Walt Whitman
“How does it feel? To be without a home, Like a complete
unknown, Like a rolling stone?”
Bob Dylan
“I am not going to answer any questions as to my
association, my philosophical or religious beliefs, or my political beliefs, or
how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs….”
Pete Seeger
While A Complete Unknown, a recent film about Bob Dylan by
the director James Mangold is a triumph of style over substance, it has one
redeeming aspect in that it was based loosely on the excellent 2015 book by
Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric.
Wald’s previous books include Robert Johnson and the
Invention of the Blues and How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An
Alternative History of Popular Music. Wald’s insights into Dylan’s world are probably
helped by the fact he is a musician. As one writer said of Wald, “He possesses
that rare ability to weave meticulous research into engaging narratives
propelled by conversational but polished prose. It’s as if someone with an
advanced degree in history and musicology who witnessed the events first-hand
is talking to you.”[1]
The years covered by Wald’s book were extraordinarily
intense. Much like today’s youth, many at the time began to shift to the left
and sought answers to complex political events. However, it is completely
natural that their radicalism was inevitably confused. Musical protest was
still largely dominated by the Stalinist politics of the Communist Party or other
equally wretched political entities such as Maoism, Castroism and the New Left.
What had once been the Trotskyist movement in the US, the Socialist Workers
Party, led by James P. Cannon, broke with Marxism in 1963 and set out on a
wretched, anti-revolutionary course.
Unlike Mangold’s film, Wald does touch on the political and ideological intricacies of the time. Wald delves into certain aspects of Dylan’s personality, musical background and political events that shaped his world outlook. James Brewer writes, “The first deployment of combat troops was carried out by President Lyndon Johnson in July 1965, about the same time as Dylan’s plugged-in performance at the Newport Folk Festival. Wald’s book documents that a performer at Newport in 1965 named Len Chandler declared himself opposed to Johnson’s sending more troops to Vietnam. That was the only mention of the conflict during the Festival.”[2]
Wald starts the book by examining Dylan’s relationship with Pete
Seeger. Alongside Woody Guthrie, Seeger was a significant influence on the
young Dylan. Seeger quickly recognised that Dylan was unlike anything or anyone
that had gone before, saying, “I always knew that sooner or later there would
come somebody like Woody Guthrie who could make a great song every week. Dylan
certainly had a social agenda, but he was such a good poet that most of his
attempts were head and shoulders above things that I and others were trying to
do.”
Wald writes that Seeger and his followers “believed they
were working for the good of humanity … but were intensely aware of the forces
marshalled against them: the capitalist system and the moneyed interests that
upheld it”.[3]
Wald concludes the chapter on Seeger’s sentencing in 1961 for contempt of
Congress when he refuses to name names of associates with connections to the
Communist Party. He quotes Seeger, saying, “I am not going to answer any
questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs, or my
political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private
affairs.”[4]
While Seeger was a significant figure in Dylan’s formative
years, the singer and writer Woody Gutherie was certainly the most important.
Dylan said of the radical songwriter, “You could learn how to live.”. As
Clement Daly perceptively wrote, “At its best, there is an almost universal and
deeply popular element in Guthrie’s music. His songs rarely descended into
pessimism or cynicism. On the contrary, much of his work, like his songs
written for the Bonneville Power Administration promoting the construction of
the Bonneville Dam in Oregon, is suffused with optimism. What was later
released as the 17-song Columbia River Collection contains some of his best
work, the later revisions reflecting his pro-Roosevelt and pro-war stance
notwithstanding. In songs like “Talking Columbia,” “Grand Coulee Dam,” “Roll On
Columbia, Roll On,” and “Pastures of Plenty,” Guthrie’s enthusiasm for the
future of humanity is palpable.”[5]
The early Dylan was like a musical sponge. As the writer
Paul Bond noted, “Dylan was listening to all sorts of music—country, the blues
of Muddy Waters, and, eventually, folk. The latter, which had grown in part out
of ethnomusicological research into traditional songs as “music of the people,”
had been promoted by the Stalinist Communist Party and other left circles as a
means of tackling contemporary issues and espousing a broadly progressive
political outlook in popular song. In contrast to the banality of such
contemporary songs as “How Much Is That Doggy In The Window. At the same time,
the American folk scene offered a wide range of performance models, accepting
the high-art theatricality of a John Jacob Niles alongside Guthrie's more
“home-spun” performances. In the American scene, there was not the same
emphasis on formal “authenticity” as there was to be in the English folk
revival. Alongside the content of the music, therefore (“Folk music delivered
something I felt about life, people, institutions and ideology”), Dylan was
also receptive to its forms, describing it as “traditional music that sounded
new.”[6]
One thing missing from Wald’s book is a detailed examination
of Dylan’s relationship, albeit indirectly, with the American Communist Party.
Both Seeger and Guthrie had deep connections to the Stalinist Communist Party
of the USA. Dylan sought to play down his debt to the Communist Party and, for
that matter, any political affiliation. Saying that he did not know of Pete
Seeger’s politics (“I didn’t realise he was a Communist. I didn’t know what a
Communist was, and if I did, it wouldn’t have mattered to me”) and his intimate
relationship with the daughter of former Communist Party member shows his
denials are not believable.
Suffice it to say the British Communist Party were less than
enamoured with Dylan. It saw Dylan as threatening their control of “ British Music”.
In 1951, the Communist Party of Great
Britain (CPGB) issued a pamphlet, The American Threat to British Culture. The
pamphlet outlined the British CP’s hostility to young American folk music. The
CP followed that pamphlet with its infamously and completely nationalist British
Road to Socialism, a reformist and complete refutation of Marxism, swapping the
world revolution with the Stalinist theory of ‘socialism in one country’. The
British CP were hostile to any outside influence that would cut across its nationalist
path and that included the American folk scene.
As Frank Riley writes, “ A debate about ‘purity’ and
‘workers’ songs’ raged in the British folk world, with Ewan MacColl being a
leading protagonist. He eventually reached the absurd position that if a singer
was from England, the song had to be English; if American, the song had to be
American, and so on. There were also detailed definitions of ‘traditional’,
‘commercial’, ‘ethnic’, ‘amateur’, etc. This was adopted as policy in those
folk clubs (a majority) where MacColl and his supporters held sway. Enter Bob
Dylan into this minefield. In 1962, Dylan came to Britain. After some
difficulty getting into the Singer’s Club, based in the Pindar of Wakefield pub
in London, he was allowed to sing three songs, two of them his own.
Contemporary accounts say MacColl and Peggy Seeger, who ran the club, were
hostile. As Dylan was little known, one interpretation could be that Alan Lomax
had talked to them about him. Dylan did not get on well with Carla Rotolo – a
relationship immortalised in Dylan’s Ballad in Plain D: "For her parasite
sister I had no respect" – so this may explain it. Or it may be that they
did not regard his self-written songs as ‘valid’ folk. Later, when Dylan was
pronounced anathema by the CP, MacColl went one step further and announced that
all of Dylan’s previous work in the folk idiom had not been true folk music.”[7]
To conclude, seeing how far the modern-day Dylan is removed
from that political and cultural ferment is staggering. As Dylan admitted, “I
don’t know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost
magically written,“ he told CBS. In his memoir, Dylan said, “You must get power
and dominion over the spirits. I had it once, and once was enough.” The
musician Randy Newman concurs, saying, “Dylan knows he doesn’t write like he
did on those first two records.“ That’s not just a quip regarding the quality;
he quite literally doesn’t write the way he used to.
His acceptance of the Medal of Honour from former president
Barrack Obama and his selling of his back catalogue for a huge amount of money
means he has finally ceased to be a voice of any generation. As David Walsh succinctly
puts it, “Bob Dylan was neither the first nor the last American popular artist,
or artist of any kind, to imagine he could outwit historical and social
processes––which threatened to “slow down” or even block his rise––by avoiding
their most vexing questions and problems. What he didn’t realise was that in
turning his back on social life and softening his attitude toward the existing
order, he was at the same time cutting himself off from the source of artistic
inspiration, that he was surrendering forever what was best in him.”[8]
[1]
https://wlm3.com/tag/albert-grossman/
[2]
A Complete Unknown: A drama about singer Bob Dylan’s rise to fame-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/01/03/kxvr-j03.html
[3]
Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the
Sixties Hardcover – August 13 2015, by Elijah Wald
[4] The official transcript of Pete Seeger’s appearance before HUAC can be found in Investigation of Communist Activities, New York Area. Part 7: Entertainment. Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Fourth Congress, First Session. August 17-18, 1955. (Joyner Docs CWIS: Y 4: Un 1/2: C 73/55/pt. 7; additional circulating copy in Joyner Docs Stacks: Y 4: Un 1/2: C 73/55/pt. 7)
[5]
100 years since singer Woody Guthrie’s birth- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/08/guth-a28.html
[6]
Ceasing to be the voice of a generation-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/11/dyla-n09.html
[7]
We live in a political world-Bob Dylan and the Communist Party-https://socialismtoday.org/archive/144/dylan.html
[8]
Does Bob Dylan deserve to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature? https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/21/nobe-o21.html
