Bob Dylan in America Read online

  Also by Sean Wilentz

  The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008

  The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln

  Andrew Jackson

  The Rose and the Briar:

  Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad (ed., with Greil Marcus)

  The Kingdom of Matthias (with Paul E. Johnson)

  The Key of Liberty:

  The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “A Laborer,” 1747–1814 (with Michael Merrill)

  Chants Democratic:

  New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850

  (photo credit I)

  DOUBLEDAY

  Copyright © 2010 by Sean Wilentz

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Portions of this work previously appeared in slightly different form in the following: www.bobdylan.com; The Bridge; The Daily Beast; The Oxford American; A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009); The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad, edited by Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005); and as liner notes for The Bootleg Series Volume 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall and Bob Dylan Live at the Gaslight 1962.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Ginsberg, LLC, for permission to excerpt from “Wichita Vortex Sutra” by Allen Ginsberg and to Special Rider Music for permission to reprint the following: excerpts from “Absolutely Sweet Marie” by Bob Dylan, copyright © 1966 and renewed 1994 by Dwarf Music; excerpt from “Blind Willie McTell” by Bob Dylan (as sung on version released on Bootleg Series Vols. 1–3), copyright © 1983 by Special Rider Music; excerpt from liner notes by Bob Dylan from Bringing It All Back Home, copyright © 1965 by Bob Dylan; excerpts from “Bye and Bye” by Bob Dylan, copyright © 2001 by Special Rider Music; excerpt from “Chimes of Freedom” by Bob Dylan (from unpublished poetry manuscripts, late 1963–early 1964), copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc. and renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music; excerpts from “Cry a While” by Bob Dylan, copyright © 2001 by Special Rider Music; excerpts from “Delia” by Bob Dylan (as sung on version released on World Gone Wrong), copyright © 1993 by Special Rider Music; excerpt from “Dusty Old Fairgrounds” by Bob Dylan, copyright © 1973 by Warner Bros. Inc.; excerpt from “For Dave Glover” by Bob Dylan; excerpt from “Highway 61 Revisited” by Bob Dylan, copyright © 1965 and renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music; excerpt from “Hurricane” by Bob Dylan and Jacques Levy, copyright © 1975 by Ram’s Horn Music; excerpt from “I Shall Be Free No. 10” by Bob Dylan, copyright © 1964 and renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music; excerpt from “Just Like a Woman” by Bob Dylan, copyright © 1966 and renewed 1994 by Dwarf Music; excerpt from “Lonesome Day Blues” by Bob Dylan, copyright © 2001 by Special Rider Music; excerpt from “Moonlight” by Bob Dylan, copyright © 2001 by Special Rider Music; excerpts from “Nettie Moore” by Bob Dylan, copyright © 2006 by Special Rider Music; excerpt from “Visions of Johanna” by Bob Dylan, copyright © 1966 and renewed 1994 by Dwarf Music; excerpt from “Advice for Geraldine on Her Miscellaneous Birthday” from Writings and Drawings by Bob Dylan, copyright © 1964 by Bob Dylan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1973). Reprinted by permission of Special Rider Music.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wilentz, Sean.

  Bob Dylan in America / Sean Wilentz.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Dylan, Bob, 1941–2. Singers—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  ML420.D98W53 2010

  782.42164092—dc22

  [B] 2009047636

  eISBN: 978-0-385-52989-1

  Frontispiece: Bob Dylan with, at rear, left to right, Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, and Garth Hudson, at the Woody Guthrie Memorial Concert, Carnegie Hall, New York City, January 20, 1968.

  v3.1

  “Only a few hints—a few diffused, faint clues and indirections …”

  —Walt Whitman

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  PART I: BEFOREChapter 1 Music for the Common Man: The Popular Front and Aaron Copland’s America

  Chapter 2 Penetrating Aether: The Beat Generation and Allen Ginsberg’s America

  PART II: EARLYChapter 3 Darkness at the Break of Noon: The Concert at Philharmonic Hall, New York City, October 31, 1964

  Chapter 4 The Sound of 3:00 A.M.: The Making of Blonde on Blonde, New York City and Nashville, October 5, 1965–March 10 (?), 1966

  PART III: LATERChapter 5 Children of Paradise: The Rolling Thunder Revue, New Haven, Connecticut, November 13, 1975

  Chapter 6 Many Martyrs Fell: “Blind Willie McTell,” New York City, May 5, 1983

  PART IV: INTERLUDEChapter 7 All the Friends I Ever Had Are Gone: “Delia,” Malibu, California, May 1993

  Chapter 8 Dylan and the Sacred Harp: “Lone Pilgrim,” Malibu, California, May 1993

  PART V: RECENTChapter 9 The Modern Minstrel Returns: “Love and Theft,” September 11, 2001, and the Newport Folk Festival, Newport, Rhode Island, August 3, 2002

  Chapter 10 Bob Dylan’s Civil Wars: Masked and Anonymous July 23, 2003, and Chronicles: Volume One, October 5, 2004

  Chapter 11 Dreams, Schemes, and Themes: Modern Times, August 29, 2006; Theme Time Radio Hour with Your Host Bob Dylan, May 3, 2006-April 15, 2009; The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased, 1989–2006, October 7, 2008; and Together Through Life, April 28, 2009

  Coda: Do You Hear What I Hear? Christmas in the Heart, October 13, 2009

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Readings, Notes, and Discography

  Illustration Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  For thirty years I have tried to write about American history, especially the history of American politics. It is extremely hard work, but gratifying over the long haul. Writing historical pieces about American music and about Bob Dylan wouldn’t have been in the cards but for a fluke, the result of strange good fortune dating back to my childhood.

  While I was growing up in Brooklyn Heights, my family ran the 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, a place that helped nurture the Beat poets of the 1950s and the folk revivalists of the early 1960s. My father, Elias Wilentz, edited The Beat Scene, one of the earliest anthologies of Beat poetry. Down from the shop, on MacDougal Street, was an epicenter of the folk-music explosion, the Folklore Center, run by my father’s friend Israel Young, whom everyone called Izzy, an outsized enthusiast with an impish grin and a heavy Bronx-Jewish accent. Nothing in that setting was anything I had sought out, or had any idea was going to become important. As things turned out, I was just lucky.

  On occasional pleasant Sundays, we’d take family strolls that almost always included a stop at the Folklore Center, which was crowded wall to wall with records and stringed instruments and had a little room in the back where musicians hung out. My first memories of Bob Dylan, or at least of hearing his name, are from there—Izzy and my dad would talk about what was happening on the street, and I (a son who wanted to look and act like his father) would eavesdrop. Only much later did I learn that Dylan first met Allen Ginsberg, late in 1963, in my uncle’s apartment above the bookshop.

  A few buildings north of Izzy’s store, next to the Kettle of Fish bar, a staircase led down into a baseme
nt club, where Dylan acquired what it took to make himself a star. The Gaslight Cafe, at 116 MacDougal, was the focal point of a block-long spectacle of hangouts and showcases, including the Café Wha? (where Dylan played his first shows in the winter of 1961). Down adjoining tiny Minetta Lane, around the bend on Minetta Street, there was another coffeehouse, the Commons, later known as the Fat Black Pussycat. These places, along with the Bitter End and Mills Tavern on far more touristy Bleecker Street, and Gerde’s Folk City on West Fourth Street, were Bob Dylan’s Yale College and his Harvard.

  The neighborhood had a distinguished bohemian pedigree. A century before, over on the corner of Bleecker and Broadway, Walt Whitman loafed in a beer cellar called Pfaff’s, safe from the gibing mainstream critics, whom he called “hooters.” A little earlier, a few blocks up MacDougal in a long-gone house on Waverly Place, Anne Charlotte Lynch ran a literary salon that hosted Herman Melville and Margaret Fuller, and where a neighbor, Edgar Allan Poe, first read to an audience his poem “The Raven.” Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, e. e. cummings, Maxwell Bodenheim, and Joe Gould, among others, were twentieth-century habitués of MacDougal Street.

  When Dylan arrived in the Village, the Gaslight was the premier MacDougal Street venue for folksingers and stand-up comics. Opened at the end of the 1950s as a Beat poets’ café—for which it received a curious write-up in the New York Daily News, then the quintessential reactionary city tabloid—the Gaslight proclaimed itself, carnival-style, as “world famous for the best entertainment in the Village.” Unlike many of the other clubs, it was not a so-called basket house, where walk-on performers of widely ranging competence earned only what they managed to collect in a basket they passed around the audience. The Gaslight was an elite spot where talent certified by Dave Van Ronk and other insiders, as many as six performers a night, received regular pay.

  Not that the place was fancy in any way. Pine paneled (until its owners stripped it down to its brick walls) and faintly illuminated by fake Tiffany (or, as Van Ronk called them, “Tiffanoid”) lamps, the Gaslight had leaky pipes that dripped on what passed for a stage, no liquor license (that’s what brown paper bags and the Kettle of Fish were for), a tolerable sound system, and hardly any room. If one used a crowbar and a mallet, it might have been possible to jimmy a hundred people in there. The threat of a police raid—for noisiness, or overcrowding, or refusing to play along and pay off the Mob—was constant. But on MacDougal Street, playing the Gaslight was like playing Carnegie Hall.

  Van Ronk was the king of the hill among the Gaslight’s folksingers; the emcee was Noel Stookey (who became the Paul of Peter, Paul, and Mary); and the headliners included Tom Paxton, Len Chandler, Hugh Romney (better known as the late-1960s psychedelic prankster and communalist Wavy Gravy), and young comics like Bill Cosby and Woody Allen. When Dylan, with Van Ronk’s imprimatur, cracked the Gaslight’s prestigious performers’ circle in 1961, he secured sixty dollars a week, which gave him enough to afford the rent on a Fourth Street apartment—and took a big step toward real fame and fortune. “It was a club I wanted to play, needed to,” Dylan recalls in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One.

  A remarkable tape survives of what appears to have been a splicing together of two of Dylan’s Gaslight performances, recorded in October 1962, in accord with what then qualified as professional recording standards. (Widely circulated for many years as a bootleg, the tape was eventually released in abbreviated form in 2005 as a limited-edition compact disc, Live at the Gaslight 1962.) The singer may have left his harmonica rack at home; in any case, this is one of the few early recordings where he performs for an audience without his harmonicas. But for all of its unpretentious, even impromptu qualities, the tape reveals how greatly and rapidly Dylan’s creativity was growing.

  A year earlier, Van Ronk’s first wife, Terri Thal, had recorded Dylan, also at the Gaslight but with far inferior equipment, in an attempt to persuade club owners in nearby cities to hire the young singer. (Thal reports that someone stole the tape; it has long been available as a vinyl LP and on compact disc, known to collectors as “The First Gaslight Tape.”) As a business scheme, the recording flopped, even though it included the best of Dylan’s first songs, “Song to Woody.” A year later, though, Dylan had jumped to the level of composing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”—a song the world beyond the Village and the folk revival would not hear until its release more than six months later on Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It might be the ghostly singing along by the audience on “Hard Rain,” or it could just be the benefits of hindsight, but this second Gaslight tape vibrates with a sensation that Bob Dylan was turning into something very different from what anyone had ever heard, an artist whose imagination stretched far beyond those of even the most accomplished folk-song writers of the day.

  I first heard Dylan perform two years after that—at Philharmonic Hall, not the Gaslight. It was another bit of luck: my father got hold of a pair of free tickets. And even though I was only thirteen, I’d been made acutely aware of Dylan’s work. A slightly older friend had presented Freewheelin’ to a little knot of kids in my (liberal, Unitarian) church group as if it were a piece of just-revealed scripture. I didn’t understand half of the album; mostly, I was fixed on its sleeve cover, with its now famous photograph of Dylan, shoulders hunched against the cold, arm in arm with a gorgeous girl, walking on Jones Street—a picture that, with its hip sexiness, was more arousing than anything I’d glimpsed in furtive schoolboy copies of Playboy.

  Some of what I did understand in the songs was funny, some of it was uplifting, and a lot of it was frightening: the line “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’ ” from “Hard Rain” stood out as particularly chilling. But I loved the music and Dylan’s sound, the guitar, the harmonica, and a voice that I never thought especially raspy or grating, just plain. Getting the chance to see him in concert was a treat, about which I have more to say below. In time, it proved to be a source of even greater luck.

  The next turn in the story, almost forty years later, is more mysterious to me. After a long and deep attachment through high school, college, and after, my interest in Dylan’s work began to wane about the time Infidels appeared in 1983. Although his religious turn was perplexing, even off-putting, the early gospel recordings at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s had also, I thought, been gripping, taking an old American spiritual tradition, already updated by groups such as the Staple Singers, and recharging it with full-blast rock and roll. Dylan had seemed to be doing to “Precious Lord” what he once had done to “Pretty Polly” and “Penny’s Farm.” Now, though, except for a few cuts on Infidels and on Oh Mercy six years later, his music sounded to me tired and torn, as if mired in a set of convictions that, lacking deeper faith, were substituting for art.

  I came back to Dylan’s music in the early 1990s when he released a couple of solo acoustic albums of traditional ballads and folk tunes, sung in a now-aging, melancholy voice, yet with some of the same sonic sensations I remembered from the early records. The critic Greil Marcus (who, several years later, became my friend and collaborator) has written that with these recordings, Dylan began retrieving his own artistic core—but I had more personal reasons for admiring them with a special intensity. When my father fell mortally ill in 1994, hearing Dylan’s hushed, breathy rendition on the second of the albums, World Gone Wrong, of the 1830s-vintage hymn “Lone Pilgrim” brought me tears and consolation I wouldn’t have gone looking for in any church or synagogue.

  By now I was writing about the arts as well as about history. On a lark, in 1998, I wrote an article for the political magazine Dissent about Marcus’s Dylan book, Invisible Republic, and Dylan’s latest release, Time Out of Mind, all prompted by a Dylan show I attended, goaded by a clairvoyant friend, the previous summer at Wolf Trap in Virginia. In 2001 a phone call came out of the blue from Dylan’s office in New York asking if I would like to write something about a forthcoming album, called “Love and
Theft,” for Dylan’s official Web site, www.bobdylan.com. Once I’d established it wasn’t somebody playing a practical joke, I agreed, provided that I liked the album, which in the end I very much did. I wrote more for the Web site over the following months and invented the somewhat facetious title of the site’s “historian-in-residence,” a job nobody else seemed to be angling for, at a home office suspended in cyberspace.

  Sometime in 2003, plans took shape for an official release, as part of a retrospective series, of the tape made on that long-ago night when I first heard Bob Dylan in concert. When called upon to write the liner notes for what would become The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall, I found the assignment intimidating. Dylan has always managed to land truly fine writers and experts, including Johnny Cash, Allen Ginsberg, Tony Glover, Pete Hamill, Nat Hentoff, Greil Marcus, and Tom Piazza, when he hasn’t written the liner notes himself. I also worried about what it would be like trying to describe a scene from so long ago without sounding either coy or pedantic. How much would I even remember?

  The memory part turned out to be easy. Listening to the recording brought back in a rush the feel of the occasion—the evening’s warmth; the golden glow of the still-new Philharmonic Hall in the still-under-construction Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; the sometimes giddy rapport that Dylan had with the audience (unimaginable in today’s arena rock concerts). But as a historian, I also felt a responsibility to fill in the larger context: what the world was going through and what Dylan was up to in the autumn of 1964. The murders of three civil-rights workers in Mississippi, the first signs that America would escalate its involvement in Vietnam, the successful test of an atomic weapon by Communist China, had all marked the beginning of a scarier phase in national and world affairs. Dylan, meanwhile, had been moving away from the fixed moral position of his earlier work into a more personal and impressionistic vein, and would soon return, though in wholly new ways, to the electrified music that had been his first love as a teenager.