The Reluctant Spokesman
When we speak about Bob Dylan, we have to be aware of the swirling, escalating presence of contradictions. He is a show business performer but a very private man. He is a Jewish folk singer but expressed surprise to his friend Richard Farina when they saw a Jewish folk singer perform. He is a songwriter, but his tunes are often lifted directly from other songs. And his name is Robert Allen Zimmerman, but he became Bob Dylan because, as he said, “You’re born, you know, with the wrong name, the wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself.”1 He takes great delight in inventing himself, presenting a complicated, ever-changing persona to the public and press but—despite the fact that he’s spent his entire adult life in show business—hates to be treated like a celebrity. He loves to lie to the media, and many people feel he hides behind his lies. His autobiography is said to contain over 200 incidents of plagiarism.2
Indeed, well-founded accusations of plagiarism surfaced in 2001 with the release of the appropriately titled Love and Theft. Both the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle noticed wholesale theft of both lyrics and tunes, even though the album credited all words and music to Dylan. In the songs on the album, Dylan had taken words and sentences verbatim from the English language translation of Dr. Junichi Saga’s 1991 Japanese gangster memoir, Confessions of a Yakuza. Additionally, almost every tune on the album was lifted from an older song. “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” was simply new lyrics to Muddy Waters’ song of the same name. “Beyond the Horizon” was “Red Sails in the Sunset.” “When the Deal Goes Down” was “Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)” and so on.3 Dylan’s biggest venture into plagiarism, though, appears to be his memoir, Chronicles. In it, he lifts material from Time magazine as well as novels by Jack London, Sax Rohmer, R.L. Stevenson, Mezz Mezzrow, Mark Twain, and Marcel Proust, among others.4
The plagiarism accusations aren’t meant to show that Dylan is not the major artist he is thought to be. Indeed, his writings over the years have proven conclusively that he is one of the best songwriters of his times. Additionally, the fact is that, since they are part of the ongoing folk process, many of the great folk songs of all times use borrowed tunes. Dylan has done this from the very beginning of his career. “With God on Our Side,” for example, uses the Irish tune “The Patriot Game.” These accusations simply show that Bob Dylan is, and always has been, a complex riddle of contradictions who has carefully and completely built a wall between himself and his public. Lifting from other people’s work is most likely designed to create and maintain a distance.
Very early in his career Dylan was saddled by the media with the designation “the voice of his generation,” a role he was never comfortable with and which he tried to reject. But it was hard to escape. So many people thought he was speaking for them that they made it impossible for him to be the normal person he wanted to be. He had to put up with climbing out apartment windows and going down fire escapes to avoid the army of obsessed fans that lurked outside his building.5 He also had to tolerate over-the-top fans who called themselves Dylanologists and went through his garbage cans, looking for evidence of who he really was and what he really stood for.6 Faced with that sort of unwanted attention and a demanding media, he has responded by lying, evading, and withdrawing. He created and embodies a fictional, almost mythological, character.
Also early in his career, Dylan was very much a part of the civil rights and protest song movement. Among his songs that had a direct bearing on race relations were “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “When the Ship Comes In,” “Oxford Town,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” and “The Death of Emmett Till.” Obviously, then, at that time, Bob Dylan’s greatest contribution was the inspiration that these songs created. Many civil rights workers went South as a result of listening to Dylan’s topical material. His songs were not his only contribution. His then-girlfriend, a long-time activist named Suze Rotolo, had introduced him to political action, and after he met Joan Baez at Newport and began touring with her his direct action increased greatly. Both of them appeared at the 1963 March on Washington.
Baez and Dylan are the performers most mentioned regarding the march but actually the music was pervasive and wide-ranging. Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson opened the morning’s music with two powerful songs, “How I Got Over” and “I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned.” Marian Anderson sang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” and Joan Baez did “Oh Freedom” and “We Shall Overcome,” which she turned into a sing-along. Then Dylan took the stage for three songs, “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” and, as a duet with Baez, “When the Ship Comes In.” Peter, Paul and Mary did two songs that were already becoming movement standards—Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Pete Seeger and Lee Hayes’ “If I Had a Hammer.” Odetta sang “I’m on My Way,” and the Freedom Singers reprised “We Shall Overcome” with Baez, Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Theodore Bikel.7
From the beginning, then, folk music drove the civil rights movement and Bob Dylan created a lot of it. By creating the music, he helped create a movement. “Without the songs of the movement, personally I believe that there wouldn’t have been a movement,” Rutha Mae Harris, one of the original Freedom Singers, told NPR. “We needed those songs to help us not to be fearful when we were doing marches, or doing picket lines. And you needed a calming agent, and that’s what those songs were for us.”8
Who was this person who, despite his wish for privacy, became a living symbol of everything his fans wanted, this man who continually built walls between himself and his public but still had to live with fans who imprinted themselves upon him like baby ducks, the man who constantly said he was just a song and dance man but could never escape the people who tried to find themselves in him, this man who did so much for the civil rights movement while claiming not to have any interest in politics?
Born on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, Dylan spent the first seven years of his life there. In 1948 his family moved to the city of Hibbing, Minnesota, where he spent a fairly normal childhood, going to school, forming local bands, and performing Little Richard songs in high school talent shows. In 1959 he appeared at a Hibbing High School talent show as Elston Gunn and the Rock Boppers; even at the age of seventeen, he preferred to protect his sense of his identity.9 Within a couple of years, still as Elston Gunnn (spelled with three ns now), he played piano in pop singer Bobby Vee’s band. Meeting Vee in a record store after hearing the established singer was looking for a piano player, Dylan introduced himself as Gunnn and told Vee he’d just come in off the road with Conway Twitty. Vee hired him but later discovered Dylan could play piano only in the key of C, so he didn’t last long in that band.10 Bobby Vee later said, “It was ill-fated. I mean, it wasn’t gonna work. He didn’t have any money, and we didn’t have any money. The story is that I fired him, but that certainly wasn’t the case. If we could have put it together somehow, we sure would have. We wished we could have put it together. He left and went on to Minneapolis and enrolled at the University of Minnesota.”11
Later, even after the Elston Gunnn role-playing, after he’d found fame, he continued to try on identities like suits. However, he denied that he was creating himself, telling an interviewer that he did not create Bob Dylan, instead Dylan had always been there. As Donald Brown said, “If Bob Dylan has ‘always been here,’ then the name is more than a name; it’s a role or spirit, something Robert Zimmerman could inhabit, enact, become.”12 Yet, other statements Dylan has made over the years would appear to contradict this one. He told Mikal Gilmore in 2001 “the folk song created an identity for people like himself, ‘an identity which the three-buttoned-suit postwar generation wasn’t offering to kids [his] age.’”13 It would appear, then, that from his teen years on Dylan was inventing personas that allowed him a safe wall to hide behind.
His heroes at this time were not folkies. He worshiped Hank Williams and Buddy Holly, whom he saw perform in Hibbing, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and James Dean, who was already dead but well on the way to becoming a legend. Dylan played rock, not folk music—his piano style was said to owe a lot to Little Richard—until he went to the University of Minnesota, where, like so many college students of the day, he was introduced to the music of Woody Guthrie, which led him into the world of folk music. He discovered folk music in Dinkytown, a bohemian neighborhood near the university that had just overcome its Beat-inspired reputation as a cradle of jazz and was transforming into a center for folk music clubs and coffeehouses. He hung out there, soaking up the folk world and learning to play guitar and harmonica so that he could follow up on his new goal in life: “to be Guthrie’s greatest disciple.”14
During the depression era, Woody Guthrie had carried the folk songs of America all over the country, singing in union halls and bars, at hootenannies, on the radio, and on records. Like John Steinbeck’s Tom Joad—a fictional character who was the protagonist of The Grapes of Wrath, a book both Guthrie and Dylan admired greatly—wherever there was a need Guthrie was there. Guthrie wrote an autobiography, Bound for Glory, which made such a strong impression on Dylan that Dylan began dressing, speaking, and performing like Guthrie. Dylan later wrote that “folk songs transcended the immediate culture” and Guthrie’s songs, in particular, were “totally in the moment, current and even forecasted things to come.”15 After that discovery, nothing made sense for Dylan but to drop out of school, go to New York, and visit Guthrie, who was at that time dying of Huntington’s disease in the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey. When Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village, he amused the folkies there, who thought of him as nothing more than a Woody Guthrie clone.
In 1961 there was a knock at the door of teenaged Arlo Guthrie’s house on Mermaid Avenue, in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. The sitter answered it and on the porch stood a scruffy kid covered with road grime who introduced himself as Bob Dylan and said he’d come to see Arlo’s father, Woody Guthrie:
The babysitter, according to Arlo’s recollection, was “really frightened” of the uninvited guest. There was something about him that was a little odd, from the mumbling way he talked to the way his eyes moved about the room. The baby sitter, Joady and Nora were all uncomfortable; they wanted the stranger to leave, but Arlo, enamored of Dylan’s “high, laceup engineer boots,” invited the teenager into the house. They chatted a little about Woody and the hospital and music…. After an uncomfortable hour-long visit, the babysitter finally convinced Dylan to leave…. Nora and Joady were relieved to see the stranger go, but Arlo wasn’t. The guy was pretty interesting.16
After being told Guthrie’s location in the hospital, Dylan visited him frequently and sang his idol the song he’d written for him, “Song for Woody,” which used the melody of one of Woody’s songs, “The 1913 Massacre.” That initial meeting led to more, and becoming acquainted with his hero had a huge effect on the fledgling folk singer. When Dylan performed, he told audiences that he’d been roaming around the country, retracing Woody’s steps. His identification with his hero was so complete that he almost became Guthrie.
Robert Zimmerman had invented a persona named Bob Dylan, who was more a myth in the making than an actual person. As we have seen, from the very beginning of his public life he concentrated on creating his alter ego. His early interviews were laced with lies and legends—even the place of his birth was obscured. He was from Denver, Wyoming, or any other place that entered his myth-making mind. He would, with a straight face, say he was raised in a carnival, had made music with Leadbelly, had been a cowboy, ridden the rails, and whatever other outrageous, distorted, and exaggerated clams he could think of. Robert Zimmerman was building a myth that he called Bob Dylan and appeared to be intent on making the legend larger than life. In this way, he protected his own privacy, which was very important to him. The mythical Bob Dylan became the wall that stood between the public and Robert Zimmerman.
Starting in the winter of 1961 Dylan worked clubs and coffeehouses around the Village, where he got to know and become friends with other performers. He was especially taken by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem and was closest to the youngest brother, Liam, to whom he said that his goal was to become as big as the Clancy Brothers.17 He also met Phil Ochs during this time, and Ochs picked up Dylan’s trick of leaving his apartment by going down the fire escape to avoid the flocks of fans waiting outside—even though at that time, since Ochs was just beginning, there were no fans lurking outside his door.
Dylan worked in obscurity until September of 1961, when Robert Shelton, music critic for the New York Times, reviewed his show at Gerde’s Folk City. That write-up brought him to the attention of record companies. But nothing came of it until Carolyn Hester hired him to play harmonica on the first album she made for Columbia Records. During those sessions, as stated earlier, he met and impressed John Hammond, who signed him to a record deal.18 His first album, Bob Dylan, was released in August of 2002 and could not under any circumstances be considered commercially successful. In its first year of availability, the album sold around 2,500 copies and Columbia executives wanted to drop Dylan from the label. Johnny Cash, at that time a major Columbia artist who sold millions of records, spoke up for Dylan, as did John Hammond. Dylan kept his deal.19
That August he legally changed his name to Bob Dylan. It was at about this time that Roy Silver sold Dylan’s contract to Albert Grossman, as discussed in the section on Peter, Paul and Mary. Grossman figured the best way to break Dylan as an artist would be to develop him a reputation as a major songwriter. To this end, he had his newly signed client record nearly every song he’d written and distributed the resulting reel-to-reel tapes to other performers in an effort to get them to record his songs. The tactic worked. Soon, artists on both sides of the Atlantic were placing Dylan songs on their albums and the original tape was widely bootlegged as The Witmark Demos (which finally got a legitimate release as volume 9 of the Bootleg Series). That effort got Dylan started. Also helping was the fact that he teamed up with Joan Baez for two crucial years. In Chronicles, Dylan describes seeing Baez on TV before he’d even left Minnesota. He wrote, “I couldn’t stop looking at her, didn’t want to blink…. The sight of her made me sigh. All that and then there was the voice. A voice that drove out bad spirits … [and] she sang in a voice straight to God.”20
Maybe the sight and sound of Baez reached Dylan, but the converse was not true. Baez first saw Dylan in 1961 at Folk City and was not impressed. It wasn’t until she saw him again at Club 47 that she was able to appreciate what she was hearing.21 He had become a different man, grown and matured as a singer-songwriter. They met that night and first sang together at the Monterey Folk Festival shortly afterward, which began a two-year professional and personal partnership.
The release of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, put him on the map. That record, begun in April of 1962 and finished in April of 1963, was much more carefully done than his first one. According to Donald Brown, it took a solid year to make it, because Dylan was aware that he needed better material than he’d recorded on Bob Dylan. He also recognized that to get the sort of material he needed, he’d have to write it.22 He wound up with thirteen fine originals and two covers, pretty much a direct reversal of what he’d put on his first album.
Among the originals are some of the songs that remain in his repertoire to this day: “Masters of War,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Girl from the North Country,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Oxford Town,” and “Bob Dylan’s Dream.” The weight of these songs was balanced by lighthearted and funny, if quirky, numbers like “I Shall be Free” and “Talkin’ World War III Blues.” Freewheelin’ was successful on every level. In its first month of release, it bettered the first year’s sales of Bob Dylan and continued to move 10,000 units a month, bringing Dylan an income of $2,500 per month.23 It also created a demand for personal appearances across the country, and Dylan found himself playing the bigger theaters and festivals.
He was also moving away from active involvement in the civil rights movement. He had become an activist at the continued urging of Suze Rotolo, whose parents were union organizers. As a result of her prodding, he began singing at CORE rallies. In 1962 he was doing benefits for SNCC. At the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, he was joined onstage by Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, and the Freedom Singers, who all did “Blowin’ in the Wind” together and then encored with a sing-along version of “We Shall Overcome.” During his set, he introduced “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” the song that inspired Theodore Bikel to fly him down to Mississippi.
Dylan’s time in Mississippi was both the high point and the beginning of the end of his activism. The “voice of a generation” tag drove him away again. The website about entertainment explained: “Feeling co-opted by white movement leaders and despising their expectations of him to become its star champion, Dylan began his retreat. Although he never stopped supporting the black struggle, becoming a Pied Piper for liberal guilt-afflicted whites was a hypocritical role he was unwilling to play.”24 As he always had, Bob Dylan went his own way, though as we shall see, he never really escaped being the voice of his generation.