It is week three of the Bob Dylan Appreciation Society and this time we are bringing his long tradition of dramatic fictional and factual writing into focus. This brings with it an opportunity to revisit the touchstone compositions of his original protest phase, a period that brought Dylan worldwide recognition but also saddled him with a genre and title that he instantly needed to wrestle himself free of. You see the young Robert Zimmerman was seduced by rock ‘n’ roll dreams like most fifties’ teenagers, yet he found an opening into the performing world through the folk scene who wholly embraced this curious outsider, but time has told us that he was never going to be defined by one single scene or genre for long. He is, after all, purely a song and dance man.
It is clear that when Dylan read the temperature of that Greenwich Village folk scene in the sixties, he cut his teeth in a topical movement that was already approaching a peak. But when he put pen to paper contributing to the canon, he simply did it better than everyone else. That whole interweaving collective of singers, activists, song hunters and academics swooped onto his material recognising it was cut from a finer cloth. It is true that everyone from Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul & Mary added Dylan material to their repertoire, but this hardly accounts for the explosion of the young man’s reputation and stature, which was down to his words alone. “How many times can a man turn his head pretending he just doesn’t see” is powerful enough in itself, these songs hardly needed overly sincere, earnest make-overs by the members of the New York folk scene to win favourable notice and appreciation.
One of Bob’s contemporaries in the protest era, even to some degree his fiercest challenger, was Phil Ochs. Personally speaking, I love the music of Ochs and feel he remains criminally under-valued, but if there is one criticism you could level at him it is that his work as a journalist did bleed into the topical songs he wrote. Often times a Phil Ochs song factually covered in fine reportage style the key elements of a current atrocity whereas, with Bob, it was his gifts as a poet that shone through. Bob also by and large avoided the pitfall of overly time stamping his work; ‘Masters Of War’ and ‘With God On Our Side’ still resonates as strongly today, they are universal and timeless whereas Ochs songs are often so packed with period names and news stories that a better than casual familiarity with sixties history does enhance your enjoyment somewhat. ‘The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll’ is one early classic where Dylan did run close to a journalistic approach but even here, the way the story is structured reveals a writers understanding of drama and pace. So much so that, by the time we hit the tense courtroom scene conclusion and the judges gavel hands down William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence, the injustice surely provokes tears of rage in any first-time listener. And that is all down to the writer’s pitch-perfect feel for drama and tension, he drives you towards that response fully intentionally.
So many of those topical songs, as featured in this song collection, became the benchmarks to aspire to in this particular form. The ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ album that included ‘Masters Of War’, ‘With God On Our Side’ and ‘The Ballad Of Hollis Brown’ was really Bob’s one true, focused and complete collection in this style of writing. But no sooner had he released that 1964 classic than he worked out the limitations and pitfalls of believing the world could be changed by songs alone. The step back was instant, jarring even and a little condescending of the well-meaning folk movement (“I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”).
Story writing would never leave Dylan though, although rarely in the next few years would a tale be presented in anything like a straightforward linear fashion. The prose remained forever vivid and enlightening, be it with a wild psychedelic ode to being ‘Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again’ or the Christianity baiting “flesh coloured Christ’s that glow in the dark” we hear about in ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. Like any great work of fiction, these pieces kept you hooked and ignited wonderful visions of the mind with every single line. Occasionally the ambition in his music delivered a ‘Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts’ which has, entirely justifiably, inspired writers into attempting to generate a film script. By contrast, the ‘John Wesley Harding’ album was for the most part an exercise in oblique, impossible to nail down fables and giddy, vintage Americana folk tales which left you in a trance.
There were occasional moments during the seventies when Bob returned to a direct form of politically motivated writing. The stand-alone 1971 single ‘George Jackson’ was written about the Black Panther leader who had been shot dead during an attempted escape from San Quentin prison earlier that year. It is interesting to note that it was around this time that John Lennon hit New York and immediately hooked up with other political writers, including Phil Ochs, for a short-lived spell of his own musical activism. Perhaps Bob, in a bit of a baron spell, was just feeling around for something to get hold of and relight his creative fire? A few years later the superb ‘Hurricane’ was released with the specific aim of getting the boxing legend Rueben Carter Hurricane out of jail. For one final time, Dylan summoned up every ounce of dramatic prose with just a little artistic license to punch through a potent message aiming for, and fairly accurately striking against, the scales of justice.
I say final because it is clear that after 1976 any desire to change the world through protest song had pretty much left Dylan altogether. He was reported to have been affected by the suicide that year of his former rival Phil Ochs, a writer who never abandoned the protest movement and seemed to pay the price for his mounting disappointments, lost in a depression he could not climb out of. Turning away from almost everything his audience had believed he represented in 1979, the main stories Bob wanted to convey were those he had read in the Bible. Although that Christian phase, even today, remains a period where most Dylan fans take a deep breath before listening, it did feature some rather fine music in the R&B / gospel vein, especially in a song like ‘Slow Train’ which unveiled a writer imparting a horrific, apocalyptic message. And even though the observation that Bob stepped back from his Christian period just as swiftly as he dropped his protest song hat is correct, those dark images stayed with him; even in 2000 he was singing of how “if the bible if right the world will explode”.
In later years Dylan has written about the current state of world affairs, but only sporadically. For me, a track like ‘Union Sundown’ is unfairly derided, taken out of the context of being Dylanologists’ prime example of a song wrongly included on ‘Infidels’ in preference to vastly superior tracks left in the can, it is actually a satisfying little slice of socialist sympathising Rock that I’m sure a Springsteen, for example, would have been comfortable with. Now in modern times, the story tunes remain a heavy facet of Dylan writing and there have also been out-and-out instances of framing iconic figures and events in song form. ‘Tempest’ is a gorgeous and epic shanty style tale of the Titanic disaster while, even more surprising from the same album was ‘Roll On John’, where Bob fondly paints a portrait of his former peer Lennon.
And that brings us to last years ‘Murder Most Foul’, another mammoth work (the longest Dylan track on any of his albums in fact) which begins as a straightforward meditation on the day John F. Kennedy died but floats off into a totally unpredictable dream-like sequence where the entire sixties cultural explosion that unfurled after that fateful 1963 assassination, the world into which Dylan’s own sixty-year career has woven, flashes before our eyes and ears. Maybe that is the thing that we should marvel at above all other artistic achievements presented in these vital, poetic works? That even after six decades of creating in this medium, Bob Dylan can still be our storyteller, the font who finds new and inspiring ways to paint his audio pictures and tell his tales of the world we all live in with apparent boundless insight into the lives we live. There will be more Dylan Appreciation next week.
Main image: Public Domain – Rowland Scherman – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration – Dylan with Joan Baez during the civil rights “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom”, August 28, 1963