Wicked Messenger

When Bob Dylan performed “Masters of War” at concerts in the United States of America in the weeks after September 11, 2001, members of the audience punctuated the song with lusty shouts of “Death to Bin Laden!” It seems some of them heard the protest-era favorite as an indictment, not of America’s military-industrial complex, but of its enemies in the war on terror.

It is unlikely Dylan will ever tell us what he meant in singing this song at this moment. Enigma has long been his stock-in-trade. After all, he never really told us what he thought about the Vietnam War. However, it is worth noting that Dylan also chose to play “Masters of War” at the 1991 Grammy ceremony, in the middle of the Gulf War waged by the first president Bush, and again on the eve of the presidential election of 2004.

Any song or work of art that survives its historical point of origin is liable to ironic transmutations. Unanchored in an environment of shared meanings, it can even be turned into its opposite. Is there a better example of the power of modern capitalism to appropriate expressions of resistance than the adoption of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” as an advertising jingle by mega-accountants Coopers and Lybrand?

I can’t remember when I first encountered Dylan. I know that becoming aware of him was conjoined with taking my first steps as both a political agent and a self-conscious consumer of cultural goods. By the time I was fourteen in 1967, I had heard most of the albums Dylan had released by then, was familiar with his legend and convinced that he was the cutting edge of advanced cultural consciousness, the acme of cool. I knew that he had defied critics, blazed a trail, crashed on a motorcycle, and gone into retreat. I tried to write Dylanesque poetry.

For a kid who was more comfortable with books and ideas than with social interaction, but who was nonetheless turned on by and desperately wanted to be part of the “something” that was “happening,” Dylan was a talisman. I loved the visceral thrust of Dylan’s music, as well as the fact that it left much to ponder over. Dylan was a bridge spanning my own contradictory impulses. On the one hand, the world was clearly riddled with injustice. Those who sought to challenge it were righteous; I wanted to be one of them. On the other hand, the world was also clearly full of beautiful, tantalizing, surprising things; I wanted to experience them. I gobbled up poetry and movies and paintings and music—and also news from an increasingly violent society and from the movement dedicated to changing it. I wanted somehow to reconcile these two spheres of existence, the personal and the public, and like others of the time performed some prodigious mental gymnastics in my efforts to do so. My sixties experience—not least listening to Dylan—set me off, perhaps too often, looking for the aesthetic in the political and the political in the aesthetic.

In the sixties, I was, however, given one immeasurable gift. I witnessed and was part of a rapid and unexpected mass radicalization. The assumptions saturating Cold War America were challenged with a vigor and headlong insurgency that no one had predicted. That process opened dizzying vistas of transformation—social and personal. This was a curse as well as a blessing. To be young at such times is not always, contrary to Wordsworth, “very heaven.” In the sixties in the United States of America, to be young was to be constantly challenged, frequently insecure, often frightened; it was to be torn by multiple desires, thrown into the cauldron of history ill-prepared, and often ill-guided.

In tracking Dylan’s febrile motion through the decade, I’ve recalled my own wayward developing consciousness of those days. But I’ve also relied on what has come after—politically and personally. When I arrived in England in 1971, I found that Dylan, along with the counterculture of which he seemed an integral part, provided a common frame of reference. In fact, Dylan’s record sales have always been proportionately higher in Britain than in the United States.

The American sixties are part of the global sixties. Remove one from the other and the equation changes, the dynamic that made the era alters. However, the American sixties do remain distinctive. What made them so was the political culture in which they unfolded. This culture was marked by the weakness of socialist traditions, especially within the labor movement, the absence of mass parties, the centrality of racial oppression, the widespread belief in America’s exceptional destiny and identity, and the reality that America had become an empire that dared not speak its name. Above all, it was in the U.S. that the global trends of consumerization and media-saturation were most advanced. The association of sixties rebellion with the power of images, symbols, and cultural products emanates from this American experience. Ironically, American capital helped disseminate dissident American culture around the world, and wherever people could get their hands on it, they made their own use of it. The music Bob Dylan made in the sixties has long outgrown its national origins, just as it has outlived its era, but to understand it, to make best use of it, you need to trace its roots in both time and place.

However you measure Dylan’s subsequent achievements (and they are substantial), they do not enjoy the same umbilical relation to the turmoil of the times as the work of the sixties. This is a body of song tied to the unfolding political and cultural drama of its era in a way that the later work is not. Tracing the thread that binds Dylan’s art to its rapidly shifting environment is this book’s primary purpose. However, in reading the songs in their musical and political context, I don’t see them as transparent reflections of the times but as expressive objects fashioned by an individual in response to those times. Dylan was not a passive lightning rod, an impersonal conductor of great historic currents. Rather, he was a navigator of those currents.

The sixties played out in miniature many of the soul-shaking extremes of other eras of upsurge and reaction—aspiration, frustration, missionary zeal, and crippling self-doubt. It’s rare, however, to find so much of this historical experience compressed into the work of a single artist. Few ages of social change have been as well-served artistically as the American sixties were by Dylan. His songs give us the political/cultural moment in all its dynamic complexity.

As Dylan’s lifetime record/tape/CD sales pass the thirty-five million mark, it’s well to remember that he is outsold not only by the 100-million-topping Beatles and Presley, but also by Prince, Madonna, Elton John, Michael Jackson, the Eagles, Aerosmith, and Kenny Rogers. What matters in the history of popular culture, in the end, is not merely how many people buy a product but what that product means to them, the role it plays in their lives, its shaping power over their imaginations. Popular culture is not an undifferentiated mass. Both aesthetic and political engagement with it demand that we make discriminations and judgments. One of the lessons of Dylan’s art in the sixties is that under the right circumstances, the producers and consumers of popular culture engage in the most lively and contentious manner in the making of discriminations and judgments. To fail to do so is to condescend to the genre, the performer, the audience, and the era.

My aim is not to claim Dylan for a cause. I do, however, aim to examine Dylan’s work in its time partly in order to serve a cause: to draw inspiration, lessons, and warnings. I wrote this book with the hard rain headed Iraq’s way. Many of the young antiwar activists I’ve met in recent months know Dylan’s work and see him as an artist of protest—despite the fact that he turned his back on political engagement nearly forty years ago. Sometimes I think they are too daunted by the sixties. Self-indulgent celebration of our generation and of Dylan does them no favors. The legacy of the era is rich, but only if it’s examined critically.

During the period covered by this book Dylan released nine albums, wrote hundreds of unreleased songs, gave countless live performances, and astounded his followers with a swift succession of stylistic, political, and personal transmutations—from folk neophyte to protest singer to rock ’n’ roll poet to wise old country sage. The changes were real and hectic. But in what follows I’ve also emphasized the continuities. This is an integral body of work produced by a single artist, recognizable through all his adventures.

This book tells the story of an artist and a movement, a story of interlocking and ultimately unresolved personal and social crises. It’s a story that unfolds through what might be called an extended, multilayered historical moment. Looking back on the decade at the end of the sixties, Julius Lester was struck by the distance that had been traveled.