‘I’m Younger Than That Now’: Bob Dylan’s Fight with the Authoritarian Left.

Gary Fraser examines the ongoing appeal of the ‘quintessential rebel’, and asks whether lessons can be learned from his artistic battles with the traditional left.

Contemporary pop culture seems to be infatuated with the 1960s to the point where the steady diet of manufactured nostalgia actually stifles new and emerging artists. Just look at any music magazine and you are likely to find some familiar sixties icon, a Lennon or a Jim Morrison, or a Jimi Hendrix, peering at you from the past. The big stars of the sixties who are still on the road like the Rolling Stones and McCartney simply trade on their old glories and the audience expects no less. Sure, they still make new music but no one is really listening. Could you imagine going to a Stones concert and they only played material this side of 1975?

Out of all the sixties icons Bob Dylan has proven to be the exception in that he still has something to say. 1997’s critically acclaimed ‘Time Out of Mind’ or 2006’s ‘Modern Times’ are an equal match with anything on his back catalogue. As an artist, Dylan has refused to be pigeon-holed, something that has often infuriated his critics. He has continually rejected the cliché labels attributed to him by the musical establishment like ‘spokesperson of the sixties generation’. His refusal to allow himself, or his music to be labelled dates back to the early 1960s when he found himself stuck with terms hanging over his head like ‘protest singer’, or his music casually referred to as ‘folk’.

By the mid-sixties Dylan started to break with the world of folk which was beginning to limit his art and reduce his voice. The folk traditionalists responded by hollering cries of betrayal at Dylan ‘going electric’. By no longer writing protest songs, Dylan they argued had ‘sold out’. Rather than his music reflecting the collective struggle of the times and his albums being a top ten list of left wing priorities like the Civil Rights Movement or anti-war songs about Vietnam, Dylan’s music, his critics on the left argued, had succumbed to ‘bourgeois individualism’. For a generation of idealists who marched to ‘We Shall Overcome’ there must have been something despairing about Dylan’s classic ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. No ‘we shall overcome’ here, just Dylan yelling that in today’s harsh world, ‘you are on your own’. During one legendary Dylan performance one of the folk traditionalists shouted out ‘Judas’. Bob Dylan appeared to have fallen from grace for the folk music establishment and the cultural left.

Recently, there has been a number of works released that examine Dylan’s break with the folk world. For example, Mike Marques ‘Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art’ and Scorsese’s critically acclaimed documentary ‘No Direction Home’. Last year saw the release of ‘The Other Side of the Mirror’, Murray Lerner’s groundbreaking documentary which captures Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in the pivotal years 1963-1965, when he was turning his back on ‘protest songs’. Lerner’s documentary is revealing for it charts the evolution of Dylan’s songs creating the space for the music to do the talking. What shines through in Lerner’s film is the essence of Dylan’s battle with the folk establishment; a battle which for Dylan was the right to be himself.

Bob Dylan is for me the quintessential rebel. He begins by rebelling against his parents and the small town mentality of the cultural backwaters of Minnesota where he spent his formative years. This develops into a rebellion against the phoniness and hypocrisy of America in the 1950s. Even today popular culture romanticises the 1950s which for many was something of a ‘golden era’, before Watergate or Vietnam, or the Kennedy assassination, and before a whole generation of young people ‘went mad on drugs’. What is often omitted is that it was only a ‘golden era’ so long as you happened to be white, and straight, and preferably middle class. Dylan, liked so many other ‘Holden Caulfield’s’ of his generation could see straight through the hypocrisy. His journey led him right into the lap of the American left.

Perhaps as a response to the commercialisation of rock and roll, Dylan became a beatnik, a radical poet and a folk singer of ‘protest songs’. Once he was freed from the backwoods of Minnesota he headed straight for Greenwich Village, New York, the home of the radicals. Whilst his contemporaries were listening to Elvis, who by this point was doing his duty for ‘Uncle Sam’, Bob Dylan was somewhere else. He was back in the 1930s and in search of the folk troubadour and mythical left wing hero of the Great Depression, Woody Guthrie.

The Bob Dylan of 1963 won the hearts and minds of the cultural left. More than any other figure he helped to bring folk music into the mainstream, giving it an edge and authenticity that so many of his contemporaries lacked. In his early albums Dylan addressed many of the concerns of the left. ‘Masters of War’ was a damning indictment of what was then being called the ‘military industrial complex’. Listening to it today, given the background to Iraq and Afghanistan and American imperialism’s reach across the planet, the song is as pertinent and impertinent as ever. In ‘Blowin' in the Wind’ a song written for the Civil Rights Movement, Dylan is not content on preaching to the converted, or humming perfunctory lines about hope and salvation. Instead he talks directly to the poor white man and asks him, ‘how many times can you turn your head and pretend that you just don’t see’.

He addresses the point, often painted over by the left, that the poor often acquiesce with the hierarchal system rather than attempt to overthrow it. This theme is repeated in ‘Only A Pawn in their Game’, in which he again attempts to understand the racism of the white man.

In 1963’s ‘The Times They Are A Changin’ album Dylan is introspective about the state of America. In ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’ he evoked the imagery of the Great Depression in the tale of an individual so driven to despair by poverty that he murders his own family. ‘North Country Blues’ focuses on the impact of the decimation of the mining industry in his home of Minnesota. Even when on familiar topics for the left, Dylan sees a darker side to life and seldom does he slip into ubiquitous clichés about the future coming of the Promised Land. In ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol’, he points to the injustices of the class system told through the story of a black maid, who in the words of the song ‘never sat once at the head of the table’.

These songs and countless others were lapped up by a young audience at the Newport Festival in 1963. The audience, just like Dylan, had seen through the hypocrisy of the 1950s and were hungry for ideas. By the end of the sixties Dylan’s audience would be burning their draft cards and refusing to fight in Vietnam, calling it the rich man’s war. Embraced by the likes of Pete Seeger, Allen Ginsberg and Joan Baez, Bob Dylan had become a prominent figure on the American cultural left and folk scene. The label ‘spokesperson of a generation’, which would cling to him like a bad suit for the rest of his career had now been measured to fit. With Dylan established as one of their own, the folk establishment started to reveal an authoritarian side. They wanted to tell him what to write, what to think, and how to talk.  Dylan responded by doing what the radical does best; he rebelled.  

He starts to see through the limitations of the folk world. Dylan intuitively knows that there is something twee and sentimental about ‘We Shall Overcome’. His world, reflected in his music is harder, more cynical, and much more real. Captured in Lerner’s documentary when the audience boos at him ‘going electric’, or in the Scorsese film about the tale of folk legend Pete Seeger trying to smash Dylan’s cable with an axe and end his performance of ‘Maggie’s Farm’, a story emerges about Bob Dylan’s fight with the authoritarian left.  

The authoritarian left wanted music that symbolised, often crudely and naively, the struggle between oppressed and oppressor. Anything that was not about organising the masses or fighting back against your oppressor was dismissed as bourgeois individualism. The result, which is often to be found in many folk songs, is simplistic sloganeering that conjures up a black and white childlike world of good versus evil. Dylan rejected this as a limitation on his music and his art. In Lerner’s film, when the audience booed at his performance of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ we are reminded that the young Dylan never did what his audience dictated. Watching it on screen, I was reminded of Oscar Wilde’s saying that ‘good art should never be populist, the public should be more artistic!’ Dylan, like Wilde was always one step ahead of everyone else. By 1964 his music was changing and with it his relationship with the folk establishment.

The authoritarian left wanted to capture the artistic freedom of critique and rebellion. Once it was captured they wanted to organise it, discipline it and mould it into one block of steel, to use Lenin’s term. The result was stultifying for an artist like Dylan. Dylan captures the authoritarian tendencies of the left in his classic song ‘My Back Pages’. In the song Dylan acknowledges that he has grown up. He has moved on from the black and white, good versus evil simplicity of the authoritarian left. And in the process of growing up he has become younger. In the song he sees through the simplistic imagery of the left:

Half wracked prejudice leaped forth “Rip down all hate I screamed” Lies that life is black and white Spoke from my skull. I dreamed Romantic facts of musketeers Foundation deep somehow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now
	Bob Dylan

Two verses later, Dylan deals with a theme which has continued to haunt the left, namely how do you overthrow oppressive systems without becoming a violent oppressor in the process? In the event of revolution and the bloody seizure of power do the masses become dehumanised? Does revolution make it easier to kill? Dylan knew that there were some on the left that wanted to replace one authority with another:

	In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand At the mongrel dogs who teach Fearing not that I’d become my enemy In the instant that I preach My pathway led by confusion boats Mutiny from stern to bow Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now
Soviet Art

Read one way, ‘My Back Pages’ highlights the danger of youthful naivety. Read another, the song helps to illuminate the left’s experience of Communism. Rather than a society where a higher quality of life was achieved the Soviet Union became one of the most tightly controlled and organised societies the world has witnessed. Before Glasnost, all cultural life was subordinate to the party and the state. A new generation in the sixties and beyond knew that after the experience of Communism in practice and the terrible crimes committed in the Gulag the left could ill afford to be naive and simplistic.

During the twentieth century the attempt to implement socialism on this model had a tendency to end up with barbed wire fences. If we have learned anything it is that we need to be wary of the grand leaders who promise us grand things. Dylan knew what he was saying in ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ when he hollered ‘Don’t follow leaders’.

In 1964 the year he wrote ‘My Back Pages’ Bob Dylan had turned the mirror onto the left itself. The left has a tendency to idealise the dead, the ‘corpse evangelists’ as Dylan refers to them in the song. The authoritarian, andro-centric left has wanted to wrap itself in the cloak of the dead father figure. On an ideological level the left has engaged in a deconstruction of religious ideas. However, at the level of human psychology, there are many parallels between the authoritarian left and the preachers of the gospel. The church has been substituted for the party, Christ for Lenin, and Marx is perfectly cast as the all knowing father figure. As Ralph Milliband once pointed out, Dialectical Materialism during the era of Communism became a formulaic catechism for the far left, justifying all sorts of twists, turns and contradictions. The parallels with organised religion are obvious. You just need to look at some of the imagery and art of the Communist period to see that Stalin and his predecessor Lenin were figures to be worshiped just like Christ. With his corpse turned to iconography, forever on display in the mausoleum, Vladimir Lenin, just like Jesus Christ had achieved a form of life after death.

Awareness of the tendencies of the left to become authoritarian helps to guard against totalitarianism in thought and in practice. Moreover, this awareness is at the core of democratic socialism, and humanistic readings of great thinkers like Marx. The tendency of the left to worship the dead and to look for authority figures probably has a psychological explanation at root. To understand more fully we might need a Sigmund Freud, or an Erich Fromm to explain. Or maybe even a Bob Dylan.

Gary Fraser