And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it.
—Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963)
Looking back on the 1960s from a contemporary vantage, one finds a multitude of ideas and events that seem revolutionary. Yet, if examined from a slightly different perspective, the era can seem as conservative as the 1950s that preceded it. For example, compare and contrast the progressive movement against the Vietnam War and racism with the popularity of nostalgic television shows like The Beverly Hillbillies or Hazel, which were steeped in a mix of family values and campy humor. What is important to note for today’s observer is that the popular culture portraits of the 1960s must be balanced against the reality of the age.
There is no denying that the decade centered on the dark days of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, race relations, Vietnam, student protest, and the murders of both Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Yet, while these tragedies and challenges marked the era, on a day-to-day basis, many Americans found that technology, innovation, and a growing economy improved their quality of life. Perhaps the best way to assess the 1960s is in thinking about the timeframe as a series of ebbs and flows, filled with many dramatic and often tragic events that symbolized the age, while the daily chaos of life continued to spin on. For some people, the undercurrent left them in a strong position to fulfill their dreams and aspirations, while others experienced the decade as one of misery and madness.
Folk music, which had fallen out of popularity for much of the 1950s, sprang back to life late in the decade to address some of the confusion that had people questioning the world around them. Like its cousin rock and roll, folk music served as one of many mass communications channels that confronted society’s challenges. Filmmakers, writers, novelists, artists, and others realized that as popular culture took a more central role in American life, they could have a more consequential voice within important socioeconomic and cultural conversations.
The use of music as a force to confront larger issues came about based on the size of the baby boomer generation that emerged in the 1960s, symbolized by Time magazine naming people “Twenty-Five and Under” as its “Man of the Year” in 1966. The sheer number of young people gave them more influence than previous generations had experienced, whether based on the purchase power they wielded or the collective voice they lent to social concerns.
Dylan exemplified the rise of the baby boomers. Like so many of his generation, he grew into maturity with his family in a better financial position than when his parents grew up. As a result of the nation’s standing in the post–World War II world, there were greater opportunities for the new generation of young people to pursue higher education, get better-paying jobs, and attain innovative consumer goods that helped make life more fluid. As a result, young people had tremendous impact on music, fashion, the education system, how companies marketed and advertised products, and politics. It is not an overstatement to say that a youth revolution occurred in the 1960s.
Given the increase in the number of college students nationwide, it is no wonder that much of the political and social activism emerged on campuses. Given the opportunity to attain advanced education, many young people realized the inherent inequalities that existed across society, particularly for African Americans and women. As the war in Vietnam intensified, antiwar efforts found a home on college campuses, where activists found a ready audience to counter the status quo.
The emergence of folk and rock music as anthems for these student movements sparked a synergy that empowered both the protesters and musicians. Employing traditional folksong techniques, but updating them for the 1960s, folk musicians ushered in a new era. Suddenly, someone like Dylan, who presented himself in a simple manner—vagabond clothing, acoustic guitar, and harmonica—could gain enormous power based on his lyrics. Naturally, folk music took up its antiestablishment stance and folk musicians stood in the vanguard of protest.
The dichotomy between Dylan’s image as a rising folk star and the disappointing sales of his debut record created an interesting challenge for his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. He had to maintain the antiestablishment stance of the folk scene, but also sell enough copies to satisfy the wary executives at Columbia Records. For the second album, though, Dylan would write and perform his own songs and rely much less on covering standards, like he did on the debut. As a result, Dylan spent a great deal of time working on the album, writing and recording across multiple sessions until the album met his standards.
Early in 1962, Dylan started writing protest songs, such as “Emmett Till” and others that aligned with the civil rights movement and societal ills faced by those in the working class. Before the release of the second album, Dylan’s prowess as a songwriter impressed many folk leaders, including singer Pete Seeger, who founded the magazine Broadside to publish new songs. Seeger and cofounder Sis Cunningham published “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues” in the first issue of Broadside, which launched Dylan’s career. Later, the magazine featured Dylan’s hits “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War.”1
Looking back on his early songwriting days in the 2004 memoir Chronicles, Dylan calls his songs “topical songs,” which he differentiates from “protest songs,” a term that he claims did not exist at the time. “I tried to explain later that I didn’t think I was a protest singer, that there’d been a screwup,” he explains. “I didn’t think I was protesting anything more than I thought that Woody Gurthrie songs were protesting anything.” Instead, Dylan labels this work “rebellion songs.”2
The album that ultimately hit the record stores in May 1963 would not suffer the fate of Dylan’s first release. Backed by Columbia’s marketing machine, the guidance of manager Al Grossman, and some fortuitous media coverage, Freewheelin’ established Dylan as a megastar. The young singer also benefited from what was happening all around him. The civil rights movement picked up steam in the early 1960s and grew into a critical topic across the nation. Dylan’s music, both reflective of the folk traditions and speaking to a new generation of activists, seemed to intersect with the daily headlines, bolstering both the activism and his place as a spokesperson.
Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan became a hit record from the start, selling 10,000 copies a month and making Dylan more money than he had ever seen, according to biographer Anthony Scaduto. Various media outlets covered the songwriter and album, from a high-profile radio interview with journalist Studs Terkel in Chicago to articles in Playboy, Seventeen, The New Yorker, Time, and countless newspaper articles and reviews.3
Even if Dylan would have done nothing else and disappeared from the music scene, the song “Blowin’ in the Wind” would have established him at the forefront of the folk world and across the broader culture. According to writer Andy Gill, “[A] song as vague and all-encompassing . . . could be applied to just about any freedom issue, at any time . . . and safeguarded his reputation as civil libertarian through any number of subsequent changes in style and attitude.”4 Literary scholar Christopher Ricks also accentuates the song’s simplicity, suggesting that if we could go back in time to the first hearing of it, basically hearing it fresh again, we would comprehend its deep meaning, “to give us pause . . . insisting that there will always be some pause that we human beings will have to be given.” According to Ricks, “Blowin’ ” is so good because it never preaches at the listener or suggests an answer to what the answer may be: “The song staves off hopelessness and hopefulness, disillusionment and illusion.”5
Biographer Clinton Heylin is even more direct than Gill or Ricks, calling “Blowin’ ” outright, “a song that would change his world—nay, the world—fusing much of what he’d been reaching for in his foundation year” (italics in original).6 According to Dylan’s first biographer, Anthony Scaduto, the Peter, Paul and Mary version of “Blowin’ ” really hit home with buyers and activists, becoming the fastest-selling single in Warner Brothers’ history at the time and getting broad airplay on the rhythm and blues stations across the South. He explains, “The racial crisis in the South was deepening and folk songs had become a vital morale booster for the Southern blacks and northern whites who joined them in the civil rights struggle.” As a result, Dylan’s song “became the most sung ‘freedom song,’ north and south, black or white,” and its author the most widely known protest singer.7
Taking up “Blowin’ ” as a mantra for the burgeoning civil rights movement, young activists (mainly white college students) propelled the song far beyond what Dylan could have imagined. He became the movement’s saint and savior. Yet, this is far removed from what he hoped for or aspired to as a musician and performer. Later, as he peeled away the folksinger label and moved into rock and roll, the outcry from fans and critics made it seem as if he had committed a sin. The infamous cries that he was a “Judas” when he performed “Like a Rolling Stone” in front of audiences that just wanted to hear folk tunes indicated the level of antipathy directed at him.
Regardless of Dylan’s thoughts about political movements or the folk scene, “Blowin’ in the Wind” cemented his place in American cultural history. But, while many people wanted him to stay wedded to that era, he did his best to distance himself from this label he never asked to hold. Like all the dualities in Dylan’s life, though, this one too is difficult to assess. Here is a musician who becomes so famous that he symbolizes an entire era, yet he repudiates the status, even going as far as eliminating “Blowin’ ” from his concert performances for a number of years in the late 1960s. While Dylan may have moved away from the song, countless others recorded it or performed it in concerts around the world. As a result, “Blowin’ ” grew into a global anthem, co-opted and adapted in many nations as underdog groups fought for civil rights.
Dylan’s ascension to the top of the folk music world was cemented in January 1964 when Columbia released The Times They Are A-Changin’ to consumers yearning for fresh Dylan material. In addition to the Dylan mania set off by Freewheelin’, which established the singer as a commercial hit, the new record served as a kind of salve for a nation still lurching after the assassination of President Kennedy the previous November. Journalist Robert Shelton calls the album “turntable literature” and notes that “a strong sense of apocalypse dominates the album . . . Dylan, brimming with confidence, was imbuing his more complex ‘stories’ with larger vision and greater universality.”8 Clearly, Dylan stood at the top of his game, a remarkable follow-up to the success he experienced with his previous work.
The country’s pensive mood is reflected in the album photograph of a much more serious looking Dylan. About to turn 23 years old, the singer and songwriter is noticeably thinner, his face taut in comparison with the bemused image on his debut release. Looking down and away from the camera, his furrowed brow suggests the tenor of the age, a post-Kennedy era with much of its exuberance gone, like a deflated balloon that marks the end of a riotous party. Dylan’s arched eyebrows hint at discomfort and his mouth seems clenched. This is not the face of a happy young man.
Ironically, Dylan captured the essence of the nation after Kennedy’s murder, even though the album had been recorded between August and October 1963, wrapping up about a month before the assassination. Quickly developing into a seasoned musician and songwriter, Dylan needed only six recording sessions to put the album together. Yet, as Heylin explains, “The emphasis, though, was very different from that of Freewheelin’. [The Times] is a far more intense album, it is less richly diverse. There is an unrelentedness to the tales of hard times and moral outrages.”9 The result is a record that questions the status quo and asks the listener to consider “regular” people who yearn for a better life, whether it is someone facing oppression based on race or a worker attempting to keep his or her family afloat.
The album is fueled by the anger of the age, but even as he waited for the record to be released, Dylan began to question the status of protest songs and his role at the top of everyone’s folk list. Although many listeners assumed that the title track spoke to the Kennedy assassination, the latter actually proved to the young songwriter that topical songs would never fulfill him as an artist. In late 1965, when asked about the generational aspect of the anthem, Dylan complained that it was not about age. Instead, he claims, “those were the only words I could find to separate aliveness from deadness.”10
What Dylan yearned for, according to writer Andy Gill, is freedom. “What he wanted to do most in the world—write and sing songs—was increasingly being viewed as something in which other people felt they had a say,” Gill explains.11 Plus, Dylan’s increasing fame seemed to scare him. Nigel Williamson says that JFK’s murder had a tremendous impact on the singer, and rhetorically asks, “If they could gun down the President in broad daylight, what might they do to the Voice of a Generation as he stepped out of the stage door into some dark alley after a gig one night?”12 Reportedly, Dylan told friends after the JFK assassination: “Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.”13 In a letter printed in Broadside magazine, Dylan described the toll fame took, saying, “I am now famous by the rules of public famiousity . . . it snuck up on me an’ pulverized me . . . I never knew what was happenin’.”14 The intensity of the media spotlight never destroyed Dylan like it did other musicians and artists, but he increasingly recognized that such a downfall stood lurking in the wings. He may not be killed, but a different kind of threat existed, one that would take his soul.
While the greatest focus on the new album spotlighted the title track, another song on the record also asked listeners to gather around to hear a sad tale, this one titled “North Country Blues.” In it, Dylan tells the story of the mining towns where he grew up and how they fell apart after corporations in control extracted all the ore. Told from the perspective of a miner’s wife from a mining family, “North Country Blues” exposes the early corporate outsourcing that took place in the early 1960s as mining operations realized that they could get cheaper labor from ore-rich areas in South America. The song also details the misery that is left behind when an area once full of promise and vitality is tapped out by corporations only interested in profit, not people’s welfare.
Certainly, “North Country Blues” never achieved the status afforded to Dylan’s anthems from this period. However, it does demonstrate the singer’s willingness to plumb his own life in the hopes of awakening others to hardships taking place. The idea that he would open himself and his past to this kind of examination took courage and commitment, and counters the criticism from some commentators that he wrote protest songs to exploit the movement, not actually support it.
Dylan understood the hardship mining towns faced. According to writer Andy Gill:
Certainly, it’s easy to imagine how the combination of, on the one hand, the heartbreaking poverty of redundant miners’ families, and on the other, the huge gaping holes left by the earth-raping multinational mining companies, might have stirred the first sore flutterings of a sense of injustice in the young Bob Dylan’s heart: these faceless corporations simply tore holes in everything, the human spirit just as easily as the ground.15
Dylan’s experience as a child in Duluth and Hibbing burned the miner’s hard life in his mind. He understood the hardships such a life entailed. Although he determined to leave Hibbing behind, his decision to publicize its plight and the challenges faced by hundreds of other mining towns across the nation showed the singer’s inclination to use his national celebrity for causes that needed such attention.
Looking back at Dylan’s career at its genesis in the early 1960s, one finds that marketing and public relations played a significant role in launching his star. Manager Al Grossman used the singer’s burgeoning reputation to push him into a new stratum, even though his first album was technically a bomb from a sales perspective. The focus on national exposure, while simultaneously limiting Dylan’s public appearances, created a mysterious aura that grew hand-in-hand with the “voice of a generation” tag after the May 27, 1963, release of Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
Grossman and Dylan were keenly aware of the power of branding, even if that term would have been foreign in the era. For example, influential television host Ed Sullivan invited the young singer to perform on his show prior to the release of his new Freewheelin’ album. At the last minute, however, Dylan refused to appear because a network censor would not let him sing “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues,” a satirical song on Dylan’s first album that imagined that communists had overrun America and pokes fun at the anticommunist, ultraconservative John Birch Society, searching for communists under the bed and in the toilet. As a result of the furor over the censorship and walkout, the not-yet-famous Dylan became a symbol of the counterculture, with several major newspapers and magazines running the story, including The New York Times, The Village Voice, and Time. The story propelled Dylan into the spotlight just in time for his new album to appear.16
Grossman pulled off a coup in allowing another of his acts—the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary—to record “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which he and singer Peter Yarrow knew fit perfectly with the mood of the nation. In mid-July 1963, the song as sung in perfect harmony by the group reached No. 2 on Billboard magazine’s top-selling singles chart, amassing some 300,000 copies sold in its first week and eventually eclipsing 1 million. The attention the single drew catapulted Dylan to even greater heights in the folk music community, which more or less anointed him its king. The faux coronation seemed complete later that month at the Newport Folk Festival. Dylan served as everyone’s main attraction.17
Whenever Peter, Paul, and Mary toured college campuses or showed up to perform, they always introduced “Blowin’ ” by telling the crowds about Dylan and emphasizing his importance. This kind of third-party validation is a cornerstone of public relations efforts and the lynchpin of thoughtful strategic communications plans. Scaduto claims that Dylan’s popularity skyrocketed as a result, making him nearly as sought after as Joan Baez. “He seemed almost a reincarnation of James Dean,” he writes, “a crushed young man whose pain seemed honest and deeply felt. . . . He projected hurt and fear, in his wounded eyes and anguished voice.”18 Dylan may have appreciated this analogy, particularly given his fascination with the Hollywood legend while growing up in small town Hibbing. Perhaps some of Dean’s charisma rubbed off on the young man, since everyone recalls that Dylan’s stage performance and likeability seemed to push him to the forefront.
While Dylan established his reputation as the singer and songwriter of the age, however, some critics saw a crass businessman emerge too. Writer Jim Miller links Dylan’s rise to the promotion of this image, rather than any real commitment to the causes his supporters backed. He explains that Dylan’s flirtations with the civil rights movement and antiwar efforts were little more than hitching his persona to causes that would result in greater record sales. Even his most famous song, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Miller says, was more about creating a picture of the singer as a brand than actually committing to the movement. “Dylan’s anthem,” Miller concludes, “was identified from the start with Dylan himself. Grossman shrewdly marketed it using time-tested Tin Pan Alley techniques. Most people first heard the song on the radio, as a hit single.”
Miller sees a great deal of posturing in the way Dylan created his image, from touring and singing with folk queen Joan Baez (and also becoming romantically involved with her, folk music’s reigning deity) to forging ties to antiwar student groups.19 Eminent Dylanologist Clinton Heylin also notes a new approach, saying, “Though always motivated to achieve fame via his music, Dylan in 1962 seemed to be approaching his career for the first time in a businesslike way.” Grossman, in Heylin’s thinking, provided the young singer with “a stabilizing factor during the increasingly frenetic rise to fame.”20
The challenge in distinguishing between what was simply Dylan and what was the money machine developing around him returns to the ever-present chicken or the egg question: what came first, music or the music industry? In the 1960s, neither could really exist without the other. As a result, Dylan as a young musician wanted to write and perform and get recorded. Chronicles is filled with Dylan’s memories of his hunger to write his own songs and develop into a professional musician. Yet, one could not achieve these dreams without submitting in varying degrees to the record industry, whether its demand that artists tour to the marketing it develops to promote the singer and sell product. On top of the direct actions taken by the record company and the artist, there are entire other tangential industries that also have a stake in the game, from the teen magazines that need content to sell copies to the countless organizations at work designing, distributing, and selling the music.
Simply put: there is always a nod to capitalism, no matter the seeming purity of the artist. Hammond had his eye out for the next big thing, which he believed would come from the folk scene. He handpicked Dylan from the dozens (if not hundreds) of potential artists because of the buzz the young man generated in and around Greenwich Village and some other East Coast college cities where he played. One cannot forget that the record industry is first and foremost a business. Like all capitalist organizations, it demands marketing and sales, which is why the stakes were so high for Columbia after the Bob Dylan record flagged.
The changes taking place across the nation and, increasingly, around the world as Vietnam turned into a household word had catapulted Dylan to the forefront of the protest movement. However, as his words and image were gobbled up and ingested by various protest groups and activists, he grew disenchanted with the scene.
In hopes of getting back in touch with humanity and away from fame’s glare, Dylan and some friends took off on a cross-country road trip, making stops in small towns, as well as important destinations, like New Orleans in the midst of the Mardi Gras celebration. His decision to get away seemed necessary and included stops to visit with famed poet Carl Sandburg (who apparently had never heard of Dylan) and Dallas, to see Dealey Plaza for himself. Dylan reportedly spent much of the time in the station wagon, driven by tour manager Victor Maimudes, not only working on lyrics with a portable typewriter, but also smoking marijuana and drinking excessively. The small entourage ended up in Denver for a scheduled concert, then took off for California, where they spent time in Carmel, with Joan Baez.
Within six months of the record The Times They Are A-Changin’ being released, Dylan was ready to hit the studio again. After a trip overseas to London, Paris, and Greece, he returned to the United States and recorded Another Side of Bob Dylan, which as the title indicates, would show the world a different Dylan, one who questioned the so-called answers that the protest movement offered and continued to move away from his role as anointed figurehead of these protests. Even as the world around him grew more chaotic and volatile, the intensity of his production and pulls on his time forced Dylan to reassess his place.
Dylan also faced significant changes in his personal life. His concern with potential violence against him caused him to become even more inward-looking and paranoid, which must have been accentuated by the strain of fame and the increasing drug use. His coterie of hangers-on and advisers grew as more and more people wanted a piece of him—an entire industry built around him needed constant attention and fueling.
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan entertaining demonstrators at the 1963 March on Washington.
(National Archives)
Most important, news of Dylan’s affair with Baez eventually reached his girlfriend Suze Rotolo (photographed with him on the iconic cover of Freewheelin’), which ended their relationship. Writing years later, Rotolo expresses the pain and agony of the fallout and reveals the pressure the young couple felt. She explains:
Bob was charismatic; he was a beacon, a lighthouse. He was also a black hole. He required committed backup and protection I was unable to provide consistently, probably because I needed them myself. I loved him, but I was not able to abdicate my life totally for the music world he lived within.21
The impact on Dylan showed in the songs he wrote for the new album. The lyrics took a turn inward, examining his own life and experiences, rather than in the vein of protest songs or anthems. Several of the songs were plainly about his relationship with Rotolo and the psychological turmoil the breakup triggered.
Despite Dylan’s wariness regarding the media in general, he formed a friendship with journalist Nat Hentoff, even inviting the critic to watch him record Another Side on June 9, 1964. Dylan was more than savvy enough to understand the possible benefit from the resulting New Yorker article. The profile pointed to the singer and songwriter’s new direction away from protest music. Moreover, his relationship with Hentoff (who had written the liner notes for Freewheelin’) provided the musician with a friendly forum for controlling his image. The venerable New Yorker set the tone for America’s upper-middle-class readers by serving as a cultural barometer for this audience. Thus, granting Hentoff access essentially gave Dylan outside validation of his new style.
Before he even began recording, for example, Dylan turned to Hentoff and set the tone for the evening, explaining:
There aren’t any finger-pointing songs in here, either. . . . Me, I don’t want to write for people anymore. You know—be a spokesman. . . . From now on, I want to write from inside me . . . having everything come out naturally. . . . Sometimes I can make myself feel better with music, but other time it’s still hard to go to sleep at night.22
The introspection continued, with Dylan telling the journalist that the songs needed to be derived from his own experiences. The recording session moved fast, with seven songs getting on tape in about two hours. At about 1:30 A.M., the session wrapped up with Dylan pounding through 14 new songs.
When Another Side hit the record stores, critics and listeners reacted with mixed feelings. It seemed as if they were still high on the protest songs of the previous two albums, though, and paid less attention to the new one, despite its newness. Furthermore, Dylan took a lot of direct grief for the title, which alienated some of his friends and provided ammunition to his enemies. The whispers of Dylan’s selling out and that stardom had overtaken his good sense grew louder.
The songs on the new record were a departure of sorts for Dylan. The ache associated with the breakup with Rotolo fueled his lyrics, particularly on the last three songs: “I Don’t Believe You,” “Ballad in Plain D,” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” The last of the three has best stood the test of time and still receives significant airplay today.
With its haunting sound and Dylan’s voice crisp filled with pain, “It Ain’t Me, Babe” tells the tale of the narrator pushing his lover away, because he basically cannot live up to her needs. She wants the kind of love and commitment that the narrator is unable to provide. Robert Shelton views the song not only as a catalog of “love’s burdens,” but also “a rejection of the mythology of true love.”23 Since Dylan composed much of the song while in London and touring Europe, the tie to his breakup with Rotolo is at the heart of the song. Heylin explains that its transposing of the male figure pushing away the female is “a hundred and eighty degrees removed from his own situation with Suze.”24
“Ballad in Plain D” seemed the most autobiographical of the three. Dylan wrote it about a screaming match he got into with Rotolo’s sister Carla, who accused the singer of being manipulative, possessive, and mean-spirited. Heylin claims that Dylan began “raking over the coals of an affair while both ends were still burning.”25 As a result, the song turns into a one-sided epic telling of the turbulent night and his recriminations against the prying influences of Rotolo’s sister and mother. The songwriter, according to writer Andy Gill, attacks the family: “Suze . . . the constant scapegoat of her family’s jealousies, while Carla is viciously characterized as a pretentious, social-climbing parasite.”26 In the end—and similar to the tact he would later employ in “Like a Rolling Stone”—Dylan is the one finger-pointing and accusing. His pain is at the surface and “Ballad” reads as a vengeful retaliation.
The Dylan of the last three songs of Another Side is a far cry from the protest singer of the previous two records. Yet, as we know, the turn inward on this album marked a turning point for the young man, still only a mere 23 years old. From this point forward, many recordings would plumb his emotions and relationships, charting a distinct path away from the daily headlines. Of course, he never moved completely away from topical songs, particularly if charting America’s interaction with injustice, but he found that his own emotions also provided a creative outlet.
* * *
In this early phase of his career, Dylan transformed from little-known folk singer to global icon, and by many accounts, the voice of 1960s’ America. At the same time, however, he almost immediately began moving away from words like “protest” and resented being labeled as anything more than a musician and performer. In a sense, this gap between the way the singer viewed himself versus the way the public saw him embodies the dichotomy discussed at the beginning of this chapter about the general perception of the 1960s as a revolutionary age and its conservative elements in daily life.
Ironically, here one sees the person identified as a spokesman essentially renounce that moniker. At the same time, though, there is no denying that Dylan’s music fueled the civil rights and antiwar movements, which only grew stronger as student-led activism galvanized nationwide. Dylan, therefore, could attempt to run away from the protest movement all he wanted and even allow his album to be called Another Side to throw it back in the faces of his followers, but they still co-opted the music and lyrics.
Adding another layer of interpretation on this chaotic time, one should also consider the corporate elements of the picture. Dylan’s first album may have bombed from a sales perspective, but within 18 months he grew into an industry. Like any business, there are many tangential influences and parties that need the primary operation to succeed. Thus, manager Al Grossman started farming out Dylan’s songs to groups that could sell them on the top-40 singles charts. Then, as Dylan’s own fame expanded, he made money as a touring artist and selling albums. All of the capitalist flurry came on the heels of several synergistic marketing teams with strategic plans to sell Dylan, just like Procter & Gamble sold Ivory soap. Fame turns artists into products, which strips away ideology at its most basic level.
In more recent times, as the 1960s decade became a primary trope in contemporary popular culture, Dylan and the nostalgic vision of that time became welded together even closer. The singer and the age are now virtually synonymous. Thus, we see “Blowin’ ” featured in the global blockbuster Forrest Gump, with Jenny (Robyn Penn) singing the song at a strip club under the moniker “Bobbi Dylan,” while Forrest (Tom Hanks) watches bewildered (which is an odd kind of take on Dylan’s 1970s’ hit “Tangled Up in Blue”). Various protest groups and activists have also resurrected the song for more recent demonstrations, including those against the wars in Iraq.