"Me and you we've known each other
Ever since we were sixteen
I wished I would have known
I wished I could have called you
Just to say good-bye, Bobby Jean."
Bruce Springsteen, Bobby Jean
We were pals back in the early 60s, Bob and I, but then he went on without me. As Bruce says about his adolescent confidante Bobby Jean, "We liked the same music...we liked the same clothes," but then he plugged in that guitar and started singing about God knows what. I was left wearing my Bob Dylan uniform, strumming away on sanctimonious anthems of soaring ideals, secure in my pre-packaged condemnations of social injustice and certain that the times they were a-chanigin'-- just not too much. But he didn't need me anymore, and I had other friends anyway.
I'm reminded of this episode, of course, by the recent release of Martin Scorsese's brilliant film about Dylan's early career and first artistic metamorphosis No Direction Home. I'd watched the DVD and inhaled the soundtrack days before the PBS broadcast aired. It was absolutely riveting to see not only Dylan in that era but all the other important figures of my formative years--the teenage Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie, Odetta, Dave Van Ronk ...
But I have been "assigned" to write about my own memories of the 1965-66 Dylan transition by a former student who always has had a great awareness of important music and a nose for a human story. I remember his asking ingenuously once or twice as a teenager for my take on the 60s as an important era of social turmoil. I always brushed him off, saying it wasn't that exciting to hear about. I did so not because the era wasn't pretty exciting or the music extraordinary, but because I didn't want to come off as stuck in the past when there was so much going on at the moment. But you asked, Jonathan, so here goes.
I got my first guitar for Christmas 1960. I hadn't even heard of Bob Dylan at the time, but I guess he'd gotten his first guitar a few years earlier because now we can hear his first recording--a low-fi tape made by a high school friend in 1959. He's moaning away on a solemn folk spiritual, "When I Got Troubles." Didn't we all.
I'd been working on my guitar chords for a year or so when I discovered the music I wanted to learn and duplicate. It came to me via an L.A. FM station, KRHM, and the d.j. was a very witty and knowledgeable host named Les Claypool. So it was folk music for an hour every weeknight at 9 p.m. and four hours on Saturdays, from 8 'til midnight. For the longest while, everything I knew about folk music was provided in recordings and commentary from Les Claypool. And as soon as Dylan's first album came out, it was on the air at KRHM.
It's hard to describe a first exposure to Bob Dylan. We folkies were used to musicians with the raw frankness of Woody Guthrie or Leadbelly. Many of the traditional balladeers and bluesmen even had quite melodious singing voices--think of Cisco Houston, Brownie McGee, or Bill Broonzy--yet we didn't expect everyone singing this stuff to sound like Glenn Yarborough or Joan Baez, but Dylan was something else. That twang was an uneasy mix of the Minnesota prairie and Oklahoma plains transplanted to Greenwich Village. He seemed to be intentionally abrasive, so rough around the edges that you had to take him or leave him alone, but could never ignore him or lump him together with others of his sort.
But most of us--and we were a vast, youthful army of folk freaks--loved him, loved the craggy voice, attended every word of the early songs, adopted the sneer for ourselves because we felt the same way about racism, poverty, and pointless war. We were relieved of the need to discover the world's rottenness and corruption because we had only to sign on to this visionary's articulation of the problems we faced. Learn the chords, learn the words, copy the intonation, wear the blue work shirt...and voilà, you were a serious, sensitive person also.
That (and the inspiration of several others like the Native American song-writer Buffy Sainte-Marie, the Canadian duo Ian and Sylvia, and an array of hot-picking bluegrass bands) got me nearly though my sophomore year of college. That year, though, was when Dylan took the first steps toward re-defining his place in the music world. He clearly needed to say more than he had been, play differently that he had been, and rattle the complacency he had inadvertently created.
He "came out" as a decisively rock artist in the summer of '65 at, of all places, the serene and scholarly Newport Folk Festival, but his fans were already dealing with the electric shock of half the tracks on Bringing It All Back Home. I remember discussing the "Dylan's new sound" with one or two friends of the folk faith. We were more amused than dismayed. Dylan seemed to be trying so hard to put people off, which in a way had always been his gig, so we refused to be as shocked as we were supposed to be.
Most of our major folk heroes, remember, were men and women much older than ourselves--the generation that was recording in the fifties, forties, and even the thirties. People like Pete Seeger or Jack Elliot were still youthful liaisons to an older group of icons--Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, the Rev. Gary Davis, Elizabeth Cotton and others. Hell, some were even dead already. Dylan was one of us. Our age. He could change his groove any time he wanted, and we would just wait and see how it turned out. Nonetheless, I do remember doing an early form of Amazon mail order, sending a copy of Bringing It All Back Home to my brother for no reason or occasion other than to gross him out.
I was premature, though. Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, soon to follow, were more outrageous and undeniably the work of genius. I wasn't aware at the time of the reaction he had gotten across England on his 1965 tour filmed by D.A. Pennebaker, but I don't think I would have been one of those creepy Dylan worshippers who shouted imprecations at him nightly as he tried to bring them something curious he'd just come up with, such as, say, "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Ballad of a Thin Man." I always liked the iconoclasts, the ass-kickers, the dare-devils of pop culture. Nothing kept me from going to clubs like the Ash Grove in Hollywood, the Ice House in Pasadena, or the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach just because Bob Dylan had stopped appearing at Gerde's Folk City in New York.
Dylan was at the height of his creative powers and naturally his music was controversial, not just because it was no longer folk or "protest" (whatever that is that something like "Desolation Row" isn't), but because he was breaking loose from literalism and sober metaphor into regions of wild subjectivity and free association. This, of course, is what painters and orchestral composers had been doing for over a half century, while "popular music" remained bound by the restraints of objective report. I wish I'd paid closer attention at the time, but a solo acoustic guitar player had fewer options if he lacked the amp, the Fender and a few mates to fill out a band--especially if he was working on something of importance that Dylan and other budding musicians, like the guy down the hall in my UCSB dorm, Robbie Krieger, weren't working on, a college degree.
So it wasn't until nearly a decade later--after I'd graduated, gotten married, and launched into a teaching career and Dylan had fully recovered from his motorcycle accident and regained interest in making new music--that we connected again. The album was Blood on the Tracks, and I was onboard again. It was not until this mid-seventies period that I would see him live for the first time, and then watch him wade through his born again phase. Now THAT was agonizing, especially when the music was so strong and the sentiment so sappy.
But we got through that together and moved on. Don't think twice, pal, it's all right.
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2 comments:
Scorsese's documentary was, as you say, riveting, as is your blog. Funny how fascination attends to so much having to do with Bob Dylan. What leaped out from the ‘65-‘66 footage was the man's thrilling defiance. Were it transported to today's culture, it would still be bracing and unique.
Also fascinating was the notion that Dylan was selling-out by plugging-in. Wasn't he already more or less a commercial giant? Didn't his turn to rock risk severing ties with his existing audience with no guarantee of picking up Beatles and Elvis fans? That sort of risk would seem to be the opposite of selling-out.
Your blog also raised extra-Dylan questions that have never occurred to me before: What was the folk revival? Where did it come from and where did it go? Record store junkies don't like to think that any genres or significant artists escape their notice, no matter how trivial or worthy of scorn. But your blog had me toggling to allmusic.com constantly: Who is Glenn Yarbrough? Ian & Sylvia? Beyond being the mysterious subject of a maudlin tribute by Firehose, who is Elizabeth Cotten? That clip of Odetta was hair-raising; I could have had 100 guesses and not been able to identify her. The era of those Technicolored album covers is recognizable but not their contents. Shouldn't it be surprising that a movement that was so big at the time (wasn't it?) should have seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth? And that it was itself never revived? Did rock simply eat it and absorb it permanently into its cells?
That would be an interesting subject, too, and probably more pleasurable to contemplate than Dylan's evangelical period.
Good questions. First, you have to understand that "selling out" for the folkies was rather more a term of art than an entirely logical accusation.
The folk scene was informally divided between artists who were considered more authentic or rootsy (the word "ethnic" seemed to be the one that stuck) and those who were clearly more well-scrubbed and derivative--"commercial" summed it up in a word. The former had lived a rough, perhaps itinerant life and when college-aged fans became interested in the kind of music they'd been making for years, they were "discovered," recorded, appreciated for their obscurity, spiffed up and featured on the college circuit or at places like Newport or Carnegie Hall.
The commercial acts stood on those shoulders and made the music more accessible to a broader pop audience. They sang on key, harmonized their voices more formally, arranged their instrumentation more precisely, and for a while sold like crazy. They worked up pleasantly crafted sets mixing traditional songs with some pop standards, and often new material, adding humorous commentary of an intellectual tone to live performances.
The two camps coexisted quite nicely because each had something to contribute and there were plenty of record contracts to go around. But the audience tended to divide itself into those who simply bought the commercially viable best-selling albums and the cognoscenti--music snobs, really--who stuck with the traditional artists or newcomers who drew their material from those authentic sources. So "commercial" came to mean slick, often bland, prettied-up renditions of music from humble, perhaps disreputable origins.
Dylan, of course, was a bit of an anomaly--ethnic enough to appeal to the insiders, but young, clever and impassioned in a way that connected him to a world beyond the rearward orientation of traditional performers. He knew and played the traditional songbook, but wrote stuff that was just as good as, and, honestly, a lot better than much of the quaint music of the rural south and midwest.
So when he seemed to drop out of the folk scene as it had come to be defined and took up something quite different, the change was seen in terms of disloyalty to the hardy band of folk devotees who saw themselves as keeping alive some treasured artifact of our American culture. Whether he actually would make more money with his new gig wasn't so much the issue as the perceived loss of a prodigy's creative talents to a retro, possibly moribund, movement.
This folk music revival, though, arrived in an era when rock & roll had yet to solidify its place in popular music. Elvis was, of course, huge, but Buddy Holly was already dead; the role of black artists was still under-appreciated, and the idea of a rock and roll "band" (as opposed to studio musicians standing behind a solo artist) was yet to pop up.
By definition, folk music had been around for untold generations. The songs--drawn from collections of English, Scottish, Irish, and American ballads and work songs--always preceded the performers. Blues songs were never written down, but, like the others, passed along from singer to singer.
Then along comes people like John Lomax and his son Alan, who take bulky recording equipment into the field and start recording and documenting this music that has been the sound track of rural American lives for generations. They not only capture performances, but "discover" some pretty powerful performers, most notably Huddie Ledbetter, as well. This sparked an interest in people like Pete Seeger (actually, the whole Seeger family--Mike and Peggy as well) and his quartet, The Weavers, to introduce the music to urban America. College campuses and clubs that had originated as beatnik coffee houses were particularly fertile grounds for this stuff to sink roots in. This is where The Kingston Trio, The Limeliters, Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Tarriers, The Chad Mitchell Trio, Dave Von Ronk, Mark Spoelstra, Koerner, Ray, and Glover, et al come in. But it also provided exposure for guys like Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, Rev. Gary Davis, Jean Ritchie, Elizabeth Cotton, and Big Bill Broonzy.
That's where it came from, but where it disappeared to is harder to track. The sound was very popular and developed some interesting diversity, but was eventually overwhelmed by something fresher, bolder, more boisterous--full blown rock bands with self-penned songs about things that were absolutely immediate to teenagers. And as you know it wasn't just the Beatles.
Suddenly, interest in 18th century murder ballads and songs about freight trains, and John Henry, "a steel drivin' man" were just a little too quaint to compete. The genre spawned some very skillful songwriters (Dylan among them) who have had continuing careers in the music business, but if they didn't shift into rock mode, they've stayed at the periphery. Most Public Radio stations now have an hour or two--typically late nights or Saturday afternoons--of folk music programming that features mostly new, usually quite obscure, artists who play songs that sound LIKE traditional music but are new-minted. I think almost no one still plays the artists that were driving the cart in the 1960s. It's these that are household names to us old farts and are unheard of to your generation. Oddly, the same thing may not happen to the rock artists that you knew in the early 80s who have long since dropped from the charts. For instance, in Spinning class last week, the instructor (mid-50s) puts on some old shit and yells out "Does anyone remember the B-52s? Duh!! Everyone, regardless of age shouts out that they do. Naturally!
So for the record: Glenn Yarborough was the short, chubby guy in The Limeliters. They had such an appealing sound primarily because of his wonderfully pure tenor voice. You'd just have to hear that three-part harmony to hear the difference between that and Crosby, Stills & Nash. Ian and Sylvia were a young Canadian couple who tapped into some very tasty traditional music early on--both English and French Canadian--and went on writing a lot of original material as their art developed and the times changed. The Complete Vanguard Collection is what you'd want to hear. Elizabeth Cotton's big contribution was a song called "Freight Train." She'd be 110 this year, so she was an elder stateswoman of the movement from the point of her discovery.
Rock & Roll didn't so much absorb this genre as elbow it aside or perhaps steamroll over it with its obvious urgency. But it's very curious to see that it has not really died out yet. Many, if not most, of the major artists and records have been reissued on CD and you can find them on Amazon along with customer reviews. That seems to be where the secret society still meets
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