Bob Dylan (66 page)

Written for the
New York Review of Books;
unpublished.

Though Dylan did his best to speak to Wiseman, making a home recording of his 1939 “Remember Me (When the Candle Lights Are Gleaming)” in East Orange, New Jersey, in 1961; a fragment of the song even turns up in D. A. Pennebaker’s
Don’t Look Back,
his 1967 documentary on Dylan’s 1965 tour of the U.K.

The friend was Paul Nelson. Born in Warren, Minnesota, in 1936, he died in New York City in 2006; a great critic, who contributed the essay on Bob Dylan for the original edition of
The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll
(New York: Rolling Stone-Random House, 1976; edited by Jim Miller), he served as a model for the character Perkus Tooth in Jonathan Lethem’s novel
Chronic City
(New York: Doubleday, 2009). What Dylan told Nelson became an undercurrent all through the middle chapters of Dylan’s
Chronicles, Volume One
—but while there he pictured himself as a Hurstwood, a bum in the alley outside the back door of a theater in which he himself was performing, he never did make that small-club tour to South America.

A talk given at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, 4 October 1988.

A few weeks after the elections of 1994, when the Republican Party turned out the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, a thirtieth anniversary celebration of the Free Speech Movement was held on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. This extemporaneous talk, transcribed from a recording, was given at a December 3 panel called “The Current Political Situation”; the other speakers were Ringo Hallinan, Jack Weinberg, Ruth Rosen, and Mario Savio, who spoke last.
Threepenny Review
published Savio’s talk, also unwritten, and mine, both without any rewriting into essay form.

Zantzinger, twenty-four, screamed racial epithets at Hattie Carroll, fifty-one, who was working at the hotel where the party Zantzinger was attending was held, and struck her with a toy cane. She later suffered a stroke and died. After a sordid life, during which he was convicted of crimes including extorting rents from poor black families on property he did not own, Zantzinger died at sixty-nine in 2009. To the end he cursed Bob Dylan for making his name a byword for evil: “He’s a no-account son of a bitch,” he says in Howard Sounes’s 2001
Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan.
“He’s like the scum of a bag of the earth.”

Mark Dayton won.

As noted above, but with more detail: “WASHINGTON-Half a dozen legislators sat a few feet away, under the crystal chandeliers of the East Room of the White House, as Bob Dylan sang ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’,’ poker-faced. ‘Come senators, congressman, please heed the call,’ he rasped. ‘Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall.’ His tone was rough but almost wistful; he had turned his old exhortation into an autumnal waltz. Afterward, he stepped off-stage and shook President Obama’s hand. It was part of ‘In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement.’” Jon Pareles, “Music That Changed History and Still Resonates,”
New York Times,
10 February 2010.

Collected in Cantwell’s
If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture.
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois, 2009; and in
Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular,
edited by Andrew Perchuck and Rani Singh. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010.

“I believed Dave Guard in The Kingston Trio,” Bob Dylan would write in 2004 in his book
Chronicles
. “I believed that he would kill or already did kill poor Laura Foster. I believed he’d kill someone else, too. I didn’t think he was playing around.”

Drawn from liner notes written for
The Band—A Musical History
(Capitol, 2005), and understandably rejected.

First given as a talk at the Morgan Library, New York, 16 November 2006 and at the conference Highway 61 Revisited, University of Minnesota, 25 March 2007.

An introduction to “Great Lyrics,” a chapbook published by the
Guardian
(London).

I gave a first, short version of this talk at Columbia University in 2005, on a panel with Sean Wilentz and Christopher Ricks, who wiped the floor with both of us; that was published in the Winter 2006 number of
Threepenny Review.
I’ve continued to revise and adapt it, as times changed the song and people continued to try to get the song to change the times. The most recent version was part of Forever Young? Changing Images of America, the European American Studies Association conference held in Dublin 26-29 March 2010.

It was the same name that Andreas Simonyi, the Hungarian ambassador to the United States, had chosen for his own Washington, D.C., band two years before. “When I was listening to rock music” in Hungary, he told the
New York Times,
“I became part of the West. This was my link to the free world.” Band members included Lincoln P. Bloomfield, Jr., a former assistant secretary of state for military affairs; Alexander Vershbow, then the U.S. Ambassador to Russia; and, not really as a ringer, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, best known to the world at large as the lead guitarist for Steely Dan, but, since the Reagan administration, best known in Washington as a tireless advocate of missile defense schemes. In 2005 the Coalition of the Willing played the Walter Reed Army Medical Center; while they did not play “Masters of War,” they did lead off with Johnny Rivers’s “Secret Agent Man.” In 2007, in response to a taunt from the fake right-wing TV talk show host Stephen Colbert that “Hungarians can’t play the guitar,” Simonyi appeared on Colbert’s show. Raising an electric guitar with an eagle jutting out of its body, Simonyi snapped off one hot riff after another before announcing that Colbert must have confused Hungarians with Finns—who when it came to the electric guitar, Simonyi said, totally “suck.” The jazz drummer Bobby Previte formed a third Coalition of the Willing in New York in 2006. With Charlie Hunter on guitar and Steve Bernstein on trumpet, the band became the first under its name with an official release:
Coalition of the Willing
(Ropeadope, 2006), which came in a Stalinist jacket. A second album,
All’s Well That Ends
(download only, 2008), featured both the singer Andrew M. and “Let’s Start a War.”