Bringing it all back home, the ever-relevant Dylan, who watched the river flow for a while, jumps head first into the current. The times they are a-changin'. Or are they? Penetrating commentary. Columbia 4-4516
– Record World (music trade paper) 11/27/71

 

It's Bob Dylan month! Time for the first annual Bob Dylan Revival. "Just like the blues," as Barry Kramer put it.

Here ya go: new, mind boggling single (about George Jackson?!) new album (Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, Volume Two) maybe a movie and record of Bangla Desh, and Tony Scaduto's supposedly definitive biography about to appear.

Every single bit of it is already awash in controversy, of course. Bangla Desh delayed over a month because of contract commitments: Baskhar Menon, Capitol Records' president, acknowledged "Bob Dylan's special position."

The Greatest Hits album: on the heels of a concert performance (Dylan is obviously the least accessible pop star ever, sort of the Greta Garbo of the counter-culture.), a record with five Dylan versions of songs he's written which everyone else has been singing for the last five years. And he's actually commenting on the other versions! Or he seems to be, in at least a couple of instances.

But why this sudden spate of public material? Why couple it with older songs? Why not just put out a new album?

Well, if you're over twenty, ask yourself this: How much like a mere memory must a man seem whose last big entrance into AM radio was accomplished four or five years ago? (That's how long it's been since Dylan, himself, has had a national hit: 'I Want You'.) Has it occured, when talking with a Funk fan or two, that Bob Dylan seems a little...uh, legendary, these days?

It's not a come-back move, exactly, but it sure does seem like a come-forward. Maybe young kids will discover The Times They Are-A-Changin' every few years, en masse, the way they've been discovering the blues. Maybe John Wesley Harding will become the "Indians" album, the way that Howlin' Wolf became "the one with the rocking chair."

But not really – or at least not for a long time. Dylan is still around, creating even more good songs to add to his already ponderous body of work. He's still vital, and alive, not as some sort of academic relic, but as a major American myth-maker. Maybe even THE major American myth-maker.

Nonetheless, with the inevitable spate of airplay for the old tunes, because of Greatest Hits, there must be some people, perhaps too young to be really involved with the old stuff, who are really discovering the power of Dylan for the first time.

That's for all you old dudes out there. For those just a little younger, who really did miss all this stuff, stay tuned: he's done it for all us old coots time and time again. I got a feeling he still has a few tricks up his sleeve. And he's not any older than Felix Pappalardi. Maybe even a lot younger.

 

2.

Bob Dylan's "George Jackson' Spurs Sales, Disagreements
By John Burks

 

...As Dylan songs go, this one has an okay melody. The band behind him cooks plenty good and Dylan – who's been accused by critics of a decreasing commitment to his material in recent years – does this one like he means it.

Perhaps that's because of what the song, 'George Jackson', is about. Dylan, who very nearly achieved the status of prophet with the rock audience of the 1960's, can be heard singing it this way on KFRC:

 

They killed a man I really loved
Shot him through the head
Lord Lord they shot George Jackson down
He wouldn't take (bleep) from no one...

 

One station in San Jose won't play it because they don't want to prejudice the Angela Davis trial which may or may not be held in Santa Clara County.

Bleeps and Clips

Others bleep or clip the word out – "wouldn't take bleep from no one," or "wouldn't take from no one" or "wouldn't take it from no one" – while some play it precisely as Dylan recorded it.
– San Francisco Examiner

 

We heard about it from friends at Columbia, a couple of days before it hit the air. The tale unfolded slowly. First the lyrics, which were crushing. It was amazing to all of us that Bob Dylan, who seemed so removed from the stream of political events, could have written this song, now. It was powerful stuff, from the beginning:

 

I woke up this morning
There were tears in my bed
They killed a man I really loved
They shot him through the head
Lord Lord they shot George Jackson down
Lord Lord they laid him in the ground

 

Dylan, it turned out, had recorded the song on November 4th, in an apparently spur of the moment move. Dylan produced, for the first time ever. Leon Russell played electric piano, and bass, Dylan guitar and harp, Ben Keith was on pedal steel and Ken Buttrey was the drummer. Josie Armstead and Rose Hicks sang the chorus.

The acoustic version, Dylan alone against harp and guitar, has become the B side, which means it gets less airplay. The "Big Band" version is the one: it sounds more or less like realized John Wesley Harding, tightly constructed, the words empahsized for chills and excitement.

The acoustic side, which many have assumed was a return to the bitter, angry folkie-screech of Freewheelin', is the perfect complement to the definitely Leon Russellish Big Band. It is not, of course, so much a return to the folkie music of Dylan's acoustic days as it is a sort of post-folk way of driving the story home. Dylan's voice is angry, and sad, but it is not the barbed-wire monster it once was.

But the Big Band version seems to be the one that most people are picking up: it is certainly the more exciting, with its endlessly repeated chorus rumbling over and over again, as though Dylan were afraid that we might somehow miss the point. "Lord Lord they shot George Jackson down/Lord Lord they laid him in the ground/Lord Lord they shot George Jackson down/Lord Lord they laid him in the ground..."

Make no mistake: this song is about George Jackson. it is not merely a lamentation for another martyr to the cause. It reflects a familiarity with Jackson's life and ideas, and there is no way to make too much of that. If, as someone suggested, 'I Shall Be Released' had been issued with the "Jackson" title, it would say the same thing. But it wouldn't mean the same thing, at all.

Dylan is not moralizing here, he is simply (which is crucial) telling Jackson's story. He's never done that before, never let a man's life stand on its own. Always he has made it secondary to some point, some abstraction about justice, or racism, or manipulative power politics ('Hattie Carroll', 'Oxford Town', 'Only A Pawn In Their Game'). This time, Jackson's death alone is enough to inspire the song, and that, alone, carries the weight of the story. Dylan is not copping to anything here. He doesn't moralize, except for a word here and there ("He was just too real") until the final verse, and when that comes, it is not the climax of the song. The climax is that endless repetition of the chorus, sung over and over again, as if in disbelief: "Lord Lord they shot George Jackson down/Lord Lord they laid him in the ground."

This song is unignorable. It smashes you in the face. Someone had a dream about it, three nights before they heard it. You may hate it; 'George Jackson' may polarize the entirety of Dylan's audience into aesthetically and politically warring camps but it cannot be ignored. 'Watching the River Flow' could be, and it was. Even radio people sense this. Where many of them didn't bother to program 'Watching the River Flow' at all, 'George Jackson' is fast becoming Dylan's biggest hit since 'Lay Lady Lay'. It is certainly getting more airplay than 'River'.

Even the opening line of the second verse, "He wouldn't take shit from no one," is not stopping airplay. Someone called it "the most controversial single in history." Ordinarily, of course, radio stations flip an "offensive" single by a major artist, letting the B side fill the requests. They can't do that with this one. If anything, the "shit" is more explicit on the acoustic version. And bleep and clip as they will, there's no backing down. THIS IS A SONG ABOUT GEORGE JACKSON.

Once it's on the air of course, a whole new element comes into play. Because Dylan makes no attempt to rationalize Jackson's politics, they come through quite quickly. It is like playing 'Pretty Boy Floyd' in the thirties! There is no mistaking the song's sympathies, it is completely unambiguous. There isn't any attempt at justifying Jackson's actions: "They sent him off to prison/They threw away the key."

Still, the radio people can be pretty sure of one thing: Dylan hasn't written a polemic. 'George Jackson' isn't interested in converting anyone. The song is not some sort of sop to the Black Panthers, nor an attempt to make up for Dylan's JDL association, nor a return to Joan Baez' whimpering "lambs."

Tony Glover, an old friend of Dylan's, says that Bob told him he wrote the song "for people who care about George Jackson." Not so people would begin to care, but for those who already do.

Making Jackson a cause would defuse him. As a mere martyr he is only good symbolically. As a flesh-and-blood example, George Jackson points a way out for millions of black prisoners. Vested interests understand this: that is why Attica has been swept under so many rugs. Joan Baez, and her ilk, who think that Dylan should make Jackson some sort of face-less rallying point, are as inane as her attempt to make 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' a Civil War Song.

If the song is for those of us who cared about "George Jackson," we need to accept it and stop bickering about whether or not Dylan really means it. Dylan's job is to give us a matrix in which to pour our concern. He explains what happened to Jackson; it's up to us to tell people why. That it happened because Jackson really was too real, that he really did tell the truth, that he developed an analysis of America that said that those who America calls criminals she has made so, because she has removed all of their options.

The Weatherpeople made New Morning an exciting political symbol. If they could do that with an album which has glaring weaknesses, what can be done with a song that speaks so lucidly about such a powerful political figure? That is our challenge, and it points up one more interesting facet of Bob Dylan.

He's still challenging us. He's still throwing gauntlets in our direction. It's not just like it used to be, but it's the same kind of thing, on somewhat different terms. Dylan is still the songwriter we can count upon, because he's the one who best understands any situation that he choses to apply himself.

It is not at all strange that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale have been profoundly influenced by Dylan. He addresses a very human situation, over and over again.

He didn't write this song so that we could do things with it, of course. At least, that was not the motivating factor. Very wisely, I think, Dylan does not see his music as a political forum, or a direct method of change. It is just too inefficient and of course, it is also too easy to think that once the song is written the job is done if only we sing it enough.

So Dylan didn't write a song to avenge George Jackson...he didn't even write it to let people know who George Jackson was. He wrote it to let us know that he cares. I couldn't be happier that he does. But, there is a question left about Dylan: How he wrote this song so simply and directly.

 

3.

Somewhere I lost connection/Ran out of songs to sing.../Looks like my plans fell through O Lord/stuck in Lodi again
– John Fogerty

 

The new album is Greatest Hits Volume Two. Volume one appeared in '67, when it was rumored Dylan was leaving Columbia; it featured 'Positively Fourth Street', which had never been on an album, and a hopelessly gawk-psychedelic poster of Dylan.

Yes, these were Dylan's greatest hits, but we already had them. The only real attraction was 'Fourth Street', unless you wanted to alleviate your favorite cuts' scratchiness.

Volume Two is a much different matter. It is obviously very consciously constructed, in order to show as much of the songwriting Dylan as possible. These songs are Dylan's greatest hits because of other people's versions, at least in the AM sense of "hit."

'Watching the River Flow', his narrow miss of the summer, is here, of course, sort of like 'Fourth Street' was on Volume One. More importantly, there are five songs that Dylan had never (but others had) officially released before: 'Tomorrow Is A Long Time', 'When I Paint My Masterpiece', 'I Shall Be Released', 'You Ain't Goin' Nowhere', and 'Down In the Flood'. These new versions are all excellent, of course, because Dylan has always been his own best interpreter.

But listen to how he changes the Byrds' 'You Ain't Goin' Nowhere' second verse:

 

Genghis Khan he could not keep
All his kings supplied with sheep
We'll climb that hill no matter how steep
When we get up to it

to this almost violent attack:

Jenghis Kahn and his brother Don
Couldn't keep on keepin' on
We'll climb that ridge after it's gone
After we went way past it

 

You couldn't be certain it was the Byrds he was after, though, if it weren't for the first verse:

 

Clouds won't lift, rain's fallin' in
Gonna see a movie called Gunga Din
Pack up your money
Pull up your tent McGuinn
You ain't goin' nowhere.

 

This isn't amazing only because it makes such an explicit attack on Roger McGuinn (after all, it's always open season for other musicians to attack Dylan) but because it's so funny. Jenghis Kahn and his brother Don are real estate salesmen – shouldn't say that, people take this stuff literally – they're American archetypes.

In fact, no matter what Sweetheart of the Rodeo or even Nashville Skyline seem to be saying, Dylan is not a country & western songwriter, and he never had any serious intention, as far as we can tell, of becoming one. C&W is certainly an element of this new music he has been developing (since Blonde on Blonde) but it is not the entirety of it.

Dylan uses C&W because it is very middle American, just as he used blues in some of his other tunes because it is a representation of black America, and he wanted to come across alienated. C&W isn't at all alienated from the mainstream of American life, and that mainstream is what Dylan is driving at. He wants to write the great American song, the way that Hemingway wanted to write the great American novel.

So country is an element, in the post-rock and roll Dylan, but it is not what he is after. Neither is rock and roll, and that is there too, pronouncedly on 'When I Paint My Masterpiece', less so on some of his other new material. So is the acoustic "folk" music of his early period, and so is blues. If Dylan is going to make music that is American on the grand scale he is going to have to strike chords that evoke Woodstock, Hibbing, Greenwich Village, Nashville, and Los Angeles, either all at once or one after the other. Because he hasn't got it all together yet, it's very easy to take the most startling addition and pretend that that is what Dylan is doing. Country is no more the sum of, say, 'I Shall Be Released' than 12-bar blues was of 'Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat'.

Even 'George Jackson' used pedal-steel on its electric side. It is certainly an incongrous juxtaposition, and Dylan has said, privately, that he was a little worried that black disc jockeys might not play it because of the steel. Nonetheless, there is the American dialectic at work: a seemingly country song about a black revolutionary.

The other new cuts more or less reflect this dialectic in operation. Both 'I Shall Be Released' and 'Down In the Flood' are 19th century pioneer sounding. It's the 12th Street bus moving west, that over-riding motif of New Morning. Perhaps it means not escape but discovery, the act of discovering how to convey what Dylan is thinking not just to embattled adolescents but also to America, as a whole.

'When I Paint My Masterpiece', seen in that light, is immediately understandable. For the Band, it makes one kind of sense: they have yet to paint their mass-audience masterpiece and thus, since their stance is basically that of the struggling artist, "It's sure been a long hard ride" means exactly that. When Dylan sings that line, his tongue is only millimeters away from his cheek. He's already written several masterpieces, and they have already been acclaimed. But he is still bothered artistically. There is another kind of masterpiece he is trying to paint. Since he's already done the other, he doesn't have to worry as much, but it's still a matter of concern.

'Masterpiece' is probably the finest cut on Greatest Hits Volume Two, though it certainly wouldn't be the best on Volume One. Dylan doesn't agonize over his dilemma, he accepts it (something the Band can't do, for one reason or another). He knows where the song is going, more or less, and he knows just what to say. He even knows how to say it, which is surprising in itself.

Dylan is not necessarily overly-secure, despite his successes, and that has been showing up a lot more lately: listen to the sardonic witticism of 'Watching the River Flow', a song that is downright sarcastic. Bob Dylan is hardly a songwriter in repose. He is not able to be as rancorous as the Band, because he has been accepted but there is something here that bothers him. Still, his voice is probably at its most assured since John Wesley Harding, which leads a lot of people to think that it's a return to the barbed-wire tongue of the past. It isn't, really, but it is hoarse and gruff.

In the context of the song, this works splendidly. Dylan's voice is scratchy when he sings "Someday everything's gonna be smooth like a rhapsody," and all of a sudden we can see the joke. Or, when he sings, "Gotta get back to my hotel room/Where I got me a date with Botticelli's Veeeenus/Yup! She promised she'd be right here with me/When I paint my masterpiece."

Far out! Look at how much the verse is improved by substituting this Italian painter fella for the Band's "little girl from Greece." Guess I'll leave that in.

He does that over and over again in 'Masterpiece', until it finally isn't even the same song. By the time he arrives in Brussells, towards the end of the song, he's not even concerned with the Band's bumpy plane ride. When Dylan arrives, he's got "a picture of a tall oak tree by my side." This sap has just traveled 5,000 miles to paint a picture of an American tree. What's going on here?

Where the Band sound defeated, in the final verse, Dylan sounds merely forlorn. He's really taking this part seriously though, make no mistake, and he doesn't change any of the words at all.

 

Someday ever' thin's gonna be dif 'r'nt When I paint my master-pieeeece

 

We couldn't believe Dylan was going through the kind of struggling, unknown artist trip that the Band talk about, but we sure can believe the one he's talking about. He's painted his oak tree and now he's looking for other subjects.

 

4.

'American Pie'

Bye bye Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevvy to the levee
But the levee was dry
Them good old boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye Singing this'll be the day that I die
– Don McLean

 

O me o my love that country pie
– Bob Dylan

 

If Bob Dylan at one time painted many masterpieces, for the last four years he has painted none at all. Some of the songs he wrote between the motorcycle accident and John Wesley Harding are brilliant, and some of the ones on JWH are very good, and so are some of the ones that followed. But none of them has been as affecting as 'Like A Rolling Stone', or 'Ballad of A Thin Man' or even 'The Times They Are A-Changin''.

To write another song like that, Dylan is going to have to figure out a way to sum up his audience again. There is some question whether he knows exactly who that audience is – that is what happened with Self-Portrait – but there is little doubt in anyone's mind that he can do it again.

If Self-Portrait didn't tell Bob Dylan anything else, though, it should have told him what it told us: that his grip on us was loosening. In large measure, he may only still have it because no one has come along to usurp it. (Grand Funk just aren't literate enough, and John Lennon is as yet too simplistic.) In a way, Dylan was trying to see how far he could push us, how much we could accept, and he found out, in a big way, with Self-Portrait.

Still, Self-Portrait's principle motif – American history – is what this new music is all about. Greatest Hits does a much better job of delineating just what it is that Dylan is up to, musically, and lyrically, just because all the songs on it are at the very least good ones.

It does more than that, though. It also delineates the difference in approach between pre-John Wesley Harding Dylan and the Dylan of the seventies. It is a difference fully as significant and startling as the switch from acoustic to electric. Maybe it isn't so surprising after all that everything Dylan has done in this decade has been met with jeers. When an audience expects masterpieces and gets developmental material instead, when it is looking for a direction and finds the sign-post groping, it tends to react badly.

Greatest Hits shows more of what he's up to. At least I think it does. It seems to make sense and you don't have to stretch the songs very much to make them fit the idea: Dylan is trying to make American music and talk to American people. He can't do it with rock and roll because that limits his audience too severely. And he can't do it with poly-syllabic streams of verbiage, either, because he sounds like just another hippie musician.

One of the problems is that you can let the audience get too broad. The Lawrence Welkishness of Self-Portrait did just that, and Dylan had to come back to New Morning to make sure we still knew where he stood, more-or-less.

Yet, New Morning was not some sort of weird retreat from the style he had been developing since John Wesley Harding; it still told basic stories with a mixture of country and rock and blues music, and it still wasn't a fulfilled statement. The same is true of Greatest Hits, and 'George Jackson', though the latter are much closer to making the sort of aesthetic statements Dylan wants to be able to make.

Dylan was always more fablist than poet. He matters most for the phrases that now and again crop up in conversation: when a friend of mine had been burnt badly on a business deal, his comment (with a grin) was, almost immediately, "Well, there's no success like failure and failure's no success at all." "Crimson flames tied through my ears" doesn't make half as much difference (or sense) as the summation: "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." It's the difference between meat and potatoes, and desert.

With JWH, Dylan began to pare his songs to their rudiments, lyricly and musically, and to try to speak plainly. It was going to take a whole new kind of song to carry these (not so very new) ideas. He wanted to talk horse-sense – which is what 'George Jackson' is about – not moralise. Catch the difference between 'Tomorrow Is A Long Time', one of the best love songs Dylan ever wrote:

 

If today was not an endless highway
If tonight was not a crooked trail
If tomorrow wasn't such a long time
Then lonesome would mean nothing to me at all

 

and this, from 'If Not For You':

 

If not for you I couldn't find the door
If not for you I couldn't see the floor
I'd be sad and blue
If not for you

 

There's no difference at all in intent, but the difference in terms of economy is stunning.

This doesn't always make the songs better, necessarily, but it does let Dylan do some things he hasn't been able to do. One of them is write 'George Jackson': a song about a man. Embroiled in a political situation, yes, but still a song about a man. Always before Dylan's political songs have been about political situations in which people happened to be involved. The tragedy, he says, of 'Hattie Carroll' is not that Hattie has been murdered, but that justice has not been served. In 'George Jackson', the tragedy is precisely the murder. Dylan doesn't even bother with anything else. He doesn't suggest, as he did in 'Masters of War', that we murder the prison guards in retribution. He certainly doesn't tell us that we should support the Black Panther Party, because that will somehow make up for Jackson's murder. In fact, the song is about an irretrivable loss: that of a human being.

It probably would be less interesting if Dylan were to pose those kind of solutions to the problem of Jackson's death anyway. It would certainly be less honest. Nothing Bob Dylan or anyone else can do can change the central fact of the song:

 

LORD LORD THEY SHOT GEORGE JACKSON DOWN LORD LORD THEY LAID HIM IN THE GROUND

 

Maybe singing about it helped take some of the load off Dylan's head. Maybe listening to it helps take some of the load off ours. But none of it changes the terrifying reality, that a brilliant young man has been cold bloodedly, determinedly shot down.

"You know, Dave," Ruth Ann Ponnech of Columbia told me, "Bob Dylan couldn't have written that song before. He had to write all those songs on Nashville Skyline and Self-Portrait to learn to write this simply, to tell a simple story."

I don't like either of those two albums better because of that, and it sure isn't the reason Bob Dylan made them, but that's beside the point. The point is that Dylan can sing this kind of song, now. He can write 'When I Paint My Masterpiece' as well, just like he could write 'Like A Rolling Stone' and 'She Belongs to Me' before. They grow out of the same kind of things. They express the same kind of beliefs. All four of them. And, if, as I said, I don't like Nashville Skyline and Self-Portrait any better, I sure can respect them a lot more.

'George Jackson' is important to those of us who love Bob Dylan and rock music both because of its subject matter and because we can finally see the sort of thing he was developing with those other records. I certainly don't expect to play even New Morning and John Wesley Harding as much as I will Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde and Bringing It All Back Home. But I also think that 'George Jackson' and its inevitable artistic counterpart, 'When I Paint My Masterpiece', leave me feeling the way the best of Bob Dylan has left me feeling: hopeful, forward-looking, adventurous. Itching for another album.

Again, neither 'George Jackson' nor 'When I Paint My Masterpiece' is Dylan's ultimate statement in the genre. It is possible that he will never come up with an All-American 'Like A Rolling Stone'. It is also possible that he will. It is on possibilities like that that we all base our hope for the future, not just of rock and roll, but of our lives.

If Dylan can re-define his audience, if Dylan recaptures it with the forcefulness he once possessed, if Dylan can inspire that kind of faith in his abilities as a songwriter (not a spokesman, not a leader, not a "poet," not the "voice of a generation") if he can do that, then he's painted a masterpiece stronger than even 'Like A Rolling Stone'. Maybe he'll take on something really heavy next time, like inter-galactic relations. But let's deal with the problem at hand: the audience.

Dylan still hasn't convinced a lot of people, even if he has convinced me. The reaction to 'George Jackson' is proof enough of that.

 

5.

HOW DOES IT FEEL?

 

Now for ten years we've been on our own
The moss grows fat on a Rollin' Stone
But that's not how it used to be...
– Don McLean

 

But when he gets to the end He's got to start all over again
– The Band

 

Go to him now, he calls ya. Ya got no secrets to conceal Awwwww, how does it feeel?
– Bob Dylan

 

It sometimes seems that no five people have agreed on what anything Bob Dylan has ever done has meant. Everyone knows that it is significant but nobody can seem to reach a consensus on just what it does mean, in itself or to us. Even Self-Portrait, which sometimes seems like the opposite side of the coin, couldn't create a consensus.

Part of the problem is that almost no one wants to believe that Dylan means what he says; everyone wants ambiguity because that way, nobody has any pressure put on them. Maybe a personal example serves best: I've been almost obsessed with Dylan ever since Self-Portrait. And the reason is simple: It looked like a bad Bob Dylan album. Suddenly, I began to wonder if it was me that was fucked up, in the way I related to Dylan, if I was (or was becoming) Mr. Jones.

Well, I was fucked up, of course. Dylan is human, and there is no way to stress that too much. Every song on every album isn't great, and it never was. It takes a lot out of you to listen to 'Ballad In Plain D', in the opposite way that it takes a lot of you to listen to 'Mr. Tambourine Man', or 'Just Like A Woman'. But the force of Dylan's presence has become so great, because we all believe(d) in him so much, that people begin to feel that it is their fault if his songs don't strike them to the heart.

In a way, everything since John Wesley Harding can be seen as nothing more than Dylan's reassertion of his own humanity. He wanted to be fallible, and human, and our reaction pretty much delineates how we feel about heroes who decide to do that. (John Lennon has, or will, contend with much the same thing.) Indeed, what Dylan obviously appreciates most about George Jackson is that "he was just too real." "He wouldn't bow down or kneel," Dylan says, and that's the reason he's worth writing a song about. Having been locked into a media prison, Dylan understands just what having to assert your humanity, and being slapped in the face for doing it, is about.

That's where people like A.J. Weberman come in of course: they don't want to believe that Dylan is just a guy. Sure, "O me o my love that country pie" sounds vacuous, but that's o.k.: Dylan is entitled to a bit of vacuity if any of us are. And it's better that way. We all have this tendency to deny that he is just a dude. (He isn't just a dude, of course, any more than George Jackson was. But you could say that he's just a brilliant young man and get away with it.)

Despite all the imprecations, we haven't ever had a better songwriter. Some of us are satisfied with that, and some of us want something more. If Dylan isn't willing to give us that, we'd better understand why; otherwise what we really want is Bing Crosby and Judy Garland and Shirley Temple, a crop of dimensionless and vapid superstars with no flesh.

A lot more people understand that now of course, and that is one reason why a lot of people can't stand the idea of 'George Jackson'. The opposite stance, that Dylan should be super-human, is the reason why a lot of other people can't abide it.

Criticism of the single falls into several areas: the most disastrous, I think, is the attitude that, as one former fan put it, "Yeah, you had an excuse for writing that kind of blubbering stuff five or six years ago." Then, referring to 'Only A Pawn In Their Game', Dylan's song about Medgar Evers, he added, "But it's five or six years later. It's not good for anything but instant nostalgia."

The other arguments against the song range from Dylan making money from it, and what he will do to Jackson's identity, to the idea that Dylan is somehow trying to "catch up" to the thought that maybe he wrote it to get A.J. Weberman and others off his back about writing political songs.

 

Once upon a time
You dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime
Didn't you?

 

Pardon me for saying so but almost all these arguments seem petty, insufferably stupid and more than a little paranoiac. Not at all, in fact, unlike the ones used by the dolts who screamed for Dylan's head when he began using electric instruments.

In one instance, Dylan fans seem to be saying: "O.K., Bob, we accept the premise. You aren't going to be a leader anymore...fine. So don't try none of that old crap. We aren't buying."

On the other hand, some other ex-fans, perhaps resentful of Dylan's new stance, and perhaps just not as trendily mobile (and it has almost always been trendy to be down on Dylan's latest move, no matter what it was) say almost the opposite: "Look man, you already sold out, and we don't give a shit what you do, we're not going to be gullible anymore."

It is very much like that instant, in the Royal Albert Hall concert, when someone in the back of the room shouts "Judas." The shouts of outrage nearly equal the laughter, but no one is around to register the looks of amazement directed, not at Dylan, but at those badgering him.

"Well man," Tony Glover said the other night, "when the subject of Bob Dylan comes up, a lot of otherwise sane people become fools." Words we would, all be wise to remember.

 

People'd call, say beware doll
You're bound to fall
You thought that they was all
Kiddin' you

 

"George Jackson' is totally unlike any other "political" song Dylan ever wrote. 'Hattie Carroll', 'Hollis Brown', and all the rest are used to make philosophical points. At the end of each verse of 'Hattie Carroll' in fact, Dylan says explicitly, "Take the rag away from your face, now ain't the time for your tears." Until the final stanza, when he describes William Zanzinger's six month sentence. "Now's the time for your tears." Justice. That is the underlying theme, of all of them.

All of the other "topical" songs are well constructed, of course, considering what they did and how morally easy it is to make those points. But Dylan's genius, as a songwriter, isn't found in any of them, except perhaps 'The Times They Are A-Changing' and 'Blowin' In the Wind'. He never did write a song about a real person, in a real situation, and come to terms with their humanity. That is what 'George Jackson' does, and it is something so much bigger that almost alone, it could stand to reveal Dylan's maturity.

'George Jackson' doesn't stand alone, though. It does what Nashville Skyline, John Wesley Harding and New Morning did: it attempts to tell a simple story simply. That is not always the way to tell a story well, and I think this is probably not Dylan's masterpiece. But, look at what Dylan left out: the allusions and allegories that would have left something less, because there mightn't have been anywhere for us to stand. Forget what you think Dylan should be doing, hold 'George Jackson' still for a moment, and take a look at what he is doing. You'll have something concrete, and very, very much unlike the nebulously "political", almost metaphysical tales he told about Medgar Evers, Hollis Brown, and Hattie Carroll.

The one thing Dylan doesn't try to do is make Jackson's case for him. This strikes to the very heart of that most disastrous objection, and the one that runs through all the others: you cannot, no one could, tell a story like this, with its obvious emotional and political entanglements and not get involved with them...unless you are very involved with the idea of the man himself. Unless, in short, you care.

In a way, the most startling thing about George Jackson is what Dylan presumes, having written it. He assumes that we know who Jackson is, and that we will side with Jackson. (Though he didn't necessarily presume that radio people did or would: remember he was worried that, because of the pedal steel, black d.j.'s might not play it.)

If Dylan has somehow been making moves to broaden his audience, he now takes a big chance: he polarizes it. The element he drives away is probably the newest, and therefore least strongly held. It is not a "safe" move, in any way, because George Jackson was who he was and because Bob Dylan's audience is not, at this time, composed solely of people with leftist political leanings. What's really sad is that it isn't safe because some of the people most vocally on Jackson's "side" aren't going to be satisfied with this. They want more. That's not desiring justice, that's greed.

'George Jackson' speaks from the heart, and people who can't hear that are foolish. The song isn't crucial because Bob Dylan has found his way back to the fold. It is crucial, to us, because it is a sign that Bob Dylan still cares about some of the same things we do, no matter what he might have seemed to be saying in 'Watching the River Flow'.

 

You used to laugh about
Ever'body that was down and out
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging
your next meal

 

Nor is the song a mere "move." It's hardly nostalgic, viewed entirely, both because it is immediate (being on AM radio, and because Jackson's death is so recent) and because it is such a seemingly drastic change.

 

Is not the pastness of the past the profounder, the completer, the more legendary, the more immediately before the present it falls?
– Thomas Mann

 

If Dylan had wanted nostalgia, he might have done something rousingly electric, like Blonde on Blonde; or something lyrically convoluted, like the second side of Another Side. Certainly he would not have done something that incorporates the best elements of his recent work: lyric conciseness and musical simplicity. 'George Jackson' is, in fact, a current extension of the best of Dylan's post John Wesley Harding music.

It is a misreading of what George Jackson means to think otherwise. Jackson affected almost everyone who read him, profoundly and personally. It is not strange that he should have reached Bob Dylan. It's merely the wisest voice of one of America's sub-cultures reaching the most exquisite of another.

 

Princess on a steeple
And all the pretty people
Drinkin'
Thinkin'
That they've got it made

 

The worst that could be said of the single is that it somehow degrades Jackson's myth. I've already heard that said, in connection with the filmscript (This Is It) which we ran a couple months ago, and which tried to deal with the man in somewhat similar terms. Well, George Jackson is a heavy legend. Attica proves that. He lived the life of a hero. He died a martyr's death. Dylan doesn't defile that myth, or distort it, by putting it on AM radio. He broadens it.

 

Exchangin' all precious gifts
But you better take that diamond ring
You better pawn it babe!

 

You can't sell George Jackson. He was too potent, and will be, for at least the next ten or twenty years. Spartacus couldn't be trashed until a thousand years after his death, after all.

Telling people that slaves, or prisoners, or gladiators, should revolt is the ultimate socially threatening act. Slaves and prisoners, in any society, must be kept that way. If their status is redefined, if their position is suddenly and clearly unjust, the society has to change to its very core.

In some respects, it is like the end of Viva Zapata! We have seen Zapata die, and the townspeople know it too, but his horse is still around. "I want people to wonder at what forces created him," George Jackson wrote of his brother Jonathan, "terrible, vindictive, cold, calm manchild, courage in one hand, the machine gun in the other, scourge of the unrighteous – 'an ox for the people to ride' " George Jackson's ideas are the ox, and the horse, just like the horse was the symbol of Zapata, keeping the revolution alive in Guerrero. And today, around Acapulco, in the state of Guerrero, when the government tries to spray the farmers' marijuana crops, the farmers try to shoot down the planes.

Well, George Jackson, man not song, is a lot like that. A mere song isn't going to change the way prisoners feel about him. And, in a strange way, George Jackson isn't dead yet. Indeed, because the song says so much about him, it keeps him alive longer.

This is what Dylan told Glover the song was for, "people who care about George Jackson."

 

You used to be
So amused
At Napoleon in rags
And the language that he used
Go to him, now, he calls ya
Ya can't refuse

 

But what about Dylan? Is this some attempt to get radicals off his back? Is it an attempt to get on a bandwagon? Is it a sign that Dylan is about to somehow "announce" that he is a fervid New Leftist?

I doubt it. If Dylan wanted the left in this country off his back, he could leave. Not just retreat to Woodstock but split somewhere hip and groovy. Malaga, Freeport, Tangier. 'George Jackson' isn't about that, anyway: A.J. and the others now expect more. Gluttons can't be satisfied.

Leaping on a bandwagon? I keep hearing that, but where in the world is the bandwagon? If anything, there is a bandwagon in the opposite direction, a distinct movement to cover up the events of San Quentin, Marin, Soledad, Attica, Rahway. And, if Dylan wanted to be politically trendy, he would have written about John Sinclair or Leslie Bacon or Angela Davis. (Not that those aren't worthy things to write songs about; it's just that they are politically trendier, beyond doubt.)

 

When ya ain't got nothin'
Ya got nothin' to lose

 

Ah, the legendary "return to radical politics." There's the great myth. We're like a pack of apocalyptics, waiting for the return of the great Messiah, so we can tie up all the loose ends.

Way off, over in some dismal corner, if you listen real hard, you'll hear Joan Baez and her simpy little song, whimpering and pleading, as though "Bobby" had left us alone with nowhere to turn without him.

If our movement is that directionless, if it is that dependent upon this one man, it's bullshit anyhow. And if it doesn't, then Bob Dylan or no Bob Dylan, it's going to go on and get stronger or weaker on its own merits.

We don't need Bob Dylan in the "fold," charming the lambs, because we don't want forced heroes, coerced leaders. Sure, everyone despises the JDL, and I hope Dylan continues to avoid making any public show of solidarity with them.

But songwriters and singers and rock'n'roll bands don't make revolutions, no matter what some people want to tell us. Only fools – just like Tony said – think that they do. Dylan, and other rock musicians, have helped and will hopefully continue. Maybe they won't, too. I don't think it matters a damn.

Maybe all the energy expended on wooing Bob Dylan back into the "movement" should be used trying to tell people what George Jackson was about, how rotten and evil the prisons and the courts have become in this country. Getting Bob Dylan "back" isn't going to do anything more, politically, than dropping lots of acid did. Once he was back, if he's ever been very far away, we'd still have all the work to do. He couldn't do it for us.

 

You're invisible now
You got no secrets to conceal

 

Several of us worked on getting Huey Newton to comment on the song, for this story. He was very tied up, primarily because he's on trial (for the third time) for manslaughter in Oakland, California, as I write this. We did get several stories from friends, and some oblique comments from Huey, himself, and I think that they are worth recording here.

Huey did meet with Bob Dylan, along with David Hilliard, last year. Hilliard grew very upset with Dylan's support for the JDL, and split early, saying that he had to leave before something disastrous happened to "this Zionist fool." Huey stayed, though he later told friends that he wished he hadn't, that perhaps Hilliard was right.

It was respect for Dylan that kept him there. Newton was apparently flabbergasted by Dylan's changes while he was in prison. After he met Bob, he put his records away in a closet in his home. A few weeks ago, though, before Dylan did 'George Jackson', Huey dragged the records out again. "I'm only depriving myself," he is said to have commented. "I really love this music."

I think that says everything about what's happening with people in regard to Dylan. Dylan's contribution has been literally invaluable – a couple of people around the office said to be sure to mention that there wouldn't even be a CREEM Magazine without him, and that's certainly true.

Huey's initial comment, when he heard about the single, was that he wondered where the money was going. I wonder too, and I think this is one time it matters. But, it isn't going to bring George Jackson back, even if Dylan donates all the rest of the money he makes in his life to the Black Panther Party. Somehow, just this once, it might be nice if other people could have Huey's reaction when he read the words. He dug 'em.

There is a realization there that is somehow important. Maybe it's just the plain and simple fact that there are more important things, and even more important people, than Bob Dylan. That doesn't degrade Dylan at all: it's what he's been trying to say to us, after all. And it doesn't mean that we should value Dylan less. A little more realistically, that's all.

I don't think that Bob Dylan is going to become a "radical" again. I do think that 'George Jackson' is a brilliant, wonderful song. If we have to continue to bicker and carp about what Dylan "means" when he speaks simply and directly and honestly to us, maybe we have to go back and listen to the man's original masterpiece. It'll probably ring through many more midnights than this, and it ends everything perfectly:

 

HOW DOES IT FEEL?
HOW DOES IT FEEEEEE1?
TO BE ON YOUR OOOOWWWWNNN
WITH NO DIRECTION HOME
LIKE A COMPLETE UNKNOOOWWWNNN
LIKE A ROLLING STOOOONNNNE!