Bob Dylan (32 page)

There are Dan Bern’s dogged attempts to embody both Bob Dylan and Mother Teresa, the Indigo Girls actually mixing sex, humor, rhythm, and politics in a convincing manner with their hit “Shame on You,” and the James Taylor-soundalike radio commercials for Lucky Supermarkets. There’s something for everybody. But before one takes the possibly risky step of, say, listening to Nanci Griffith sing “If I Had a Hammer” on
Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger,
or Bern suffer over Monica Lewinsky and the Oklahoma City bombing, it’s worth casting back to a scene from
Animal House.

It’s toga night at the lowest fraternity on campus, somewhere on the East Coast sometime during the Kennedy administration, and John Belushi, dressed as a Roman senator and already drunk, descends from his room to join the festivities. On the staircase he encounters a neatly dressed preppie (Stephen Bishop, who might as well be playing himself) charming several steps’ worth of sorority sisters with his rendition of “I Gave My Love a Cherry.” Belushi pauses. A quizzical expression falls over his face, as if he’s contemplating a fundamental question of ontology, or about to deliver an address on the destruction of Carthage. His face darkens. You begin to hear this innocent little folk ditty as he does: as a contradiction of all that is vital and true in the history of mankind. Thus Belushi calls upon the spirit of “Louie Louie”: he grabs Bishop’s guitar
from his hands and smashes it with a single blow. “Sorry,” he says, handing back the wreckage. Sometimes, he seems to be telling us as he stumbles down the stairs, you just have to do what’s right.

There are thirty-nine performances in the opera of sententiousness, sentimentality, condescension, and children’s choruses that is
Where Have All the Flowers Gone,
and not all of them are bad, any more than all protest songs are bad. Roger McGuinn couldn’t do a bad version of “The Bells of Rhymney,” which is a great protest song, and John Stewart couldn’t harm “Old Riley,” which is about playing the banjo. But the purity of heart, the certainty of righteousness, the inexplicability of doubt, and the smooth, genteel, utterly harmless surfaces of the music, whatever the style, is like a disease. As one wades across this double CD—which has a lot less to say about the indomitability of the human soul than the recently released four-CD set
Bird Call! The Twin City Stomp of the Trashmen,
a band known only for its single hit, the 1963 “Surfin’ Bird”—one realizes that Pete Seeger’s songs, whether sung by him or by Judy Collins, Richie Havens, Bragg, Tim Robbins, Odetta, DiFranco, Bruce Cockburn, or any number of others, really are about one world: his. “So I ask the killers, do you sleep at night?” Kim and Reggie Harris sing with deep concern and insufferable piety on “Those Three Are on My Mind,” Seeger’s tribute to civil rights workers murdered by police and Klansmen in Mississippi in 1964, and in the real world there is a simple answer: “Yes.”

Dan Bern isn’t obvious about the fact that he belongs in this company; for that matter, he comes on as a sort of folkie John Belushi. A Midwesterner who knows he’s going to be pegged as a New Dylan and figures he’ll live through it, he wears his sense of humor on his sleeve. He has an exuberant grasp of broken rhythms that translates as an affirmation of radical individualism: a song is what he says it is, even if it sounds like a collection of mistakes. He wants desperately to be annoying: class clown, practical joker, fart champion, arsonist. Whatever it takes, he’s game. He kicks off his second full-length album,
Fifty Eggs,
with a half-crazed rant about how big his balls are; it’s stupid and it’s funny. But halfway
through, even if you’re laughing, the insistence that this is a satire of male bragging takes over. Bern doesn’t want you to think he thinks his balls are as big as Jupiter. Call him an asshole, no problem; on the wrong side, never. It’s the same with “Cure for AIDS,” “Chick Singers,” “Different Worlds,” about sexual freedom, sexism, and racism; they aren’t bad songs, they’re fun to listen to, for a while, but they want so badly to please while pretending they want to get under your skin that before long you may not trust a sound out of Bern’s mouth. He acts like the last guy on earth you’d want cornering you at a party.

Legend has it that John Belushi could be pretty horrible at a party himself, but it’s too bad he’s not here to take up the good fight once again. The whole way of being in the world that he smashed on that staircase long ago is with us still.

 

Billy Bragg and Wilco,
Mermaid Avenue
(Elektra, 1998).

 

Where Have All the Flowers Gone—The Songs of Pete Seeger
(Appleseed, 1998).

 

Trashmen,
Bird Call! The Twin City Stomp of the Trashmen
(Sundazed, 1998).

 

Dan Bern,
Fifty Eggs
(Work, 1998).

April 1999

 

The pop moment I’ve found most affecting in the last few months comes at the end of
Little Voice,
when Michael Caine’s wiped-out sleazeball promoter gets up drunk on a nightclub stage and sings a horrible, self-flagellating version of Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over.” The
classic song has been rubbed smooth by decades of overplay, but now it’s ripped into someone else’s story so violently you may never again be able to hear it as an innocent object, as a kind of toy. Now it has been brought into a play about real life—or the play of life as such.

I couldn’t get Caine’s scene out of my head. I began to think about how songs survive—and one of the ways songs survive is that they mutate. Once you start thinking this way, it’s like listening to a new radio station: a vampiric, surrealist station where nobody knows what time it is and everything happens at once.

Sometimes this happens subtly, around the margins, in soundtracks or commercials. The song is moved just slightly off the map we normally use to orient ourselves—but in a way that, in a year or ten, may completely change how we hear it, what associations we bring to it. Pop songs are always talked about as the soundtrack to our lives, when all that means is that pop songs are no more than containers for nostalgia. But lives change, and so do soundtracks. Even if they’re made up of the same songs.

Etta James’s “At Last” was a number two R&B hit in 1961, and a bare pop hit. After that it lived a quiet life in a small, neat house on a poor street—until last year, when the musical director for
Pleasantville
came knocking. In James’s hands the record was a soft exhalation after years of silent suffering, a sweep of passion so full of doubt it all but turns in on itself, and it was used to orchestrate the most romantic scene in the movie: a boy and a girl, connecting for the first time, driving into the sylvan glade of Lover’s Lane as the novelty of their emotions brings new color streaming into their black-and-white 1950s sitcom world. The bucolic set-up was too good to leave to the movie, though—and now, just months after the film’s release, you can see the scene replayed, tree for tree and leaf for leaf, in a Jaguar commercial. But while in the movie the song is a forgotten voice brought back to speak as if for the first time, blessing the young lives it’s dramatizing, in the commercial the song completely escapes. It’s too unrushed, too patient, to be used as the commercial wants to use it: to make you want something,
right now. So it turns and walks away—not back to the history books, but back to Pleasantville.

Where Bob Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” has gone is a trickier question. Dylan supposedly wrote it after attending the 1963 March on Washington, where he and others sang for equal justice. There was a story in the paper about a white rich man’s son in Baltimore, William Zantzinger, who, drunk at a society party, had beaten a black woman to death.
¹⁴
The song Dylan wrote was solemn, elegant, and almost unbearably painful. In the last verse his song turned bitter and ugly, and he sprang the fact on which, for him, the story turned: “For penalty and repentance . . . A six-month sentence.” When you listen, it’s as if Dylan can barely expel the last word. It breaks and stumbles, as if the singer will never not be shocked.

Thirty-four years later, in 1997, the Baltimore cop show
Homicide
ran three episodes about the murder of a Haitian maid employed by a rich Baltimore family; the father, played by James Earl Jones, had shielded his guilty son. Why? Because of William Zantzinger, the Jones character says, and he tells the old story in Bob Dylan’s words, as if they are now part of a bible, as if a white man’s crime should pay for a black man’s, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—even if in both cases the eyes that close are those of a poor black woman. “In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel, to show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level,” Jones explained to Andre Braugher’s detective, too young to remember, and so long after the fact, or before the new fact, that it was impossible to read his tone: “The ladder of law has
no top and no bottom.” But the law had a top and a bottom for Zantzinger, Jones was saying: Doesn’t my boy deserve the same? A song that was once so clear, that sounded as if its words might be chiseled over some courthouse door, now seemed to make no sense at all.

Then last December 8, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, the Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz stirred the broth one more time. Among a group of scholars arguing against Bill Clinton’s impeachment on various Constitutional grounds, Wilentz seemed to come out of nowhere, pugnacious, angry, granting Republican representatives no more respect than he would a well-dressed lynch mob. He denounced the argument “that if we impeach the president, the rule of law will be vindicated if only in a symbolic way, proving forcefully that no American is above the law and that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom.” Nonsense, he said: the offenses of which Clinton is accused put no Constitutional principle in jeopardy—and if you vote for impeachment for any reason found outside the Constitution, out of vengeance or for gain, “History will track you down.”

With those last words, Wilentz recovered the voice of the song that, through blind quotation, he had made part of the official historical record of the nation—a voice of suppressed and bitter fury. (“I got tired of Henry Hyde describing Clinton as if he were William Zantzinger,” Wilentz says.) In his way, Wilentz was singing a Bob Dylan song as badly as Michael Caine sings “It’s Over” in
Little Voice
—and as fully. I can’t listen to Roy Orbison’s original anymore: compared to Caine’s version it sounds bloated and strained, where Caine’s is all sweat and self-loathing. The song itself may be over—or, rather, definitively appropriated, never to be given back. As for Dylan’s song, like Etta James’s, you can think it has just begun to travel, a mutant now, limbs fallen off, strange sores appearing, the sores growing into whole new bodies.

 

Little Voice,
directed by Mark Herman (Miramax, 1998).

 

Pleasantville,
directed by Gary Ross (New Line, 1998).

Bob Dylan, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” from
The Times They Are A-Changin’
(Columbia, 1964). On 9 February 2010, Dylan sang a slow, spare, musing version of the title song from the album at the White House for A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement; it’s hard to imagine that “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” could ever lose its flesh, or that had Dylan offered it instead that night, it wouldn’t have stopped the night dead in its tracks. For an unparalleled reading of the song, see Christopher Ricks, “Bob Dylan,” in
Hiding in Plain Sight,
edited by Wendy Lesser, San Francisco: Mercury House, 1993.

 

Homicide: Life on the Street
(NBC), “Blood Ties” episodes 79-80, Oct. 17, 24, 31, 1997.
Homicide: The Complete Season 6
(A&E Home Video, 2005).

20 January 2000

 

The best words on Rick Danko, who died in his sleep on 10 December 1999, at fifty-six, were written thirty-four years ago, almost to the day he died, by the late Ralph J. Gleason. Bob Dylan had come to San Francisco with his new backing band, the Hawks. The noise they made was stupendous, and most eyes were focused on the center of the stage, where the action seemed to be, with Dylan and lead guitarist Robbie Robertson facing each other for the choruses, playing head to head, hand to hand. Gleason, though, was drawn to the left, where the young bass player moved with an uncannily graceful yet somehow violent rhythm, as if he were cracking the rest of the band like a whip—as if, secretly, he were the scientist behind the alchemy. Writing in the
San Francisco Chronicle
on Dylan’s Bay Area shows, Gleason, thinking of the concrete cylinder that shoots up over the city from Telegraph Hill, summed up Danko more directly: “He looked,” wrote a man who had covered Hank Williams, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Elvis Presley, “like he could swing Coit Tower.”

You can hear that happen on a song that emerged on the Dylan-Hawks tour, “Tell Me, Momma,” as it was played in Manchester, England, on 17 May 1966. By then the combo was using the tune as the kickoff for its shows; this performance, this night, cracks it open. Now, there was always a lot of gospel in Rick Danko’s bass, a lot of Motown, with Funk Brother James Jamerson’s fingers reaching the short distance from Detroit to Danko’s home ground in Ontario, just across the border. The muscular, syncopated thumps that open the Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek,” the stiffening attack in its demo cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Don’t Do It,” the pulse in “Chest Fever”—it’s all power, all control. But on “Tell Me, Momma,”
you’re hearing a hipster, someone who can’t be surprised, who knows there’s a twist he can put in every story, someone who’ll be looking the other way when it hits you. With a heedlessness that would rarely be present when the Hawks turned into the Band, everybody on the Manchester stage is hurling himself into this performance: Dylan is soaring like an eagle diving in and out of a stampede just to egg the cattle on, but off to the side, a funny grin on his face, Danko is both keeping the charge going and waiting for the moment when he will ease right out of it, step back and seal it. It’s just a three-note pattern, coming up again and again when for a second the song needs to be suspended, when the boys have shot over a cliff, looked down, decided they don’t care and kept going.
Rrrrum-bum-bum,
Danko says with his bass, flipping the whole enormous piece of music to the drummer. The move is so casual, so striking, that there’s a split second before the drummer accepts the song, slashing down on his cymbal, kicking the music back to the group as a whole. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever heard.