Like a Rolling Stone

Now it’s different. Now I want to play the songs—because I actually dig them myself. I was doing a lot of stuff before that I didn’t really dig . . . stuff which had reasons to be written, which anybody worth anything could see through, which I could see through, and—higher-up people couldn’t, can see through, but just wouldn’t let on, ’cause there is a thing to play a game. So a lot of people play games with me, and call me weird names, because I wrote songs like “With God on Your Side,” but—what it really meant to write something like that and sing it on the stage has never been brought out or expressed. I’ve never seen that written anywhere.

“Kinda ersatz,” said a friend in late 1963, when we first heard Dylan’s own recording of the already famous protest song. Despite the oddity of anything sounding remotely like Bob Dylan’s voice on the radio, he meant that the song sounded as if it were written by the times, not by anyone in particular. Maybe that was why the song, with a melody from the slavery lament “No More Auction Block,” as rendered by the glossy folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary—two goateed guitarists and a female singer with long, straight blonde hair (or “two rabbis and a hooker,” as the critic Ralph J. Gleason put it)—was such a huge hit. The piece was perhaps not as obvious as it seemed. How long would there be war, it asked, how long would there be racism? If the answer was blowing in the wind, did that mean the answer was where anyone could grasp it, or that the answer would always elude whoever reached for it?

Never mind that it’s “Blowin’,” not “Blowing”; earlier in the year, when the news broke that Dylan might be near death from a heart condition (“I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis,” he said when he left the hospital), the newspaper cartoon that would follow the event seemed preordained. You could see a small group of people gathered on a bridge, a scattering of ashes in the air, and the solemn caption: “Now, Bob Dylan too is blowing in the wind.”

As the decades went on, Dylan found a way to both give people a song they wanted and bring it to a life it never had when it was new—because in a way it was never new, with the questions used clothes and the missing answer a songwriter’s sleight-of-hand. On a live recording Columbia released in 2000—a “field recording,” with a bootleg sound, as if caught from somewhere in the crowd—“Blowin’ in the Wind” was a free-floating sign, pointing backwards. The song itself was now blowing in the wind; it had long since blown away from its author, and you can hear how people have momentarily attached themselves to it, the author with no more claim to the composition than the audience. He sings as if the song is, somehow, unfamiliar, certainly not as if he owns it. The confidence and condescension of a younger man—Don’t you get it?—has been replaced by the regret of an older one; singing alongside Dylan, guitarists Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell take the tune to an aching higher register, and suddenly the song is daring the future to shut it up. Over seven minutes the song is a play—but obituaries don’t have room for plays, let alone for anything that, over a lifetime, plays out its string.

Thus Bob Dylan, fated to be called weird names even after his death: names like “protest singer.” In late 1965, at a press conference in Los Angeles, when Dylan and the Hawks were, as Marlon Brando put it, making the loudest noise he’d ever heard short of a moving freight train, no one asked Dylan about his new music. While friends snickered at his side, one reporter after another asked what he was protesting, did he mean what he said, how many protest singers were there (“Forty-two,” Dylan said), was it just a trend? “Il est un Vietnik,” Jean-Pierre Léaud said to Chantal Goya in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 Masculin féminin, explaining Bob Dylan: a beatnik against the Vietnam War. The sleeve of a 1974 bootleg put its title above the kind of carnival booth that features holes for a man and a woman to join their heads to bodies or costumes painted on plywood—those of the couple from Grant Wood’s American Gothic, say:

EARLY 60’s REVISITED
A Photo of You As You Were—Only $1

Under the empty hole for the woman’s head is a braless figure in a turtleneck, pedal pushers, and sandals, holding a sign reading “We Shall Overcome”; a middle-aged Bob Dylan, a look of unhappy acceptance on his face, his head in the space over a figure with a guitar, dressed in jeans, boots, and a sheepskin jacket, waits alone, as if he gets the dollar if you’ll pose with him, or as if this is the only way he can still get girls. Already in 1972, as if the sixties were not three years but three decades in the past—or as if “Like a Rolling Stone” had never been sung—the National Lampoon’s Radio Dinner album had opened with a late-night TV commercial:

Hi! I’m Bob Dylan. Remember those fabulous sixties? The marches, the be-ins, the draft-card burnings, and best of all the music. Well, now Apple House has collected the best of those songs on one album called Golden Protest, performed by the original artists that made them famous. You’ll thrill to “Society’s Child” by Janis Ian! “Pleasant Valley Sunday” by the Monkees! “What Have They Done to the Rain” by the Searchers! “In the Ghetto” by Elvis Presley! “Silent Night/Seven O’Clock News” by Simon and Garfunkel—and who can ever forget that all-time classic, yes, it’s Barry McGuire’s immortal “Eve of Destruction.” And of course, my own “Masters of War.” All for the incredibly low price of $3.95. And, if you order now . . .

Behind all of this was a happy desire to acknowledge how impossibly stupid extreme fashions look even months after they go out of style, and a desperate, shamed attempt to pretend that the ideals and convictions that had carried people through the previous years—that had found them living with an intensity and, for some, a creativity that a few years later seemed impossibly fecund—were nothing more than extreme fashions. Bob Dylan, it seemed, had said that wrongs should be made right; if they had not been, if the war was still going on and racism had merely changed shape, those who had recognized themselves through the way Dylan said what he said (“The sound of Bob Dylan’s voice,” the critic Robert Ray once wrote, “changed more people’s ideas about the world than his political message did”) could best save themselves by painting him as a fool. And the Radio Dinner commercial, done with a perfectly aged frog in Dylan’s throat, its cadences falling just where they should, was really funny.

Sometimes, as with “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” with Dylan in his bard-of-the-people work shirt on the cover of the 1963 album of the same name, his protest songs were programmatic and automatically anthemic, even if unsingable by crowds. More often they came with a cocked eye, with ambiguity and doubt—and a sense of detail that put you in the action. When in the 1990s Dylan sang “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” from 1963, about the six-month sentence received by a privileged white Marylander who beat a black hotel worker to death with his cane, on occasion the song seemed to slow down: you could almost feel the cane as it moved through the air. Protest songs could be shuffling, laconic stand-up comedy routines, as with the priceless “Talking World War III Blues.” The bomb has fallen; the singer takes a Cadillac out of an abandoned dealership. “Good car to drive,” he says. “After a war.”

Dylan tried to escape the label. “I’ve never written any song that begins with the words ‘I’ve gathered you here tonight . . . ’” he said. Asked about his favorite protest singers, he named lounge singer Eydie Gorme and Robert Goulet, according to legend the artist who first inspired Elvis Presley to shoot out a TV set. Asked for his political opinions, Dylan acted shocked: “I’ll bet Tony Bennett doesn’t have to go through this kind of thing.” He feigned outrage: “Does Smokey Robinson have to answer these questions?” He could have meant that it was ridiculous to ask mere pop singers about the state of the world, or that a black man from Detroit might have more to say about the state of the world than a bohemian from New York City. It didn’t matter. He could change his name; he could even change the world, as some commentators insisted, but he couldn’t change what he was called.

In Don’t Look Back, D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary film of Dylan’s tour of the United Kingdom in the spring of 1965, you see a reporter in a phone booth after a show, dictating a story that could have been written before the show began, if not the year before: “Sentence. He is not so much singing as sermonizing. Colon. His tragedy, perhaps, is that the audience is preoccupied with song. Paragraph. So the bearded boys and the lank-haired girls, all eye-shadow and undertaker makeup, applaud the song and miss the sermon. They are there; they are ‘with it.’ Sentence: But how remote they really are from sit-ins and strikes and scabs. Paragraph: ‘The times they are a-changin’, ’ sings Dylan. They are when a poet fills a hall.” It’s easy to laugh at the string of clichés—but what if those clichés were being generated by Dylan himself? What if they were true? What if it wasn’t that the audience was missing the sermon, but that Dylan himself was missing the song? On that tour, every show began with “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” at that moment in 1965 number 16 on the U.K. charts, and every time it is a millstone: Pennebaker never shows more than a few seconds, knowing that to put more of the song on the screen would be to leave dead air in the film. Dylan sings “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”; William Zantzinger’s cane merely hits its target. Except for the end of “Talking World War III Blues,” with Dylan reciting what Lincoln supposedly said about how you can’t fool all of the people all of the time—reciting the words very slowly, deliberately, upside down and inside out, as if the idea is very hard to get right, which it is—“Some of the people can be half right part of the time . . . All of the people can be part right, some of the time . . . Half the people can be part right all of the time . . . But all of the people can’t be all right, all of the time”—Dylan only comes to life off-stage. “I was singing a lot of songs I didn’t want to play,” Dylan told Nat Hentoff in 1966, describing the tour. “I was singing words I didn’t really want to sing.” The most damning words were the simplest: whenever he played a song, Dylan said, “I knew what was going to happen.”

As Stan Ridgway sang in 2004 in “Classic Hollywood Ending,” “The audience has learned to cheer.” The fans knew their roles; they expected the performer to know his. He did, and he acted it out. It was a ritual of self-confirmation, and the opposite of an event, which is the putting into play of something new, something unpredictable, where anything can happen, where the artist no less than a president subjects himself or herself to what history is made of. “I claim not to have controlled events,” as Lincoln certainly wrote on 4 April 1864, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Faced with an act—a performance—that breaks the nexus of expectation and result, an audience might rush the stage and attack the performer. The performer might leave the stage in the middle of a song and never come back. The audience might attempt to drive the performer off the stage with denunciation and abuse—which, when Dylan returned to the United Kingdom a year later with the Hawks, is precisely what happened.

Much of what took place that night in 1964 was as ritualized as any show Dylan played in the U.K. the following spring. Two years before, in the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, as he sang an early version of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” a visionary epic about, people later said, the Cuban Missile Crisis, some in the crowd came in solemnly behind Dylan on the refrain, as if for a moment the ballad had turned into a Gregorian chant. The effect is so ghostly it’s as if the Cuban Missile Crisis truly did lead to the atomic war many thought Kennedy thought he was ready for, and that this, not the ramble of “Talking World War III Blues,” was the sound you heard, after the war. In Philharmonic Hall people began cheering before Dylan finished the first line of “Who Killed Davey Moore?” about a boxer beaten to death in the ring—to show they knew what was coming next, to affirm that the concert would give them what they expected, that it would prove to them that they belonged. That same night, though, Dylan played “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” which he had played in public only twice before.

Over the years the number would become the most ritualized of any Dylan ever wrote. The harsh, leaping, biting strum on the guitar, the catalogue of the endless hypocrisies of modern American life, of advertising, commuters, political parties, censorship, sexual repression, organized religion, country clubs, “propaganda all is phony”—all of it would come to seem like a set up for a single line of the song. By now, anyone who cares knows what will happen when Dylan gets to the words “Sometimes even the president of the United States must have to stand naked.” People will stomp and cheer to show which side they’re on—or what messy choices they’re superior to.

The ritual is a trick that time played on the song, as soon enough presidents did find themselves stripped naked, with Lyndon Johnson driven from office, Richard Nixon and his vice president both forced to resign, Jimmy Carter and then George Bush humiliated in defeat, Bill Clinton’s every sexual foible exposed to the world, but it is also a trick that for forty years Dylan’s audience has played on itself. The song, after all, has outlasted almost as many presidents as Fidel Castro, and as the song is played now on any stage, in any city, you can all but hear people waiting for the line to come up, waiting for the chance to play the part that, by now, the song demands. That is why it is so strange to hear the song as it was played on that Halloween night, before it was a clue to anything, when a twenty-three-year-old Bob Dylan sings “Even the president of the United States sometimes has to stand naked,” and nothing happens. The line hangs in the air, in a void it itself has called up, as if it’s not obvious what it says. It wasn’t obvious: in a few days, almost everyone in Philharmonic Hall old enough to vote would go to the polls to cast their ballots for LBJ, running as the peace candidate against Barry Goldwater, who had flirted with the notion of using atomic weapons in Vietnam. Johnson had yet to be demonized; Nixon, who would disgrace the presidency, had not been elected. Ford had not replaced Nixon, or Carter Ford, or Reagan Carter, or Bush Reagan, or Clinton Bush, or Bush Clinton.

Sometimes, as in a performance in Santa Cruz in 2000, Dylan was able to take the song back from the events that had controlled it. Here the melody slowly creeps up from silence, coming out of a fog like the memory of an old bluegrass song—“Nine Pound Hammer,” maybe. The music bounces forward on a high-stepping beat, until very quickly the syncopation is a finger reaching out of the past, beckoning, and then a hand reaching out of an alley, grabbing your arm. There are light drums, and finger-picking on two acoustic guitars—it’s a little folkie chamber orchestra, people around a campfire, a setting rightfully too intimate for anyone to intrude upon with a cheer for anything, though of course when “Sometimes even the president . . .” comes around some do cheer. “Others say don’t hate nothin’ at all ’cept . . . hay-tred,” Dylan sings, the line sticking out of his mouth like a cigar, so sly, so questioning of himself and the people present, so “Did anybody here ever buy that slogan, did anybody put it on a bumper sticker and slap it on their car?” Every verse is thrown away at the end, not with resignation, or bitterness, but with experience, which is still taking place. “What else can you show me?” is sung as if the singer expects neither that there will be something or nothing. For a few minutes at the end the guitars play the song out of itself, as if it is, for this night anyway, no longer a carapace containing a single line, but a chance to find words and rhythms in the song no one has ever heard before.

Soon after that night in the fall of 1964, the song would be stopped cold by its own audience. There was no applause dubbed onto the studio recording that appeared on Bringing It All Back Home in March 1965, but “Sometimes even the president . . .” already implied it. One side of the album led off with “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a two-minute-seventeen-second Chuck Berry-styled comic rant against, among other things, the entire American social system, its “Too Much Monkey Business” leaps disguising, as the music historian David Hajdu seems to have been the first to notice, a lyric rooted in an old Woody Guthrie-Pete Seeger number called “Take It Easy.” It was Bob Dylan’s first single to reach the pop charts—for one week, at number 39. It was followed on the album by “She Belongs to Me,” “Maggie’s Farm,” “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” “Outlaw Blues,” “On the Road Again,” and “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” most of them scratchy, clanging, written with flair, sung with glee, Dylan and his backing musicians in moments thrilled at their own new clatter.

Supposedly made at the suggestion of Dylan’s producer Tom Wilson, who as an experiment clumsily dubbed timid, effete electric instrumentation over Dylan’s utterly depressed 1962 reading of “House of the Risin’ Sun,” perhaps the Bob Dylan recording least likely to benefit from special effects, and then presented Dylan with the results (as, later in 1965, Wilson would do with an acoustic version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence,” which became an enormous international hit), these were Dylan’s first rock ’n’ roll recordings. He had recorded with a band in 1962, for songs that were included on or omitted from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, including a prancing cover of “That’s All Right,” Elvis Presley’s first single; Dylan’s first single, from the same year, the unnoticed “Mixed Up Confusion,” had guitars, bass, piano, drums, and a beat. But this was jug-band music; it didn’t speak Chuck Berry’s language, not to mention Little Richard’s. Dylan’s new sound on Bringing It All Back Home was a bid for Beatle territory, for pop success—and oddly, given what was to happen a few months later, no alarms were sounded. Despite a threatening jacket photo by Daniel Kramer, a tableau vivant that invited whoever was looking into a demimonde of expensive clothes and laudanum, where Robert Johnson traded songs with Lotte Lenya, a forgotten nineteenth-century politician gazed down from a mantel at Lyndon Johnson on the cover of Time, and an elegant woman in a red dress haughtily looked you in the eye as Dylan clutched a small gray cat as if it were his Doppelgänger, the new songs sounded, as a fan told Dylan in England that spring, “like you’re just having a laugh.”

The best laugh was the last song on the side. “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” begins with a laugh, as a take opening with Dylan strumming his acoustic guitar stops short, and Tom Wilson breaks down in giggles, as if he’s just pulled off a great practical joke. They start again: a single milky note from Bruce Langhorne’s electric guitar tips the first words into the drums. The song was a kind of answer record to Chuck Berry’s 1959 “Back in the U.S.A.”—one of those rare works of pop art where, as with Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? you get the feeling that whatever irony might have been present as the artist began was burnt off by the fervor he or she brought to the work by the time it was finished. In Berry’s case, he’d just returned from a tour of Australia. “Ooo-hah,” chant the backing singers on the chorus, breathing real American air and letting it out. Berry is singing about freeways, hamburgers, jukeboxes. “It was a real thrill to get into my own Cadillac . . . and drive myself sixty miles per hour up I-55 to my own home,” he wrote in his autobiography—not of returning from Australia in 1959, but of returning from Federal prison in 1963, where he’d been sent by a racist prosecutor on a trumped-up charge. There is a keen sense of the implacability and variety of American racism all through Berry’s book; there is no irony in “Back in the U.S.A.” and there was no irony in Bob Dylan’s discovery of it.

The late San Francisco collage artist Jess once spoke of “the hermetic critique lockt up in art.” The critique locked up in protest songs was not hermetic, and despite a rock ’n’ roll sound “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” was a protest song—though it was a protest song that made “Maggie’s Farm” feel almost as sententious as “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” A rewrite of the Bently Boys’ 1929 pickin’-and-grinnin’ sharecroppers’ complaint “Down on Penny’s Farm” and a precursor of Johnny Paycheck’s 1977 “Take This Job and Shove It,” “Maggie’s Farm” was a protest song about factories, sweat-shops, offices, jobs, chores, classrooms, and despite word-play that would keep it on fans’ lips for years, Dylan sounded bored as he sang it.

He didn’t sound bored in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.” Unlike “Maggie’s Farm,” “Who Killed Davey Moore?” “Masters of War,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” and many more, if this was a protest song it was not rhetorical. When the singer asked a question, he did not assume the answer would be as plain to his listeners as it was to him. He didn’t presume it would be plain at all—perhaps because like “Back in the U.S.A.” this protest song was also a celebration: a celebration of the failure of rational humanism in these United States. Compared to the rock ’n’ roll records Berry had made ten years before, “Bob Dylan’s 115 Dream” is primitive, all trip stumble and fall, jangle and screech, with New York studio musicians, notably drummer Bobby Gregg and pianist Paul Griffin, trying to keep up with Dylan, sometimes even getting a step ahead, as in perfect dream logic a sailor casts his eyes upon Fitzgerald’s “fresh, green breast of the new world.”

The singer escapes—“Don’t even ask me how,” he says, this is all moving very fast, inside the shiny sound the band is making a dog is chasing its tail, the singer has a tale to tell and he’s barely three steps into it. You can’t tell if what’s driving him forward is exasperation, amusement, disbelief, or the momentum of someone pushed off a cliff. Everywhere he goes, people turn him away, beat him up, steal his clothes. He dashes into a government building; the bureaucrat he encounters tells him to get lost. “You know, they refused Jesus, too,” the singer says, as if the last thing he expects is for the line to get him any help. “You’re not him,” the bureaucrat says reasonably. The singer goes back to the street, which is now running backwards and upside down. “A pay phone was ringing,” he says, “and it just about blew my mind/ When I picked it up and said hello, this foot came through the line.” He seems surprised; by this time, the listener isn’t. Hey, you say to the sailor, it’s a phone. What did you expect?

Finally, the singer flees. He goes back to his ship, takes the parking ticket off the mast, weighs anchor. For the first time since the song began he lets a breath out easily. But the story isn’t quite over. The singer gets out of the U.S.A. but the listener doesn’t; the singer gets the last laugh. “When I was leavin’ the bay,” he tells you,

I saw three ships a-sailin’

They were all heading my way

I asked the captain what his name was

And how come he didn’t drive a truck

He said his name was Columbus

I just said, “Good luck”

Despite this—“All my songs end with ‘good luck,’” Dylan once said—the country in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” is at once a horror movie and a utopia, phantasmagoric and immediately recognizable, complete with protest marches, hot dogs, undertakers, transvestites, con artists, pimps, and Brotherhood crusades. It’s supposed to sound crazy—or is it supposed to sound what it sounds like now and what it sounded like when it was made, which is completely realistic and utterly glamorous? Fun? A great adventure?

It’s a protest song about a country that is ridiculous before it is anything else. It is, among other things, a rewrite of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, a comic version of the story Dylan would tell a few months later in “Like a Rolling Stone,” and a picture of a life that hasn’t changed—a common, modern story that doesn’t make any more or less sense than it did when it was first told. Heard today, the song can seem more than anything a story about the modern market as a thing in itself, a song so complete it’s less a song than a movie—a movie that could be shot in the center of any great city in the world, right now, with people bouncing back and forth as randomly as pinballs, everybody talking on cell phones, checking pagers, punching notebooks, some people talking into their wrists, into the Dick Tracy wristphones that fifty years after Chester Gould thought them up are finally on sale, everyone talking, nobody noticing anybody else because nobody has time, everybody trying desperately to use up time as fast as they can, because time is money, and there’s nothing more thrilling to do with money than spend it. “Breathless,” Dylan could have called the song; you don’t want it to end. And that, for a protest song, is the best laugh of all. As with the state of the nation, caught up in a crisis it had yet to truly acknowledge, the arrival of the Beatles, and the call-and-response of the Top 40, “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” was a stage for “Like a Rolling Stone,” a performance that would take in all those things, and send them back transformed.

There was no laughter on the other side of the album. There, except for “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” where single backing instruments were so subtle they seemed more like emanations from the songs than pieces added to them, this was Bob Dylan as he had always been, alone, with his guitar and harmonica. The side comprised four long songs, all of which promised they would never get near Top 40 radio—and they were so self-evidently full of meaning, so striking, so important, so elegant and so beautiful that their quiet drowned out the noise of the songs on the other side. Bob Dylan may have meant to draw a line, but it was in a furrow already plowed, and flowers grew over it. The faster he moved, the more his trap held.