Bob Dylan (9 page)

Dylan's attitude toward God—or at least toward organized religion—had been ambivalent, to say the least. Only in his later career did he
make overt statements of specific religious belief, and for many fans and observers they didn't gel too well with earlier statements on the subject, such as those in the interview he gave to Izzy Young of
Sing Out!
magazine around the time he was recording his first album: “Got no religion. Tried a bunch of different religions. The churches are divided. Can't make up their minds, and neither can I. Never saw a god; can't say until I see one.”

He has, however, always been keenly aware of biblical discourse as a useful storehouse of mythopoeic folk imagery, littering his songs with references to parables and prophets; and as he got involved with the civil rights movement, Dylan surely recognized the commitment of church leaders like Martin Luther King, and the strength King's followers drew from their faith. Indeed, many of his own songs from this period suggest his acknowledgment that protest anthems are, in effect, secular hymns, and his delivery frequently takes on a sermonizing cast.

Set against this understanding, however, was a deeply-rooted belief that God, in his role as publicity agent for the organized churches, was not on the side of the angels, but working for the system against the interests of the underdog. ‘With God On Our Side' manages to articulate all these complex conflicts of interpretation, mocking the notion of a god that can be manipulated by politicians into justifying war, yet ultimately appealing to that same god to stop the next war. By comparison, the bullying fundamentalism of his later born-again Christian songs seems simplistic and small-minded, and more than a little mean-spirited.

This calm, reflective mood piece is clearly indicative of Dylan's increasingly problematic relationship with Suze Rotolo. There is a resignation that the protagonists are drifting slowly but irrevocably apart, and that it's Dylan's fault, just as much as Suze's—“You're right from your side, I'm right from mine.”

While Suze had been away in Italy, Bob had used her absence as a creative spur, letting his muse feed off the emotional pain, while preserving her as an idealized memory. When she returned, it became apparent that they had both done a lot of growing-up in the intervening seven months, and, they slowly realized (Bob more reluctantly than Suze), a lot of growing apart, too. Bob had become something of a star, and Suze had become a more assertive young woman, but Bob still craved the attentions of the more supportive, “Bob-centric” girl who had left for Italy.

Though Suze moved back into the 4th Street apartment shortly after returning from Italy, the old magic had gone—friends reported that they didn't seem to talk as much and that they spent a lot of time just watching television. As the summer of 1963 wore on, with Dylan's star increasingly in the ascendant, the incessant rumors of a liaison between him and Joan Baez took their toll on Suze. “What kind of rumors do you hear about Bobby and Joanie?” she asked Terri Van Ronk at the Newport Folk Festival that July. “The same kind of rumors you hear,” replied her friend.

In September, Suze moved in to her sister Carla's apartment in the East Village, where Bob followed her, eventually moving in with the sisters—a situation which placed an intolerable burden on all three of them. A miserable Christmas with Suze's mother in New Jersey was followed by the embarrassment of a party at Carla's apartment during which Bob's outlandish friend Geno Foreman—son of the celebrated liberal activist Clark Foreman—burst in shouting, “Hey Bobby! Heard you're makin' it with Baez, man! She any good?” Bob's six-week road trip brought things to head: as the trip wound on, he phoned Suze less and less, and when he got back to New York, he seemed meaner and more sarcastic than before. The final break-up came shortly after his return in March 1964, following a storming row at Carla's apartment (see entry for ‘Ballad In Plain D').

‘One Too Many Mornings' seems poised on the cusp of self-knowledge, a moment of contemplative stillness in the eye of an emotional
hurricane. Some fans of Dylan's protest anthems found the song's introspective tone and personal subject-matter a betrayal of the “finger-pointing” principles underlying nearly all the rest of the album's songs. It is, however, more of a breakthrough than a betrayal, marking one of the earliest realizations in his work that simple black and white answers may not be applicable to more complex emotional issues.

For the second time in the space of five tracks, listeners are invited to “Come gather round” the storyteller—a miner's wife in this instance—as she relates her mournful ballad of hard times in the iron-ore mining district of Minnesota. As with so many of Dylan's protest songs, there is a resonance that goes beyond the immediate situation, returning to haunt subsequent
similar events. Here the narrator, having already lost a brother and father to mining disasters, suffers again when the mine is closed: her husband turns to drink and eventually disappears, leaving her alone to bring up their three children. In the recession years of the late Eighties and early Nineties, particularly as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) began to bite, the succinct seventh-verse explanation of free-trade economics—basically, that there's always some poor foreigner who can undercut your labor wage—took on a starkly premonitory tone, suggesting that the ravages of capitalism are both cyclical and inescapable.

The song is undoubtedly one of the more personal of Dylan's protest offerings, set as it is on the Iron Ranges where he lived as a child, among the endless acreage of spoil tips and strip-mines that made up the Eastern Mesabi Range. The town of Hibbing, where he grew up, started off in the 1890s as an iron-ore version of one of the Klondike gold-rush boom-towns of California. Following a slump in the early years of this century, John D. Rockefeller was able to buy up the entire range cheap and sell it on at a huge profit to US Steel, who pillaged the earth at an unprecedented rate, supplying a quarter of America's iron from vast open-cast mines. One such mine, the Hull-Rust Pit, measured almost four miles long and one mile across by the time young Robert Zimmerman was around to peer into it. More earth was dug from this hole, it's said, than was excavated for the entire Panama Canal.

By the early 1950s, most of the ore had been mined, and the area slipped into another localized depression. Dylan himself didn't come from a poor mining family —as he explains in the second of the “11 Outlined Epitaphs” which comprise the album's liner-notes, “my parents were not rich… an' my parents were not poor”—but it was impossible not to notice the effect of the mining slump in this “dyin' town.” Bob's dad, Abe, ran a store, Zimmerman's Furniture & Electric, selling appliances and furniture to the town's 18,000 inhabitants. As soon as Bob was old enough, Abe would make him go out collecting hire-purchase payments in the poorer sections of town, even though he knew his customers wouldn't be able to pay. “I just wanted to show him another side of life,” explained Abe. “He'd come back and say, ‘Dad, these people haven't got any money.' And I'd say, ‘Some of those people out there make just as much money as I do, Bobby. They just don't know how to manage it.''

“Bob hated it most of all when he had to repossess stuff from people who couldn't pay,” recalled his first girlfriend, Echo Helstrom. “I think that's where he started feeling sorry for poor people.” Certainly, it's easy
to imagine how the combination of, on the one hand, the heart-breaking poverty of redundant miners' families, and on the other, the huge gaping holes left by the earth-raping multinational mining companies, might have stirred the first sore flutterings of a sense of injustice in the young Bob Dylan's heart: these faceless corporations simply tore holes in everything, the human spirit just as easily as the ground. Hardly surprising, then, that he did exactly as the miner's wife advises in the song, barely waiting till he was grown before he fled the town, there being nothing left there to hold him.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)'s chief organizer in Mississippi, Medgar Evers, was murdered in his front yard in June 1963, possibly an enraged racist's response to the enrollment of two black students at the University of Alabama (where Governor George Wallace made a token attempt at obstructing their entry to the premises) earlier that day.

Ironically, as Evers was being shot that evening, President John F. Kennedy was celebrating the successful demolition of another bastion of segregation in a televised speech which claimed, “This is one country; it has become one country because all of us and all of the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents. We cannot say to ten percent of the population that… the only way they are going to get their rights is to go into the streets and demonstrate.” He was, of course, wrong: further racist outrages stained that year, culminating in the murder of four young girls at worship when Birmingham, Alabama's 16th Avenue Baptist Church was bombed at the end of the summer.

Evers' death baffled and infuriated Kennedy, who had previously tried to compromise with the segregationists. He admitted to Arthur Schlesinger, “I don't understand the South… when I see this sort of thing, I begin to wonder how else you can treat them.” To show solidarity, Kennedy had his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, attended Evers' funeral, and he invited Evers' family to the White House; his policy of appeasement, meanwhile, was consigned to the garbage, as he sought to impose desegregation on the South.

Protest singers were quick to respond to the murder, in drearily didactic songs like Phil Ochs' ‘The Ballad Of Medgar Evers', a typically quotidian account of Evers' life and death which did little to rouse spirits, rally energies or inspire thought. ‘Only A Pawn In Their Game', which Dylan first performed at a voter-registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, on July 6, 1963 (captured in footage included in D.A. Pennebaker's film
Don't Look Back)
, was a more telling, elegant work, establishing Evers' death in the very first line and then, rather than just condemning the killer, considering the underlying causes—institutionalized poverty, the divide-and-conquer policies of demagogic Southern politicians—which had led a pathetic white man to commit such a cowardly act.

This method, of moving from the detail to the larger picture, was one that Dylan had recently used in another song, ‘Who Killed Davey Moore?', debuted in April 1963 but never recorded. Both works take specific events as the central core of songs which quickly spin out to more generalized conclusions, the first implicating fight officials, promoters and audiences in the death of boxer Davey Moore, and the second consigning Evers' killer to a marginal role as a tiny cog in the huge machine of institutionalized racism. While Evers was buried “as a king,” Dylan concludes, his killer's epitaph will state that he was “only a pawn in their game.”

The song's intelligence and deft design set standards none of Dylan's contemporaries could match, marking him out as not simply a journalistic protest singer, but a political philosopher too. But, ironically, the increased depth at which Dylan was now beginning to work, both technically and imaginatively, would soon lead to a style of composition which effectively reversed this process of deriving general conclusions from particular events: in his later Sixties work, the turbulent, multifarious characteristics of an entire cultural
zeitgeist
would be boiled down into some of the most inscrutably personal songs ever written.

Dylan himself has described ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather' succinctly as “This is girl leaves boy,” and that just about covers it, though not quite as tenderly and elegantly as the song itself. It's yet another song inspired directly by the absence of Suze Rotolo on her Italian trip, though here
Dylan transposes the location to Spain in order to accommodate the punchline. A girl, about to depart for Spain, asks her lover what sort of gift he'd like her to send back to him; nothing, he answers, but her safe return. When, shortly after, she sends a letter from the ship telling him she may be gone for longer than planned, he realizes she doesn't feel for him as he does for her, and decides that, yes, she can send him something: a pair of boots —the suggestion being that even if she does return, he will likely have traveled on himself, rambling off down the road that figures in so many of his songs.

‘Boots Of Spanish Leather' was written while Dylan was on a visit to Italy in the first week of 1963 with the black folk singer Odetta. Bob had hoped to meet with Suze in Italy, but his expectations were dashed when he learned that she had left for New York a few weeks earlier. Like another song he wrote in Italy, ‘Girl From The North Country', the tune to ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather' leans heavily on the traditional folk song ‘Scarborough Fair', which he had recently learned from the English folk singer Martin Carthy.

This was the earliest and most explicit example of the religious imagery that would continue in Dylan songs through the Eighties. Though ‘With God On Our Side' mentions the deity, it is not built of religious images, the way that ‘When The Ship Comes In' is. The ship referred to here is the Ship Of God, or Noah's Ark—a vessel of salvation created to protect its passengers from the storms which would wreak God's vengeance upon unbelievers and the wicked. The opening lines echo Revelations 7:1, where “no wind might blow on earth or sea or against any tree,” though Dylan's Judgment Day contains the spookily surreal additions of laughing fishes and smiling seagulls.

It's a hymn of victory over the immoral and iniquitous, to lift hearts saddened by the roll-call of injustice that makes up most of
The Times
They Are A-Changin'
. It's as close as folk protest gets to happy-clappy Christianity, with a vindictiveness to its self-righteous apocalyptism, notably in the final verse, where the drowning of the foes is greeted with distasteful triumphalism. The bitter tone arises from the circumstances of the song's birth. According to Joan Baez, the pair arrived at a hotel where the desk clerk snubbed Bob, but when Joan went in to check, the staff responded, “Hello Miss Baez, we've been waiting for you.” Bob poured his anger into the song. “He wrote it that night,” she recalled to Anthony Scaduto, “took him exactly one evening to write it, he was so pissed… I couldn't believe it, to get back at those idiots so fast.”