Wicked Messenger

He told them they needed “A love so hot it can melt the armaments / Before they melt the entire country of Vietnam.”¹ In the end, the self-conscious turn to the gentle and childlike could not withstand a reality that was anything but. For the summer of 1967 was also Vietnam summer, when 20,000 young volunteers took to the door-knockers across the U.S. to argue the case for an end to the war. Finally, two years on from the launch of the all-out U.S. assault, the demonstrations at home began to swell. In the spring, 100,000 rallied in New York, led by Martin Luther King; in the autumn, even more marched in Washington. But the rising tide of protest was accompanied by a rising sense of horror, a feeling of desperation. Paradoxically, the scale of the marches seemed to increase the sense of futility: so many people on the streets, and still they didn’t listen. The 400,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam at the beginning of the year increased to half a million by its end. Hundreds of GIs were being killed each week and many more maimed or wounded. For the Vietnamese, it was incalculably worse.

And the summer of 1967 was the summer of insurrection, violence, and death in American cities. In the black ghettoes, the aspirations and political consciousness engendered by the civil rights movement smashed up against the daily frustrations of poverty, joblessness, bad housing, rotten public services, and brutal policing. The federal government that had failed its people in the South was now dispatching them to die in Vietnam. That summer witnessed blazing disorder in fifty-eight cities, in the course of which police and national guards took forty-three black lives in Detroit and twenty-four in Newark.

Reflecting on why he had been booed by angry black youth at a meeting in Chicago, Martin Luther King explained:

For twelve years I, and others like me, had held out radiant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream . . . I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had soared. They were now booing because they felt we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream they had so readily accepted turn into a nightmare.²

So amid the euphoria of ecstatic rock ’n’ roll and communal self-discovery, it was not at all strange for Andrew Kopkind, consistently one of the era’s most sensitive observers of the radical Left, to observe: “To be white and radical in America this summer is to see horror and feel impotence.” The bankruptcy of the establishment had been revealed as never before: “the old words are meaningless, the old explanations irrelevant, the old remedies useless.” The only hope was that “The wretched of this American earth are together as they have never been before, in motion if not in movement.”³

It was in 1967 that SDS completed its long, tortured repudiation of liberalism. In a speech given to the spring national council, the organization’s national secretary, Greg Calvert, explained that liberals were those who “acted for others” whereas “radicals or revolutionaries” were acting for themselves, engaged in a struggle for their own freedom that was at the same time a struggle for systemic social transformation. Calvert defined SDS’s tasks in language that might have described the Dylan of Highway 61 Revisited: “For SDS, organizing people is detaching them from American reality. When we break them out of that reality, that America, they begin to see their own lives, and America, in a new way . . . the process, really, is to allow the real person to confront the real America.”⁴

Students and youth came to be seen as oppressed in their own right. To many, then as now, the comparison seemed disproportionate. But it struck a chord; it tapped into the same sense of unspecified alienation, that same lust for autonomy and authenticity that Dylan’s music articulated. A top-selling SDS badge of the time promoted draft resistance with the slogan Not with my life you don’t—parodying the title of one of that year’s more lamentable Hollywood comedies.^am With the first serious clashes between white antiwar demonstrators and police—in Los Angeles in June and in Oakland in October—some radicals began talking about “white riots” to complement the actions in the black ghettoes. On the Left, there was increasing agreement that the time had come to move “from protest to resistance.”

By the autumn, SDS had acquired a 30,000-strong following on some 250 campuses around the country. Its numerical strength had grown tenfold in two years—a measure of the upsurge in student radicalism, and SDS’s own unique role as its vehicle and vanguard.⁵ Carl Davidson described the SDS campus shock troops of 1967 as follows: “younger members, freshmen and sophomores, rapidly moving into the hippy, Bobby Dylan syndrome. Having been completely turned off by the American system of compulsory miseducation, they are staunchly anti-intellectual and rarely read anything unless it comes from the underground press syndicate.”⁶

In Playboy, Paul Goodman anatomized the Dylanesque soul of the new student radical:

Their solidarity based on community rather than ideology, their style of direct and frank confrontation, their democratic inclusiveness and aristocratic carelessness of status, caste or getting ahead, their selectivity of the affluent standard of living, their effort to be authentic and committed to their causes rather than merely belonging, their determination to have a say and their refusal to be processed as standard items, their extreme distrust of top-down direction, their disposition to anarchist organization and direct action, their disillusion with the system of institutions . . .⁷

In popular music, the experimental vein opened by mid-sixties Dylan was now being mined with gusto by others. In the spring, the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper. The San Francisco groups unveiled the psychedelic sound. Hendrix took Dylan’s rock ’n’ blues poetry to orgiastic heights. It was the year of “White Rabbit,” “Light My Fire,” “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” among a crop of songs marked by druggy references, obscure lyrics, and exotic sounds. In June, the first Monterey Pop Festival—self-consciously modeled on Newport—featured Hendrix’s sprawling, guitar-drenched cover of “Like a Rolling Stone.” The festival was the dawn of what soon became known as “progressive rock”—rock infused with the sense of experiment, artistic seriousness, and sensory exploration that Dylan had introduced in his mid-sixties masterpieces. At Newport itself, Arlo Guthrie debuted his draft-dodger epic, “Alice’s Restaurant,” to an enthusiastic reception, and Country Joe and the Fish were cheered for their antiwar “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag.” Both songs brimmed with political satire, and were topical in the best Newport tradition, but both were also marked by their mordant jokiness. The killing machine had become too real, too omnipresent, and gallows humor felt like the only reasonable response. Again, Dylan’s work stands behind both songs.

This was also the summer of Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair).” No sooner had the counterculture been identified by the media than it was packaged and promoted as a product. Time made “the new generation” its “man of the year” and praised it for its commitment to “the western ethos—decency, tolerance, brotherhood.” The fashion, film, music, and advertising industries all vied to exploit the new market. Adorno would have smiled bitterly at the ease with which political resistance was transformed into a packaged aesthetic experience—into a lifestyle, a term that enters common usage in this period. So instantaneous was the commodification of the new ethos that at the end of the summer countercultural radicals were already staging a “death of hippie” demonstration in a forlorn effort to cast off the identity fashioned for the insurgents by the media. The irony that the new mass anticonsumerism was propagated by the instruments of consumerism was clear to many at the time; perhaps less clear was that this irony had its roots in the characteristic contradictions of American sixties culture. The youth rebellion of the era was itself, in part, the product of the commercial society against which it rebelled. The insurgent response was buried deep inside the very structures that it shook: even Leave It to Beaver had Eddie Haskell.

Just as big business saw big profits in the nascent counterculture, sections of the Left were also staking a claim, with greater historical entitlement, but in the end with considerably less success. The Yippies—a designation that both mocked and exploited facile media labels—launched themselves on the world in the autumn of 1967. They were the most high profile of many left-based attempts to harness the inchoate politics of the counterculture. Tellingly, they relied almost exclusively on the media to do this. Abbie Hoffman and his comrades proved adept at exploiting television, radio, and newspapers to subvert establishment assumptions; their guerrilla marketing was cheap and cheerful and it had an impact way beyond the confines of the activist Left. But it was always problematic.

The recognized leaders of radicalized American youth in the late sixties were anointed by the media; their leadership was exercised largely through symbolic gestures, images, and catchphrases. There were no mass organizations to which they were accountable, and little real dialogue between the highly visible vanguard and the volatile, rapidly swelling army of dissident students and young people. There were many slogans—some of them incisive and inspiring—but little ideology or program. “The secret of the yippie myth is that it’s nonsense,” wrote Jerry Rubin, proudly, in Do It! his 1970 bestseller; “its basic informational statement is a blank piece of paper.”⁹ It was, more than ever, year zero for many on the American Left. The consequent political vacuum was to be filled in the years to come, alternately, by the liberal Democrats (the McCarthy and McGovern presidential campaigns) and by a bewildering variety of dogmatic ultraleftisms.

Nonetheless, thanks to the confluence of all these trends—thanks to the movement and the media—individual gestures of rebellion did take on powerful political implications, and in some cases did lead to active political engagement. In the charged circumstances of the times, choices over hair, dress, and music came to mean more than they had in the past or would in the future. They referred to something larger than the lone teenage consumer; for many, they referred to and represented the embrace of a great social movement.

Dylan later described 1967 as “the season of hype.”¹⁰ He was singularly unimpressed by the claims being made for the counterculture, the new generation, the new rock, and the New Left. These were all claims that had been lodged in his earlier work, which may have been one reason why the ever-restless one responded to the psychedelic outburst with wary cynicism. It was also one reason why, throughout this period, even as he sat in silence and rural isolation, the mystique of Bob Dylan continued to spread and intensify. His entire back catalogue sold as never before. In August 1967, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde all went gold. Columbia issued a Greatest Hits album to fill the void left by Dylan’s retreat; within six months, it too went gold. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back was released, introducing the Dylan persona to far more people than had actually seen the man perform live. Thanks to the season of hype, Dylan’s work was lapping over ever wider social circles.

During the summer of 1967, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale met with their colleagues in a house in San Francisco to create a new newspaper, The Black Panther. As they worked through the nights honing their message, one record played repeatedly in the background, Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man.” Seale recalled:

This song Bobby Dylan was singing became a very big part of that whole publishing operation of the Black Panther paper. . . . This record became so related to us, even to the brothers who had held down most of the security for the set. The brothers had some big earphones . . . that would sit on your ears and had a kind of direct stereo atmosphere and when you got loaded it was something else! These brothers would get halfway high, loaded on something, and they would sit down and play this record over and over and over, especially after they began to hear Huey P. Newton interpret that record.

Moved by the song but puzzled by the lyric, Seale had asked Newton, “What the hell is a geek?” Newton explained that a geek was a circus performer who ate live chickens:

He doesn’t like eating raw meat or feathers but he does it to survive. But these people who are coming in to see him are coming in for entertainment, so they are the real freaks. And the geek knows this so during his performance, he eats the live chicken and he hands one of the members of the audience a bone, because he realizes that they are the real freaks.

For Newton, the geek-freak interplay carried potent race and class overtones:

What Dylan is putting across is middle class people or upper class people who sometimes take the afternoon off and put their whole family into a limousine and they go down to the black ghettoes to watch the prostitutes and watch the decaying community. They do this for pleasure. . . . people who are disadvantaged . . . they’re not interested in them coming down for entertainment. But if they’ll pay them for a trick, then they’ll tolerate them, or else they’ll drive them out of the ghettoes. This song is hell. You’ve got to understand that this song is saying a hell of a lot about society.¹¹

The summer of ’67 was a time of hope and energy for the Panthers. In May, the hitherto obscure group of revolutionary black nationalists had seized the media spotlight when its members marched onto the floor of the California State Assembly in Sacramento brandishing guns. (In fact, they had intended to sit in the gallery, but got lost en route.) At the time, the party could claim only seventy-odd members, all of them in two West Coast chapters. But they were brash, confident, convinced that they themselves could and would find the key to unlock the black revolt. In marrying ghetto-based community organizing, black pride, the language of anti-imperialism, and the policy of armed self-defense, they believed they had resolved the movement’s mid-decade impasse. Infiltration, repression, egomania, media addiction, and the cult of the gun had not yet turned the party’s internal life into a maelstrom of feuds and personal abuse. In the wake of the Sacramento stunt, they worked to forge links with (and revitalize) the remnants of SNCC, but they weren’t seeking leadership from other quarters; they intended to take the initiative and provide it themselves.

That a rock ballad written by an introverted white boy from Hibbing should mesmerize this would-be ghetto vanguard, forged out of poverty and violence, is a testament not only to Dylan’s art, but also to the era that shaped it. The Panthers were a political response to many of the same tides that shaped Dylan’s artistic arc: the successes and frustrations of the civil rights movement, the bankruptcy of Vietnam War liberalism, a distrust of academic or formal discourses, and a commitment to authenticity and the language of the street. They shared Dylan’s rage at being patronized, as well as his contempt for middle-class liberals who let other people get their kicks for them. They had rejected “America” as a racist entity—and aligned themselves, nominally at least, with those people of color outside the United States who were resisting the U.S. government. For them, the bards of social patriotism—not to mention the prophets of peace and love—held little appeal. In contrast, Dylan’s confrontational energy, his uncompromising assertion of his own autonomy, exerted an immediate emotional and intellectual attraction. Newton and his friends were determined to decipher his code, and make his song their own.

The Panthers took from Dylan’s song what they needed. Newton’s reading of the lyric—characteristically blending the excitement of intellectual discovery with dogmatic self-certainty—may have been singular and obsessive, but it was also apt. Dylan’s carnivalesque satire was an anthem for outsiders who had declared themselves insiders, a trenchant riposte to an uncomprehending, exploitative gaze; it was not at all far-fetched to see America’s race- and class-divide looming behind it. After all, it was African-American culture that provided the template for the protective shell adopted by white bohemia—that shell which Dylan inserts between himself and Mr. Jones.

Meanwhile, the artist who had vowed “I will not go down under the ground” had burrowed into a basement in the Catskills. There, for several months in mid-1967, Dylan conducted a communal musical workshop, an experimental laboratory in which melodies, lyrics, rhythms, instrumentation, and voices could be swapped and varied and reshaped according to the whims and moods of the participants. Crucially, there was no album-making agenda; no business pressure. This was a private affair. And in that privacy, Dylan and his colleagues—Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, and Levon Helm (i.e. The Band)—found freedom. The freedom to plagiarize and to improvise, to say everything or to say nothing, to leave experiments incomplete, to indulge whims. The freedom to play. This is music liberated by its sheer inconsequentiality.

In their full glory, the Basement Tapes comprise 160 recordings of more than 100 individual songs. The vast majority are covers: forgotten pop hits from the fifties, country ballads from the thirties and forties, folk revival standards, blues, rockabilly, bluegrass, songs by John Lee Hooker, Hank Snow, Johnny Cash. It’s a rich and idiosyncratic selection of American people’s music (the sole non-American number is Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble Bee”). In among the covers are a score of Dylan originals, mingling easily in this motley company. Even The Band couldn’t be sure, when Dylan brought them an unfamiliar tune, whether it was one of his own or something retrieved from his vast interior storehouse of popular song.

The Dylan originals on the Basement Tapes boast a startling profusion of memorable hooks and melodies. Song after song features swelling, emotion-choked choruses that are both instantly accessible and impenetrably mysterious. The verses, in contrast, are often wayward, half-told anecdotes, passing impressions, verbal fragments. The eerie disparity between the incomplete, elliptical narratives and the cosmic sense of loss and longing proved seductively and enduringly intriguing.

For five years—the first half of his twenties—Dylan had been in the van, racing ahead, sustaining a precarious balance on the crest of a wave. But at the very moment when avant-gardism was sweeping through new cultural corridors, Dylan decided to dismount. The dandified, aggressively modern surface was replaced by a self-consciously unassuming and traditional garb. The giddiness embodied, celebrated, dissected in the songs of the mid-sixties had left him exhausted. He sought safety in a retreat to the countryside that was also a retreat in time, or more precisely, a search for timelessness. The basement sessions have the air of soothing a fever—the fever of incessant innovation that Dylan had embodied for a few eventful years. Vindictiveness and righteous indignation have been replaced by a more reflective and less judgmental temper.

Inevitably, this private creative moment soon became public. Basement Tape tunes were quickly covered by Peter, Paul and Mary, Manfred Mann, Flatt and Scruggs, the Byrds, and, of course, The Band themselves on Music From Big Pink. More significantly, unlicensed copies of the tapes circulated widely. Within two years the Basement Tapes had become the first mass-distributed bootleg. The laid-back, down-home sound proved a trendsetter (by no means always a positive one). What Dylan and his friends were doing in the privacy of the basement, without purpose or plan, somehow reflected the needs and mood of a broader public mesmerized and discomfited by a series of titanic social clashes.

From the moment the Basement Tapes began seeping out into the world, their musical language struck many as distinctively and self-consciously “American.” Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson both described what they were doing in Woodstock as making “American music.” This thesis is at the core of Greil Marcus’s study of the Basement Tapes, Invisible Republic, where he argues that the tapes are an invocation and exploration of “the old, weird America” whose idiosyncratic voices had been assembled in Harry Smith’s Anthology.

While the “Americanness” of the music is something that almost everyone claims to hear, it is exceedingly difficult to define. Specific allusions are few and far between. The cast of characters and the landscape may suggest an “invisible republic,” but perhaps less so than in the mid-sixties albums. Marcus locates the Basement Tapes’ Americanness not so much in scattered lyric references as in the musical backdrop and the tone of voice—the flat, wary, masked tone that he associates with America’s paradoxical historic development. While his book—easily the most thoughtful meditation on the meaning of Dylan’s music—goes a long way to defining this tone, it does remain elusive.

Marcus argues that Smith’s Anthology is unified by intimations of a “perfectly, absolutely metaphorical America—an arena of rights and obligations, freedom and restraints, crime and punishment, love and death, humor and tragedy, speech and silence . . .”¹² The American “arena” is here so widely drawn that almost any cultural product, from any nation, could qualify for inclusion. As so often in American writing about American popular culture, there is an America-shaped hole at the heart of the analysis. What the songs in Smith’s Anthology have in common is that they were produced, initially, by and for working-class people, and mainly outside the great urban centers. Why then should Americanness be presumed to be their primary binding agent? Are these songs really any more American than Broadway or Hollywood show tunes? Only, of course, if you redefine America as essentially a rural and small-town entity. And that mythology freezes America, removes it from history, and makes it a plaything for repression and empire.

As Dylan himself was fleetingly aware, “America” is a selective construction; in the end, like other nation-states, the U.S. is defined more by the conflict and interaction among its constituent elements than by any lowest common denominator. The critical resort to national identity explains little and obscures the fact that many of the Anthology songs more closely resemble the folk art of foreign societies than Hollywood or Tin Pan Alley or rock ’n’ roll. The modal scales employed by Dock Boggs can be heard in Celtic, Middle Eastern or South Asian music. As Alan Lomax had noted in the fifties, when he made field recordings of Sicilian peasants, folk art was a global phenomenon, largely outside the harmonic rules that governed both western classical and commercial popular music. The American category on which Marcus, along with so many others, relies is as restrictive and reductive as the political categories against which Dylan rebelled. In the end, Marcus commits the very sin with which he charges Lomax and the popular front: he homogenizes a variegated tradition in pursuit of a political vision. That vision may be darker, more fatalistic than anything Lomax (or Harry Smith) would have endorsed, but it is, no less than theirs, the product of ideology and historical experience.

Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that in the basement Dylan and his colleagues were trying to reestablish a relation to a tradition from which they felt severed. The songs are saturated with memory and loss, though what is being remembered or lamented is usually unspecified and unclear. Marcus argues that:

. . . every American harbor[s] a sense of national ending . . . a great public event locked up in the silence of the solitary. For any American it is a defining moment; no promise is so precious as in the moment one knows it can never be kept, that it belongs to the past. In 1967, in the basement of Big Pink, this event was in the air . . . ¹³

The naively disillusioned daughter to whom the song is apparently addressed seems not to be listening. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” is a public rallying call; “Tears of Rage” is a private howl of grief. The power of the chorus—“tears of rage, tears of grief ”—lies in part in the sense that no one will hear, that no one can fathom the narrator’s tragedy. “Why must I always be the thief?” he asks plaintively. Why am I always cast in this role: the criminal, the accused, the outcast? Marcus notes that Dylan sings on this track with “an ache deep in the chest, a voice thick with care.” In “Tears of Rage,” love has been forfeited; guilt and betrayal are mutual. “Oh what kind of love is this / which goes from bad to worse?” The song is haunted by the feeling that patriotic solidarity, national identity, intergenerational bonds have all been dissolved, both sometime in the remote past and immediately, in the here and now. There’s no popular-front optimism in the America of the Basement Tapes. (Woody Guthrie is a ghost, but only one of many.) There’s no faith in progress, democracy or the people. The music certainly evokes an American heritage, but it is a darker one than the sentimental banalities of either the television jingoists or the social patriots.

In the Basement Tapes, America is a hermetic enclosure. It’s a construction outside of which Dylan never steps. Having abandoned year zero, Dylan now sees the same grand tragedies, the same small comforts, repeated cyclically. When, a year later, an interviewer mentioned the deaths of Kennedy and King and the war, Dylan responded: “We’re talking now about things which have always happened since the beginning of time. The specific name or deed isn’t any different than that which has happened previous to this. Progress hasn’t contributed anything but changing face and changing situations of money and wealth.”¹⁴ This is the conservative, antimodernist Dylan who can be traced back to the folk revival. But the cyclical view is distinctly post-accident. It is also, as laid out by Dylan in the interview, glib. In the songs it has power because it’s not a ready-made, self-serving philosophy but an incomplete, pain-riddled vision, not a cheap answer, but a more radical posing of the question.

The Basement Tapes are filled with the sound of young men singing like old men. Young men who had prematurely acquired a ruminative sense of a lost past. Rudderless and adrift in an unstable and violent present, they longed for the enduring, for musical modes and lyric moments beyond fashion and hype. In an age of relentless neologism, the attraction of the Basement Tapes was their timeless quality. However, as Marcus notes, “there is no nostalgia in the basement recordings; they are too cold, pained, or ridiculous for that. The mechanics of time in the music are not comforting.”¹⁵ Retreat may be a palliative, but it is not a cure.

In the Basement Tapes, Dylan adopts a relaxed attitude toward the grotesque, the bizarre, the inexplicable. The encounter with the surreal inanity of the mundane is more equable, more accepting than before; the jokiness is less manic, less defensive. It’s as if the artist found it a relief not to have to be serious about anything at all. He could be chirpily bucolic in “Apple Suckling Tree” and jauntily bathetic in “Please Mrs. Henry” (“I’m down on my knees, and I ain’t got a dime”). He mocks his own inertia and impotence, but with a much gentler touch than in Blonde on Blonde. In place of that album’s strangled urgency, Dylan adopts a laconic humor, a deadpan tone that speaks of resignation and self-preservation in the face of absurdity and betrayal.

Escape and escapism are among the dominant themes of the Basement Tapes, but there is always an ambivalence—about the possibility, desirability or permanence of escape. In the mournful “Goin’ to Acapulco,” the boys sing the chorus, “goin’ to have some fun,” like men facing a prison sentence. The verse offers only a wry, self-protective renunciation:

Now, if someone offers me a joke
I just say no thanks.
I try to tell it like it is
And keep away from pranks.

“You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” appears to celebrate bucolic retreat: “Oh, oh, are we gonna fly / Down in the easy chair!” But on closer inspection it proves to be a curious kind of retreat. Where the chorus hymns an escape that offers both elation and safety, the verses elaborate the paradox of a static journey. In a stark reply to his own “Baby Blue,” Dylan sings:

Pick up your money
And pack up your tent
You ain’t goin’ nowhere

It’s not surprising that this tune became a key track on the Byrds’ influential Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the album that first ploughed the country-rock furrow. Still, it remains altogether more arch and discomfiting than the paeans to rural verities that were to become commonplace as the sixties turned into the seventies. In the last verse, the drawled seriocomic delivery moves dreamily from the frustrations of the world conqueror, Genghis Khan, to what sounds like a lazy person’s revision of a freedom song:

We’ll climb that hill no matter how steep
When we come up to it

The sense that there may be something ghastly lurking in the back-woods, a void at the heart of the retreat, fills “Too Much of Nothing.” In the plangent chorus, there seems to be a reference to T.S. Eliot’s wives (“Say hello to Valerie, say hello to Vivien”). The poet of dread-filled stasis certainly has a place in this song. The easygoing shuffle of the tune contains a subterranean foreboding:

Now, too much of nothing
Can make a man feel ill at ease . . .

The longing for peace, community, and simple fellow-feeling was common ground with the summer of love. But Dylan did not share the shallow optimism of the flower children, or their embrace of an ethic of irresponsibility, or the hopes of imminent transformation that in some ways they shared with the angry radicals. He looks at human affairs here from a safe distance, but remains troubled by them. The sense of resignation is never complete in any of these songs. They are the songs of a man at rest, but uneasily so.

The song titled “Clothes Line Saga” on the official Basement Tapes album was originally labeled “Answer to Ode.” In late August, the Beatles “All You Need Is Love” was knocked off the number-one spot in the charts by a curious song by the unknown Bobbie Gentry, “Ode to Billie Joe.” Gentry was born in Choctaw County, Mississippi, not far from Greenwood, and her song opens on a landscape familiar to Dylan:

It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day

I was out choppin’ cotton and my brother was balin’ hay

And at dinner time we stopped and we walked back to the house to eat

And mama hollered at the back door “y’all remember to wipe your feet”

Dylan recognized in the Gentry song the use of the vocal mask that gives nothing away, that only hints at ominous truths. The surface banality stands in piquant contrast to a hidden tragedy. Indeed, the song was a hit partly because it implied that our problems, social and personal, were more troubling than we liked to admit. In Dylan, the banality itself becomes sinister; the mask becomes a trap. The uncanny normalcy paraded before us by the narrator is straight out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—accurate in all details, yet utterly lifeless.

In Gentry’s song, the secret sore weeping under the surface of daily routine is that “Billy Joe Mcallister jumped off the Tallahatchie bridge.” The song only hints at why this happened and how the narrator was involved (an unwanted pregnancy is the usual interpretation). It’s a private tragedy, a hidden disgrace. In Dylan’s reply, the “secret” that troubles the placid surface of daily routine is a highly public one:

“Have you heard the news?” he said, with a grin,
“The Vice-President’s gone mad!”
“Where?” “Downtown.” “When?” “Last night.”
“Hmm, say, that’s too bad!”
“Well, there’s nothin’ we can do about it,” said the neighbor,
“It’s just somethin’ we’re gonna have to forget.”
“Yes, I guess so,” said Ma,
Then she asked me if the clothes was still wet.

The vice president in 1967 was Hubert Humphrey, the Minnesota politician whose liberal credentials had been eroded by his role in the exclusion of the MFDP at Atlantic City and by his support for the Vietnam War. It’s inconceivable that Dylan did not have him in mind. In addition, the “Vice-President” serves as one of Dylan’s generic authority figures, like the “blind commissioner,” the “drunken politicians” and the senators who pop up in the mid-sixties songs; only now his antics elicit no disbelief. There is no struggle against futility. And that is the problem. In “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Dylan asked: how can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see? In “Clothes Line Saga,” he tells a tale of those who see and hear but still turn away, their senses blighted by the continuum of normalcy. The song meanders to a close by way of a line that is the antithesis of every sentiment expressed by Dylan since he’d first picked up a guitar: “Well, I just do what I’m told.” At which point, the singer returns to the family house and shuts “all the doors.”

It was a bleak social vision against the fevered backdrop of the summer of ’67. In this chilling tale of imperturbable American complacency, and in his intuitive sense that most Americans remained disengaged from the unfolding horrors of the age, Dylan proved more acutely aware of the real challenges facing the insurgents than many of those leading the charge. In “Clothes Line Saga,” America escapes behind a closed door, and responds to the madness and betrayals of public life by shutting them out, citing impotence and cultivating amnesia.

Among the more self-conscious pieces of Americana on the tapes is “Down In the Flood,” whose starting point is the blues response to the Mississippi’s menacing habit of periodically breaching its banks. The harrowing flood of 1927, which displaced hundreds of thousands of African-Americans, inspired three songs Dylan knew well: Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues,” Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Rising High Water Blues,” and Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere.” In all of them, the singer confronts a force of nature, a community is overwhelmed. “Down in the Flood”’s invocation of a collective tragedy takes us back to Dylan’s earliest work, not least his songs about the bomb. But the body of the song is preoccupied with unnamed individuals who seem to be in dispute about the desirability, practicality, and fairness of making a bid to escape the rising waters. As in many of the Basement Tapes, the mythic is offset by the anti-mythic. In the enigmatic chorus only one fact is salient: sometimes choices are imposed and prove to be irrevocable.

In the soaring chorus of “This Wheel’s On Fire,” the out-of-control driver races toward his doom in an ecstasy of rock ’n’ roll. As he detaches himself from the careening imminence of the violent present, he reaches into the past. Each verse begins and ends with the phrase, “If your memory serves you well.” But what is being summoned to memory? Only the plan to meet again, fragments of past interaction, a few bright, palpable, inexplicable details (“I was goin’ to confiscate your lace / and wrap it up in a sailor’s knot / and hide it in your case”) flashing out from a general murkiness.

It was little more than a year since the same artist had insisted “please don’t let on that you knew me when.” The man who was so eager to outgrow the past, who sloughed off identities and relationships with a change in the season, and who had celebrated that freedom in song, is now prophetically intoning: “you knew that we would meet again”—and it doesn’t matter whether that’s in the here or the hereafter. The past surrounds us, clings to us, but we only see it and know it when it’s too late.

The same frail balance between the yearning for freedom and a sense of predestined tragedy swells up inside “I Shall Be Released,” the fragmentary Basement Tape destined to become a global standard. Repeated renditions have made the song robustly anthemic, but in its original incarnation it’s sung by Dylan and Richard Manuel with a tremulous frailty, as if the singing were an effort to keep fear and exhaustion at bay. It’s a song of simplicity and beauty that manages to be immensely evocative in its short span. Somehow its sheer sketchiness conjures up the poignancy of the desire for release and the immutable reality of confinement. It echoes with anonymous injustices committed through eons. While Dylan brings us close to the nameless, faceless narrator, at the same time he wraps this immediacy in a longer view, a cyclical view of freedom and incarceration that seems to take in the course of a whole lifetime. The result reinforces the sense that here, as elsewhere in the Basement Tapes, the yearning for freedom is also a yearning for oblivion, for death, for immersion in the setting sun.

The first person narrator speaks from a prison cell. Prison—and more broadly the cruelty of the criminal justice system—is a leitmotif in Dylan’s work, from “The Ballad of Donald White,” through “The Walls of Red Wing,” “Hattie Carroll,” “Percy’s Song” (“He ain’t no criminal / And his crime it is none, / What happened to him / Could happen to anyone”), “Seven Curses,” “Chimes of Freedom,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” and beyond. On one level, “I Shall Be Released” is a prisoner’s lament. Certainly, many who’ve found themselves incarcerated have heard it and sung it that way.^an But prison here is also, of course, a metaphor—for an oppressive social order or for corporeal life itself. It was precisely this kind of flexibility of metaphor than made it possible to turn gospel songs into freedom songs. In this composition, Dylan takes the hunger for deliverance that fills both the gospels and the freedom songs and detaches it from religious or political teleology.

When David Riesman’s sociological study of the modern American character, The Lonely Crowd, appeared in 1950 it became a bestseller and put its author on the cover of Time magazine. The phrase “the lonely crowd” was, in fact, invented by the publishers, and does not appear in the book, but its paradox captured the growing unease about the fate of the individual in a mass society. For Dylan’s purposes, all that mattered was the title, not the book. The members of the “lonely crowd” are locked up in individual cells, and yet they share the same grievances and the same aspirations, and live in the same prison. The wistful reaching for the ineffable that animated “Blowin’ in the Wind” is very much at the core of “I Shall Be Released,” as in other Basement Tapes, but it’s been inverted. The indefinitely hopeful has given way to the indefinitely sorrowful. The historical opportunity that could be plucked out of the wind has been spent, and is now a thing of the past—haunting the present. In his earlier guises, Dylan had made ancient modes (folk, blues) sound contemporary; here he made contemporary feelings and experiences sound ancient.

Throughout 1967, Phil Ochs was a familiar figure at antiwar rallies. Three years after “Talking Vietnam,” he’d composed a string of songs about the war—“White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land,” “We Seek No Wider War,” “Cops of the World”—and was more preoccupied than ever by American militarism. Like nearly everyone else in the movement, however, he was touched by the psychedelic moment. That year he released Pleasures of the Harbor, using backing musicians, studio effects, and more personal and archly poetic material. “In such an ugly time the true protest is beauty,” he wrote in the liner notes. Yet Ochs was impatient with the counterculture. In “Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends” he jibed at the new self-indulgence.

Later in 1967, Ochs unveiled his newest antiwar composition, “The War is Over,” a song that reflects the febrile mixture of fantasy and despair that characterized the movement during this period. It was inspired by a suggestion Allen Ginsberg had made to a reporter from the Los Angeles Free Press—that the paper should do what he’d done in “Wichita Vortex Sutra”: declare that the war was over. Ochs even staged his own War Is Over rally in New York City’s Central Park that autumn. All this irritated the veteran Trotskyist and tireless antiwar organizer, Fred Halstead: “It made me angry at the time because what we all needed in those days was some inspiration to hold on and reach out, not advice on how to put the problem out of mind. There was already too much of that in a variety of forms.”¹⁶ Ginsberg defended his chosen tactic. The aim was to “make a magic phrase which will stick in people’s consciousnesses like a rock, just as the phrase domino theory—another phrase that stuck in people’s consciousnesses like a rock—got them all confused. So once somebody gets up and says it, that precipitates the awareness, the same awareness of the same desire to end the war, in lots of other people . . .”¹⁷

Ginsberg’s aim was to disturb the complacency that allowed Americans to live with the ongoing atrocity of the war. Ochs’s song was more ambivalent. It opens with the ghostly image of “silent soldiers on a silver screen” accompanied by fifes and drums and fanfares, the accoutrements of weaponized patriotism. By the time it reaches its end, the martial tempo has been exposed as a death march:

. . . So do your duty, boys, and join with pride

Serve your country in her suicide

Find the flags so you can wave good-bye

But just before the end even treason might be worth a try

This country is too young to die . . .

Ochs still cloaked his call for “treason” in the language of social patriotism, but his desperation was growing. The militarized forward motion of the song’s musical setting suggests the impersonal relentless-ness of the war. It lambastes not only its cruelty and waste, but our own ability to live with it. Even protest has become a ritual:

Angry artists painting angry signs
Use their vision just to blind the blind
Poisoned players of a grizzly game
One is guilty and the other gets to point the blame
Pardon me if I refrain

How to break through this sterile charade? If the battle against the warmongers was fought out in our own consciousness, as not only Dylan but many others at the time had suggested, then perhaps it could be won there as well. Marx turned Hegel on his head to found dialectical materialism; in the hallucinatory year of 1967, there seemed plenty of people keen to turn Marx himself on his head, and declare that consciousness determines being. In October, thousands of young people surrounded the Pentagon in a widely publicized collective effort to “levitate” the physical embodiment of the war machine. The final lines of “The War Is Over” indicate that, for Ochs, this is clutching at straws, though he also seems to be saying that all we have to clutch at is straws.

When John Wesley Harding was released in early 1968, it stood in stark contrast to current trends. In place of the multilayered, unabashedly electrified sound that had swept all before it in recent years, Dylan offered an austere, stripped-down alternative, a minimalist ensemble of bass, drums, and acoustic guitar, punctuated by low-key harmonica interludes. Even the monochrome cover seemed a rebuke to the color-spattered fashions of the day.^aq In the songwriting, there was a new economy. It was as if Dylan had moved beyond the prolix romanticism of Blonde on Blonde into a severe classicism. The imagery was pared back. The florid and extraneous were excised. For the first and only time in his career, Dylan completed most of the lyrics before starting work on the tunes. As he made clear in interviews at the time, he was consciously trying to write with restraint and precision. “There’s no hole in any of the stanzas. There’s no blank filler. Each line has something.” Allen Ginsberg, with whom Dylan discussed the change of style, confirmed, “There was to be no wasted language, no wasted breath. All the imagery was to be functional rather than ornamental.”¹⁸

Like the Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding painted a timeless landscape, saturated in historical suffering. But in place of the Basement Tapes’ wealth of personal idiosyncrasy, the figures that occupy this landscape are abstract, universal, isolated. “I put myself out of the songs,” Dylan insisted, “I’m not in the songs anymore.”¹⁹ He has left the theater of his own consciousness to fashion images and tales that stand on their own, as self-contained vehicles for home truths about the human condition. The songs seem carved in granite. Yet they are also edgy, abrupt, incomplete—and very much enmeshed in the experiences and dilemmas Dylan shared with others on the eve of the world-splitting events of 1968.

In John Wesley Harding, social reality seems much more solid than in the kaleidoscopic mid-sixties songs. It also seems less changeable, its features permanent and elemental: poverty, homelessness, loneliness, the arbitrary cruelty of the mob or the state. In some ways, it’s a return to the territory of “Hollis Brown” or “North Country Blues”—a territory largely shunned in the psychedelic era. It should have but didn’t strike commentators at the time just how political this album was. There was no mention of Vietnam or civil rights, but there were immigrants, hobos, drifters, rich and poor people, landlords, outlaws. That this territory did not strike many as “political” is an indication of just how insensitive sections of the American New Left had become to the class issues that preoccupied their predecessors. Dylan himself seemed aware of the paradox. When John Cohen said to him, “your songs aren’t as socially and politically applicable as they were earlier,” Dylan snapped: “As they were earlier? Could it be that they are just as social and political, only that no one cares to . . . let’s start that question again.” After Cohen repeated the point, Dylan gave a more tight-lipped reply: “Probably that is because no one cares to see it the way I’m seeing it now, whereas before I saw it the way they saw it.”²⁰

In one respect, John Wesley Harding was in keeping with musical fashion. It was a concept album, a coherent and distinctive vision, and as such a worthy successor to the string of visions Dylan had etched on vinyl since 1962. But John Wesley Harding was also an accident. Initially, Dylan had intended to enrich the Nashville tracks with guitar and organ. Robbie Robertson had dissuaded him, and thus the strikingly bare sound was sent out into the world. Similarly, Dylan left the lyrics of the title track unfinished. He meant to write another stanza but it wouldn’t come—there was an ambiguity here he could not resolve. It’s not the only song on the album that seems truncated. Dylan himself explained that, despite appearances, these songs were not really ballads; they “lack this traditional sense of time,” the narrative patience and scope that Dylan associated with the folk genre.

Woody Guthrie had died in October, shortly before Dylan recorded John Wesley Harding. He had been Dylan’s starting point as a singer-songwriter, stylistically and politically, and Dylan had never wavered in his devotion to Guthrie’s music. It’s not surprising that the title track, like other songs on the album, revisits a Guthrie archetype. The song begins as a celebration of a modern-day Robin Hood, the outlaw who was “a friend to the poor” and “never known to hurt an honest man,” a successor to Guthrie’s Pretty Boy Floyd. But in the song’s cursory narrative, the notes of ambivalence—the suggestions of violence, guilt, and opportunism—pile up. “All along this countryside, He opened a many a door . . . with a gun in every hand,” “he was never known / To make a foolish move.” In reality John Wesley Hardin (Dylan added the g) was an assassin with some forty killings to his name and at one time a member of an anti-Reconstruction vigilante gang in Texas. He served seventeen years in jail, where he qualified as a lawyer, only to be gunned down by an aggrieved business partner soon after his release. Dylan may or may not have been aware of the historical background (he may just have liked the resoundingly Protestant name) but the evasive formulations of the song certainly undercut any suggestions of noble heroism. “All across the telegraph / His name it did resound.” All that’s left is the published account, and that could be a lie or it could be the truth—or more likely a compound of the two. There’s something of John Ford’s ambiguous endorsement of legend over truth here, but with an additional bleakness: history offers no bittersweet vindication.^ar

Dylan’s portrait of the “poor immigrant” is even less heroic. This isn’t one of Guthrie’s deportees, but a cold and selfish man who lies and cheats. Driven by insecurity and acquisitiveness, he “passionately hates his life / And likewise, fears his death.” Lost in an alien land of competitive individuals, the immigrant’s very efforts to survive and thrive dehumanize him. He “eats but is not satisfied,” “hears but does not see,” and “falls in love with wealth itself.” It’s a form of lifelessness, Dylan’s long-standing enemy, but now it is pitied rather than scorned. Like other songs on the album, it deromanticizes the oppressed, but also disdains cynicism. The immigrant is a victim of history.

The song also restates Dylan’s critique of money-power, the suspicion of Mammon that persists through all his metamorphoses. The incompatibility between wealth and human solidarity is made explicit in “I Am a Lonesome Hobo.” At first, the hobo presents himself in isolation, an individual cut off from the human family. “Where another man’s life might begin, / That’s exactly where mine ends.” Then he reveals how and why he has fallen from grace:

Well, once I was rather prosperous,
There was nothing I did lack.
I had fourteen-karat gold in my mouth
And silk upon my back.
But I did not trust my brother,
I carried him to blame,
Which led me to my fatal doom,
To wander off in shame.

Some might find this statement of values not only explicit but banal. And at times on John Wesley Harding there is a Polonius-like quality in the way “the moral of the story, the moral of this song” is so flatly drawn. However, Dylan routinely undercuts the complacency—frequently, as in the last line of “I Am a Lonesome Hobo,” by a brisk reminder that the losses stand unrecouped. And the advice to “hold your judgment for yourself ” is more than a world-weary expedient. One respect in which John Wesley Harding does break from the Dylan of the mid-sixties is its repudiation of self-righteousness. The need for a more tempered and understanding engagement with a hostile world fills “Dear Landlord,” usually read as Dylan’s message to Albert Grossman, the manager with whom he had recently quarreled. The song’s marvelous opening salvo—“Please don’t put a price on my soul”—is the eternal plea of the creative artist to the moneyman. Though the artist’s “burden is heavy” and his “dreams are beyond control,” he vows to “give you all I got to give;” he knows that he remains dependent on the moneyman’s whims:

And I do hope you receive it well,
Dependin’ on the way you feel that you live.

The plaintive blues moves toward a cautious plea for negotiation based on mutual respect. “Each of us has his own special gift” and therefore: “if you don’t underestimate me, / I won’t underestimate you.” It’s one of several songs on the album that end in blank irresolution. In “Dear Landlord,” the social nexus is a demanding one. Salvaging a measure of dignity and autonomy requires patience and compromise.

In the compact “Drifter’s Escape,” Dylan returns to “the courtroom of honor” he’d exposed in “Hattie Carroll.” Now it’s a broader theater of injustice, and what takes place within its walls is altogether less dignified. From his dramatic opening cry: “Oh, help me in my weakness,” the drifter appears as Everyman, exhausted and bewildered by his fate, persecuted by the state for no reason. The song depicts the public domain as a shameless charade. The judge casts his robe aside and sheds a conspicuous tear:

Outside, the crowd was stirring,
You could hear it from the door.
Inside, the judge was stepping down,
While the jury cried for more.

If the drifter is a passive everyman, the Wicked Messenger is a more complicated figure, and his fate is more enigmatic than the drifter’s. The song title appears to be derived from Proverbs 13:17: “A wicked messenger falleth into mischief: but a faithful ambassador is health.” In Dylan’s song, the wicked messenger first appears in public, unbidden, as an obsessive (“a mind that multiplied the smallest matter”) with a compulsion to flatter his audience. He makes a bed for himself “behind the assembly hall.” One day he brings forth a note to the world reading “The soles of my feet, I swear they’re burning.” The public response to this personal declaration carries a sting in the tail:

Oh, the leaves began to fallin’
And the seas began to part,
And the people that confronted him were many.
And he was told but these few words,
Which opened up his heart,
“If ye cannot bring good news, then don’t bring
any.”

The wicked messenger is the artist, the prophet, the protest singer, seeking public approval and being told in starkly unequivocal terms the price of that approval—he forfeiture of integrity and autonomy. As for the “faithful ambassadors,” Dylan tells their saga in “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” an adaptation of “Joe Hill,” a popular-front favorite, which opens:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me
Says I, “But Joe, you’re ten years dead,”
“I never died,” says he, “I never died,” says he.

The song was composed in the summer of 1936 not by workers, organizers or itinerant balladeers but by two educated leftist intellectuals, Earl Robinson and Alfred Hayes, at the CP-organized Camp Unity in upstate New York. By the end of the year, the song had spread across the country and was being sung in Spain by members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.²¹ As he reveals in Chronicles, Dylan learned about Hill from Izzy Young and knew him as a “messianic figure who wanted to abolish the wage system of capitalism—a mechanic, musician and poet . . . . an organizer for the Wobblies, the fighting section of the American working class.” He also knew the song—and didn’t like it:

Protest songs are difficult to write without making
them come off as preachy and one-dimensional.
You have to show people a side of themselves that
they don’t know is there. The song “Joe Hill” doesn’t
even come close, but if there ever was someone who
could inspire a song, it was him. Joe had the light in
his eyes.

Dylan replaces Joe Hill with St. Augustine. There’s no particular significance in the choice; it was enough that it was a saint from long ago. The substitution enabled Dylan to throw his story back into history, and thereby suggest that the tale was eternally recurring. The modern-day secular martyr was being recycled into a type from antiquity. Like Joe Hill, Dylan’s St. Augustine “is alive as you or me,” but he’s not calmly reassuring, he’s frantic: “searching for the very souls / who already have been sold.” In the second verse, the saint, like Joe Hill, steps forward to address his beloved but debauched democracy (“Come out, ye gifted kings and queens”). However, he does not stir the people to action; he merely asks them to “hear my sad complaint.” He then declares, with a lilting finality: No martyrs are among ye now, whom you can call your own. This ringing line repeals the substance of the Hayes-Robinson song. A striking statement from an artist who had mourned Medgar Evers and written poems about JFK, who’d lived through the Birmingham church bombing and the murders of Mississippi summer, not to mention the death of Che Guevara, announced weeks before he wrote the song. It seems the public world is now too inauthentic to sustain anything as morally grand as a martyr. The only consolation is to “go on your way accordingly / and know you’re not alone.” But there’s a further twist in this reconsideration of Joe Hill’s mission and fate. The singer’s dream ends with the realization that he himself is among those who have put the saint to death. (Having declared there are no martyrs, St. Augustine quickly becomes one.) Dylan himself is revealed as one of the distracted mob, one of the persecutors. And this guilt bereaves him of the only consolation St. Augustine has offered, and he finds himself “alone and terrified.”

This retelling of the legendary martyr-singer’s tale is in part Dylan’s reflection on his own democratic-prophetic vocation. The only prophecy the artist can make with confidence is that he and his message will be rejected by a world that values all the wrong things. The movement’s reassuring dream of redemption through history has been replaced by a nightmare of unqualified bleakness and failure. The true prophets of freedom (not the charlatans in the media) will always be rejected by those who fear freedom. The pathos of the song, however, lies in the admission of mutual complicity—one of the themes that ties John Wesley Harding together. We are all guilty, we all fear the truth, and if we were treated as we deserve, we’d all be damned. The facile dichotomy between them and us, between the hip and the straight, the in-group and the masses, the leader and the pack has been dissolved by humbling experience.

Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise, ye princes, and anoint the shield. For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth. And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much heed: And he cried, A lion: My lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower in the daytime, and I am set in my ward whole nights: And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.

The apocalyptic tone is nowhere stronger on John Wesley Harding than in “All Along the Watchtower.” This startlingly concise and deeply mysterious composition begins in medias res. As Dylan himself noted, it’s a case of “the cycle of events working in a rather reverse order.” The last verse sets the scene for the first two. And one key to that last verse is the passage in Isaiah quoted above. Here the princes are called to keep watch; the “couple of horsemen” approach from the distance; their message is that a civilization has fallen.

The first two of the three verses that make up “All Along the Watchtower” comprise a dislocated dialogue between the two biblical horsemen, recast by Dylan as the joker and the thief. The joker opens the song with a declaration of the urgent need to escape from an environment of oppressive incoherence:

“There must be some way out of here,” said the
joker to the thief,
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief.”

Where the joker is aggrieved, petulant, panicked, the thief—who replies in the second verse—is calm, “kindly,” but also stern. “No reason to get excited” is not the laid-back counsel it may seem. What is needed now, the thief avers, is steely nerves; it’s precisely because there is cause for panic that this is no time to panic. Where the joker complains about thieves (those who drink his wine and dig his earth), the thief complains about those “who feel that life is but a joke.” It’s a caution against cynicism, and a call to find something deeper in this anxious moment. But the thief offers no “way out of here,” merely the prophetic injunction:

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.

But this command for clarity in extremis is wrapped up in enigma. Communication is urgent and necessary but it remains problematic. At the song’s end, apocalypse is imminent. In the Bible, the growl of the wild cat and the howl of the wind are harbingers of the end of times, the fall of Babylon (both can be found in the Book of Revelations, but then, so can almost anything). Critics are right to note the influence of the Bible in Dylan’s work of all periods, but it was only later that this interest acquired a mystical or formally religious significance. What grabbed the young Dylan about the Bible was what grabbed him about folk and blues: its archaic and resonant language, the metaphorical power that enabled it to speak of a deeper experience, a more abiding mystery, than the language of newspapers and magazines. A visitor to Woodstock found two books on Dylan’s table: a Bible and a volume of Hank Williams’s lyrics.

Apocalyptic themes can be found in Dylan’s work from the beginning, whether it’s the nuclear apocalypse of “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” the egalitarian revolution hymned in “When The Ship Comes In” or the history-galvanized revelation in “Chimes of Freedom.” Often the language used to evoke the apocalypse is biblical, but in Dylan’s work of the sixties apocalypse is a social category: a response to the bomb, the imminence of social transformation, the impossibility of social transformation, the cataclysm of war. The wind that howls at the end of “All Along the Watchtower” is the same storm of history that blows through “When The Ship Comes In,” “Chimes of Freedom,” and “Farewell Angelina.” But here, history is no longer vindication or revelation or unbearable chaos; it’s a universal and inescapable judgment. Its action, however, takes place offstage. Its contents are unspecified. Instead, the song loops back on itself. We’re left with the joker and the thief in urgent discussion. The circularity of the song’s structure continuously brings us back to the same moment, to the fact that there’s no “way out of here.” In medias res is not only the song’s method but the state it evokes. It gives us history lived on the brink of destruction and revelation. This tautly constructed, self-contained, gnomic song vibrates with impending doom. Soon after the album’s release, Hendrix took that vibration and orchestrated into a rock Götterdämmerung. With its slouching vocal and three dramatically crafted guitar solos, his “All Along the Watchtower” may be the most insightful and original of all Dylan covers. (Dylan approved and in the seventies adopted Hendrix’s arrangement for his own performances.) Hendrix’s single rode high in the charts in late 1968 and was heard far away in Vietnam, where GIs felt they knew exactly what the song was about.

Among Dylan’s dramatis personae, jokers and thieves are generally unheroic outcasts, impish misfits, scavengers, surviving on the margins. Here they are disembodied voices from an interior discussion. And what they are discussing is the appropriate response to an outside world of chaos, injustice, and violence. There’s another Old Testament prophecy, this one from the Book Ezekiel, that may be relevant:

But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman’s hand.

John Wesley Harding gave the impression of an artist who had replaced the phantasmagoric glimpses of Blonde on Blonde with a clear apprehension of unchanging realities. But it was only an impression. Dylan was, after all, a mere twenty-six years old, and realities were shifting around him at a baffling velocity. The album was not and could not be an old master’s final summation. It was, rather, an arrested moment, as Dylan sought to refine the lessons of previous years. Nor, for all its stylistic coherence, is the album entirely sustained. Though “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” is a favorite with many Dylanologists, it’s a contrived allegory that teases and baffles but ultimately bores. (Nonetheless, the little neighbor boy “with his guilt so well concealed” who mutters “nothing is revealed” is a clue to the rest of the album.) Similarly, “As I Went Out One Morning” fails to satisfy. There is nothing here but allegory, and a not very illuminating one at that. It’s an episode revolving around another belle dame sans merci, who is encountered when Dylan goes out “to breathe the air around Tom Paine’s.” If this alludes to the ECLC fiasco of late 1963, then its main point of interest must be that in the last line of the song it is Paine who apologizes to Dylan. (You’d think it would be the other way around.) If one discounts this bloodless exercise, the only love songs on John Wesley Harding are the two upbeat, pedal-steel-backed country numbers with which the album concludes. They’re charming and wonderfully crafted tunes, but utterly without shading. Both songs are simple statements of unconditional submission to love and family. It didn’t look like it at the time, but they were portents of artistic decline.

In Chronicles, Dylan confirms his distaste for the late-sixties and his anguished estrangement from the era he had helped to shape:

The events of the day, all the cultural mumbo jumbo were imprisoning my soul—nauseating me . . . the mounting of the barricades, the government crack-down . . . the lying noisy voices—the free love, the anti-money system movement—the whole shebang . . . didn’t want to be in that group portrait . . .

The repulsion Dylan felt towards both sides in the polarized cultural battles of the day was shared by another artist who “didn’t want to be in that group portrait” but, retrospectively, occupies a place in its front ranks. In late 1967, Frank Zappa spent several months in the studio with his band, The Mothers of Invention, crafting his third album, We’re Only In It for the Money. The record was as dense as John Wesley Harding was spare, but equally marked by a skepticism towards the fashions of the hour. Zappa was an early apostle of west coast avant-gade rock ’n’ roll “freakery,” reveling in (and advertising) the judgment of an industry magnate who declared that his music had “no commercial potential.” Like other white guitarists of the era, he had schooled himself in the blues, but to the usual sources he added modernist classical music and an inclination to Lenny Bruce-style confrontational satire. In “Plastic People” and “Status Back Baby,” he had savaged high school mores and offered theme tunes for the most sneeringly alienated teens of the day. In Only Money, he broadened his canvas, and trained his mockery on his own audience.

The album’s cover (conceived by Zappa and executed by Cal Schenkel) parodies the collage Peter Blake created for Sergeant Pepper. Where the Beatles had appeared in brightly colored military band uniforms, with the group’s name spelled out in a neat floral arrangement, the unprepossessing Mothers dressed in hideously frilly women’s dresses and their name was spelled out in roughly chopped fruit and vegetables. Blake’s artwork featured an array of pop culture icons, including Dylan, whose place was taken on the Only Money variant by Lee Harvey Oswald. The possibility that this was a reference to Dylan’s ECLC shocker is enhanced by the fact the executive producer of Only Money (and of Zappa’s other 60s albums) was Tom Wilson, who had produced Dylan’s work from Freewheelin’ up to and including Like A Rolling Stone. (Wilson also appears on the Only Money cover).

Like Sergeant Pepper, Only Money is a sonically intricate studio production. It is also a frenetic attack on the ethos of the earlier album and the psychedelic clichés it spawned. Zappa’s anger is aimed simultaneously at philistine, reactionary America and at the counterculture that claimed to offer an alternative to it. The album’s title struck at the core pretense of the new rock industry—the claim to have transcended pop commercialism—as is made clear in one of the babbling monologues that wind in and out of the album’s carefully orchestrated mayhem:

I can’t wait for my rock ’n’ roll record to come out and all the teenagers will start to buy it . . . When my royalty check comes I think I’m going to buy a Mustang . . .

Only Money mixed Chuck Berry, Stockhausen, jazz, Hollywood soundtracks, Brecht and Weill, heavy metal guitar, jazz, doo-wop, surf music, commercial jingles, unidentifiable noises, arcane references, off-key singing, electronic distortion and driving rock rhythms. Often Zappa’s parodies of pop genres are more infectious than the originals. But he never allows his compositions to come to the expected conclusion; he’s constantly disrupting his own music, challenging and disturbing his listeners. Surveying the contemporary U.S., Zappa is mesmerized and appalled:

American way
Try and explain
Scab of a nation
Driven insane

While Zappa is nauseated by the “psychedelic dungeons popping up on every street,” he’s also enraged by the parental insensitivity that bred the countercultural reaction:

Ever take a minute to show a real emotion

In between the moisture cream and velvet facial lotion

Ever tell your kids you’re glad that they can think

Ever say you loved ’em? Ever let ’em watch you drink?

Ever wonder why your daughter looked so sad?

It’s such a drag to have to love a plastic mom and dad

“All your children are poor unfortunate victims of systems beyond their control,” he declares, “a plague upon your ignorance and the gray despair of your ugly life.” But for Zappa, the “flower punks” pose no threat to mainstream society because they mirror its sickness: “Hey punk, where you going with those beads around your neck? / I’m goin’ to the shrink so he can help me be a nervous wreck.” In “Absolutely Free,” he parodies drug anthems like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds;” the title deliberately blurs the line separating an advertising slogan from a statement of personal liberation. The all-male chorus moans “freedom, freedom,” a demand that for Zappa has become merely an echo of brain-dead consumerism. And the “love ethic” of the counterculture is portrayed as yet another corporate ruse to exploit unthinking young people—one which leaves them dangerously ill-equipped to deal with the rage of a violent society:

I’ll buy some beads . . . some feathers and bells and a book of Indian lore . . . I will ask the chamber of commerce how to get to Haight Street and smoke an awful lot of dope. I will dance around barefoot . . . I will love everyone, I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street . . .

Like Dylan, Zappa viewed the dreams of freedom celebrated over the airwaves and in the underground press as facile self-indulgence. He saw consumerism and conformity recreated under the guise of rebellion. In John Wesley Harding, Dylan stepped back from the turmoil of the era and tried to fix its dilemmas through a long lens. In Only Money, Zappa plunges the listener into the maelstrom. The album was teen pop turned inside out, subversion subverted. Zappa’s bohemian anti-bohemianism was extremist by nature, but it could not be sustained, and his achievements in the wake of Only Money were fitful. He was and remained a libertarian, a devotee of individual freedom who was perpetually irritated at the uses to which individuals put that freedom. In the seventies and eighties, he descended too often into lazy pastiche and crass sexism. Still, amid the cynicism of Only Money, he produced a song of gentle charm that challenged the counterculture to practice what it preached:

There will come a time when everybody who is
lonely will be free
To sing and dance and love
There will come a time when every evil that we
know will be an evil
That we can rise above
Who cares if hair is long or short or sprayed or
partly gray
We know that hair ain’t where it’s at
There will come a time when you won’t even be
ashamed if you are fat!

For Dylan, it was a reunion with old associates from the folk scene: Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Jack Elliott, Odetta, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton. Interwoven with their performances of Guthrie classics was a prose narrative written by one-time Almanac Singer Millard Lampell and recited by leftist actors Robert Ryan and Will Geer—the latter had worked and traveled with Guthrie in the thirties and forties, and makes an appearance in Bound for Glory.^at Dylan paid homage to his early role model in his own manner. He brought The Band with him to Carnegie Hall, and together they played three Guthrie numbers in a highly unorthodox style—a rough-edged rockabilly with soulful harmonies and aggressively jerky guitar solos. It was the ensemble’s only public performance in anything like the mode of the Basement Tapes—a dramatic contrast with the cutting-edge sound that had characterized their last public appearances. It was still electric and it still rocked, but in place of the immediacy and modernity of 1966 was a package that felt remote, plangent, archaic. Dylan’s singing is sometimes shaky, as if he’s still in the Catskill basement conducting one of his meandering private meditations on a favorite old tune. But overall, it’s a gutsy and original performance, treating the Guthrie originals with dignity but not reverence, and notable, not least, for Dylan’s choice of songs.

Having long since mastered Guthrie’s wide-ranging repertoire, Dylan could have selected any number of Woody’s more playful or personal compositions, but alighted instead on three songs that were explicitly political in intent and rooted in American history. He opened with a raucously upbeat version of “The Grand Coulee Dam,” one of the Columbia River songs Guthrie wrote in early 1941, when the Bonneville Power Administration brought him up to the Pacific Northwest to sing the praises of the federally funded hydroelectric project—and counteract the hostile propaganda of the big private power companies. This song celebrates both the American landscape and the intervention of the federal government in that landscape. It evokes the power and majesty of the “that King Columbia River” as it “comes a-roaring down the canyon to meet the salty tide” and the perils humans have faced “In the misty crystal glitter of that wild and windward spray” (which sounds like a phrase from “Mr. Tambourine Man”). Dylan shouts out the lines as if he was trying to be heard above the rush of the great waters. He seems to relish their untameable restlessness. But he throws himself equally into the following verses, explaining how “Uncle Sam took up the notion in the year of thirty three” to harness the river’s energy for “the factory and the farmer and for all of you and me” (and to help build “a flying fortress to blast for Uncle Sam”).

There’s no tension here between nature and human society. The singer addresses the Columbia like a brother: “River, while you’re rolling you can do some work for me.” These days, mega-dams like the Grand Coulee are criticized for their ecological and social costs, and protest singers in the third-world countries where these dams are now built are more likely to condemn than to praise them. Of course, the giant private companies, having found World Bank-sponsored big dam projects highly lucrative, have also changed their tune. What seems to fire Dylan in the Guthrie song is its spirit of celebration, its happy merger of lyrical pantheism and social patriotism. Its New-Deal optimism may be worlds apart from his own political temper at this moment but Dylan refuses to mock or undermine the song; he honors Guthrie by plunging into it with unsentimental vigor.

Dylan’s next choice was “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,” a paean to FDR that Guthrie wrote after the president’s death in 1945. It’s a one-dimensional eulogy of the rich kid crippled by polio who became the champion of the poor, the enemy of the “money-changin’ racket boys,” and, fitfully, the great hope of the popular front. Dylan tactfully omitted the telltale verses about the Allies’ wartime conferences at Yalta and Tehran:

He didn’t like Churchill very much . . .
He said he didn’t like DeGaulle or Chiang Kai-Shek
Shook hands with Joseph Stalin, says: “There’s a
man I like!”

Dylan finished his set with “I Ain’t Got No Home,” one of Guthrie’s dust-bowl ballads of the late thirties, which borrows its tune from “This World Is Not My Home,” a Baptist hymn popularized by the Carter Family. Guthrie, who had been inclined to religious mysticism in his younger days, here turned the consolations of other-worldliness upside down. The result was a grim-minded protest against the earthly dispossession of the poor by the rich.

Dylan and The Band turn the song into a keening lamentation. “Police make it hard wherever I may go,” the singer wails, as if the rich man’s cops were forever dogging his steps. Guthrie, of course, had considerably more first-hand experience of police cruelty than Dylan. Nonetheless, Guthrie’s insistence on the subservience of state agents to economic power haunts the younger man’s work, running through “Donald White” and “Hattie Carroll” to “John Wesley Harding” and “The Drifter’s Escape.” In Dylan’s songs of the mid-sixties, the theme is elaborated as a multidimensional metaphor. Singing Guthrie’s words at Carnegie Hall, as the decade nears it climax and conclusion, Dylan reminds himself and his audience of the metaphor’s foundation in an enduring social reality.

“Dylan manifests a profound awareness of the war and how it is Daffecting all of us,” wrote Jon Landau (later Bruce Springsteen’s producer) in his review of John Wesley Harding. “This doesn’t mean that I think any of the particular songs are about the war or that any of the songs are protests over it. All I mean to say is that Dylan has felt the war, that there is an awareness of it contained within the mood of the album as a whole.”²²

There is a single direct reference to Vietnam in Dylan’s work of this period. It comes in the liner notes for Bringing It All Back Home written in early 1965:

a middle-aged druggist
up for district attorney. he starts screaming
at me you’re the one. you’re the one
that’s been causing all them riots over in
vietnam. immediately turns t’ a bunch of
people an’ says if elected, he’ll have me
electrocuted publicly on the next fourth
of july.

When he toured Australia in early 1966, Dylan was quizzed about his views on the war—the Australians had sent troops to back the Americans—but kept ducking the question. When a reporter finally asked if he didn’t have any feelings at all on the subject, he said, “Sure I have a feeling about war, about Vietnam. My thoughts lie in the futility of war, not the morality of it.” At a press conference later in the tour, he offered a more flippant line.

In February 1968, as John Wesley Harding—sans hype—moved up the album charts, the Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive. It brought them to the gates of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, but at terrible human cost. Militarily, they were soon dislodged from the cities of the south and thrown back into the countryside. Politically, the gain proved incalculable. Back in the U.S., the credibility of the war makers tumbled. Opposition widened and sharpened. Eugene McCarthy’s primary challenge to LBJ attracted substantial student support, and his unexpectedly strong showing in New Hampshire hastened the president’s decision not to seek reelection. The more radical elements, however, remained convinced that McCarthy and his ilk had little to offer. Even as some young people were taking their first tentative political steps in identifying with McCarthy, others were striding beyond liberalism. Their numbers multiplied in response to the events that toppled over one another during the following months. The assassination of Martin Luther King was followed by a wave of violent rebellion in the inner cities. The SDS-led student occupation of Columbia University in April became a foretaste of the events in Paris in May. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June fueled the sense of a society out of control, and also, for the moment, terminated the liberal Democratic option. SDS’s ranks now swelled to include 100,000 students nationwide. ²⁴

By the summer of 1968, black and student unrest in the U.S. was clearly seen and felt to be part of a global insurgency. Whether Dylan liked it or not, in many parts of the world he was heard as the voice of dissident America. He was certainly one of the reasons why European youth, overwhelmingly hostile to the US war, did not at any stage repudiate American popular culture. In the U.S., no matter how firmly Dylan disclaimed any representative function, his voice was heard more than ever as the voice of and for the social crisis that everyone now agreed was gripping the country by the throat.

As for the man himself, he remained silent as John Wesley Harding quickly became his bestselling album yet. In July of 1968, however, he decided to grant an interview, not to the national media, but to Sing Out!, the left-wing folk magazine that had championed his early music and passionately debated his development, and was now broke. The interview was conducted by two of Dylan’s old friends from the Village, John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers and Happy Traum, the banjo and guitar player who was editing Sing Out! and living not far from Dylan in Woodstock. Cohen was deferential and seemed uncritically excited by everything Dylan said. In contrast, Traum was preoccupied with something Dylan hadn’t said. He asked his old friend: “Do you foresee a time when you’re going to have to take a position?” “No,” Dylan replied. That wasn’t good enough for Traum, and at several points in the lengthy interview he returns to the subject.

Traum: They’re trying to overcome the people ruling them, and they are powerful people who are running the show. They can be called the establishment, and they are the same people who make the wars, that build the missiles, that manufacture the instruments of death.

Dylan: Well, that’s just the way the world is going.

Traum: The students are trying to make it go another way.

Dylan: Well I’m for the students, of course, they’re going to be taking over the world. The people who they’re fighting are old people, old ideas. They don’t have to fight, they can sit back and wait.

Traum: The old ideas have the guns, though.

Traum: Probably the most pressing thing going on in a political sense is the war. Now I’m not saying any artist or group of artists can change the course of the war, but they still feel it their responsibility to say something.

Dylan: I know some very good artists who are for the war.

Traum: Well I’m just talking about the ones who are against it.

Dylan: That’s like what I’m talking about; it’s for or against the war. That really doesn’t exist. It’s not for or against the war. I’m speaking of a certain painter, and he’s all for the war. He’s just about ready to go over there himself. And I can comprehend him.

Traum: Why can’t you argue with him?

Dylan: I can see what goes into his paintings, and why should I?

Traum: I don’t understand how that relates to whether a position should be taken.

Dylan: Well, there’s nothing for us to talk about really.

Even that brush-off does not deter Traum, who insists on challenging Dylan’s position and finally elicits from him a sharp rebuke:

Traum: My feeling is that with a person who is for the war and ready to go over there, I don’t think it would be possible for you and him to share the same values.

Dylan: I’ve known him a long time, he’s a gentleman and I admire him, he’s a friend of mine. People just have their views. Anyway, how do you know I’m not, as you say, for the war?²⁵

In Dylan’s nonposition on Vietnam, there’s an element of sheer perversity, a desire to tweak and challenge his audience and his followers, a disinclination to give people what they might expect from him. But the wariness of categories here seems more than ever a protective mask, a means of dodging the issue. What’s frustrating is not that Dylan vacillated or displayed the same confusion felt by millions of others, but that he was so reluctant to work at the problems, so lazily satisfied with facile evasions (in contrast to the demands he placed on himself as an artist). An irascible disposition to pose awkward questions is to be cherished, but those who ask awkward questions must also have the patience to listen to complex answers, and when it came to politics, Dylan, at this stage, did not. He resisted the temptation to swim with the youth tide, to accept voguish answers, but he did not resist the temptation to surrender to answerlessness. In this intellectual retreat, he was not alone, as impatience with the status quo too easily and too often translated into impatience with the intricate and long-term demands of movement building.

As a public figure and a private citizen, Dylan failed the test Vietnam posed to all Americans. He did turn away and pretend that he just didn’t see—or rather, he claimed that he saw too much, too far, too deeply, and that therefore it was impossible, inauthentic, for him to speak out. That was a posture. Out of his disdain for fashion, for simplistic dualities, out of his anxieties about getting it wrong and finding himself out of his depth, out of his fear of the cost that taking a stand might exact—not least in the public hatred it would unleash upon him—he turned away, as surely as one of the citizens in his “Clothes Line Saga.”

“‘We’re a Winner’ is a song with a message,” Curtis Mayfield explained in January 1968, “a message to all, and yet basically to the black masses of people . . . things move slowly but with the movement we’re a winner.”²⁶ The message made many radio executives uncomfortable. Nor did it sit that easily with the label, ABC, from which Mayfield and the Impressions soon decamped. Mayfield was twenty-six years old. He knew the kind of music he wanted to make, why he wanted to make it, and whom he wanted to make it with and for. In the coming years, his black-owned and managed Curtom label would release a series of densely orchestrated, socially conscious singles.

“We’re a Winner” blended a positive response to the new black nationalism with the optimism of earlier years. “There’ll be no more Uncle Tom / at last that blessed day has come.” After King’s assassination, Mayfield’s writing took on a more somber tone, and greater political realism, but remained rooted in the humanistic ideology of the civil rights movement. Like King, Curtis tried to bridge the gap between the moderates and the militants, between a necessary black pride and a more inclusive politics. He was not afraid to lecture the separatists. In 1969 the Impressions released “Mighty, Mighty, Spade and Whitey,” an appeal to a movement in crisis:

Your black and white power
Is gonna be a crumbling tower
And we who stand divided
So goddamn undecided
Give this some thought
In stupidness we’ve all been caught

The harsher mood could also be heard that year in Nina Simone’s “Revolution”: “I’m here to tell you about destruction . . .” The album on which this featured also included smoking covers of three Dylan songs: “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” and “I Shall Be Released.” Soon after, Simone wrote “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” ruefully recalling her younger self and the changed circumstances that faced her successors:

Young, gifted and black
How I long to know the truth
There are times when I look back
And I am haunted by my youth
Oh but my joy of today
Is that we can all be proud to say
To be young, gifted and black
Is where it’s at

Curtis Mayfield’s first solo album, Curtis, appeared in 1970. Musically and lyrically, it was more adventurous than anything he’d attempted with the Impressions. The richly textured sound was anchored in a deep, funky pulse. And politics were everywhere. The first single from the album was the apocalyptic “If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Gonna Go.” It’s an indication of how widespread and deep-going the sense of social crisis had become in these years that it darkened the vision of even a dedicated optimist like Mayfield. Nonetheless, he remained committed to a music of uplift. The solo album also included the alternative anthem, “Miss Black America,” “Move On Up,” which recapitulates motifs from “Keep On Pushing” and “We’re a Winner,” and the remarkable “We People Who Are Darker than Blue,” a song that ought to be listened to by anyone who thinks that the only true voice of the black power era was one of aggressive nihilism. In “Keep On Keeping On,” from his 1971 follow-up album, Roots, Mayfield sings: “Everybody gather round and listen to my song, I’ve only got one. . . .” He wasn’t embarrassed to reiterate his core theme—the inspirational gospel politics of “People Get Ready,” the message of struggle sustained, survived, redeemed, over many years and indeed many generations.

Mayfield’s work was part of an efflorescence of social comment in black popular music. After so many years of hesitation and silence among the soul stars, the dam broke. Between 1968 and 1973, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, the Temptations, Bobby Womack, Stevie Wonder, Edwin Starr, and others produced a rich seam of what can only be described as protest music—songs replete with topical references and a partisan appeal—wrought to a degree of musical sophistication undreamt of by the folkies. Of course, this wasn’t music for rallies or marches; it was music to dance to.

The hip-hop artists of the nineties ransacked the records of this period; Mayfield is said to be the most sampled of all, a tribute to his fecund musical imagination. Over his grooves, a new generation laid down hard-hitting social comment laced with a revived black nationalism. But they did so in the absence of a mass movement. As a result, authenticity—“keeping it real”—remained highly problematic in the hip-hop world. For some, authenticity was salvaged through gun-toting gangsterism or misogyny. Aggressive postures were certainly more common than active involvement in black communities. But that’s what the industry wanted, and it had grown far more ruthlessly expert in appropriating and marketing the authentic than it had been in Dylan’s time.

Soon after the Sing Out! interview, a national television audience witnessed a Dylanesque nightmare come alive on the streets of Chicago. While the Democratic National Convention nominated Vice President Humphrey over antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy, the riot squad grew restless. Police assaulted and teargassed demonstrators, journalists, delegates and bystanders. McCarthy had advised his own supporters to stay away, and the mobilization for the Chicago demonstration was in the hands of the Yippies, SDS, and others on the far Left. The turnout of 10,000 was relatively small, but that did not lessen the symbolic impact of the confrontation between countercultural radicals and Mayor Daley’s storm troopers. In an effort to draw young people to the protests, and to up the symbolic stakes, the Yippies spread rumors that Dylan—or the Beatles or the Stones—would be appearing. In the end, Phil Ochs found himself performing “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” in Grant Park amid flaming draft cards, encircling police, and cries of “off the pigs” from zealots and provocateurs alike. The protesters moved off toward the convention center. There, under the gaze of the television cameras, they were met by a ferocious police attack, to which they responded by chanting “the whole world is watching!”^av It was five years to the day since the March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington. ²⁷

The events in Chicago were traumatic for Ochs. “Chicago’s going to come everywhere in the western hemisphere,” he said a few months later. “We’ll all get to meet Mayor Daley in person. One way or another, Chicago was very exhilarating at the time and then very sad afterward. Because something very extraordinary died there, which was America .”²⁸ The cover of his next album, Rehearsals for Retirement, featured a tombstone with the words Phil Ochs (American) Born El Paso Texas Died Chicago Illinois. Commercially, the album was a flop. Harassed by the FBI, appalled at the war and the violence at home, uncertain of his own role as singer and activist, he experienced the first bouts of the depressive illness that drove him to suicide in 1976. “America used to be the melting pot,” he said in 1969. “Now the pot is boiling over.” Convinced that somehow he had to find a way to speak directly to working-class Americans, he tried to reinvent himself as a Presley-style rock ’n’ roller, gold lamé suit and all. The transition was much more artificial than the one Dylan unveiled at Newport, and though it led to a similar clash with the expectations of previously devoted fans, it did not succeed in reaching a new audience. The ironically titled Greatest Hits album of 1970 made not the slightest dent in the now huge rock ’n’ roll market. On one song on the album, “Chords of Fame,” Ochs warned his successors:

I can see you make the music
’Cause you carry a guitar
God help the troubadour
Who tries to be a star
So play the chords of love, my friend
Play the chords of pain
If you want to keep your song,
Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t play the chords of fame

In August 1968, the Beatles told their fans just what they thought about the latest ideological fashion in “Revolution,” a put-down of violent political posturing (with typical sixties volatility, John Lennon would soon recant and recast the message). The underground press cried Judas, but Irwin Silber asked. “Whoever said the Beatles were revolutionaries in the first place? The record companies, the press agents, the promoters, the managers—the whole greedy crew of artful dodgers who figure you can peddle revolution along with soap and cornflakes and ass and anything else that can turn over a dollar.”²⁹

In November 1968, Columbia Records (Dylan’s label) ran a series of full-page advertisements in the underground press—then reaching hundreds of thousands of potential customers—showing long-haired protesters locked in a police cell, surrounded by placards displaying the slogans Music is Love, Grab Hold, and Wake Up. Above the image ran the bold strap: But the Man Can’t Bust our Music. The small text explained: “the establishment’s against adventure and the arousing experience that comes with today’s music” but “the man can’t stop you from listening.”³⁰

The Columbia campaign assumed that the best way to sell the new music was to emphasize its oppositional nature, as long as one was careful not to mention anything specific that people might be opposed to (notably the war). Other large corporations followed suit. But some six months later, Columbia and the rest cancelled the campaign and withdrew their advertising from the underground press. They claimed that they had been embarrassed by the tasteless and prurient material that often surrounded their ads. They may also have been influenced by an FBI memo that warned that the ads “appear to be giving active aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States.”³¹ In any case, they set out to find other means of reaching record-buying kids.

Music From Big Pink, The Band’s evocative debut album, was released in mid-1968. Initially, the group attracted attention because of the link with Dylan: they had backed him in 1966, their album included three previously unreleased Dylan songs (Basement Tapes masterpieces “I Shall Be Released,” “Tears Of Rage,” and “This Wheel’s On Fire”), and its cover was graced with a charming fauxnaif painting by the master himself. But in Music From Big Pink, and even more in their second album, titled simply The Band (released in October 1969), this ensemble of idiosyncratic talents created a distinctive sound-world that exercised its own powerful appeal.

They found authenticity in a lost America of toil and sweat, in the regional, the handmade, the eccentric. Far from rejecting the past, they embraced it, as if it held the only safety and salvation. Their Americana—and it really doesn’t matter that four of the five were Canadian—was not the familiar stuff of social patriotism. No national unity, no collective inheritance is celebrated here; instead, we are offered portraits of individuals prey to huge, uncontrollable forces and invocations of fleeting moments of peace and camaraderie.

“King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” from the second album, is one of the very few pop songs of this period even to mention organized labor (“I work for the union . . .”). However, it’s a decidedly ambivalent treatment of the subject. The song’s story line is obscure, but the meaning, as Greil Marcus said, is in the singing: “just listen to the worry in his voice.” What’s realized so potently in this song is the rising anxiety of an individual facing impending catastrophe. Despite its promises (“your hard times are about to end”), the union, it seems, cannot tame nature or fate.

The second album also included a song that was to become a standard: “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” How strange that this lament for the fall of the Confederacy should touch and stir the white rock ’n’ roll audience in 1969—only a few years after television screens had been filled with images from Birmingham and Selma. Stranger still that, in 1971, the song should supply Joan Baez with her biggest commercial success.

Robertson has explained that the song was inspired by a conversation with Levon Helm’s father, and his salutation, “the South shall rise again.” This unexpected resuscitation of the Confederacy springs from The Band’s fascination with the “real America,” the America that had not been slicked down and brightly packaged. It reflected their deliberately counter-fashionable sympathy with the redneck nation sneered at by students and intellectuals. But its deeper matter, and its appeal, went beyond that. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is a lamentation that seems to well up from deep inside a defeated nation. It is a song about the curse of war and especially the price that working-class people always pay for war. It is haunted by that sense of historical loss Greil Marcus speaks of. It resounds with echoes of the Vietnam War.

Chicago and the other dramatic events in America that year were part of a global chain reaction. Just as in the U.S., insurgencies had been gestating elsewhere, and now—under the overarching impact of the struggle between the U.S. and Vietnam—they exploded into the open. Britain, Germany, and Japan all witnessed large antiwar demonstrations, student strikes and occupations, and street battles between protesters and police. In France and Italy, there was all that and more—including industrial action on a scale not seen in decades. Student uprisings played a role in changing governments in both Pakistan and Belgium. In Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring was crushed by the Soviet invasion. Maoist youth launched the Naxalite rebellion in India. And in Mexico City, the Olympic games were preceded by the massacre of 300 student protesters by the police and army.

In that context, revolutionary rhetoric seemed less far-fetched than at any time since before World War II. “The Times They Are A- Changin’” was no longer a wistful prophecy but an accurate description of a global reality. Or was it? In the U.S. presidential election that autumn, the prowar Nixon beat the prowar Humphrey by a narrow margin, with the even more prowar Wallace picking up 13 percent of the popular vote. And most of those who voted for either Humphrey or Nixon agreed with Wallace that the protesters in Chicago didn’t get half what they deserved. But while the electoral landscape seemed to defy the Left’s assumptions of the day, it did not confirm the Right’s either. In Arkansas, for example, voters backed Wallace for president, liberal Republican Winthrop Rockefeller for governor, and reelected to the Senate one of the most persistent and high-profile critics of U.S. foreign policy, William Fulbright. People were in motion, and one of the errors of the Left was to construct too great a political and cultural gap between the enlightened ones (themselves) and the rest of the population, who were never merely the uniform “silent majority” Nixon and Agnew claimed to champion. Dylan had articulated this “them and us” dichotomy as fiercely as anyone. In John Wesley Harding, even as it was becoming the dominant psychology on the Left and the counterculture, he had drawn back from it. Others did not.

The whole raison d’être of the New Left had been exposed as a lot of hot air, that was demoralizing. I mean, these kids thought they were going to change the world, they really did. They were profoundly deluded. I used to talk to them, to the hippies, yippies. I understood their mentality as well as anyone could. But things like Altamont, things like Kent State, the election of Richard Nixon, the fact that the war just kept going on and on and on, and nothing they did could stop it.

The SDS national convention held in Chicago in June 1969 was to be the organization’s last. Two thousand delegates attended. They had all seen the special issue of New Left Notes with its banner headline YOU DON’T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO KNOW WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS, a quote from Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Underneath the headline was a lengthy statement drawn up by individuals from the SDS national leadership and the Columbia chapter, which had risen to prominence as a result of the previous year’s occupation. This statement argued that in the context of the increasingly bloody worldwide struggle against imperialism “white mother country radicals” had to take a new step. If they were really to be of assistance to the Vietnamese and the black liberation struggle—epitomized for SDS by the Black Panthers—they had to become “revolutionaries.” And to them, being a revolutionary was about engaging in direct physical confrontation with the power of the state and the war machine.

The Weathermen, as the supporters of the statement became known, spurned alliances with “reformists” (anyone to their right) and labor unions, presumed to be irredeemably corrupted by racism and imperialism. Instead, they looked to “youth” as the only constituency within white America that could or would initiate far-reaching change. Youth, even middle-class youth, had little investment in the capitalist system, which was experienced as alien and repressive. The evidence for this was to be found in the manifest radicalization of ever-growing swathes of young people (not only college students) and above all in the phenomenal spread of the counterculture.

For the Weathermen, Dylan was a handy weapon in the factional battle that had preoccupied them for the last year. In early 1968, a small Marxist-Leninist outfit called Progressive Labor had entered SDS—thanks to its antiauthoritarian deletion of the old social democratic proscription of Communists. PL espoused a stridently class-reductionist style of Marxism, opposed the new black nationalism, advocated a “worker-student alliance,” disparaged the counterculture, and insisted that its male members keep their hair short and wear “straight” clothes. You wouldn’t have thought they would make headway in SDS, with its individualist ethos and ideological agnosticism. But it was precisely those qualities that made SDS easy prey to PL’s organizational discipline and its members’ apparent facility—and dauntingly absolute certainty—in deploying Marxist categories.

So the Weathermen used Dylan to show up PL’s unhipness, to mock its vanguardism, and to suggest that it was all talk and no action. But they also tried to fight PL with its own weapons—indulging in Leninist jargon in a manner that SDS’s first generation and their Prairie Power successors would have found grotesque. Alongside Dylan they quoted Lin Piao (“Long Live the Victory of the People’s War”). In coming out for “revolutionary communism” and a strategy of violent confrontation they bid farewell to the Port Huron Statement and indeed to much that had made SDS distinctive and attractive.³²

Behind the crisis in SDS lay the realities, both heady and harsh, of the growing radicalization of youth and the growing frustration at the movement’s inability to stop the war. According to Gallup, in the spring of 1968, 8 percent of students called themselves “radical or far left” (a 100 percent increase over the previous year); 16 percent agreed with the statement “the war in Vietnam is pure imperialism” (a year later, that would rise to an astonishing 41 percent). Sixty-nine percent classified themselves as “doves.” Fortune revealed that half of all college students thought the U.S. was a “sick” society.³³

In June 1969, SDS seemed to be at the height of its resonance with youth. But as a result of the experiences of the decade now coming to an end, the organization remained unstable. It was two years since the radicals had turned “from protest to resistance.” While the former had continued to expand the latter had remained mainly symbolic—because physically stopping the war machine was beyond the capacity of the movement, and way beyond anything organized labor was prepared to contemplate. At the same time, the Nixon administration was harassing dissidents and taking repressive measures that convinced some that “fascism” was at hand. Seven years after Port Huron, the SDS leaders in the Weather faction were still looking for a way to move outside the student ghetto, still looking for a force that could rise to the imminent moral challenge, still uncomfortable with their comfortableness. In battling PL, they saw themselves as the true inheritors of the SDS lineage, and their claim was a reasonable one.

Coupled with the strident but sketchy “anti-imperialist” analysis was the familiar discourse of authenticity. The call to direct action and personal transformation (not least rejection of the comforts of middle-class existence), however changed in tone, was an elaboration on the early emphases of the civil rights and peace movements, as was the notion that movements of opposition should somehow prefigure the society they were trying to build. And their belief that where vanguards led others would surely follow derived from the experience of the last nine years, during which, from Greensboro on, small numbers of brave people had been shown to be forerunners of great changes.

Like Dylan at the ECLC dinner, the Weathermen had decided that any investment in the social order disarmed its opponents. They wanted to expose themselves to the dangers from which they were protected—as students, as intellectuals, as putative members of the middle class, as Americans—and to test just how much their beliefs and their politics really meant to them. Nonviolence had been sold to them as both principle and tactic—so they rejected it as both principle and tactic. The power of SNCC’s commitment to direct action in the South was transmuted into a worship of action, including violent action, for its own sake, and a sneering insistence that nothing else was authentic. The liberal utopianism of the early sixties had not been abandoned so much as it had turned darkly apocalyptic. The gentle political urgency of “Blowin’ in the Wind” had been given a savage twist.

What made Weather and much of the late-sixties Left different from their SDS forebears was their adoption of the jargon of Leninism and their uncritical devotion to foreign revolutions. This desperate reaching out to forces and ideas seen to lie beyond America’s borders has earned the undying ire and ridicule of many. But even in this, the Weathermen continued to reflect the distinctiveness of the American sixties. America remained exceptional—only now, that exceptionalism was defined as a national barbarism and sickness. Apart from seeking the approval of the Vietnamese and the Cubans, there was little interest in dialogue with the Left in other societies. As far as the Weathermen were concerned, no one really had anything to teach them, including the oppressed in whose name they were prepared to destroy and be destroyed. In their anti-intellectualism, the Weathermen were at their most distinctively American, and quite at odds with the global culture of the Left, even at that time. Their internationalism could express itself only as a negation, not least of the rhetoric of social patriotism, which, for all of them, still formed an emotional hinterland. In their prostration before the Panthers or the Vietcong, the white radicals professed revolutionary humility and self-abnegation; but there was more than a touch of arrogance and self-promotion in their posturing. They believed they were the youth leaders the media said they were. They accepted the media’s narrative of what had been happening in America over the last decade—a narrative comprised of symbolic images, dramatic confrontations, and charismatic leaders. And they devised their strategy accordingly.

For all their folly, the Weathermen—though never numbering more than a few hundred—did embody a more widespread mood, which was why people followed their antics with such fascination, and why many young people identified with them without approving of their actions or having the least intention of following their example. “Weatherman is a vanguard floating free of a mass base,” Kopkind observed. “But there’s more to it than that. What appeal Weatherman has comes in part from its integration of the two basic streams of the movement of the sixties—political mobilization and personal liberation.”³⁴

One of the most bizarre and unexpected apparitions in a year when public life took on an increasing surreal quality was the re-emergence of Bob Dylan in the spring of 1969 in the guise of a crooning country and western singer. Since the release of John Wesley Harding in early 1968, his admirers had wondered how the master would respond to the tumultuous events that followed. What would he have to say about “the revolution”? The kids had been surging through the streets, apparently inspired by Dylan’s music. But Dylan himself had sunk into silence. Not merely public silence, as in the eighteen months following the motorcycle accident (in fact, one of his most fecund periods); after recording John Wesley Harding he wrote nothing for more than a year. Under contractual pressure to produce an album, he returned to the studio in February 1969, with hardly a new song in his head; the result of a series of haphazard sessions was Nashville Skyline.

At the time, country and western was viewed as the antithesis of the counterculture, the epitome of the unhip. Nashville was the embodiment of ultrapatriotic, right-wing America, socially, politically and culturally conservative. Dylan himself had long known that this image was a caricature, that country music was haunted by voices of discontent and alienation. He harboured a secret fondness for Jimmie Rodgers, one of the earliest white, working class performers to achieve commercial success by raiding black vocal styles. He had gown up on Hank Williams, had absorbed his lyrical artistry, and been moved by his songs of exultation and isolation: “When I hear Hank sing, all movement ceases,” he commented, “The slightest whisper seems sacrilege.” Though Williams is hailed as the father of country and the grandfather of rock ’n’ roll, he referred to himself as a folk singer, and his understanding of the genre was close to the credo of authenticity to which both Lomax and Dylan subscribed. “Folk music is sincere,” he said in 1952, a few months before his early drink and drug-induced death, “There’s nothing phoney about it. When a folk singer sings a sad song, he’s sad. He means it.” It was this strand of confessional rawness within the country idiom that touched Dylan in his youth (and to which he has paid frequent tribute in later years).

Dylan knew that the rockabilly rebels of the mid-fifties (Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins) were but one step removed from Nashville orthodoxy. And he had been a Johnny Cash fan even before the two met at the Newport Festival in 1964—where Cash, like other artists, was re-packaged as a “folk singer.” He described Cash’s early hit, “I Walk The Line,” as “one of the most mysterious and revolutionary [songs] of all time, a song that makes an attack on your most vulnerable spots. . . . He sounds like he’s on the edge of fire, or in the deep snow, or in a ghostly forest. . . .” Cash himself had been among the first artists from outside the folk milieu to recognize Dylan’s genius. Like Sam Cooke, he felt pushed by Freewheelin’ to extend his range, to tackle more explicit social matter. He covered “Don’t Think Twice,” “It Ain’t Me Babe,” and “Mama, You Been on My Mind.” He also recorded a series of thematically unified albums, including, in 1964, Bitter Tears, an opus on the injustices suffered by Native Americans (mainly covers of songs by Broadside veteran and Dylan favorite Peter La Farge). In 1968, Cash scored huge commercial hits with two live albums, one recorded in Folsom Prison and one in San Quentin. Here he brought the spirit of angry protest—mellowed by humour and religiosity—into the grim habitat of some of America’s most desperate human beings:

San Quentin, I hate ev’ry inch of you.
You’ve cut me and have scarred me thru an’ thru.
And I’ll walk out a wiser weaker man;
Mister Congressman why can’t you understand?

In 1969, Cash was at the height of his success; that year he outsold even the Beatles, and hosted his own weekly network television show (on which Dylan appeared). He enjoyed pop chart success with the excruciating novelty song “My Boy Sue” and with “The Lonely Voice of Youth,” in which he sentimentalized the younger generation even as Dylan himself was doing his best to run away from it. In 1971, he composed his own anthem, “Man in Black,” in which, echoing both “Chimes of Freedom” and “With God on Our Side,” he declared his social mission:

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his
crime,
But is there because he’s a victim of the times. . . .
I wear it for the sick and lonely old,
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,
I wear the black in mournin’ for the lives that could
have been,
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.
And, I wear it for the thousands who have died,
Believin’ that the Lord was on their side.

This was the kind of explicit political declaration that Dylan himself had long since grown wary of. Yet in Cash’s hands it carries conviction. His sympathy for the poor and the outcast became one of his trademarks, but the radicalism was always mingled with social conformity and audience-soothing sentiment. He could follow up “San Quentin” with the jingoistic “Raggedy Flag,” which would have made Guthrie cringe even at the height of his patriotic fervor during the war-time popular front.

Dylan’s producer, Bob Johnston, had played rhythm guitar on some of Cash’s studio albums, and he had already induced to Dylan to record both Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding in Nashville. When Dylan returned to Nashville in early ’69, bereft of creative ideas, Johnston persuaded Cash to join him in the studio. Cash not only admired Dylan’s work; he felt a gentle compassion for the younger man’s troubled spirit. He knew that Dylan was in crisis, stymied by the weight of expectation and media attention. In Nashville, he offered him brotherly acceptance and support. Dylan repaid it by writing “Wanted Man”—in which he subordinated his own artistic personality to generate a convincing Cash pastiche.

However, the results of their studio collaboration were largely unsatisfactory, as was the album that emerged from Dylan’s Tennessee foray. For some, Nashville Skyline, with its smooth country instrumentation, mellow lyrics and fruity vocals, was Dylan’s most attractive production to date; certainly it sold better than any of his previous releases. But for all the attempts to find some higher wisdom in its paeans to domestic bliss and homey pleasures, the reality was that too much of Nashville Skyline was bland and complacent—faults no one would have associated with previous Dylan creations. The tougher country tradition of which Cash himself was an avatar was entirely absent. There was no hint of the icy despair of Hank Williams in “Alone and Forsaken” or “Mansion on the Hill,” nor the soaring affirmation of “Jumbalaya” or “I Saw the Light.” Instead, listeners were treated to a charade: the restless one pretending to be at rest. The fickleness and rawness that characterised Dylan’s treatment of erotic relations in the past was replaced by unqualified assertions of enduring love and loyalty, frequently couched in abject cliches: “Love is all there is, it makes the world go round.” “You can have your cake and eat it too,” he claimed, without the ironic coloring that might have made this wishful thinking poignant. To some extent, the sparseness of invention was masked by the excellence of the arrangements and the professionalism of the accompanists. Some songs (“Lay Lady Lay,” “I Threw It All Away,” “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”) are certainly better written and more enjoyable than others (“Country Pie,” “Peggy Day”). But as a whole, the album is an exercise in deliberate banality (not to mention, at less than half an hour total running time, a rip-off for the consumer). Dylan himself admitted many decades later: “I quickly recorded what appeared to be a country-western record and made sure it sounded pretty bridled and house-broken . . . for the public eye, I went into the bucolic and the mundane as far as possible.”

Yet despite its artistic weaknesses and fan-snubbing perversity, the album proved hugely influential. The rendezvous of Greenwich Village and Nashville was to have a lasting impact on both country and rock. This fusion had already been wrought to greater artistic effect in the Flying Burrito Brothers’ Gilded Palace of Sin, in which former Byrds Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman blended urban and rural, black and white, the soberly straight and the spacily psychedelic, romantic entanglement and social comment. The result—dubbed “cosmic American music” by Parsons—was a masterpiece, now acknowledged as seminal, but neglected at the time. It took Dylan’s widely-publicized Nashville adventure, and the chart success of the album he produced there, to alert the marketing men to the fusion’s commercial potential—and to persuade the youthful rock audience that country was worth listening to.

However, this new awareness was a mixed blessing. Country music came to be seen as the white counterpart of soul, and equated with a more authentic America, one counterposed to urban decadence, foreign influences, and innovatory cultural politics. Its virtues were portrayed as the virtues of tradition: simplicity, humility and lack of pretension. But the notion that country music or Nashville was free of pretension or posturing is so preposterous it’s astonishing (though revealing) that so many continue to believe it. The image of unvarnished righteousness and roughneck sincerity was calculated and packaged for mass consumption. Nashville, like Broadway, was a regional industry that became a national touchstone. Where Broadway sold itself to the wider market as the epitome of urban sophistication, Nashville exploited its identification with down-home ruralism. The latter was no less cynical, and no more authentically American, than the former.

The hippie capitalists who organized the Woodstock Festival of Music and Art in August 1969—those “three days of music and peace” advertised in the underground press—traded heavily on Dylan’s cachet. The festival was scheduled to take place not at Woodstock but at Walkill, some forty miles away, before it was moved another twenty miles further afield to Bethel. “The place name Woodstock,” Kopkind explained, “was meant only to evoke cultural-revolutionary images of Dylan.”³⁵ Some three weeks before the festival, one of the key organizers, Michael Lang, made a pilgrimage to the real Woodstock and appealed to the reclusive master to take the stage that had been set for him. “We met in his house for a couple of hours,” Lang recalled. “I told him what we were doing and told him, ‘We’d love to have you there.’ But he didn’t come. I don’t know why.”

As he made clear to friends, Dylan never had any intention of gracing the festival with his presence. The hippies had already penetrated his rural idyll and he felt himself besieged, physically and psychologically, by the counterculture he’d helped to propagate. “The Woodstock festival,” he told Rolling Stone in 1984, “was the sum total of all this bullshit. And it seemed to have something to do with me, this Woodstock Nation, and everything it represented. So we couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get any space for myself and my family.”³⁶

Even as it promoted the festival, the underground press baited the entrepreneurs behind it. “Rock Imperialists Make Plans for Woodstock” ran the headline of one Liberation News Service dispatch, which argued that “the revolutionary energy of rock ’n’ roll is a response to oppression” and warned that the establishment was out to seize that energy. Abbie Hoffman and friends threatened to mount demonstrations against the promoters—until they kicked in $10,000 for food and medical provision and agreed to the construction of a “Movement City” on the festival site.³⁷

The argument of the radicals was true as far as it went. Without the movement, there would be no counterculture; without the counterculture, there would be no music and no market for it. Above all, this music made claims to be something more than a commercial product. It belonged not to the record companies but to the constituency that had created it. It was their instrument and if others were going to exploit it, then a tax would be levied—by those people claiming to represent the movement and the generation. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing is simply that the promoters gave in, that the headline-grabbing cultural radicals had sufficient leverage at this moment to extract concessions.

But just how meaningful were those concessions? Movement City was set up about a quarter of a mile from the main stage. There, SDS, Newsreel (an alternative news collective), the Yippies, Hog Farmers, the underground press, and various good causes made camp several days before the festival itself began. Hoffman and Paul Krassner mimeographed thousands of flyers urging festival-goers not to pay the admission charge. These proved redundant. The flimsy barriers were quickly swept aside by the swelling numbers and those who’d purchased tickets in advance need not have bothered. No one who made it to Woodstock was going to be kept out—not least because of the shared sense, invoked by both promoters and radicals, that the music was already owned by the people coming to hear it.^aw

Despite his irritation, Dylan remained a presiding spirit at Woodstock, potent in absentia, as he had been these last three tumultuous years. Wavy Gravy, Dylan’s old comrade from the Village (as Hugh Romney he’d emceed at the folk clubs), was not only master of ceremonies but chief link-man with the Hog Farm Collective, who supplied vital last-minute food, first aid, and security for the 400- 500,000-strong encampment. Joan Baez, perceived as a hangover from the first half of the decade, introduced the assembled multitude to Robinson’s and Hayes’s “Joe Hill,” (which she introduced as “an organizing song”) and finished her set with “We Shall Overcome,” thus bringing a touch of both the popular front and the civil rights movement to the gathering. Country Joe also brought the spirit of protest to Woodstock. That he prefaced his “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag,” more grimly pertinent than when it had been released two years previously, with the “Fish cheer”—leading the crowd in chanting the letters F-U-C-K—said a great deal about how the mood had changed from earlier periods. The hopefulness and sobriety of both Newport and the March on Washington had been replaced by bitter despair and ebullient self-indulgence. The same shift in tone could be heard in Arlo Guthrie’s performance of his new dope trafficker’s epic, “Coming Into Los Angeles.”

Among the performers at Woodstock were a string of artists whose work was unimaginable without the explorations made by Dylan earlier in the decade: the Incredible String Band, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful Dead, Joe Cocker (who sang “I Shall Be Released”), and, of course, The Band, who played “Tears of Rage” and “This Wheel’s On Fire.” Most of all, wrapping up the festival with an historic performance, there was Jimi Hendrix. His metal-mangled, punk-majestic assault on “The Star Spangled Banner” says more about the festival and the moment than the utopian anthem penned by Joni Mitchell. Hendrix’s treatment of the national war song (which might be taken as a coda to his version of “All Along the Watchtower”) was rich in aching, exultant ambiguity, and quite indecipherable outside the Sturm und Drang of America in the late sixties. It partook, as surely as the folk revival, in the romance of America, but it was a romance that had turned contentious and bitter. In Crosstown Traffic, his masterful study of Hendrix, Charles Shaar Murray writes:

The ironies were murderous: a black man with a white guitar; a massive, almost exclusively white audience wallowing in a paddy field of its own making; the clear, pure, trumpet-like notes of the familiar melody struggling to pierce through clouds of tear-gas, the explosions of cluster-bombs, the scream of the dying, the crackle of the flames, the heavy palls of smoke stinking with human grease, the hovering chatter of helicopters . . . it depicts, as graphically as a piece of music can possibly do, both what the Americans did to the Vietnamese and what they did to themselves.³⁸

Social patriotism had been transmuted into an inescapable nightmare. As for Movement City, Abe Peck of the Chicago Seed described it as “a desperate leftist island amid the rock ’n’ roll rabble, full of sterile meetings on how ‘we’ could organize ‘them’ . . .” On the second night, after the Who had stormed through “Pinball Wizard,” Abbie Hoffman staggered on stage to call for support for John Sinclair, the self-styled White Panther and prophet of “the guitar revolution” who had just been imprisoned for ten years for possession of a couple of joints. An irritated Pete Townshend bumped Hoffman on the head with his Gibson. (Townshend later described the act as “the most political thing I ever did.”) Abbie wandered offstage, but if he was perplexed by the non-response to his appeal for Sinclair, it didn’t stop him celebrating “the birth of the Woodstock Nation” as “the death of the American dinosaur.” Hoffman’s attempt at a leftist appropriation of the festival (and indeed of the generation, now transformed into a “nation within a nation,” just like “the black colony”) produced a bestselling book but, in the long run, it was a puny effort compared to the corporate exploitation of the event via record and film, and more recently DVD. In Michael Wadleigh’s hugely successful movie, released in 1970 to greater acclaim than the festival itself, all images of and references to Movement City, SDS, Newsreel, and the Yippies were excised.³⁹

Like Newport, Woodstock showcased a counterculture defining itself in reaction to the dominant culture—even as the latter sought to exploit and package the former’s achievements. The numbers were far greater, as was the money involved, but the old quest for authenticity was still at its heart, though it had become less demanding. Puritanism had been replaced by hedonism; immediacy was preferred to history. Woodstock posed the question that radicals had been debating since the mid-sixties: was the new rock audience—the audience that Dylan helped to fashion—a living community with a political ethic or was it just a new consumer demographic, united by nothing but the music? Was Woodstock itself a moment of collective self-discovery, the self-identification of a new social body, or was it merely the identification by capital of an audience ripe for exploitation?

On the Left, there were divided responses. Hoffman and an army of zeitgeist chasers were quick to adopt the festival as a model for a new society, a new America that had miraculously gestated inside the womb of the old. The Weathermen found in Woodstock confirmation of their thesis—the straw they clutched at in their rage and impotence—that American youth were becoming a revolutionary constituency, shedding their investment in the old world and ready to build the new, without compromise. Others were doubtful. “A ritual consecrated to consumption,” sneered a member of the SDS first generation, Todd Gitlin. Irwin Silber was pleased to see how the young people “shed for a few days those hard protective shells which most Americans have created for themselves” but warned that Woodstock was “a ‘revolution’ the ruling class could live with.”⁴⁰ Linking the festival experience to the unfolding struggles that had shaped the decade, Kopkind wrote: “For people who had never glimpsed the intense communitarian closeness of a militant struggle . . .Woodstock must always be the model of how good we will all feel after the revolution.”⁴¹ But in the meantime, he warned, its impact would be more double-edged:

The new culture has yet to produce its own institutions on a mass scale; it controls none of the resources to do so. For the moment it must be content—or discontent—to feed the swinging sectors of the old system with new ideas, with rock and dope and love and openness. Then it all comes back, from Columbia Records or Hollywood or Bloomingdale’s, in perverted and degraded forms.

The New York Times headlined its editorial on Woodstock: NIGHTMARE IN THE CATSKILLS. Tut-tutting about the “colossal mess” of the transient metropole in the mountains, the Times conceded that “the great bulk of the freakish-looking intruders behaved astonishingly well. They showed that there is real good under their fantastic exteriors.” Like the “Negroes” at the March on Washington, these outsiders had somehow defied a stereotype, and offered reassurance, as well as challenge, to middle-class whites.

Meanwhile, Dylan, lured by a huge fee and the chance to escape the Woodstock mania, flew across the Atlantic to appear at the Isle of Wight festival—an appearance that the New York Times deemed worthy of a front-page report. It was his first visit to Britain since the fraught concerts that ended the 1966 tour. Now the audience came not to bait him, but to worship at his feet. His remarks to the press were inoffensive and unrevealing; his set was regarded as spiritless and anticlimactic; he spent nearly all his time with his fellow superstars, and flew back home at the first opportunity.

As an organization, SDS never recovered from the fractious convention of June 1969. The Weathermen brought in the Panthers to bait PL, but after one Panther made a remark about “pussy power” the lines of contest were chaotically redrawn. Amid PLers waving the Little Red Book and chanting Maoist slogans, Bernardine Dohrn led a walkout of the non-PL majority. There were now two SDS “national centers,” neither of them meeting the needs or even speaking the same language as the bulk of those who had been attracted to the organization in recent years.

The Weathermen called for direct action on the streets of Chicago in the autumn. They hoped to replicate the previous year’s dramatic youth-police confrontations—and their radicalizing impact. HOT TIME: SUMMER IN THE CITY, OR I AIN’T GONNA WORK ON MAGGIE’S FARM NO MORE ran the headline in New Left Notes. But they couldn’t follow up the catchphrases with anything more substantial—intellectually or organizationally. No more than a few hundred joined the Days of Rage in October. ⁴²

In contrast, less than a month later, three-quarters of a million turned up in Washington to protest against the war, supplemented by another 200,000 in San Francisco. There was no Dylan, of course, but the crowd was happy to listen to John Denver, Mitch Miller, Arlo Guthrie, the cast of Hair, and Pete Seeger, who led the protesters in chorus after chorus of Lennon’s “Give Peace A Chance.” The demonstration was not without tensions. The liberals who had largely eschewed the antiwar movement now sought to place themselves at its head and renewed their efforts to purge it of radicalism. Yippies and others led a militant radical breakaway march to the Justice Department, where they were met by tear gas. Neither the liberals nor the new “revolutionaries” had much to say to the vast crowd that they hadn’t heard before, nor did they offer any means of turning this extraordinary outburst of popular protest into something enduring. Nonetheless, the scale and diversity of the marches made it clear, not least to Nixon himself, that the antiwar movement now represented a huge social force. Plans to escalate the conflict—including the deployment of nuclear weapons—were put on hold.⁴³

The movement that SDS helped initiate had now reached truly mass proportions—but the remnants of SDS were not interested. They issued an invitation to select individuals to join a mid-December “war council” in Flint, Michigan. “We have to create chaos and bring about the disintegration of pig order,” they declared, and merrily embraced the “vandals” label stuck on them by the media after the Days of Rage, once again quoting “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “the pump don’t work cause the vandals took the handles.” At Flint, the Weathermen declared themselves for “armed struggle,” voted to dissolve SDS and move “underground.”⁴⁴ It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them to take a vote among the 100,000 young people spread across the country who still thought they were SDS members. In the end, the message to the rest of the movement was that you did need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows and that they—the SDS vanguard—were the meteorological experts.

On March 6, 1970, three Weather members died when an accidental blast tore apart a lower Manhattan townhouse they had turned into a bomb factory. A decade after students had nonviolently sat-in in Greensboro, the townhouse explosion seemed to suggest that the protest impetus had spent itself in self-destructive madness.^ax As ever, the critics who prophesize with their pens spoke too soon. When Nixon announced the U.S. “incursion” into Cambodia on April 30, the protests that followed were the most widespread and sustained of the entire war. They touched virtually all sections of society—including GIs—but it was among students that they enjoyed greatest support and were most intense. Sixty percent of the country’s college students went on strike, joined by large numbers from high schools and even junior highs. The national guard was sent to twenty-one campuses in sixteen states. Four students were shot dead at Kent State in Ohio and two at Jackson State in Mississippi. In the months to come, Nixon was forced to retreat; Kissinger bemoaned his yielding to “public pressures.”⁴⁵

Even as most of the high-profile leaders thrown up during the previous decade stood disorientated on the sidelines, more people—not least large numbers of working-class people—engaged in political protest. It was during 1969 to 1971, after both SDS and SNCC had imploded (and with Dylan wrapped in silence and banality) that antiwar sentiment, coupled with countercultural habits and identities, sank deep into white working-class communities. It was this development, reflected in the swelling mutiny among the GIs, that finally brought the war to an end.⁴⁶

The shaping character of the sixties in the United States was the unevenness of the development of political consciousness. That was true both of the movement itself and of the society it sought to address. Julius Lester wrote in the summer of 1969:

We refer to “the movement” as if it were a political monolith. But what we now call “the movement” bears little resemblance to what we called “the movement” in 1963. In the early sixties, the “movement” consisted of SNCC, CORE, and SCLC in Afroamerica, SDS, various socialist groups and peace groups in America. . . . Today, “the movement” is no longer an identifiable political entity, but we still refer to it as if it were. It is more a socio-political phenomenon encompassing practically all of Afroamerica and a good segment of the youth of America . . . The political perspective of someone who has been in “the movement” since 1960 (and how many are left?) was, of necessity, going to be different from that of one who entered in 1968 . . . The “movement” veteran had a sense of “movement” history, having lived it. The “movement” neophyte did not. As far as he was concerned, “the movement” began when he became aware of it. ⁴⁷

In 1970, in some places, the spirit of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” was just catching on. For many it was still fresh and even frightening. Meanwhile, bitter GIs gave “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Positively 4th Street” new meanings; disillusioned organizers nodded over “My Back Pages;” stoned kids spaced out to Blonde on Blonde; new pastoralists in flight from the cities embraced the Basement Tapes and John Wesley Harding; huge numbers continued to get off on the unearthly rock ’n’ roll of the mid-sixties masterpieces, whose antiauthoritarian politics now seemed second nature to many. At this moment, in Dylan’s music, there was something for (and against) everyone.

Throughout the sixties, Dylan had seen himself as an uncompromising truth-teller, even when he was questioning assumptions about the very nature of truth. But that onerous vocation wavered at the decade’s end, and as an artist he was able to rise to its demands only intermittently thereafter. Having confronted the crisis of prophecy in John Wesley Harding, it seemed as if Dylan, for many years, could find no way around or through it.

The impetus that had taken Dylan from his first album through to John Wesley Harding had come to an end; there would never again be the sense that his albums comprised an unfolding succession of artistic-philosophical visions and revisions. The thread that had bound Dylan to his era and his audience—even when he was castigating both severely—had snapped. Nonetheless, it was extraordinary that an artist and a social eruption should be so persistently, and paradoxically, bound together for so long.

In June 1970, Dylan was awarded an honorary doctorate by Princeton University. David Crosby, who joined Dylan’s entourage for the ceremony, recalled the day:

When we arrived at Princeton they took us straight into a little room and Bob was asked to wear a cap and gown. He refused outright. They said, “We won’t give you the degree if you don’t wear this.” Dylan said, “Fine, I didn’t ask for it in the first place.”⁴⁸