Unit 2 The United States of America in the 1960s

Bob Dylan, the Beat Generation, and the Counter-cultural Movement

Introduction to Bob Dylan (1941-):

the Song-Dance Man in the 1960s’

American CultureSelf Portrait by Bob Dylan (1970)

Bob Dylan:

I had ambition to set out and find like an Odyssey of going home somewhere I set out to find this home that I’d left a while back; I couldn’t remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way home there. And encountering what I remembered on the way, was how I envisioned it all. I didn’t really have any ambition at all. I was born far from where I’m supposed to be, and I’m on my way home. You know---.

(From the film No Direction Home)

Conference in Chicago in December, 1965

Reporter: “Do you think of yourself primarily as a singer or a

poet?”

Dylan: “I think of myself more as a song and dance man, you know.”

 

Dylan: “I didn’t consider myself as a song writer at all, but I

need to wrote that and I needed to sing it. So that’s why I

needed to write it. ’Cause it hadn’t been written and that’s

what I needed to say.”

 

“I’m only Bob Dylan when I have to be Bob Dylan.”

“Most of the time I’m just myself.”

I. Before Dylan’s appearance: the Beat Generation and the Folk song tradition

A. Beat Generation in the 1950s: Allen Ginsberg

“Beat” means beat down

and/or beatific. It was a

movement that promoted

freedom of the self in the

ideal classless society.

Ginsberg’s most famous

two poems can be regarded as

the bible of the Beat counterculture.

“Howl” (1955 ~ 56)

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving

hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an

angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the

starry dynamo in the machinery of night, […]

“America” (1956)

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.

America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.

I can't stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb

I don't feel good don't bother me.

I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.

America when will you be angelic?

[….]

B. Folksongs Tradition and the folk-song revival of the late 1950s and the 60s: Woody Guthrie

The folk music revival of the late 1950s and the 1960s was a

discrete cultural phenomenon largely supported by young,

relatively affluent, well-educated members of the middle

classes as an alternative to mass popular entertainment. It

was a time of reinterpretation, when a new generation

became immersed in a journey of cultural discovery through

music on recording, in coffeehouses, on street corners, in

dormitories, in living rooms, at folk festival, and anywhere

else young people gather. (Millie Rahn, “The Folk Revival,”

American Popular Music, 193)

Wood Guthrie (1912 - 1967)

The representative figure of the

folk-song revival movement.

His famous songs,

the Dust Bowel Ballads,

precisely depicted the devastation

of the 1930s’ Dust Bowel event.

And his other song, “This land is

your land,” also sang the voices of

the oppressed people in the

American society and searched for

the new image of the American identity.

“This land is your land”

This land is your land, this land is my land

From California, to the New York Island

From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters

This land was made for you and me

As I was walking a ribbon of highway

I saw above me an endless skyway

I saw below me a golden valley

This land was made for you and me

[….]

• Both of Guthrie and Dylan were strongly influenced and inspired by the blues, folk song, country music, and etc..

• Mark Spoelstra, a singer and song writer:

“Like, Woody was very important to both of us. Bob, I think,

wanted to be more like Woody than I did. He was able to

adapt a kind of theater about himself. Actually , the very first

time that I met him, he was really acting, in a way. And that

was good because you can go anywhere when you’re

somebody else.”

• Dave Van Ronk:

“The folk revival was postponed by almost 10

years by the witch hunt. I mean when US

Army publishes pamphlets on how to spot a

communist that have lines in them like, ‘He

will sometimes play the guitar.’ That kind of

thing had a very repressive and suppressive

effect. ”

“By the time McCarthy, I think, started to wane, the

folk music thing started to come up.”

II. “Bob Dylan” on the stage of the 1960s: Who is the man called “BOB DYLAN?”

A. Minnesota Stage:

1. Robert Allen Zimmerman, born in Duluth, north

Minnesota, on May 24th, 1941, the son of Abraham and

Beatrice Zimmerman.

2. His parents were descended from East European Jews,

immigrated before WWI.

3. Hibbing: a typical American country place where Dylan

spent most of his adolescent times; a cold,

conservative, boring Iron Range where Robert

completed his junior and high school education in

1959. Mostly learned pop culture from radios and TVs.

4. Enrolled at the University of Minneapolis in 1960, but

soon abandoned the degree.

a. Started using the name “Bob Dylan”

5. Turning Moment of Dylan: First contact with Woody

Guthrie’s music, the poet of dust bowl and of folksong tradition

6. Left Minneapolis and bound for Greenwich Village, New

York City on January 1961.

Dylan: “I don’t know folk music was delivering me something, which was the way I always felt about life, you know, and people, and institutions, and ideology, and it was just, you know, uncovering it all.”

B. New York Stage:

• Dylan wrote a fictionalized autobiography to Izzy Young, the owner of the Folklore center:

I was born in Duluth, Minnesota,

in 1941. Move to Dakota, Kansas,

North Dakota for a little bit, started

playing in carnival when I was 14

with guitar and Piano. Arvella Grary

taught him blues songs; a blind street

singer from Chicago about four or five years ago used to

know a guy name Mance Lipscomb from Navasota, Texas,

listened to him a lot, met him through his grandson, a rock ‘n’

roller.”

1. Folk song period: 1961 ~ 1963• Self Learning and performing in Greenwich Village folk

clubs like Gaslight Club etc.. • Dylan appeared at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1961. • 1962 His first album, Bob Dylan, in which the song

“Blowin’ in the Wind” became the

greatest hit and the

anthem of the 60s’ culture.

• 1963 The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

Newport Folk Festival: “When the Ship Comes In” / “We

Shall Overcome”

• Awarded by The Emergency Civil Liberties Union• Dylan’s speech to the members:

“I look down to see the people that are governing me and

make my rules, and they haven’t got any hair on their

head. I get very uptight about it. There’s no black and

white, left and right to me anymore. There only up and

down, and down is very close to the ground. And I’m

trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial,

such as politics. ”

• 1964 Newport Folk Festival• Dylan: “I wrote the songs to perform the songs, and I

needed to sing, like, in that language.”

2. Transitional period: 1963 ~ 1964

• Moving from the theme of social protest toward self introspection

• 1964: Another Side of Bob Dylan and The Times They Are A-Changin'

a. Concert at Philharmonic Hall in 1964: A Time Before the Storm

Dylan: “I wrote a lot of songs in a quick amount of time. I

could do that then, because the process was new to me.

I felt like I’d discovered something no one else had ever

discovered and I was in a sort of an arena artistically that

no one else had ever been in before, ever, although I

might have been wrong about that.”

Dylan: “In taking all the elements

that I’ve ever known, to make

wide-sweeping statements which

conveyed a feeling that was in the

general essence of the spirit of the

times. I think I managed to do

that I thought that I needed to press on and get as

far into it as I could.”

3. The Turn From Acoustic to Electric Set: Going “Electric” from 1965

• “Electrified folk rock in the mid- and later 1960s and

1970s”• Harold Leventhal, the folk manager and concert promoter:

“Suddenly to have stopped; that meant that he was going

away as getting away from to his and that bother us.”

Dylan: “An artist has got to be careful, never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s ‘at’ somewhere. You always have to realize that you’re constantly in the state of becoming. You know. And as long as you can stay in that realm, you’ll sort of be all right. I can’t self-analyze my own work, and I wasn’t going to cater to the crowd, because I know certain people would like it and certain people didn’t like it. I had gotten in the door where no one was looking. I was in there now and there was nothing; anybody from then no could ever do about it.”

a. 1965 Newport Folk Festival: plugged his guitar

Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited• a turmoil at the concert started from “Maggie’s Farm”• Peter Seeger: “if I got an axe, I’d chop the mike cable

right now.”

b. A Press Conference in Chicago in December, 1965• Promoting Rock-music elements in his songs • Highway 61 Revisited (1965): Dylan turned fully to rock

music. • “Like A Rolling Stone” (1965): a hallmark of rock music

c. Plugged His Music: • Dylan: “It was electric but doesn’t necessary mean that

it’s modernized just because it’s electric. You know. It

was like a country music was electric too.”

4. “American Invasion”: Dylan in the World Tour

a. England’s trip:• Booing and Praising

from the audience: • In France: A French asked

Dylan why he changed and

thought that his first album was

better than the others.

Dylan replied, “Is he American?

If not, he can’t understand.”

London, 1966. Booing! Huge American flag behind Dylan.

• “Go home. Get off, Bobby.”• “Traitor! Why don’t you hear yourself?”• “He’s fake.”• “We paid to see a flipping folk singer not a big group.”

New Castle, England, May 21, 1966.• “He’s just changed altogether. He’s changed from what

he was. He’s not the same as what he was at first. You don’t even recognize him. NO.”

• “You know, I thought he just couldn’t improve if he tried. Then the next thing that happened was he went really commercial with this backing group. And I didn’t like that very much. I don’t know what he’s trying to do. I think he’s conceding, you know, to some sort of popular taste. I think it’s a bad thing. I think he’s prostituting himself.”

• “I don’t think the spirit of the Dylan songs has been portrayed with this incredibly corny group behind him. I like his earlier records as on this Freewheelin’ LP, etc.. But this, I just can’t stick.”

C. After the motorcycle crash on July 29, 1966: “But to live

outside the law, you must be honest.”

1. The metamorphosis of Dylan’s songs: Away from the early “Dylan”

a. The Influence of Country Music:

John Wesley Harding (1967) and Nashville Skyline

(1969)

2. Dylan in the 1970s

a. Self Portrait (1970) and New Morning (1970)

b. A prose and poetry assemblage, Tarantula (1971)

c. Acted in the film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

Blood on the Tracks (1975) and later Desire (1976) got

a commercial success.

3. Dylan in the 1980s

Demonstrating “his newfound Christian faith” Saved

(1980)

4. Dylan in the 1990s

a. The folk-oriented

World Gone Wrong (1993)

was awarded a

traditional-folk Grammy

Award

b. Time out of Mind (1997)

won the album-of-the-year

Grammy.

5. After 2000

a. In 2001 Dylan won an Academy Award for his song

"Things Have Changed" from the film Wonder Boys

(2000).

b. Love and Theft (2001; Grammy Award)

c. The feature-length documentary No Direction Home

(2005), directed by Martin Scorsese

d. Modern Times (2006), debuted at number one on the

Billboard Top 200 Albums chart.

e. Awarded Pulitzer Prize in 2008, "for his profound

impact on popular music and American culture,

marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic

power."

III. The language power of Dylan’s lyrics: the folk song, Civil Right Movement and the American Culture.

Allen Ginsberg:

“the torch [the spirit of ‘beatnik’] had been passed to another

generation from earlier bohemian or beat illumination and

self-empowerment.”

• 1961 John Fitzgerald Kennedy won the presidential

election as the 35th President of the United States

on January 20, 1961.

Peace Corps created by Pres. Kennedy • 1962 The Cuban Missile Crisis began on October 14,

1962.

• 1963 Lyndon Johnson becomes President of the United

States• 1964 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was amended to

include gender.

The Beatles arrive at John F. Kennedy International

Airport on February 7th, 1964. (British Invasion)

Vietnam War (1964-1973)• 1965 Malcolm X was assassinated.

American’s direct involvement in the Vietnam War• 1968 Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, in

Memphis, Tennessee.

Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June 6.

• 1969 The success of the Apollo 11 mission of landing on

the Moon on July 20, 1969.

Woodstock music festival

A. Civil Right Movement:• Suze: “These were traumatic times to live through. And

just the way I felt was the insane. It was insane. Why

should this be happening? And I’m sure Bob had the

same thing. You just can’t live through this. You live in

your own little world and your own interests, but the other

worlds is definitely part of it.”• Peter Yarrow on “March on Washington” on August 1963:

“it was a moment of the confirmation of the possibility of that hope become reality. That was the moment of recognition of what people could do to change history.”

• Bob Dylan: “I’m not a topical song writer. No. I don’t really even like that word. I mean it’s not a song about a certain event; it’s beyond that.” (WFMT Radio, Chicago, 1963)

 • Dylan: “I was up close when King was giving that

speech. To this day it still affects me in a profound way. I looked out the podium , I looked out at the crowd and I remember thinking myself! Man, I’ve never seen such a large crowd.”

B. His songs: Protest? Topical Songs?

1. “Master of War” (The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan 1963)

Come you masters of war

You that build all the guns

You that build the death planes

You that build the big bombs

You that hide behind walls

You that hide behind desks

I just want you to know

I can see through your masks

[….]

2. “Talkin‘ World War III Blues” (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan 1963)

Well, now time passed and now it seems

Everybody’s having them dreams

Everybody sees themselves

Walkin’ around with no one else

Half of the people can be part right all of the time

Some of the people can be all right part of the time

But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time

I think Abraham Lincoln said that

“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”

I said that

3. “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall” (The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan 1963)

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?

Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?

I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains

I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways

I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests

I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans

I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard

[….]

4. “Chimes Of Freedom” (Another Side of Bob Dylan 1964)

Through the mad mystic hammering of the

wild ripping hail

The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder

That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze

Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder

Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind

Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind

An’ the unpawned painter behind beyond his rightful time

An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

[….]

5. “When the Ship Comes In” (The Times They Are A-Changin‘ 1964)

A song will lift

As the mainsail shifts

And the boat drifts on to the shoreline

And the sun will respect

Every face on the deck

The hour that the ship comes in [….]

Then they’ll raise their hands

Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands

But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered

And like Pharoah’s tribe

They’ll be drownded in the tide

And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered

6. “Only A Pawn in Their Game” (The Times They Are A-Changin' 1964)

A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood

A finger fired the trigger to his name

A handle hid out in the dark

A hand set the spark

Two eyes took the aim

Behind a man’s brain

But he can’t be blamed

He’s only a pawn in their game

[…]

7. “With God On Our Side” (The Times They Are A-Changin' 1964)

Oh my name it is nothin’

My age it means less

The country I come from

Is called the Midwest

I’s taught and brought up there

The laws to abide

And that the land that I live in

Has God on its side

[….]

Dylan proved to be a rare rock star who recognized the

artificiality of the image, “Bob Dylan” he had helped create,

and with his recurrent attempts to set things right, he self-

consciously struggled the dialectic of authenticity and

artifice. He disappointed fans and critics at the end of the

1960s when he sought to demystify his earlier work ….

There was some truth here, for Dylan achieved the finest

songwriting of this time. (Howard Brick, Age of

Contradiction, 86)

IV. Reference

• Appell, Glenn and David Hemphill. American Popular Music: A Multicultural History. New York: Thomson & Wadsworth, 2006.

• Brick, Howard. Age of Contradiction: American thought and Culture in the 1960s. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001.

• Rahin, Millie. “The Folk Revival: Beyond Child’s Canon and Sharp’s Song Catching.”

• American popular Music. Eds. Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick. U of Massachusetts Press, 2001.

• Scorsese, Martin. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. New York: Apple, 2005.

• Williams, Richard. Dylan: A Man Called Alias. London: Bloomsbury, 1992.

V. Further reading:

A. Books:

1. Dettmar, Kevin J. H. The Cambridge Companion to

Bob Dylan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.

B. DVD:

1. Martin Scorsese. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. New York: Apple, 2005.

C. Websites:

1. Bob Dylan’s official site: http://www.bobdylan.com/# 2. American Cultural History: http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decade60.html

3. Kamin, Jonathan. “Dylan, Bob.” Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. 2008. Grolier Online. 26 Dec. 2008 <http://gme.grolier.com/cgi-bin/article?assetid=0092130-0>.