Bob Dylan Page 10
The resistance to confinement is a theme that regularly features in Dylan’s work. For example, In ‘All I Really Wanna Do’, Dylan sings to his paramour that he ‘ain’t lookin’ to . . . Simplify you, classify you . . . Analyse you, categorise you . . . Or define you or confine you’, with the clear implication that he expects the same in return. It is notable that the two songs Dylan decided to call ‘I Shall Be Free’ and ‘I Shall Be Free #10’ are both nonsense songs, stripped of the confinement of rational expectations. Later in the decade, confinement became a political issue, as in ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’:
A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit
To satisfy, ensure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not forget
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to.
Related to a resistance to confinement is the idea of transition, of ‘moving on’. This can be seen most clearly in songs such as ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’ and ‘One More Cup Of Coffee’ but is a consistent theme throughout Dylan’s career. Dylan’s most famous song of this era – ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ – offers a prime example of this commitment to transition. The theme of the song is that it is only when stripped of the security of everyday comfort and privilege that you can find out who you really are but, as Ricks discusses, although the song is superficially vengeful, it contains a strong undercurrent of yearning.18 The soaring vocal in the choruses intimates that being on your own and completely unknown provides a level of freedom unattainable to the singer, who can never be completely unknown. Moving on and starting again are the only ways to start from a clean slate. Standing still means being defined and confined. Dylan’s response to such a situation is always to move on. It is a central characteristic of Dylan’s star-image, a central emblem of Dylan’s Never Ending Tour, discussed in chapter 7, and best summed up towards the end of ‘Tangled Up In Blue’:
When finally the bottom fell out
I became withdrawn
The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keepin’ on
Like a bird that flew . . .
This transitoriness – an unwillingness to be tied down to one place or one position – is a central feature of rock culture. Rock emerges within the mainstream, generated through the emotional experiences of a unique generation that relies upon the comfort and privilege of an administered consumer society while at the same time being constrained by the limits of that administration. Grossberg portrays rock culture as an attempt to transcend the possibilities of an administered society through adopting symbols of those excluded from its everyday wealth and privilege:
Rock appropriated as its own the markers of places outside of everyday life which other musics, other voices had constructed. These voices and the places they marked became the signs of authenticity within the everyday life of rock culture, but they were the voices of peoples who had no everyday life, who existed outside the privileged spaces of the repetitiously mundane world of the rock formation. Rock then attacked, or at least attempted to transcend, its own everyday life, its own conditions of possibility, by appropriating the images and sounds of authenticity constituted outside of, and in part by the very absence of, everyday life.19
From this perspective, it seems far from coincidental that ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ – which emphasises the freedom gained by losing the trappings of going to the finest schools and being forced to ‘live out on the streets’ – should be considered the quintessential rock song (voted the greatest song of all time in a Rolling Stone poll in 2004). What rock culture does is generate an outsider status for its insiders in order to disrupt the everyday life of the mainstream. As with the folk revival, however, such a project is doomed to failure because it fails to take account of the circumstances of its own production: ‘it takes for granted the luxury and privilege of everyday life as the condition of possibility of its own struggle against the mundanity of its everyday life; and it fails to articulate a vision of the conditions of possibility for the destruction of everyday life.’20
Without constructing a genuine political alternative to its own sites of privilege, rock culture is confined to disrupting the rhythms of its everyday existence through a celebration of instability, transitoriness and insecurity. ‘Mobility is given precedence over stability . . . space is given precedence over place.’21 Rock itself is therefore a culture of transitions, a form of permanent instability that secures the comfort of post-war society but maintains itself as an other, an in-between, a way of gaining control of one’s life by abandoning the control provided by the welfare state. This means that, within rock ideology, keeping on keeping on is a crucial motif both for individuals and rock culture as a whole:
unlike other musical forms, rock’s very existence depends upon a certain instability or, more accurately, a certain mobility in the service of stability. Rock must constantly change to survive; it must seek to reproduce its authenticity in new forms, in new places, in new alliances. It must constantly move from one center to another, transforming what had been authentic into the inauthentic, in order to constantly project its claim to authenticity.22
And, as for rock, so too for Bob Dylan.
THE ART IDEOLOGY: SELF AND TRANSCENDENCE
The primary ways in which rock culture attempts to transcend its everyday existence are an emotional investment in the rock culture itself (so that being part of rock’s community matters) and an emphasis upon individual self-consciousness and self-development. The first of these is linked with rock’s roots in the folk movement and will be discussed later. In this section, I want to discuss the increasing emphasis on self-consciousness in Dylan’s work and detail its relationship to the newly forming rock culture.
Accounts of Dylan’s development place great emphasis upon a three-week road trip that Dylan took in February 1964. Dylan was due to play a concert in San Francisco and he decided to drive from New York with companions Pete Karman, Paul Clayton and Victor Maymudes. Although the trip may not have been the Kerouac-inspired journey intended (Dylan repeatedly shied away from people who recognised him), it is notable because on it Dylan began work on an important new song. ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ is widely hailed as a breakthrough song in Dylan’s work – Heylin states that ‘it changed everything’23 – as it lacks any of the characteristics of conventional protest songs, concentrating instead on finding a way of transcending the singer’s consciousness. ‘Let me forget about today until tomorrow’, sings Dylan, and calls on the Tambourine Man to ‘cast your dancing spell my way’.
Dylan performed ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964, along with another new song, ‘Chimes Of Freedom’. ‘Chimes Of Freedom’ is an early stab at what Dylan would perfect in ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ – an attempt to provide a systemic critique of a complete social order rather than a specific instance of injustice. This spirit of critique, however, is tied to a pantheistic experience of the majesty of nature. In ‘Chimes Of Freedom’ the experience of the sublime coincides with a generalised malaise as, caught in a storm, the singer and his companions see the chimes of freedom flash for a catalogue of outsiders such as the mistreated mateless mother and the misdemeanour outlaw. In the end, however, the song concludes that alienation and outsiderness are something we all have to endure, as the chimes flash
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones, and worse
And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe.
Dylan’s new songs seemed popular with the audience at Newport 1964, but they did not please many significant players in the folk revival. For example, Irwin Silber wrote an open letter in Sing Out! stating ‘I saw at Newport how you had somehow lost contact with people . . . some of the paraphernalia of fame were getting in the way’ while, in Broadside, Paul Wolfe wrote that the performance was the ‘renunciation of topical music by its major prophe
t’ and that the new songs ‘degenerated into confusion and innocuousness’.
Dylan’s responses to critics of his new direction mark a significant development in the emergence of rock culture. In an 1964 interview with Nat Hentoff justifying his maligned, and commercially unsuccessful, new album, Another Side Of Bob Dylan, Dylan stated:
There aren’t any finger-pointin’ songs in here. Those records I’ve made, I’ll stand behind them, but . . . I don’t want to write for people anymore. You know, be a Spokesman . . . From now on, I want to write from inside me.
In one sense, such a response merely continues the process of Dylan rejecting his role as a spokesman. It does, however, betray a subtle but significant shift. In his early renunciations of the spokesman tag, the dominant motif of Dylan’s argument was that he was merely writing and singing about issues that concerned him (for example, on the liner notes to the Freewheelin’ album, he wrote ‘All I’m doing is saying what’s on my mind the best way I know how’). From 1964 onwards, the claim shifted slightly to one that he has to write what is ‘inside of him’, to express his own self. This subtle change reflects a new awareness of self in Dylan’s work. During 1964, Dylan became more self-conscious of his status as an artist, and drew inspiration from the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, telling friends ‘Rimbaud’s where it’s at. That’s the kind of stuff [that] means something’.24
The idea that rock music is a form of popular art rather than mere entertainment is a key characteristic of rock culture. Rock stars are expected not only to reflect the excesses of bohemian caricatures25 but to express individual visions. Critic Jon Landau, for example, writes that ‘the criterion of art in rock is the capacity of the musician to create a personal, almost private, universe and express it fully’.26 We can see this claim repeated many times about Dylan. Paul Nelson, for example, in an article in Sing Out! in February 1966, defended Bob Dylan’s new style as:
A highly personal style-vision: Dylan’s unyielding and poetic point of view represents a total commitment to the subjective over the objective, the microcosm over the macrocosm, man rather than Man, problems not Problems. To put it as simply as possible, the tradition that Dylan represents is that of all great artists: that of projecting, with the highest possible degree of honesty and craftsmanship, a unique personal vision.27
The idea that a rock star is an artist means prioritising the artist’s inner self as the source of expressive work. However, in contrast to the old blues singers, for example, who also supposedly expressed the sensibility of their experience in their songs, a further layer of sophistication is added to rock artistry. Singing of one’s self was not sufficient to claim artist status: as the latter part of Nelson’s statement makes clear, it is also necessary to adopt a high degree of skill and sophistication. Keightley suggests that the measure of an artist in this context is ‘one who stays true to the Modernist credos of experimentation, innovation, development and change’.28 Thus, ‘self-consciousness became the measure of a record’s artistic status; frankness, musical wit, the use of irony and paradox were musicians’ artistic insignia’.29
The growing emphasis on artistic self-consciousness can be seen in the increasing focus on originality as a prerequisite of rock authenticity. Whereas in earlier popular music there had conventionally been a division of labour between those who wrote songs and those who performed them, rock musicians were now expected to sing material they had written in order to express their own individuality. The figure of the singer-songwriter thus became the staple of authenticity. The importance placed on originality can be seen in the emerging discourse of rock stars actually being ‘poets’ and here Dylan is the central figure. Dylan’s skilful use of words resulted in his being described as a poet from early in his career. His drift towards self-consciousness exacerbated this tendency. For example, on an early TV appearance, the host introduced Dylan by saying that ‘He’s primarily a poet. He’s a very popular entertainer now, but I think one of the reasons for his popularity is that he has the mind of a poet’, while Barry Kittleston, reviewing a major solo concert, wrote in Billboard that ‘Dylan’s poetry is born of a painful awareness of the tragedy that underlies the contemporary human condition’. It is a label that has dogged his whole career. For example, in 1991, Paul Zollo wrote ‘he’s written some of the most beautiful poetry the world has known, poetry of love and outrage, of abstraction and clarity, of timelessness and relativity’.
The claim that rock stars are poets is at best misguided and itself demonstrates how a particular ideology was used to advance rock’s claims to be a superior cultural form. Whatever arguments there may be about early poetry being sung, ‘poetry’ in contemporary society is not sung. Poetry, as a meaningful category, refers to a particular type of cultural production with particular rules, expectations, forms of production and consumption. It is not a label that marks out a particular standard of excellence – there is bad poetry, just as there are good songs. Bob Dylan is an extraordinarily talented user of words, but he’s not a poet, and tired clichés arguing that he is ‘as good’ as Keats are an attempt to justify popular culture through alien concepts of high culture rather than treat it on its own terms. As Scobie asserts, ‘it is a false compliment, based on the intellectual snobbery which assumes that “high culture” is innately superior to any work in a popular medium’.30 This will be discussed further in chapter 7.
The way that these high cultural discourses about poetry and originality infiltrated our understandings of popular music in the sixties does emphasise how rock emerged as a way of stratifying mainstream consumption, of creating a distinction within commercial music between the serious and the trivial. Another way in which the ‘seriousness’ of rock culture can be seen is with the rise to prominence of the album as the key rock format. Both the 33 rpm LP and the 45rpm single emerged in the immediate post-war years and these different formats functioned as a means of stratifying the record market by age. Singles were aimed at the teen market, characterised by instability and rapid turnover of product. In contrast, albums were targeted at adult consumers. Due to their longevity, stability and higher price, album sales acted as the bedrock of the industry, accounting for 80 per cent of all expenditure on records by the end of the 1950s.31 In tandem with their economic importance and age demarcation, albums were seen as more prestigious than singles, and were associated with ‘good’ and ‘serious’ music (classical music, jazz, Broadway musicals), whereas singles were associated with throwaway fads and immature consumers.32 Albums give time for a work to develop, able to go through different ‘movements’, create various moods. Singles were for quick thrills, specifically dancing, and were over in three minutes before the listener got bored. One of the key features of the emergence of rock is how the album rather than the single becomes its key format: by 1964 sales of ‘teen LPs’ were rising (though still treated as less prestigious within the music industry at this time, considered a collection of singles rather than a coherent work). By 1967, when ‘teen LPs’ have become ‘rock LPs’, youth albums outsold adult albums for the first time.33 This is a crucial moment in the development of rock’s cultural legitimacy (nothing makes a musical form legitimate like stable, long-term sales) as the prestige associated with adult-oriented albums of the 1950s became associated with youth albums of the 1960s. The emergence of the album as the key rock form enables rock to provide a long-term investment (both aesthetic and economic). Rock albums became conceptualised as ‘complex and coherent works of art whose value is assessed over the long term’ while rock stars became viewed as performers with an extended career in which each album serves as a distinct chapter in their personal aesthetic development (see the quote in the footnote on p. 191 as one example).34
The emergence of rock culture, from about 1965 to 1968, thus depends upon a series of ideas concerning how rock music is actually a form of popular art, and rock stars popular artists. Dylan is central to the emergence of this kind of discourse. As part of a ‘more mature’ folk genre
, he had already utilised the album as his main format and thus his electrified albums carried cultural legitimacy into the teen market. During 1965 and 1966, he embodied the idea of an artist following a unique personal vision no matter where (personally and professionally) it took him. Dylan came to represent artistic change itself. The speed of change, from The Times They Are A-Changin’ (January 1964), through Another Side of Bob Dylan (August 1964), to Bringing It All Back Home (March 1965), to Highway 61 Revisited (August 1965) to Blonde On Blonde (May 1966) is breathtaking. The change in concert performance style from his May 1965 UK shows to even the acoustic portions of his 1966 shows must have seemed incomprehensible to audiences. And the conflict between Dylan and his audiences engendered by the electric performances in 1965 and 1966 were evidence of an artist following his own aesthetic vision rather than pandering to the needs of his audience. As Paul Nelson put it, in a Sing Out! article discussing the Newport 1965 performance: ‘The only one in the entire festival who questioned our position was Bob Dylan. Maybe he didn’t put it in the best way. Maybe he was rude. But he shook us. And that is why we have poets and artists.’35
THE FOLK IDEOLOGY: THE ROCK COMMUNITY AND THE POLITICS OF THE SELF
The idea that rock was a form of popular art was only one aspect of the new rock culture. Equally important was the idea that rock was a new form of folk music, and here, again: ‘Dylan was the key figure. Dylan provided pop artists with a new model of “the star” and a new range of topics for songs. But in creating these opportunities, Dylan also brought with him some of folk’s ethos’.36 ‘Dylan’ however was not a blank slate when he made his shift from acoustic to electric music – his stardom meant that he embodied many of the characteristics of the folk revival and, while new layers of meaning were added to his stardom when he changed musical forms, the ‘old’ elements of Dylan’s stardom influenced what the new Dylan represented.