Chickie Pomerantz was lit.
Opening night of the 1963 Brandeis Folk Festival had been lame. All those green bookbags and black turtlenecks. All those skanks and pears. Then this skinny guy with this scratchy voice came on singing about some farmer starving to death in South Dakota. Chickie and Kevin Cahill and Frannie St. Exupery and a couple other jocks tossed beer cans at the stage.[2] “You shoulda seen the assholes run,” he said, coming back to the dorm.
I went the second night. Pete Seeger, the headliner, announced he would sing some songs by a young man who had performed the night before. WBZ was already playing the Chad Mitchell Trio’s version of the first song. The second I had never heard. I had never heard anything like it. Sitting on a blanket on the floor of Shapiro Gym, on a first date with a girl whom, 3000 miles and a four-year separation later, I would marry, I had — in a phrase that did not exist yet in my vocabulary — my mind blown.
The first song was “Blowing in the Wind.” The second was “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Three weeks later, back in Philadelphia after finals, I bought The Free-Wheelin’ Bob Dylan at Sam Goody’s on Chestnut Street.
2.
To appreciate Bob Dylan, it is necessary to remember some things about America back then.
First of all, rock’n’roll had no respectability. The truth is, despite much revisionist rhetoric to the contrary, in the entire northeastern United States — and, practically speaking, culture-wise, the northeastern United States was all that existed, the south being full of rednecks, the midwest corn, no one having heard of Boulder or Santa Fe, and California too far away to count[3] — not one person liked Elvis Presley.[4]
Frankly, if you grew up in a normal 1950’s American home, rock’n’roll was an embarrassment. If you were riding in a car with your parents and the radio was set from the last time you were driving and, say, Little Richard came on, you felt positively unclean. Rock’n’roll was something, like baseball cards and Davy Crockett hats, your parents expected you to out-grow. You expected to out-grow it too. Nobody, except some colored guys in the boys’ room and a couple guineas at the bowling alley, thought of rock as a possible career move. It was great for basement parties and riding around in ’55 Chevies, but nobody thought about it or or wrote about it, except in something like Dig magazine, which was for, given the benefit of the doubt, brain-damaged eight-year olds. Even me and Max Garden and Davey Peters, who’d been going to shows starring Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and The Turbans since our bar mitzvahs and could tell you who did “Strange Love” and “In Paradise” and on what label and the color, knew rock’n’roll was dumb and not to be allowed into the same room as The Four Aces or the original cast album of “L’il Abner.” I mean, “A-wop-bomma-loo-mop-a-wop-bam-boom?” C’mon.[5]
3.
I went to college a reasonably well-rounded kid. I played football and got drunk weekends. I wore Stevenson buttons and argued against capital punishment. My favorite books were The Hustler and The Cool World. Part of me was All-American and part Politically Concerned and part drawn to a freshman’s idea of the Edge. I knew I was supposed to graduate with my adult life assembled, and I had no reason to suspect it would significantly differ from those of my parents and their friends. So Orientation Week I figured, Okay, it’s time. I set my clock radio on KNBR, “The Voice of the Classics.”
That lasted till Tuesday.
If you were at college in the early ’60s and not listening to classical music and still expecting to out-grow rock’n’roll, you had a choice of jazz or folk. Jazz was cool. I bought albums; I went to clubs. But jazz was hard. If you weren’t a musician, who knew what the hell was going on. And jazz wasn’t real accessible. It wasn’t on the radio when you were rolling down Route One at two a.m. aching for noise. Folk music was on the radio even less than jazz. Plus, it fell on the side of an ideological clash Chickie Pomerantz and Kevin Cahill were heaving Bud cans at.
This battle had to do with disagreement over what constituted the worthwhile life. At most colleges, students were sneaking flasks into football games, twisting at fraternity parties to The Hot Nuts, and blithely assuming John Kennedy knew what he was doing in Southeast Asia. They believed that what had gone on before would go on forever. They assumed that their flasks and parties would track them to the suburban house with spouse and kids and double-garage that lay at the limits of their vision. Brandeis booed its football team into extinction, booked Odetta for Spring Weekend, and eagerly awaited the Second Coming of Eugene Debs. Brandeis was a campus where… Well, when Abbie Hoffman went there, he was on the tennis team.
Any self-respecting, letter-sweatered high school hot shot entering Brandeis in September 1960 was going to find himself wrenched into a painfully dislocative position. For the first time, selection as Team Captain or Head Cheerleader was tantamount to nomination as Not Real Bright or Miss Airhead. At Brandeis, the power to define worth lay with the turtlenecks and bookbags. They had taken it from the Captains and Cheerleaders through high school. After graduation, in the “real” world, they might have to take it again. Meanwhile, they would get their innings in. References to Heidegger and Tillich got you on base in this league. Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills were the heavy-hitters. Kafka, Freud and Marx had their plaques on the walls. And all any suggestion that the good was composed of four-bedroom Colonials and Country Squire wagons got you was guffaws. As Chickie Pomerantz put it: “Man, this place is run by the first ones out in dodge ball.”
It was amidst this struggle that Bob Dylan landed. And proved himself the greatest American artist of the 20th Century.
4.
I used to say Bob Dylan was the second-greatest American artist of the 20th century. Ernest Hemingway, I would say, was Number One. Now I have reversed the order.
When I say “the greatest,” I am talking about two things: how good you are at what you do; how much impact you have on anybody else. Nobody wrote a better sentence or paragraph than Hemingway. Nobody described an event more clearly or made it resonate more strongly. And he had impact. A generation or two believed you were not a proper novelist unless you fought a war or hunted lions or drank pernod with Gertrude Stein. And not only novelists bought this line. When I was growing up, Yalies still traveled to Pamplona to run from bulls.
Bob Dylan was good too. Nobody wrote a better protest song. With “Blowing in the Wind” and “The Times They are A-Changing,” he helped score a revolution. Nobody wrote better love songs either. He wasn’t whining about lipstick on a collar. He wasn’t aching to hold some idolized hand. With “Don’t Think Twice” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” he replaced Top 40 idiocy and schmaltz with attitude and grit. And nobody wrote better hate songs than Dylan. In fact, as far as I know, with “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Positively Fourth Street,” he invented the entire genre.
And Bob Dylan had impact.
.
First, he made it okay to like rock’n’roll.
Some people think the Beatles made rock’n’roll okay. Those people have their fingers up their nose. In America — and we are still talking 1963, ’64 and the taste-making, reputation-establishing northeast here — no one in any position of import ever said anything nice about the Beatles except, maybe, that Paul was cute. The New York Times wasn’t profiling B.B. King yet. Ramparts wasn’t covering Chuck Berry. Rolling Stone did not exist. As for the quarterlies, where the deep-thinkers’ high priests established writ, any music that made one wiggle was too tainted with Mongoloidism to warrant a second thought. The Beatles were rock’n’roll, and rock’n’roll was pap.[6]
I remember telling this English professor that I thought Hard Day’s Night was a good film. (“Movie.” I’m sure I said “movie” actually.) He laughed in my face. “Antonioni,” he said. “Fellini. Truffaut.” A year later, the twerp was on panels discussing “Social Satire in ‘Too Much Monkey Business.'” Then it was like I was rubbing his nose in The Girl Can’t Help It – which, by the way, now plays regularly as a Turner Classic Movie.
When Bruce Springsteen introduced Bob Dylan for induction into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, he said that Dylan “freed our mind… and changed the face of rock ‘n’ roll forever.”[7]
The Boss had it right.
Dylan’s going electric turned everything around.
By 1965, if you were young and anti-war and anti-racism and anti-starving to death in South Dakota (and anti-boxing and anti-Playboy and, don’t forget, anti-“Rock-A-Day Johnny singin’ ‘Tell your ma, tell your pa, our loves a-gonna grow ooh-wah, ooh-wah'”[8]) — in short, if you were serious and smart and not likely to be a top draft choice of Delta Kappa Epsilon, Bob Dylan was the cat for you. This meant two things: one, Dylan had established credentials with a bunch of out-of-power (societally speaking) intellectual heavies, hungry to — as Brandeis demonstrated — set standards of their own; and, two, by gaining their approval, he’d been certified as someone to be taken seriously by everybody else.
So when he plugged in his amp at Newport, those of us who’d been embarrassed by liking rock before came further out of the closet. And found ourselves allied with some of the same dweebs who’d dumped on us for owning Frankie Lymon albums. This alliance was intriguing. For Dylan, though moving off the bumper-sticker simplicities of his earlier politics, was still being seductively partisan. Only now, with his drug references and put-downs, his put-ons and psycho-dramas, he was offering those who chose to identify with him — to value what he valued and scorn what he scorned — the choice of Hip or Square.
That was an important choice. It was a challenging time. Vietnam. Watts. The Haight Ashbury. For many of us, the country we had grown up in no longer existed. What we had been taught was good was being revealed as evil. What we had been warned was bad was turning out to feel damn great.
The times they were a-changing. Something was happening here. And unless you were prepared to confess to being Mr. Jones, you wanted to know what. So when Dylan put it together — Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde — poetry and headline, madness and nightmare, rage and adoration — the effect was overwhelming. Nobody had ever heard anything like this. To try to hold onto and decipher the elusive, dazzling, just-sung line in “Gates of Eden” or “Desolation Row” or “Memphis Blues Again,” while the next and next and next exploded, was to have your head re-wired. What jewels hung from which mule? Why shoot that fire with holes? Who stripped what President naked? The images rang with an authenticity and promise that challenged one to know. They claimed a canny relationship to a rightfully rejected world that had to be shared. Me and Max and Davey — and even, eventually, Chickie Pomerantz — could recognize this greatness.[9]
At the end of Portrait of the Artist, Stephen Dedalus states that he aims to forge the conscience of his race in the smithy of his soul. Bob Dylan did that.
And he killed the whole idea of Hemingway.
In Hemingway, acts established worth, and the ones that counted were primarily physical. How high were the mountains one climbed. How big were the bulls one fought. How much the earth moved when you fucked.
The mind was for people who couldn’t be Hemingway. People who were the first ones out in dodge ball. Those people had as their role model… Holden Caulfield![10] Pencey Prep’s fencing team’s manager, for Christ’s sake. If he had not decompensated and made it to college, Holden would have been firmly in the bookbagger’s camp, putting down football and beer kegs and old fashioned, red-blooded American fun.[11]
The weird thing was, though, in one way Holden and Hemingway were in fundamental agreement. The key to Holden’s moral center, the curse which all had to avoid, was phoniness. It wasn’t defined; but whenever he put someone down, there it was: the headmaster was “a phony slob” and B.D.’s old girlfriend was “(s)trictly a phony” and lawyers who wanted to be slapped on the back were “phony.” All were tainted in this way that Holden in his — what? — sincerity? truth? purity? — was not. And Old Hem, with his “built-in shit-detector” and search for “the true gen” abhorred the artificial as much as Holden.
Both seemed to share this idea that some immutable essence, instilled at birth or during formative years or by toxins in one’s drinking water, established a person’s core self. The proper thing to do was accept this self — whether bull-dodging wizard or dodgeball-catching lump — and not fake or put on airs or try to pass as something else. It was a point-of-view that was simultaneously moral and stoic and repressive and obtuse. It was a Platonic view of certainty and established value and immunity to change that enshrined a hierarchy of those to be idolized and those to be shunned. And Bob Dylan ran it off the goddamn table.
.
I mean, who could have been phonier than Bob Dylan? Here was this hick town, midwestern Jew, copping the last name of an Irish poet and the voice of an Okie organizer. Here was this wuss, who had never scored a touchdown or shipped out on a freighter or landed a marlin becoming a cultural hero. Dylan was supposed to be a singer/poet/artist. He was supposed to reveal truth. Hemingway was Hemingway and Holden was Holden. Kerouac was Kerouac and Woodie was Woodie. And Bob Dylan was Zimmerman. When Newsweek broke that story, a pre-med down the hall burst into my room like he had proved I’d swapped my soul for a jelly doughnut.
“But really, Fred,” I said, “so what?”
That wasn’t bad; but if I had been on my toes, I might have come up with what one critic said about Marcel Duchamp — another artist in anybody’s Top Ten. Duchamp’s major contribution, Rudolf E. Kuenzli wrote, was to “explode the notion of a single meaning of identity” by “multiplying (them) in order to undo any kind of fixity.”
The same can be said for Dylan, album after album stripping one mask from his face and replacing it with another. I can’t claim that anyone I know ever said, “Bob Dylan has destroyed fixity, so I am dropping out of dental school and getting bizarre”; but, coincident with the man’s first going gold, any number of formerly conventional folks began ordering lives off the specialty shelves. Even leaving Brandeis in 1964, the furthest-out went on to nothing more radical than graduate school in Theatre Arts. A minute later, sons and daughters of Pentagon officials and industrial magnates were washing the feet of Indian gurus, tending goat herds in New Hampshire, and bombing ROTC offices and moving underground.
5.
I had gone to law school.
I hadn’t been entirely thrilled by the decision. To ward off the fear that I had begun an acculturative process that would end with everything about me regimented from my shoes (wing-tipped) to my side-burns (short,) I spent most of my free time with a group of people, most of whom I’d known since high school. One was back from four years in the Air Force. One had dropped out of Penn, Temple and Penn State. One had been asked to leave Antioch because he was an undesirable element. (He said he’d tried to start a fraternity.)
We lived in or around Powelton Village, which to the extent Philadelphia had a Haight-Ashbury or Greenwich Village was it. We hung out at existentially depressed bars. We partook of substances which, at this time and place, put us in a tiny outlaw fringe.[12] Being an outlaw added a dimension that compensated for the handicaps being a law student imposed.[13] It made one appealing to girls from art school. It seemed to guarantee that the stiflings of middle age would be kept at bay. I can not tell you how depressed I was to walk into a dermatologist’s party a couple years later and see the pre-rolled joints laid out on the buffet beside the smoked eggplant.
.
I am in my 50s now – (that is, I was, in 1996). I have a profession, wife, house, and, I suppose, Berkeley is a suburb. I spend an inordinate amount of time discussing health care costs with real estate agents in the hot tub at our swim club. It is startling to recall that only yesterday I was inviting into my living room a fellow who would be killed in prison while serving time for two motorcycle-gang related homicides and another who would roam Center City dressed as a pink-eared rabbit. Bunny, biker and I would get stoned, rap and…
…listen to Bob Dylan.
.
I have carried him with me for 30 years. I have seen him perform a dozen times – (two dozen, now). I buy his recordings after I have stopped buying anybody else’s. I, still, will not leave a room or car if a song of his is playing.
Life sticks us with bandilleros we can never remove. Some rip at us forever; some are ecstasies to savor. We all had moments which most stamped our definition. We all made choices that changed us beyond repair. A song can snap our cells into a former order like filings in a magnet’s draw.
On any day, people who were crucial to our lives disappear. They die, go mad, are sucked by currents beyond control into distant bays and eddies. During the time where this essay centers, the people I encountered seemed to be more exotically plumed than people before or since. With them, I did things at which, now, I shake my head. It is not that these acts were “better” or more fulfilling than my present doings, but they were vastly different. I suppose this is true of any 21 or 25 year old who reaches 50. I suppose it is a pointless realization.
But in The Magus, which my friends and I were reading at this time, John Fowles wrote: “There comes a time in each life like the point of a fulcrum…. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.” Those days, we felt in that position. One false move and shackles; one mis-step and doom. For some of us, that was over-statement; for others, there could not have been a truer belief. And for us all, Dylan was an important piece in the mosaics of self that we were forming. When I hear the music, adrenalin races; crap is cut through; faces, parties, good lines, good nights, phases of my being, spring up from the shade.
.
Recently, when Bob Dylan played Berkeley, my wife and I learned at what hotel he was staying. We sat on a sofa across from the single bank of elevators. We studied who got on and where the elevator stopped when they got off and tried to guess which floor was his.
We had been there 30 minutes when the doors opened. “It’s Bob Dylan,” I said.
“I know,” my wife said.
He was short. He was thin. He glared with hostility and suspicion. Then he crossed the floor, having seen nothing more alarming than a greying woman in t-shirt and sweatpants and a balding man in a gabardine suit.
For Norman: “I’ll Remember You.”
NOTES
[1] This piece originally appeared in the spring 1996 issue of Karamu. It has been revised slightly.
[2] This is a lie. I could get away with it in 1996, but now that a tape of this concert has surfaced, I don’t want any enhanced-audio freak complaining they don’t hear any aluminum landing.
The jocks tossed beer cans at Joan Baez three years earlier.
[3] California was so far away that the coolest guy on campus at one major northeastern university of my acquaintance was nick-named “Coast” because he had been there. It was so far that, when Billy Steinmetz announced he was going to Stanford Law School, everyone assumed it was because NYU had rejected him.
[4]. That isn’t quite true. Mary Geesling, 16, Ardmore, Pa., liked Elvis Presley; but her parents were divorced, and her father ran a gas station, so you know what kind of girl she was.
[5] I can remember as late as May 1965, sitting in my apartment in West Philly, thinking, as Larry or Barry, this friend of my roommate, came rushing in, excited because The Miracles’ Greatest Hits was out. Well, yea, great, Larry or Barry, I thought. The Miracles. ‘Shop Around,’ ‘She’s Not a Bad Girl.’ That’s cool. But, like, why not grow-up?
Larry or Barry, he ended up the biggest concert promoter east of Bill Graham.
[6] When this article first appeared, no sentence in it caused greater consternation among my readers. In fact, the editor of this very journal is at my throat about it. But I am sticking to my guns. When Dylan, the serious, substantial folkie transformed into the trivial, juvenile rocker, a typical review ran: “(His audience) had come to listen to the lone voice of youthful dissent against the evils of the adult world. And they got the Beatles (emp. supp.) instead.”
[7] Okay, you got me. I admit he had in there “…the way Elvis freed our body…”
[8] Bob Dylan. “Talking World War III Blues.” At this point, Dylan still hid his roots. In early interviews he cites as influences non-commercial folk artists like Mance Lipscomb, and Muddy Waters. When he later cops to Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, his chroniclers tidy them up as “urban style rhythm-and-blues performers.” It isn’t until 1969 he publicly claims kin to Elvis and Buddy Holly.
[9] The extent of Dylan’s cultural penetration did not reach me until, on a trip east in the mid-‘90s, I visited a hoagie shop at which I have been dining since junior high and where, while waiting in line, I would hear more racist, sexist, homophobic remarks than in a decade of lunches in Berkeley. (Jokes here still began, “What’s the difference between Martin Luther King and…”) Anyway, here I am, wearing my Bob Dylan baseball cap, and the guy behind the counter says, “‘Hey, I been quotin’ him for 30 years. ‘When y’ain’t got nothin’, y’got nothin’ t’lose,'” and another counter guy (known to regulars only as “Mousie’s brother”) correctly I.D.s the song in question.
[10] After first writing this piece, I encountered reviews by Robert Shelton (1963) and Nat Hentoff (1966) analogizing Dylan to Holden and a Daily News clip recalling Dylan, in his first days in New York, boasting he was going to play him in the movie of Catcher.
[11] Some people are going to say, “Hey, pal, what about beatniks? Weren’t they around too?” Well, yes and no. On the Road came out in 1958, but Kerouac was writing about events that had happened 10 years before. Even then, a careful reading of the literature will show, there were never more beats than could comfortably fit into John Clellon Holmes’s apartment, drinking red wine out of paper cups and going ape-shit if somebody scored some pot. By 1960, most of them were shot, only to be revived, as if from cryonic suspension, when the cultural revolution hit in 1967/68.
[12] What is popularly known as “the ‘60s” did not reach Philadelphia until May 1967 when hippies were first sighted in Rittenhouse Square. Neighbors attempts to obtain an injunction against their presence were unsuccessful.
[13] Being a law student who liked Bob Dylan (and who had your class’s only beard) could also lead people who knew little more about you than this to ask if you could turn them on — not the sort of question one welcomed from strangers at the time.