Why Dylan Matters. Richard Thomas F.

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       TOGETHER THROUGH LIFE

      As was the case for many who came of age in the mid-1960s, my first Dylan experience centered on issues of social justice. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” with my school chorus in New Zealand. This song, from Dylan’s first original album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, was my first, true introduction to Dylan’s music, though I was already familiar with the chart-topping version sung by the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary. When we sang Dylan’s version in chorus, I remember being somewhat put off by the “addition” of the words “Yes ’n’ ” before each of the questions, absent from the version I had hardwired from the radio—“Yes ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail?” and so forth. I recall pointing this out to the chorus director, who was clearly an early Dylan fan. He insisted that we sing the Dylan version, and I soon came to share his preference.

      We could sing this song and make it our own back then in New Zealand because it belonged to no one time or place, but rather was right for any time or place as a cry for justice and peace. A few years later, in 1969, “Blowin’ in the Wind” would take on a new and more immediate meaning for me, as I participated as a member of HART (Halt All Racist Tours), a student organization protesting the New Zealand rugby tours of apartheid South Africa. Now the song’s reach had expanded, beyond the U.S. civil rights struggle that was its original backdrop. It was also about Nelson Mandela and others, sentenced by the apartheid regime to life imprisonment with hard labor on Robben Island—within clear sight of the pleasant beaches of Cape Town. Before 1967, New Zealand had been sending racially selected teams to play against whites-only rugby teams in South Africa. Then Maori players were allowed to play with the status “honorary white.” “Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head / Pretending he just doesn’t see?”—those lines easily came to mind as I joined those marches. In these years the song also became an anthem as we demonstrated against my country’s symbolically important and militarily insignificant involvement in Vietnam: “Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly / Before they’re forever banned?”

      “Blowin’ in the Wind” worked pretty well for those occasions, as it had for the seminal civil rights protest March on Washington on August 28, 1963, there sung not by Bob Dylan, but by Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan himself sang two songs from his as-yet-unreleased album of that year, The Times They Are A-Changin’, first “When the Ship Comes In,” accompanied by Joan Baez, and then on his own, “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” In spite of its historical role at moments such as these, “Blowin’ in the Wind” can’t now, and couldn’t then, simply be labeled a protest song. From his first known performance of the song, in April 1962 at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, Dylan struggled to free it from such categorization. Here’s the way the songwriter—that’s what he was, it needs to be stressed, not a protester—introduced the song back then:

      This here ain’t a protest song or anything like that, ’cause I don’t write protest songs. … I’m just writing it as something to be said, for somebody, by somebody.

      Too late. As the Roman poet Horace (65–8 BC) put it, “Once it’s let loose the word flies off and can’t be called back.” Dylan couldn’t call back the song, but he soon stopped singing it in concert. He only performed it a handful of times during the decade in which it had become an anthem, including a memorable performance for his debut at the Newport Folk Festival on the evening of July 26, 1963. The memory of that show would help to fuel a sense of betrayal in the minds of folk and protest song purists not only at the next Newport festival in 1964, when Dylan opted not to play the song, but especially and finally at Newport in 1965, when he traded his traditional solo acoustic performance for one backed by Mike Bloomfield’s electric guitar. Things had already changed at Newport the previous year, when Dylan played new, still-unreleased songs “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the latter showing how astonishingly complex and poetic his language and song had become. The lyrics of “It Ain’t Me, Babe” almost seemed to be directed to fans who had come expecting a repeat of “Blowin’ in the Wind” from the year before: “Go ’way from my window / Leave at your own chosen speed / I’m not the one you want, babe / I’m not the one you need.” The end of the refrain, “It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe,” in hindsight, came across as a warning of what would happen at the next year’s festival, on July 25, 1965. That evening, with Bloomfield’s howling electric guitar riffs coming out of the darkness of the stage, alternating at times line by line with Dylan’s singing, Dylan delivered the message: “Well I try my best / To be just like I am / But everybody wants you / To be just like them / They say sing while you slave and I just get bored / I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.” The acoustic Dylan that folk fans loved hadn’t gone away, but the song they had heard and loved two years before was silenced for the time being. Something else was happening that many folk purists, particularly older ones, along with those in the antiwar movement, were just not ready for. The songs of those years, culminating in the “thin, wild mercury music” of Blonde on Blonde, as Dylan himself described it, had entered another universe. In just fifteen months, from March 22, 1965, to May 16, 1966, Dylan recorded and released three albums—Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde—that would establish and perfect the entirely new genre of folk-rock, a convenient label, even if it was not to Dylan’s liking.

      As the years went on, for people who stopped following Dylan’s new music, who booed at the concerts of 1966 and were radicalized by the deepening involvement in Vietnam, Dylan was frozen in time, only those few songs relevant to what now mattered. He was useful as a protest singer, joined at the hip to that acoustic version of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “Masters of War,” the other great song on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan that was adopted as a protest anthem, was addressed directly to those who build the weapons and send the young men to die for the wars from which they profit. Like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” it created an indelible association in the minds of those who would head off to Vietnam. Dylan’s disclaimer about not writing protest songs made back in 1962 at Gerde’s hadn’t worked. His music, powerful from the beginning, would take on a life of its own. Dylan didn’t turn up at the protest marches of 1965 and later to sing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” but singers like Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and others unknown and without fame would take over for him, at marches, in student СКАЧАТЬ