Tangled Up in Bob (Page 3)

But if there is one group with whom Dylan currently resists association despite, or perhaps because of, his formidable contribution, it's the 1960s counterculture. When the brash young Dylan of '65 quipped, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," he might have thought he could make it into Bartlett's (he did), but how could he have predicted that, just five years later, three allusively named Weathermen would set off a bomb on Manhattan's West 11th Street and accidentally die in his name? And when it did happen, and self-styled "Dylanologists" were digging through his trash, chanting outside his apartment and parachuting into his Woodstock home, how could he have felt? Hardly like a member of Woodstock Nation. Mike Marqusee's Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art is sensitive to this incongruity. Years before the Weathermen, Dylan marched with SNCC and was an opening act for Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. But his period of political engagement was but a sliver of time (albeit glorious), from 1962-63. And he has since admitted, in Chronicles, to having a soft spot for Barry Goldwater and has still refused to take a position on the war in Vietnam or, more recently, Iraq.

The cover of the book has Dylan getting his Guthrie on circa 1963, complete with a plaid work shirt, tattered jeans and a waterfront in the background, just waiting to unite some workers of the world. Marqusee writes like a professional journalist but isn't out of his depth when he busts out the Adorno and Marcuse. He's an anguished, aging New Lefty who wants to let Bob be Bob but wishes he'd crawl out his window a little more to fight the good fights. Dylan, of course, is the last person who ever wanted to be a voice of a generation, as he told Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes last winter, and as he says repeatedly in Chronicles. But Marqusee and Dylan are also keenly, painfully aware that the moment for Dylan to be that voice has long passed anyway, even if some stray, incoherent remarks before a subpar performance at Live Aid twenty years ago did help raise millions of dollars for struggling American farmers. Dylan may have allowed Bank of Montreal to use "The Times They Are A-Changin'" in 1996, but the songs of that 1962-63 period continue to provide a soundtrack to civil (and, in the case of the Weathermen, uncivil) disobedience. At a recent protest in the streets of Taipei, the words of Dylan still resound, even as they are somewhat lost in translation: "How many rocky roads must the people of Taiwan walk, before really achieving democracy?"

Marqusee doesn't idealize the Dylan of that period. Even when he was pointin' fingers at the assassins of Medgar Evers or the sociopathic good old boy who knocked off poor Hattie Carroll, he was still a royal pain in the ass: Accepting the Tom Paine Award, he got toasted before the speech and told the crowd, weeks after the Kennedy assassination, that he identified with Lee Harvey Oswald. As Marqusee aptly put it: "Throughout the sixties, Dylan is writing both within the historical tide and against it." If you remember the 1960s, the cliché goes, you weren't really there. But for Dylan, emblematic and inspiring as he was, he wasn't there, he was gone. At one point, after Marqusee has established an earnest, responsible argument about Dylan's place in the 1960s, he issues the following judgment about Dylan's capacities as a prose writer: "Without the verse structure, without the disciplines of popular music, Dylan flounders, as readers of Tarantula will know." That statement was perfectly fair back when Chimes of Freedom was published in 2003. Marqusee must have rued it as soon as he received his review copy of Chronicles.

Marqusee is correct that Tarantula, Dylan's 1971 novel, is, despite the claims of a minority of well-meaning and sensitive apologists, an incoherent mess, a sophomoric imitation of Finnegans Wake that without a rock-star byline would have languished in a publisher's slush pile. In Chronicles, Dylan steers clear of Joyce and instead recalls the plain-spoken voice of The Grapes of Wrath and Bound for Glory, although its hidden allusions and true intent could prove to be as elusive and opaque as in a Modernist novel. But it is compulsively readable, a kooky journey where he can remember every shop and bar that lined Bleecker Street in 1961, every blade of grass outside Archibald MacLeish's house in 1970 and every thought that ever went into the making of two curios from his oeuvre: 1970's New Morning and 1989's Oh Mercy. While there are many puzzling observations and omissions, Dylan is very clear when it comes to how the hero of Chronicles differs from that of Chimes of Freedom. "The big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities." Oh, that's all.

Dylan continues to perform those songs as a vehicle for expressing powerful new realities, but the further he gets from their political moment, the less they are about pointing his finger at a topical issue and the more they become eternal and strange. Nowhere is this more recent incarnation of old protest anthems more apparent than in the closing credits of Masked & Anonymous. Dylan starred in the film, co-wrote the script and made a movie that was almost a complete train wreck (although a fascinating one for revealing the allegorical contents of Dylan's brain). But then, on the voiceover, Dylan intones a monologue that introduces an eerie version of "Blowin' in the Wind," not one that demands answers to questions but a slower, weirder version that never expects to really figure out how many roads a man must walk down. "Truth and beauty are in the eye of the beholder," Dylan rasps as the song begins playing, doffing his cowboy hat to Keats. But he follows that up with a gnomic shrug, in what could be an apt response to all those writers and critics prophesizing with their pens: "I stopped trying to figure everything out a long time ago."

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