1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (20 page)

Some thought Dylan was continuing his Rolling Stones fixation. He palled around with the drug-addled Brian Jones and was known to greet him with “Hello, Brian, how’s your paranoia?” Also, “keeping up with the Joneses” was the great American pastime.

All that can be said for sure is that, to the strains of Al Kooper’s creepy organ, a guy enters a room alone, holding his pencil, and has to put his eyes in his pockets as he’s besieged by strange men in a whirlpool of phallic imagery. Geeks, sword swallowers, one-eyed midgets, lumberjacks, and kneeling naked men clicking their high heels borrow Mr. Jones’s throat, turn him into a cow, and hand him bones. It is as if he’s been dosed with LSD and shepherded into a gay orgy at Andy Warhol’s Factory (where Dylan made intermittent appearances throughout the year).

New York artist Steve Kaplan (born 1944) remembered the first time he heard the song. “I was living at my mom’s house in Queens. And I remember going to bed one night and listening to the AM radio, and I heard this song at about 2 a.m.… It was Bob Dylan, and I was listening to the words. And I remember thinking to myself,
‘What the fuck is this? What is this guy talking about?’
It was absolutely hypnotic. It was as if I had just been changed to a different frequency, zapped right into the radio. I was listening with my ears the size of cauliflowers. I could not get enough of that song. But it ended, and I went back to school the next day.”
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Huey Newton, who would form the Black Panthers the following year, listened to the album ritualistically. He told his comrades that the song was a metaphor for how the white man was screwing over the black man.

The album’s eleven-minute final song, “Desolation Row,” hints at the reasons Dylan once felt such kinship with the civil rights movement. The opening lines refer to a postcard of a hanging, which Dylan’s father actually witnessed. When his father was eight years old, on June 15, 1920, three black men in a traveling circus were accused of raping a white woman and lynched two blocks from his house. Postcards with photos of their corpses were sold. (Dylan’s grandparents had fled Ukraine from the pogroms of 1905, where Jews were raped and murdered, so being lynched wasn’t such a remote possibility to his father.) A few lines later, Dylan sings of restless riot squads needing somewhere to go; the track was recorded on August 4, a week before the Watts riots.

Al Kooper said the main inspiration for “Desolation Row,” however, was Manhattan’s Eighth Avenue, “an area infested with whore houses, sleazy bars and porno supermarkets.”
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The song climaxes on the
Titanic
, where people shout, “Which side are you on?,” also the title of a folk song about a coal miner strike. Dylan believed that during his performance at Newport, someone had been shouting at him, “Are you with us? Are you with us?”
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Here he seems to be hinting that the old-fashioned acoustic scene was sinking like the
Titanic
, into irrelevance. (“Positively 4th Street” also has a verse about being on the winning side.)

Ironically, the song was acoustic; Dylan tried an electric version of “Desolation Row” but didn’t like it. Luckily, Bob Johnston’s Nashville friend Charlie McCoy was in town. McCoy had played for everyone from Presley to Johnny Cash to Quincy Jones and Perry Como. McCoy’s fluid guitar work in the style of Grady Martin so captivated Dylan that he recorded in Nashville for the next five years. Producer Johnston spliced together takes six and seven to capture Dylan’s stunning harmonica solo at the end. (Dylan’s playing was often underrated, but his earliest recorded gig was as session harmonica player for Harry Belafonte on “Midnight Special,” four years prior.) Jagger said he heard “Desolation Row” referred to as Dylan’s version of “The Waste Land,” which is fitting, as T. S. Eliot is one of the song’s “all-star cast.”
28

Dylan scholar Mark Polizzotti theorizes that the title came from mixing John Steinbeck’s
Cannery Row
with Jack Kerouac’s
Desolation Angels
, which was published in June.
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Angels
looks back on the glory days of the Beat Generation of a decade earlier. In a
New York Herald Tribune
review of the book, writer Nelson Algren excoriated Kerouac for the same reason the Newport folkies castigated Dylan: for being apolitical. Algren, the author of
Walk on the Wild Side
, was just a little older than the Beats and, like many of the folkies, had been blacklisted by the FBI. Algren charged that although both beatniks and Hugh Hefner–style sexual hedonists proudly considered themselves “nonconformists,” they existed only because “a country enjoying such a plenitude of physical luxuries … could actually support infantilism as a trade … Their nonconformity was of no significance: No Congressional investigator is any more likely to ask anyone whether he knew Allen Ginsberg than he is to ask whether he knew Hugh Hefner.”
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The negative feedback from the folk community blended with the exhaustion Dylan suffered from his relentless professional schedule—
Revisited
was recorded in just five days—the hurricane of fame, and the drugs he relied on and that kept him up for days at a time. In “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” the weariness of Paul Griffin’s piano brings the heavy sound of the 1970s five years early. “From a Buick Six” is a psychic flash of the motorcycle accident that will take Dylan off the road a year later. Even in the upbeat “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” he muses that he might die on top of the hill. The bleak nihilism of
Highway 61 Revisited
is a far cry from the joyous laughter of
Bringing It All Back Home
, recorded just six months earlier.

12

Hello, Vietnam

President Johnson doubles the draft call to thirty-five thousand men a month on July 28, two days before enacting Medicare and Medicaid.

President Lyndon Johnson
was driving his special assistant Joseph A. Califano Jr. on his Texas ranch when, as Califano recalled, “We reached a steep incline at the edge of the lake, and the car started rolling rapidly toward the water. The president shouted, ‘The brakes don’t work! The brakes won’t hold! We’re going in! We’re going under!’”
1

Luckily, LBJ was playing a joke on his aide: he was driving an Amphicar, a vehicle that could be driven on a road or in a lake.

The months after Johnson’s landslide victory in the 1964 presidential election were some of the most exciting in his life; it seemed all his dreams were within reach. When he lit the White House Christmas tree, he proclaimed, “These are the most hopeful times in all the years since Christ was born in Bethlehem.” On January 8, in the first State of the Union address aired during prime time, Johnson announced his plans for the Great Society—government programs that together would create “abundance and liberty for all.” His inauguration on January 20 drew the biggest crowds in Washington’s history, until Barack Obama’s in 2009.

In the late 1920s a young LBJ had taught poor Mexican-American kids in Texas, and having seen poverty up close made him determined to end it. “If every person born could acquire all the education that their intelligence quotient would permit them to take, God only knows what our gross national product would be—and the strength we would add to our nation, militarily, diplomatically, economically, is too large even to imagine.”
2

President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Johnson the head of the National Youth Administration in Texas, where he helped disadvantaged kids. Then, in 1953, the forty-six-year-old Johnson became the youngest Senate majority leader in history. Thus when he became president after Kennedy’s assassination, he knew how to work the political system. He framed many of his social programs as fulfilling Kennedy’s ambitions, and he struck quickly, knowing that the honeymoon of his victory against Republican Barry Goldwater would not last long. He never read books or went to movies; his only interest was learning about the lives of his fellow politicians so he could better cajole, seduce, or threaten them with the famous “Johnson treatment.”
3

The Dow Jones stock market index had gone up 44 percent in the last two years, and everyone believed the future looked bright for continued economic expansion. Future economic rivals such as Germany and Japan had yet to challenge the dominance of the Detroit automakers. Unemployment was 4.1 percent, the gross national product had grown more than 5 percent in the last year, and Congress enjoyed a Democratic majority.

Thus Johnson pushed through a raft of social entitlements that would stand as the high-water mark for Big Government liberalism, despite congressional Republican George H. W. Bush and the American Medical Association denouncing new programs such as Medicare and Medicaid as “socialized medicine.” Fellow congressmen Gerald Ford, Bob Dole, Strom Thurmond, and Donald Rumsfeld also opposed the programs.
4

Medicare A taxed employers and employees a higher amount for Social Security, and then put the additional money into a trust fund for seniors to use for hospital bills and nursing home costs. Medicare B gave seniors the option to take some money out of their Social Security check to combine with government funds to pay for doctors, nurses, and tests. Medicaid was a mix of state and federal moneys that paid for the medical needs of families with children, low-income people on welfare, the disabled, and the elderly.

Johnson signed the bills into effect on July 30. Other Great Society bills established Head Start, public radio, public television, food stamps, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Immigration reform addressed long-standing discrimination against southern and eastern Europeans and Asians. (Asian immigration in particular had been severely restricted.) Johnson also increased Social Security benefits and maternal-child health services, made it easier to qualify as disabled, added rehabilitation coverage, and lowered the age at which widows could begin receiving benefits. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act distributed federal money to schools.
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Simultaneously, the administration raced toward the moon. On March 18, Soviet Aleksei Leonov became the first man to walk in space, and the United States responded with a flurry of activity. From March to July, the unmanned lunar probe
Ranger
9 sent back live satellite pictures that were broadcast on TV. The United States put the first two-person crew and the first nuclear power reactor into Earth’s orbit. On June 3, Edward Higgins White became the first American to walk in space. The
Mariner 4
sent the first pictures from Mars when it flew by the planet. On December 15, the U.S.
Gemini 6
and
7
accomplished the first rendezvous in orbit.

But across the Pacific, a nation a few thousand square miles larger than New Mexico was poised to end America’s sense of omnipotence.

*   *   *

In 1858 France
took over Vietnam, whose rubber, rice, and tin became some of the most valued commodities of the French empire. But the Vietnamese farmers received none of the profits from their exports, and the French taxed the peasants excessively. Protestors were beaten or killed. Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) appealed to U.S. president Woodrow Wilson for help. But the U.S. administration ignored him, so he went to the Soviet Union instead, and adopted its Communist style of revolution to end colonial rule in his homeland.
6

Ho Chi Minh’s coalition, called the Viet Minh, went to war with France in 1946. The United States supported the French, fearing that if Vietnam went Communist, the other nations in the region would fall into the Soviet-Chinese bloc as well, a belief known as the Domino Theory.

France lost the war in 1954, and the Geneva Conference temporarily divided the country into North and South Vietnam, with the understanding that it would reunify in 1956 and have free elections. The Viet Minh ruled the north. From 1953 to 1956, they based their land-reform model on that of China’s Chairman Mao. The government took the land from the tiny percentage of people who owned it and executed approximately 50,000 to 175,000 “landlords,” while many more starved.
7
More than a million fled from North Vietnam to the south; two million more attempted but were prevented from leaving by the Viet Minh.
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The United States moved to make the Republic of South Vietnam a permanent country, backing Ngo Dinh Diem in a fraudulent 1955 referendum. Diem was a Catholic despite South Vietnam being 90 percent Buddhist. His government was corrupt, and reformers were jailed or shot. South Vietnam broke into civil war. The Viet Minh organized southern rebels into the National Liberation Front (NLF) to topple Diem and reunify with the north; Diem’s administration dubbed the NLF the Viet Cong (Vietnamese Communists). The Viet Minh aided them with arms and training.

In 1962 President Kennedy sent American advisers to train Diem’s armies, but the advisers could not tell the difference between neutral civilians and Viet Cong so, per
The Pentagon Papers
, more than four million people, or 33 percent of South Vietnam’s population, “were herded forcibly from their homes” into “strategic hamlets,” while their “old dwellings—and many of their possessions—were burned behind them.”
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These strategic hamlets, walled-in villages where armed guards prevented anyone from coming in or going out, were run as labor camps.

South Vietnam was roiled by coups, but Johnson was not going to be the first American president to lose a war. He told White House press secretary Bill Moyers, “I’m not going to let Vietnam go the way of China. I told them to go back and tell those generals in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson intends to stand by our word, but by God, I want something for my money. I want ’em to get off their butts and get out in those jungles and whip hell out of some Communists. And then I want them to leave me alone, because I got some bigger things to do right here at home.”
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