Bob Dylan (56 page)

Dylan wrote and sang long, detailed songs about racial injustice, from “The Death of Emmett Till” to “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” to “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” called “The Death of Medgar Evers” when Dylan sang it on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington in 1963. He wrote visionary protest songs, like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” He wrote funny protest songs like “Talking World War III Blues,” where he dreamed of himself alone in the city after the bomb has fallen: he walks into a Cadillac dealership, gets into a Cadillac, and heads out. “Good car to drive,” he says with a smile-when-you-say-that pause: “Good car to drive . . . after a war.”

Most of all, Dylan wrote and sang songs that told stories about the wrong inside a nation that believed it was always right: “With God on Our Side,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Blowin’ in the Wind.” These were the songs that brought Bob Dylan into the common imagination of the nation, and those were the songs that fixed him there. “You have to have power and dominion over the spirits,” Dylan said in 2004, in
Chronicles,
of what it took to write these songs.

But even in the heyday of the protest song, “Masters of War” seemed like too much. Too sententious, too self-righteous, too full of itself—stilted, as if it was less a matter of someone writing a protest song than the protest song as such spontaneously generating its own copy, or its own cartoon. “You hide in your mansion / While young people’s blood/ flows out of their bodies / And into the mud,” Dylan sang in “Masters of War”—still, that almost was poetry compared to “You Been Hiding too Long,” another Bob Dylan protest song from the same moment.

“Come all you phony super-patriotic—” OK, stop right there, we don’t need to hear any more—but there is more, a lot more, no melody, no rhythm, no meter, no heart, no conviction, really no song at all, but press a button and the protest song comes out: “You lie and mislead / You—for your aims and your selfish greed . . . Don’t think that I’ll ever stand on your side . . .” And on, and on, and on.

This song is so awful it’s been erased from Dylan’s published song collections. Look through the Archive section on his Web site: it isn’t there. Dylan probably never recorded it. He may have only performed it once, at a concert in New York in 1963, when he also sang “Masters of War”—but this self-congratulatory spew is inside “Masters of War” as much as President Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address about the military-industrial complex, which Dylan would later claim as his inspiration: “The spirit was in the air,” he said in 2001, as if he were quoting himself, “and I picked it up.” This song is the deformed spawn of the impulses behind “Masters of War.” Even if “You’ve Been Hiding Too Long” was only performed
once, it was once too often: someone had a tape recorder that night, and thirty years later the thing turned up on a bootleg.

Unlike “You’ve Been Hiding Too Long,” “Masters of War” does have a melody—the melody of “Nottamun Town,” a British folk song that might go back five hundred years, though it seems older than that, from a time beyond historical ken. In the feeling it carries, it seems to come from the devastation that fell on Arthur’s kingdom when Guinevere turned to Lancelot.

It’s often described as a nonsense song; that’s the last thing it is. Today it communicates as 20th century surrealism in 16th century clothes: “Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down . . . Come a stark-naked drummer a-beating the drum . . . Ten thousand stood round me, yet I was alone . . . Ten thousand got drownded that never was born.” It is a protean song, bottomless: just as Dylan took its melody for “Masters of War,” he took its language for “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” where a man travels the world and returns with a tale to tell: “I heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazing / Heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening . . . I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken.” And yet even in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” which is a great song, Dylan couldn’t find the road that would take him all the way back to the strangeness of “Nottamun Town”—where the world turns upside down, and the curse is that, somehow, nothing has changed. “Ten thousand got drownded that never was born”: this is the first protest song; this is the end of the world.

The British song collector Cecil Sharpe found “Nottamun Town” in Kentucky in 1917; the old ballads had held their shape in Appalachia far longer than they had in Britain. Traditional versions of “Nottamun Town” were in a major key; that put a sardonic smile in the music. But at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, Dylan heard a version in a minor key by the Cambridge folk singer Jackie Washington.

The twist put a chill on the melody. It gave Dylan an opening into the bad dream he was after for “Masters of War”: shadowed, doomstruck, the sound of a funeral procession, or a crowd chasing one.

Dylan himself stopped singing the song by 1964. Songs like “Masters of War” were “lies that life is black and white,” he sang that year. The protest song was a prison of meaning, or anti-meaning; Dylan’s refusal of the protest song was a prison break. Protest songs destroyed the songs that gave them life, ate them. As “Nottamun Town” disappeared into the belly of “Masters of War,” you could understand that protest songs were themselves cannibals.

Singing “Masters of War,” knowing what lay behind it, Dylan might have flinched at what he had himself created: flinched at how he’d cheated “Nottamun Town” of its own mysteries, cheated it to make a point or outrun his folk-song rivals. He might have stepped back at the recognition that audiences didn’t want to be taken to far distant lands that never were, let alone to a world that made no sense—they wanted to be told that the world was exactly what they thought it was. They wanted to be told that the world was divided into two sides, right and wrong, and they wanted to be told that they were right. And that’s what he gave them.

It was a sensibility—a way of being the world—that has never gone away. In 1988, Sut Jhally of the University of Massachusetts and Ian Angus of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia published an anthology called
Cultural Politics in Contemporary America.
In their introduction, they attacked Bruce Springsteen for his protest song “Born in the U.S.A.” They attacked him because that song—released in 1984, a song about a Vietnam veteran who, a decade after the war ended, still feels like an outcast in his own country—could be heard, and understood, in more than one way. Ronald Reagan could appropriate it for a campaign speech, trumpeting the song as a celebration of shared values—even though someone else might have heard the song as damning the betrayal of those values. But John Lennon protest songs, Jhally and Angus said, were different—such absolutely forgotten work as “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” “Attica State,” “Angela,” for Angela Davis, and “John Sinclair,” which FBI agents in an audience for a John Lennon-Yoko Ono concert in Detroit reported “probably will become a million-seller”—even though, the agents wrote in their report, inaugurating the new genre of FBI rock criticism, “Yoko
Ono can’t even remain on key” and the song itself “was lacking Lennon’s usual standards.”

John Lennon “suffered from no such ambiguity” as Bruce Springsteen, Jhally and Angus said, and there was “no possible misunderstanding of his art”—and really, aren’t they writing like FBI agents in academic clothes? Forget that when there is no possibility of misunderstanding, there is no art. That is what Bob Dylan remembered when he stopped singing “Masters of War.”

Dylan brought “Masters of War” back into his repertoire in the late 1970s. He was playing more than a hundred shows a year, and to fill the nights he brought back everything. It was a crowdpleaser, the number-one protest song even before anyone bothered to run a poll on the question. Even so many years after the fact, many of Bob Dylan’s fans were still uncomfortable with songs that didn’t divide the world into right and wrong; they still liked the old protest songs the best. But nothing in the song as Dylan was playing it the second time around hinted at what it would turn into on 21 February 1991, at the Grammy Awards telecast, where Dylan was to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award.

These days Lifetime Achievement Awards at the Grammys are handed out like parking passes; most of the many recipients don’t even bother to show up. In 1991 the idea was new; it was a big deal. And that year the Grammy show came square in the middle of the first Iraqi-American war—as television, a break from round-the-clock footage of the bombing of Baghdad.

Just a week or two before, at the unprestigious American Music Awards telecast, Donnie Wahlberg of the pioneering boy-band New Kids on the Block appeared wearing a “WAR SUCKS” T-shirt. It was a brave thing to do. He had a lot to lose, and he may have lost his career—today Donnie Wahlberg is mostly remembered as the older brother of the actor Mark Wahlberg, who in 1991 was still the would-be rap star Marky Mark. The Grammys officials announced that nothing like what Donnie Wahlberg had done would take place on their show.

“Uncle Bobby,” Jack Nicholson said, introducing Dylan, as Dylan and his four-piece band came onstage to play one song. In dark
suits, with fedoras pulled down over their faces, the musicians looked like small-time hipster gangsters who’d spent the previous ten years in the same bar waiting for the right deal to break and finally said the hell with it; Dylan held himself with authority, as if he were the bartender. He looked terrible, bloated and pig-eyed. He wore a gray hat and there was a white thunderbolt on his red guitar strap.

It was an instantly infamous performance, and one of the greatest of Dylan’s career. He sang “Masters of War,” but in disguise: a version, the film critic Amy Taubin wrote in 2005, “as abstract as a black hole.” At first, you couldn’t tell what it was; you couldn’t understand a word Dylan was singing, but not because he was mumbling. Whatever Dylan was doing, he was pressing hard. He was all tension, all vehemence.

He slurred the words as if whatever narrative they contained was irrelevant. He was saying that the performance had to communicate as a symbol or not at all. He broke the words down and smashed them up until they worked as pure excitement, until the appearance of a single, whole signifier—“Jesus,” “Guns,” “Die”—lit up the night like a tracer bullet. The performance was almost unbearably fast, the beat snapping back on itself, then fragmenting as guitar lines shot out of the music as if without human agency—and it might have been a minute, it might have been two, it might have been as long as the performance lasted for the melody to creep out of the noise, for the song to reveal itself for what it was.

Dylan was asked why, on this night of all nights, he chose to sing “Masters of War.” “The war going on,” he said. Why did he slur the words, he was asked. “I had a cold,” he said.

 

 

With that night, the song began its second life. Three years later, on 16 February 1994, without his band, Dylan sang “Masters of War” in Hiroshima. On 5 October 2001, in Spokane, Washington, at Dylan’s first concert after the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., he played “Masters of War” as some of the crowd shouted “Death to Bin Laden!” A year later, when George
W. Bush made plain his intent to launch a second Iraq war—on 11 November 2002, just after the mid-term elections that Bush had used the specter of war to win—Dylan appeared at Madison Square Garden, and again offered “Masters of War,” and again as an answer record to real life. He gathered three musicians in a circle, with himself at the center: playing acoustic guitars and a bass fiddle, seated on chairs, they looked like a coven, and the song sounded like a curse dug out of the ground.

The song began to travel. In May of 2003, with the war under way, the jazz drummer Scott Amendola and the singer Carla Bozulich of Berkeley put a nine-minute version on the Internet. They made a storm; cowering under a harsh, seemingly inexhaustible solo by the saxophonist Eric Crystal, they took the song’s rage into the realm of fairy tale, all mist and lightning, a storm so strong there were moments when the sound made it difficult to remember what you were listening to. The hectoring self-satisfaction of speakers at anti-war rallies began to creep into Bozulich’s voice—the tone that let you know that the last thing such people want is for the powerful to do good; if that happened, how could they feel superior?—but then came the final verse. The instrumentation dropped to almost nothing, only bare taps and silences, and you could hear someone speaking for herself: a single voice, letting you imagine that this was all that was left, after the war.

More than a year later, in October 2004, with Bush and John Kerry battling for the presidency and Minnesota up for grabs, a Minneapolis record-store owner, Mark Trehaus, working with the St. Paul punk band the Dillinger Four—in the thirties, St. Paul was the gangster John Dillinger’s favorite hideout—released their own version of the song. It was credited to Brother Mark Treehouse and the Dylanger Four plus Four.

Except for Arzu D2 of the great St. Paul punk band Selby Tigers, who spoke the words of the song in the flat, plain tones of a young woman accusing her parents of looting her college fund, it was a pure, tuneless rant. But the record was perhaps more about the cover, which pictured Bush, his Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, his Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Vice President Dick Cheney—Cheney pointing his finger, but not, like Uncle Sam, looking you in the eye. It wasn’t immediately clear what you were looking at; the faces were washed in the reds, whites, and grays of an old 3-D comic book, the kind you needed 3-D glasses to read.