Bob dylan by greil marcu.., p.50
Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, page 50
“When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,”
When We Were Good (Cantwell)
“When You Go Your Way and I Go Mine,”
“When You’re on Top” (Wallflowers)
“Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat),”
Where Dead Voices Gather (Tosches)
“Where Did Vincent Van Gogh,”
Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger
“Where I Should Always Be” (Band)
Whishaw, Ben
White, Barry
White, Bukka
White, Josh
White, Vince
White Album (Beatles)
Whitehead, Colson
Whitman, Walt
Whitman, Slim
“Who Do You Love,” (Diddley/ Hawkins/Band)(Diddley et al.) (Hawkins)
“Who Killed Davey Moore?,”
“Wigwam,”
Wild Boys of the Road (Wellman)
“Wild Mountain Thyme,”
Wilentz, Sean
“Will Jesus Wash the Blood from Your Hands,”
“Will the Circle Be Unbroken” (Burnett)
Williams, Hank
Williams, Sue
Williams, William Carlos
Williams Jr., Hank
Williamson, John Lee “Sonny Boy,”
Williamson II, Sonny Boy (Rice Miller)
Willis, Bruce
Willner, Hal
Wilson, Al
Wilson, Edmund
Wilson, Flip
Wilson, Jackie
Wilson, Murry
Wilson, Woodrow
“Wind and Rain” (Crooked Still)
Winehouse, Amy
Winner, Langdon
Winter, Johnny
Winterland (San Francisco)
“With God on Our Side,” 409
Withers, Pick
Wojtanek, Allyse
“Won’t Get Fooled Again” (Who)
Wood, Ronnie
Woodrow, Bill
Woodstock
Woodstock (Hendrix)
Woodstock Nation (Hoffman)
“Woogie Boogie,”
“Words by Heart” (Cyrus)
Wordsworth, William
Workman, Nimrod
World Gone Wrong
World Trade Center
“Worried Man Blues” (Carter Family)
“Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train, The” (Macon)
Wright, Frank Lloyd
Writings and Drawings (Dylan)
Wynette, Tammy
X
X
Y
“Yazoo Street Scandal” (Band)
“Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread,”
Yeltsin, Boris
Yoakam, Dwight
“You Angel You,”
“You Been Hiding Too Long,”
“You Belong to Me,”
“You Can’t Catch Me” (Berry)
“You Changed My Life,”
“You Don’t Own Me” (Gore)
Young, Mona Lisa
Young, Neil
Young Adults (Pinkwater)
Young Mr. Lincoln (Ford)
“Youngblood” (Coasters/Russell)
“You’re Gonna Make Me Miss You When You Go,”
Z
Zantzinger, William
Zeitlyn, Mira Yom Tov
“Zen Koans Gonna Rise Again” (Van Ronk)
Zevon, Warren
Zimmerman, Abraham
Zinn Howard
“Zombie” (Cranberries)
ZZ Top
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Greil Marcus is the author of When That Rough God Goes Riding and Like a Rolling Stone (both with PublicAffairs), The Old Weird America, The Shape of Things to Come, Mystery Train, Dead Elvis, In the Fascist Bathroom, and other books; a twentieth anniversary edition of his Lipstick Traces was published in 2009. With Werner Sollors he is the editor of A New Literary History of America, published by Harvard University Press. Since 2000 he has taught at Berkeley, Princeton, Minnesota, and the New School in New York; his column Real Life Rock Top 10 appears regularly in the Believer. He lives in Berkeley.
PUBLICAFFAIRs is a publishing house founded in 1997. It is a tribute to the standards, values, and flair of three persons who have served as mentors to countless reporters, writers, editors, and book people of all kinds, including me.
I. F. STONE, proprietor of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, combined a commitment to the First Amendment with entrepreneurial zeal and reporting skill and became one of the great independent journalists in American history. At the age of eighty, Izzy published The Trial of Socrates, which was a national bestseller. He wrote the book after he taught himself ancient Greek.
BENJAMIN C. BRADLEE was for nearly thirty years the charismatic editorial leader of The Washington Post. It was Ben who gave the Post the range and courage to pursue such historic issues as Watergate. He supported his reporters with a tenacity that made them fearless, and it is no accident that so many became authors of influential, best-selling books.
ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN, the chief executive of Random House for more than a quarter century, guided one of the nation’s premier publishing houses. Bob was personally responsible for many books of political dissent and argument that challenged tyranny around the globe. He is also the founder and was the longtime chair of Human Rights Watch, one of the most respected human rights organizations in the world.
For fifty years, the banner of Public Affairs Press was carried by its owner, Morris B. Schnapper, who published Gandhi, Nasser, Toynbee, Truman, and about 1,500 other authors. In 1983 Schnapper was described by The Washington Post as “a redoubtable gadfly.” His legacy will endure in the books to come.
Peter Osnos, Founder and Editor-at-Large
1 The album the Rolling Stones cobbled together in 1967, during the Summer of Love (“Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair”), in order to have something on the market in the face of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper juggernaut.
2 Included in Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat. New York: New Directions Press, 1946, 1961. xvi.
3 Playboy, March 1966: “PLAYBOY: Mistake or not, what made you decide to go the rock-’n’-roll route? DYLAN: Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I’m in a card game. Then I’m in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a “before” in a Charles Atlas “before and after” ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy—he ain’t so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I’m in Omaha. It’s so cold there, by this time I’m robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain’t much to look at, but who’s built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything’s going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say? PLAYBOY: And that’s how you became a rock-’n’-roll singer? DYLAN: No, that’s how I got tuberculosis.” I couldn’t resist.
4 Michael Lang, one of the organizers of the 1969 Woodstock festival.
5 Before the Flood eventually reached #3 on the Billboard charts.
6 With a last line from Rolling Stone, 13 March 1975.
7 Jann Wenner, the editor-in-chief and publisher of Rolling Stone, disagreed with my review and decided to write his own. When it appeared two issues later it was widely taken as an editor sandbagging his own reviewer, but nothing could have been further from the truth. I encouraged Jann to put his own words in his own paper (as we called it then); just as he edited me, I edited him.
8 You never know; in 1983 the cover art for Saved was replaced by a conventional depiction of Dylan onstage with his band of the time.
9 Written for the New York Review of Books; unpublished.
10 Though Dylan did his best to speak to Wiseman, making a home recording of his 1939 “Remember Me (When the Candle Lights Are Gleaming)” in East Orange, New Jersey, in 1961; a fragment of the song even turns up in D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, his 1967 documentary on Dylan’s 1965 tour of the U.K.
11 The friend was Paul Nelson. Born in Warren, Minnesota, in 1936, he died in New York City in 2006; a great critic, who contributed the essay on Bob Dylan for the original edition of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll (New York: Rolling Stone-Random House, 1976; edited by Jim Miller), he served as a model for the character Perkus Tooth in Jonathan Lethem’s novel Chronic City (New York: Doubleday, 2009). What Dylan told Nelson became an undercurrent all through the middle chapters of Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume One—but while there he pictured himself as a Hurstwood, a bum in the alley outside the back door of a theater in which he himself was performing, he never did make that small-club tour to South America.
12 A talk given at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, 4 October 1988.
13 A few weeks after the elections of 1994, when the Republican Party turned out the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, a thirtieth anniversary celebration of the Free Speech Movement was held on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. This extemporaneous talk, transcribed from a recording, was given at a December 3 panel called “The Current Political Situation”; the other speakers were Ringo Hallinan, Jack Weinberg, Ruth Rosen, and Mario Savio, who spoke last. Threepenny Review published Savio’s talk, also unwritten, and mine, both without any rewriting into essay form.
14 Zantzinger, twenty-four, screamed racial epithets at Hattie Carroll, fifty-one, who was working at the hotel where the party Zantzinger was attending was held, and struck her with a toy cane. She later suffered a stroke and died. After a sordid life, during which he was convicted of crimes including extorting rents from poor black families on property he did not own, Zantzinger died at sixty-nine in 2009. To the end he cursed Bob Dylan for making his name a byword for evil: “He’s a no-account son of a bitch,” he says in Howard Sounes’s 2001 Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan. “He’s like the scum of a bag of the earth.”
15 Mark Dayton won.
16 As noted above, but with more detail: “WASHINGTON-Half a dozen legislators sat a few feet away, under the crystal chandeliers of the East Room of the White House, as Bob Dylan sang ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’,’ poker-faced. ‘Come senators, congressman, please heed the call,’ he rasped. ‘Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall.’ His tone was rough but almost wistful; he had turned his old exhortation into an autumnal waltz. Afterward, he stepped off-stage and shook President Obama’s hand. It was part of ‘In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement.’” Jon Pareles, “Music That Changed History and Still Resonates,” New York Times, 10 February 2010.
17 Collected in Cantwell’s If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois, 2009; and in Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular, edited by Andrew Perchuck and Rani Singh. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010.
18 “I believed Dave Guard in The Kingston Trio,” Bob Dylan would write in 2004 in his book Chronicles. “I believed that he would kill or already did kill poor Laura Foster. I believed he’d kill someone else, too. I didn’t think he was playing around.”
19 Drawn from liner notes written for The Band—A Musical History (Capitol, 2005), and understandably rejected.
20 First given as a talk at the Morgan Library, New York, 16 November 2006 and at the conference Highway 61 Revisited, University of Minnesota, 25 March 2007.
21 An introduction to “Great Lyrics,” a chapbook published by the Guardian (London).
22 I gave a first, short version of this talk at Columbia University in 2005, on a panel with Sean Wilentz and Christopher Ricks, who wiped the floor with both of us; that was published in the Winter 2006 number of Threepenny Review. I’ve continued to revise and adapt it, as times changed the song and people continued to try to get the song to change the times. The most recent version was part of Forever Young? Changing Images of America, the European American Studies Association conference held in Dublin 26-29 March 2010.
23 It was the same name that Andreas Simonyi, the Hungarian ambassador to the United States, had chosen for his own Washington, D.C., band two years before. “When I was listening to rock music” in Hungary, he told the New York Times, “I became part of the West. This was my link to the free world.” Band members included Lincoln P. Bloomfield, Jr., a former assistant secretary of state for military affairs; Alexander Vershbow, then the U.S. Ambassador to Russia; and, not really as a ringer, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, best known to the world at large as the lead guitarist for Steely Dan, but, since the Reagan administration, best known in Washington as a tireless advocate of missile defense schemes. In 2005 the Coalition of the Willing played the Walter Reed Army Medical Center; while they did not play “Masters of War,” they did lead off with Johnny Rivers’s “Secret Agent Man.” In 2007, in response to a taunt from the fake right-wing TV talk show host Stephen Colbert that “Hungarians can’t play the guitar,” Simonyi appeared on Colbert’s show. Raising an electric guitar with an eagle jutting out of its body, Simonyi snapped off one hot riff after another before announcing that Colbert must have confused Hungarians with Finns—who when it came to the electric guitar, Simonyi said, totally “suck.” The jazz drummer Bobby Previte formed a third Coalition of the Willing in New York in 2006. With Charlie Hunter on guitar and Steve Bernstein on trumpet, the band became the first under its name with an official release: Coalition of the Willing (Ropeadope, 2006), which came in a Stalinist jacket. A second album, All’s Well That Ends (download only, 2008), featured both the singer Andrew M. and “Let’s Start a War.”
Copyright © 2010 by Greil Marcus.
Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™,
a member of the Perseus Books Group.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 1321, New York, NY 10107.
PublicAffairs books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.
Editorial production by Marrathon Production Services. www.marrathon.net
Set in 12-point Apollo
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010934404
eISBN : 978-1-586-48919-9
Greil Marcus, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus
