Bob Dylan (26 page)

On the other hand, it didn’t bother me at all that Dylan recently licensed “The Times They Are A-Changin’”—certainly his most famous, catchphrase-ready protest song, in the mid-’60s an inescapable affirmation of the power of the Civil Rights movement to redeem the nation’s soul—to be used in a TV commercial for the Coopers & Lybrand accounting firm. I think all songs should go up on this block. As with the NBC collage (perhaps inspired by Tim Robbins’s
Bob Roberts,
in which a right-wing folk singer-politician storms the heights with “The Times They Are A-Changin’ Back”), it’s a way of finding out if songs that carry people with them, songs that seem tied to a particular time and place, can survive a radical recontextualization, or if that recontextualization dissolves them.

The Beatles” “Revolution” may never recover from its Nike commercial, but Coopers & Lybrand didn’t lay a glove on “The Times They Are A-Changin.” When Bob Dylan sang it on his MTV
Unplugged
show—taped November 17 and 18, little more than a week after the election, it aired December 14—the song was full of new life. With a lively band around him, Dylan took the lead on acoustic guitar, making more of the song’s inner melodies, its hidden rhythms, than ever before. He slowed the song down, as if to give it a chance, as it played, to catch up with the history that should have superseded it. Or was the feeling that the song was still lying in wait, readying its ambush? As he did throughout the performance, Dylan focused certain lines, words, syllables, looking around behind impenetrable, blacker-than-black dark glasses, as if to ask, “Are you listening, are you hearing, who are you, why are you here?” By design, the people in the front rows of the audience were young enough to go from this show to the taping of the Taco Bell commercial without skipping a beat, but breaking such a rhythm seemed to be what Dylan was doing this night with “The Times They Are A-Changin.”

Emphasis was the motor of the performance, with quietly stinging notes highlighting especially “If your time to you is worth savin’,” a phrase that in 1964 felt certain and today can feel desperate and bereft—a deeper challenge. Or perhaps those words, sung
and played as they were, were now a challenge for the first time. If Dylan was celebrating anything as he retrieved the number, it was menace. The song took on a new face, and you could hear it as if it were putting a new face on a new time. Instead of Great Day Coming, the feeling was, Look Out. What opened out of the song was not the future, but a void. It was all done lightly, with a delight in music for its own sake: Dylan’s gestures and expressions, like his black-and-white polka-dot shirt, radiated pleasure. You didn’t have to hear anything I heard, but what you couldn’t hear, I think, was an old warhorse of a greatest hit trotted out to meet the expectations of the crowd.

“The Times They Are A-Changin’” was not in any way the highlight of the show; that was probably “With God on Our Side.” With its circa 1952 grade-school-textbook summary of American wars, it brought the same displacement the Cranberries play with in “Zombie.” There the word 1916 leaps out, because today the mention of an event that took place before the song’s intended audience was born is a bizarre use of pop language. It’s a strange violation of an art form that sells narcissism more effectively than anything else.

Seven years ago, describing Bob Dylan at the Live Aid concert in 1985, Jim Miller, in perhaps the best short overview of Dylan’s career, spoke of a “waxen effigy,” a “lifeless pop icon,” “a mummy.” The guy onstage in 1994 was more like a detective, investigating his own songs—and then treating them as clues, following them wherever they led, to the real mystery, the real crime. For the last year or so, the most ubiquitous appearance of this pop icon in pop media has been that moment in Counting Crows’ “Mr. Jones” when Adam Duritz shouts, “I want to be Bob Dylan!”—and it’s a wonderful non sequitur. What in the world does it mean? As it seemingly was not a few years ago, what it means to be Bob Dylan is now an open question; as Taco Bell insists, there may be fewer open questions around these days than one might have thought.

 

Bob Dylan,
MTV Unplugged
(Columbia, 1995).

Cranberries, “Zombie,” on
No Need to Argue
(Island, 1994).

 

Jim Miller, “Bob Dylan,”
Witness
2-3 (Summer/Fall 1988). Collected in an abridged version in
The Dylan Companion,
ed. Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman. New York: Delta, 1990.

 

Counting Crows, “Mr. Jones,” from
August and Everything After
(DGC, 1993).

 

———. “Mr. Jones,” album and acoustic versions (DGC, 1994).

Summer 1995
¹³

 

I was very struck by something Ruth said in the last sentence or the second-to-last sentence of her talk, where she said, “I ask you to consider.” That little transitional phrase went off like a small bomb in my head. That very same phrase, “I ask you to consider,” was used near the climax of Mario Savio’s famous speech on the steps of Sproul Plaza, thirty years ago yesterday, just before the big sit-in that led to the culmination of the Free Speech Movement. It has always seemed to me to epitomize the kind of talk that went on during the Free Speech Movement, the respect for the audience or the listeners or the crowd or whatever you want to call it, the complete lack of any assumption of any sort of superiority of special knowledge, the complete absence of any sense that the speaker was
there to convey to you, the listener, something he or she knew and you didn’t—it was a kind of civility, but it was also the antithesis of rant, the antithesis of a speaker coming forward with certainty, knowing exactly what the truth was and expecting you only to accept it. So I just wanted to point that out. It was a moment I liked.

Now, I’m a critic. I write about music, mostly, I write about novels, movies. And I was asked here to provide a kind of cultural perspective on the current political situation. And maybe I do have a perspective, but I don’t know how current it is. I know that I can’t begin to imagine the kind of crunch that the country is going to be experiencing in the next few years. I’ve done a very good job in the last few weeks of not imagining it. A friend of mine sent me a top ten of songs to play following the election, and I amended it, and my number one was an old Rod Stewart song called “I’ve Been Drinking.” I’ve been playing that song over and over in my head.

One thing that I thought of before coming here—obviously, the notion of free speech comes to mind first of all. A novelist named Steve Erickson has a comment on free speech that I like. He says, “The Constitution grants no one free speech. It assumes you already have it. It simply says the government can’t take it away.” I think this is something that is misunderstood by some of our more famous performance artists, who seem to equate free speech with receiving a government grant, and seem to equate losing a government grant or being denied one with being deprived of free speech. I don’t think that’s how it works. I think free speech comes in some ways when you least expect it. And what’s most important in the domain of free speech is being able to recognize it.

Now, I simply want to present today two examples of speech, one free and one unfree. Simply as things that you might keep in mind, because over the next few years we’re all going to be faced with many, many examples of false speech, of speech that pretends to be speech of resistance, speech of refusal, speech of an alternative to what we read about in the papers and see on the news every night, but won’t be. And we’re going to come across, less frequently, explosions, some of them stillborn, some of them silent, where real free speech takes place.

In order to present these two examples, I’m going to go back to exactly this weekend, not thirty years ago, but twenty-nine years ago. Twenty-nine years ago in Berkeley, two events took place that I’ve thought about over and over and over again. The first was a celebration of the Free Speech Movement, and of course the date that was chosen, then as now, was the date of the big sit-in. And the strangest tableau was presented on the steps of Sproul Hall. There were figures dressed in enormous papier-mâché masks. I mean, not just masks of head size, but at least if my memory isn’t playing tricks on me, masks that seemed to go up three or four feet high. They looked like Mr. Peanut figures, almost as if they could barely walk with these enormous things on their shoulders. Well, I seem to remember that there were several figures, but one of these figures was Mario Savio, who was not in Berkeley that year, and the other was Clark Kerr, the president of the university. And so there was a kind of jousting match between the Savio figure and the hapless Kerr figure. It was a Punch and Judy show, really; the Savio figure vanquished the Kerr figure, who slunk off in shame and despair. This was funny, it was enjoyable, and it was a nice substitute, since the man that people really wanted to hear was not there.

But then something happened that turned the entire event into something ugly. The person inside the Savio contraption had a speech that he wanted to give against something the university had done that was an attempt to roll back free speech gains that had been made the previous year. And so he delivered his speech from inside the Savio construction. It was possibly the most alienated, the most self-canceling, the least human, the most robotic attempt at political speech I’ve ever seen. I think we’re going to see a lot of people dressing up in other people’s clothes, so to speak, denouncing, criticizing, claiming to offer alternatives, but doing so in a way that really only takes away an individual sense of self, of confidence, of power, of imagination.

That very same weekend, maybe it was the night of that day, I don’t remember, but it was December 3rd of 1965, Bob Dylan came to town. He played at the Berkeley Community Theatre with a
band that in later years became known as the Band, in those days was called the Hawks—it was a blues bar-band that he’d picked up. That was a time when there was a tremendous dispute raging around the country, a dispute that now seems utterly quaint, over whether Bob Dylan had sold out by abandoning folk music and acoustic guitar to play commercial, corrupt rock ’n’ roll and make a loud noise. It was very refreshing, it was very interesting, that at Berkeley Community Theatre that night, nobody cared. People sat fidgeting while Bob Dylan went through the acoustic/folk music part of his show, like “Get on with it, get on with it, we want to see the band.”

Well, Bob Dylan was performing at that time—as a friend of mine named Howard Hampton has said—as if he had a knack for turning a casual aside into a condemnation of an entire social order. There was a way in which he could turn a phrase, and suddenly you’d turn your head, as if someone had just slapped you in the back of the neck. There was a way in which he would move an arm out, and you’d feel as if you’d been grabbed, as if someone was questioning all the basic assumptions by which you lived your life. Well, that night, he put on a show that without any question was the most powerful performance I’ve ever seen by anyone.

My friend Howard Hampton said something else about Bob Dylan’s music of that time. This is a young person—he’s in his early thirties, he wasn’t around, he’s not thinking nostalgically. He’s simply basing a critique of the present on what he hears in the past. And he made this argument: to say that what a person like Bob Dylan is doing today, when he attempts to continue his career for its own sake, is the equivalent of what he did years ago when he gave his career a meaning for being in the first place—to say that the two things are equivalent is obscene. And, he said, it’s also to continue the politics of the last twenty years, which have taken shape in order to suppress the kind of demands that Bob Dylan’s speech once made.

A cultural war is inaugurated and a counterattack is made. Part of that counterattack is to simply destroy the notion that a performance
can be more than a performance, that entertainment can be more than entertainment. What were the demands that Bob Dylan, that night in Berkeley in 1965, was making on society?

They were, in the simplest and most complex terms, a demand to be free. He performed a drama of freedom. And it was scary, it was confusing. It was a drama where first you clear away the debris—everything that gets in the way. You’re sighting what it might mean to be your true self in a mirror that doesn’t exist. Once that is cleared away, there is the joy of discovering that, “My God, I can say out loud what I think.” Then there is the fear, once having made that discovery, of actually having the burden of putting it to use, and actually standing up, as someone did a few minutes ago, in the middle of a crowd, and saying something that maybe people don’t want to hear. Whether or not you agree with what’s being said, it’s always worth remembering what kind of nerve it takes to do that. It takes a lot of nerve.

What happened that night, and what I’ve always remembered, is the complete antithesis of the kind of reduction, the kind of shrinking of speech, that I saw in Sproul Plaza on the first anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. It was a kind of expansion that I learned about during the Free Speech Movement here, and that I’ve seen happen in politics since, occasionally. It’s a shout. It’s a gesture. It turns into a conversation. It begins, perhaps, when a refusal meets a rule. And right off the bat, you’re questioning whether you should take one step forward or one step back. Very quickly, you’re questioning, “Well, whether or not I want to do this, do I have the right to do it?” Very quickly, you’re questioning whether the institution that presumes to give you that right or to withhold it has any legitimacy whatsoever. Very quickly after that, you’re questioning the nature of institutions themselves. And by the end—and this could be five minutes later, five days, five months—you’re questioning the meaning of life. That’s what happened in that performance. That’s what happened in some speeches I’ve heard over the years, speeches that in one way or another, if not in these words, contain that “I ask you to consider”—
think now, don’t take what I’m saying on trust, see if it makes sense.