Bob Dylan Read online

  The different political approaches can also be illustrated by looking at the use of pronouns in folk music. In the songs of the union era, ‘the protest singer . . . presented his utopian visions in the second person plural (we)’.32 ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ are perhaps the most obvious examples. In some of his early work, Dylan follows this pattern. For example, in an early protest song, ‘The Death Of Emmett Till’, Dylan concludes:

  But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give,

  We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live.

  More typically, however, Dylan utilised singular pronouns (I and, particularly, you) in his work, as exemplified in his two most famous protest songs. Ricks suggests that ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ conveys ‘a certain political loneliness . . . by continually playing plurals against singulars’33 and points out that there is no ‘we’ in ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ ’ – ‘it is another of the great Dylan you songs’.34 The reference to a plural in this song (‘they’) refers only to the times and not to the people.

  Hampton suggests that the use of singulars becomes a central feature of folk music beyond the 1950s35 and this implies that sensitivity to subjective experience was not unique to Dylan. Indeed, it echoes the work of the earlier folk idol, Woody Guthrie (and was, presumably, a reason for Dylan’s own admiration of Guthrie). However, Guthrie became politically radicalised by his engagement with the New York folk scene of the 1940s and, perhaps more attuned to the collective ethos of his contemporaries, strove to weld his championing of the underdog with a union-driven social patriotism.36 Dylan’s work makes no such concession and this explains why a change in musical form – the shift in pronouns – is actually a political shift that is both a symptom and a cause of Dylan’s strained relationship with the folk revivalists.

  This approach also offers one way of explaining the reason for Dylan’s prominence within the revival. Dylan’s work, more than anyone else’s, gave expression to the shift in political consciousness that characterises the folk revival, from union collectivism to empathetic individualism. In Goldmann’s terms, Dylan’s work expresses the new revivalists’ ‘world view’. This quality of Dylan’s work fundamentally links him to the folk revival:

  Dylan’s early songs appeared so promptly as to seem absolutely contemporary with the civil rights movement. There was no time lag. He wasn’t a songwriter who came into an established political mood, he seemed to be a part of it and his songs seemed informative to the Movement as the Movement seemed informative to the song writer. This cross-fertilization was absolutely critical in Dylan’s relationship to the Movement and the Movement’s relationship to Dylan. He gave character to the sensibilities of the Movement.37

  This symbiotic relationship between Dylan’s songs and ‘the movement’ is emphasised in a recent analysis by Mike Marqusee:

  the music Bob Dylan made in the sixties has long outgrown its national origins, just as it has outlived its era, but to understand it, to make best use of it, you need to trace its roots in both time and place. However you measure Dylan’s subsequent achievements (and they are substantial), they do not enjoy the same umbilical relation to the turmoil of the times as the work of the sixties.38

  This is the fundamental element of Dylan’s stardom. However much he has attempted to shake off the label, to change roles, to be an anti-leader, Dylan’s stardom since he ‘left the folk movement’ over forty years ago, has been shaped by this image as a political leader. His politics, however, and his work, emerge from a change in consciousness of the folk revival, in particular the emergence of a new cohort of young revivalists at the start of the sixties. This changing generational consciousness explains why a Bob Dylanshaped space should emerge at the beginning of the 1960s. The Goldmannesque explanation offered here provides only a partial explanation for why it was this particular Bob Dylan, and not any of the other emerging folk singers, that filled the space. It may explain why Dylan became seen as the greatest songwriter within the folk movement but it does not fully explain why he should emerge as a star in a way that Woody Guthrie, for example, never was. One explanation is in Dylan’s shift from folk music and his role in the emergence of rock, discussed in the next chapter. What is also significant, however, is the way in which the folk revival was, unlike earlier folk music, intrinsically part of the mass media.

  STARDOM, FOLK MUSIC AND MASS CULTURE

  I have already mentioned that the interest in folk culture was part of a much wider cultural critique, as the Romantics sought times and places that had not been colonised by the ills of capitalism. An interest in folk music, even today, maintains an element of that critical consciousness. This is most clear in relationship to the music industry, as folk music is considered as more authentic and real than the music produced by record labels. Folk revivals are, therefore, their own form of cultural critique (one of the dominant discourses of the fifties folk revival in Britain, for example, was in opposition to the Americanisation of British music caused by the emergence of rock and roll). These assumptions (about ‘real’ and ‘mass produced’ music) can be seen in the conventions of folk music, in the seating arrangements in folk clubs and – notably for Dylan’s story – in the absence of electrical amplification, both of which serve to minimise the distance between singer and audience. In folk music, the relationship between singer and audience should be ‘natural’ rather than ‘mediated’. An interest in folk culture is in some ways, therefore, a form of criticism of mass culture. Folk music is supposed to be thoroughly anti-commercial because otherwise the capitalist music industry would sanitise and drain the emotion and/or politics from it. Folk music is ‘our’ music, the music of the people and not ‘their’ (the capitalists’) music imposed upon us, providing us with a false consciousness and satisfying desires we didn’t know we had. In an early critique of mass culture, Dwight MacDonald outlines the dichotomy:

  Folk Art grew from below. It was a spontaneous, autochthonous expression of the people, shaped by themselves, pretty much without the benefit of High Culture, to suit their own needs. Mass Culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audiences are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying.39

  Whether these ideas are true or merely part of the same ideological process that defined folk music in the first place is not the point here: what matters is that, when looking at the folk revival around 1960 it becomes harder to maintain such distinctions. To a certain extent, the folk revival was commercially driven, filling in a gap left by the decline of rock and roll. It is certainly true that those young people attracted to folk music during the revival could not be considered representative of ‘the folk’, generally being white, middle class, well educated and from the Eastern Seaboard. More than anything, they were an audience defined by shared taste.

  Serge Denisoff argues that this resulted in a major shift within the sensibilities of the folk revival because the new generation of folkies ‘did not reject, as did the “workingclass intellectuals” of the 1940s, the offerings of mass media as obscurantist ploys. Nor did they necessarily desire the creation of a “people’s music”. For them folk music was already part of popular music, subject to the structural nuances of the industry.’40 In empirical terms, I think this is a little blunt. It would be incorrect to suggest that the music industry was no longer a subject of criticism by the new folkies. What the music industry was producing was being criticised and ‘folk music’ was still supposed to stand for the pure, the incorruptible and the uncommodifiable, in contrast to the commercial pop songs of the day. At a more ideological level, however, Denisoff is correct because the major change was that, for the younger folk-revivalists, the mass culture critique was no longer absolute. It was no longer assumed to be the case that all mass culture was necessarily drivel. Perhaps because some of them had experienced the radical potential of Elvis and James Dean, the new
folkies were more optimistic, believing that the cultural industries could produce some aesthetically interesting and politically challenging work even if most of what it produced was pap. The belief was that, despite the industry’s best intentions, good work could still sneak out.

  The folk revival was thus built on a contradiction; it was a mass-mediated revival of a form of music that was against the mass media. It was a form of stylistic rebellion which borrowed from urban, bohemian, subcultures.41 This is not to suggest that it was a fake, or that its participants were insincere. On the contrary, many of them were rather too sincere, and over-earnestness was a feature of the folk revival that Dylan most disliked. But it is to say that it was authentically inauthentic, a mediated presentation of unmediated folk music. It also means that the most prominent players in the folk revival – Dylan in particular – were subject to pressures of commerce and fashion the likes of which Pete Seeger never had to manage.42 Because the folk revival happened in a mass-mediated environment, Dylan became a folk music star in a manner inconceivable to someone of Seeger’s generation and this caused concern for that older generation. This is not merely because of the contradiction inherent in an individual representing a collective movement: as Hampton points out, the heroic singer-songwriter has always played an important role in the folk protest movement, most notably in the figures of Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie.43 In those earlier instances, however, the individual had been an embodiment of the people – not a representative of, but a representation of the folk. While Woody Guthrie embodied the spirit of the folk, a personification of the multitudes, stardom offers something different. It utilises stars as embodiments of social groups and types, but it also valorises the specific individuality of the star.

  If we go right back to the start of Dylan’s career, we can see this tension. Dylan’s early years as a performer were characterised by the elaborate tales he spun to create a fictional biography that mimicked the hard travelling under taken by Guthrie. The specific details of his stories varied with each telling, but there are some consistencies in his overall projection. He acknowledged that he grew up in Hibbing, but told stories of how he had run away several times as a child and had travelled throughout the southwestern states. Dylan’s vehicle for rationalising his travelling past was that he worked on carnivals. He would tell stories of carnival folk and the people he had met while travelling, frequently prefacing songs with details of fictitious characters from which he had supposedly learned the song. This fictional biography went on for a surprisingly long time, and also featured in some of his work. In ‘My Life In A Stolen Moment’, a poem included in the programme for his April 1963 concert at New York Town Hall, he wrote:

  Hibbing’s a good old town

  I ran away from it when I was 10, 12, 13, 15, 15½, 17 an’ 18

  I been caught an’ brought back all but once.

  Gibbens argues that Dylan’s tall tales, ‘did not really amount to an alternative, fictitious biography so much as an evasion of biography. The important thing was not that he should be from somewhere other than where he came from, but that he should be from nowhere in particular . . . that he should be a kind of Everyman.’44

  There is some merit in this; the everyman figure – an individual like Guthrie that embodies the essence of the people – has played an important part in American culture. But Dylan’s play-acting also opens up perhaps the most extreme contradiction of stardom – the tension between the star-as-ordinary and the star-as-special. The emergence of stardom is intricately linked to the emergence of democracy and meritocracy, ‘only becom[ing] a phenomenon in the age of the common man’.45 One feature of the transition from traditional to modern societies is the way that religion, monarchy and ascribed social roles that automatically commanded respect through birth were usurped by the idea that any individual could become a person of wealth and influence by virtue of hard work and talent. Stardom only emerges within this modern context. Stars function as public proof that success is open to all. So, ideas that stars come from a humble background, that everyone has a unique personality and that, yes, even you could be discovered as a star, are key elements of the ideology of stardom. This is apparent in the rags-to-riches Hollywood tales and has perhaps reached its ultimate end with reality TV shows. It is clear that the discourse of ordinariness played a key role in Woody Guthrie’s celebrity. Dylan, in adopting a Guthrie-esque persona, follows that tradition.*

  It is also clear, however, that something more is going on. Guthrie’s experiences, and the portrayal in his autobiography make him out to be not just ordinary, but extraordinary. Guthrie’s abundance of ordinary experience makes him an extraordinary character and Dylan, through deceit, tries to play a similar sleight of hand: presenting himself as a mundane, no high-flyer, regular kind of guy while at the same time offering a biography that clearly marks himself off as very different from other would-be folk singers. This contradiction, between ordinariness and specialness, is a central element of stardom. As Dyer states:

  Particularly as developed in the star system, the success myth tries to orchestrate several contradictory elements: that ordinariness is the hallmark of the star; that the system rewards talent and ‘specialness’; that luck, ‘breaks’, which may happen to anyone, typify the career of the star; and that hard work and professionalism are necessary for stardom. Some stars reconcile all four elements, while with others only some aspects are emphasised. Stardom as a whole holds all four things to be true.46

  These things are contradictory, but the most powerful stars manage to hold them in balance: ‘[Dylan and Baez] were “absolutely coherent” and yet compounded of heterogeneous elements usually foreign and irreconcilable; they were arrestingly familiar, instantly recognizable, and yet somehow inscrutable; widely imitated, made themselves of imitation, mere types, long familiar in the revival and on the wider cultural landscape and yet thoroughly inimitable and original.’47 Stardom’s emphasis upon the individual means that the politics of a movement become mediated through a particular star persona and thus through the actions of the star (in this instance though, I think, not in any of the others discussed here, Baez is as important as Dylan). The way that stardom functions means that politics can only be viewed through the prism of a particular star’s actions:

  It would be hard for the press to deal in any other way with a star’s revolutionary associations. What the star does can only be posed in terms of the star doing it, the extraordinariness or difficulty of her/his doing it, rather than in terms of the ostensible political issues involved.48

  Ultimately it meant that the strength of the folk revival depended upon the image of one individual. For those who saw the folk revival as a way of enabling political change, this was a fragile position.

  In the end, of course, the old guard were right from their side: Dylan’s split from the folk revival precipitated its demise, and the individualised politics, both in the revival itself and in its transmutation into rock, were not tools to enable working-class emancipation. They were wrong, however, in thinking it could ever be anything else. The folk revival was not a mass movement but a mass-mediated movement. Because of this it could never offer a real alternative, but could only posit change through itself, through the very medium that helps maintain inequality. It could never transcend the conditions of its own production. The revival’s origins within the culture industry also explains the emergence of a political sensibility dominated by individualism. While the belief was that only by developing one’s individual self-awareness could one change society, such transformation could only occur through consumption in the commercial sphere (this reaches its apex with the evolution of rock). As Robert Cantwell notes:

  Bob Dylan’s first album was not a commercial triumph but it was a triumph of the folk revival . . . now it was ratified by the commercial establishment. Play could become an instrument for shaping reality and hence a means of laying claim to the social and historical initiative. This was the contribution of the folk rev
ival to the sixties counterculture.49

  A mass mediated form of popular music, even one as embedded in political discourse as the folk revival, can only ‘capture what it is like to be oppressed; it cannot explain that oppression or remove it’.50 Similarly, while a star can express or embody the contradictions of a particular time, ideology or group, he can’t reconcile those contradictions, can’t make them go away. Stardom is a contradictory mixture of subjectivity and collectivity, of the common (wo)man and the unique individual but it is also the marriage of democracy and commercialism51 – it emerges as a phenomenon only in a commercialised culture and, as such, it can never be the vehicle to transcend that commercial reality.

  Dylan emerged as a star at a time when things may not have seemed this way, however. More than anyone else, he came to symbolise the political restlessness of a new generation who, initially, utilised the honesty and simplicity of folk music as a way of expressing their frustration. Whether Dylan ever genuinely believed that political change was possible is doubtful but, for our discussion of Dylan’s stardom, irrelevant. What matters are two key points. First, the star image of Dylan as an emblem of politically radical youth; second, the elevation of human subjectivity and individual self-development as a form of political activity. Both of these become intensified during the emergence of rock in the mid-sixties, which fundamentally depended upon the sensibilities of the folk revival. As such, Dylan is the key figure in the emergence of rock culture.

  Snapshot: The chameleon poet

  Dylan became increasingly uncomfortable with his role in the folk revival. He had regularly disclaimed the Spokesman of a Generation tag and, in 1964, he released the album Another Side Of Bob Dylan, which contained a number of love songs and ‘My Back Pages’, a disclaimer of his ‘protest era’. Significantly, it contained no explicit protest songs in the manner of The Times They Are A-Changin’. Many of Dylan’s fans became increasingly uneasy about his seeming change of direction.