Robert Duncan, one of the key figures of the San Francisco poetry renaissance of the 1950s in which the Beat Generation surfaced, once said that he didn’t believe there was any such thing as a poet. What happened, Duncan said, was that every so often this or that man or woman became, in the process of composing a particular work, the poet. And when the work was done, so was the designation. In other words, the poet was a process one entered, not a title — not a noun but a verb. If one were to give Duncan’s idea historical application, one might say that whoever became the poet might come to stand for the particular time in which the designation fell to him or her. In the case of Allen Ginsberg, for instance, who first read “Howl” at the Gallery Six in San Francisco in the mid-fifties, the period would date from that reading into the early sixties, when he published “Kaddish,” a work of comparable power. Then, according to my personal chronology, a sort of hand-off took place, and the laurel wreath was passed to Bob Dylan, with Ginsberg’s personal blessing.
There was Allen, in fact, among those photographed on the back of the first Dylan album I bought, in the spring of 1965, Bringing It All Back Home. Up to then, the poets I hung out with in New York — and we considered ourselves the standard bearers in all things — didn’t give much weight to Dylan. He was a folkie, and a protest singer into the bargain, and our cadre was decisively apolitical. Joy had nothing to do with politics, and joy was what we were trying to create in our work. In fact, it wasn’t a poet who alerted me to Bob Dylan’s latest album but an actor friend, who brought it over to another friend’s apartment, and when I said something casually disparaging about Dylan, he simply put the record on the turn-table and “Subterranean Homesick Blues” erupted over the room. End of story. There was no mistaking it. It was joy. It was the same joy that was just then beginning to be associated with those two new English rock groups, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. It was resurgent rock-and-roll, but in Dylan it had found an altogether new, bent, American surrealist, Beat Generation lyricism.
Dylan had gone electric at the Newport Folk Festival and been booed by die-hard folkies to the point of tears, but this new album, including songs that he’d sung at Newport, was, from that first song, the one thing he hadn’t done before and heretofore evidently couldn’t do. It surged through you and made you glad to be alive:
Johnny’s in the basement
Mixin up the medicine
I’m on the pavement
Thinkin bout the government…
Look out, kid
It’s somethin you did
God knows when
But you’re doin it again…
I could scarcely believe my ears. With stoked electric accompaniment behind him, this guy, who a few short months before had sounded like he was trying to impersonate an old man — what was that about? —suddenly sounded great, young, and interesting. It was the spring of 1965 and everything changed. I suppose that’s the synergy that Duncan implies with his remark about the poet. “Howl,” after all, effectively broke the spell of the consumer-bound fifties. Bringing It All Back Home made you feel great — as great as a John Sebastian song for The Lovin’ Spoonful like “Do You Believe in Magic?” or “What a Day for a Day Dream” but Dylan was also obviously a major consciousness and that added a heady spike to the mix:
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
The history may be a little tipped here — Eliot and Pound were always respectful friends, so far as I know — but no matter: the guy was ready to bite off a bit more than he could chew, because nobody would notice anyway, and in fact it wasn’t more than he could chew. “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” the epic surrealist vision of Columbus landing in America which closes the album, begins with Dylan starting off minus his band — a musical faux pas — and the poet erupting in laughter for an infectious long time. Dylan’s laugh is deeper than his singing voice, the laugh of a man who knows he’s struck gold. “I hate guys like that,” my poet friend Tom Clark remarked a year or two later about the newly-arrived Jimi Hendrix. “They’re commanders, you know?” The same was true of Dylan of course. He had gotten everything right, and there was nothing to do except to listen to it, over and over. That Dylan was serious trouble for any poet didn’t change the fact that he was also great, and that comprised a real if not entirely simple pleasure.
At ten, when I lived for a couple of years in suburban Pacific Palisades, my friends had races with the little model cars they sold at hobby shops called Dinky Toys. One of us sat in the middle and raced all of the cars, one belonging to each of us in a group of four or five, around and around a circular track determined by whatever reach one’s outstretched arm commanded. Whoever sat in the middle could have cheated at will and made his own car, or the car of his favorite pal of the moment, the winner. But we were kids and our egos were easily subsumed by the visceral drama of the race itself. We trusted the ring master to lose his head and simply bring in the winner who was slated to win that race. Amazingly enough, I don’t remember any arguments about who won. Artists’ egos, perhaps, have to be a little like that.
It was right around here, too, that the paradigm shifted decisively to rock as the vehicle for the news for our generation. As the sixties went into gear — and 1965 seems more or less the start-up of that epoch — few of us took a daily paper, because it was understood that you weren’t going to read the truth there. We knew, for instance, that there was something dreadfully wrong with a headline like “13,000 Advisors Sent to Vietnam.” Still, the New York Times printed it with its implacable straight face.
There was a lot of anger on both sides of what was deemed “the generation gap,” and Dylan is a great poet of anger. If the hippies were largely a middle class phenomenon, their fathers and mothers were understandably upset that little Johnny and Betsy had grown up to be such shits that they didn’t give a damn about what Mom and Dad struggled so hard to achieve. Johnny and Betsy, on the other hand, were listening to the music, and the music said don’t wait, we want the world and we want it now. Dylan told us, in a tight arrangement with Al Kooper’s heat-grill of an organ vamping behind him, that the middle class just wasn’t going to get it:
Something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you—Mr. Jones?
Dylan went on a creative roll over the next couple of years, following Bringing It All Back Home with Highway 61 Revisited, and then the double album Blonde on Blonde, which served notice, if any further notice was needed, that he was a creative phenomenon who left everybody shifting in his wake. It was during this period that The Beatles hit their stride as art song writers with “Penny Lane,” “Paperback Writer,” and “Strawberry Fields,” and The Rolling Stones loosened the blues to include lyric lines that wouldn’t have been likely a year or two earlier from the Lords of Muddy Waters: “Jumpin Jack Flash” et al. It was the psychedelic sixties by now, and it was Dylan, I think, who found the fullest verbal equivalent to the retinal and aural circus. And Dylan, it should be noted, was said to favor amphetamines. This writer once ingested some methedrine with the idea of noticing its impact on composition, and Dylan’s work of this period might be seen as an unparalleled exemplification of that chemical venue. What can happen is a kind of sustained double entendre (a pun allows you to hear two voices at the same time, both William Empson and Robert Duncan instructed):
Inside the museum Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa must have had the Highway Blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
Blonde on Blonde as a title, too, was simultaneously a lament on his romantic life and an off-the-cuff echo of the Russian suprematist painter Malevitch’s high modernist “White on White” in the Museum of Modern Art. Dylan was planting a nicely contoured boot in every camp imaginable — from Jasper Johns to Eric Burdon, from Charles Olson to Albert Einstein. And when he hit top-forty radio with a song reputedly about Edie Sedgwick called “Like a Rolling Stone,” it was hard for anyone not to hear him. I was in Woodstock that summer of 1965 and glimpsed Dylan a number of times at the Espresso Coffee House, one night in heated though not audible vituperation with Sally Grossman, whom I knew slightly, his agent Albert Grossman’s wife and the woman featured with him in the cover photograph of Bringing It All Back Home. (Someone once told me that the woman in the cover photograph, whom I knew to be Sally, was actually Dylan in drag — the equivalent of the de rigueur rumor when a new male artist became famous that he was gay.) That summer I must have listened to “Like a Rolling Stone” dozens of times with delight on the radio and on the jukebox at the Espresso without deciphering any of the lyric but the tidal wave of the chorus:
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone
By the mysterious synergy that allows an artist to speak for a particular moment, one might venture that there was a multitude of answers to the question posed: as many answers as there were of us on the verge of launching this voyage that became the sixties, one that would take many of us a long way from home. There was a deep emotional throb of goodbye in the chorus, and also an empowering melodic rush in it. It would be years before I read the lyric sheet and discovered the character portrait Dylan had conjured of a young Sedgwick-like figure at large in the world without Mommy, Daddy or bank account. In these new songs by Dylan, there was the same coruscating wit that wouldn’t hesitate to shoot a fool down, but there was also a new emotional empathy coming into play in this song, and in the one that took up the whole of side four in Blonde on Blonde, which was said to be about Dylan’s wife, Sarah, “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”
One had a sense, too, of an artist having accomplished in a few short years what many might not realize in a lifetime. The largesse of the double album was even a bit wearying, at least to this admirer, although one played it as compulsively as one had ever played an album. The repeated saturation in the music is one element of the sixties culture that has all but eluded comment. When Blonde on Blonde came out, it became for a good many of us the new sound track of our lives. It was as if Dylan on the turntable all day and night in the households of his peers, was laying in a template of sensibility that would follow us into our future lives, like a B.A. or a law degree. It was, perhaps, what Fitzgerald meant for his readers in the twenties. A far closer interface was possible, however, in the era of electric media. Dylan having made top-forty radio now had unprecedented reach in our newly christened global village. He was The Poet, and also, as in any such apotheosis, a great deal more than that. He became for several years — outstripping The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, groups after all, for all their individual genius — the living model of what we were and/or what we aspired to be.
There is, of course, a lot of pressure in being that — in trying to be that as a parent, for instance, let alone as a role model for a generation of one’s peers. After the release ofBlonde on Blonde, Dylan dropped out of sight, and there were rumors, though not confirmed in the media, of a serious motorcycle accident, one in which he had barely avoided death, and for a stretch of over a year he was out of the picture. And that was the year in which the sixties went over the falls.
I had met my future wife, Gailyn McClanahan, in Cambridge just after the release of the Beatles album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. The song “Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds” was said to be a transcription of the acronym L.S.D. As a couple Gailyn and I had baptized ourselves in the psychoactive sacraments, so to speak, and then smoked ourselves under the table. As winter rolled around, the Great Paranoia descended and we fled Massachusetts for Paris that November. After a Franco-American comedy of errors trying to get my father’s Paris Opera district flat installed with central heating, we fled Paris for New York. I was scared. Years later when I alluded to the fear I felt, which belied marijuana’s reputation as a benign recreational drug, Jim Carroll remarked that he thought one crossed a point of innocence with a drug, after which the drug knew you as well or better than you knew yourself, and things could get crazy, whatever the drug might be. Being with Gailyn, having a book of poetry coming out with Random House, and smoking marijuana to stay relaxed — I was walking the winter streets of New York with the sensation that buildings might fall on me. As this happened, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones both came out with albums positively rancid with psychedelia, as it occasionally struck me despite the fact that I was a self-annointed true believer: Magical Mystery Tourand His Satanic Majesty’s Request. The cover of the latter featured Mick Jagger peering out from the center of what looked like a retinal circus with too many faces I was no longer so delighted to see.
Then Bob Dylan came out with an album that was like a pinprick to the whole lopsided circus balloon. It featured a cover with a black and white photograph of Dylan, with short hair, in a buckskin jacket standing with several people one didn’t know in the country somewhere. The album was John Wesley Harding and featured a stripped-down acoustic sound and a different voice than one had heard from Dylan before, full of plaintive resonance, singing Bible-like parables out of the old west.
Now Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
They were the best of friends
So when Frankie Lee needed money one day
Judas quickly pulled out a roll of tens
And placed them on a foot stool
Just above the potted plain
Sayin’, “Take your pick, Frankie Boy
My loss will be your gain.”
Dylan simultaneously made his first concert appearance in more than a year with Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie at Town Hall, and it was like his return to the family fold, the folk roots that had once nourished him, now a man who had walked through the fire. It was a heartening spectacle just then. It was as if he’d called us up from wonderland and delivered us back to the side of the lake.
The next Dylan album, Nashville Skyline, with a new countrified Dylan singing “Lay Lady Lay” and doing a duet with Johnny Cash, seemed to shore up the back-to-basics line ofJohn Wesley Harding. Dylan was now a family man, and I had a brief encounter with him in Woodstock during the spring of 1969 right after the album appeared. I was just married and Gailyn and I were on the macrobiotic diet and deep into the hippie fashion palette of the day. Dylan was driving his children around in a wood-paneled ranch wagon, the modestly attired country husband and father. When I told him, sitting in the driver’s seat of his wagon, how much I liked Nashville Skyline he looked pleased and even a little surprised. His voice and presence, both on and off the album, seemed that of a man far older than his twenty-eight years. And well it might. While he would go on to create many memorable and beautiful works, his moment of apotheosis was just then turning — he had shepherded us through a dazzling, perilous decade, even while news of the demise of other key figures had begun to arrive. Dylan was the preeminent artist of the sixties, our Shakespeare, and his survival into the present seems not the smallest of his many miracles. But then, his predecessor and friend and supporter from the outset, Allen Ginsberg, had also survived his turn as The Poet.
Happy Birthday, dear Bob.