Happy 80th Birthday Bob!
Bob at 80
Bob at the MLK speech
Reading and listening to so many tributes to the Bob--one could be forgiven thinking that we were alive at the time of a modern day saint. I felt that way a bit when Martin Luther King was still alive--the quality of his soaring rhetoric in service to his passion for justice was something even this young wet behind the ears teen could respond to. One of the often overlooked facts is that he was making his appearance on the same platform as MLK when he was only 23. Dylan in a few short years had risen from pop singer- from backwater Hibbing, Minnesota, from a Little Richard wannabe to the pinnacle of poetic authority. Not many could be rocketed to success on the strength of a few major records to becoming something akin to the spokesperson of their generation—a phrase of course that he hated. But this is what he managed to pull off. What happened next probably shaped the next part of his career.
After being given the platform to speak to around 250,000 people on the mall-(the US civil rights movement had shown up in full) on that day to listen to the probably the single greatest speech of the 20th century, instead of singing Blowin in the Wind a safe choice he sings Only a Pawn in Their Game. It was one of the few ill judged moments in Dylan’s career since as Wikipedia points out “The lyrics actually reiterate the claim that the murderer "can't be blamed. He's only a pawn in their game." In fact, the state twice prosecuted the murderer in 1964, but each time the all white jury failed to reach a verdict. No wonder the performance only received a smattering of applause. But that was Dylan--never one to follow any kind of political correctness. Sean Wilentz a Dylan historian argues by seeing Evers assassin as a pawn he is taking on a much larger theme--"It isn't simply a matter of hatred; it isn't simply a moral question. It's a political question and an economic question. The poor white man's at the caboose of the train, but it's the system — the rich, the powerful, everyone from the cops on up and down — they're the ones who are twisting this guy's head around with racism in order to keep him down..."Dylan's writing a different kind of art," Wilentz says. "Not just in the sense of art because it's beautifully written, but because he actually had that ability to, as I say, enter into lots of different people's brains and souls and see them in collision."
Dylan’s eternal quest is for the right angle to look at an experience--not the one that best suits the political fashion but that seems to him the most authentic and connected to a larger theme or story he wants to tell. The long and complicated Dylan story full of different masks, different musical styles and even religious philosophies is a story of continuous revolt against any set of expectations. A few months after the I have a dream speech-- Dylan attended a dinner event in New York hosted by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee who had awarded its annual Tom Paine Award “for his contribution to the fight for civil liberties.” In a rambling speech he admitted a certain sympathy for that assassin. ’I’ve got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where — what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I too — I saw some of myself in him. I don’t think it would have gone — I don’t think it could go that far. But I got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt, in me — not to go that far and shoot.” In a letter written to explain his remarks he states, “When I spoke of Lee Oswald, I was speakin of the times, I was not speakin of his deed if it was his deed. The deed speaks for itself but I am sick, so sick at hearin “we all share the blame” for every church bombing, gun battle, mine disaster, poverty explosion, an president killing that comes about. It is so easy t say “we” an bow our heads together I must say “I” alone an bow my head alone for it is I alone who is livin my life.
This is the side of Dylan that wants to reveal truths even if they might be painful and unacceptable. Fortunately he stopped the effort to speechify --he found the way to get a these truths not through any use of political platforms or taking “stands” but using his poetic and lyrical gifts to examine his own experience to help us all examine the world’s hypocrises, missed connections and deceptive illusions.
The best songs are the ones where he takes us on a journey with him--we see the heiress who once threw the bums a dime and now has to live out on the street. We see slavery and its effects through the singer Blind Wille McTell’s eyes--
Seen them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghost of slavery ship
I can hear them tribes moaning
Hear the undertakers bell
Nobody can sing the blues like blind Wille Mc Tell
There is an awareness in all his songs but most poignantly in Blind Willie McTell of massive human evil --the unforgettable line in that song
Well God is in his heaven
And we are what was his
But power and greed and corruptible seed seem to be all that there is
But always a pull away from darkness—that word “seems” is a good indication that he is not a 100 percent sure of his belief. But he is always attentive to that darknesss so in a song like Every Grain of Sand there is the line
In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed
There's a dying voice within me reaching out somewhere
Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair
Dylan' wants us to imagine that last moment of grief —a cry for some sort of answer —and interestingly enough the only hope is that the voice echoes into the void—with the strange word “toiling” so similar to the word “tolling” like the tolling of a bell. But they are sounding in some kind of abstract realm—”the morals of despair.
The song is close to being circular—the emotions are not allowed to move beyond the obvious despair —an echo chamber of chaotic thoughts until the end when the rhythm begins to change—a new attention to choices he has informed by an enlarged awareness of where he stands in nature and in time,
I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other time it's only me
I am hanging in the balance of a finished plan
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand
Dylan is about meaning --he uncovers it in his own life by looking carefully at the world. Some of his most memorable songs are about the loss of meaning—Desolation Row, where they are painting the passports brown, Ballad of a Thin Man where Mr Jones stumbles around to figure out not just where he is but who he is, Highway 61 where mad things are occurring that spoof the craziness of the Biblical Story of Abraham, Talkin World War 3 Blues where the mad logic of nuclear war is held up to ridicule. But these songs are more entertainment not part of the major repertory that would include, Girl from the North Country, Blind Willie McTell, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol, Every Grain of Sand, Just Like a Woman, Hard Rain, Sara, Its Alright Ma, I Shall be Released. What counts in these major songs is that focused effort to return to repair a world that has lost its meaning through the power of song. So a confessional song like Idiot Wind is not quite as successful —because we feel despite the raw power of the emotional honesty that meaning is not quite focused. Yes they are both idiots but as the idiot wind continues to blow no one is learning anything from the experience.Unlike Idiot Wind where we feel Dylan is holding back some key information, Just Like a Woman provides a fully empathic picture of a relationship on the rocks. Isn’t it clear he pleads,
That I just can't fit
Yes, I believe that it's time for us to quit
But when we meet again, introduced as friends
Please don't let on that you knew me when
I was hungry and it was your world
The neat rhyme with “fit” and “quit” gives the narrator a moment pause preparing us us for that specific and dramatic move to “being introduced as friends.” But Bob is not done with us yet—he grasps that new reality and what it means for both of them. He does not want anyone to know that once she had all the power in the relationship before she succumbed to her “fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls.”
There are at least 80 more Dylan’s —more than enough for each one of his years on this planet and for each of us —but that is enough of a tribute for now. Dylan is quite simply the kind of artist we still so desperately need to light up our confused and troubled times. Times that he has witnessed and helped us see all the way from sharing that stage in Washington DC with MLK to today. Roll on Bob--roll on.