Please note in keeping wity my recent run of mistakes on the site, the wrong article was published yesterday. Here is the correct one. The person in charge of putting up articles (me) has been suitably admonished by the person running the site (which is also me).
Really sorry everyone. Tony.
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DYLAN & US: BEYOND AMERICA
by Wouter van Oorschot
Translated by Brent Annable
Previously in this series…
- Amuse bouche
- 1. Who the book is (not) for – part 1
- 1. Who this book is (not) for – part 2
- 2. Anything but idolatry – part 1
- 2. Anything but idolatry – part 2
- 3. Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 1
- 3. Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 2
- 3. Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 3
- 3. Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 4
After browsing through the Cashbox Archives, it should come as no surprise that the cracks began to appear in The Great American Songbook’s once-foolproof formula for success. All that was necessary was for the sands of the Pax Americana to shift, which they ultimately did of their own accord. Long-term economic prosperity – which many had viewed as ‘progress’ – was all it took.
It was against this backdrop that the first generation of rich teenagers grew up. Like every generation before them, they sought each other out in order to teach one another about and enjoy life. Their primary motivation was love and/or sex – we are primates, after all. And as we all know, for centuries dancing has proven to be both the best scenic route and prelude to sex (self-gratification aside). The music industry may have provided the dance music, but it took some time before people noticed that the youth were ‘discontented’. Teenagers too ill-equipped to entertain themselves, but who noticed that they still had oceans of free time even after all their dancing and flirting, started feeling bored. In the mid-1950s, the adults then noticed that the combination of puberty/adolescence and boredom resulted in a strong tendency to exhibit deviant behaviour.
Emblematic of such behaviour was the character of Jim Stark in the aptly-titled 1955 movie ‘Rebel without a cause’, which made a cult figure of actor James Dean (1931-1955), whose untimely death sadly occurred in that same year. The film’s concurrent release with the definitive breakthrough of rock ‘n’ roll was no coincidence. An adult society that allowed young people to remain children for longer, but which also demanded that their behaviour remain ‘above board’, was not especially rich in adventure and so did nothing to cure the generation’s boredom. True adventure could only be found by throwing caution to the wind and travelling haphazardly across the country, a pastime reserved exclusively for true adventurers, of which there are always only relatively few. Dreaming of adventure did become a literary possibility in 1957 with the release of On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), but then again, most young people at that age were not readers either. Some, however, did retrace the journeys through the United States described in the book with exact precision. And before we lose sight of him: Bob Dylan – who in 1964 trundled from the east to the west coast in a station wagon with some friends during what must have been his last carefree holiday before being launched into world-stardom – declared that On the Road had been a powerful source of inspiration to him.
All very well and good. But it was rock ‘n’ roll that channelled all of the young people’s pocket money, free time and ennui. It was the inestimable legacy of Dylan’s two black forefathers, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, the latter of whom once said in an interview:
What we did: we took boogie woogie that black people was playin’ all the time and we put the blues and the boogie woogie together: rock ’n roll! You see, rock ’n roll is nothing but rhythm and blues up-tempo. And rhythm and blues up-tempo is boogie woogie.
Their new style brought about a pivotal change in American society, as it penetrated to the very marrow of both the bourgeois norms of decency and the strict racial segregation in their country. Their first television appearances show only white, smartly-dressed and well-groomed middle-class youths, daintily bopping along while seated in their chairs. But in the concert halls where they played, the young people – who had been segregated at the door based on skin colour – began dancing together as a mixed group. To quote Little Richard again:
Rock music broke down racial barriers. I would play places, and they would have white spectators. The white people would sit upstairs, the black people would be downstairs, because I was a black man. And the white people would leap over the balcony, come down and the audience would start integrating, because music has no racial boundary.
Some time later, rocking-and-rolling was permitted in the television studios, though black people were rarely included, if ever. Richard was more explosive but also more one-sided than Berry. All things considered, his songs were only about ‘good-looking girls’ – and he was a closeted homosexual to boot! Berry’s lyrics were more effective at capturing the essence of young people’s lives, and they occasionally even offered social criticism.
Though the recording industry was once again churning out reams of semi-talents, Elvis Presley was essentially the only one worthy to join the ranks of the forefathers. But Presley fans, prepare yourselves for some unpleasant news. Whereas Berry and Richard composed and released their own hits one after the other, the white ‘king’ –dubbed so in part because he was white – did not write his own material, and so sang songs by others. When that came to no avail, he successfully diverted attention away from his limited musical talent with fearsome pelvic movements and a provocative tough-guy expression. He was admittedly very sexy and had a voice, true, and as such he was certainly a seductive crooner who won the hearts of many a teenager. Each to their own. But ‘king’? No, that title was for Richard and Berry. Unlike the many who claim that rock ‘n’ roll began with Bill Haley’s ‘Rock around the clock’ and/or ‘Bye bye love’ by the Everly Brothers (ruddy or swarthy since they were not white, but one could be forgiven for saying so) I am a proponent of Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’ (August 1955) and Richard’s ‘Tutti frutti’ (January 1956).
Chuck Berry – Maybellene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75RiHJGfyUE
Chuck Berry – Tutti frutti: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F13JNjpNW6c
My reasons are musical ones: Bill Haley’s sound and that of the brothers Everly is nothing more than the serviceable workmanship of the music industry, whereas the rock by Berry and Richard is raw and real. And Presley’s greatest contribution, as a ‘randy and fair-skinned’ young man was that he made rock ‘n’ roll acceptable to the randy and fair-skinned youth of the middle classes. More than that really cannot be said. I understand that some will interpret this view as unfair (or anti-fair), but that is nonsense. Since when and why is the entire world population required to adulate Elvis Presley?
The musical and social revolution brought about by rock ‘n’ roll took flight with the advent of the portable transistor radio in 1954. The ‘pocketable’ Sony TR-63, that appeared three years later, became a coveted item among teenagers as it enabled them to listen to their favourite music anywhere, as it was broadcast by hundreds of commercial stations throughout the country. Here, the principal definition of ‘anywhere’ was: far from mom and dad, and not only inside the house, but outdoors as well. The global surge in youth music would not have been possible, or would at least have been significantly delayed, without television shows and the sale of millions of transistor radios.
The law of the handicap of a head start was consummated in the transition from singers who sang other people’s songs accompanied by string orchestras and brass bands, to young people who wrote their own lyrics and melodies which they performed themselves. This was the context in which Bob Dylan, then still known as Robert Allen Zimmermann, grew up.
In the early 1960s, when rock ‘n’ roll had died down somewhat, The Beatles made their entrance, representing the final fruits of the head-start handicap in the American entertainment industry. They are mentioned here because they strongly influenced Dylan, and vice versa.
As pleasantly virile and upbeat as their sound was, and however openly they sang about love, The Beatles’ early lyrics demonstrate that American songwriters were not the only ones struggling with mushy sentimentality. On the other hand, they did single-handedly (albeit in the wake of several innovative English pop groups such as the Kinks) shape young people’s music into the worldwide variant within Western folk music that was dubbed pop music. They had already been working hard at this process for two years when in August 1964, halfway through their first United States tour, Dylan called on them at their hotel in New York. At that time, he himself was little more than a folk singer who, while famous in his own country, was completely unknown beyond its borders and had released a failed debut single which, while not folk, was not identifiable as anything else. We will return to that later.
In any case: Dylan did not visit the Beatles as a victim of the Beatlemania that had spread like wildfire from the spring of that year, but simply because he understood how magnificent their music was. His most recent reason to believe as much was the appearance of The Beatles’ Second Album in April of that year, which opened with their cover of ‘Roll over Beethoven’ as an homage to Chuck Berry, and concluded with the show-stopping ‘She loves you’. From their sound, he had drawn the conclusion that the rock ‘n’ roll that had evolved during all of their teenage years had suddenly become ‘classic’, and also that the folk music of which he was a major exponent at the time was limiting his opportunities. His fourth album, Another side of Bob Dylan, that had appeared that same August would therefore be his last solo ‘folk’ album containing his own material. On it, he had announced his farewell to the folk world – but not the folk genre – with the purely autobiographical but cryptic number ‘My back pages’ and its chorus lyrics:
Ah, but I was so much older then I’m younger than that now.
Feel free to interpret these lines, if you can. Perhaps a slick, twenty-first-century spoken-word translator would render them as ‘Man, what a boomer I was back then, now thankfully I’m woke’. We might safely disregard that interpretation for now. But in any case: Dylan had determined for himself that the young people’s music was moving in a different direction, and that it was also his direction. Reason enough to approach The Beatles, who had been responsible for it, to exchange ideas. The ‘Fab Four’, for their part, were already familiar with some of Dylan’s work which they greatly admired, and so they were happy to see him. Not until years later was it revealed that Dylan had also offered them a joint in their hotel room, and that ‘a good time’ was had by all. Dylan had already been familiar with marijuana (to say the least) for some time, and his initiation into its use had already left traces in his own work. With The Beatles it would be no different. ‘She’s a woman’ by Paul McCartney, the B-side of their single ‘I feel fine’, and ‘I’m a loser’ by John Lennon, on their new LP Beatles for Sale that appeared in late November/early December of 1964, were the first unmistakeable signs thereof.
Although at the time, as a nearly-thirteen-year-old, I was ‘more into the Rolling Stones than The Beatles’, I could not deny it any longer: ‘I feel fine’ and ‘She’s a woman’ were sublime. They were the product of a far more varied musical DNA than that of the Rolling Stones – though my thirteen-year-old self could never have formulated it that way.
But as I have already mentioned, it was in that same December of 1964 that Dylan and I encountered one another with ‘All I really want to do’, and it was this ‘encounter’ that would profoundly influence my outlook on life. Many millions have never experienced such a thing; to me, it was a boon.
At the time, I knew nothing of what Dylan’s life had been like prior to our encounter. And of course, I quickly realised that he knew nothing of our meeting, and that he never would. But I didn’t care. To me, it was real.
The next chapter looks at characteristics of the traditional love song, after which we will take a deep dive and I will demonstrate how my intellectual life and Dylan’s work became intertwined, as I have promised.
(to be continued)
Wouter’s book is only available in Dutch for now:
Dylan en wij zonder Amerika, Wouter van Oorschot | 9789044655179 | Boeken | bol
We will publish more chapters from it in English on Untold Dylan in the coming weeks