Bob Dylan

I recently watched Martin Scorsese’s documentary film on Bob Dylan. It was a truly moving, troubling and bitter-sweet experience. Bob Dylan arose as a sort of Phoenix, or more properly a Cassandra, out of the scarred and brutal landscape of a strip mining town in the hinterland of the mid-West to become quite unconsciously the voice of a time and the icon of the disaffected for a generation.

Dylan was profoundly influenced by Woody Guthrie who had so eloquently spoken of a rather strange caste of dispossessed dust bowl Okies whose Diaspora was catalyzed by drought, depression and bank foreclosures.  They became a unique underclass of the disaffected in America: hillbillies, poor, uncouth, uneducated to the point of being comical stereotypes of want and… White. They settled in the sweat shops of California agriculture until eventually displaced by more comfortable stereotypes of Blacks and Hispanics.

The music and genuine voices of Guthrie, John Jacob Niles, Odetta and others eventually became “cool” in Greenwich Village as a sort of white-faced minstrel show of Folk music on the heels of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferenghetti and the “beat generation”.

(When I grew up in Cambridge I saw Kerouac and Ginsberg numerous times at a coffee shop called the “Club 47” at 47 Mt Auburn St just off Harvard Square.)

Into this mix the perception of Dylan cut like acetylene and soared like a brilliant rocket into the dark night of the soul of young people with real hopes and real ideals lost in impotence and dread.

And just at that time a great cause was taking root on the American soul. Civil rights became the issue searing and tearing the fabric of American society. Bull Connor, Medgar Evers, Martin King, Rosa Parks, Freedom Riders; embodied a shocking tale of injustice and woe which had for so long simmered beneath the comfortable life of emerging post-war Middle America. This awakening was a sort of extension of the Civil War, the outcome of which had become derailed by Jim Crow reconstructionism for one hundred years. And now the battles raged again in Montgomery and Selma and on a hundred other fronts as they had before at Manassas and Gettysburg.

(I met Rosa Parks at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in his first term.)

The pot began to boil and Dylan provided much of the flame, not by overt political activism but rather by sheer force of naked observation put into words and music.

There was hope engendered in his words: “…the times they are a-changing…”; “…a hard rain is going to fall…” The power of mobilization of ideas and people seemed as if it would bring forth some sort of justice and change. And it did to an extent. From being Coons and  Niggers, on to becoming Negroes and later Coloreds and People of Color, on to African Americans and finally to Blacks the movement almost succeeded in bringing  a  whole race, and 10% or so of the population of America, from negritude to humanity. This later day manumission in some 40 years. It is a work in progress and Dylan was a voice for the catalysts of change way back then.

The days of children taught to huddle under school desks and suburbanites building bomb shelters in the back lawn were symptoms of a mass paranoia of an “eve of destruction” which gripped my generation in its formative years. Into this mix, or out of it, arose Dylan with a message of perception and hope.

But the pressure of expectations wore him down and he changed musical form and interest and was roundly excoriated for doing so. At Newport Pete Seeger actually looked for an axe to cut the cables to Dylan’s amplification system. Apparently Dylan had gone from icon to heretic; and all over Paul Bloomfield, the Butterfield Blues Band and an electric guitar. He became an idol with feet of clay to those who looked for others to actually act.

What is particularly interesting to me in this tale was that the genuine activism of many of the young in those times soon eroded into hippiedom, sex, drugs, rock and roll and hedonism. The real edge was lost and meanwhile, at first undetected, a serpent had slowly uncoiled itself and with malevolent eye and a steady inexorable slither began to climb the branches of the national tree to devour the youth of America as a tree snake raids the nestlings of unsuspecting and impotent birds in a pitiless and amoral manner.

Involvement in Viet Nam grew slowly after the fall of great men, all of whom had human weaknesses, like John and Robert Kennedy and Martin King. Perhaps the deaths of those three had sapped the spirit of the young and it was not until the ungodly spectacles of GIs burning straw huts of peasants in Vietnamese villages and of National Guardsmen gunning down white, middle-class college girls at Kent State did the spirit of youth re-awaken.

(As a Regular Army soldier I have some strong opinions about the use of ill-trained National Guardmen for any serious military purpose. Kent State was an example and recently Abu Ghraib is another,)

Presidents like Johnson, who perhaps had the least promise of anyone in those times ensconced in the office, but who was in the end a genuine champion of civil rights, was driven down by the juggernaut of Viet Nam. Rosa Parks was “sick and tired of being sick and tired” but LBJ was sick and tired of the whole inexorable situation in which he found himself. He died sick and worn. Pictures of him in his last months in the oval office speak volumes.

 He was followed by the truly unholy Mr. Nixon, a man of unsurpassed pettiness. It has been pretty much down hill since then from the inane Mr. Regan, to the characterless Mr. Clinton (no one really cared about his peccadilloes but rather were offended by his abuse of power over a young and naïve intern) and recently by the truly avaricious and unscrupulous Pater et Filio of the Bush dynasty.

Are these people the best and brightest we as a nation could produce?

(When one looked at Ronald Regan then or looks at George “Dubbya” now, it is immediately apparent that THEY are not running the show…. so the question arises….”Who is?”)

What happened to us and to the ideals of our youth? My youth and the youth of our times. The hippies died out or became yuppies. The occasional geriatric granola muncher can be seen from time to time even to this day in these parts, and the Yuppie spawn have lost all purpose and are immersed in the culture of the NFL, Brittany Spears and pornographic, talent-less heiresses. Iraq is a sideshow to Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl. The mendacity of politicians is surpassed only by their hubris.

“Oh where have you gone my pretty one, pretty one?”

What in God’s name went wrong? Why have we, filled as we were with promise and aspiration, failed so abjectly?

Back to the film.

Joan Baez was interviewed and her brilliance of intellect and her staggering beauty as a 60 something are only matched by the crystal excellence of her music and voice in the time of our lives which once mattered so much to us.

Her beauty, voice and timelessness endure.

In that there is some hope, joy and solace.

The material on this site and the material linked to should be considered to be copyrighted by the author, but is freely available for copying for non-profit use. Any commercial use should be cleared with the webmaster, who will contact the author(s).