebel song ‘The Patriot Game'—sounds like a funeral march for national integrity, which is in effect what the song comprises.

Adopting the persona of a nameless everyman from the American midwest, the narrator considers his country's military history, as he was taught in school—from the conquest of the native Indians, then the Mexicans and Confederates, on through two World Wars, up to the point where his country trembles on the brink of nuclear war with Russia—and realizes that on each occasion, the war-mongers have claimed they were fighting on God's behalf. The song concludes with him hoping that if God is indeed on our side, he'll stop the next war. It's an elegant, neatly-turned piece, complete with a sly, sardonic reference to how, despite the Holocaust, the forgiven Germans now have God (in the form of the US) on their side; but the penultimate verse, in which he wonders whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side too, disrupts the flow, a too-cute conceit which Dylan couldn't bring himself to leave out.