Cigar Box Banjo (11 page)

I allowed my novelistic sensibility free rein. I imagined a man—a quiet man, a nice man, a man who likely enjoys crossword puzzles and never did any real harm to anyone else— and I imagined him stepping outside, looking up, and seeing all the stars.

But I walked outside, just after midnight . . .
And I saw all the stars.

As I continued, it quickly became apparent that the man was missing someone, that his partner was no longer alive. In the final verse, he writes this person a letter, acknowledging the futility of the act. “Still,” he intones with a shrug, “you do what you gotta do to survive.” And then the man looks up at the sky again, seeing all those billions and billions of stars, essentially all of creation. It is a small miracle that such a tiny human act can reap such amazing benefit. It was a good song. I showed it to the rest of Porkbelly Futures. We added it to our repertoire just before we hit the road for the Maritimes.

OKAY—BACK TO Bob Dylan. When my brother’s friends speculated about whether Dylan had “gone too far,” they were, of course, referring to his appearance, on July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival.

It was Dylan’s third consecutive appearance at the festival, and in the years previous, he had done exactly what was expected of him. He’d stood in front of a microphone—actually, two large radio-style microphones duct-taped together— and rendered his songs of protest. He’d invited Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, and the Freedom Singers to join him onstage as he sang “Blowin’ in the Wind,” accompanying himself and the others on his guitar, stiffly strummed and rudi-mentally fingered.

That summer, as in summers previous, Dylan spent a great deal of time in Woodstock, New York, staying at the home of his manager, Albert Grossman. I have no concrete evidence that he was indulging in pharmaceuticals—other than the fact that
everyone else in the world was
—but his writing was becoming increasingly, well, agitated. The husky-throated Baez, his girlfriend at the time, recalled, “Most of the month or so we were there, Bob stood at the typewriter in the corner of his room, drinking red wine and smoking and tapping away relentlessly for hours. And in the dead of night, he would wake up, grunt, grab a cigarette, and stumble over to the typewriter again.”

One ignores at one’s peril (isn’t it hateful when one begins with “one,” and one is therefore compelled to keep using “one”?) the former Robert Zimmerman’s choice to rename himself “Dylan,” after Dylan Thomas, the great and fabulously self-destructive Welsh poet. Zimmerman was inspired by the driven manner in which Thomas spun lyrical gold out of the dross of his day-to-day life. He was likewise inspired by French poets like Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and by the Surrealists, who allowed their thoughts to come forth freely and uncensored. I could say much about that school of thinking, but I believe the Surrealists’ position is succinctly expressed by one of their visual arts counterparts, Salvador Dali. “There is only one difference between a madman and me,” he asserted. “I am not mad.”

So it was in this frame of mind that Dylan had gone too far at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. He was the Sunday night headliner; the act preceding him was Cousin Emmy, whose big tune was “Turkey in the Straw.” After singing two songs acoustically, Dylan was joined onstage by Al Kooper and Barry Goldberg (on organ and piano), Sam Lay (drums), Jerome Arnold (bass), and the whiz kid from the Fickle Pickle, Mike Bloomfield.
⁸
And as he launched into “Maggie’s Farm,” there came—or so legend has it—a resounding chorus of catcalls and boos. “Sell out!” people shouted, and “Bring back Cousin Emmy!”

Dylan was startled, even shaken, by the response. After all, his most recent album,
Bringing It All Back Home
, had featured an acoustic side and an electric side. Some people claimed later that at least a few boos were directed at the very poor sound quality. Others said that the most vocal of the dissenters were backstage. Pete Seeger, who didn’t like the music one little bit, reportedly announced, “If I had an axe, I’d cut the cable right now!” Festival board member Alan Lomax, likewise incensed, pleaded with the sound men to turn the volume down. Dylan and his band rushed through “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Phantom Engineer,” a song that eventually became “It Takes a Train to Cry.” Then he announced, “That’s all,” and the musicians left the stage. Further booing ensued, some of it provoked by the electric nature of the set, some by the fact that the set had been only five songs long. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary rushed onstage to assure the crowd that Dylan would be back, that he was just fetching his acoustic guitar.
⁹
Behind the scenes, Joan Baez was urging Dylan to re-take the stage. He did so with some reluctance, bringing his acoustic with him. This quieted the crowd, as it seemed something of a capitulation. When he discovered he hadn’t brought the right harmonica (you remember, they come in different keys), he asked if anyone had one in E. There came a clattering of oblong silver projectiles. Dylan retrieved one, fitted it into the holder, and performed “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”

IT DOES seem, after all these years, to have been a lot of to-do about little. The Band’s Robbie Robertson opined, “It seemed kind of a funny statement to me at the time, that somebody’s gone electric. It was like, jeez, somebody’s just bought a television.” But I suppose the crowd could sense what was really going on: the division between the two ways in which music could be “popular” were being bound together with the violence of a welding torch. Before that, music could be “by and of the people”—socially conscious, eager to precipitate change—or it could be “enjoyed by the masses,” a little bit glib and innocuous. The Beatles were not, at least not at that moment in history, interested in social change. They were, it seems to me, lyrically interested only in cataloguing the vagaries of banal relationships. In this, they were part of a tradition that, although it is age-old, seems to have been exacerbated by World War II. Certain songs have always been light-hearted—inconsequential—and such songs were welcomed, I’m suggesting, by a war-weary world. In 1946, for instance, the big radio hits included Bing Crosby’s rendition of “Sioux City Sue” (in which the singer pledges to swap his horse and his dog for the red-haired, blue-eyed object of his affection) and “Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy.”

This tendency toward frivolity was still dominating the radio waves in the early sixties. Consider “Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp).” The style of music in that song is “doo-wop,” which tells us something right there, that there exists a genre characterized by its use of nonsense syllables. “Who Put the Bomp” was written by Gerry Goffin and Barry Mann, and is, I think, agreeably self-mocking. Still, just because one mocks oneself for doing something doesn’t mean that one should have done the thing in the first place.

Here’s my very unpopular stance. I think the Beatles, with their unprecedented popularity, did more than anyone else in their early days to deplete the music coming out of our radios of any remaining meaning or significance. And who came in their immediate wake? Freddie and the Dreamers. Herman’s Hermits, with front man Peter Noone smugly recycling old music hall songs. There were, admittedly, groups that evidenced more substance and grit. The Animals seemed to come from a genuine place, informed by council houses, disease, and flat ale. But while you might think the blues-based Rolling Stones had more, er, balls, I remind you of the earlier quote citing the loss of meaning in the British reworkings of American blues. By 1965, with so much music sounding so similar—the twang of electric guitars, the wrecking-ball bounce of the bass, snappy snares and cymbal washes—some people feared a diminishing of music’s intent and purpose.

This is what they feared, I think, when Dylan went electric.

It’s also important to note that this event took place at a folk festival.
¹⁰

Silly songs weren’t the only musical response to World War II. Over in Scotland, the first Edinburgh International Festival was held in 1947 in an effort to raise post-war spirits. Finding the festival’s offerings too establishment for their taste, eight little theatrical companies more or less gate-crashed the event, putting on their own shows near the officially sanctioned ones. The movement eventually became the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In the same spirit, the Edinburgh Labour Festival Committee was created, with representation from various trade unions, significantly the Musicians Union and the Workers’ Music Association.
¹¹

The committee organized a People’s Festival, and a man named Hamish Henderson was asked to arrange a ceilidh, a musical panoply of indigenous music. The first took place on August 31, 1951. You can listen to this ceilidh if you’re so inclined, because Alan Lomax was on hand to record it. There were fiddlers and Gaelic singers, balladeers and mucklers. I am hypothesizing it was from that first People’s Ceilidh that folk festivals have multiplied, steadfastly retaining their egalitarian nature. They are extensions of men like Hamish Henderson, who was a folksinger, a poet, an orator, a philosopher, a humanist, a soldier, a spy, and—I think this is extremely cool—the man to whom the Italians formally surrendered, at the end of World War II.

Folk festivals are extensions of another man who was present at that first People’s Ceilidh, too. He had been present at the Edinburgh Festival as a playwright and a man of the theatre. His name at the time was James Miller. At one point, according to George Bernard Shaw, Miller was the best living playwright in Britain (other than Shaw himself). Miller was a dangerous kind of playwright; he and his first wife, Joan Littlewood, had founded the Theatre Workshop, an agitprop outfit that was once “bound over” by the police and forbidden to mount production for two years. But Jimmie Miller was increasingly attracted by folk song, the voice of the people. Like his friend and colleague Alan Lomax, he became a great collector of balladry, and—changing his name to Ewan Mac-Coll, to reflect his Scottish birthright—the composer himself of many a well-known song.

His most famous was the Grammy-winning “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” It was written for MacColl’s third wife, Peggy Seeger, half-sister of Pete, the man who ranted and raved at Newport in 1965 and wished he had an axe with which to banish electricity. (And yes, I realize I’ve left out a wife. That would be dancer Jean Newlove, mother of two of MacColl’s children, one of which was Kristy MacColl, the singer joining the Pogues for the rousing “Fairytale of New York.”) While I’ve no doubt that the romantic underpinning of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” was deep and heartfelt, the song was in fact written at Peggy’s request. She was in the United States at the time, acting in a play, and felt the production lacked something. MacColl wrote the song very quickly and taught it to Peggy over the phone, as his Communist background prevented him from entering the USA.
¹²

So it was, let me suggest, with the spirit of such men, Ewan MacColl and Hamish Henderson, looking over his shoulder that Robert Zimmerman elected to “go electric,” to take folk music away from the big-P People and give it to the small-p people.
¹³
Or what was left of folk music, that is, because on that day in 1965, Dylan effectively made the term meaningless. Indeed, “folk music” these days is usually synonymous with “acoustic music,” as though people were still trying to reject Dylan’s unholy endorsement of electricity.

People continued to boo at Newport after Dylan left the stage, prompting his famously acerbic comment that “they must be pretty rich to go someplace to boo.” But—even though I thrilled as a boy to “Like a Rolling Stone,”
¹⁴
and have since then played music so loud my hearing is irreparably damaged—I’m not sure they were entirely wrong in doing so.

And now you know why some of my acquaintances refer to me as “Paul Quarrelsome.”

1
The reference is to Big Bill Broonzy, a bluesman from Bolivar County, Mississippi, who was popular with white audiences and helped spearhead the folk revival.

2
I was surprised at how often I ended up writing about Dylan, in fact. As big a fan as I am, I hadn’t realized quite how profound his influence was on the popular song in the last half of the last century. I mentioned this in an e-mail to my friend Roddy Doyle, who responded, “Thanks for the heads up about Dylan. I’ll Google him.”

3
In 1930, in what many people consider one of the most important country blues sessions ever, Charley Patton, Son House, Willie Brown, and singer and pianist Louise Johnson recorded together at the Paramount studios in Grafton, Wisconsin. A significant aspect to that session has to do with the technical limitations of the era. As each number was played and sung, the music was etched—right then and there—onto a wax disc called the “matrix”—what we might now call a master, as it was thence used to create the stamper and the commercial copies. The matrix spun at a speed of seventy-eight rpm, and a ten-inch disc (the most dependable size, less breakable than bigger versions, which did exist) could hold a little over three minutes of music. So the musicians were required to limit their performances to three minutes. That edict—this is my non-scholarly conjecture—affected the recording process long after the seventy-eight had gone the way of the dodo.

4
Bruce Springsteen reported something similar. When he first heard the song, he recalled at Dylan’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind.”

5
I’m speaking of commercial and critical success. On all other levels, they turned out okay.

6
Delmore Schwartz is also the model for Von Humboldt Fleisher in Saul Bellow’s wonderful novel
Humboldt’s Gift.

7
One of the first manifestations of this was my inclusion of the phrase “twiddle with my dinky” in the song
Friendly!
Hardly a bold statement; still, many people are oddly irked and rankled by it.