Bob Dylan (10 page)

William Zantzinger, a Maryland socialite and scion of a wealthy farming family, did indeed kill poor Hattie Carroll, a 51-year-old barmaid, at the Spinsters' Ball at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore, early in the morning of Saturday February 8, 1963. Zantzinger hit the mother of 11 children around the head and shoulders with a cane when she was too slow in delivering a drink. “When I order a drink,” he is reported as saying, “I want it now, you black bitch.” She collapsed and was taken to Baltimore Mercy Hospital, where she died of a brain hemorrhage shortly after 9 o'clock that morning.

Zantzinger, who had tried to dispose of the cane by snapping it into several pieces, resisted arrest when policemen tried to charge him with assault, and was accordingly also charged with disorderly conduct and held overnight. Released on $600 bail, he was re-arrested and charged with homicide when police learned of Hattie Carroll's death—the first white man in Maryland ever to be accused of murdering a black woman. In June 1963, three judges found Zantzinger guilty only of manslaughter and, adding insult to injury, in August he was sentenced to six months imprisonment.

The shameful inequity of such “justice” stung Dylan into a swift response and—either in Joan Baez's Carmel home (according to Baez) or in a 7th Street cafe in New York (according to Dylan's own annotations to the
Biograph
box set)—he composed this epic of deferred outrage, using a verse pattern based on Brecht's
The Black Freighter
. As with ‘Only
A Pawn In Their Game' and ‘Who Killed Davey Moore?', Dylan tries to broaden the issue to reflect upon a system that enables such an act to occur, rather than the act itself. Here, he does it by referring repeatedly to the violent act through three verses (the second and third compare the relative social positions of the two protagonists), ending each verse with a request that the liberal listener should save their tears, before revealing the injustice which truly merits those tears in a devastating final verse, with what the
Village Voice's
Andrew Sarris splendidly described as “…the strange intensity of Bob Dylan's climbing up the meter of his song-poem as if he were on all-fours, wailing at the world he never made but understood too well.”

The rhyme scheme shows how Dylan was maturing technically as a poet: apart from repeating “table” in three consecutive lines of the third verse to evoke the tedium of Hattie Carroll's servility, the only rhyming lines are the “fears” and “tears” of the chorus—until the last verse. This opens with the quasi-assonance of “gavel” and “level” to suggest subtly the imbalance in the scales of justice, and concludes with the sucker-punch of “repentance” and an understated “six-month sentence,” which finally bursts the dam of tears. According to Phil Ochs, the song was one of Dylan's favorites.

The last of the album's songs to be recorded, ‘Restless Farewell' bears out the message of the title-track, but not in a way most fans would have expected. A weary
mea culpa
fittingly set to a melody reminiscent of the traditional song ‘The Parting Glass', it features Dylan effectively walking away from his past, apologizing to those he may have harmed, admitting his frustration at others' claims upon his time and muse, and fretting at the distorting-mirror effect of fame. In its apparent rejection of commitment, and its stress on personal over public values, it seems to go against all that the rest of the album stands for.

Two days after what he had thought was the final recording session for the new album, Dylan played an October 26, 1963 concert at Carnegie Hall, which demonstrated how far his fan-base had grown beyond the narrow confines of the folk audience, taking in a less sophisticated but equally enthusiastic teenage crowd. Following the concert, he had been frightened by the intensity of the mob of screaming fans around the stage
door, but he recovered his buoyancy at an after-show party held at the 96th Street apartment of Woody Guthrie's manager Harold Leventhal.

The very next day, however, his parade was rained upon by
Newsweek
magazine, which ran an exposé, by journalist Andrea Svedburg, of Dylan's middle-class Jewish roots. When a promised interview had failed to materialize, Svedburg had rooted around in Hibbing and Minneapolis and dug up the truth about his childhood. Faced with the prospect of his client's carefully-nurtured image being cracked, Albert Grossman relented and the interview finally went ahead. But not for long: Dylan quickly became riled and terminated the interview, and Svedburg went ahead and wrote a sharply iconoclastic profile, featuring the embarrassing juxtaposition of Dylan's claim to have lost contact with his parents with an account of how Abe and Beatty Zimmerman had, at their son's expense, actually attended the Carnegie Hall concert to see him perform.

In itself, that would not have been terribly damaging; indeed, a competent PR person could easily have put a different spin on the story, to make it appear as though kindly Bob was simply trying to protect his family from the corrosive effect of fame (which was probably partly true anyway). But the article also included the rumor—since utterly disproved—about how Dylan had either stolen or bought his most famous song, ‘Blowin' In The Wind', from a New Jersey high school student (see the entry for ‘Blowin' In the Wind'). Understandably furious, Dylan raged at everyone around him, castigating his parents for talking to Svedburg, and Columbia press officer Billy James (to whom he would not speak for two years) for setting up the interview. He raged about journalists in general, who would henceforth be given as rough and unrevealing a ride as possible whenever he was forced to communicate with them. “Man, they're out to kill me,” he complained bitterly. “What've they got against me?”

His immediate response, though, was to seek vengeance the only way he knew how: through words. He wrote the ninth of the album's “11 Outlined Epitaphs” liner-note poems, in which he set out to ridicule magazines in general—“I do not care t' be made an oddball/bouncin' past reporters' pens”—and pointedly describes an interview exchange in which the inquisitor sinisterly threatens unspecified rumor as punishment if he refuses to cooperate.

He also wrote ‘Restless Farewell', in which he set his face against the “false clock” trying to “tick out [his] time” and obscure his purpose with the “dirt of gossip” and the “dust of rumors”—a clear reference to the
Newsweek
article—as all the misgivings he was currently experiencing about the direction of his life, his work and his career brimmed over into a wistful
adieu
to his former friends and foes.

Five days after the Carnegie Hall concert, on October 31, 1963, another recording session was scheduled specifically to record ‘Restless Farewell', which was added as the album's final track—probably at the expense of the vastly superior ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune', which had been recorded the previous week, and which shares its album-closing air of reflective resignation. (If so, it would not be the last time his judgment in such matters would prove fallible, as anyone who has heard his ‘Blind Willie McTell' would attest.) Nevertheless, it provides a fitting epilogue to Dylan's protest period, even though he would continue to be viewed predominantly in that light for another year or two. There would be no “finger-pointing” songs on the next album, other than ones aimed at himself.

ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN

Dylan's words were coming home to roost, considerably faster than he had anticipated. By the time
The Times They Are A-Changin'
was released in January 1964, he was already feeling estranged from his former self, and the people and events which had influenced him.

He was becoming increasingly convinced that the quick and easy answers demanded by the protest movement were not answers at all, merely slogans, and that the search for real answers lay within oneself. It was a search, moreover, which raised the possibility that what was needed was not actually answers, but a whole new set of questions. Simply by answering the old questions, he believed, one was already playing on somebody else's pitch. “Nobody in power,” he told a friend, “has to worry about anybody from the outside… because he's not in it anyway, and he's not gonna make a dent. You can't go around criticizing something you're not a part of, and hope to make it better.” Accordingly, one could either opt in and criticize, or opt out and keep one's counsel.

In the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, Dylan had every reason to keep his own counsel. “If somebody
really
had something to say to help somebody out,” he told friends, “well, obviously, they're gonna be done away with.” Already scared by the impact of his own mounting fame, Dylan had now found the horrifying justification that rendered his paranoia more than just an egotistical indulgence, that brought the fear on to a very real plane indeed. He needed to get away, he told friends, needed to see more of the world. He had already taken refuge from the public pressures of New York City by spending more and more time at the Woodstock
home of his manager Albert Grossman, but now he wanted to travel further afield. “I wanna get out and ramble around,” he told Pete Karman, a journalist friend of Suze's. “Stop in bars and poolhalls and talk to real people. Talk to farmers, talk to miners. That's where it's at. That's real.”

Accordingly, a cross-country road trip was set up for February, on which Dylan was accompanied in his new Ford station-wagon by Karman, folk singer Paul Clayton—the one from whom Bob had “borrowed” the melody for ‘Don't Think Twice, It's All Right'—and his new road manager Victor Maimudes, who did the bulk of the driving. Ostensibly underwritten as a promotional tour for Dylan's new album, the trip quickly turned into a drunken, drugged debauch, Bob's very own
On The Road
and
Bound For Glory
combined, as he was able to compare, first-hand, the virtues of Guthrie's ethical activism with the thrills of Kerouac's experientialism.

From New York, the gang headed to Hazard, Kentucky, where they delivered a stack of donated secondhand clothing to striking miners. They also picked up a package of marijuana that had been mailed ahead to the local post office, the first of several such deliveries; at a cafe, Dylan bought a spice-jar humorously labeled “marijuana,” which, full of dope, was proudly displayed on the car's dashboard as they sped through the South. The next stop was Flat Rock, outside of Hendersonville, North Carolina, where they visited the poet Carl Sandburg. Though he was difficult to track down—the locals knew Sandburg primarily as a goat farmer, not a poet—they eventually made it to his farm, where Dylan gave him a copy of his new record and spent a short while trying to converse with Sandburg, poet-to-poet, before departing, apparently slightly peeved that the older poet had not heard of him.

Without the secondhand clothing taking up space, Dylan was able to move into the rear of the station-wagon, which he used as a study, pecking out lyrics on a portable typewriter. Punctuating the trip with occasional performances at places like Emory College, they eventually arrived in New Orleans in the middle of the Mardi Gras celebrations, into which they threw themselves with gusto. Dylan seemed determined to make gestures against the city's separatist social policies, visiting a black bar, Baby Green's—where the bartender, not needing trouble with the local police, threw them out—and incurring the wrath of sailors by sharing his bottle of wine with a black performer in the carnival procession. After two nights, they headed off for Denver, where Bob had a concert scheduled, by way of Dallas. As they pulled away from New Orleans, Dylan sat in the back, transforming the magic swirlin' ship of the carnival procession into ‘Mr Tambourine Man'.

In Dallas, they wanted to see for themselves the site of Kennedy's assassination, and were shocked when, while asking for directions to Dealey Plaza, a local said, “You mean where they shot that sonofabitch Kennedy?” Continuing on to Denver, they stopped off to pay respects at Ludlow, Colorado, scene of a legendary labor massacre in 1914 when over 30 striking miners were shot by strike-breaking National Guardsmen. After the Denver gig, they headed across the Rockies, in a hurry to get to California. At one point, Victor gunned the station-wagon past a funeral cortege on a narrow mountain road, only to find a police car at the head of the procession; the resulting confrontation, which they survived by claiming to be a group “like The Kingston Trio” en route to a show, sobered them up quickly.

After the initial euphoria of the trip had worn off, however, the road took its toll on their nerves. By the time they hauled into the Bay Area for a show at the Berkeley Community Theater, a rift had developed between the non-doper Karman, who increasingly felt as if he was trapped with a trio of lunatics, and the others, who had grown tired of his nit-picking straightness and his habit of sneering at Bob's poetic imagery, which he thought was meaningless jive-talk. “I was beginning to feel crazy when they were crazy,” he recalled later. “Victor, a freaky nut, and Dylan very weird, and Clayton always high on pills—I just had to break away from them.” He was replaced for the final leg of the trip by Bob Neuwirth, an extrovert artist/musician who would become one of Dylan's closest confidantes over the next few years.