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Bob Dylan's Turning Away
from "Invisible Republic" by Greil Marcus, published in 1997

Art was the speech of the Folk Revival ~ and yet, at bottom, the folk revival did not believe in art at all. Rather, life ~ a certain kind of life ~ equaled art, which ultimately meant that life replaced it.

The kind of life that equaled art was life defined by suffering, deprivation, poverty and social exclusion. In folklore this was nothing new. "Thanks to folksong collectors' preconceptions and judicious selectivity, artwork and life were found to be identical," historian Georgina Boyes writes in The Imagined Village. "The ideological innocence which was the essence of the immemorial peasant was also a 'natural' characteristic of the Folk and their song." A complete dissolution of art into life is present in such a point of view : the poor are art because they sing their lives without mediation and without reflection, without the false consciousness of capitalism and the false desires of advertising. As they live in an organic community ~ buttressed, almost to the present day, from the corrupt outside world ~ any song belongs to all and none belongs to anyone in particular. Thus it is not the singer who sings the song but the song that sings the singer, and therefore in performance it is the singer, not the song, that is the aesthetic artifact, the work of art. In a perfect world, in the future, everyone will live this way.

The last paragraph is a leftist translation of what began as a genteel, paternalistic philosophy; it is a version of socialist realism. In 1966 folklorist Ellen J. Stekert saw it alive in the folk revival, and traced it to Communist folk music circles in New York in the 1930s. Woody Guthrie and Aunt Molly Jackson, she wrote, celebrated as great artists by their sponsors, were not even good artists, judged either by the traditional standards they were seen to embody or by the urban standards of their primary, political audience, which embraced them for political reasons ~ because the singers brought authenticity to the politics. "It was a pitiful confusion," Sekert wrote. "It was monstrous for urbanites to confuse poverty with art." When art is confused with life, it is not merely that art is lost. When art equals life there is no art, but when life equals art there are no people. "The tobacco sheds of North Carolina are in it and all of the blistered and hardened hands cheated and left empty, hurt and left crying," Woody Guthrie himself wrote of Sonny Terry's harmonica playing. He didn't say if Sonny Terry was in it.

This, finally, is what Bob Dylan turned away from ~ in the most spectacular way. In September 1965, as the furor over his replacement of object with subject was growing, he tried, at a press conference in Austin, Texas, site of his first performance with the Hawks, to explain. He argued, it seems, that in a profound sense his music, though that was a term he would refuse soon enough: "Call it historical-traditional music." Despite the phrase, it was as if he saw traditional music as being made less by history or circumstance than by particular people, for particular, unknowable reasons ~ reasons that find their analogue in haunts and spirits. One can here him insisting that the songs he had been writing and performing over the previous year were those in which events and philosophies with which one could identify had been replaced with allegories that could dissolve received identities. Songs such as "Desolation Row," "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," "Highway 61 Revisited," "Tombstone Blues" ~ somber or uproarious songs populated by Beethoven and Ma Rainey, Ophelia and Cleopatra, Columbus and Captain Ahab, Poor Howard and Georgia Sam, Abraham and Isaac, Mexican cops on the take and the fifth daughter on the tweflth night ~ carried the tradition in which he had taken his place. "What folk music is," he said,……..it's not Depression songs….its foundations aren't work, its foundations aren't "slave away" and all this. The main body of it ~ except for Negro songs which are based on that and just happened to overlap ~ is based on myth and the bible and plague and famine and all kinds of things like that which are nothing but mystery and you can see it in all the folk songs. Roses growing right up out of people's hearts and naked cats in bed with spears growing right out of their backs and seven years of this and eight years of that and it's all really something that nobody can really touch.

But this sort of talk was simply one more allegory. It quieted no one's anger and calmed nobody's despair. For when Dylan turned away from the equation of life and art, when he followed where his music led him, he turned away not just from a philosophical proposition but from an entire complex of beliefs and maxims that to so many people defined what was good and what was bad. Thus when he appeared before them holding a garishly shaped and coloured electric guitar and dressed in a bizarre tight suit that looked like a single piece of chequered cloth, like some medieval court fool's costume bought on Carnaby Street, he signified no mere apostasy but the destruction of hope. As he stood on stage he was seen to affirm the claims of the city over the country, and capital over labour ~ and also the claims of the white artist over the black Folk, selfishness over compassion, rapacity over need, the thrill of the moment over the trials of endurance, the hustler over the worker, the thief over the orphan. In the crowds many would clench their fists and gather their breath in anger and disgust, feeling, if not quite picturing, whole drams of despoliation: coal companies stripping eons of natural wonder and centuries of culture off the southern highlands where the treasured old ballads were still sung; police beating peaceful black teenagers bloody and even to death; the whole planet convulsed by hydrogen bombs.

Dylan's performance now seemed to mean that he had never truly been where he had appeared to be only a year before, reaching for that democratic oasis of the heart ~ and that if he had never been there, those who had felt themselves there with him had not been there. If his heart was not pure, one had to doubt one's own. It was as if it had all been a trick ~ a trick he had played on them and that they had played on themselves. That was the source of the betrayal felt when Bob Dylan turned to his band and he along with Rick Danko and Robbie Robertson turned to face the drummer, who raised his drumstick, the three guitarists now leaping into the air and twisting off their feet to face the crowd as the drummer brought the stick down for the first beat. That was the source of the rage.

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Thanks to Greil Marcus, author of "Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes", published by Henry Holt & Co., in the USA, and by Picador in the UK, in 1997