Night Beat (8 page)

IF THERE WAS any central message to Bob Dylan’s early music, perhaps it was that it isn’t easy for a bright, scrupulous person to live in a society that honors the inversion of its own best values, that increasingly turns from the notions of community and democracy to the twisted politics of death and abundance. To live through such times with conscience and intelligence intact, Dylan said in his music, one had to hold a brave and mean mirror up to the face of cultural corruption.

These days, of course, the politics of corruption and death are doing just fine, and are fairly immune to any single pop star’s acts of sedition. But back in the fevered momentum of the 1960s, when he first asserted himself, Dylan had a colossal impact on the changing face of American culture. In that decade’s early years, folk music (which had been driven underground in the 1950s by conservative forces) was enjoying a popular resurgence, inspired by the (on the surface) wholesome success of the Kingston Trio (though there was nothing wholesome about their 1958 number 1 single, “Tom Dooley”—a century-old song, recounting the true story of a man hanged for knifing his girlfriend). Under the influence of Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary, folk was turning more politically explicit, and was also becoming increasingly identified with civil rights and pacifism, among other causes. But it was with the young nasal-toned, rail-thin Bob Dylan—who had moved from Minnesota to New York to assume the legacy of folk’s greatest hero, Woody Guthrie—that 1960s’ folk would find its greatest hope: a remarkably prolific songwriter who was giving a forceful and articulate voice to the apprehensions and ideals of the emerging restless generation. With “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” Dylan penned songs about racial suffering and the threat of nuclear apocalypse that acquired the status of immediate anthems, and with “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” he wrote an apt and chilling decree of the rising tensions of the coming era. “Come mothers and fathers/Throughout the land,” he sang, in a voice young with anger and old with knowledge, “And don’t criticize/What you can’t understand/Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/Your old road is/Rapidly agin’/Please get out of the new one/If you can’t lend your hand/For the times they are a-changin’.”

In those first few years, Dylan was already beginning to transform the possibilities of popular songwriting—opening up the entire form to new themes and a new vernacular that were derived as much from the ambitions of literature and poetry as from the traditions of folk music. (In 1963, Peter, Paul, and Mary had two Top 10 hit singles written by Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”) But Dylan would soon go on to change
all
of what popular music might do. Inspired by both the popularity and the inventive song structures of the Beatles—who had exploded on America’s rock scene in early 1964—Dylan was feeling confined by the limited interests of the folk audience, and by the narrow stylistic range of folk music itself. After witnessing the Beatles’ breakthrough, and after hearing the rawer blues-based rock being made by the Animals and Rolling Stones, Dylan realized it was possible to transform and enliven his music, and to connect with a broader and more vital audience in the process. (When the Byrds scored a June 1965 number 1 hit with their chiming folk-rock cover of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” it only further convinced him.)

On July 25, 1965, Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and played a brief howling set of the new electric music he had been recording—and shocked folk purists howled back at him in rage. And for fair reason: The fleet, hard-tempered music that Dylan began making on albums like
Bringing It All Back Home
and
Highway 61 Revisited—
music unlike any reinvention of folk or pop that we had heard before—effectively killed off any remaining notions that folk was the imperative new art form of American youth, and conferred on rock a greater sense of consequence and a deeper expressiveness. Clearly, it was music worth the killing of old conceits and older ways. In particular, with “Like a Rolling Stone” (the singer’s biggest hit, and the decade’s most liberating, form-stretching single), Dylan framed perfectly the spirit of an emerging generation that was trying to live by its own rules and integrity, and that was feeling increasingly cut off from the conventions and privileges of the dominant mainstream culture. In the same manner that he had once given voice to a new rising political consciousness, Dylan seemed to be speaking our deepest-felt fears and hopes—to be speaking for
us.
“How does it
fee-eel,
he brayed at his brave new audience, “To be without a
home/
Like a complete
unknown/
Like a
ROO-olling STONE?”

How
did
it feel? It felt scary; it felt rousing; and suddenly it felt
exactly
like rock & roll.

WITH BOTH HIS early folk writing and his mid-1960s switch to electric music, Dylan articulated the rising anger of a bold new generation. In the process, he recast rock & roll as an art form that could now mock an entire society’s values and politics, and might even, in the end, help redeem (or at least affront) that society. Also, Dylan proved to be a natural star. He cultivated an impeccable gaunt-and-broody look and a remarkably charismatic arrogance. He was razor-witted, audacious, and dangerous, and he was helping to change the language and aspirations of popular music with his every work and gesture. In addition, Dylan’s interplay with the Beatles had seismic effect on popular music and youth culture. Combined, the two forces changed the soundscape of rock & roll in thorough and irrevocable ways that, a third of a century later, still carry tremendous influence. The two forces also had a sizable impact on each other. The Beatles opened up new possibilities in style and consensus; without their headway, Dylan likely would never have conceived “Like a Rolling Stone,” much less enjoyed a smash hit with it. But if the Beatles opened up a new audience, Dylan determined what could be done with that consensus, what could be
said
to that audience. His mid-60s work reinvented pop’s known rules of language and meaning, and revealed that rock & roll’s familiar structures could accommodate new unfamiliar themes, that a pop song could be about
any
subject that a writer was smart or daring enough to tackle. Without this crucial assertion, it is inconceivable that the Beatles would have gone on to write “Nowhere Man,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Paperback Writer,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” or “A Day in the Life,” or even that the Rolling Stones would have written the decade’s toughest riff and most taunting and libidinous declaration, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

Dylan also bore influence on the Beatles in two other important respects. For one thing, he was reportedly the person who introduced them to drugs (marijuana, specifically), during his 1964 tour of England. This brand of experimentation would gradually affect not only the Beatles’ musical and lyrical perspectives, but also the perspectives of an entire generation. Indeed, in the mid-1960s, drug use became increasingly popular with young people and increasingly identified with rock culture—though it certainly wasn’t the first time drugs had been extolled as recreation or sacrament, or exploited for artistic inspiration. Many jazz and blues musicians (and, truth be known, numerous country-western artists) had been using marijuana and narcotics to enhance their improvisational bents for several decades, and in the ’50s, the Beats had brandished dope as another badge of nonconformism. But with ’60s rock, as drugs crossed over from the hip underground (and from research laboratories), stoney references became more overt and more mainstream than ever before. Getting high became seen as a way of understanding deeper truths, and sometimes as a way of deciphering coded pop songs (or simply enjoying the palpable aural sensations of the music). Just as important, getting stoned was a way of participating in private, forbidden experiences—as a means of staking out a consciousness apart from that of the “straight world.” Along with music and politics, drugs—which at this point largely meant marijuana, but would later incorporate psychedelics, amphetamines, barbiturates, opiates, and cocaine—were seen as an agency for a better world, or at least a short-cut to enlightenment or transcendence. And though the Beatles would stay demure on the subject for another year or two, by 1965, hip kids and angry authorities were already citing such songs as Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” for their “druggy” meanings.

The other thing Dylan did for the Beatles was to help politicize them (in fact, he helped politicize a vast segment of rock culture), inspiring the group to accept their popularity as an opportunity to define and address a vital youth constituency. Following Dylan’s example, Lennon and McCartney came to see that they were not only speaking for a young audience, but for a generation that was increasingly under fire. More and more, their music—and rock at large—became a medium for addressing the issues and events that affected that generation.

AS A RESULT of all this influence, Bob Dylan was—next to Elvis Presley—the clearest shot at an individual cultural hero that rock & roll ever produced, and though he certainly pursued the occasion of his own moment in history, he would also pay a considerable cost for his ambition. You can see the payment already beginning in
Don’t Look Back,
D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary of Dylan’s 1965 solo tour of England. At every step of the tour, the young Dylan is met with rapt seriousness and testy curiosity, but also with the kind of pop-minded idolatry he had yet rarely enjoyed in America. And quickly enough, Dylan gets the better of it all—or at least seems to. He subverts an interview with a stuffy
Time
magazine correspondent into a stinging dismissal of the media, and how it bowdlerizes art, life, and truth. “I’m not gonna read any of these magazines . . . ,” says Dylan, “ ’cause they just got too much to lose by printing the truth, you know that.”

“What kind of truths do they leave out?” asks the interviewer.

“On anything!” answers Dylan. “Even on a worldwide basis. They’d just go off the stands in a day if they printed really the truth.”

“What is really the truth?”

“Really the truth is just a plain picture,” says Dylan.

“Of what?” asks the interviewer. “Particularly.”

“Of, you know,” says Dylan, “a plain picture of, let’s say, a tramp vomiting, man, into the sewer. You know, and next door to the picture, you know, Mr. Rockefeller, you know, or Mr. C. W. Jones, you know, on the subway going to work, you know. . . . ”

Another time in the film, Dylan rails viciously and proudly against a drunken party-goer. (“Listen, you’re Bobby Dylan,” slurs the drunk. “You’re a big international noise.” Snaps back Dylan: “I know it, man, I know I’m a big noise. But I’m a bigger noise than you, man.”) And in one particularly funny but cruel scene, Dylan calculatedly picks apart a painfully unassured science student. (“When you meet somebody,” asks the student, “what is your attitude toward them?” Dylan doesn’t pause a beat. “I don’t like them,” he says.)

In each of these encounters, Dylan acquires new and startling traits of self-certainty, and they’re all manifest in the quick, cocky expressiveness of his face. It’s a sharply handsome, mutable-looking face, as vain and brooding as Presley’s, as veiled and vulnerable as James Dean’s. Yet at other times it registers exhaustion, fear, and the demands that come with fame and irrevocable knowledge. Sitting on a train bound for Manchester, his features looking wan and pinched, hands shielding his eyes, Dylan looks as though he wanted to crawl out of many of his own best moments. The pressure was under way, and it ate at him quickly. Compare the cover portraits from
Highway 61 Revisited
(1965) and
Blonde on Blonde
(1966) and you can find visible evidence of the singer’s increasing strain. In the
Highway 61
picture, Dylan looks exactly like what he was: a smart, self-assured street- and pop-wise twenty-four-year-old poet-prodigy, willing to stare down the world with a defiant gaze. By the time of the
Blonde on Blonde
photo—shot maybe six months later—he looked wasted and wary. In less than a year, Dylan had seemed to pass from youthful assurance to a haunted and dissolute weariness. What you heard on
Blonde on Blonde
was a wizardly greatness; what you saw on its cover was the visage of a man being consumed by that greatness. It was a bit like coming across a picture of what Robert Johnson might have looked like, just before the end.