Bob Dylan (58 page)

 

Cultural Politics in Contemporary America,
edited by Sut Jhally and Ian Angus. London and New York: Routledge, 1988.

 

Jon Wiener, “FBI Rock Criticism,” in
Come Together: John Lennon in His Time.
New York: Random House, 1984, xvi.

 

Scott Amendola and Carla Bozulich, “Masters of War,” included on the Scott Amendola Band’s
Cry
(Cryptogramaphone, 2003).

 

Brother Mark Treehouse and the Dylanger Four Plus Four, “Masters of War” (Heart of a Champion/Treehouse Records, 2004).

 

Roots, “Masters of War,” Beacon Theatre, New York, concert for
I’m Not There,
7 November 2007. The concert recording can be found at
Wolfgangsvault.com
.

 

Leon Russell, “Masters of War (Old Masters)” from
Leon Russell
(Shelter, 1970/The Right Stuff, 1995).

 

Jimi Hendrix, “Star Spangled Banner,” from
Live at Woodstock
(MCA, 1999).

———. “Machine Gun,” from Band of Gypsies (Capitol, 1970).

 

Howard Zinn,
Artists in Time of War.
New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.

 

Viggo Mortensen’s “Masters of War” is not included on the DVD of
The People Speak.
It appeared briefly on YouTube and was taken down.

March/April 2009

 

8/9)
Eden,
directed by Declan Recks (Samson Films). In this film about a miserable Irish couple’s tenth anniversary, Aidan Kelly’s Billy Farrell leaves his wife in a disco for a party, chasing a girl he thinks has eyes for him, though all she sees is an old man. He passes out drunk; in a room behind him, people start singing “House of the Rising Sun.” Farrell wakes up, automatically singing along, sees the girl, stumbles to his feet, and as he grabs her, forcing himself on her as she tries to push him away, the song continues, but now the voice you hear belongs to Sinéad O’Connor, an avenging angel who seems to be singing from inside Farrell’s heart, which she’s turned against him. The song has gone from its commonplace beginnings somewhere in the American south, sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century, to Bob Dylan’s first album in 1962 to the Animals’ epochal 1964 worldwide hit, to countless versions by street singers and karaoke belters to a party in an Irish town in the early 21st century, where if nothing else it’s a song everybody knows, and from there into the spectral hands of a woman who could stare down anyone on the planet—and who’s to say where its true home is, who owns it, whose singing most rings true?

 

July 2009

 

1) Bob Dylan,
Together Through Life
(Columbia). Casual, to the point where the clumsiness comes to the surface—except with “Forgetful Heart,” where a shadow passes over the singer’s face. But nothing here quite carries the weight of a scene from last season’s
In Treatment,
when Mia Wasikowska’s smart, sarcastic, suicidal teenage gymnast Sophie turns the tables on Gabriel Bryne’s fifty-something psychologist Paul Weston, as if once she was so much older but
she’s younger than that now and he’s too old to know what she’s talking about. “‘The times they are a-changing,’” she says as a session is ending. “It’s from a Bob Dylan song. My gift to you.”

 

10) Bob Dylan, video for “Beyond Here Lies Nothing” (YouTube). A montage of photos from Bruce Davidson’s 1959 series “Brooklyn Gang”—Larry Clark’s
Tulsa
made suitable for
Vogue
—with the Jokers getting tattoos, hanging around, taking their shirts off, going to Coney Island, trying to look as if they don’t care. Near the end a woman with lank black hair and black eye-makeup comes into the story. She carries experience the boys don’t, desires they couldn’t fathom, but she has nowhere else to go and so she’s here. She’s a dead ringer for Amy Winehouse, and you miss her more than ever.

 

February 2010

 

6/7) Bob Dylan and Dion, United Palace Theater (New York, 17 November 2009). The stage of the Rev. Ike’s old stomping grounds was pure House of Blue lights before Dylan came on: deep velvet background, upside down electric candles ringing the top of the stage. In that stetting “Beyond Here Lies Nothing,” from
Together Through Life
last spring, was a sultry vamp from a ’40s supper club. Clearly the song was still opening itself up to Dylan; he sang with heart, as if looking to find how much it might tell him. “Dedicated to our troops,” Dion had said earlier, for “Abraham, Martin and John,” and the mood Dylan was creating was already too fine for “Masters of War.” Instead he sang the mom-sends-son-off-to-glory-and-then-he-comes-back number “John Brown” (it sounds like an ancient British broadsheet; Dylan copyrighted it in 1963) in a hard-boiled voice, the Continental Op running down the murders in
Red Harvest.
Most striking of all was “Ballad of a Thin Man.” In Todd Haynes’s film
I’m Not There,
Cate Blanchett, as Dylan in London in 1966, acts out the song standing alone behind a mike stand
like a nightclub singer, no protection of a guitar between performer and audience. It was something Bob Dylan had never done, but that was precisely the posture he assumed now, as if the movie had taught him something new about his own song: how to make it more intimate, more direct, so that it was the audience, not the singer, that was left more naked, more defenseless.

For all that, Dion stole the show. He began with Buddy Holly’s “Rave On”—and that had be to remind both Dylan and the crowd of the night in early 1959, just days before Holly died, when a seventeen-year-old Robert Zimmerman sat in the Duluth National Guard Armory, Holly himself sang “Rave On,” and Dion was an opening act on that show, too. Now he was seventy, and his voice grew, spread out, gained in suppleness and reach with every song. One by one, he put the oldies behind him, so that it all came to a head with “King of the New York Streets,” from 1989.

It’s a gorgeous, panoramic song: a strutting brag that in the end turns back on itself, a Bronx match for the Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me.” It leads with huge, doomy chords, wide silences between the notes, creating a sense of wonder and suspension, and you don’t want the moment to break, for the music to take a single step forward—just as, after the song has gone on and on, you can’t bear the idea that it’s going to end. From that almost frozen beginning, the pace seemed to speed up with every verse, but it wasn’t the beat that was doubling; it was the intensity and the drama. Dion’s wails were as fierce as ever, but never so full of wide-open spaces, the voice itself an undiscovered country, and it was hard to believe that he had ever sung better.

 

June 2010

 

2) Alfred: “Like a Rolling Stone,” in
Bob Dylan Revisited: 13 Graphic Interpretations of Bob Dylan’s Songs
(Norton). Almost everything here is destructively literal, to the point that most of the pictures
meant to illustrate the songs are accompanied by matching lyrics that instead illustrate the pictures—or reveal the complete lack of imagination behind them. By contrast—and with the use of shifting color schemes, where each chapter in the story of a woman attempting to escape into a life of her own and continually finding herself imprisoned by the life she was born to is governed by shadings of blue, taupe, yellow, olive green, brown, gray, and finally a bright, light-filled page that is scarier than anything darker—Alfred trusts abstraction. Until the very last of his sixty-seven panels there isn’t a word to be seen. The story he tells isn’t obvious, isn’t clear. It doesn’t match Dylan’s soaring, heat-seeking-missile crescendos and choruses—it brings them down to earth. It isn’t a social allegory; it’s one person’s odyssey, a lifetime that returns her to precisely the place she first flees. And the Siamese cat isn’t a symbol of evil or anything else. It’s the woman’s conscience, or the one who, all along, has been singing the song that has been playing deep in the farthest back corners of her mind.

 

September 2010

 

5&6) Matt Diehl interviews Joni Mitchell (
Los Angeles Times,
April 22). “Bob is not authentic at all,” Mitchell said. “He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.” Charles Taylor: “In protest, Chelsea Clinton changes her name to Hibbing.”

Salon
3 November 2008

 

I write four days before the election, in Minnesota, where yard signs are everywhere. Here in the modest Uptown part of Minneapolis, it’s almost all Obama; in the wealthier sections you can find McCain signs that loom as large as billboards. At a family dinner one night we toasted misery on the next-door neighbors. This is a very patriotic part of the country. People are proud of their convictions.

For weeks, all of the indicators, measurements, polls, and calculations have pointed to an Obama victory, even an overwhelming rout. But while I read the polls many times a day and half believe them—believe them all, the poll that has Obama leading by 15 as much as I believe the poll on the same day that has him leading by 2—I also believe absolutely none of it. My whole life, my upbringing, education, travel, and talk, from working in Congress as an intern at the height of the Civil Rights movement in the mid-1960s to every election in which I’ve ever voted, makes it all but impossible for me to believe that, on Tuesday, a single state will turn its face toward the face of a black man and name him president of the United States.

Throughout the primary season it was trumpeted again and again that regardless of the outcome of the Democratic contest, the nation would see its first major-party ticket headed by either a woman or a citizen whose skin was not white. But it was not remarked on that, in a world where women have led Israel, India, Great Britain, and Germany, a female president was not unthinkable, but that an African-American president was. “I never expected to see this in my lifetime,” the white, left-wing journalist Larry Bensky, in his sixties, said one day on the radio, bitterly, because while it was a fact, it was not necessarily true: he could not credit it. He might have been thinking that it was all an illusion, a trick the country was playing on itself. Could the election be a vast and horrible twenty-first century version of the now-forgotten 1950s embarrassment Take a Negro to Lunch Day, or the nation remade as its own blackface minstrel show, with the whole thing over when the sun goes down?

McCain rally, Concord, South Carolina, 21 October 2008,
New York Times.

The more likely an Obama victory seems, the more monstrous the alternative has become. That is partly because McCain has made himself a monster of hate and lies, homing in on the evil that lies as a legacy in the heart of every white American: a guilt that turns into fear, less of a strangely calm, eloquent, dark-skinned man not yet fifty, but of even symbolic reckoning for four hundred years of racist crime.

But the specter of a McCain presidency, with Sarah Palin waiting in the wings—a Dominionist, which is to say she believes, and entered politics to ensure, that her God by right has and by her
hand will enjoy dominion over every aspect of life in the United States—seems monstrous also because it promises, at best, in merely practical terms, to wreck the country, if not to erase it, leaving the Constitution the dead letter Bush and Cheney have worked to make it, acting, throughout their terms, as if it already were. The country that as it has for more than 200 years struggled both to escape and live up to its charter is still recognizable, but there have always been Americans who never recognized that America, and McCain now stands for them.

What sort of president might Barack Obama be (“If,” in the thought that crosses so many minds if not so many mouths, “he lives”)? The presidency changes people; there is no way of telling. He might be ground down, his gift for speaking of complex things in a complex way that sounds like ordinary talk breaking up into catch-phrases and clichés, as on the campaign trail in its last days, Obama like McCain repeating the same lines hour after hour until even he must be nearly choking over the way a truth can feel like a lie. Or he might, with a carriage and a way with words that makes comparisons with John F. Kennedy seem to flatter Kennedy, not him, again plant seeds of possibility that anyone might harvest.

There are also comparisons to Lincoln, and these map the desert Obama as president would have to cross. “Instead of glory, he once said,” the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote of Lincoln, “he found only ‘ashes and blood.’” For the moment, for the country, perhaps for Obama too, that would be reward enough.