Bob Dylan (59 page)

GQ Style
March 2009/ Black Clock 2010

 

“It’s been a long time comin’, but—” So said Barack Obama in the first moments of his victory speech in Grant Park in Chicago on election night, calling on Sam Cooke along with the other familiars—Abraham
Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr.—he invisibly but unmistakably gathered to his side. “If you ever hear me sing ‘A Change Is Gonna Come,’” Rod Stewart once said of Cooke’s song, released in late December 1964, just after Cooke was shot to death outside a motel in Watts, “you’ll know my career will be over”—because, Stewart seemed to imply, he would not be able to look an audience in the face after failing to live up to the song. But Obama had more confidence—or, because he was perhaps testifying that, not four years old when “A Change Is Gonna Come” first aired on the radio, he had lived out his life under the shadow of the song, had carried it with him like a manifesto, Obama was asserting that he could not only sing the song, in his own way, in his own cadence, but rewrite it. “But I know, a change gone come,” Cooke sang. “Change has come to America,” Obama said.
Did
he
really do that? Did
Sam Cooke
really do that?

I wasn’t in Chicago that night. I was in Minneapolis, in Northrop Auditorium at the University of Minnesota, in the audience, as Bob Dylan played for the first time on the campus of his erstwhile alma mater. The second song was “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” from the year before “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a song I’ve never liked. It always seemed as if it were written by the times, which is to say it felt like a manifesto written by a committee, or commissioned by one. But on this night so much history was loaded into the song it was impossible not to be sucked into its gravity.

Dylan paced the song with space between the words, the rhythm the steps of someone making his way through an empty mansion with both care and dread. It was as if the song, or the history it carried, was moving in slow motion, carrying—as Obama would say later in the night of a 106-year-old voter named Ann Nixon Cooper, “born just a generation past slavery”—not only the history the song was made to celebrate—“She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people ‘we shall overcome’”—but the history that remained to be made: the history
that the song and those present to hear it would witness as it and they had witnessed what had come before.

But it was more than that. As Dylan took all of the triumphal-ism out of the song, the cheering, the defiance, all of the easy ride the song had promised when it first appeared, he turned it into a kind of dirge. He divided history in two: the time the song had, now, outlasted, and the time that would, now, test it. As a dirge the song became a warning: in the past, the people listening had or had not made the history the song spoke for, but now they would have to make it, or fail the song just as Rod Stewart believed he would fail “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

The last song of the night was “Blowin’ in the Wind,” another song I’ve never liked, another song that, this night, for me rang a bell it never had before—even if it was, as Sam Cooke himself stated plainly, the song that inspired him to write “A Change Is Gonna Come.” “I was born in 1941,” Dylan said just before he began the number. “That was the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. I’ve been living in a world of darkness ever since. But it looks like things are going to change now.” I only caught the last line; when the song ended, everyone crowded into the Northrop lobby, under a giant television screen tuned to CNN. It was ten o’clock, just as the polls closed in California, just as the anchorman over our heads announced that Barack Obama had been elected president of the United States. Dylan had not gone a minute past where he knew the show had to end.

What happened then, all over the country, and all over the world—people shouting through their tears—is not unrelated to the way Obama was able to call up “A Change Is Gonna Come” as he spoke that night. It is not unrelated to the sense of authority that has surrounded Obama since. Almost always, when someone is elected president of the United States, whether it is someone you supported or someone you opposed, it takes a long time before the attachment of the word
president
to that person’s name begins to sound even remotely real, and with Obama that was not true on election night and it has not been true since. That is, I think, because
of the way he speaks—a manner for which the word eloquence is merely pretty, and hollow.

It’s the ability to speak of complex things to large numbers of people in a way that neither compromises the complexity of what the speaker means to say nor insults the intelligence of those who are listening—to speak in a manner that itself attunes those who are listening to their own complexity. I am thinking of Obama’s speech on race, from March 18 of last year, when controversy over statements and sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright threatened to derail his campaign—a thirty-seven-minute address that gathered listeners as if around a campfire—but I am also thinking of a scene from John Ford’s 1939 film
Young Mr. Lincoln
as described in
Short Letter, Long Farewell,
a novel published by Peter Handke in 1972.

The narrator, a young Austrian in America, goes to a theater. Lincoln, played by Henry Fonda, has agreed to defend two brothers accused of murder; a drunken mob arrives at the jail to lynch them, and Lincoln faces it down. He talks; he captures the drunks, the narrator says in wonder and awe, not missing the flicker of an eyelash, the turn of a vowel, “by softly reminding them of themselves, of what they were, what they could be, and what they had forgotten. This scene—Lincoln on the wooden steps of the jailhouse, with his hand on the battering ram—embodied every possibility of human behavior. In the end not only the drunks, but also the actors playing the drunks, were listening intently to Lincoln, and when he had finished they dispersed, changed forever. All around me in the theater I felt the audience breathing differently and coming to life again.” That is what eloquence is too weak a word for: speech that is not only about democracy, but that is itself democratic.

In
The Human Stain,
published in 2000, Philip Roth tells the story of Coleman Silk, a seventy-two-year-old man from an African-American family from East Orange, New Jersey, who has passed as a Jew—that is, as a white man—his entire adult life. Reading the novel now, one can hardly avoid imagining Barack Obama into its pages, not because he ever passed or ever could, but
because as an African-American he seems to have invented himself as absolutely as does Coleman Silk. “What do we really know about this man?” John McCain asked throughout the fall campaign, and even without the innuendo—was he a Muslim, a communist, somehow a terrorist?—the question hit home because it was about something real. Obama’s very ease in his own skin, his apparent immunity from slurs and lies—like Jackie Robinson in his ability to trust in his own gifts and never betray his own rage at the slurs and lies that by election day had at Republican rallies become a torrent of hate, with crowds shouting “Traitor!” and “Kill him!” at the mention of his name—spoke for, as Roth wrote of Coleman Silk, “the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness.” Obama seems like his own creation: that is the source of his aura, the sense of self-command that draws people to him, and it is at least partly the sense that he is not quite real, not quite human, that terrifies, or sickens, others. The self-made American embodies America, a nation that was itself made up—“Every day,” Roth wrote, “you woke up to be what you had made yourself”—but the self-made American is also a kind of Frankenstein.

The banner headline on the front page of the
New York Times
the day after the election was queer in its affirmation of what the election had been about: RACIAL BARRIER FALLS IN HEAVY TURNOUT. As a self-invented American, one who could claim the history of the Civil Rights movement, as in his litany of place names from Montgomery to Atlanta, without excluding anyone from that history, Obama did not run as someone who had set himself against a racial barrier. A particular individual set himself a goal and achieved it; America was not less racist the day after the election than it was the day before it. But perhaps what was wrong about the headline was that it spoke in terms that were too narrow, too small, too merely functional for what had actually occurred.

The country may not have changed, but its history did. It rewrote itself. For as a friend said, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Bob Dylan’s last word on election night, was not just “Blowin’ in the
Wind.” It was also the song Dylan has long said he “took it off,” “a spiritual,” a song that dates to the Civil War, a song Lincoln might have heard, but not likely ever sang—as, one night in Greenwich Village, in a performance of an empathy so great it might better be called transubstantiation, a Jew in 1962, turning himself into an African-American in 1862, Bob Dylan sang the song: “No More Auction Block.”

This book covers work written over more than forty years, but the conversations behind it go back further than that—to whenever it was that any given person heard Bob Dylan or heard of him, or for that matter first heard or was forced to sing a folk song, or heard a rock ’n’ roll record on the radio, or fell in love with the myths of American history even as one suspected that no story could be quite so perfect as America made its story out to be. But sooner or later Bob Dylan was a focal point. He has always been someone who you couldn’t not have an opinion about. The people named here—friends, chance acquaintances, colleagues, fellow-travelers, editors, teachers, students—talked, argued, went to concerts and shouted for more or wondered when it would be over, listened to records and traded tapes, wrote and published, cursed and celebrated, told stories and spread rumors, made judgments they lived to regret or in some cases didn’t, but in all ways were generous, querulous, open, suspicious, disbelieving that you hadn’t yet heard, read, seen, and convincing that you had to hear it, read it, see it, right now. I’m glad our paths crossed, and glad that in so many cases they still do: Nick Amster, Doon Arbus, Gina Arnold, the late Richard Avedon, the late Lester Bangs, the late John Bauldie, Sara Beck, Erik Bernstein, Joel Bernstein, Paula Bernstein, Sara Bernstein, William Bernstein, Gérard Beréby and François Escaig of Editions Allia, Dean Blackwood and Susan Archie of Revenant Records, the late Adam Block, Liz Bordow, Betsey Bowden, Meredith Brady, Bart Bull, Sarah Bures, Robert Cantwell, Bob Carlin, Robert Christgau, Joe Christiano, Pete Ciccione, T. J. Clark, Mary Clemmey, Joshua Clover, Frances Coady and James Meader of Picador USA, John Cohen, Emmanuelle Collas of Galaade Editions, Elvis Costello, Jonathan Cott, Sue D’Alonzo, Mike Daly, the late Sandy Darlington, Don DeLillo, Maddie Deutch, Carola Dibbell, Julia Dorner, Elizabeth
Dunn-Ruiz, Danielle Durbin, Monte and Kathy Edwardson, Steve Erickson,
expectingrain.com
, Barry Franklin, Hal Foster, Ken Friedman, Simon Frith, David Gans, B. George, Courtney Gildersleeve, the late Charlie Gillett, Evan Glasson, the late Ralph J. Gleason, Tony Glover, Jeff Gold, Joan Goodwin, Mike Gordon, Peter Guralnick, Marybeth Hamilton, Howard Hampton, Clinton Heylin, Niko Hansen and Birgit Polityki of Rogner and Bernhard, Todd Haynes, Bob Hocking and Linda Stroback-Hocking, Amy Horowitz, Jeff Place, and Andras Goldinger of Smithsonian Folkways, Glenn Howard, Garth Hudson, Maud Hudson, Rode Idlet of Black Ace Books, the late Norman Jacobson, Michael Jennings, Steve Jepsen, Loyal Jones, Branden Joseph, the late Pauline Kael, the late Ed Kahn, Jim Kavanagh, Kalen Keir, the late Stewart Kessler, Russ Ketter, Brent Kite, Al Kooper, Doug Kroll, Carol Krueger, Tony Lacey of Penguin, Jon Landau, Elliott Landy, Jon Langford, Mark Lilla, Daniel Marcus, Steve Marcus, the late William Marcus, Brice Mar-den, Dave Marsh, James Marsh, Paula Matthews, Sharyn McCrumb, Paul Metsa, Linda Mevorach, Jim Miller, Bruce Miroff, Toru Mitsui, John Morthland, Colin B. Morton, Paul Muldoon, the late Paul Nelson (at right), Bob Neuwirth, Matthew Noyes, Michael Oliver-Goodwin, Donn Pennebaker, Sherri Phillips, Michael Pisaro, Robert Polito, Beth Puchtel, Scott Puchtel, Kit Rachlis, Kyle Rafferty, Robert Ray, Kevin Reilly, Christopher Ricks, Jon Riley, Robbie Robertson, John Rockwell, the late Michael Rogin, the late B. J. Rolfzen, Mary Rome, Cynthia Rose, David Ross, Peggy Ross, Luc Sante, Jon Savage, John Schaar, Fritz Schneider, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Beth Schwartzapfel, the late Mike Seeger, Joel Selvin, the late Greg Shaw, Christine Sheu, Cameron Siewert, Rani Singh, Alexia Smith, Brett Sparks, Rennie Sparks, Bruce Springsteen, Peter Stampfel, Bob Steiner, Jim Storey, Bill Strachan, Tracy Brown, Jack Macrae and Katy Hope of Henry Holt, Steve Strauss, Sara Stroud, Elisabeth Sussman, Sandy Tait, Marisa Tam, Charles Taylor, Pat Thomas, Caitlin Thompson, Ray Thompson, Greg Tomeoni, Ken Tucker, Gerard van der Leun (who one day in 1968 passed me a basement tapes cassette on a Berkeley street corner as if we were conducting a dope deal), Lin van Heuit, Richard Vaughn, Amy Vecchione, Eric Vigne of Folio, Sarah Vowell, Ed Ward, Lindsay Waters, Lydia Wegman, Janet Weiss, the late Bill Whitehead, Benjamin Wiggins, Sean Wilentz, Hal Willner, Langdon Winner, Lori Ann Woltner, Ian Woodward, Todd Wright, Stephanie Zacharek, and Michael Zilkha.