Bob Dylan (5 page)

After the song was featured that May on the cover of the sixth issue of
Broadside
magazine—a small, mimeographed bulletin set up by Pete Seeger, Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen for the dissemination of new topical songs and analysis, and largely run by Gil Turner—it became part of every folkie's repertoire, the new
lingua franca
of folk protest. Pete Seeger was especially impressed, and became one of Dylan's most fervent supporters, convinced the kid was a genius, even if he had borrowed the tune from the old folk song ‘No More Auction Block' for ‘Blowin' In The Wind'. If anything, that just authenticated it for him, anchoring the new song in the grand old folk tradition of adaptation and interpretation. Not that it prevented Dylan copyrighting the tune as his own, of course. (More sinister, however, was the later rumor, reported in
Newsweek
, that the lyrics had been written by a student in New Jersey, Lorre Wyatt, from whom Dylan had purchased them. Wyatt himself first tried to explain away the situation by saying “some kids” had confused Dylan's song with another which he himself had written, called ‘Freedom Is Blowing In The Wind', and that only
the titles were similar, before finally admitting, in a 1974 magazine article, that it was all bullshit and that there was no truth in the rumor. “The coat of fakelore I stitched years ago is threadbare now —it never fit me very well,” he wrote. “I'm just sorry it's taken me 11 years to say ‘I'm sorry.'”)

Dylan's friend Dave Van Ronk, still rankling from the way Bob appropriated his arrangement of ‘House Of The Rising Sun', was less complimentary than Turner and Seeger when the song was played for him the day after Turner had debuted it at Gerde's. “What an incredibly dumb song!” he spluttered with typical bluffness. “I mean, what the hell is blowing in the wind?” But a few weeks later, after hearing someone parodying the song in Washington Square Park, he realized that Dylan had come up with an enduring cliché. So did Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, who also knew the commercial value of such a cliché. In a masterstroke of managerial synthesis, he earmarked the song for his other main act, Peter, Paul & Mary, the folk group he had created the previous year, who were establishing themselves as the commercial folk heirs to The Kingston Trio with hit versions of folk standards like ‘Lemon Tree' and ‘If I Had A Hammer'. The following summer, a few months after the release of
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
, their version of ‘Blowin' In The Wind' went to number two on the American pop charts, becoming Warner Brothers' fastest-selling single ever and cementing Dylan's position as the crown prince of folk-protest.

Realizing their artist's true potential, Columbia belatedly rushed out a single of Dylan's version in August 1963, a month after Peter, Paul & Mary's had been released. It failed to chart, leaving Dylan tagged for some time primarily as a songwriter, rather than a performer. The song was, however, used as the theme for
Madhouse On Castle Street
, a BBC television play in which Dylan played his first dramatic role, appearing as an American protest singer—hardly a stretch, one would have thought.

Though some commentators, most notably Dylan biographer Robert Shelton, claim that the girl from the North Country is actually Bonnie Beecher—a bohemian actress Bob fell in love with during his time in Minneapolis, and at whose apartment Tony Glover recorded several of the
early Dylan tapes—most agree it is more likely to be Echo Helstrom, his first serious girlfriend from his schooldays back in Hibbing.

Bob met Echo in October 1957, when he was just 17, and she 16. At the time, Bob Zimmerman was a nice enough middle-class boy, clean-cut and round-faced, while Echo was from a poorer working-class family, definitely from the wrong side of the tracks. They discovered a shared interest in R&B music, which both would listen to late at night on the radio, on the DJ Gatemouth Page's program, or on stations in Chicago and Little Rock, Arkansas, which had particularly powerful transmitters. Nobody else in Hibbing, it seemed, was interested in this music, but they were obsessed with it: the first time they met, Bob used his pocket-knife to break into the Moose Lodge where he had earlier been practicing with his band, in order to play her his Little Richard piano licks.

Already, Bob knew what he was going to do with his life. “By the time I met him,” recalled Echo later, “it was just understood that music was his future. All along we knew there was no other way for him to get out of there, to leave Hibbing.” His ambition sometimes led him to playful fantasy pranks, as when he played Bobby Freeman's ‘Do You Want To Dance?' down the phone to Echo, claiming it was him and his band; but she and her mother recognized, even at this early stage, Bob's intrinsic empathy with the underdog. His later interest in country music may have stemmed from his association with Echo, too: he and his friend John Buckland would trawl through Echo's mother's large collection of Country & Western 78s, trying out the songs on their guitars, particularly the sad songs about prison fires, dying children and similar depressing subjects.

For a while, Bob and Echo were sweethearts, swapping identity bracelets and even attending the prom together, albeit as outsiders somewhat cut off from the school mainstream. The 1958 Hibbing High yearbook records Bob's feelings for Echo: “Let me tell you that your beauty is second to none, but I think I told you that before… Love to the most beautiful girl in school.” By that summer, however, they were growing apart. Increasingly restless and pinched by the confines of Hibbing, Bob's boot heels had taken to wandering, and his weekends would be spent out of town, in Duluth or Minneapolis, while Echo pined away miserably at home. She realized he was probably seeing other girls and so, one Monday morning, she handed his ID bracelet back in the school corridor. “Don't do this in the hall,” pleaded Bob, “let's talk about it later.” But it was already too late.

Bob Dylan finished writing the song on his brief trip to Italy in the first week of 1963, where he had hoped to meet up with Suze Rotolo
again. Alas, she had left to return to New York mere days before. He had, he later claimed, been carrying the song around in his head for a year, and it seems as though the manic swing from anticipation to disappointment caused it to burst out of him. Equally important in its eventual appearance was his sojourn in England on the same European trip, where Dylan went to appear in the BBC play
Madhouse On Castle Street
. In the company of old chums Richard Fariña and Ric Von Schmidt—over there to record an album on which Dylan, credited as Blind Boy Grunt, would play impromptu harmonica—he did the rounds of the London folk clubs, where he picked up some old English folk songs from traditional singers such as Martin Carthy. Like another expatriate American folkie, Paul Simon, Dylan seems to have been particularly attracted to the old English folk song ‘Scarborough Fair', and adapted it to fit his own ends.

This diatribe against the arms industry is the bluntest condemnation in Dylan's songbook, a torrent of plain-speaking pitched at a level that even the objects of its bile might understand, with no poetic touches to obscure its message. It would seem to have had scant effect: even today, armaments manufacturers are virtually the only companies that governments are prepared to prop up and subsidize, whatever the cost, despite the often flagrant incompetence and fraudulent misuse of public funds exhibited by these companies in cahoots with the military establishment.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's final advice to the incoming President John F. Kennedy in January 1961 was to beware of this military-industrial complex, which he belatedly realized had effectively dictated much of American foreign and economic policy in the postwar years, encouraging the Cold War arms race and reckless military adventurism in order to serve their own vested interests, rather than the interests of the country as a whole.
Their influence spread into other areas, particularly science and education, which became heavily dependent on Defense Department funding, and which in turn became more tightly focused on military research, at the expense of other areas. By 1960, the Federal Government was subsidizing research in universities to the tune of over a billion dollars a year; thanks to Federal funds, a single institution like the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (M.I.T.) could spend more money on scientific research than all the universities of the British Isles combined.

Kennedy either ignored Eisenhower's advice or found himself over a Cold War barrel rolled under him by his hawkish Chiefs Of Staff. He had been in office only a few months when he authorized a massive arms procurement program worth an $3 billion on top of the already substantial arms budget, with an additional $207 million earmarked for civil defense. The money pouring into the arms companies' coffers has grown even greater since, as armaments have become more technologically complex, like Stealth bombers and Cruise missiles, or more fanciful, like Reagan's comic-book “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative.

First debuted by Dylan at Gerdes Folk City on January 21, 1963, ‘Masters Of War' remains as pertinent almost four decades later. Its lyrics were published in the 20th issue of
Broadside
magazine in February 1963, accompanied by a couple of drawings by Suze Rotolo—one of a man carving up the world with a knife and fork while a family watches forlornly, and another of a baby-carriage kitted out with a gun and tank-tracks. The tune is an adaptation of the traditional melody to the English folk song ‘Nottamun Town', probably learnt from Martin Carthy on one of Dylan's English trips.

The closest Dylan comes on
Freewheelin'
to the dark soul of country blues as practiced by performers such as Robert Johnson or Son House, ‘Down The Highway' is a bare, basic blues format, worked around a 12-bar scheme. A single strummed guitar chord teeters through the verses, collapsing into a flat-picked resolution at the end of each couplet, the evocative musical equivalent of the piteous sinking of shoulders after an impassioned
cri du coeur
. The subject matter, a girlfriend who has abandoned him for some “far-off land” which proves, in the penultimate verse, to be a desolate “Italy, Italy,” is clearly about the pain caused by the absence of Suze Rotolo, who was pursuing her own life on an extended trip to that country.

The narrator is stranded, lovelorn, on some endless highway, lugging his suitcase to nowhere special: wherever he goes, she won't be there, so what does it matter? It's possible that Dylan came up with the song as he was returning to see old friends in Minnesota: the same day, June 8, that he saw Suze's ship off at the docks in New York, he himself set off for Minneapolis. Shortly after, back in New York, Dave and Terri Van Ronk were surprised to receive a phone call at four in the morning from Bob, who was standing in a Minneapolis phone box in sub-zero temperatures, crying for Suze. Upon his return to Greenwich Village, all his friends were surprised at how listless and melancholy he had become, and how he had changed physically as well as emotionally—the puppy-fat apparent on his first album cover had disappeared, leaving him looking gaunt and weary, like Woody Guthrie. “He was falling apart at the seams,” said Mikki Isaacson, a Village friend. “He was so depressed we were afraid he was going to do something to himself.” Time did little to ease his pain. On a tape made by his old friend Tony Glover on another trip back to the twin cities a couple of months later, Dylan can be heard pining for Suze: “My girl, she's in Europe right now. She sailed on a boat over there. She'll be back September 1, and till she's back, I'll never go home. It gets kind of bad sometimes.”

The mention of gambling in the third verse could be a reference to the Greenwich Village folkies' back-room poker games, but in the context of Dylan's life is far more likely to refer to his perilous hand-to-mouth existence in his time in New York. Since dropping out of college in Minneapolis a year before, he had bummed around a bit, to nearby Madison and Chicago, and as far afield as Colorado and New Mexico, before heading East to eke out a virtual hobo existence on peoples' floors in New York, heavily reliant on the compassion of strangers while he tried to develop a career in music. It had all been a huge gamble, and just as it seemed he might be set for the big jackpot pay-off, with a beautiful girlfriend, a record deal, burgeoning acclaim and the imminent prospect of both fame and fortune, his girl had gone and left him “without much more to lose.”

Despite providing the original working title for
Freewheelin'
, the trifling ‘Bob Dylan's Blues' is probably more important for its position in the album's running-order than for any intrinsic merit. Coming after the intensely emotional opening sequence of four songs, it offers a moment of light
relief before the testing blizzard of imagery in ‘A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall', the LP's centerpiece. At the recording session on July 9, it perhaps served a similar purpose, immediately preceding the taping of ‘Blowin' In The Wind'. An example of how blues expression can lighten the spirit, its attitude of cheeky irrelevance punctures the self-pity at its heart. Nevertheless, it's interesting for a couple of reasons: the line “Go away from my door and my window too” is a premonitory echo of the shorter, snappier opening line of ‘It Ain't Me Babe'; and the presence of the Lone Ranger and Tonto in its opening line marks the first appearance in Dylan's recorded work of the gallery of pop-culture icons that would populate much of his later work.

Blowin' In The Wind' may have established Bob Dylan as the principal anthemist of the Civil Rights movement, but it was ‘A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall', written later that same year, which established him as the folk-poet of a new generation. Its strings of surreal, apocalyptic imagery were unlike anything that had been sung before, and the song's rejection of narrative progression in favor of accumulative power lent a chilling depth to its warning. It was the closest folk music had come to the Revelation of St. John, and every bit as scary.