When Dylan changed direction
Laura Schwartz reviews Martin Scorsese’s film about Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, BBC2
No Direction Home was not about Dylan the man or Dylan the musician, but Dylan the icon. In telling the story of how Bob Dylan came to acquire and ultimately to reject the title of “voice of a generation”, Scorsese also treats him as a symbol — as an embodiment of the tension between art and politics.
No Direction Home was as much about America in the fifties and sixties as it was about Dylan’s life and career. Scorsese set interviews with Dylan and his contemporaries against a backdrop of footage depicting the wider political and cultural upheavals of the period. Dylan’s decision to drop out of the University of Minnesota and travel to New York to become a musician was depicted as coterminous with the beatnik generation’s rejection of the conformist and consumerist values of post-war America.
Dylan’s own account of his early career, playing in the coffee shops of Greenwich Village, also bought into this image of him as a child of the times. He described a young man motivated only by a “love of the sound”. All he knew, when he arrived in New York in 1961, was that he wanted to hear more of the kind of music his hero Woodie Guthrie had played.
Later that year he was signed by one of the biggest commercial labels, Columbia records. According to Dylan, his first album consisted simply of the songs that happened to be in his head on the day. Interviews with fellow musicians of that era painted a rather different picture. They portrayed Dylan as a far more determined and ambitious figure, for whom it was not unknown to steal material from other musicians.
Whatever the reality, Dylan’s status as the poet of the protest movement was only confirmed by the subsequent success of songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”. Yet even at this stage Dylan denied that he wrote “topical songs” and disliked being labelled as a “protest songwriter”. The left-wing folk singer Dave Van Ronk remembered how he and his comrades had thought Dylan to be hopelessly naive on the subject of politics. And yet, somehow his music was able to capture perfectly the frustrations and aspirations of those far more involved than himself in the activism of the early sixties.
The story of Dylan’s rise to fame was cut with footage from his 1966 European tour, when he ditched his acoustic guitar for an electric backing group. Again and again Scorsese showed us Dylan being booed through his songs, British audiences complaining that they came “to see Bobby — not a pop group”. In the second part of Scorsese’s documentary we saw the chain of events that led up to this turning point in his career. Dylan first went electric at Newport folk festival, where the audience booed him off stage and the folk singer Pete Seeger, one of Dylan’s formative influences, tried to cut the wires to the amplifier.
Dylan had tired of the role of political troubadour. For him it had simply been a part he played during a particular phase of his work, but now it had begun to restrict him artistically. He was sick of journalists asking him to explain the “message” in every song and to identify which political event they referred to.
Footage from the 1966 tour depicted Dylan as an increasingly exasperated interviewee, bombarded with imbecile questions as to what he thought about being the “ultimate beatnik”, who eventually started to refuse to engage not only with the trappings of fame but also with the fans who had made him famous in the first place.
Almost forty years later it is hard to comprehend the passion with which Dylan’s former admirers attacked what we might now see as nothing more than a stylistic shift. But Dylan’s decision to play a new kind of music represented much more than that — it amounted to a political betrayal.
The acoustic Dylan had played at civil rights demonstrations; the electric Dylan asked only, “how does it feel to be on your own?” These were no longer the songs of an optimistic new generation; they spoke instead of the disillusionment of that generation. The outrage directed at Dylan was not directed at him as a musician, but at his failure to continue to remain true to the promise of a better world.
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What?
"His decision to play a new kind of music...amounted to a political betrayal"?
That's the dumbest shit I've ever heard. Sorry, but it is.
If readers want a more intelligent take on Dylan, go here: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/buhle290905.html
Partisan Dylan and the demands of the movement
This review misses the political strength of the post-civil rights movement Bobby. And it misses the importance of moving on from the folk idiom, including the acoustic arrangements, to the development of both the political Dylan and of Dylan the poet. And inexplicably the review takes the side of the folkies who feared their idol had deserted them.
Maybe the writer is not a Dylan fan.
First, it is a mistake to think of the first outings for the electric guitars as the time when Bob broke with his former political self. (Its also probably true that its not the point at which he broke with his former musical self either, but this is not the place for such a discussion.)
Bob found the civil rights movement deeply inadequate (reducing liberty to ‘equality in school’) and he found that folk too was a deeply inadequate medium through which to express his thoughts about the mid c20.
Listen again to Another Side (64) and feel for him as he crams Chimes of Freedom into the musical form demanded by his place and time, his stage of development and his audience. Then listen to any later version of the same song, and you'll find it rocked up better than anything Bruce could muster.
Chimes of Freedom is a profoundly political song. But it’s broken with the CR movement. It’s starting to challenge orthodox thought patterns; it’s a stage towards the surrealist Dylan that is to emerge 12 months later. Dylan must have known that the folk-form did not suit his new artistic capacities: he was bursting out of the constraints of folk. By his next album he was plugged in.
On the same album, Another Side, Bob released My Back Pages (another acoustic song) which is a fine critique of the revolutionary movement - especially the lines:
Girls Faces formed the forward path
From phoney jealousy
To memorising politics of ancient history
Flungdown by corps evangalists
Unthought of, though, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now'
Bob had emotionally and intellectually left behind the movement by 64. He had also taken folk forms and acoustic guitars as far as they could go. By the 65 albums he had ‘gone electric’ and surreal.
Contrary to the reviewers belief, after Another Side - his transitional album, he was far more politically sophisticated than when writing the anthems of the CR movement – the rather poor Blowing’ and Times They Are a Changin’. Free from the movement his insights are far more profound than these made-to-order anthems. By 65 he had released Highway 61 Revisited. The song which titles the album is itself a marvellous attack on the industrial/military complex. (It reminds me of Catch 22) Like a Rolling Stone, from the same album, is not only the first rock single it’s also a devastating critique of the WASP.(It reminds me of a political version of the Stones' Play with Fire)
I do not want to write off all the pre-Another Side songs. Some are first class and overtly topical/political too. Hattie Carroll (William Zandzinger) is a folk-form and acoustic version of the politics which resurface some 20 years later in the very-rocked up Hurricane. When the Ship Comes In is a beautiful, millenarian rage against the straight-world which refused him, the scruffy youth, a hotel room. It is written in the language of the Old Testament. It is Bobby’s version of deliverance ( which was a prevalent theme in the CR movement): he was vengeful.
Although with a couple of exceptions, Dylan didn’t write overtly political songs after 64 he still delivered biting critiques of human and societal relations. This post 64 guy had his head screwed on: whether talking about Lenny Bruce or any other outlaw (‘he was the brother that you never had’) or about returning to Judaism and breaking with Christianity (where the muse is his black Baptist wife and produces his best ever line: ‘did you ever meet your accusers face to face in the rain?’ from Caribbean Wind) Or about loss which is the theme of Blood on the Tracks.
To sign up to 'Bobby the renegade' is the most alarming error of this review. It misses the point. Frankly its bollocks to evaluate the artist’s contribution through his relationship to this or that movement. You might just as well object to the fact he was probably a shit to Sara.The most alarming thing I took from the review was the insistance that the role of the artist is to be an activist.
The most interesting lesson I took from the BBC's Dylan fest was just how reactionary is this idea that the folkies peddled about authenticity. It was backward then and it’s backward now – especially now when it’s the cry of the resistors who think they see the authentic in clericalism.