http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/08/sean-wilentz-bob-dylan-in-america.html
August 16, 2010
"Bob Dylan in America," by the historian Sean Wilentz, will be
published in September by Doubleday. The following excerpt is Chapter
2 of the book.
--
Penetrating Aether: The Beat Generation and Allen Ginsberg's America
by Sean Wilentz
Aaron Copland's first important musical project after Billy the Kid
was to write the score, in 1939, for a film by the innovative
director Lewis Milestone, made from John Steinbeck's novella about
hard-luck migrant workers in California, Of Mice and Men. Copland had
been trying to break into film work since 1937 but was still known in
Hollywood as a composer of modernist art music and hence was
considered too difficult for American moviegoers. Thanks in part to
his good friend Harold Clurman of the Group Theatre, who had
relocated to Hollywood, and inspired in part by Virgil Thomson's film
work, Copland finally got his foot in the door, received the
Steinbeck assignment, and produced a score in his new style of
"imposed simplicity" (although without the obvious borrowing from
folk music or cowboy songs). The film won immediate critical praise,
as did Copland's accessible adaptation of modernist
techniquesincluding, daringly for the time, dissonanceto his
score's wide-open, pastoral evocations. The following year, Copland's
music for Of Mice and Men earned him two Academy Award nominations
and the National Board of Review Award.
Late one night in 1940, Jack Kerouac, not yet out of high school, saw
Milestone's filmpossibly in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts,
but most likely in Manhattan's Times Squareand left the theater
envisaging phantoms flitting out of sight beneath the streetlamps.
The movie, as well as the ghostly aftermath, stuck with him,
particularly its rackety opening scene, carried along by Copland's
dramatic music. Fifteen years later, Kerouac described it in the
"54th Chorus" of his large clutch of poems Mexico City Blues:
Once I went to a movie
At midnight, 1940, Mice
And Men, the name of it,
The Red Block Boxcars
Rolling by (on the Screen)
Yessir
life
finally
gets
tired
of
living
Twenty years after Kerouac wrote those lines, on a crisp
scarlet-ocher November afternoon at Edson Cemetery in Lowell, Bob
Dylan and Allen Ginsberg visited Kerouac's grave, trailed by a
reporter, a photographer, a film crew, and various others (including
the young playwright Sam Shepard). Dylan had performed the night
before at the University of Lowell, on a tour of New England with a
thrown-together troupe of new friends and old, including Ginsberg,
which called itself the Rolling Thunder Revue. Ginsberg, who became
excited when the tour buses reached the city, met up with some of
Kerouac's relatives and drinking buddies and tried to immerse Dylan's
entourage in Kerouacian lore. Shepard, who had joined the troupe
ostensibly to write the screenplay for a movie Dylan planned to make
of the tour, duly recorded in his travel log the names of real-life
Lowell sites described in the Duluoz LegendKerouac's collective,
Faulknerian name for the autobiographical novels, revolving around
his fictional alter ego Jack Duluoz, that constituted the main body
of his work. But at Edson Cemetery, Ginsberg recited not from
Kerouac's prose but from poetry out of Mexico City Blues, including
"54th Chorus" invoking specters, fatigue, mortality, Mexico, and
John Steinbeck's boxcar America, while he and Dylan contemplated
Kerouac's headstone. And when Dylan included footage of the event in
the film he made in and about the Rolling Thunder tour, yet another
complicated cultural circuit closed, linking Kerouac listening to
Copland and watching Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men in 1940 with the
scene at Kerouac's grave in Renaldo and Clara in 1977.
Dylan knew the poems, Ginsberg later claimed. "Someone handed me
Mexico City Blues in St. Paul in 1959," Dylan told him. "It blew my
mind." It was the first poetry he'd read that spoke his own American
language, Dylan saidor so Ginsberg said he said. Maybe, maybe not.
Without question, though, Dylan read Mexico City Blues and was deeply
interested in Beat writing before he left Minneapolis for New York.
(Like other Beats and hipsters, his friend Tony Glover ordered a
paperback copy of William Burroughs's Naked Lunch from France, where
it had been published by Olympia Press in Paris in 1959 as The Naked
Lunch uncertain whether the book, deemed obscene by American
authorities, would clear customs. The book indeed arrived, and Glover
lent it to Dylan, who returned it after a couple of weeks.) And
Dylan's involvement with the writings of Kerouac, Ginsberg,
Burroughs, and the rest of the Beat generation is nearly as essential
to Dylan's biography as his immersion in rock and roll, rhythm and
blues, and then Woody Guthrie. "I came out of the wilderness and just
naturally fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemian, Be Bop crowd, it
was all pretty much connected," Dylan said in 1985. "It was Jack
Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti … I got in at the tail end of
that and it was magic … it had just as big an impact on me as Elvis Presley."
Dylan's connection to Kerouac was mainly artistic. After he arrived
in New York, he now says, he quickly outgrew the raw, aimless,
"hungry for kicks" hipsterism personified by Neal Cassady's
character, Dean Moriarty, in On the Road. Aimlessness would never
suit Dylan. And by the time Dylan had begun making a name for
himself, Kerouac had begun his descent into the alcoholism and
paranoia that would kill him in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.
Dylan never met him. But he still loved what he called Kerouac's
"breathless, dynamic bop phrases," and always would. He could relate
to Kerouac as a young man from a small declining industrial town who
had come to New York as a cultural outsider more than twenty years
earlieran unknown bursting with ideas and whom the insiders
proceeded either to lionize or to condemn, and, in any case, badly
misconstrue. Now and then, over the years to come, recognizable lines
and images of Kerouac's would surface in Dylan's lyrics, most
conspicuously in the song "Desolation Row."
Dylan's continuing link to the Beat generation, though, came chiefly
through his friend and sometime mentor Allen Ginsberg. Dylan's link
with Ginsberg dated back to the end of 1963, a pivotal moment in the
lives and careers of both men. Thereafter, in the mid-1960s, the two
would complete important artistic transitions, each touched and
supported by the other. On and off, their rapport lasted for decades.
And in 1997, in New Brunswick, Canada, Dylan would dedicate a concert
performance of "Desolation Row" to Ginsberg, his longtime comrade,
telling the audience it was Allen's favorite of his songs, on the
evening after Ginsberg died.
As with Dylan's connection to New York's Popular Front folk-music
world, his connection with the Beats had a complicated backstory. The
origins of the Beat impulse, like those of the folk revival, dated
back much further than the 1950s, let alone the 1960s, to the days of
Dylan's childhood in Duluth and Hibbing. For all the obvious
differences between the Beats and the folk-music crowdthe Beats'
affinities were with the arts of Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake, and
Charlie Parker, and not Anglo-American backwoods balladrythe Beat
writers found themselves, early, locked in conflict with some of the
same liberal critical circles around Partisan Review that decried,
for different reasons, the folksy leftism of the Popular Front,
including its high-or middlebrow version in Aaron Copland's music.
Out of that conflict emerged Beat artistic ideas that Dylan admired,
remembered, and later seized upon when he moved beyond the folk
revival. Even though Dylan invented himself within one current of
musical populism that came out of the 1930s and 1940s, he escaped
that current in the 1960swithout ever completely rejecting itby
embracing anew some of the spirit and imagery of the Beat
generation's entirely different rebellious disaffiliation and poetic
transcendence. Dylan in turn would make an enormous difference to the
surviving, transformed Beats, especially Ginsberg, each influencing
the other while their admirers forged the counterculture that
profoundly affected American life at the end of the twentieth century.
~~~
Although they were distinct and in many ways antagonistic, the folk
revival and the Beat scene shared certain ancestral connections in
the Depression-era Left, and this may help explain why the liberal
critics thought the Beats were so contemptible. Jack Kerouac's feel
for some of the texture of lower-class life and for what he called
"the warp of wood of old America"his appreciation of "the switching
moves of boxcars" in Steinbeck, Milestone, and Copland's Of Mice and
Menprovided one set of similarities. Along with several others in
the Beat orbit, including Ginsberg, Kerouac joined the left-wing
National Maritime Union in order to ship out with the merchant
marine. (Working at the NMU's headquarters on Sixteenth Street was
Ginsberg's troubled mother, Naomi.) On the West Coast, Gary Snyder
brought some of the traditions of Pacific north-woods radicalism into
his Zen poesy. But the most powerful link was through Ginsberg, who
would always be the most political of the Beat writers. In his poem
"America," which he wrote in 1956, soon after the McCarthy Red Scare,
Ginsberg confessed that he had sentimental feelings for the Wobblies,
described being brought as a boy to Communist-cell meetings, and
chanted in praise of the anarchist martyrs of the 1920s Sacco and
Vanzetti. The allusions were not merely historical.
Ginsberg's readers know about his mother, Naomi, the loyal Communist
who took him to those cell meetings, as immortalized in his poem
"Kaddish." But Naomi's was not the only left-wing political influence
inside the Ginsberg household. Ginsberg's father, Louis, taught high
school in Paterson, New Jersey, and was an accomplished mainstream
lyric poet whose verses appeared in the New York Times and other
respectable places. In his youth, though, the elder Ginsberg, then a
Eugene V. Debs socialist, published poetry in Max Eastman's Masses
and its successor, the Liberator. He then gravitated, in the late
1920s, to a loosely organized association called the Rebel Poets,
co-founded by the "proletarian" novelist Jack Conroy (who wrote The
Disinherited and was an influence on, among others, John Steinbeck
and Richard Wright). Louis did not join his wife in the Communist
Party, which added to his air of moderation. Yet, like his fellow New
Jersey poet William Carlos Williams and other non-Communists, he
published work in the Communist-leaning monthly New Masses. And he
shared in the widespread outrage that led him to contribute a poem,
"To Sacco and Vanzetti," to a commemorative volume published in 1928,
shortly after the two convicted anarchists were executed.
Hints of the Beats' left-wing genealogy lasted through the 1960s and
beyondthanks, again, chiefly to Allen Ginsbergand it made some
difference to Dylan, who, whatever his thoughts about politics and
political organizations, never lost his attraction to rebels and
outlaws. The day after the Rolling Thunder Revue left Lowell,
Ginsberg wrote a letter to his father:
Beautiful day with Dylan, beginning early afternoon visiting
Kerouac's grave plot & reading the stone … We stood in the November
sun brown leaves flying in wind & read poems from Mexico City Blues…
Dylan wants to do some scene related to Sacco & Vanzetti when we get
to Boston.
Boston's symbolic significance needed no explication between son and
father: Sacco and Vanzetti had been executed there in 1927, for the
murder they allegedly committed in nearby South Braintree seven years
earlier. It is plausible that Dylan kindled to the idea of performing
"some scene" about thema reprise, perhaps, of one of Woody Guthrie's
song tributes on his album Ballads of Sacco and Vanzetti, composed
and recorded in 1946-47 at the prompting of Moe Asch, though not
issued until 1960. But nothing came of the idea. By the time the
Rolling Thunder Revue reached Boston, Joan Baez, one of the troupe's
stars, had even ceased singing the Alfred Hayes-Earl Robinson anthem,
"Joe Hill," about the Wobbly organizer and songwriter executed in
1915a song she had featured at earlier stops during her allotted
solo portion of the show. Baez and Dylan did share the vocal on "I
Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine," Dylan's rewrite of "Joe Hill." Traces
of the old radical America persisted, long after Dylan had moved
beyond writing topical songs. But Dylan had transformed those traces
completely, as he transformed everything.
Dylan had hardly come to the Beats in search of a new political
cause; rather, he was taken (as he had been before he left Minnesota)
with their play of language as well as their spiritual estrangement
that transcended conventional politics of any kind. In this sense,
Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the others served Dylan a bit as rock and roll
didas something he had picked up in Minnesota, returned to, and
absorbed anew after he had passed through the confining left-wing
earnestness and orthodoxy of the folk revival. Ginsberg sensed
Dylan's disquiet about politics when the two men first met, and it
was one reason why he found Dylan so compelling. "He had declared his
independence of politics," Ginsberg later recalled, "because he
didn't want to be a political puppet or feel obligated to take a
stand all the time. He was above and beyond politics in an
interesting way." Although he could not help himself, at first, from
regarding Dylan, as he later put it, as "just a folksinger," Ginsberg
had heard some of Dylan's songs and understood them as something much
grander than imitative folk art or political storytelling, "an
answering call or response to the kind of American prophecy that
Kerouac had continued from Walt Whitman."
Dylan, for his part, could not yet have knownfew if any of the
Beats' young admirers didhow the original core members of the Beat
generation had been hard at work for years before they established
their reputations in the late 1950s. The Beat generation and its
aesthetic had their own long foreground; the major Beat writers began
to forge their friendships and find their literary voices in the same
1940s America that produced the Almanac Singers and Appalachian
Spring. And the conflicts of the 1950s and early 1960s between the
Beats and the liberal intellectuals the most poignant, ambivalent,
fateful, and intellectually interesting of the conflictsbegan in the
spring of 1944, nearly a decade before anyone had even heard the
phrase "Beat generation," when the Columbia College freshman Allen
Ginsberg signed up to take a Great Books course with the eminent
literary critic and Partisan Review intellectual Lionel Trilling.
~~~
Ginsberg arrived at Columbia in 1943, having taken a solemn vow that
he would dedicate his life to serving the working class, but he would
soon change course. He fell in with another student, Lucien Carr, who
introduced him to his older friend (and fellow St. Louis native)
William S. Burroughs and to a Columbia dropout, Jack Kerouac, who was
living on Morningside Heights with his girlfriend, having been
honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy on psychological grounds. In
conversation with Ginsberg, Carr formulated the aesthetics of what he
called, borrowing from William Butler Yeats, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
and, above all, Arthur Rimbaud, the "New Vision"a Left Bank bohemian
transcendentalism, at once Edenic and decadent, based on shameless
self-expression, an unhinging of the senses, and renunciation of
conventional morality.
Carr would, before long, become caught up in a bizarre honor murder
that landed him in prison for two years, and he would never become a
full-fledged author. But out of the New Vision, his friends built
ideas about spontaneous renderings of direct experience that became
the foundations of Beat writing. And through Ginsberg (whose run-ins
with Columbia authorities over relatively minor incidents would lead
to a year's suspension and delay his graduation until 1948), those
ideas came into direct contact and conflict with Trilling's more
measured conceptions of literature.
"In the early years, I tried to be open with him," Ginsberg later
told his friend the journalist Al Aronowitz about Trilling, "and laid
on him my understanding of Burroughs and Jackstories about them,
hoping he would be interested or see some freshness or light, but all
he or the others at Columbia could see was me searching for a father
or pushing myself or bucking for an instructorship, or whatever they
had been conditioned to think in terms of." In fact, Ginsberg and
Trilling actually shared some important ground, over and against
important currents in American culture, which had the effect of
making their disagreements all the more rancorous. Both were
estranged from the cult of scientific reason and the consumerist
materialism that seemed to be swamping the country during the years
just after World War II. Both had rejected the submission of art to
any strict ideology or party line; despite Ginsberg's sentimental
gestures (and an abiding sense of himself as a radical, no longer
Marxist, but Blakean) neither teacher nor student had any use for
Communist/Popular Front left doctrine. Both recoiled from the regnant
academicism of the so-called New Critics, including John Crowe
Ransom, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks, who called for the formalist
"close reading" of literature, to the exclusion of history, morality,
biography, or any other contextual considerationsthereby turning
literary analysis, according to Trilling, into "a kind of
intellectual calisthenic ritual."
Yet if Ginsberg and Trilling both saw in literature an escape route
from tyranny and torpor, they differed sharply over literature's
spiritual dimensions and possibilities. In his repudiation of
literary as well as political fellow traveling, the anti-Stalinist
Trilling looked to poetry and fiction to affirm a skeptical
liberalism, founded on what he called "the value of individual
existence in all its variousness, complexity and difficulty." He was
especially drawn to probing the ironies and ambiguities in the works
of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Henry James, E. M. Forster, George
Orwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other practitioners of what he
called "moral realism"defined not as merely "the awareness of
morality itself but of the contradictions, paradoxes and dangers of
living the moral life." Trilling's work took readers outside the
traditional insight of literary criticism into essentially
philosophical considerations of good and evil, nature and
civilization, commitment and evasion.
These difficult proving grounds of the liberal imagination afforded
little room for the kind of transcendent "freshness" and "light" that
the young Ginsberg and his bohemian friends were proclaiming. In
1945, Ginsberg touted Rimbaud to Trilling as a prophet, "unaffected
by moral compunction, by allegiance to the confused standards of a
declining age." Trilling duly read up on Rimbaud and reported that he
found in the poet's rejection of conventional social values "an
absolutism which is foreign to my nature, and which I combat." The
idea that artistic genius arose out of derangement of the senses was,
to Trilling, a dismal legacy of what he called the Romantic
movement's solipsistic, hedonist conceit that mental disturbance and
aberration were sources of spiritual health and illumination "if only
because they controvert the ways of respectable society."
Trilling's idea of transcending mundane reality through what he
called great literature's sense of "largeness and cogency" and of the
"infinite complication" of modern life struck Ginsberg as, finally, a
dodge, a retreat into conformism masked by intellectual ambiguitya
"cheap trick," he told a friend years later, that Trilling performed
to hide his own "inside irrational Life & Poetry & reduce everything
to the intellectual standard of a Time magazine report on the present
happiness and proper role of the American Egghead who's getting paid
now & has a nice job & fits in with the whole silly system." In
direct contrast, Ginsberg and the Beats developed an aesthetic that
renounced intellectual abstractions and poeticized individual lived
experiencewhat Ginsberg described in 1948, in a letter to Trilling,
as "the shadowy and heterogeneous experience of life through the
conscious mind."
By the time the teenage Bob Dylan first encountered Beat writing a
decade later, these literary skirmishes on Morningside Heights had
turned into battles between archetypes that helped lead, in turn, to
the culture wars of the 1960s and after. Beat and liberal
intellectual became locked in an antagonism that established each as
the opposite of the other in their own minds. Dylan, in Dinkytown,
had no trouble deciding which side he was on, and in Dinkytown, far
from the political trench wars of Manhattan, there was an easy
overlapping between Beat bohemianism and the scruffy authenticity of
the folk clubs. But when he arrived in New York, his head full of
Woody Guthrie, he would discover that although the two worlds
intersected, Manhattan's cultural alignments were more convoluted.
~~~
In 1958, a resourceful entrepreneur, master carpenter, bohemian, and
lover of poetry, John Mitchell, opened a coffee shop at 116 MacDougal
Street, near Bleecker, in what was once a coal cellar and which more
recently had sheltered a subterranean gay hangout, the MacDougal
Street Bar. According to Al Aronowitz, Mitchell, a native of
Brooklyn, had settled in Greenwich Village in the early 1950s, where
he befriended and, for a time, roomed with the celebrated crumbling
old Village bohemian poète maudit Maxwell Bodenheim, shortly before
Bodenheim's shocking murder in 1954. Emerging as something of a
neighborhood celebrity himself, Mitchell opened a Parisian-style
coffeehouse, Le Figaro, on the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker, saw
it become an instant hit with the locals as well as curious tourists,
then sold it at a handsome profit.
Mitchell soon had his eye on the space at 116 MacDougal, which was
dank and cramped but perfectly located for another coffee shop.
Unable to raise the ceiling, he lowered the floor and opened for
business, featuring sweet drinks and dessert items as well as coffee.
(Having a boozeless menu reduced costs and avoided the hassles with
the police and the Mob that went with securing a liquor licenseand
it catered well to those bohemians whose drug of choice was
marijuana, not alcohol. In any case, drinking customers could sneak
in bottles stuffed in brown paper bags, or repair to the Kettle of
Fish.) Mitchell invited the growing legion of Village poets who
broadly identified with the Beat movement to recite their material
and entertain his customers, in exchange for the proceeds collected
in a basket handed around the audience. He called his new coffee shop
the Village Gaslight, and among the poets who would read there was
Allen Ginsberg.
Ginsberg's breakthrough had come in San Francisco in October 1955,
when a poetry reading in a converted old auto repair shop on Fillmore
Street featured his first stunning recital of "Howl." The poem's
publication, in Howl and Other Poems, by the local bookseller and
poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1956, followed by Ferlinghetti's failed
prosecution on obscenity charges, brought Ginsberg wide public
attention and acclaim. The Beats and their West Coast friends and
kindred spirits who included the young poets Michael McClure, Gary
Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Philip Lamantia, as well as the older,
surrealist-influenced Kenneth Patchenlaunched an enthusiasm for Beat
and Beat-style poetry that sympathetic critics labeled the San
Francisco Renaissance.
Ginsberg, who had spent 1957 in Morocco and, later, Paris, returned
in June 1958 to the United States, where Manhattan would remain his
main base of operations for most of the rest of his life. The New
York Beat scene of bars and coffeehouses flourished in the 1950s
along the main thoroughfares of Greenwich Village west of University
Place. (Neighborhood rents climbed so high as a result that artists
and poets, Ginsberg included, took up residence across town, east of
Cooper Square.) A New York circle was closed, uptown, in February
1959, when Ginsberg returned to Columbia for a highly publicized
public reading with Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky and recited "The
Lion for Real," in honor, he said ironically, of Lionel Trilling.
"It's my old school I was kicked out of," Ginsberg wrote to
Ferlinghetti a week later, "so I suppose I'm hung up on making it
there and breaking its reactionary back."
All the while, a few blocks up MacDougal Street from where John
Mitchell opened his Village Gaslight, the folksingers had been
gathering in Washington Square. At some point either just before or
just after the end of World War II, the story goes, a man named
George Margolin began turning up on Sunday afternoons with his guitar
in the square, to play union ballads and familiar folk songs
(including "Old Paint," one of the songs Aaron Copland had borrowed).
By the early 1950s, Sundays in Washington Square had become the focus
for folk-music enthusiasts from around the city. Pete Seeger and his
wife, Toshi, obtained the necessary police permit for playing music
in public, and in time flocks of folk instrumentalists and singers of
every variety crowded the dry fountain at the center of the square.
Alongside Woody Guthrie's first great acolyte, Ramblin' Jack Elliott,
there jostled the young Dave Van Ronk, and alongside him, the even
younger Mary Travers, alongside whom were numerous others who, in the
early 1960s, would lead the folk revival. Despite the blacklisting of
Seeger and the Weavers, a New York folk scene had persisted with
roots in the Popular Front cultural radicalism of the 1930s and
1940salthough it was also to prove more eclectic than its forerunner.
The continuing presence of Earl Robinson, Alan Lomax, and Seeger,
among others, guaranteed folk music's enduring connection to the
1940s Popular Front Communist worldview. (The Weavers proved
resilient enough to enjoy a reunion concert at Carnegie Hall, under
the professional hand of their former manager, Harold Leventhal, late
in 1955.) A few key institutionsabove all Sing Out! magazine,
cofounded in 1950 and edited by the politically orthodox Irwin
Silbercarried on the Popular Front outlook. And the New York
folk-song scene would always have a strong leftist bent, which
deepened when the southern civil-rights movement began making headway
in the late 1950s. But at almost every level, a growing portion of
the folk-song community had no strict or formal political connections
and demanded none of its artists and performers.
Moe Asch, the founder of Folkways Records, was the son of the
important Yiddish writer Sholem Asch and came to the United States
when he was still a boy. A leftist radical who was involved with the
People's Songs folk revivalists, Asch also kept his distance from
Communist ideologyhe once called himself a "goddamn anarchist"and
was happy to record strong music regardless of the performers'
politics or the contents of the songs. (It was Asch who, in 1952,
released the influential six-LP collection Anthology of American Folk
Music, compiled by the eccentric filmmaker and occultist Harry Smith
from previously recorded material.) Although best known for his folk
recordings, Asch also worked closely with jazz musicians, including
the pioneer of the stride-piano style James P. Johnson.
Then there was Israel "Izzy" Young. An aspiring bookseller and
square-dance enthusiast from the Bronx, born in 1928, Young had
developed a passion for folk music and had struck up friendships with
some of the more talented and creative Washington Square regulars.
(Among them were John Cohen and Tom Paley, who, with Pete Seeger's
half brother, Mike, became the New Lost City Ramblers, and who
recorded four albums of old-timey folk music, songs from the Great
Depression, and children's songs by the end of the 1950s.) In time,
Young decided to rent a storefront on MacDougal Street for selling
folk-music records and books. (In order to cover the lease, he cashed
in a thousand-dollar insurance policy.) He called the place the
Folklore Center and opened for business in March 1957.
Fiercely independent in his leftish politics, Young prized music over
ideology. His storelocated a few doors down from the cellar where
John Mitchell would soon be showcasing the Beat poetsbecame a
clearinghouse for musicians, record company men, scholars, and
enthusiasts. Young was also something of a concert promoter. One of
the founders of the Friends of Old Time Music, he helped arrange, in
1959, a regular concert series at Gerde's bar on Fourth Street west
of Broadway, which he called "The Fifth Peg at Gerde's." The bar's
owner, Mike Porco, undertook the venture as a lark, but when the
music began attracting steady crowds, Young got squeezed out of the
operation. Gerde's Folk City was born.
Soon after, John Mitchell, having also noticed the trend, switched
from using folksingers for turning the house between recitations by
Beat poets to hiring folksingers regularly. By the time Bob Dylan
arrived in January 1961, the Gaslight was the premier showcase for
folksingers on MacDougal Street, and Dylan considered himself
fortunate to break into the Gaslight lineup. In April, he secured his
first important extended New York engagement, as an opening act for
the blues great John Lee Hooker, at Gerde's. But it was still a long
way from the Village clubs to musical stardom. A little more than six
months after Dylan premiered at Gerde's, Young would lose money when
he sponsored Dylan's first theatrical concert, at Carnegie Chapter
Hall, and only fifty-three ticket buyers showed up. Dylan's big break
only came months later, in September, when the New York Times critic
Robert Shelton reviewed a show at Gerde's, dealt quickly with the
headline act, the Greenbriar Boys, and devoted his own headline and
the bulk of his story to celebrating Dylan as the prodigious new
talent on the folk scene. After playing backup harmonica on a
recording session for the folksinger Carolyn Hester the day after
Shelton's article appeared, Dylan signed a five-year recording
contract with Columbia Records, where the legendary John Hammond, who
had worked with Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, and Big Joe Turner,
would be his producer.
Relations between the folkies and the Beats in New York were not
necessarily close or even harmonious. The Beats' preferred music was,
and always had been, jazz, from bebop to the free jazz experiments
being undertaken by Ornette Coleman and others at the Five Spot on
Cooper Square. On the West Coast, Kenneth Patchen had pioneered in
reading what he called his "picture poems" to the accompaniment of
the Charles Mingus combo. Kerouac appeared with a jazz group at the
Village Vanguard on Seventh Avenue in 1958 and recorded readings of
his prose and poetry with the saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims; he
also collaborated with David Amram on the jazzy soundtrack, part
spoken, part musical, for Robert Frank's Beat movie Pull My Daisy.
The folksingers shared the Beats' disdain for consumerist materialism
and conventional 1950s dress and mores, as symbolized by clean-cut,
collegiate folk groups like the Kingston Trio, who had built on the
earlier success of the Weavers. But the Beats had their own hip style
that clashed with what the Afro-surrealist Beat Ted Joans (who for a
time had shared a cold-water West Village flat with Charlie Parker)
called, in 1959, the "silly milly" folksingers, "the squarest of
squares," with "their boney banjo-shaped asses."
Still, as Moe Asch's recordings showed, the Beat jazz scene and the
folk revival sometimes overlapped. Folkies and Beats could not help
interacting as poetry cafés and music clubs proliferated cheek by
jowl on and around MacDougal Streetthe Café Bizarre (located in what
had been Aaron Burr's livery stable), the Commons (which would later
become the Fat Black Pussycat), the Bitter End, and many others.
Dylan writes in his memoirs of seeing Thelonious Monk in one club,
off-hours, sitting alone at the piano, and when Dylan informed him he
was playing folk music up the street, Monk replied, "We all play folk
music." Among the jazz musicians who played at the Fat Black Pussycat
were the pianist Sonny Clark and the tenor saxophonist Lin Halliday.
The folkies were hardly uninterested in the jazz they heard all
around them, on records as well as in the clubs. Van Ronk started in
New York as a self-described "jazz snob," more interested in the jazz
pioneers of the 1920s still to be found in the Village than in the
earnest folk types. Dylan reports in Chronicles of listening at
friends' houses to all sorts of jazz and bebop records, by artists
ranging from Benny Goodman and Dizzy Gillespie to Gil Evans, who, he
notes, recorded a version of Leadbelly's song "Ella Speed." ("I tried
to discern melodies and structures," he recalls. "There were a lot of
similarities between some kinds of jazz and folk music.") And at
least some of the Beats listened to black rhythm and blues as well as
jazz, just as the younger folkies like Dylan did. (Allen Ginsberg
began his great poem about his mother, "Kaddish," describing a
midwinter Manhattan scene in 1959, in which, after a sleepless night,
he reads the Kaddish aloud "listening to Ray Charles blues shout
blind on the phonograph.") All were influenced, in their sense of
stagecraft and spontaneity, by the burgeoning Village Off-Broadway
and experimental theater, ranging from Julian Beck and Judith
Malina's Living Theatre and the avant-garde productions at the
venerable Cherry Lane Theatre on tiny Commerce Street, to the first
of the impromptu "happenings" in private apartments and lofts.
By 1961, the Beats and folkies also shared MacDougal and Bleecker
streets with herds of tourists who would come to town to see the
weirdos perform and get a whiff of bohemian danger. As recorded by
the Village Voice photographer Fred McDarrah in his collection of
pictures and articles Kerouac and Friends, a more serious Beat scene
persisted, in readings at the Living Theatre, in nighttime
conviviality at the Jazz Club, the Cedar Street Tavern, and Riker's
Diner, and in book signings and parties at the 8th Street Bookshop,
co-owned by my father and uncle, Eli and Ted Wilentz. But the Beats
did not entirely disappear from MacDougal, even as the tourist trade
burgeoned. (At the Folklore Center, Israel Young, an utterly
indifferent businessman, would bolt the door when MacDougal got too
crowded, to permit the folksingers to chat and to perform their songs
for each other in peace.) Some of the poets turned into showmen,
giving the customers all of the espresso and all the black-bereted
soulful and titillating verse they could want. Some of the MacDougal
and Bleecker cafés turned into vaudeville-like tourist traps, where
cracked raconteurs and musical jabberwocks would appear on a rapidly
changing bill with genuinely talented performers.
It was in one of those hole-in-the-wall MacDougal Street cabarets,
the Café Wha?, that Bob Dylan performed on the same day he hit New
York City in January 1961. The writings of Jack Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg were already in his brain, though his search for Woody
Guthrie was foremost on his mind. And, although it might have seemed
different in some of the other clubs, there were signs that, just as
the folksingers were getting popular, the Beat phenomenon was running
out of steam.
~~~
On January 26, 1961the same day, just after Dylan's arrival in
Manhattan, that Aaron Copland was narrating The Second Hurricane in
midtowna group of writers gathered at the apartment of the Belgian
theater director Robert Cordier, on Christopher Street, to discuss
(and, for some, to celebrate) the death of the Beat generation.
Cordier's friend James Baldwinwho especially disliked Kerouac's
work, considering it patronizing and ignorant in its projections
about American blackswas there. So were Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag,
William Styron, and the Beats Ted Joans, Tuli Kupferberg (later of
the rock band the Fugs), and the Village Voice journalist Seymour
Krim. A few of the non-Beats, particularly Mailer, found the Beats
very interesting. But most of the writers had gathered to bury what
was left of a movement that they believed had been thoroughly
co-opted by the commercial mainstream. What had begun as an
iconoclastic literary style (whether one approved of it or not) had
become, the detractors said, just another fad, a subject fit for
television comedies. (The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, a popular TV
sitcom that featured a comedic "beatnik" character, Maynard G. Krebs,
had debuted in September 1959.)
The major Beat writers, meanwhile, were going their own ways. Two
months after the meeting at Cordier's, Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky
set sail for Paris, in part to locate William Burroughs and in part
to escape the malign publicity directed at them and their friends
from critics high and low. Over the next two years, Ginsberg and
Orlovsky would circumnavigate the globe, visiting Tangier (where they
would finally find Burroughs), Greece, Israel, and East Africa,
before reaching India, where they spent fifteen months in holy
seeking before they ended their travels in Japan and headed home. The
somewhat younger poet Gregory Corso, who had joined the Beats' inner
circle in 1950 and whose City Lights volume of poems Gasoline,
published in 1958, had greatly impressed Dylan in Minneapolis, had
been sidelined by an addiction to heroin and alcohol. With Kerouac
devoting most of his time during these years to drinking, writing,
and living with his mother in Northport, Long Island, and Orlando,
Florida, the Beat generation would never be the same.
Bob Dylan, who has said he "got in at the tail end," had read the
Beats in Minneapolis, but apart from preparing him for the open road
that he found in Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory, the literary
effects on his early lyrics are difficult to discern. The Beats'
performance style was something else again, or so Dylan has recalled.
"There used to be a folk music scene and jazz clubs just about every
place," he remembered a quarter century later. "The two scenes were
very much connected, where the poets would read to a small combo, so
I was close up to that for a while. My songs were influenced not so
much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets
who recited poems with jazz bands." The poetry on the page that
mattered, he has said, were "the French guys, Rimbaud and François
Villon," to whom he turned after reading Ginsberg and the others.
As the Beat presence in the Village faded, MacDougal Street became,
more than ever, a showcase for the folk revival. Not that Dylan
forgot the Beats, or failed to connect with the Beat writers and
artists who remained in town. He still adored Allen Ginsberg's work
and had a special kinship with the oft-incarcerated jazz poet Ray
Bremser (whose "jail songs" he cited, along with Ginsberg's love
poems, in the last of the "11 Outlined Epitaphs," free verse he
substituted for liner notes on his third album). What he later called
the "street ideologies" of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, and the others
still signaled to him the possibility of a new form of human
existence. At some point in 1963, he met Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and
the two discussed possibly publishing a book of Dylan's writing,
alongside Ginsberg's and Corso's volumes, in the City Lights Pocket
Poets Series. Still, Dylan's literary breakthroughs, taking him
outside the idiom of traditional Anglo-American balladry, would come
from other sources and experiences, not least from hearing Micki
Grant sing Marc Blitzstein's translation of "Pirate Jenny." The Beat
influence would rekindle only after Dylan had established himself as
a rising starthe greatest young folk songwriter in the Village and,
for that matter, in the countrywhen he met up with Allen Ginsberg.
~~~
In December 1963, Ginsberg and Orlovsky, having at last returned to
New York from their travels, took up temporary residence in Ted
Wilentz's family apartment above the 8th Street Bookshop, while they
looked for an apartment of their own. It was, coincidentally, a
moment of national trauma. The inauguration of President John F.
Kennedy (less than a week before Dylan's arrival in New York and the
writers' gathering in the Village to bury the Beat generation) had
elevated new hopes for a great cultural as well as political change.
It seemed as if the nation had suddenly decided, as Norman Mailer put
it, "to enlist the romantic dream of itself" and to "vote for the
image in the mirror of its unconscious." But now Ginsberg and
Orlovsky came back to the Village less than a month after President
Kennedy's assassination.
Although he would later deny it, Kennedy's murder hit Dylan as hard
as it did everyone else, and maybe more than most. Three weeks later,
receiving an award from the established left-wing Emergency Civil
Liberties Committee, Dylan expressed his deep discomfort with the
well-dressed, older audiencewell-intentioned people, he perceived,
who were on the sidelines and who wanted to change the world but at a
safe distance. He identified more, he said, with James Forman and the
young activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who
were putting their bodies as well as their goodwill on the line in
the southern freedom struggle. Anyway, he declared, switching course,
he did not see things in terms of black and white, left and right
anymore"there's only up and down," he said. Then he shocked
everybody by confessing that, speaking as a young man, he could
imagine seeing something of himself in the president's young
assassin. Gasps, then boos and hisses followed, and Dylan stepped
down. Unable to articulate his feelings any better than thatsome
reports say he had drunk a good deal of wine to fortify himself
before the speechDylan seemed to be at loose ends.
While Dylan brooded and stumbled, Ginsberg and Orlovsky tried to pay
Kerouac a visit in Northportbut Kerouac's formidable French-Canadian
mother, Gabrielle, who despised Kerouac's Beat friends for what she
thought they had done to her Ti Jean, turned them away. A
transfiguration of the Beat generation would, though, commence at
month's end, without Kerouac. Al Aronowitz, who had written
extensively about the Beats for the New York Post, was now writing
about Dylanmore or less, he admitted, in order to become part of his
inner circle. Aronowitz got word of a welcome-home party for Ginsberg
and Orlovsky, to be held at Ted Wilentz's Eighth Street apartment on
Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, when the bookshop's distracting
holiday season was done. Aronowitz thought it would be interesting to
bring Dylan along to meet the author of "Howl." (As it happened,
Dylan preferred "Kaddish," which Ferlinghetti had published as part
of his Pocket Poets Series soon after Ginsberg and Orlovsky had left
for Paris, in 1961.)
Weeks earlier, at a party in Bolinas, California, Ginsberg, on his
way back to New York from India, had heard Dylan on The Freewheelin'
Bob Dylan singing "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"and, he later said,
wept with illuminated joy at what he sensed was a passing of the
bohemian tradition to a younger generation. At Wilentz's apartment,
Ginsberg and Dylan discussed poetry, and, according to Aronowitz,
Ginsberg came on sexually to Dylan. ("Allen was really a flaming
queer," Aronowitz later said.) Dylan, unfazed, invited Ginsberg to
join him on a flight to Chicago, where he was scheduled to play at
the august Orchestra Hall the following night. Ginsberg declined,
worrying, he recalled, that "I might become his slave or something,
his mascot."
Dylan had already been experimenting with writing free verse, without
intending that it would serve him as lyrics. Not long before he met
Ginsberg, he poured out a poem about the day of Kennedy's murder,
which concluded:
the colors of friday were dull
as cathedral bells were gently burnin
strikin for the gentle
strikin for the kind
strikin for the crippled ones
an strikin for the blind.
Pulled together, the lines would form part of what Dylan called the
"chain of flashing images" that soon went into "Chimes of
Freedom"marking both Dylan's reconnection to Beat aesthetics and the
transformation of those aesthetics into song. And in 1964 and 1965,
Ginsberg and Dylan influenced each other as both of them recast their
public images and their art.
~~~
D. A. Pennebaker's cinema verité film about Dylan's concert tour of
En gland in 1965, Dont Look Back, includes several scenes of Dylan
and his entourage in his suite at London's Savoy Hotel. In one of
them, Dylan squats on the floor amid a gaggle of English folkies and
hangers-on, and slurring his words, he converses with Ramblin' Jack
Elliott's old recording mate Derroll Adams, who had relocated to
England and who suggests that they get together "and I'll turn you on
to some things."
"Okay. Are there any poets like Allen Ginsberg around, man?" Dylan asks.
"No, no, nothing like that," Adams replies. He pauses for a split
second. "Dominic Behan."
"Hey, yeah, yeah, you know, you know," Dylan says, then the name
sinks in and he sounds repulsed. "No, I don't wanna hear nobody like
Dominic Behan, man."
Dylan mutters the name again, contemptuously, "Dominic Be-un." A
sodden English voice, off camera, spits out: "Dominic Behan is a
friend of mine…"
"Hey, that's fine, man," Dylan says, evenly enough, "I just don't
wanta hear anybody like that though."
It's no wonder that Dylan was annoyed. A couple of years earlier, he
had lifted the melody of Behan's song "The Patriot Game" for his own
"With God on Our Side," and the word was going around that Dylan had
plagiarized himeven though Behan himself had based his song on a
traditional Irish tune, "The Merry Month of May." But Behan, the
brother of the playwright and novelist Brendan Behan, was also part
of the Irish working-class equivalent of the folk revival in the
United States. Dylan, having gone as far as he was going to go with
the folkies, had been turning elsewhere, to his own variations on
rock and roll (as the musical world would soon discover) and to
American bop prosody as it was sliding into late-1960s hippie
ecstasy. (Later in the scene, he would badly outmatch the latest
British folk sensation, Donovan, laying down "It's All Over Now, Baby
Blue" as a kind of response to Donovan's impromptu performance of his
ditty "To Sing for You.") Intensely restless in the spring of
1965still performing his old material, solo, on acoustic guitar and
rack harmonica, but with his mind roamingDylan was on the cusp of
something new, and he wanted to hear Ginsberg's poesy.
As it happened, unknown to Dylan (and as Dont Look Back does not
reveal), Allen Ginsberg had just flown to London from Prague,
suddenly ejected by Czech authorities as a corrupter of youthhe was
now a year shy of fortya week after a massing of a hundred thousand
students, with rock bands blaring, had proclaimed him the King of
May, as part of the revival of an annual festival that the Communists
had suppressed for twenty years.
In the movie's next scene (shot, according to the transcript of the
film, the following day), all is calm in the hotel roomand there,
out of the blue, though only fleetingly on camera, is Ginsberg,
seated and chatting softly with Dylan. The sequence is utterly
fortuitous, spooky in its timing given what has just happened
onscreen: Dylan asked for Ginsberg, and all of a sudden there he was,
seemingly conjured up out of the vapors but in fact thanks to the
apoplectic commissars of Prague. (Pennebaker confirms that nobody had
any idea that Ginsberg was coming the night that Dylan brought up his
name with Derroll Adams.) An important moment in Beat lore merged
with an iconic moment in Dylan's careeralthough explaining all of
that in the film would have taken the focus off Dylan and, in any
case, would have taken too long. Instead, the camera records the
hippest of 1960s friendshipsand makes possible a clever piece of
image making, joining the singer as poet in the same documentary
frame with the poet as cultural hero.
Over the two years since Dylan and Ginsberg had met, their connection
had become a public fact as well as an artistic and personal
alliance. It started off quietly enough. During part of the summer of
1964, Dylan stayed at the country retreat of his manager, Albert
Grossman, on Striebel Road in Bearsville, New York, just west of
Woodstock. Ginsberg, breaking away from various engagements in New
York (including a campaign to legalize marijuana), spent some time
with Orlovsky at Grossman's, where Dylan taught him how to play a
harmonium that Orlovsky had lugged back from India. In September,
Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and one of Ginsberg's rare girlfriends, the young
filmmaker Barbara Rubin, were part of Dylan's entourage at a concert
in Princeton, New Jersey.
The following February, Dylan appeared on Les Crane's nationally
broadcast, late-night TV talk show, dressed not in his customary
suede and denim but in a modish suit and performing with an
accompanist, Bruce Langhorne, who played an acoustic guitar with an
electronic pickup. Between songs, Dylan bantered with Crane about a
collaboration he had undertaken with Ginsberg"sort of a horror
cowboy movie," Dylan deadpanned, that Ginsberg was writing and he was
rewriting, and that would take place on the New York State Thruway.
"Yeah?" asked Crane, who seemed to get the put-on but was willing to
play it straight. "Are you gonna star in it?"
Dylan: Yeah, yeah, I'm a hero.
Crane: You're the hero? You play the horrible cowboy?
Dylan: I play my mother (audience laughter).
Crane: You play your mother? In the movie?
Dylan: In the movie. You gotta see the movie (audience laughter).
Three months later, Ginsberg appeared in the movie that Pennebaker
was making about Dylan. By then, Columbia had released Bringing It
All Back Home, its back cover illustrated with photographs taken by
Daniel Kramer in Princeton, including one of Ginsberg wearing Dylan's
trademark top hat and another of Rubin massaging a weary Dylan's
scalp. To top it off, and seal the symbolism, a small photo showed
Dylan smiling impishly, wearing the same top hat Ginsberg was wearing
in the first picture. The two shared an odd 1960s bohemian crown,
with intimations of Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter in Alice's Adventures
in Wonderland. And just in case the message wasn't clear enough,
Dylan wrote in the album's liner notes:
i have
given up at making any attempt at perfection
the fact that the white house is filled with
leaders that've never been t' the apollo
theater amazes me. why allen ginsberg was
not chosen t' read poetry at the inauguration
boggles my mind / if someone thinks norman
mailer is more important than hank williams
that's fine.
In early December, in San Francisco, Dylan stopped by Lawrence
Ferlinghetti's bookstore, City Lights, where Ferlinghetti was staging
what came to be called the Last Gathering of Beat poets and artists
(five years after the "funeral" at Robert Cordier's apartment). A
dozen or so Beat writers turned up, including Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and
Michael McClure. Dylan, who had by now released "Subterranean
Homesick Blues" and "Like a Rolling Stone," and was touring with his
backup musicians, would play that evening at the Masonic Auditorium,
having performed the previous two nights at the Berkeley Community
Theater. He had had fun the day before at a press conference where
Ginsberg asked a hipster question: "Do you think there will ever be a
time when you'll be hung as a thief?" (Dylan, taken aback
momentarily, smiled and replied, "You weren't supposed to say that.")
Now he would mingle with Ginsberg and Ginsberg's friends at one of
the Beat scene's literary headquarters, accompanied by his band's
lead guitarist, Robbie Robertson. The two musicians headed straight
for the store's basement in order to avoid the crush of fans and not
to intrude on what Dylan thought ought to be entirely the Beats'
occasion. When the hubbub subsided, Dylan posed for some pictures in
the alley that adjoined the store, alongside McClure, Ginsberg,
Ferlinghetti, Robertson, and Orlovsky's brother, Julius.
Dylan had thought that some photographs of him with the poets might
look good on the cover of the album he had just begun recording,
which would become Blonde on Blonde. Even though the pictures, some
of them made by the young photographer Larry Keenan, did not appear
on the album, they would be widely reproduced in books as well as
future Dylan record releases, affirming Dylan's place among the poets
and theirs with him.
The Beats' gathering over, and the concert done, Dylan headed south
with Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and McClure, riding in Ginsberg's Volkswagen
van (bought with the proceeds from a Guggenheim Fellowship) to San
Jose, to meet up with the band for another concert before finishing
off the tour with concerts in Pasadena and Santa Monica. Dylan had
given Ginsberg a gift of six hundred dollars, enough to purchase a
state-of-the-art, portable Uher tape recorder. (Ginsberg, in
gratitude, taped one of Dylan's concerts in Berkeley, as well as
approving members of the audience, to show Dylan that the hostility
his new electric music had received from reviewers was undeserved.
Rebutting charges that Dylan had sold out his fans, Ginsberg later
remarked: "Dylan has sold out to God. That is to say, his command was
to spread his beauty as widely as possible. It was an artistic
challenge to see if great art can be done on a jukebox.") Dylan also
presented McClure with an Autoharp, on which the poet would soon be
composing in what was, for him, an entirely new kind of sung verse.
Then Dylan flew back to New York to resume work on his new album and
prepare for a grueling tour of the continental United States, Hawaii,
Australia, Europe, and Britain, which would culminate in his historic
concerts at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester and at the Royal Albert
Hall in London. Ginsberg, after a brief trip to Big Sur, returned to
Los Angeles (where he met the Byrds and the record producer Phil
Spector), then took off in the van headed east. Orlovsky drove;
Ginsberg dictated poetry into the Uher recorder, which he had called,
musician-style, his "new ax for composition." As the Volkswagen
gyrated between Lincoln, Nebraska, and Wichita, Kansas, Ginsberg
compressed radio announcements, highway advertising signs, pop lyrics
of the Beatles, the Kinks, and Dylan, always Dylan, and the bleak
farming landscape into verse, and composed, as taped spoken stanzas,
the lengthy "Wichita Vortex Sutra" one of his greatest poems and,
along with Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, the most powerful
literary response to America's mounting military intrusion in Vietnam.
~~~
Dylan and Ginsberg's friendship was close and respectful but also
complicated, as the New York poet Anne Waldman has explained. Fifteen
years Dylan's senior, Ginsberg was hardly old enough to be a father
figure, but Dylan sometimes cast him that way, as the patriarch of
the entire hip cultural family. (In the film he made from the Rolling
Thunder Revue in 1975, Dylan actually had Ginsberg play a role named
Father.) Yet Dylan garnered by far a larger audience with his music
than Ginsberg did with his poems, and Ginsberg became such a devotee
of Dylan's that, during the Rolling Thunder tour, Waldman recalls,
members of the troupe "joked that Ginsberg was Dylan's most dedicated
groupie." Ginsberg's homosexuality and obvious desire for Dylan added
an additional layer of tension and even curiosity. Certainly, by the
1970s, Dylan had eclipsed Ginsberg as a cultural, and
countercultural, star; at times, especially during the Rolling
Thunder Revue, Ginsberg seemed practically to be nipping at Dylan's
heels, wanting but never quite reaching the aura of rock-and-roll
adulation and glory. At these moments, Dylan, and not Ginsberg,
seemed to be the more powerful man in the friendship, the older
brother if not the father. On Dylan's part, Waldman writes, there was
"a bit of taunt and tease in the relationship whose intimacy I
notice[d] Ginsberg deeply enjoy[ed]." And, one might add, there was a
bit of pathos on Ginsberg's part.
Still, in their odd tandem, Dylan and Ginsberg helped each other
complete transitions into new phases of their careers after 1963.
Part of the transitions had to do with image. Masters of
self-protection and media presentation, Dylan and Ginsberg entered
into, if only tacitly, a mutual-reinforcement pact. By the time they
met, Dylan was already on the move artistically, yet that move had
its risks. Trading in the soulful, Steinbeckian leftishness depicted
in his portrait by Barry Feinstein on the cover of The Times They Are
A-Changin' was bound to confuse and even offend a portion of Dylan's
young pro-civil-rights, ban-the-bomb folkie base, as well as the
folk-revival old leftists. The falloff became obvious when Dylan's
second album of 1964, Another Side of Bob Dylanwhich included the
completed "Chimes of Freedom"did not crack the Top 40 on the sales
charts. (By contrast, The Times They Are A-Changin' had broken in at
number twenty on the charts.)
Having Ginsberg as his visible ally helped Dylan negotiate the shift,
as well as his return to rock and roll on the three albums that
followed Another Side in 1965 and 1966. To be sure, Ginsberg and the
Beats, with their mysticism, sexual frankness, and individualism,
were politically unreliable as far as the Popular Front veterans were
concerned. And some of the Beats (though not Ginsberg) shared a
resentful view that the folk musicians, Dylan included, had shoved
them aside at the very beginning of the 1960s. But Ginsberg was
enough of a leftist to satisfy the younger folkies. (Joan
BaezDylan's lover through part of this period, and disconcerted at
Dylan's growing detachment from politicsasked Ginsberg and McClure
late in 1965 to act as Dylan's conscience.) As a cultural
revolutionary, antibourgeois seer, and antagonist of the academy,
Ginsberg commanded respect on the left. Above all, Ginsberg stood for
literary seriousness, on a level far above what even the most
talented folkie lyricist, let alone rock and roller, could hope to attain.
Dylan, meanwhile, helped Ginsberg make his transition from Beat
generation prophet to a kind of older avatar of the late-1960s
counterculturefor the poet, a new kind of fame. If Dylan did not
open the doors to the widest pop markets, he beckoned to audiences
that no poet of the traditional sort could hope to reachbaby
boomers, fully twenty years younger than the Beats, who listened to
Top 40 radio and crammed into places like Orchestra Hall in Chicago
and Carnegie Hall in New York to hear their hero Dylan perform. Apart
from Andy Warhol, no artist on the New York scene in 1964 and 1965
was as shrewd a molder of his pop public image as Dylanand for
Ginsberg, himself a great self-publicist and promoter of his poet
friends, the association with Dylan was one of the catalysts that
transformed him into a celebrity emblem, young America's wild-haired poet.
None of this means that the connection between the two men was merely
or even mainly about cultural marketing. Ginsberg wrote only a few
brief verses in 1964 (complaining, in one of them, about the
distracting telephone, "ringing at dawn ringing all afternoon ringing
up midnight," and callers hoping to cash in on his celebrity), but in
his poem of Prague in 1965, "Kral Majales," written during the
unexpected flight to London where he immediately linked up with
Dylan, he sprang to life as one of the Just Men who denounced lying
Communists and lying capitalists, and who was chosen King of May
"which is the power of sexual youth." Later, Ginsberg talked
seriously with Dylan about future joint projects, possibly including
a record album of Ginsberg's mantras.
In one of the culminations of "Wichita Vortex Sutra," Ginsberg,
having already declared the Vietnam War over but still hearing the
blab of the airwaves about death tolls and new military operations,
wrote of how, at last, the radio bade new promise:
Angelic Dylan singing across the nation
"When all your children start to resent you
Won't you come see me Queen Jane?"
His youthful voice making glad
the brown endless meadows
His tenderness penetrating aether,
soft prayer on the airwaves.
Five years later, Ginsberg would finally record with Dylan,
performing mantras, William Blake songs that he had put to music, and
at least one song that Dylan and Ginsberg wrote together. Ginsberg
would, for the rest of his life, see Dylan's work (and not the Beat
generation jazz experiments he linked to Patchen and Kenneth Rexroth)
as aligned with his own practice of vocalizing poetry, in a
vernacular, idiomatic, self-expressive form.
Dylan, for his part, was determined to make his own artistic break
from the topical, folkie Left when he recorded Another Side in a
single afternoon and evening on June 9, 1964, telling the journalist
Nat Hentoff, "There aren't any finger pointing songs in here … From
now on, I want to write from inside me … for it to come out the way I
walk or talk." Combined with a renewed attachment to Rimbaud, which
he had affirmed to his friends months earlier, Dylan's dedication to
writing from withinto capturing what Ginsberg had called, nearly
twenty years earlier, "the shadowy and heterogeneous experience of
life through the conscious mind"placed him within the orbit of the
Beats' spontaneous bop prosody even before he returned to playing
with a band on electric guitar.
Dylan's transition, although rapid, was not flawless. Another Side
written amid a coast-to-coast concert tour, riding with friends and
exploring the country in a station wagon; followed by his final
breakup with Suze Rotolo; followed then by his first concert tour of
Britain and a trip through Europe that ended in a village outside
Athenscontains the occasional poetic clinker. (From "Ballad in Plain
D": "With unseen consciousness, I possessed in my grip / A
magnificent mantelpiece, though its heart being chipped.") The album
is not uniformly successful in its experiments with what Ginsberg
described as "join[ing] images as they are joined in the
mind"efforts influenced by sources as diverse as Japanese haiku and
what T. S. Eliot called the "telescoping of images." "Howl" had
evoked "horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams" and "the crack of doom
on the hydrogen jukebox"; Dylan's "My Back Pages"a strong,
expressionist song about looking back and moving onoffers apprentice
images of "corpse evangelists" and "confusion boats."
Still, Another Side was, by any measure, an artistic breakthrough.
Typing and scribbling on notepad paper from London's Mayfair hotel,
Dylan composed lyrics in bursts of wordplay, including little
narratives and collage-like experiments. Writing on the other side of
what would eventually become the lyrics for "To Ramona," he tried out
little riffs, some of which would turn up in "I Shall Be Free No.
10," and some of which would be discarded. (The latter included a
pair of couplets set off in alternating lines, one on the left about
getting his monkey to do the dog atop a lumberjack log, the other on
the right, about joining Ingmar Bergman in singing "Blowing in the
Wind," written out as if each couplet was coming in from a different
side of a set of earphones.) In their finished form, the album's
simpler songs of love and anti-lovesung to the cracked-lipped
Ramona, to the gypsy fortune-teller of Spanish Harlem, and about the
unnamed watery-mouthed lover who turns him into a one-night
standshow an inventiveness in language, narration, and characters
far more sophisticated than anything on Freewheelin'. Whatever its
slips, "My Back Pages" contains interesting turns about "half-wracked
prejudice" and ideas as maps, along with its unforgettable chorus
about being younger than before.
Above all, there is "Chimes of Freedom"an expansion of the free
verse lines that Dylan had written about the day President Kennedy
died, but reworked into a pealing of thunder and lightning for all
the world's confused and abused, one dazzling image following
another: "majestic bells of bolts" supplanting clinging church bells
in "the wild cathedral evening," flashing, tolling, striking,
tolling, as "the sky cracked its poems in naked wonder." Making music
out of nature's sights and sounds had attracted Dylan before, in his
mystical song "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" (just as Jack Kerouac tried
to render the ocean's roar as poetry in his book Big Sur, published
in 1962). But in "Chimes of Freedom," strong metaphors replace
similes; sight and sound uncannily merge in the flashing chimes; and
a simple story of a couple crouching in a doorway turns into a
hail-ripped carillonand a song of tender empathy as well, far
outside the old politics of left and right, black and white.
A year later, Dylan divulged his indebtedness to the Beats. In March
1965, the same month that Columbia Records released Bringing It All
Back Home, with its encomiums to Ginsberg, Kerouac published
Desolation Angels, his last great novel of his experiences inside the
Beat generation circle. Part of the Duluoz cycle, the book covered
events and developments in 1956 and 1957: Ginsberg's unveiling of
"Howl," the San Francisco Renaissance, Kerouac's growing
disillusionment with his Beat friends, his bringing his mother out to
California from Lowell and then his plunge into the weirdness and
mystery of impoverished Mexico, only to have his Beat friends, the
Desolation Angels, catch up with him. In early August, Dylan recorded
"Desolation Row" for his sixth album, Highway 61 Revisited, and the
correspondences with Kerouac, beginning with the title, were too
exact to be coincidental.
Various readers have plucked out lines in the novelKerouac's
descriptions of the poet David D'Angeli (Philip Lamantia) as "the
perfect image of a priest" or of all the authorities who condemn
hot-blooded embracers of life as sinners, when, in fact, "they sin by
lifelessness!"that turn up verbatim or nearly so in Dylan's song.
The ambience of "Desolation Row" is reminiscent of Kerouac's Mexico,
a mixture of cheap food and fun (and ladies for hire) but with "a
certain drear, even sad darkness." After the recording of the song
was done, Dylan suddenly decided to add a swirling, Tex-Mex acoustic
guitar run, played by the visiting Nashville sideman Charlie McCoy,
which dominates the track's sound. Later, asked at a press conference
to name Desolation Row's location, Dylan replied, "Oh, that's
someplace in Mexico." Decades after that, when he returned to play
the Newport Folk Festival in 2002, Dylan and his band performed
"Desolation Row" in the style of a Mexican border song.
"Desolation Row" presents a kind of carnival (the critic Christopher
Ricks calls it a "masque") of fragments, shards of a civilization
that has gone to pieces, in a modernist tradition that runs from
Eliot's Waste Land to Ginsberg's "Howl." Curious listeners have had a
field day claiming particular references in every line, beginning
with the very first, "They're selling postcards of the hanging."
Clearly, some would have it, this alludes to the Hanged Man tarot
card that turns up in the opening section of The Waste Land; not at
all, others retort, it's about a notorious lynching that occurred in
Dylan's birthplace, Duluth, in 1920, when his father was just a boy,
and when, indeed, postcards of the two hanged blacks were made and
sold as souvenirs. Who knows? With its repeated images of drowning
and the seain references to the Titanic, Shakespeare's Ophelia,
Nero's Neptune, Noah's ark and the great rainbowthe song almost
certainly echoes The Waste Land's repeated invocations of death by
water. But no matter. Here on "Desolation Row" (conceivably a
Beat-influenced updating of Steinbeck's Cannery Row) it is enough to
see the characters from the Bible, Shakespeare, folktales, the
circus, and Victor Hugo, most of them doomed, as well as Albert
Einstein disguised as a noble outlaw, sniffing drainpipes and
reciting the alphabetstrange sights and sounds, but all too real,
everything a symbol of itself, viewed by the singer and his Lady
looking out on it all, detached, from inside Desolation Row.
In all of its strangeness, the song mocks orthodoxies and confining
loyalties of every kindloyalties to religion, sex, science, romance,
politics, medicine, moneywhich the singer has rejected. The least
mysterious verse (although it is mysterious enough) comes next to
last. Crammed aboard the damned Titanic, the people are oblivious to
what is happening; instead, they shout an old reliable left-wing
folkie tune (made popular by the Weavers), "Which Side Are You On?"
T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, respectively the author and the editor of
The Waste Land, struggle for command of the ship; but it is all a
laugh to the calypso singers; and down beneath the dreamlike sea
where lovely mermaids flow, and where (simple) fishermen hold
(simple) flowers, thoughts of Desolation Row are unnecessary. Neither
strait-minded politics nor modernist high art will save the ship from
crashing and going down.
~~~
In 1985, a review of mine for the Village Voice of Kerouac and
Friends, Fred McDarrah's collection of photographs and articles
related to the Beats, mentioned how writers and critics have differed
over when and why the Beat generation disappeared. Soon after the
piece was published, Al Aronowitz, whom I'd never met and never
would, phoned to inform me that the Beat generation died the minute
that he introduced Ginsberg to Dylan in my uncle's apartment.
Self-dramatizing though he was, Aronowitz had a pointfor by the time
Dylan recorded "Desolation Row," he had found his way out of the
limitations of the folk revival, having reawakened to Beat literary
practice and sensibilities and absorbed them into his electrified
music. He had thereby completed (according to Ginsberg himself) a
merger of poetry and song that Ezra Pound had foreseen as modernism's
future. Thereafter, it would be Ginsberg who sought artistic
enlightenment from Dylan, turning his long-line verse into musical
lyrics, and at times even becomingas he did during the Rolling
Thunder Revue tour of 1975the willing mascot he had initially feared
he might become. At the beginning of the 1970s, Ginsberg persuaded
Dylan to collaborate on some studio recordings, the best of which,
"September on Jessore Road," would not be released until 1994, a few
years before Ginsberg's death. Finally, Ginsberg would partially
fulfill what one punk rock musician from the 1980s called his firm
desire "to be a rock star," by working with, among others, Joe
Strummer of the Clash and Paul McCartney.
The changing of the guard, though, had occurred between when
Aronowitz said it did in late December 1963 and the recording of
"Desolation Row" a little more than eighteen months later. On the day
he made Another Side in June 1964, Dylan recorded a version of a new
song, "Mr. Tambourine Man," but he wisely decided it was too
important to include on an album completed in a one-off session. He
played the song twice at the Newport Folk Festival in late July, to
rapturous applause and cheers. And by the middle of autumn, he had
written two more compositions that sang of bread-crumb sins and of
walking upside down inside handcuffs, which completed the transition.
He tried out the new songs on the road in Philadelphia, Princeton,
Detroit, and Boston. Then, on Halloween night in New York City at
Philharmonic Hall, he sprang them on an audience that included Allen
Ginsberg (who had brought along with him Gregory Corso)and,
coincidentally, this author.
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