Devil Sent the Rain Page 11
What we can know is that the voices questioning Welch’s right to do what she does are putting the emphasis in exactly the wrong place. They are the same type of people who felt betrayed thirty-five years ago when it turned out that Bob Dylan was a Jewish kid from Minnesota instead of Billy the Kid’s younger brother. They are operating out of an inquisitional mode that is anathema to anybody who actually derives pleasure from the arts. It is a particularly creepy form of puritanism.
Here’s the thing: First of all, Gillian Welch is not playing, or claiming to play, “traditional music,” strictly speaking, any more than Bob Dylan was. She knows the repertoire and some of the techniques, but there are all kinds of elements in her music that are hardly orthodox old-time elements, and that are clearly there as part of an intentional effect. As for the often rural, and even rural-gothic—murder, moonshine, failed crops—subject matter of her songs . . . well, what about it? “Caleb Meyer,” the song all the reviewers mentioned from Hell Among the Yearlings, is about a foiled rape attempt somewhere in the vicinity of “them hollering pines.” It’s a good song, and I don’t believe one needs to have been the victim of a rape attempt or live near the hollering pines to have written it, or to appreciate it. If there’s a better devotional song than “By the Mark,” from Revival, I don’t know what it is. It makes no difference to me whether Gillian Welch believes in Jesus or not; the song carries its own weight. Besides, it is about a kind of truth in life that one can recognize as truth whether or not one believes in Jesus in the first place. But both discs are full of terrific songs (and singing)—“Good Til Now” (with its faint echoes of Blind Boy Fuller’s “Weeping Willow”), “Acony Bell,” “My Morphine,” “Winter’s Come and Gone,” “Barroom Girls,” “Only One and Only” . . . To make an issue of who is behind the lyrics and the voice moves the discussion into a completely different arena.
It seems to me that it takes an extreme poverty of imagination to propose, implicitly or explicitly, that people can write only about their personal experience (or, worse, about the experiences peculiar to their ethnic/gender/regional/national group). It takes poverty of imagination, and hostility to the idea of the free human spirit. Any hope one might have left for a society like ours depends on the constant assertion of the possibility of that kind of empathy. Of course, as an artist, the further from your personal experience you try to reach, the more effort, intuition, honesty, humility, and/or luck it takes. The further you reach, the easier it is to do something that just doesn’t work, doesn’t ring true. But the question is whether it works, whether it rings true, not whether you have an inherited visa to enter that territory.
A few years ago, while I was attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Saul Bellow came to talk to us for a few days. In addition to a reading, he conducted a workshop and a question-and-answer session. During the Q&A one student asked him about “stealing” from other writers—borrowing techniques, structural ideas, entering other cultural milieus. Bellow smiled wanly and said, “You are entitled to steal anything you are strong enough to carry out.”
Amen.
From the Oxford American
The following four pieces come at the work of Bob Dylan from four different angles. The first appeared in the commemorative program for the 1997 Kennedy Center Honors, the year when Dylan was honored along with Lauren Bacall, Jessye Norman, Charlton Heston, and Edward Villella. He had just released his stunning, Grammy-winning return-to-form disc Time Out of Mind, and was at a new, or renewed, creative peak. All the honorees got to invite someone of their choice to write an encomium for inclusion in the program; I was honored to be invited to write this.
The second piece appeared as booklet notes accompanying the DVD The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963–1965, which contains extraordinary footage of Dylan remaking himself over the course of three summers. Those were crucial moments not only for his life and career but for the direction of American popular music and culture.
The very short third Dylan item here accompanied the disc Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan, a collection of Dylan’s Christian songs performed by African-American gospel performers such as Mavis Staples, Shirley Caesar, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, and Rance Allen.
The final Dylan piece, “World Gone Wrong Again,” was commissioned for, and published in, the collection Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader, edited by Benjamin Hedin. It represents my attempt to understand, up to a point, the role that Dylan’s revisiting of traditional material on his two solo albums Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong played in his creative revival of the 1990s. The odd structure and tone of the essay had something to do with the sinister progression of events in the early years of the new millennium, specifically the ongoing disaster of the George W. Bush administration, whose choices seemed to be eroding the already tenuous social contract many Americans felt they shared, and which had always seemed to me to be incarnated in American music, and most specifically in Dylan’s. It was published in 2004. The next year, the shit really hit the fan.
Bob Dylan, 1997
The central question for an American artist—both as an American and as an artist—is how to remain indivisibly oneself while, in Walt Whitman’s phrase, containing multitudes. Few in our time have done both as fully as Bob Dylan.
By now it probably goes without saying that he is the foremost American songwriter of the past thirty-five years. Even a short list of his best-known songs, from “Blowin’ in the Wind” through “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the songs from classic albums like Highway 61 Revisited, Blood on the Tracks, Infidels, and this year’s triumphant Time Out of Mind, would take up half this page. In the course of writing and performing them he has changed everyone’s expectations of the kinds of complexity and meaning that popular songs could deliver.
But beyond his preeminence as a songwriter and performer, Bob Dylan has remained a quintessentially American artist in the largest sense, a true American original. By combining African-American blues, white country music, rural folk music, imagist poetry, and rock and roll, Dylan created a new musical and literary form, both popular and serious at the same time, which many have emulated but of which Bob Dylan is still not only the prototype but the unchallenged master.
From the beginning, Dylan’s work has occupied a special, central ground where forms and genres that had previously been seen as separate or incompatible combined and were transmuted into something both wholly his own and wholly in the American grain. From many sources came one voice—E pluribus unum—and in his constant reimagining of these materials he has proved, over and over, that the elements of American culture, in all their contradictory, painful, exhilarating, and sometimes indigestible glory, are infinitely elastic, and infinitely renewable.
For years, reviewers of popular culture have reflexively referred to Bob Dylan as the voice, even the conscience, of a generation. And it is true that the period of the 1960s, in nearly all of its aspects—its political and moral preoccupations, its apocalyptic overtones—was reflected in his recordings of the time as it was in no other single artist’s work, regardless of genre. Yet he has remained an abiding presence in American culture, his work growing and changing as he and the culture at large have grown and changed during the past three decades. He and his work represent something perennial in our culture.
“I always thought,” he said once, “that one man, the lone balladeer with the guitar, could blow an entire army off the stage if he knew what he was doing.” That sense of the power of the lone creative voice can be traced, its pulse felt, through the great river of creative imagery and action that stretches back centuries in the United States: traveling lecturers, tall-tale spinners, itinerant entertainers of all sorts, blues singers, old-time fiddlers. It is there to be heard in the work of Jimmie Rodgers and Blind Lemon Jefferson, Emily Dickinson and Bessie Smith, Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac, the sense of the individual voice, intensely personal, indivisible, taking on American life, in all
its epic contradictions.
In his song “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” on his 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home, the singer spins a long, tall yarn in which he arrives in North America before the arrival of Columbus and has a series of funny, dreamlike encounters, skirmishes, and near-misses with a gallery of bizarre characters. At the end of the song the singer greets Christopher Columbus himself as the explorer arrives on the continent, and Dylan wishes him a deadpan “good luck.”
It is a tall tale in a tradition going back to Mark Twain, and well before him, yet it is something more as well. In it we watch a vivid imagination cutting a mythic reality down to size—projecting itself, in fact, right into the middle of that reality. With wry humor, the singer celebrates a discovery of a land that is confusing and out of whack yet full of possibility, and claims, in a more than symbolic sense, the territory for his own.
There is a recognizable stance here, and in all of Dylan’s work: a sense that the individual sensibility—aesthetic, political, spiritual—could claim a role at the heart of the nation’s ongoing drama, in the middle of its ethnic and regional polyphony, locate what was of value there, and sing a new self, even a new country, out of it. As if the very activity of incorporating, coming to terms with, those multitudes of influence and utterance is itself somehow at the heart of the American ideal.
A large part of Dylan’s enduring claim on our imagination and attention is that his example has restated that ambition and that possibility, year after year, to this day. His has been an example not only to songwriters but to fiction writers, playwrights, poets, and filmmakers, constant proof that this culture, in all its contradictions, is still there to be claimed yet again, seen anew, through the agency of the human heart and imagination.
From the commemorative book for the
Kennedy Center Honors ceremony, December 1997
Leaving the Farm
After a certain point, most of what you can say about a person only obscures the truth of who he is, like vines covering a house. Rarely can a document strip away the encrustation of legend, lies, projection, and wish fulfillment and make you see the outlines more clearly. This film is one of those documents.
So much has been written about the early days of Bob Dylan, and about his first appearance with an electric band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, that it seems futile to add to it. The endless interpretation can make it harder to hear the songs. But in The Other Side of the Mirror director Murray Lerner cuts through all of the midrash and shows Dylan himself, in the context of those early-’60s changes, and the film speaks more pointedly than volumes of explanation could.
The Newport Folk Festival, where this film was shot, was started in 1959 by impresario George Wein and promoter Albert Grossman. It was a spinoff of Wein’s Newport Jazz Festival, which had been bringing the likes of Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis to the upper-class enclave of Newport, Rhode Island, every summer since 1954.
From the beginning, the project of the Newport Folk Festival was not just cultural but political. In fact, for some of the most powerful guiding spirits of the Festival—Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel, members of an older generation that had come of age with the left-wing politics of the 1930s and 1940s—there was little or no distinction between the cultural and the political. Music—song—was for them, at its truest, an expression of the spirit of common people, and a tool by which those people might gain greater power and leverage in society. Traditional ballads and songs preserved a sense of continuity with the past; topical songs advanced a critique of the present and a vision of the future. Individual performers, no matter how talented, were subordinated to the tradition, and to the larger project of social change.
When Bob Dylan came along, with his youth and his personal intensity and his overwhelming songwriting talent, the folk establishment must have smelled spring in the air. There had been important topical songwriters before Dylan—Joe Hill, Pete Seeger, Aunt Molly Jackson, and, especially, Woody Guthrie, who was Dylan’s most potent early influence. But Dylan had a genius that lay beyond any of them. To a degree unmatched by any other songwriter of his or any other generation, Dylan mixed the lyric and prophetic modes. The songs’ political concerns came through with such power because they were carried by this combination, aided also by Dylan’s strong dramatic instincts.
In 1963, when the earliest footage here was shot, Dylan was still the prized and private discovery of the extended family of folk music enthusiasts that had begun to mushroom in the 1950s. Dylan’s songs as performed by Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, and others, had made him a reputation that preceded him everywhere, but at Newport large numbers of the faithful could now see those songs literally embodied in the fascinating and contradictory persona Dylan represented—tough yet vulnerable, young yet battle-worn, comically self-effacing and uncompromisingly intense. Finally, the Old Guard must have thought, a brilliantly talented and creative and charismatic youngster who could bring their own message of social justice to a larger audience. Such hopes have driven many a youngster from his or her parents’ house in search of a little fresh air.
The Other Side of the Mirror shows us with vivid economy and directness the progression of Bob Dylan first fulfilling those hopes and then rapidly and inevitably freeing himself from them and finding his own voice, a new persona, a way forward into very different psychic and political and artistic territory. The film does this by merely presenting well-chosen and intelligently sequenced footage of Dylan’s performances from the Festivals of 1963, ’64, and ’65, along with just enough contextualizing material to be able to see the effect he was having on those around him. Some of the footage is taken from the informal daytime “workshops” held during the Festival, and some from the more formal nighttime concerts.
The earliest glimpse we have of him is from one of those daytime workshops, performing on a stage shared by Doc Watson, Clarence Ashley, and Judy Collins. Joan Baez joins him to sing his antiwar song “With God on Our Side.” Baez, already a star, had by then fallen in love both with the artist and with the man, and she had helped expose him to her already wide and devoted audience. This film brilliantly cuts from their afternoon performance to their reprise of the song at an evening concert. It also shows Dylan delivering his Woody Guthrie–esque “Talkin’ World War III Blues” and, with burning intensity and commitment, his bitter, nuanced song about the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, titled “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” Finally he is surrounded onstage by Baez, Pete Seeger, the Freedom Singers, and Peter, Paul, and Mary for an ensemble performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The first song that brought Dylan fame and fortune, “Blowin’ ” was hardly a conventional topical song, although it was adopted almost immediately by the civil rights movement and the nascent peace movement. It was based not on answers but on questions—repeated questions that pointed to larger questions about the nature of life. This performance amounted to a kind of collective acknowledgment of Dylan’s emerging centrality, an implicit anointing of him as the Hope Of The Future.
A lot happened between Newport ’63 and Newport ’64. Two events, in particular, stand out: the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, and, three months later, the Beatles’ first U.S. visit. The assassination was in some ways the culmination of many of the political themes about which Dylan had been singing. It signaled a split in the American psyche: a shift in power to a younger, more vital generation had been aborted. Kennedy was replaced in office by the dour, older Lyndon Johnson. Then, with the New Year, came the Beatles, an explosion of fun and irony and sex from foreign shores, just the thing to help a traumatized public forget its trauma for a while. If Kennedy’s death had foreclosed a newborn sense of possibility in politics to which young people could relate, rock and roll would step in to fill the vacuum. Something in that equation affected everyone in the United States.
By the time the 1964 Newport Folk Festival came around, an obvious shift had taken pla
ce in Dylan. In all these 1964 performances Dylan seems to have a different relationship to the audience, a shift perhaps from shared struggle to shared joke. Instead of burning, uncompromising songs of social indictment, he sings ironic love songs and imagistic poetry. A spoken introduction from folk godfather Pete Seeger precedes an afternoon performance of the not-yet-released song “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and one can only imagine Seeger’s thoughts as he sits, visible on the side of the stage, listening to Dylan singing about dancing beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, instead of about God stopping the next war . . . When Dylan sings the obligatory duet with Joan Baez on “With God on Our Side,” the comparison with the year before is fascinating. The climax of the song is delivered not with ardent closed eyes but with knowing, open eyes, a smile not quite hidden around the edges.
But the standout performance from 1964 is surely the monumental “Chimes of Freedom,” a mystical poem full of flashing, nonlinear imagery, delivered here with the focus, intensity, and exhilaration of an artist who has found his true freedom and his real voice. When Dylan finishes his performance the audience roars its amazement and hunger for more, refusing to listen to emcee Peter Yarrow’s pleas for order, sanity, and all-around good citizenship. Although Odetta and Dave Van Ronk, both major folk stars, were still to come, the sheer force of Dylan’s artistry and charisma had blown everything else away. And in Yarrow’s lonely, haggard, besieged figure, imploring the turned-on audience to be reasonable and accept the ordered, preordained progression of the evening, we can read the writing on the wall for the Folk Establishment. Performers were supposed to be serving a Larger Good, but Dylan’s assertion of personal, artistic freedom was more compelling to that audience than any other kind of Larger Good.