Bob Dylan (6 page)

The root inspiration for the song came from the Cuban Missile Crisis—the moment at which, it's commonly agreed, the Cold War came closest to boiling over into all-out nuclear catastrophe. The crisis came about in the wake of Fidel Castro's revolutionary 1959 transformation of Cuba into a communist state. In 1961, the young new American President, John F. Kennedy, revealed his inexperience and immaturity by supporting a CIA plot to overthrow Castro, to which end many of the anti-Castro Cuban refugees pouring into America were enlisted in an insurrectionary force of 1,500 men, who were trained in Guatemala for a counter-revolutionary invasion of Cuba.

Despite widespread antipathy towards the plot from the British government—who warned that the invasion would breach international law—and such weighty American political advisors as Dean Acheson, Arthur Schlesinger and Senator J. William Fulbright, who counseled that “the Castro regime is a thorn in the flesh, but it is not yet a dagger in our heart,”
Kennedy proceeded with the plan. It was a disaster: when the invasion force attempted to establish a beach-head at the Bay Of Pigs on April 17, 1961, it was summarily wiped out by Castro's waiting defenders.

Kennedy's reputation was badly damaged by the abortive mission, which led his Soviet opposite number, the bombastic Nikita Khruschev, to adopt a fiercely aggressive stance at the Vienna summit negotiations that June over the future of Berlin. The summit went badly, ending with Khruschev asserting, “I want peace—but if you want war, that is your problem.” The outcome of the failed negotiations was the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, and the deepening of mistrust on both sides.

Meanwhile, stung by the Bay Of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy had authorized further covert measures against the Castro regime, under the code name Operation Mongoose, ranging from the absurd (slipping El Presidente a poisoned cigar) to the effective, most notably the crippling of the Cuban economy through fifth-columnist saboteurs. So when, in the summer of 1962, the US Navy held intimidatory military maneuvers just outside Cuban territorial waters, Castro sought an alliance with the Soviet Union, who in return for economic subsidies were secretly granted permission to install nuclear missile bases on the island, on the justifiable
pretext of defending Cuba's independence against any further invasion. To the Soviets, forced to tolerate American nuclear missiles in Turkey, right on its own southern border, this was simply a tit-for-tat retaliation in the USA's backyard—“Nothing more,” Khruschev claimed in his memoirs, “than giving them a little taste of their own medicine.” But to an America emotionally sore from years of red-baiting paranoia, it was as if the country had, for the first time, suffered an invasion of its own.

By the middle of October, the world was at the brink of nuclear war, while Kennedy and Khruschev walked a perilous tightrope of political brinkmanship. Rejecting the foolish suggestions of his bellicose military chiefs that he should bomb or invade Cuba (or both), which would surely have caused an escalation of hostilities leading to all-out war, Kennedy decided to call Khruschev's bluff by opting for a policy of blockading the island, prevent it receiving any further Soviet supplies. On Monday October 22, the seventh day of the crisis, he appeared on television to announce his decision. “The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards,” he explained, “as all paths are… [but] one path we shall never choose… is the path of surrender or submission.”

Two fraught, nervous days later, the policy bore fruit: Soviet vessels delivering further arms supplies turned back. “We are eyeball to eyeball,” said Kennedy advisor Dean Rusk, “and the other fellow just blinked.” But this still left some missiles already installed on the island, which the Soviets were rushing toward preparedness. The situation was apparently not helped when an American U2 spy-plane was shot down over Cuba the following Saturday, October 27, though in retrospect this seems to have decided both leaders to settle the issue quickly, before it got out of hand. Khruschev had been hoping to secure the removal of the US missiles in Turkey in exchange for dismantling the Cuban missiles, but all he received publicly was a promise that the USA would not invade Cuba; secretly, however, Kennedy agreed to remove the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, which were obsolete anyway. The crisis was over, though the proximity to imminent catastrophe left lingering ripples in the American consciousness, poetically addressed in Dylan's song.

“I wrote that,” said Dylan, in his most famous commentary on any of his songs, “when I didn't figure I'd have enough time left in life, didn't know how many other songs I could write, during the Cuban thing. I wanted to get the most down that I knew about into one song, the most that I possibly could, and I wrote it like that. Every line in that is actually a complete song, could be used as a whole song. It's worth a song, every single line.”

The “hard rain” of the song is not, however, nuclear fallout. “It's not atomic rain,” explained Dylan. “It's just a hard rain, not the fallout rain, it isn't that at all. The hard rain that's gonna fall is in the last verse, where I say ‘the pellets of poison are flooding us all'—I mean all the lies that are told on the radio and in the newspapers, trying to take peoples' brains away, all the lies I consider poison.”

The song, which Dylan wrote in late September in his friend Chip Monck's apartment below the Gaslight club, began as a long, free verse poem, a French Symbolist-style extension of the opening lines of the epic ballad
Lord Randal
. That night, he showed it to the folk singer Tom Paxton at the club. “It was a wild, wacky thing, the likes of which I'd never seen before,” recalled Paxton. “As a poem it totally eluded me, so I suggested he put a melody to it. A few days later I heard him perform it as ‘A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall'.” Within days, the song was being acclaimed by friends as Dylan's greatest work. “We all thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread,” said Dave Van Ronk. “I was acutely aware that it represented the beginning of an artistic revolution.”

The most explicit of the songs reflecting Dylan's feelings toward the absent Suze Rotolo, ‘Don't Think Twice, It's All Right' was one of the most popular of his earlier compositions, being widely recorded, though usually more blithely than in Dylan's original version, which has an understated air of resigned rancor quite unlike any other love songs of the period. Noel “Paul” Stookey, who would sing the song with Peter, Paul & Mary, recognized its magical quality as soon as he heard it: “I thought it was beautiful, a masterful statement… It was obvious that Dylan was stretching the folk idiom, [that] a new spirit had come.” He was right. For a folk song, it was unusually modern in attitude, with a daring balance struck between affection and bitterness. Dylan would later become an expert at all-out vindictiveness, so much so that friends became wary of approaching him for fear of being subjected to his acid tongue or poison pen; but here, his obvious disappointment is tinged more with simmering regret, only boiling over into mild spite in the penultimate line of each verse, where Suze is variously castigated for being immature, uncommunicative, wanting his soul when he offered his heart and,
in the most dismissive of put-downs, wasting his “precious” time. Ironically, though it was Suze who had actually left Bob, the song salvages his pride by claiming it is he who is “trav'lin' on.”

Some of his friends were embarrassed by the song. “Bobby was rolling it out like a soap opera,” said Dave Van Ronk. “It was pathetic. The song was so damn self-pitying—but brilliant.” Upon her return from Italy, Suze at first found it strange, if flattering, to hear others singing this song written about her, but it eventually contributed to her split from Bob when, at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival that July, Joan Baez introduced the song as being “…about a love affair that has lasted too long.” For Suze, this confirmed the rumors she had heard about Bobby and Joanie, the new “King and Queen of Folk,” and she stormed away from the festival.

While the song's lyric was revolutionary in form, the melody was again purloined from a traditional source, an Appalachian tune called ‘Who's Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I'm Gone', which Dylan's friend, the folk singer Paul Clayton, had discovered and adapted for his own song ‘Who's
Gonna Buy Your Ribbon Saw'. Many of their friends were angered by the way Dylan brazenly neglected to credit either the traditional source or (especially) Clayton, who was notoriously short of cash due to his drug problems. “The honorable thing would have been for Bobby to cut him in on the copyright,” believed Dave Van Ronk, “but that wasn't Bobby's way.” Instead, after a mild legal tussle, Dylan ensured that his publishers gave Clayton “a substantial sum,” and the two remained friends, Clayton accompanying Bob on his cross-country drive in February 1964.

The liner-notes to
Freewheelin'
mistakenly claim that the song was recorded with the band that played on ‘Corrina, Corrina' and ‘Mixed Up Confusion', but while it was certainly recorded at the same session, it is clearly a solo performance. Some commentators have speculated that it may have originally been recorded with a band accompaniment that was subsequently wiped, but the limitations of early-Sixties recording technology mean that it would have been virtually impossible to have erased the extra guitar, drums, bass and piano completely without leaving a certain amount of audio spillage which would have been captured on Dylan's own microphone. It's feasible that the band backing may have been added later on another track, and then erased, but the actual song as heard on the album is by Dylan alone.

The last song recorded for the
Freewheelin'
album, ‘Bob Dylan's Dream' offers the most telling indication of just how fast Bob Dylan was maturing as a person, and of how rapidly his attitudes were changing. A wistful reverie of lost youth, the song finds Dylan, not yet 22, looking back on the innocent idealism of his teenage years with the world-weary sadness of one apparently much older.

Like Dickens in
A Christmas Carol
, Dylan uses a dream to observe his former self and his friends “talkin' and a-jokin',” having fun, chewing the fat and putting the world to rights with the blithe certitude of youth. His loss, he realizes, is twofold: not only has the easy-going innocence of those days passed, but the convictions once held so firmly—“It was all that easy to tell wrong from right”—as issues of simple black and white clarity have blurred into infinite shades of gray complexity.

Dylan claims, in the liner-notes, that the inspiration for the song came from a conversation he had with the singer Oscar Brown Jr. one night in
Greenwich Village, though he carried the idea around in his head for some while before it took on a more concrete form. Dylan's several return journeys to Minnesota before and after the release of his first album undoubtedly helped crystallize the theme of the song, as he realized the disparate paths taken by himself and his old friends from Hibbing and the Dinkytown campus neighborhood of Minneapolis.

“It was obvious he'd grown,” recalled his country-blues chum Spider John Koerner after one such visit. “He was friendly and all that, but it was obvious he was into something stronger than we got into. You could see it, something forceful, something coming off.” By summer of 1962, old folkie friends like Tony Glover, Paul Nelson and Jon Pankake, who published the Minneapolis folk magazine
Little Sandy Review
, were chiding Dylan about his new protest-song direction, suggesting he should try and strike a balance between his new style and his older, traditional style, and though he was already feeling used by certain civil rights organizations, Dylan clearly felt his Minnesota friends were being left behind.

A year later, the gap was growing wider still, as he made clear in a promotional appearance for his forthcoming album on April 26 on Chicago's WFMT radio station where he was interviewed by Studs Terkel about his life and work. Asked about childhood friends, Dylan replied: “They still seem to be the same old way… I can just tell by conversation that they still have a feeling that isn't really free… They still have a feeling that's… tied up in the town, with their parents, in the newspapers that they read which go out to maybe 5,000 people. They don't have to go out of town. Their world's really small.”

Dylan's world, by contrast, was growing larger all the time, as demonstrated by the melody he appropriated for ‘Bob Dylan's Dream' from the traditional British folk ballad ‘The Franklin', which Dylan had heard performed by the English folk singer Martin Carthy while visiting London in December 1962.

After the serious, sometimes angry tone taken on social matters earlier on the album, ‘Oxford Town' is shorter and sweeter in style, if not in subject matter, offering a jaunty, hootenanny singalong treatment of a specific civil rights issue: the violent struggle for the registration of the first black person at the University Of Mississippi (“Ole Miss”) in September 1962.

After winning a Federal court ruling allowing him to register at the university, James Meredith was denied entry to the university registrar's building by demagogic state governor Ross Barnett, who was attempting to ride the tide of resentment rolling through the South at the imposition of what Southerners saw as Yankee directives aimed at breaking their spirit. Attorney General Robert Kennedy inquired whether Barnett would make a deal to allow Meredith to register, and was informed, “I would rather spend the rest of my life in a penitentiary than do that.” Mississippi, Kennedy pointed out, had to obey, being part of the United States, to which Barnett responded, “We have been a part of the United States, but I don't know whether we are or not.” “Oh,” asked Kennedy, “are you getting out of the Union?”