Night Beat Page 7

  On July 25, 1965, Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and played a brief howling set of the new electric music he had been recording—and shocked folk purists howled back at him in rage. And for fair reason: The fleet, hard-tempered music that Dylan began making on albums like Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited—music unlike any reinvention of folk or pop that we had heard before—effectively killed off any remaining notions that folk was the imperative new art form of American youth, and conferred on rock a greater sense of consequence and a deeper expressiveness. Clearly, it was music worth the killing of old conceits and older ways. In particular, with “Like a Rolling Stone” (the singer’s biggest hit, and the decade’s most liberating, form-stretching single), Dylan framed perfectly the spirit of an emerging generation that was trying to live by its own rules and integrity, and that was feeling increasingly cut off from the conventions and privileges of the dominant mainstream culture. In the same manner that he had once given voice to a new rising political consciousness, Dylan seemed to be speaking our deepest-felt fears and hopes—to be speaking for us. “How does it fee-eel, he brayed at his brave new audience, “To be without a home/Like a complete unknown/Like a ROO-olling STONE?”

  How did it feel? It felt scary; it felt rousing; and suddenly it felt exactly like rock & roll.

  WITH BOTH HIS early folk writing and his mid-1960s switch to electric music, Dylan articulated the rising anger of a bold new generation. In the process, he recast rock & roll as an art form that could now mock an entire society’s values and politics, and might even, in the end, help redeem (or at least affront) that society. Also, Dylan proved to be a natural star. He cultivated an impeccable gaunt-and-broody look and a remarkably charismatic arrogance. He was razor-witted, audacious, and dangerous, and he was helping to change the language and aspirations of popular music with his every work and gesture. In addition, Dylan’s interplay with the Beatles had seismic effect on popular music and youth culture. Combined, the two forces changed the soundscape of rock & roll in thorough and irrevocable ways that, a third of a century later, still carry tremendous influence. The two forces also had a sizable impact on each other. The Beatles opened up new possibilities in style and consensus; without their headway, Dylan likely would never have conceived “Like a Rolling Stone,” much less enjoyed a smash hit with it. But if the Beatles opened up a new audience, Dylan determined what could be done with that consensus, what could be said to that audience. His mid-60s work reinvented pop’s known rules of language and meaning, and revealed that rock & roll’s familiar structures could accommodate new unfamiliar themes, that a pop song could be about any subject that a writer was smart or daring enough to tackle. Without this crucial assertion, it is inconceivable that the Beatles would have gone on to write “Nowhere Man,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Paperback Writer,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” or “A Day in the Life,” or even that the Rolling Stones would have written the decade’s toughest riff and most taunting and libidinous declaration, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

  Dylan also bore influence on the Beatles in two other important respects. For one thing, he was reportedly the person who introduced them to drugs (marijuana, specifically), during his 1964 tour of England. This brand of experimentation would gradually affect not only the Beatles’ musical and lyrical perspectives, but also the perspectives of an entire generation. Indeed, in the mid-1960s, drug use became increasingly popular with young people and increasingly identified with rock culture—though it certainly wasn’t the first time drugs had been extolled as recreation or sacrament, or exploited for artistic inspiration. Many jazz and blues musicians (and, truth be known, numerous country-western artists) had been using marijuana and narcotics to enhance their improvisational bents for several decades, and in the ’50s, the Beats had brandished dope as another badge of nonconformism. But with ’60s rock, as drugs crossed over from the hip underground (and from research laboratories), stoney references became more overt and more mainstream than ever before. Getting high became seen as a way of understanding deeper truths, and sometimes as a way of deciphering coded pop songs (or simply enjoying the palpable aural sensations of the music). Just as important, getting stoned was a way of participating in private, forbidden experiences—as a means of staking out a consciousness apart from that of the “straight world.” Along with music and politics, drugs—which at this point largely meant marijuana, but would later incorporate psychedelics, amphetamines, barbiturates, opiates, and cocaine—were seen as an agency for a better world, or at least a short-cut to enlightenment or transcendence. And though the Beatles would stay demure on the subject for another year or two, by 1965, hip kids and angry authorities were already citing such songs as Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” for their “druggy” meanings.

  The other thing Dylan did for the Beatles was to help politicize them (in fact, he helped politicize a vast segment of rock culture), inspiring the group to accept their popularity as an opportunity to define and address a vital youth constituency. Following Dylan’s example, Lennon and McCartney came to see that they were not only speaking for a young audience, but for a generation that was increasingly under fire. More and more, their music—and rock at large—became a medium for addressing the issues and events that affected that generation.

  AS A RESULT of all this influence, Bob Dylan was—next to Elvis Presley—the clearest shot at an individual cultural hero that rock & roll ever produced, and though he certainly pursued the occasion of his own moment in history, he would also pay a considerable cost for his ambition. You can see the payment already beginning in Don’t Look Back, D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary of Dylan’s 1965 solo tour of England. At every step of the tour, the young Dylan is met with rapt seriousness and testy curiosity, but also with the kind of pop-minded idolatry he had yet rarely enjoyed in America. And quickly enough, Dylan gets the better of it all—or at least seems to. He subverts an interview with a stuffy Time magazine correspondent into a stinging dismissal of the media, and how it bowdlerizes art, life, and truth. “I’m not gonna read any of these magazines . . . ,” says Dylan, “ ’cause they just got too much to lose by printing the truth, you know that.”

  “What kind of truths do they leave out?” asks the interviewer.

  “On anything!” answers Dylan. “Even on a worldwide basis. They’d just go off the stands in a day if they printed really the truth.”

  “What is really the truth?”

  “Really the truth is just a plain picture,” says Dylan.

  “Of what?” asks the interviewer. “Particularly.”

  “Of, you know,” says Dylan, “a plain picture of, let’s say, a tramp vomiting, man, into the sewer. You know, and next door to the picture, you know, Mr. Rockefeller, you know, or Mr. C. W. Jones, you know, on the subway going to work, you know. . . . ”

  Another time in the film, Dylan rails viciously and proudly against a drunken party-goer. (“Listen, you’re Bobby Dylan,” slurs the drunk. “You’re a big international noise.” Snaps back Dylan: “I know it, man, I know I’m a big noise. But I’m a bigger noise than you, man.”) And in one particularly funny but cruel scene, Dylan calculatedly picks apart a painfully unassured science student. (“When you meet somebody,” asks the student, “what is your attitude toward them?” Dylan doesn’t pause a beat. “I don’t like them,” he says.)

  In each of these encounters, Dylan acquires new and startling traits of self-certainty, and they’re all manifest in the quick, cocky expressiveness of his face. It’s a sharply handsome, mutable-looking face, as vain and brooding as Presley’s, as veiled and vulnerable as James Dean’s. Yet at other times it registers exhaustion, fear, and the demands that come with fame and irrevocable knowledge. Sitting on a train bound for Manchester, his features looking wan and pinched, hands shielding his eyes, Dylan looks as though he wanted to crawl out of many of his own best moments. The pressure was under way, and it ate at him q
uickly. Compare the cover portraits from Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966) and you can find visible evidence of the singer’s increasing strain. In the Highway 61 picture, Dylan looks exactly like what he was: a smart, self-assured street- and pop-wise twenty-four-year-old poet-prodigy, willing to stare down the world with a defiant gaze. By the time of the Blonde on Blonde photo—shot maybe six months later—he looked wasted and wary. In less than a year, Dylan had seemed to pass from youthful assurance to a haunted and dissolute weariness. What you heard on Blonde on Blonde was a wizardly greatness; what you saw on its cover was the visage of a man being consumed by that greatness. It was a bit like coming across a picture of what Robert Johnson might have looked like, just before the end.

  In July 1966, shortly after the Blonde on Blonde sessions—and immediately following a tumultuous concert tour of the United Kingdom with his backing group the Hawks (later renamed the Band)—Dylan was riding his motorcycle one morning nearby his home in Woodstock, New York, when the back wheel locked and he was hurtled over his handlebar. He was taken to Middletown Hospital, with a concussion and broken vertebrae of the neck. An impending sixty-date concert tour of America was canceled and so were all future recording sessions. He retreated to his home in Woodstock, with his wife and children, and spent months holed up with his friends in the Band. According to some rumors, Dylan was not as seriously hurt as was widely believed, and had decided to use the time off to immerse himself in his new family life. According to others, Dylan also used the sabbatical to recover from the intense psychological turbulence and rumored drug-and-alcohol bents of his short-but-titanic season as the king of rock & roll.

  During that layoff period—in that same season that became known as the Season of Love—Dylan sat around at his Woodstock home and in the basement of a nearby house rented by members of the Band, and in essence reevaluated not just his music, but his political and spiritual tempers as well. All together in that time, Dylan and the Band recorded something over one hundred tracks—many of them new songs (most improvised on the spot) and several others that were covers of old folk, country, and rock & roll songs. What resulted was a set of recordings that many fans and critics regard as Dylan’s most haunting and arcane body of work (author and critic Greil Marcus has written an entire terrific volume on the subject, Invisible Republic, published in 1997). Interestingly, Dylan himself would only rerecord two or three of those songs for release on his own later albums (though several tracks appeared on subsequent collections of his unreleased material, and many of the songs—most notably “I Shall Be Released,” “Tears of Rage,” “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” and “Too Much of Nothing,” were soon covered by such artists as Peter, Paul, and Mary, the Byrds, and the Band). Finally, in 1975—eight years after those sessions—Dylan authorized an official release of some of those recordings, The Basement Tapes (though if you look hard enough, you can find a five-CD set called The Original Basement Tapes that pretty much documents the entire affair; it’s well worth the search and the expense).

  As Marcus and others have noted, the basement recordings are full of strange parables, biblical references, half-finished tales of humor, flight, death, and abandonment. It is all roughhewn, primitively recorded—as if a ghost were taking it all down in its impalpable memory. And yet there is something about those songs that seems timeless, as if all the tumult going on in the world outside (a tumult that Dylan helped make possible with his earlier mind-challenging style of rock & roll) was simply far removed. At the same time, you do hear America—its joys, its losses, its fears, and betrayals—in those basement recordings as you hear it nowhere else in Dylan’s music, not even in his early, more explicitly political anthems. What remains interesting, though, is how distant Dylan has sometimes seemed from what he and the Band created during that long season.

  There is a spooky, unforgettable bootleg video of a visit between Dylan and John Lennon, as they sit in the back of a limousine, winding their way through London in post-dawn hours. It was shot in 1966 (for the singer’s still-unreleased, astonishing film, Eat the Document), during Dylan’s wild and dangerous U.K. tour with the Hawks, and in the roughly twenty minutes that the episode lasts, you can see that Dylan was a man clearly close to some sort of breakdown. At first he and Lennon are funny and acerbic—not to mention competitive—in their exchanges, though it also seems apparent that Dylan has been up the entire night, maybe drinking; maybe taking drugs. Suddenly, he starts to come undone. He is sick of having a camera in front of him at every moment, and more than that, he is literally sick. He turns pale and begs the driver to get him back to the hotel as quickly as possible. Lennon, meantime, is cautious, trying to stay clever, though he looks clearly horrified at what he is witnessing. Had Dylan kept up that pace—that pace of indulgence, that pace of making music that challenged almost every aspect of the world, music that outraged his old fans and caused his new fans to want him to push even harder—he might well have been dead within a season or two. The psychic costs of that sort of artistry, of that force of invention, can be unimaginable. It was as if Dylan danced extremely close to the lip of an abyss. We wanted to know what he saw there—we wanted to know so that we could have that knowledge without running the ungodly risk of facing that abyss ourselves. Dylan probably got as close to that edge as one can and still remain alive, and finally he decided that the glimpse alone was not worth his obliteration. Dylan, it seems, saw too much too fast, and was afraid of ever getting that close again to chaos.

  At least, that’s one way I have sometimes thought about what informed Dylan’s retreat into Woodstock and into the fraternity of the Band and their music-making. It was a way of finding what could be recovered after one had learned too much about the meanness of not just the world outside, but also about the dark, troubled depths of one’s own heart. Still, periods of retreat can sometimes be as painful to recall as whatever led to the retreat in the first place, and for whatever reason, Dylan has only occasionally incorporated the basement material into his active repertoire. Years after that time, Dylan would tell biographer Robert Shelton: “Woodstock was a daily excursion to nothingness.” The Band’s guitarist Robbie Robertson, in a conversation with Greil Marcus for the purpose of Marcus’s Invisible Republic, seemed to confirm Dylan’s comment: “A lot of stuff, Bob would say, “We should destroy this.’ ” In that nothingness, though, Dylan made some of his best music, and—not for the last time—reinvented himself.

  EIGHTEEN MONTHS after his 1966 accident—and at the peak of rock & roll’s psychedelic era—Dylan returned to the pop world with John Wesley Harding: an acoustic-guitar and country rhythm-section album, featuring a man who was now singing in a startlingly mellifluent voice. Along with the basement sessions, John Wesley Harding was music that set out to find what could be salvaged in the American spirit—what values of family and history might endure or help heal in a time of intense generational division and political rancor. It was as if Dylan were trying to work against the era’s context of rebellion and refusal, a context that he, as much as anybody, had helped make prevalent. (Indeed, almost every work Dylan made subsequently would run against the grain and temper of the predominant rock & roll sensibility.) Or perhaps he had simply lost his affection for a cultural momentum that, in his rush to fame and invention, had almost cost him his life and sanity.

  But Dylan had changed rock & roll too much to undo or stop its drift, or to be released from the promises of his earlier visions. John Wesley Harding was simply further proof: The album’s stripped-down sound and bare-bones style set in motion a wide-ranging reevaluation—and reaffirmation—of rock & roll root values and had a tremendous impact on everyone from the Beatles and Rolling Stones to the Byrds and Grateful Dead. In effect, John Wesley Harding flattened the visions and ambitions of psychedelia. After hearing John Wesley Harding, the Beatles made “Get Back,” the Stones revivified their blues sensibility with Beggar’s Banquet, the Grateful Dead made their countryish masterpieces, Workingman
’s Dead and American Beauty, and the Byrds (who had now acquired the remarkable Gram Parson) became an unabashed, fully-formed country-western band with Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

  This trend began to disturb some critics a year later when, in 1969, Dylan recorded his own full LP of lovely and pure country songs, Nashville Skyline, that included a raggedy duet with C & W star Johnny Cash. The immediate effect of this offbeat turn was to complicate the myth of Dylan’s personality, and the meanings of his music. It made him appear more enigmatic, mysterious, and abstruse, and raised questions not only about the validity of his musical departure, but about our political responses to it. Since country music was widely viewed as the music of a working-class sensibility, and since it represented a conservative audience that was seen as stalwart supporters of the war in Vietnam, did this mean that Dylan had now turned political sides? Or had he simply lost faith in political solutions altogether? (“Dylan’s calm sounded smug, tranquilized,” wrote historian Todd Gitlin in The Sixties. “To settle his quarrel with the world, he had filed away his passions.”) Could music this refined and seemingly apolitical have any real meaning for a young audience still under the shadow of the Vietnam War? After all, rock & roll was supposed to be for a young audience, and in the climate of the late 1960s, that audience was politically concerned—in fact, mortally threatened. How could a rock figure of Dylan’s caliber make music that failed to respond to those concerns? Like Elvis Presley before him, Bob Dylan changed the course of a nation, and then, it seems, attempted to remove himself from the ramifications of such an act.