Chapter 1 – The Early Years
From Duluth to New York City
Bob Dylan was born May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. Duluth is a port-city in the northeast part of the state, situated on Lake Superior. It was named after Daniel G. Du Lhut (also spelled Du Luth), a French explorer of the seventeenth century. Duluth’s population fluctuates from decade to decade but generally its urban citizenry numbers slightly over 100,000 persons.
In historical context, 1941 was a troubled year. World War II had been raging for over twenty months when Dylan was born; the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was only half-a-year away. Meanwhile, the German Nazis had already taken the Ruhr, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.
Hitler’s armies had overrun France and the Low Countries and were one month from the June 1941 invasion of the one foe Hitler had to conquer to win mastery of Europe: the U.S.S.R.
By the time Bob was four years old, Hitler’s dreams of glory had been shattered in both East and West by the Allied armies. May 8, 1945 marked Victory-in-Europe Day, an occasion for celebration of the world’s peoples for deliverance from the dark years of 1939-1945. V-E Day was soon followed by V-J Day or “Victory in Japan”.
The fighting with Japan ended on August 15 with surrender terms being signed on September 2 aboard the battleship “Missouri” in Tokyo Bay. The war years had galvanized the American people into fighting fascism; the sacrifice was high but the goal of defending democracy was considered well worth the price.
We have no reason to suppose that Dylan could remember anything of the war years although his 1941 birthdate does prove that he possessed a few extra years of maturity on the postwar generation yet to come, the Baby Boom generation, many of whom were destined to become student activists as they came of age in the turbulent Sixties.
In some sense, then, Dylan is part of a pre-Baby Boom generation that values its links to America’s past. This view may help explain why Dylan seeks to enhance musical traditions developed by musicians prior to 1940 – in a way that may be at variance with a description of the Baby Boom generation’s taste in music. This latter group, according to certain historians and sociologists, sought to turn their backs on the past and rebel against all social norms.
For them, the war years rapidly became “ancient history”, a traumatic episode in the lives of their parents. Politics was seen as a sham; many of the hippie drop-outs lost interest in political activity. There was so much hypocrisy one had to turn one’s back on it, rather than fight to overcome it. Struggling with the politics of hypocrisy would only drag you down into the morass.
The Baby Boomers were concerned with the present and a slice of the future; the here-and-now; the visibly real world of materialistic items of comfort and pleasure; the good times rocking-and-rolling rather than the pain and despair that dominated so much of the landscape for two decades during the 1930’s and 1940’s.
Bob Dylan would become a leading figure for them in his songs of conscience and ballads of youthful exuberance. He is in and of the Much Studied Postwar Generation but in music and experience he has an additional few years on which to draw–perhaps part of the reason why he does not shut out the past but makes such effective use of its cultural legacy.
As various critics have observed, a primary reason for Dylan’s great success was his ability to absorb many types of musical influence. He is not averse to finding beauty in the music of an earlier era – even as he helped shape the musical tastes for the 1960’s through his innovative lyrics and enchanting melodies.
A MUSICAL ODYSSEY BEGINS
The last song on his first album is Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”. Blind Lemon Jefferson was born in 1897 and achieved some popularity as a blues singer. Dylan is a preserver, a learner, and an “appreciator” of the work of others – and not in matters just limited to musical matters. He looks into the why of things, he learns to interpret and think matters out his own way. He asks new questions, as in “Blowin’ in the Wind”:
Yes, ‘n’ how many times must the cannon balls fly/
Before they’re forever banned? ….
Yes, ‘n’ how many deaths will it take ‘till he knows
That too many people have died?
His poetry is timely though the theme is old: why is there war? The questions he formulates could apply to earlier wars or to all war in general; they can also apply to the Vietnam War Era. He has picked up a good deal from other artists: rhythm and blues, folk music, and blues from the Negro people.
These artists reflected life in the United States in their music, before and after World War II. They always had something genuine to say; originality was the hallmark of their music. These authentic traditions were not born overnight and seldom catered to the trend towards “fads” in popular music. Nor was it heavily commercialized music, at least not in the beginning.
While today such men as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Huddie Ledbetter, and Woody Guthrie are considered giants in the world of music, their “success” early on was never very impressive compared to later Super Stars. They were seldom paid any kind of salary commensurate with their talent but their undeniable impact on the blues singers and folk musicians who would follow them was of the first magnitude.
Dylan’s serious side is not hidden in his music; he does not turn towards “Tin Pan Alley” methods of success. He does not mimic the slick sugary tunes that pass for Pop music although he absorbs the best of it.
We are told by biographer Anthony Scaduto that Dylan liked the music of such illustrious notables as Hank Williams, Little Richard, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Jimmy Reed, Big Joe Williams, Jesse Fuller, and Big Bill Broonzy—among others—as a young boy growing up. More perceptions of Dylan, man and performer, can be gathered from Robert Shelton’s comments in the New York Times:
He may…mumble the text of “House of the Rising Sun” in a scarcely
understandable growl or sob, or clearly enunciate the poetic poignancy
of a Blind Lemon Jefferson blues, but his music-making has the mark
of originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his youth.
Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters
less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem
to be straight up. [1]
2
At about age six, Dylan moved with his family from Duluth to the town of Hibbing in an area rich in iron-ore mining. Indeed, the whole town of Hibbing was once bodily moved over to make room for the mining interests. The place is not far from the Canadian border, since Hibbing is approximately 200 miles north of Minneapolis. The state is rich in history as well as mineral resources; Minnesota is the home of the Mesabi Iron Range, a range of hills in the northeast of the State containing very rich iron-ore deposits.
It was originally mined by scraping away the surface dirt and then digging down; such open-pit mining techniques are considered injurious of ecological and aesthetic concerns. It is plausible to suggest that Bob Dylan’s sense of justice and injustice—beauty on the one hand, man-made ugliness on the other—was learned in part from what he witnessed in his own home state?
A song like “North Country Blues” is a direct commentary on what he saw in the way of mining operations and the effects it had on towns in Minnesota. Several verses from the mournful lament will illustrate the point:
Come gather ‘round friends
And I’ll tell you a tale
Of when the red iron pits ran plenty
But the cardboard filled windows
And old men on the benches
Tell you now that the whole town is empty…
Then the shaft was soon shut
And more work was cut,
And the fire in the air, it felt frozen.
‘Til a man come to speak
And he said one week
That number eleven was closin’.
They complained in the East,
They are paying too high.
They say that your ore ain’t worth digging.
That it’s much cheaper down
In the South America towns
Where the miners work almost for nothing.
So the mining gates locked
And the red iron rotted
And the room smelled heavy from drinking.
Where the sad, silent song
Made the hour twice as long
As I waited for the sun to go sinking…
The summer is gone,
The ground’s turning cold,
The stores one by one they’re a-foldin’.
My children will go
As soon as they grow.
Well, there ain’t nothing here now to hold them.
In another age, Dylan’s anger might have been expressed by his becoming a writer or a painter but Dylan’s medium was the guitar and song. He liked music from an early stage, admiring various singers and styles: rhythm-and blues, some folk, some blues, some soul.
Of his early life, varying versions got out, not all of them authentic. Passages on the record jacket of his first album state simply: “Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota on May 24, 1941. After living briefly in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Gallup, New Mexico, he graduated from high school in Hibbing, Minnesota ‘way up by the Canadian border’.” [2] Moreover, biographical notes on album two, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”, continue in this vein:
During his first nineteen years, he lived in Gallup, New Mexico;
Cheyenne, South Dakota; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Philipsburg,
Kansas; Hibbing, Minnesota (where he has graduated from high
school), and Minneapolis (where he spent a restless six months
at the University of Minnesota). [3]
Biographer Anthony Scaduto, however, debunks part of this traveling-man image of Dylan, citing Dylan himself as the source of false stories about his early life. For example, Dylan claimed to have run away from home a fair number of times. In the Bob Dylan Song Book we find these comments:
In an often hilarious summary of his early experiences called
“My Life in a Stolen Minute”, Dylan wrote, “Hibbing’s a good ol’ town.
I ran’ away from it when I was 10, 12, 13, 15, 151/2, 17an’ 18. I been
caught an’ brought back all but once.”
His first jaunt was to Chicago and before the police found him,
the 10-year-old runaway had gotten his first guitar from the friend of a
street singer on the South Side. [4]
According to his script of a peripatetic youth, Dylan first saw Woody Guthrie in Burbank, California—over two thousand miles to the West. Fascinating copy, indeed! The Song Book compounds one fiction with another when it states, in a semi-factual tone: “He’d run away to Chicago when he was 10, traveled with a Texas carnival when he was 13, and thumbed his way for the next seven years from New Mexico to South Dakota, from Kansas to California.” [5]
More fascinating stories, but unfortunately—according to Scaduto’s research–most of it is untrue; Bob Dylan grew up in Hibbing all along! In Dylan’s case, it appears that the human imagination is frequently more real to a growing boy with musical talent than the prosaic details of life itself. Dylan, in other words, hoaxed a lot of people when he got to New York in 1961, telling stories about his traveling exploits that were fictionalized to a fair degree. He had come a long way from Minnesota and people took his word for it as to where he’d been and what he’d been doing.
It is indicative of Dylan’s irreverence for the existing social system—as well as a reflection of his sense of humor—that he got so many official sources (newspaper columnists, record album producers, compilers of the Song Book) to fall for such tall tales without being swift enough to discover the “discrepancies”.
Perhaps Dylan’s rough-edged vocal quality and mature talent convinced people that he’d traveled around and yet, Scaduto insists, most of the towns and road-sagas of Dylan’s youth are invented. (Though, at around age 19, Dylan did land a job as a singer in Colorado). When one considers the ease with which he absorbed the blues from other singers—who had traveled and been places—then his stories hardly seem like a “lie” at all. They were, but Dylan tried to breathe life into them anyway and fairly well succeeded.
THE REAL DYLAN EMERGES
That’s an early introduction to Dylan; punching the Status Quo in the under-gut before his career even began to take off, as though to say: what’s truth? Whose truth? How do ya’ arrive at it? How do ya’ know the System’s truths aren’t nothing but lies? How do ya’ know the young people aren’t nothing but lies?
How do ya’ know the young people aren’t standing by to discover a whole bunch of new truths, ready to explode them onto the scene? As though to say: if the System can’t verify a stretched-story or two of mine, from where does it get its information? Who does the checking?
Who decides what appears in print and song and what doesn’t—who decides what gets verified, what gets asserted as truthful, whether rightfully it is or not?
Yes! Dylan started his career with a punch to the under-gut of the Status Quo. From the start, his stories represent far more than a rambling untamed imagination; it’s Dylan recognizing where real music comes from in the country. It’s his way of acknowledging that music classes, piano lessons, and voice training are all well and good, along with schooling in music theory and composition.
It’s the people who have been traveling–like Guthrie–who saw hard times and shared the people’s sorrows and joys, who write the best kind of music. The artists who traveled and learned songs all across the country—they’re the ones who joined the people’s struggle and who witnessed deeds both small and great, whether an act of kindness or a protest against injustice. These singers were in their own way a repository of the nation’s cultural expression, arising from the people themselves.
Fictionalized or not, Dylan’s running-away escapades were authentic enough in one sense; he would learn his music from some of the best folk-singers and finest blues musicians around. He would not follow the path laid down by slick promoters of saccharin-like music, here today and gone tomorrow.
As it turns out, Dylan was raised in Hibbing, Minnesota, son of a Jewish family named Zimmerman. His dad, Abraham, owned a store, and Dylan was a product of this social background! As Anthony Scaduto writes: “By the time Bob entered high school his father and his uncle were operating an expanded store at the same location, now called Zimmerman’s Furniture and Electric. They sold furniture, appliances, and did some electrical contracting.”
What’s more, at one time Bob was expected to help his father repossess items from poor people; Dylan found the experience disquieting, to say the least. He did not make a good repossessor nor stuck with the job for long.
Dylan was actually born Robert Allen Zimmerman although in his imagination he appears to have escaped any conventional identity at a rather early age. It is humorous to see him write on the back cover of his fifth album, entitled “Bringing It All Back Home”:
i’m standing there watching the parade/
feeling combination of sleepy john estes,
jayne mansfield, Humphrey bogart/mortimer
snurd, murph the surf and so forth/… [6]
The small E.E. Cummings-style “i” is a device of Dylan’s own making as are the other minor spelling changes he makes up for some words: “old” becomes “ol’”; “and” becomes “an’”; “to” becomes “t”; “though” evolves into “tho” and “night” becomes “nite”, and the like. It verges on expanding a Mark Twain approach to the twentieth century’s common man’s street speech, given a Dylanesque twist.
DYLAN ON THE MOVE
The folk-singing poet extraordinaire was already using the Dylan appellation for a moniker by the time he hit New York. He perhaps was making a deliberate effort to erase the tracks behind him, as American Indians would use the branches of bushes as brushes to hide the hoof-prints of their horses.
In this way—new name, new identity—it became easier to make his past what he chose, to invite people to believe what he told them, and to establish a rough-and-ready image for the launching of his career.
Dylan could selectively choose to ignore or acknowledge aspects of his past when the mood hit him; he was now “Bob Dylan” but he did not forget his family, either. He married Sara Lowndes in November of 1965 and when their second son was born, he was named Seth Abraham Isaac Dylan for Dylan’s father Abraham, who died in May 1968—right before Sara had given birth.
(We are indebted to Anthony Scaduto’s ground-breaking biography for such details. Scaduto’s facts are reliable although we shall have cause to disagree with his interpretation of Dylan, as both man and singer, in subsequent chapters.)
For true Dylan fans the liner-notes on his albums make wonderful reading, particularly those records which have his poetry or rambling prose vignettes in place of biographical commentary, most notably albums three, four, and five: “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, “Another Side of Bob Dylan”, and “Bringing It All Back Home”. His “11 Outlined Epitaphs” on Album Three is semi-autobiographical and stands by itself as on over-powering introduction to Dylan as poet.
The Critics Take Notice
Stacey Williams writes on Album One: “Bob Dylan started to sing and play guitar when he was ten”. [7] The Song Book agrees, and adds: “By age 15, he’d also taught himself piano, autoharp and harmonica …” [8]
As we have seen, there is cause to be skeptical of some facts published about Bob Dylan; however, there’s no reason to doubt the estimates of when Dylan learned to play music.
Scaduto goes into more detail on Dylan’s first playing experiences, as individual and as part of a group, especially while in high school in Hibbing. For more of that story, the reader need only consult the relevant pages in Scaduto’s Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography (1971).
Scaduto suggest that Dylan’s early Little Richard imitations were not always appreciated by his high school audience. Even so, one can sense the ways in which Dylan was becoming skilled at adapting his musical ways to fit the occasion, adjusting vocal stylings and song repertoire to reach more people.
He does not compromise his music yet a subtle talent emerges of his being able to “read” an audience. His tunes were sometimes raucous and rollicking but he made sure they had popular appeal as well.
He did not have to dazzle or shock; he could reach out and create powerful musical moments for his audience. He was learning how to create a mass following for what he was trying to do–without giving up the musical forms of exploration and expression that intrigued him the most: the sign of a true artist.
Dylan simply shows sense enough to rearrange his repertoire when necessary in order to reach a wider audience. There is this almost a palpable sense of Dylan wondering to himself: what do I have to do to succeed?
Rhythm-and-blues alone was not the answer. What was yet to come would provide the answer. Songs of delightful originality with beautiful lyrics pleased thousands of fans. The unique Dylan style helped create the loyal following that would also allow him musical freedom in his heyday of performing. From modest blues and folk-singing roots, he became a crowd pleaser par excellence.
Whether he learned tricks to accomplish the transformation or whether it was a natural expression of his rapidly maturing talent, is anyone’s guess: most likely, it was both.
Nor should we forget the turbulent times that helped propel him to fame: he had an “exploding 1960’s” as backdrop for his work. As social poet, he would soon leave far behind most of his rivals. The decision to keep on being “serious” in his music was one key aspect of his meteoric rise to stardom in the ever changing Sixties.
THE DYLAN SAGA
In Hibbing, Dylan had a girlfriend, with the pretty name of Echo (in full, Echo Star Helstrom). We need delve into details—Scaduto does that—although one anecdote by Scaduto deserves mention here:
Sometime in the Spring of 1958, Bob came over to Echo’s house
with a book in his hand, Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck. “This
is a great book”, he told her, excitedly describing the novel.
“Steinbeck is a great writer.” And with that boyish enthusiasm that many
would find so infectious, Bob read everything of Steinbeck’s. “Hey, hey,
do you know Steinbeck wrote East of Eden, that James Dean movie?”
he once shouted. [9]
Dylan didn’t read much, according to Scaduto, but admired John Steinbeck a great deal. He attended the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis, for six months in 1959, but decided that college was not for him. (Flashes here of artistic talent in the past that did not pursue college: Jack London and Frank Norris leaving the University of California campus at Berkeley, Pete Seeger leaving Harvard, John Steinbeck himself leaving Stanford without taking a degree, etc.). A Broadside song sheet (Volume 2, 1963) suggests that Dylan also enjoyed the poetry of Bertolt Brecht. In describing the song “Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, the accompanying notes state:
The lyrics reveal Bob Dylan as a true poet. It is on the basis of “Hard Rain”
that some critics have compared Dylan to Lorca, the Spanish poet murdered
by the Franco fascists a half dozen years before Bob was born. Others note
a strong influence of the American Beats. Still others compare it to the work of
Bertolt Brecht, Bob’s favorite poet. [10]
It is apparent that when Dylan liked an author, he because intensively involved in that writer’s work. Though he dropped out of college, and Scaduto mentions that reading was not Dylan’s favorite pastime, anyone who listens closely to Dylan’s songs realizes that he was absorbed a tremendous amount of education from a wide variety of sources, books certainly among them. His poetic images are as vivid as Lorca’s, as strengthened in perceptions of the world and of human nature as the efforts of any great poet.
His literary style was not born directly of the English college textbook, granted, but it was all the more refreshing for its independent vitality. In his poetry and lyrics, he accomplished what erudite prose writers and poets have attempted before him: to discuss and describe life in personal, immediate way- ways that give expression to his innermost thoughts and feelings, but ways which also have great value to the emotions of the listener as well.
Great writers often tackle the human condition: class and social conflict, predicaments of the human personality, relationships of individuals placed in the context of the society around them. Steinbeck indeed comes to mind; Jack Kerouac among the Beat authors; and countless others. There were writers who, with or without formal education, took their knowledge of life and poured it into their masterpieces. Another group of artists comes to mind—musicians this time, not writers—who achieve largely similar purposes in their tunes and lyrics.
Fundamentally, the traveling singers of the blues—black singer or white singers—also sought to express basic truths about human beings. Dylan, in aligning himself with rhythm-and-blues (down-on-my-luck crying-blues, too) absorbed a wide-ranging education from many different street singers, as fully as if he had embarked on a self-imposed reading regimen of all the great novels in the world. The guitar was quicker, under the tutelage of his nimble fingers; he could learn songs faster, and make up his own and play them, a lot sooner than he could read a 300-page novel or spend four years in college.
He couldn’t actually duplicate the poverty-induced exploits in the lives of such individuals, or the hard-times travelin’ blues of black singers, but he could be an apt pupil. Josh White, for example, when a young boy, had led around great streets singers like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Joe Taggert. Those days were gone for Dylan, as were the days of hoboing on the railroads, but the music lived, waiting to be recaptured and given a revitalized second life. Josh White, Blind Lemon, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and more had been innovators in the world of guitar music. Now they needed someone to assimilate their contributions, and pass it on to a new generation of Americans; the blues from the past has a message for the present.
The attitude is conscious enough on Dylan’s part; on album two, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”, these comments of his appear:
“Down the Highway” is a distillation of Dylan’s feeling about the blues.
“The way I think about the blues”, he says, “comes from what I learned
from Big Joe Williams. The blues is more than something to sit home
and arrange. What made the real blues singers so great is that they were
able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time, they were
standing outside of them and could look at them. And in that way, they
had them beat. What’s depressing today is that many young singers are
trying to get inside the blues, forgetting that those older singers used them
to get outside their troubles.” [11]
It is a penetrating comment, to be sure. Dylan’s interest in the blues is also an interest in social reality—not sugar-coated, but plain, hard, and even ugly. It is an orientation that he never loses throughout his singing career although Anthony Scaduto conveniently breaks up Dylan’s singing into a “folk music protest” phase and a (non-political) “folk-rock” stage later. If Dylan is aware of a purpose to the blues other than pure entertainment, then listen likewise to him describing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”:
“Hard Rain”, adds Dylan, “is a desperate kind of song.” It was
written during the Cuban missile crisis of October, 1962 when those who
allowed themselves to think of the possible results of the Kennedy-Khrushchev confrontation were chilled by the imminence of oblivion. “Every line in it”,
says Dylan, “is actually the start of a whole song. But when I wrote it, I
thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put
all I could into this one.” [12]
Reading or not, college graduate or not, Dylan was obviously thinking for himself as the 1950’s merged into the 1960’s and gave promise of becoming a much more intellectually alert decade than the coerced silence of McCarthyism and President Eisenhower’s go-slow-and-do-nothing era of political inertia.
The decade of 1950’s may well be remembered as a cultural wasteland suffering from censorship and blacklisting, racial prejudice and discrimination, and other forms of social injustice. While Scaduto may not feel Dylan was political, other critics thought differently. The following excerpt is how Broadside Magazine reacted to “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, itself one of Dylan’s more visual poetical forays in music:
This song, which is really a long poem set to music, is considered
by many to be Bob Dylan’s masterpiece—so far. There undoubtedly will
be other Dylan works to challenge it, since he is only 22.
“Hard Rain” means different things to different people. Some see
it merely as a protest against atomic fallout; to others it carries a much deeper
meaning— they see the “hard rain” as the burning hell the American people
will have to pass through in order to correct the many things wrong with our
society (a foretaste of which the Negro people are encountering as they
struggle for democratic rights guaranteed them a hundred years ago) . . .
Woody Guthrie, of course, is Bob’s greatest teacher, as he himself
has said many times. Almost a forerunner of “Hard Rain” is the long,
recently-discovered Whitmanesque poem by Woody, “My Freedom Fire”,
printed in the August issue of the magazine Mainstream.
But it is safe to say that no Guthrie character could wander as far as
Dylan’s “blue-eyed son” without running across the union activity.
I saw a young man walking that picket line,
I saw a young woman carrying a union sign. [13]
While “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” certainly created vivid images in the mind of the listener, a poetic masterpiece in its own right, it also served as forerunner to a new wave of highly focused lyrics–with even greater punching power–found in such memorable songs as “Masters of War”, “Only A Pawn in Their Game”, and “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
If early critics found “Hard Rain” as “socially-aware” as the above passage indicates, it logically follows that Anthony Scaduto is going to have trouble arguing that Dylan turned his back on protest—because later Dylan songs have even more “protest” in them than “Hard Rain”: The song itself anticipates a new musical direction for Dylan in which he gives free rein to his poetic imagination; we need not see his coming “folk rock” phase as unexpected or a repudiation of the beauty and passion of the lyrics found in his “folk music” music.
We are, after all, discussing a poet who authored such hard-hitting songs as “Ballad of Hollis Brown”, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, “With God On Our Side”, “Who Killed Davey Moore?”, and “Oxford Town”. These are all songs directly concerned with social injustice, or individual victims of injustice. Dylan is learning how to champion the cause of the socially oppressed, the downtrodden, or the just plain worried (the blues!)
If such an approach is not present in every song, neither is it entirely absent from any album for long. That Dylan mixes poetry and art in with “protest” should not blind us to the many gems of his social commentary! “Blowin’ in the Wind” is a beautiful melody, certainly, but it also has social commentary well worth noting:
Dylan tried to explain “Blowin’ in the Wind” a couple of months later,
in remarks for Sing Out! in which he said:
“There ain’t too much I can say about this song except that the
answer is blowing on the wind. It ain’t in my book or movie or T.V.
show or discussion group. Man, hip people are telling me where the
answer is but oh I won’t believe that. I still say it’s in the wind and just
like a restless piece of paper it’s got to come down some time… But the
only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down so
not too many people get to see and know it… and then it flies again.” [14]
Although it may be considered problematic to use Dylan’s explicitly socially-aware songs from the early-to-mid Sixties as evidence for characterizing his career, there is relevance. The depth of Dylan’s social conscience at the beginning of his rise to fame should be studied carefully in its own right if we are to appreciate what to look for in the mid-Sixties and after. One first has to appreciate these poetic protest lyrics in order to spot the same red thread of his later music.
Dylan is weaving a giant tapestry where many musical patterns exist and overlap; his songs inter-relate in countless ways with ever-in-motion designs. To understand that Dylan was an outspoken critic of the Status Quo in his first albums will make it much easier to trace how he retained his social conscience during his folk-rock period. For the moment, let us return the narrative to the chronological perspective so far developed.
The notes for “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” album, for instance, have more valuable remarks to add in describing the immensely popular song “Blowin’ in the Wind”:
The first of Dylan’s songs in this set is “Blowin’ in the Wind”.
In 1962, Dylan said of the song’s background: “I still say that some of
the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they
see wrong and know it’s wrong. I’m only 21 years old and I know that
there’s been too many wars… You people over 21 should know better.”
All he prefers to add by way of commentary now is: “The first way to
answer these questions in the song is by asking them. But lots of people
have to first find the wind.” [15]
The brief biographical sketches that appeared in Broadside and Sing Out! broke new ground in introducing the poet behind the songs. Dylan’s beautiful song “Fare-Thee-Well” appeared in Broadside, Vol. 2 (songs from Broadside Magazine); the accompanying notes on Dylan included this comment: “’Home’ is Hibbing, Minnesota (his parents and a younger brother still alive live there). Hibbing is northwest of Duluth and was founded in 1893 for the miners digging ore on the fabulous Mesabi iron range. When the deeper ore played out the town was moved over bodily to make way for the world’s largest open-pit mine. That was in 1917.” [16]
When he talks about Hibbing today, Bob remembers mainly the
misery brought to his town by the Eastern mining interests through their
ruthless exploitation of workers and ore. Referring to the exploiters as
“he”, Dylan says,
“You shoulda seen what he did to the town I was raised in—
seen how he left it. He sucked up my town. It’s not too late now
for the people—they’re lost. When will it be too late for him?”
“Fare Thee Well” is a song not only about Bob Dylan and
Hibbing, Minnesota, but about all Americans, East and West, North
and South, who are having to leave their distressed hometowns
because “he” has sucked them dry. [17]
Two other songs by Dylan appeared in the same issue: “Who killed Davey Moore?” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”. The latter song we have briefly mentioned; the former song deserves a few words. It has an explosive quality in rhythm and lyrics; once heard, it sears the imagination in wave after wave of unforgettable, righteous indignation by the composer. For possible culprits for the boxing-ring death of Davey Moore, Dylan looks at the timid referee, the screaming crowd, the complacent manager, the eager boxing writer, as well as Moore’s actual opponent that night. Once more, he is asking “questions”, but with such a forceful impact that his queries take on an exclamatory power—the chorus fairly shouts itself into one’s conscience:
WHO KILLED DAVEY MOORE?
WHY DID HE DIE
AND WHAT’S THE REASON FOR?
Of special relevance to this cursory look at Dylan’s early songs, are the notes in Broadside that reveal how Dylan himself felt about his songs and the society they reflect:
“The same guy who sucked up my town wants to bomb Cuba, but
he doesn’t want to do it himself–send the kids. He made all this money,
but what does he do to earn it? Take away his money and he’d die.
Punch him in the gut enough times and he’d die.”
“He’s a criminal, a crook, a murderer.” This is Bob Dylan talking
to reporter Jack A. Smith in a recent interview for the National Guardian.
The “he” Bob talk about represents the ugly forces he sees around him—the
“masters of war” scheming to bring on an atomic holocaust, the exploiters,
the wealthy, the “red-baiters and race haters”, brutal police, “free-takin
money-makers”, the hypocrites and phonies who piously claim they have
“God on their side” as they explain away past horrors and slaughters and
clamor for more, the playboys and playgirls who drive their Cadillacs
uncaringly past fellow human beings down in the gutter.
“Dylan’s songs are attempts to punch ‘him’ in the gut”, writes Smith.
This song typifies what Smith means, for Bob knows it was “he” who also
killed Davey Moore. [18]
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” was copyrighted in 1962 by Dylan, while “Fare Thee Well” and “Who Killed Davey Moore?” were copyrighted in 1963. The first song appeared on album two (“Freewheelin’) but Dylan did not record the other two songs on his first album. Pete Seeger, however, sings all three songs on “Broadside Ballads”, Vol. 2. Seeger notes, with characteristic modesty, in referring to “Who Killed Davey Moore?”:
I think this is one of Bob’s best songs. He sings it in a kind
of hoarse chant; hardly more than two notes of the scale, one high and
one low, like in the first two lines. I found myself unable to do it this
way, though, and had to weaken and use two more notes. [19]
What one sees, then, in these songs, is Dylan’s hatred of hypocrisy and social injustice. This conclusion is not that of the present author alone but is the general consensus of many critics who have written about Dylan. While Broadside and the National Guardian have strong commitments to a left-progressive ideology (and good folk music!) they were not the only journals and writers noting Dylan’s stature as a social commentator. In the Bob Dylan Song Book, under “Personal Notes”, we find this summary:
There is reason for such enthusiasm. For in the years since he
came East, Bob Dylan—singer, composer, poet, humorist, spokesman—
has developed into the most creative force in folk music today.
As folk poet, Bob Dylan is without peer among his generation.
His songs or “stories”, as he calls them, have been sung and recorded by
Odetta, Marlene Dietrich, Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Kingston Trio, Ian
and Sylvia, The Chad Mitchell Trio, Bobby Darin, Pete Seeger and Judy
Collins. Joan Baez is preparing an album of all Bob Dylan material.
Many of his songs, such as “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”, “Blowin’
in the Wind”, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, and “Masters of War”, have
been among the most popular recordings in the country. Their quality,
however, has insured them a place in American music more permanent
than a high listing on best-selling charts. [20]
These remarks refer to Dylan’s arrival in New York at the start of 1961 and the impact he has had on folk music circles since then. Much of this unrestrained praise might strike one as being unwarranted–or at least weakened by the absence of any counter-balancing criticism—but it is precisely this lavish praise that demonstrates best how Dylan took the music world by storm; superlatives were heaped upon him, and his recording career skyrocketed. Some found his voice unpleasant at first but as Dylan drew praise from such critics as Robert Shelton (who wrote on folk music for the New York Times), his audience grew and his unusual vocal stylings became part of his charm rather than a detracting weakness.
With a rapidly-growing number of critics and fans in his corner, responding to his honesty and raw musical talent, it was plain that Bob Dylan’s career as a folk-singing poet had untapped potential. The Dylan Meteor was starting to rise. The Song Book continues:
Dylan is a deeply committed young man who conveys his concern
for the world around him through unique and poetic imagery that makes
explicit the human condition. As critic Robert Shelton has noted, “Dylan
breaks all the rules of songwriting except that of having something to say
and saying it stunningly…”
Moods of poignancy, anger, bitterness and hope have not been
projected so movingly since the days of Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy.
He has been influenced by them and by Hank Williams, Muddy Waters,
Jelly Roll Morton, Mance Lipscomb and Big Joe Williams. His Midwestern
twang, expert handling of the “talking blues” and sardonic wit seem almost
directly traceable to Woody Guthrie…
Rising above folk music as a vogue, he seizes the themes of
loneliness, fear, war, freedom, and despair, transcends their potentiality
for tiresome cliché and, in a fusion of Negro blues and country music,
translates them into a profound aesthetic experience. It is this that has
led Pete Seeger to say that “He’ll be America’s greatest troubadour” and
to add, as if the young singer’s commitment were almost too intense, “if
he doesn’t explode”.
One critic wrote “Dylan has absorbed, engorged or engulfed all the
techniques of the unlettered greats of the folk song tradition, including the
rich strain of Negro contribution to the culture.”
Dylan’s explanation—“Open up your eyes an’ ears an’ yer influenced—
an’ there’s nothing you can do about it… I just seem to draw into myself
whatever comes my way and it comes out me.” [21]
The critics were suitably impressed and made note of the young singer as social observer. There is little or no sense, then, of Dylan lucking into an occasional “protest song”. His music was identified as having substantive insights from the very start. Perhaps the manner in which he expressed his concerns changed later but his music’s connection to the real world never completely disappeared as the decade of the 1960’s unfolded. Any attempt to divorce Dylan’s lyrics from his underlying concern for social justice is doomed to fail.
This view runs counter to Anthony Scaduto’s approach of claiming that Dylan’s entered a “folk-rock phase” wherein protest was the least important element of his music. We will rebut this argument of Scaduto’s and show its essential fallacy in ensuing chapters. For now, it suffices to complete our examination of how critics responded to Dylan in New York in 1961-62: it is especially important to include the evaluation of Robert Shelton, one of the first folk-music critics to realize the potential greatness of Bob Dylan:
These are the songs of Bob Dylan, the pioneer, the trail-blazer,
the innovator, who has disturbed, delighted, dismayed and deepened
the thinking of millions of listeners. He breaks all the rules. He sets
new compass-points. He experiments and assimilates all musical
influences, then turns about to influence the musical worlds around him . . . .
He keeps his own counsel and always has. They [his friends]
will tell you he hates lifelessness, hypocrisy, regimentation, injustice,
pomposity . . . .
His “Times They Are A-Changin’” became a credo for the
questioning, defiant collegiate generation that, for a time, elevated him
to the role of spokesman . . . .
The biography of Bob Dylan rests in his songs. His middle-class
background, his leaving the University of Minnesota, his rambling around
the country, his involvement in the Greenwich Village scene are mere details…
Here then is the musical biography of Bob Dylan, told in songs
of love, songs of anger, songs of protest, songs of humor, songs of anguish,
songs of hope, songs of the beauty and absurdity of the inner and outer
world of which he writes. [22]
Plainly, we see that the leading critics did not ignore the poetic and artistic merits of Dylan’s music—these were not qualities that arose only in his later songs, as if in opposition to his protest lyrics. Nor do the critics ignore the social commentary of his songs, for they recognize full well that his originality is inspired by the world around him. There is an adept blending of poetry and social message in Dylan’s lyrics, and it is precisely the contention of this work that the blend can be found in much of Dylan’s music—from whatever period of time one chooses. The nature of the blend—the varying ways in which he balances art and social awareness—may undergo significant transformation from album to album, but it is nearly always present. Indeed, it lingers on as one of Dylan’s most enduring and persuasive forms of song presentation.
It is a preconceive prejudice that sees poetry and protest as wholly incompatible categories in the first instance; Dylan had no trouble transcending both to create beautiful songs with inspiring lyrics that thrilled the imagination of millions of listeners. If we call him solely a poet or solely a writer of protest verses, then we begin to err by over-labeling and simplifying the work of one who is, after all, a complex and sometimes enigmatic artist.
His mood changes can be small or monumental; his lyrics can be crystal clear or pared down to the point of being elusive; explicit here, subtle there;. Within one album one can listen to a song over-loaded with meaning–each verse jammed full of significant and powerful phrases—or a melody that soothes and words that tickle. His most ferocious songs are contrasted nicely with relaxed easy-going verses that the listener can enjoy for their humor and imagination; Dylan could be poetic and wise in one ballad, harsh and uncompromising in another–keeping the listener spellbound and eager for more.
He can be buoyantly optimistic in one song and then dismally pessimistic, bordering on the distraught and cynical, in another; he can make you laugh, and he can make you cry. Whatever the emotional wave, seldom is the music devoid of insightful commentary for long. His songs of conscience are surrounded by humorous stories, lovers’ ballads, and great mad talking-blues rambles (“Motorpsycho Nitemare”) that leave the listener feeling exulted—and, for real Dylan aficionados, impelled to a loud chorus of “yeas!” of delight.
Dylan displays a conscientious commitment to speak up for others: be it a single individual, as in the “Ballad of Hollis Brown”, or of humanity taken as a whole threatened by the frightening machinations and militaristic preparations for global conflict of the “Masters of War”.
References for Chapter 1
1. Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan Song Book (New York: M. Witmark and Sons). “Personal Notes”, p. 11, quoting folk music critic Robert Shelton in a New York Times article. Photographs by Chuck Stewart.
2. “Bob Dylan” (produced by John Hammond), album one on Columbia released March 1962. Notes by Stacey Williams.
3. “The Freewheelin” Bob Dylan”, album two, released May 1963. Notes by Nat Hentoff.
4. Bob Dylan Song Book; “Personal Notes, p. 12.
5. Ibid., p. 11.
6. “Bringing It All Back Home”, album five, released March 1965. Poem by Bob Dylan.
7. “Bob Dylan”, album one. Notes by Stacey Williams.
8. Bob Dylan Song Book, “Personal Notes”, p. 12.
9. Anthony Scaduto, Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography (New York: A Signet Book, New American Library, 1971), p. 31. Updated with a new “Afterword” by Steven Gaines, 1979 (paperback).
10. Pete Seeger, “Broadside”, Vol. 2, 1963. The album includes a twelve-page song-sheet with words, music, and notes about the songs, including three by Bob Dylan. See p. 8 of song-sheet for notes on “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”.
11. “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”; notes by Nat Hentoff.
12. Ibid.
13. Pete Seeger, “Broadside”, Vo. 2, 1963. Song-sheet, p. 8.
14. Scaduto, Bob Dylan, 1971, p. 140.
15. “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”, notes by Nat Hentoff.
16. Pete Seeger, “Broadside”, Vol. 2, 1963. Song-sheet, p. 4.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 6.
19. Ibid.
20. Bob Dylan Song Book; “Personal Notes”, pp. 11-12.
21. Ibid., p. 12.
22. Ibid., pp. 14-15.
