Bob Dylan (12 page)

At the recording session, Dylan apparently experienced problems reading his lyrics, and had to do several fresh starts. One of his friends in the control room advised Tom Wilson, “Man, dim the lights—he'll get more relaxed.” Wilson declined the suggestion. “Atmosphere is not what we need,” he explained, “legibility is what we need.”

The clearest statement of Dylan's changing attitude—and the single greatest justification of the album's title—‘My Back Pages' is his
mea culpa
, an apology for the stridency of his earlier social proselytizing in which the paradoxical refrain “Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now” attests to the rejuvenation of spirit the songwriter feels, having removed the blinkers of protest from his creative urges.

Within the song's six verses can be found sketched out the essential core of the debate which all left-wing activists inevitably have to confront, concerning the extent to which individual desires and aspirations must be curtailed in pursuit of a more universal social “good.” The youthful certitude of his protest period, Dylan suggests, was indicative of an autocratic conservatism almost as detrimental to the progress of the human spirit as those forces it condemned; having abandoned it, he now felt younger, more open to the sheer variety of possibilities. It was only later, he realized, “that I'd become my enemy in the instant that I preach[ed].”

For Dylan, the nub of the matter is as much literary as political: though he would never totally abandon the tradition of social commentary (merely change his mode of address), his disaffection with the direct-address style demanded by the protest-song movement can be gauged by the virulent, dramatic imagery with which he disdains his former self: the “half-wracked prejudice” he felt; the “corpse evangelists” of the left; the “mongrel dogs who teach”; and the “mutiny” his change of attitude entailed. “I'm not
really a social critic,” he said to a friend. “I knew where to put the song back then, I knew where the slot was, that's all. When I wrote those songs, they were written within a small circle of people. I took time out to write those things… stopped to write them consciously. The other stuff I was doing, resembling more what I'm writing today, they came from inside of me and I didn't have to stop to write them… I was me back then, and now I'm
me
. I can't ever be the me from back then, I can only be
me
, from today. And the me from today is involved in a bigger circle of people.”

This seems a more honest explanation than the bravado with which he greeted Joan Baez's retrospective query about what he was thinking when he wrote his protest songs. “Hey, news can sell, right?” he claimed, cynically. “You know me. I knew people would buy that kind of shit, right? I was never into that stuff.” Others have claimed that all along, Dylan's motives were driven more by ambition than empathy, that he was simply using the topical-song movement to achieve stardom.

Ignoring for the moment the obvious fact that, until Dylan had transformed it, the topical song movement was hardly a guaranteed route to success, this view of him does not match that held by friends like Phil Ochs, Dave Van Ronk and John Hammond, who later stressed, “When he first came here he was thinking and talking about injustice, and about social problems… He was uptight about the whole set-up in America, the alienation of kids from their parents, the false values.” Ochs, a fervently political songwriter who frequently found himself on the receiving end of Bob's jibes, was generous enough to vouch for Dylan's integrity during that period: “He was just going on to bigger things when he started denying it, that's all.” Ochs was right: for Dylan himself, ‘My Back Pages' would be the
auto-da-fé
from which would rise, phoenix-like, the rejuvenated modern artist of the electric trilogy. “I used to think I was smart,” he said around this time, “but I don't know any more. Don't even know if I'm normal.”

(She Acts Like We Never Have Met)

Reversing the usual sexual roles of the time, ‘I Don't Believe You' finds a male lover bewildered by his one-night-stand's disavowal the morning after. It seems equally as likely to have been written about Joan Baez as about Suze Rotolo—though it could just as easily be about a literal one-night
stand. Whichever it is, the theme of emotional bewilderment reflects the increasing complexity of his private life, as it trailed in the slipstream of his accelerating celebrity.

Dylan's phrasing, and the uptempo swirl of the strummed guitar, expertly evokes the heady abandon of momentary, drunken infatuation, but serves to render each verse's subsequent deflation less convincing. There's also a snort of tipsy laughter in verse three—one of the humanizing moments Dylan likes to leave in his songs—which, besides making him sing the wrong lines, also adds to the song's curiously chipper tone. It's as if, even as he sings, the bewilderment is being sloughed off, allowing him to conclude the song with one of his better deadpan jokes, responding to a query about whether it's easy to forget with a sardonic “It's easily done/You just pick anyone/ And pretend that you never have met.”

The song was written during Bob's summer 1964 stay in Vernilya, a village outside of Athens, Greece. It also provided him with a sharp riposte, caught for posterity on the legendary 1966 UK concert bootleg: as The Band counts into ‘Like A Rolling Stone', Dylan responds to an outraged folkie's cry of “Judas!” with “I don't believe you—you're a liar!” This was a clear reference to the fickleness of his folk fans' affections, so flimsy they might be shocked by mere electricity.

The title is particularly apt: written and recorded at a time when Dylan was leaving behind his straight-shooting protest-song mode in favor of a more allusive lyric style featuring chains of resonant, surreal imagery, this is perhaps the plainest song from his mid-Sixties canon, and one of the least satisfying. For while he could wax lyrical about more abstract philosophical concerns, such as the state of society and the nature of freedom, the specifics of personal trauma proved less permeable to artistic interpretation, as demonstrated by this self-pitying, one-sided account of the final traumatic night of Dylan's long-standing romance with Suze Rotolo.

The only girl with whom he had experienced any sort of extended relationship, Suze was duly rewarded for her constancy by being pictured with Dylan on the front sleeve of
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
, although it was, annoyingly for him, a relationship on which Suze's older sister Carla and her mother Mary seemed to exert unwelcome influence. In Dylan's maudlin song, Suze is a clumsily idealized figure (“With the innocence of a
lamb, she was gentle like a fawn”), the constant scapegoat of her family's jealousies, while Carla is viciously characterized as a pretentious, social-climbing parasite. Dylan was gaining a reputation for waspish put-downs of friends and acquaintances, and it's possible that where most of his victims, not wishing to jeopardize their relationship with the rising star, were easily cowed, Carla may have been less ready to accept his acid tongue. He did, after all, live in her apartment. The showdown between Bob and Carla late in March 1964 is rendered here in a portentous, melodramatic manner, full of heavy-handed, violent imagery.

The two of them had had a flaming row the previous summer at a record company sales conference in Puerto Rico, Bob blowing his top when Carla chafed at his rebellious rudeness. Their relations thereafter had become so abrasive that Carla was made to feel a stranger in her own Avenue B home after Bob followed Suze there from the 4th Street apartment. The couple were bound by a sort of fatalistic Catch-22: Bob desperately craved Suze's attention and support, and Suze desperately wanted to be more than Bob would let her be. Increasingly, their time together became mired in sullen funks, with TV replacing communication. At the conclusion of Dylan's previous romantic liaisons, he usually preferred to avoid outright confrontation, affecting disinterest until the relationship atrophied and the girl simply left him. Carla, however, was clearly not prepared to let her kid sister be treated this way, demanding resolution when the rumors about Dylan's perpetual on/off romance with Joan Baez grew too strong to ignore.

In February 1964, Dylan's stoned cross-country road trip had been scheduled to end up in San Francisco, where Joan would be the “surprise” guest at his Berkeley concert —and, the Rotolos suspected, further insinuate herself into his affections. As the tour progressed, Bob's phone calls to Suze became more and more infrequent and she suspected the worst. The truth was probably that the hopped-up Dylan was on a creative roll, completely caught up in his work—it was on this trip that he wrote ‘Mr Tambourine Man' and ‘Chimes Of Freedom'—and he simply couldn't be bothered sustaining the bourgeois pretense of a stable relationship. Ironically, one of the poetic images that Pete Karman had, on the car journey, denigrated as meaningless jive-talk—“No-one's free, even the birds are chained to the sky”—found its eventual home in the last line of ‘Ballad In Plain D'.

The affair between Suze and Bob finally came to a head in the last week of March 1964, with a major argument. Carla returned home to the apartment late one night to find Bob and Suze rowing loudly. She asked
Dylan to leave, but otherwise decided not to get involved, retiring to bed. An hour later, she asked him to leave again, whereupon Dylan turned on her, unleashing a vitriolic outburst. Angry and distracted, Suze threatened suicide, but fainted before she could cut her wrists. Carla tried to push Dylan out of the door and the two ended up brawling, before he eventually left at around four in the morning.

Though he attempted reconciliation later that day, his relationship with Suze was finally over, but its collapse stained several of the songs on
Another Side Of Bob Dylan
, where it was positioned between ‘I Don't
Believe You' and the concluding ‘It Ain't Me Babe', two of his most cynical relationship songs. It remains the only song which Dylan regrets writing—though happily, Bob and Suze later became just friends.

“People have asked how I felt about those songs that were bitter, like ‘Ballad In Plain D',” Suze later told Victoria Balfour. “I never felt hurt by them. I understood what he was doing. It was the end of something and we both were hurt and bitter… His art was his outlet, his exorcism. It was healthy. That was the way he wrote out his life… the loving songs, the cynical songs, the protest songs… they are all part of the way he saw his world and lived his life, period.”

‘It Ain't Me, Babe' was reportedly begun in outline form early in 1963 in Italy, while Dylan was on the European trip that would also see him playing a small role in the BBC drama
Madhouse On Castle Street
, though its tone suggests it may have been completed later.

It's yet another song inspired by Suze Rotolo, reflecting both the bitterness of Dylan's feelings in the immediate aftermath of their breakup, and a kind of damage-limitation exercise whereby he might salvage some of his wounded pride. A rebuttal of the notion of true love, it finds the song's narrator unable to fulfill his beloved's demands, unwilling to perform the roles of protector, healer, loyal lover and gallant gentleman with which society has saddled the male suitor. Its curt tone—“leave at your own chosen speed,” “everything inside is made of stone”—stood in stark contrast to the gross sentimentality of the contemporary Tin Pan Alley-dominated pop song tradition, which, then as now, trafficked in the illusory bliss of love.

It's a sharply cynical piece of work—indeed, though essentially an admission of weakness on the singer's part, it thrusts blame on to the object of his disaffection, implying that her conservative demands are an imposition which could hold him back from some unspecified goal. Accordingly, some have viewed the song as an allegorical reflection of Dylan's relationship with his audience, against whose restrictive demands he was beginning to kick. Though lacking virtually all the necessary characteristics for mainstream pop success, in the immediate aftermath of The Byrds' hit with ‘Mr Tambourine Man', it gave close-harmony pop group The Turtles their breakthrough hit in 1965.

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME

Bob Dylan's
annus mirabilis
was 1965, the year he would transform popular music with two extraordinary albums that brought a new wit and literacy to rock'n'roll, and an electric immediacy to poetry.

At the time, however, the presence of an amplified rock band on
Bringing It All Back Home
was widely viewed more as a defection from folk music than a breakthrough to an exciting new mode of expression. Eyebrows were raised and letters were written within a folk-singing community lulled into pessimism by the sort of dreary protest balladry that Bob had grown out of a couple of years before. Rather than acknowledge his ambition, they denounced him as a sell-out.