Bob dylan by greil marcu.., p.33
Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, page 33
—Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957
Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.
I say “I” even though I didn’t actually bomb the Pentagon—we bombed it, in the sense that Weatherman organized and claimed it . . . Some details cannot be told. Some friends and comrades have been in prison for decades; others, including Bernadine, spent months and months locked up for refusing to talk or give handwriting samples to federal grand juries. Consequences are real for people, and that’s part of this story, too. But the government was dead wrong, and we were right. In our conflict we don’t talk; we don’t tell. We never confess.
When activists were paraded before grand juries, asked to name names, to humiliate themselves and to participate in destroying the movement, most refused and went to jail without saying a word. Outside they told the press, I didn’t do it, but I dug it. I recall John Brown’s strategy over a century ago—he shot all the members of the grand jury investigating his activities in Kansas.
—Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days, September 2001
“You don’t know where she is?” I asked again. He shrugged again, and I said, “OK.” I let the automatic dangle from my hand as I waited for the sound of a jet making its final approach over the motel. “Last chance,” I said before the noise was too loud for him to hear. He shrugged again. “You know I’m not going to kill you, don’t you?” I said. He shook his head, but his eyes smiled. He might be a piece of shit but Jackson had some balls on him. Either that or he was more frightened of his business associates than he was of me. That was a real mistake on his part. When the landing jet swept over the motel, I leaned down and pumped two rounds into his right foot.
“You didn’t have to shoot him twice,” Trahearne said.
“Once to get his attention,” I said, “and once to let him know I was serious.”
—James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss, 1978
The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale, they may not reach the level of many others—for example, Clinton’s 1998 bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people.
—Noam Chomsky, 13 September 2001
Over the years since the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979, the [American] public has become tolerably familiar with the idea that there are Middle Easterners of various shades and stripes who do not like them . . . With cell phones still beeping piteously from under the rubble, it probably seems indecent to most people to ask if the United States has ever done anything to invite such awful hatred.
—Christopher Hitchens, The Guardian (London),
13 September 2001
What we saw on Tuesday, terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us what we probably deserve . . . The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy forty million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, the abortionists, the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make an alternative lifestyle, to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, “You helped this happen.”
—Rev. Jerry Falwell, 700 Club, 13 September 2001
Responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it.
—Salman Rushdie, “In Good Faith,” 1990
The water was rising, got up in my bed
Lord, the water was rolling, got up to my bed
I thought I would take a trip, Lord, out on the days I slept.
—Charley Patton, “High Water Everywhere Part II,” 1929
I was stranded in Chicago until late last night. On the runway in Newark on Monday at 8 A.M.—that was OK by one day; on the runway at O’Hare on Tuesday at 8.30—that wasn’t so great. The airport shut down, and we were left to make our way into a chaotic Chicago of semi-evacuation. After three days and five plane reservations cancelled, I finally found a car and drove home. Eight hundred miles of flags, licenses from everywhere and bumper stickers like MY PRESIDENT IS CHARLTON HESTON and HOW’S MY DRIVING / DIAL 1-800-EAT-SHIT. With my finger on the pulse of the nation, I pulled in about 10 P.M.
—Hal Foster, Princeton, New Jersey, e-mail, 15 September 2001
For the first time in America, except during the Civil War and the World War, people were afraid to say whatever came to their tongues. On the streets, on trains, at theatres, men looked about to see who might be listening before they dared so much as say there was a drought in the West, for someone might suppose they were blaming the drought on the Chief! . . . Every moment one felt fear, nameless and omnipresent. They were jumpy as men in a plague district. Any sudden sound, any unexplained footstep, any unfamiliar script on an envelope made them startle; and for months they never felt secure enough to let themselves go, in complete sleep.
—Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here, 1935
Gloom and sadness and bereavement just hang in the air. My local firemen were killed, and the whole area is plastered with missing-people flyers: someone’s little daughter who had accompanied her mother to work, endless husbands and wives and daughters and sons and best friends; destroyed people.
—Emily Marcus, Charles Street and Greenwich Avenue,
Manhattan, e-mail, 15 September 2001
High water rising, rising night and day
All the gold and silver being stolen away
Big Joe Turner looked east and west from the dark rooms of his mind
He made it to Kansas City, Twelfth Street and Vine
Nothing standing there
—Bob Dylan, “High Water (For Charley Patton),” September 2001
The ship? Great God, where is the ship?
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851
PART SEVEN
Find a Grave, 2001-2004
REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10
Salon
26 November 2001
3) findagrave.com. It was Connie Nisinger, a high school librarian in the Midwest, who decided that this interesting site needed a picture of the final resting place of Billy Lyons, shot dead in St. Louis on Christmas Day, 1895, his corpse kicked through time ever after in the countless versions of “Stag-o-lee,” “Stacker Lee” and “Stagger Lee.” Click “Search by name,” type in “William Lyons,” and there is Lyons’s plot in St. Peter’s Cemetery in St. Louis, sec. 5, lot 289. The site allows you to “Leave flowers and a note for this person”: keep clicking and you can leave a cigar or a beer instead. Advertising bars include “Contact Your High School Classmates”—to find their graves?
Salon
10 December 2001
10) Cameron Crowe: director, Vanilla Sky (DreamWorks/Paramount). Charles Taylor writes: “In Vanilla Sky, the Cruizesuzs, Tom and Penelope, recreate the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. May God have mercy on us all.”
NOT SINGING TOO FAST
Interview
February 2002
“I don’t think she could bear not to be in the headlines,” said a professor two weeks after Susan Sontag’s instantly notorious New Yorker comment on the September 11 mass murders as “a consequence of specific American alliances and actions”—there apparently being no need to name what they were. The woman speaking had lived through Auschwitz and, as a dissident intellectual, through three decades of a postwar Stalinist regime; at seventy-two she suffered no fools. But Sontag was no different from so many others, from novelists to reporters, from columnists to philosophers, who after that day stepped forward to deny that anything had been done that required any rethinking of anything at all. None had changed his or her mind in the slightest about anything. Nearly every argument was intended to congratulate the speaker for having seen all the way around the event even before it happened. The speakers could have said what President Dwight Eisenhower once said: “Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.”
Perhaps more than those called to other callings, artists work in the dark—and without artists, society would enter the future blind. “I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me,” as Bob Dylan once put it; the best artists trust that instinct. Especially in a time of chaos—when so many are insisting that what one might feel as chaos is still order—artists can explore, track and map the wilderness of uncertainty and doubt that ordinary political speech means to deny. Rather than calculating what will do the most good or please the most people, artists can trust their own blind bets, without calculating any effects whatsoever. That doesn’t mean art has no effects; it means the best artists accept that they have no control over what those effects might be. But the speech of artists—the language their work speaks—can be as impoverished as that of anybody else.
I think one reason so many people think of the firefighters and police officers who were called to the World Trade Center on September 11 as heroes—those who lived and those who didn’t—is that as they acted to save their city and their fellow citizens, they kept their mouths shut. They had neither the time or the need to justify, apologize, or explain. Perhaps singers and musicians, who like political actors engage in public speech, have something to learn from firemen and police officers, from people whose extraordinary but also everyday heroism now keeps the word hero from being too easily applied.
What singers and musicians might have to learn is this: when you have nothing to say, it is not incumbent upon you, as a public person, to say anything. “[He] made it very clear he’d written the song about the state of things post 9/11,” San Francisco Chronicle critic James Sullivan said to me about Rufus Wainwright’s debut of his song “Eleven Eleven” during a performance last November. “The first lines were ‘Woke up this morning, it was 11:11,’ or ‘. . . the clock said 11:11’—I distinctly remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh. The dreaded journal entry.’ I like Rufus plenty, but the song struck me like it was his dutiful songwriter’s homework project.” At the austere September benefit concert “America: A Tribute to Heroes,” Bruce Springsteen offered his song “My City of Ruins”—and, really, you could answer its chorus of “Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up!” with, “Shut up, God damn it! Give me time to despair! Give me time to hate!” Did the song, written two years ago for the residents of Asbury Park, New Jersey, need to be sung in this utterly different context? Wouldn’t it have been more powerful, more shocking—more of an affirmation of the terrorist attacks not as a “dose of reality,” as Susan Sontag described them, but as a rent in reality—for an artist as eloquent and honest as Springsteen to step forward and attest that for the moment he had nothing to say?
“Let us not talk falsely now,” Bob Dylan sang in “All Along the Watchtower,” three years after his comment on chaos, by then in the middle of the Vietnam War, just before the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. How do you do that? In a time of public crisis, when, more than oneself, one’s community is in jeopardy, from within or from without, it may be that a citizen, and especially a citizen who is also an artist, avoids speaking falsely by offering nothing less than the very best of what he or she has to say—which sometimes might mean nothing at all.
REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10
Salon
25 February 2002
4/5) Dave Van Ronk: The Folkways Years, 1959-1961 (Smithsonian Folkways) and No Dirty Names (Verve Folkways, 1966). When he died February 10th at sixty-five, Van Ronk left behind a well of generosity and affection. Many of those who passed through the Greenwich Village folk milieu in the 1960s, perhaps most, learned the classics from him—“In the Pines,” “Careless Love,” “Spike Driver’s Moan,” “Betty and Dupree”—but as The Folkways Years makes plain, what set Van Ronk apart from those with whom he shared his place and time was not his ability to bring the old music to life. Only rarely, as on the shattering “Zen Koans Gonna Rise Again” from No Dirty Names, one of his few original compositions—the sardonic title instantly dissolving into a chant of self-loathing as the “Mayor of MacDougal Street” looks down from his railroad flat at the junkies hustling their women in the doorways—did he sing anything you couldn’t have heard someone else sing better. Van Ronk was different because he was what so many people think they want to be, if only they could find the time: a man whose life was a gesture of welcoming, a storyteller whose stories allowed those who were listening to imagine that they themselves were in the story, at the same time sitting back in the warmth of Van Ronk’s presence, listening to their own adventures.
HOW GOOD CAN IT GET
Interview
November 2002
“How Good It Can Get” is a typically expert Wallflowers tune—and a key to why their new Red Letter Days is a break through the wall of craft and moderation the group has always played behind.
Since the band’s debut ten years ago with The Wallflowers, when leader Jakob Dylan was twenty-two, their music has rolled through the radio with an ease Dylan’s own father never mastered. “One Headlight,” from the huge 1996 album Bringing Down the Horse, so dominated the radio in 1997 that some people figured Bob Dylan wouldn’t release his rocks-and-gravel comeback Time Out of Mind until his son made room for it.
On “How Good It Can Get” the singer is introducing a woman to sex. “We’ll make a lover / Out of you yet,” he promises with infinite condescension—with an and who is this “we”? hanging in the background as the song moves on. Red Letter Days has already kicked off with the life-is-great testament “When You’re on Top”—which on the radio sounds more like a commercial than a single (music this vapidly enthusiastic can sell anything) and will end with “Here in Pleasantville” (few will be surprised by the revelation that all is not pleasant in a place called Pleasantville). But a certain momentum is building in “How Good It Can Get,” and you might wonder why the musician in Jakob Dylan seems never to have asked himself the same question not even hiding in the phrase.
He answers the question of how good it can get on Red Letter Days—and it’s something to hear. The violence of “Everybody Out of the Water,” the hammering choruses of “Too Late to Quit,” the rising groove in “See You When I Get There,” the fists-shaking-in-your-face noise of “Everything I Need,” the grinding of brags against doubts in “Feels Like Summer Again”—something as apparently small as the willingness to throw a phrase like “makes me sick” into a melody that seems to promise no trouble for anyone—all of it testifies to a willingness to break through to the other side, and to what you can send back when you make it.
“Everybody Out of the Water” (originally called “New Frontier”) is part watching television last September, looking at the ruins in downtown New York, trying to believe what you were seeing. It’s part “London Calling”—as it appears on the Clash’s 1979 album of the same name, not in this year’s creepy Jaguar commercial (pronounced “Zshag-u-ahr” by the pitchwoman). It’s part answer record to Bob Dylan’s 1967 “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood),” or his 2001 “High Water (For Charley Patton)”—itself an answer record to Patton’s 1929 “High Water Everywhere,” which was an answer to the 1927 Mississippi flood. The promise of John F. Kennedy’s presidency—the New Frontier, named, some cynics have suggested, after the hotel where Elvis Presley made his Las Vegas debut in 1956—hangs over the music as the summation of all broken promises, or what’s left when the floodwaters finally recede. The song gives no quarter, quiets down only to let the clouds gather again, to make the climb of the rhythm back to the top of the song’s mountain more exciting than it was the last time around. “On your mark / Get set, let’s go” is the first line: Can the music keep up with its subject, or even outrun it?
“Everybody out of the water!” Jakob Dylan shouts again and again. When he says, “The city’s been leveled,” right at the start, you don’t quite believe him—not yet. But the guitar figure snaking closely around a spot the whole song is circling from a shrinking distance convinces you the story is for real. “This is the New Frontier / Everybody out of the water” is suddenly frightening.
And then Dylan is doing things he’s never even hinted at before. The word “shit” hurts. The word “sucks” is a void—the way Dylan mouths the word is pure American speech, a complete rejection of all authority, particularly the authority of people saying everything is going to be all right.
That is the message Dylan’s own music has communicated in the past. Now he has opened up a hole deep enough to bury his previous hits—and so when on Red Letter Days the suggestion comes that things might indeed be all right, you can believe it’s not an idle notion. But it won’t feel as good as the argument that everything has gone to hell.
Wallflowers, Red Letter Days (Interscope, 2001).
REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10
Salon
4 November 2002
10) Bob Dylan: “Train of Love,” from Kindred Spirits: A Tribute to the Songs of Johnny Cash (Lucky Dog). Aren’t tribute albums terrible? Dylan almost never does good work on them, but here, surrounded by Dwight Yoakam, Steve Earle (it’s against the law to make a tribute album without him), Travis Tritt, Keb’ Mo’, the unspeakable Hank Williams, Jr., Bruce Springsteen, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris, and Rosanne Cash, he gets real, real gone, though not before pausing to wave goodbye: “I used to sing this song before I ever wrote a song,” Dylan says before “Train of Love.” “I also want to thank you for standing up for me, way back when.” Way back in 1965, onstage at the Newport Folk Festival, where, as the current revisionist line has it, nothing actually happened.
