Bob Dylan: The Voice That Divided America

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Mark, I'm going to describe a person and I want your first instinct. There's a kid from a mining town in northern Minnesota, born Robert Allen Zimmerman. His father sells furniture and appliances. The kid reinvents himself as a Dust Bowl hobo, steals his name from a Welsh poet, moves to New York at 19, becomes within two years the most important protest singer in America, plays the March on Washington on the same day as I Have a Dream, is called the Conscience of a Generation, and then the moment he is at the absolute peak of that role, deliberately destroys it.

SPEAKER_00 0:47

I'd say that sounds like a nihilist, someone with a very specific relationship to the truth.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

And what would you call that relationship?

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Complicated, productive, possibly infuriating, depending on whether you needed him to stay put, and he doesn't stay put.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Right. And here's what makes it a history story and not just a music story. Every single time he changed who he was, and he did it at least four times in one decade alone. America was in the middle of a crisis about exactly the same question. Who are we? What do we owe each other? Is the country we thought we were still the country we actually are? Dylan was doing his identity crisis in public, and the 60s was right there alongside him doing the same thing at full volume.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Robert Allen Simmerman, Bob Dylan.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Bob Dylan.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Okay, before we get into it, I want to name the thing that makes this episode slightly different from our usual approach. Because normally we come to you with a historical figure who has been misunderstood. Machiavelli was not a villain, Garbo was not a spy thriller, and so on, and we make the case for the real version. Dylan is more complicated than that. Dylan is not misunderstood exactly. He is genuinely contradictory. The myths are partly true. The performances were also real. The invented biography was also a kind of autobiography. And I think that makes him one of the most useful lenses we have ever pointed at an American decade.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Because the sixties is a decade that is also genuinely contradictory. It's the decade of the greatest legislative achievements for civil rights in American history and the decade of the assassination of Martin Luther King. It's the decade of Woodstock and the decade of the Manson murders. It's the decade of enormous collective energy and also the one that collapses that energy into cynicism and exhaustion. It does not resolve cleanly, and Dylan doesn't either, as we've been hinting.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

And we're not going to try to resolve it cleanly. We're going to use Dylan as a way into the decade, starting from the beginning, which means starting from hibbing.

SPEAKER_01 2:47

It always means starting from hibbing, uh, as all things must. Welcome back to the Mike and Mark History Experience, the show where we pull history off the page and ask the questions the textbooks are too polite to raise. I am Mike Williams coming to you from Los Angeles, where my daughter Monica has just informed me that her school played Blowin' in the wind in class, and one of her classmates asked if it was a protest song against leaf blowers.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

I will not mock that child. If you have never heard the song before and someone tells you it's a protest song, the answer is blowing in the wind could mean anything. That is either a flaw or a feature of Bob Dylan, depending on your disposition.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

We are going to spend this podcast deciding which. Today we're talking about Bob Dylan and the 60s, and specifically about identity, his Americas, and what happens when you try to build a self out of borrowed materials during a decade that keeps changing the building code.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

So, the beginning.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Hibbing is an iron range town, iron ore country, about as far north in Minnesota as you can get before you cross into Canada. Cold in a very serious way. Not scenic in any conventional sense. The economy is extractive, you dig it out, you ship it out, the town serves the mine. His father is Abraham, who runs a furniture and appliance store. His mother is Beatty. They are comfortable, not wealthy. Respectable, not remarkable. Young Robert grows up in a house with a television and a record player, and absolutely no reason on paper to become one of the most important American artists of the 20th century.

SPEAKER_00 4:30

And yet something is happening inside that house.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

Something is happening. He discovers the radio early, and what he discovers on it is the thing that will never leave him. Little Hank Williams. The first wave of rock and roll coming up through the static from stations in the South. He forms bands in high school. His family is bewildered. His father wants him to take over the store. He will not.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

There is something I find very moving about that, actually. Not the rebellion, the refusal to inherit. Because I think a lot of what Dylan's story is about is what happens to a generation of Americans who look at what was prepared for them and say, that is not sufficient. And the Iron Range in the late 1950s, whatever else it is, is not sufficient for a kid who can hear little Richard.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

He goes to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in 1959, lasts about a year, discovers the folk scene in a neighborhood called Dinky Town, folk music coffee houses, people singing Woody Guthrie songs and talking about the labor movement and the bomb. And somewhere in that scene, Robert starts becoming someone else.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

He takes the name Dylan from Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, the alcoholic visionary from Swansea, England. And I always find this choice interesting because it's not a convenient name. It doesn't sound American. It doesn't sound like a folk singer. It sounds like someone who read English poetry and wanted you to know it.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

And then he builds the biography. He tells people he grew up riding freight trains, that he ran away from home as a child, the age varies depending on who's asking, from ten to fifteen, that he travelled with a carnival, that he learned to play guitar from old bluesman in the deep south, that he knew Woody Guthrie personally before coming to New York. He affects an accent, something between Guthrie's Oklahoma drawl and something assembled from listening to too many leadbelly records.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

And how much of it is true?

SPEAKER_01 6:22

Essentially none of it. He had a perfectly ordinary middle-class suburban childhood and a bedroom full of records, and he found all of it completely insufficient.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

And people in Greenwich Village believed him.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

They believed him because they wanted to. The folk world had a very specific idea of what authenticity looked like. It looked like hard labor and hard miles and a guitar worn smooth from years of use. Dylan was a twenty-year-old from Minnesota performing that idea with extraordinary conviction and it worked. Which tells you something important about authenticity that a sufficiently committed performance of it is indistinguishable from the real thing.

SPEAKER_00 6:57

Which is either a reassuring or an alarming observation.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

Probably both. He arrives in New York in January of 1961. He's 19. Within weeks he's playing in the coffee houses of Greenwich Village Cafe. Wha Goethe's Folk City, and people are paying attention. He visits Woody Guthrie in the hospital. Guthrie is dying of Huntington's disease in a hospital in New Jersey and plays for him. Guthrie approves. And that approval matters enormously. Not just personally, symbolically. Because Guthrie is not just a musician. He is the living root of the tradition Dylan is trying to inherit.

SPEAKER_00 7:33

What does that tradition actually stand for? Because I think people hear folk music and assume it's just a genre, and it's more than that.

SPEAKER_01 7:40

It's significantly more than that. The folk revival of the early 60s has its roots in the labor movements of the 1930s, the Popular Front, the people who believe that art should serve political purposes. Pete Seeger, the Weavers, the idea that music is a tool, that songs can organize workers, can build solidarity, can speak truth to power in a language ordinary people understand. It's music with a moral framework built into its DNA.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

Music as collective action.

SPEAKER_01 8:09

Music as collective action. And it's worth noting what's happening in America at this precise moment because Dylan doesn't arrive in a vacuum, 1961. The Freedom Riders are travelling through the South, being met with violent mobs at bus stations in Alabama. The sit-ins are spreading. John Kennedy is in the White House, young, promising, and surrounded by a cold war that could end the planet on any given Tuesday. The civil rights movement is building towards something it doesn't yet know the shape of, and the folk world is the soundtrack to all of it.

SPEAKER_00 8:39

And then his second album comes out.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

The Freewheel and Bob Dylan album is in 1963. And this is where I ask you to stop and think about what is actually happening here because it's genuinely extraordinary. This is a 21-year-old, two years out of a Minnesota college, writing original compositions of such force that they sound like they've been in the tradition for a hundred years. Blowing in the wind, a hard rains are gonna fall, masters of war, don't think twice it's all right. These are not promising early works. These are fully realized masterpieces.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

Where does that come from?

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Nobody can fully account for it. He's reading constantly the beat poets, Kerouac, Ginsburg, he has an ear for language that cannot be taught. He's borrowing freely, blowing in the wind, takes its melody almost note for note from an old spiritual no more auction block, which is something he'll do his entire career without apology. Because he understands that tradition is not a museum. It's a living thing you take from and add to. But what he builds from the borrowed materials is genuinely, undeniably his own.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? That line, I've heard it ten thousand times and it still does something to me, not because of the melody, because the question is real. It's the question the civil rights movement is staking lives on. And a kid from Hibbing wrote it.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

A kid from Hibbing, who had never walked those roads, who had never personally experienced what that line is about. And this is the tension that will run through Dylan's entire story and through the entire decade story. Does it matter where art comes from if the art is true?

SPEAKER_00 10:15

My answer, which I want to put on the table now, and you can tell me if you disagree, is that it matters, but not in the way people usually mean. It doesn't matter in the sense of invalidating the work. Blowing in the wind is not diminished because Dylan didn't grow up in Mississippi, but it matters in the sense that the gap between where he came from and who he was claiming to be is part of the story. Because a whole generation of young Americans was doing the same thing. Performing versions of themselves that had no biographical precedent, trying on identities and finding some that fit and some that didn't, and moving on. Dylan just did it more consciously and more publicly and turned it into better art.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

And in August of 1963, he plays The March on Washington. He's on the same stage as Martin Luther King, Mahalia Jackson, Joan Byers, he sings When the Ship Comes In, and Only a Pawn in Their Game. He is 22 years old and he's to a degree that is almost impossible to overstate exactly where history needs him to be.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

And he is already quietly becoming someone else.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

Before we get to the betrayal, we have to talk about Joan Byers. Because you cannot understand what Dylan does in 1964 and 1965 without understanding what he and Byers were to each other and what that relationship cost.

SPEAKER_00 11:30

Set it up because she is not a supporting character here.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

She is not a supporting character at all. Joan Byers in 1961 is already a star. She has a recording contract, a following, and a reputation as the moral conscience of the folk revival that Dylan is just arriving to claim for himself. She is three years older than him. She has purity of commitment that he does not have and probably cannot have. And when she hears him play in a Greenwich Village coffee house, she does something remarkable. She opens her concerts to him, she brings him on stage in front of her audiences, audiences who have no idea who he is, and says, Listen to this, you need to know about this person. She essentially hands him her platform before he has earned one of his own.

SPEAKER_00 12:18

That is an act of extraordinary generosity or extraordinary confidence in her own judgment.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

Both. And they become romantically involved by 1962. And the relationship is in the vocabulary we've been using all episode a collision between two incompatible ideas of what an artist owes. Baez believes the artist owes the cause. She sings at civil rights marches, she goes to Selma, she will later go to Hanoi during Vietnam to protest the bombing. Her commitment is not symbolic. It is bodily, physical, at genuine personal risk. And she believes, or at least she needs, which is not the same thing that Dylan shares that commitment, that the songs mean he will show up the way she shows up.

SPEAKER_00 13:02

And Dylan does not show up that way.

SPEAKER_01 13:05

Dylan does not show up that way. He plays the March on Washington and he is present for the great early moments of the movement, but increasingly he is writing songs that are moving away from direct statement. He is restless. He is already, by 1963, privately skeptical of topical songwriting, of what he will later call finger pointing songs. And the distance between his public role as movement poet and his private artistic direction is widening. Byers is, I think, among the last people to understand this because she loves him, and because the version of Bob Dylan she loves the protest poet, the moral witness is genuinely there. It is just not all of him.

SPEAKER_00 13:48

And when the electric period begins, she is in the audience.

SPEAKER_01 13:53

She is in the audience. She goes on the 1965 tour with him through England. She is documented in the Penabaker film Don't Look Back. And what the film shows, if you are watching carefully, is the end of something. Dylan is dismissive in ways that are sometimes sharp enough to be cruel. He is already with someone else or about to be. He does not reciprocate the generosity she showed him. He does not bring her on stage. He does not, it seems, make much effort to acknowledge what she did for him at the beginning. And Baez, to her credit, does not collapse into silence about it. Years later, she will write and perform a song called Diamonds and Rust that is as honest an account of a relationship gone wrong as anything in the American songbook. It is better writing emotionally than almost anything Dylan wrote about the same period.

SPEAKER_00 14:41

That song, I want to defend that claim actually, because I think people hear it as a breakup song and stop there. It's not a breakup song. It's a meditation on memory and self-delusion, and the way love involves a kind of collaborative fiction that you only understand as fiction once it's over.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Which is interestingly exactly the theme of Dylan's entire career. So in the end, they were both making the same art about the same subjects and arriving at incompatible conclusions about what it required of them. The historical footnote here, and it is not a small footnote, is that Joan Byers had more courage than Bob Dylan by every political measure. She put her body on the line in ways he did not. She accepted the consequences of her convictions in ways he chose not to, and she is a lesser figure in the official history of the sixties. Which tells you something important and not entirely flattering about which qualities the official history rewards.

SPEAKER_00 15:34

The official history rewards the people who changed, not the people who stayed.

SPEAKER_01 15:38

Which is the American myth, operating exactly as designed, and also, depending on your disposition, a genuine moral problem. Keep that tension in mind. We're gonna need it for what comes next. 1964. The year things start to crack. And to understand why they crack, we need to understand what Dylan is reading and hearing and what that does to him. Because the change does not come from nowhere.

SPEAKER_00 16:03

He's been exposed to Rimbo, the French symbolist poets, he's listening to the Beatles obsessively, John Lennon in particular. And what he hears in these influences is a way of using language that is not organized around a clear political argument. Language that opens onto something rather than closing it down. Imagery that is surreal, personal, unsettling, not because it refuses to mean anything, but because it means more things than can be summarized.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

And the protest song form, for all that he has mastered it, is a form built for summarization. Three verses, a chorus, a moral, a verdict. And he is beginning to find the verdict less interesting than the trial.

SPEAKER_00 16:44

There's also a personal dimension that I think matters here. Because by 1964, the folk world's investment in Dylan has tipped from admiration into something closer to ownership. They don't just love his songs, they need them to keep meaning what they meant. They need Bob Dylan, the symbol, the conscience of the movement, the voice of the generation to remain fixed, to stay put, to keep writing blowing in the wind forever.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

And Dylan, to his credit and his enormous frustration, is not a symbol. He's a person. And the person keeps changing.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

He releases another side of Bob Dylan in August of 1964, and the title is so honest it's almost aggressive. There are love songs on it, there are rye, self-deprecating songs. There is a song called My Back Pages, in which he explicitly disavows the certainties of his protest period. I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. The movement people are confused. Some are annoyed, some are more than annoyed.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

And then at the end of 1964, he goes to a party in New York and is introduced to the Beatles. And at this party, the story goes, Bob Dylan introduces the Beatles to marijuana because he has misheard a lyric in I Want to Hold Your Hand and thinks they are already users. And the Beatles introduce Dylan in return to the possibility of what electric music can do with intelligence behind it.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

Whether that story is precisely accurate or not, the chemistry is real. Dylan hears what the Beatles are doing, the stones, the British invasion in general, and he hears freedom in it. The electric guitar as a vehicle for something that acoustic folk music cannot carry.

SPEAKER_01 18:20

And in January of 1965, he records Bringing It All Back Home. Half acoustic, half electric. It's both a declaration and a farewell. Side one is electric sharp, surrealist, propulsive. Side two is acoustic, as if he's giving the folk world one last look at what they're losing. The song Mr. Tambourine Man is on the acoustic side, and it is one of the most beautiful things he ever wrote, and it is completely unpolitical. It is about the imagination, about following sound into a place beyond ordinary experience. It is as far from Masters of War as music can get.

SPEAKER_00 18:55

And then in June, like a Rolling Stone.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Six minutes and thirteen seconds. Nobody was releasing six minute singles in 1965. Radio stations didn't know what to do with it. It opens with a crack of snare drum that sounds like a gunshot or like a door slamming, depending on your mood, and then the organ comes in and the guitar and the voice, and for six minutes Dylan is singing at someone with a fury and a precision and a wit that had simply not existed in popular music before.

SPEAKER_00 19:25

How does it feel to be on your own with no direction home? Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone. I want to sit with those words for a second because I think they are the key to the whole story we're telling. That question, how does it feel to be on your own, is the question the entire decade is asking. It's the question the civil rights movement is asking white America. It's the question Vietnam is asking the young men being drafted. It's the question the counterculture is asking about the generation that built the suburbs and bought the appliances. How does it feel when everything you thought was solid turns out to be negotiable?

SPEAKER_01 19:57

And Dylan is asking it about himself. He has burned down his old identity. He has left the movement, he has gone electric. He is in free fall, and like a Rolling Stone is what free fall sounds like when you have a genius for language and a willingness to turn the wreckage into something beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

And then Newport, the 25th of July 1965.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

Newport Folk Festival, Newport, Rhode Island. The holiest ground in American folk music. The place where Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and the whole tradition gather every summer to affirm what they believe. And Dylan walks on stage with an electric band. He has borrowed the rhythm section from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and they play three songs, Loud and Distorted, and a portion of the audience booze.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

Pete Seeger, the story goes, is backstage trying to find an axe to cut the power cable. Whether that's literally true is disputed. As a capture of emotional reality, it is exact.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Now, I want to give Newport its proper weight here, because the standard telling folk purists versus artistic evolution, old versus new, conformity versus freedom, that telling is not wrong, but it is not complete. Will you give me the other version?

SPEAKER_00 21:09

The other version is about what the folk world actually believed and why the belief was not small minded. The folk tradition's argument, and it has deep roots, it goes back decades, is that music is a communal act, that the artist belongs to the community, that to stand before an audience is to accept a responsibility to that audience. Going electric is not, by that logic, just a style change. It's a declaration of independence from the very idea that the artist owes the audience anything. And for a movement in the middle of the most dangerous fight in American politics, the civil rights movement in 1965, is the year of Selma, the year of the Voting Rights Act, the year of real violence and real stakes that declaration of independence feels like abandonment.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

And Dylan's counter argument, which he never made directly, because direct argument was not his mode, is that art belongs to the Artists first, that the moment you start making work for the audience rather than from yourself, you stop making art and start making something useful but dead. That a fixed symbol, however beloved, is not a living artist. It's a monument. And monuments do not write songs.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

Both arguments are serious, both are defensible. And the historical point, the reason we're spending time on this, is that this argument is not only about Bob Dylan. This is the argument the sixties has with itself in every register, in every movement. Who do you owe? What does solidarity require? Is there a self that exists prior to and independent of the community? Or is the self always already constructed by the community and therefore obligated to it? These are not abstract questions. People are dying over these questions in 1965.

SPEAKER_01 22:50

And Dylan's answer, play it loud, is an answer that the decade gives in a dozen other contexts. The students for a democratic society, the black power movement, the counterculture generally, there is a generational conviction in the air that the inherited obligations to parents, to institutions, to traditions are not automatically binding. That the self has the right to determine its own commitments, that you do not owe the past your future.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

Which is both liberating and depending on who is relying on you, terrifying.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

And then he releases the album that is, for my money, the full realization of what Newport was announcing. Highway 61 revisited.

SPEAKER_00 23:35

This album. It sounds like a dream assembled from everything Dylan has ever read and heard, and it is somehow emotionally coherent. You feel it before you understand it. You may never fully understand it. I have been listening to it for decades, and I'm still finding things in it.

SPEAKER_01 24:11

And the thing about Highway 61 revisited as a cultural artifact, not just as music as history, is that it arrives in August of 1965, the same month as the What's Uprising in Los Angeles, the same month the Voting Rights Act is signed. The country is burning, literally and legislatively, and the most urgent American music of that month is not a protest song. It is something stranger and more private and I would argue more honest about what it actually feels like to be alive in America in that specific August.

SPEAKER_00 24:46

More honest because less prescriptive. A protest song tells you what to feel and what to do about it. Desolation Row puts you inside a world so completely broken down and reconstituted that the only honest response is bewilderment. And bewilderment in August of 1965 is arguably more accurate than Clarity.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

Into 1966, Dylan is touring relentlessly with a full electric band that will eventually evolve into the band. Every night in every city, there are people in the audience shouting Judas Booing, holding up signs. There is a famous recording from the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, in England. Someone shouts, Judas from the crowd. Dylan's response before turning to the band to launch into Like a Rolling Stone is to say very quietly, I don't believe you. You're a liar. And then turning to the musicians, play it loud. And they do. The loudest, most ferocious version of the song ever recorded.

SPEAKER_00 25:49

That moment is one of the great confrontations in cultural history. And what I find most interesting about it is not the aggression, it's the specificity of I don't believe you. He's not saying you're wrong. He's saying you're performing an outrage you don't actually feel in service of an idea of Dylan that you need more than you need the music. He sees through the Judas moment as its own kind of theatre.

SPEAKER_01 26:13

And he might be right about that. The booing at Dylan concerts in 1966 had become, for some people, its own ritual, its own performance of belonging to the tradition, which Dylan characteristically finds more interesting to name than to accommodate.

SPEAKER_00 26:31

And then in July 1966, he crashes his motorcycle near his home in Woodstock, New York. He is hurt. How badly hurt is genuinely unclear. The details have never been fully established, and Dylan himself has been characteristically cryptic about them. What is clear is what happens next. He stops completely. No touring, no recording for public release. He retreats to a house in Woodstock with his wife Sarah and their children, and he disappears from public life for the better part of two years.

SPEAKER_01 27:00

And the culture that has been organized around his movements, the counterculture, the rock world, the still grieving folk movement, is left without a map.

SPEAKER_00 27:09

Because what happens in those two years, 1966 to 1968, is catastrophic. Martin Luther King is assassinated in April 1968, Robert Kennedy in June. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August turns into a police riot. The country that Dylan had been writing about in the abstract, the country in crisis, the country of desolation row, is now visibly, concretely coming apart, and the prophet has gone silent.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

Meanwhile, in uh Woodstock, something else is happening. Dylan is recording with the musicians who will become the band Robbie Robertson, Levinhelm, Garth Hudson, and Richard Manuel in the basement of a pink house they call Big Pink Big Pink. And what they make together is nothing like anything Dylan had done before.

SPEAKER_00 27:56

These recordings eventually released years later as the basement tapes are warm, loose, sometimes silly. They draw on country music, old gospel, mountain ballads, nineteenth century American folk forms that the folk revival had mostly forgotten. They sound like music made for pleasure by people who are rediscovering what music sounds like before it becomes a statement.

SPEAKER_01 28:20

And this is, I want to argue, the most historically significant thing Dylan does in the entire decade. Not Newport, not like a Rolling Stone, this. The retreat to the basement, the decision, after years of being the most important public artist in America to make music that has no audience, that makes no argument. That is answerable to nothing except whether it sounds good in the room.

SPEAKER_00 28:45

Why is that historically significant?

SPEAKER_01 28:47

Because it names something the counterculture and the movement and the whole decade is going to learn the hard way. You cannot maintain maximum intensity forever. The revolution is not a permanent condition. At some point you have to go to the basement and play old country songs and remind yourself what it felt like before the world needed you to save it. The basement tapes are a document of someone practicing the art of being a human being rather than a symbol.

SPEAKER_00 29:08

And then he comes out of the basement and releases John Wesley Harding in December of 1967. And it is the shock nobody expected.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

Spare. Biblical. Short songs with a moral gravity that is almost Old Testament. No excess, no electric noise, no surrealism for its own sake. It sounds like a man who has been through something and come out on the other side of it quieter.

SPEAKER_00 29:34

And the counterculture, the Woodstock Nation, the Summer of Love crowd receives this with something between confusion and betrayal. Because he was supposed to be their Dylan now, having abandoned the folk movement, having gone electric, having been the prophet of the new Bohemia he was supposed to settle in, to be the poet laureate of the turn-on-tune-in dropout generation. And instead he makes a spare country-inflected album about biblical outlaws, and then in 1969 follows it with Nashville Skyline.

SPEAKER_01 30:04

Pure country music. Sung in a voice nobody had heard from him before. Smooth, warm, almost sweet, the rough nasal delivery of the protest years, the slurred electric snarl, gone. He duets with Johnny Cash. He records in Nashville with session musicians who have spent their careers making the music of people, the counterculture regarded as the enemy. He is once again deliberately in the wrong place.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

And I find this moment aesthetically and historically the most interesting of all his reinventions. Because country music in 1969 is not politically neutral. Country is the music of Nixon's silent majority. It's the music of the people the counterculture has spent the decade defining itself against. And Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman, Jewish kid from the Iron Range, three times over apostate prophet, walks into that music and makes it beautifully and unapologetically.

SPEAKER_01 30:57

He's refusing, once again, every identity on offer, folk saint, electric prophet, counterculture poet. He will not wear any of the uniforms. And here is where I want to make the historical argument that I think is the center of this episode.

SPEAKER_00 31:12

Make it.

SPEAKER_01 31:13

The 1960s kept trying to appoint prophets. The civil rights movement needed a voice. The counterculture needed a voice. The anti-war movement needed a voice. Each formation needed someone to speak for it and carry its meanings into the future. And Dylan kept refusing the appointment. Every refusal was also a revelation because what his refusals told you was that the decade did not have a single meaning. It was not a unified movement with a clear direction. It was a decade of Americans trying in different places and from different positions to answer the same question, who are we and who do we owe? And coming up with incompatible answers. Dylan was the only artist honest enough, or perhaps reckless enough, to enact that incompatibility in public.

SPEAKER_00 31:55

He is the decade. Not the decade as it wanted to be remembered, heroic, purposeful, moving in one direction. The decade has it. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

Last section. And I want to do two things here. I want to make the large argument about what Dylan tells us about America and identity. And I want to have the argument with you that we've been circling all episode. The one about whether Dylan's refusal to stay put was principled or convenient.

SPEAKER_00 32:23

Start with a large argument.

SPEAKER_01 32:25

Okay. America has a central myth. The myth is reinvention. You can come here and become something new. You are not bound by where you came from, by your class, by your history, by the family you were born into, the self-made man, the frontier, the immigrant story. This myth is real. It has been true for enough people, often enough to be part of the national self-understanding, but the myth has a hidden clause. The reinvention is supposed to go in one direction, upward into something stable and legible. You become a success, you become a citizen, you become an American. The machinery doesn't know what to do with someone who reinvents themselves sideways or backward or into something that cannot be clearly described.

SPEAKER_00 33:12

And Dylan reinvents himself in directions that have no category.

SPEAKER_01 33:16

Robert Zimmerman becomes Bob Dylan, the hobo folk singer, a performance of an identity that has never existed in the form he is performing it. Then Bob Dylan, the protest saint, a real tradition, entered with real seriousness, but still a chosen role. Then Bob Dylan, the electric visionary, a contradiction in the terms his audience has been using. Then Bob Dylan, the retreating family man, then Bob Dylan, the country singer. Then in the 1970s, after the decade, we're discussing Bob Dylan, the Born Again Christian, which is its own astonishing chapter, and so on, he keeps going. He is 73 years old at the time of his Nobel Prize in 2016, and he has been in continuous artistic motion since 1961.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

And each reinvention reveals something about the American myth. Because each time he changes, the people he leaves behind, the folk world, the counterculture, the Christian rock audience, each time those people's hurt is real. And their hurt is the hurt of people who believed in the version of the myth that says reinvention has a destination, that you are working toward a finished self. And Dylan keeps demonstrating that there is no finished self, that the becoming never stops.

SPEAKER_01 34:29

And here's where I think it connects to the 60s specifically. The decade began with a coherent story about itself. The story was we are going to finish the promise of American democracy. We are going to extend civil rights to everyone. We are going to build a great society. We are going to be finally the country we always said we were. That story was genuine. It was backed by real sacrifice and real courage and real blood.

SPEAKER_00 34:54

And then it fractured.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

It fractured because the promise was harder to keep than the story allowed for. And because the people who needed to keep it were not all the same people and did not all want the same things. The civil rights movement fractured between integration and black power. The anti-war movement fractured between electoral politics and direct action. The counterculture fractured between communes and nihilism. The whole decade spent the second half dismantling the consensus it had built in the first half. And Dylan, who had been both part of that consensus and resistant to it, turns out to have been a more accurate map of where the decade was going than anyone wanted him to be.

SPEAKER_00 35:35

He was the fracturing.

SPEAKER_01 35:37

He was the fracturing, made audible with better chord changes.

SPEAKER_00 35:42

Okay, now I want the argument. Because I've been patient.

SPEAKER_01 35:46

Let's have it.

SPEAKER_00 35:46

My argument is this. Dylan's principled refusal to stay put, his commitment to artistic evolution over movement loyalty. I accept that as real. I am not calling it cynical, but I want to name what it costs the people who needed him to stay. Because Pete Seeger's anger at Newport was not a small-minded man defending a small minded tradition. It was a man who had built his life around the belief that music is a tool of solidarity, that the artist belongs to the community, that collective action requires collective commitment. And Dylan walking off stage that night was, from inside that belief, an act of genuine betrayal. The hurt was proportional to the commitment. And I think we owe it to that hurt to take it seriously rather than filing it away as the folk world failing to understand genius.

SPEAKER_01 36:30

I take that seriously. I genuinely do. And here's where I think the tension in Dylan's story maps onto the decade's own unresolved argument. Because the civil rights movement itself was having this argument. Ella Baker believed in collective, grassroots, bottom-up organizing. That the movement belonged to the people doing the work, that no individual, not even King, should become so central that the movement could not survive without him. And King himself, who was in many ways a very different kind of figure from Dylan, more obviously committed, more willing to accept the burdens of leadership. Even King was by 1967 and 1968 moving in directions that his most loyal supporters could not follow. Opposing Vietnam, talking about economic justice in terms that made his liberal allies uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_00 37:24

So the movement was doing what Dylan was doing.

SPEAKER_01 37:26

The movement was doing what Dylan was doing. Every individual and every collective was in the process of becoming something that the people who loved the earlier version had not signed up for. And the question, who do you owe when you have to choose between what you were and what you are becoming? That question does not get a clean answer. Dylan didn't answer it. The decade didn't answer it. We are still, in this country, not finished answering it.

SPEAKER_00 37:52

Which is why he still matters.

SPEAKER_01 37:53

Which is exactly why he still matters. Not because the songs are good, though they are, not because the story is interesting, though it is. Because the question he kept refusing to answer, who are you when the identity you were given is insufficient and the identity you invented keeps becoming insufficient is the permanent American question. And Dylan enacted it uh more completely, more publicly, and over a longer career than anyone else in the history of the culture.

SPEAKER_00 38:19

And the answer?

SPEAKER_01 38:20

There isn't one. That's the answer. There is only the next song.

SPEAKER_00 38:23

I want to ask the question that has been sitting underneath this entire episode. Because we've been talking about what Dylan meant to the sixties, but we haven't fully asked what the sixties meant, what it actually was as a historical event and what ended it, because the sixties doesn't end on the thirty first of December 1969. Something ends, something specific and irreversible, and I want to know what you think it is.

SPEAKER_01 38:44

Okay. Let me make a distinction first, because I think it matters. There is the sixties as a calendar decade, which ends in the normal way, and then there is the sixties as a project, a collective attempt to answer the question. We've been circling all episode. Can this country become what it always said it was? That project has a beginning, a middle, and an ending that is not clean, and the ending is not caused by one thing. It is caused by a cascade. Stop the cascade. The first thing that kills the 60s is the assassinations. Not just Kennedy in 1963, though that one cuts very deep. I mean the sequence, uh King in April 1968, Robert Kennedy two months later. You cannot overstate what those deaths do to the movement's sense of possibility. Because King and Kennedy are not just symbols. They are the evidence that the system can be changed from within through law, through moral witness, through political action. When they are killed, the evidence is gone. And what replaces it for a significant portion of the movement is the conviction that the system is not reformable, that the enemy is not just segregationists and hawks, the enemy is the structure itself. And that conviction that the system must be broken rather than changed is one of the things that tears the coalition apart.

SPEAKER_00 40:06

And then Vietnam.

SPEAKER_01 40:07

Vietnam is not a separate story. Vietnam is the same story the civil rights movement is telling, just told in blood, at a different address. The same government that deployed federal marshals to protect the Freedom Riders is simultaneously deploying 19-year-olds to die in a rice paddy for reasons that are never made coherent. And what the draft does, particularly the way it operates, with college deferments that protect the children of the comfortable and funnel the poor and the black directly into the machinery is to make the connection undeniable. The war and the movement and the economic structure of American life are the same argument. You cannot separate them. And by 1968, the people who tried to work within the system who believed in electoral politics in the Democratic Party, in the possibility of peaceful change, watch that hope get beaten with police batons outside the convention hall in Chicago. The system is not going to cooperate.

SPEAKER_00 41:01

And then Nixon.

SPEAKER_01 41:03

Nixon wins in November 1968, and his victory is the statistical proof of something the movement did not want to see. The counterculture, the protest movement, the whole apparatus of the 60s as a progressive project, it is a minority, a loud, culturally prominent, historically important minority. But the country, given a choice, chose the guy who promised to restore order. Nixon's silent majority is not a fiction. It is the majority. And that is not a small thing to absorb. The 60s, in its own head, was the future. Nixon's election is the country telling the 60s, actually, you are not the future, you are an episode.

SPEAKER_00 41:41

But I want to push on the self-implosion part. Because those are external forces, assassinations, the war, Nixon. The 60s also destroys itself from within. And I want you to name that.

SPEAKER_01 41:52

The 60s destroys itself in at least three ways. And they are all related. The first is the fracturing of the coalition. Civil rights and black power are not the same project. The students for a democratic society and the Weather Underground are not the same project. The women who were in the movement and kept being asked to make the coffee and sleep with the leadership, they are eventually going to name what they were experiencing. And when they do, the coalition does not survive the naming intact. Every formation that had marched together discovers around 1967 and 1968 that it had been marching for slightly different destinations. The solidarity was real, but it was also provisional. And when the provisional nature becomes visible, the disillusionment is enormous.

SPEAKER_00 42:41

What's the second way?

SPEAKER_01 42:42

The second is the exhaustion of maximum intensity. You cannot sustain maximum moral urgency indefinitely. The movement required people to operate at the highest possible register of commitment for years. It required sacrifice, danger, the sustained willingness to risk your body and your future for a cause. Most people cannot maintain that. Not because they are cowardly, but because it is not humanly sustainable. And uh the counterculture's answer to the problem of exhaustion, which was essentially opt-out, drop out, build the new world in the ruins of the old one, turned out to be its own trap. Ultimate is December 1969, three months after Woodstock. The Rolling Stones hire the Hell's Angels for security. A man is stabbed to death in front of the stage. Four months earlier, the Manson murders, the counterculture's myth of itself that the young and the free were building a better world organized around love and music cracks open and something uglier comes out.

SPEAKER_00 43:38

And the third?

SPEAKER_01 43:39

The third is the one that is hardest to say and most important. The 60s is undone in part by its own success. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Great Society programs, the end of Jim Crow as legal structure. These are real enormous hard won achievements. And they are also. In political terms, the moment the Democratic coalition fractures, because the white working class in the North and the South, the union members and the factory workers who were part of the New Deal coalition look at what the party has done, and a significant portion of them decide that what has been built is not for them. Nixon reads this correctly. He builds a new coalition out of the fracture. And the conservative movement that comes into full power with Reagan in 1980 is the direct political descendant of that fracture. The 60s wins the moral argument and loses the political one. Which is either a tragedy or an unfinished story, depending on how patient you are.

SPEAKER_00 44:39

And where is Dylan in all of this?

SPEAKER_01 44:41

Dylan is in the basement, literally. He is in Woodstock recording old songs with a group of musicians who will become the band making music that has nothing to do with any of the arguments being settled outside. And I want to argue that this is not a failure of courage. It is a different kind of witness. Because what the basement tapes say, what their very existence says, is that the life of the imagination does not end when the political project falters. That there is a tradition older than any single decade's certainties that you can go back to the well, that the songs that were there before the movement are still there after it. Dylan's retreat is not abandonment. It is the act of a man who understands, perhaps better than anyone, that the decade's most dangerous illusion was the belief that everything, art, identity, politics, love, history could be unified into one great burning moment of collective purpose.

SPEAKER_00 45:38

Things cannot all burn at the same temperature forever.

SPEAKER_01 45:41

Things cannot all burn at the same temperature forever. And the 60s burned at maximum temperature for about three years. The March on Washington to Newport to the Voting Rights Act to the Watts Uprising, that run, and then not a collapse exactly, but a differentiation. The single story becomes multiple stories. The movement becomes movements. The decade becomes, in retrospect, not a unified arc, but a set of arguments that were conducted simultaneously and resolved where they resolved it all in different directions. Dylan shaped that.

SPEAKER_00 46:26

He was rebuffed by the decade too, though. The folk world rejected him. The counterculture expected something from him that he refused to deliver. He was not a comfortable fit for any of the available identities the 60s was offering.

SPEAKER_01 46:38

He was rebuffed. And that is precisely why he remains part of the story. Because the 60s is not, in its honest version, a story of triumphant consensus. It is a story of extraordinary aspiration and genuine fracture and irresolvable argument. Dylan embodies that more completely than anyone who actually stayed. The people who stayed, who committed to the movement, who accepted its burdens and its solidarities, they tell one true story about the decade. Dylan, by refusing, by moving, by being impossible to fix in place, tells another true story. The story of what it felt like when the decade was happening to you and you could not keep up with it and it could not keep up with you.

SPEAKER_00 47:20

The subtitle of this episode is Identity, Reinvention, and the Decade That Couldn't Keep Up. I want to note that neither side of that sentence is entirely fair. Dylan couldn't keep up with the decade either.

SPEAKER_01 47:32

That's the right correction. They were both moving too fast for each other, and that is in the end why the decade matters. And why he matters. Not because anyone got it right, but because the scale of the ambition, the sheer scope of what was attempted morally and artistically and politically, forces every subsequent generation to measure itself against it. The 60s ends. It ends badly in many ways in assassinations and riot and a war that will drag on for another six years past Nixon's election. It ends in the exhaustion of its own energy. But it does not end in failure. Exactly. The Voting Rights Act does not unpass. Blowing in the wind does not become a worse song. The question how many roads does not stop being the question. That is what Dylan understood about his own work, I think, even when he was refusing to be pinned to it. The question outlives the decade. It outlives him. It outlives us. That is what makes it art and not just history.

SPEAKER_00 48:27

Alright, bottom line. Was Bob Dylan the voice of the sixties?

SPEAKER_01 48:31

He was the voice of the sixties the same way the sixties was the voice of America. Which is to say, contradictory, brilliant, maddening, capable of extraordinary beauty and extraordinary self-indulgence, and ultimately more honest about the impossibility of the task than anyone who accepted the task cleanly could afford to be.

SPEAKER_00 48:50

And Newport justified?

SPEAKER_01 48:53

Newport was one of the most important artistic decisions of the 20th century, and it cost real people real things. Both of those sentences are true, and neither cancels the other.

SPEAKER_00 49:04

And the invented biography, the fake hobo from Minnesota?

SPEAKER_01 49:08

The fake hobo from Minnesota understood something true that the self you perform long enough becomes the self you are. That identity is not something you inherit, it's something you build. He built badly in some respects, and the building was sometimes dishonest, and it produced some of the most lasting American music ever recorded. Welcome to the American myth operating exactly as designed.

SPEAKER_00 49:29

How does it feel to be on your own with no direction home?

SPEAKER_01 49:32

Still the question. Still no answer. Still the best six minutes in the history of American music.

SPEAKER_00 49:37

That's it for today's episode of the Mike and Mark History Experience.

SPEAKER_01 49:41

If this episode made you want to go back and listen to Highway 61 revisited from first track to last, that is the correct response. Start with like a Rolling Stone, end with Desolation Row, clear your schedule.

SPEAKER_00 49:52

And if you have been booing Bob Dylan since Newport 1965, 60 years is long enough. He is not coming back to acoustic. The guitar stays electric. You can let it go.

SPEAKER_01 50:03

Bob Dylan, as of this recording, is 84 years old today, living in Los Angeles, Calabasas, a small town in the West Valley, I believe.

SPEAKER_00 50:11

We didn't mean to resolve anything here, but let you know that things are still blowing in the wind.

SPEAKER_01 50:16

No, you didn't.

SPEAKER_00 50:18

Goodbye, folks. Until next time.