[Marxism] Dave Marsh on Dylan

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(Marsh is a radical rock critic.)

Counterpunch October 1 / 2, 2005
Message from Bob Dylan
A Direction Home

By DAVE MARSH

I found this while doing research on Dylan in 1963-64. I was writing a text
for a book to be published next month as Forever Young, by Douglas Gilbert,
the photographer who made some of the most amazing pictures of Dylan in the
summer of '64.

Part of the context for what was happening was his 'renunciation' of
politics. I went looking for what I could find about Dylan's apology to the
Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, for making a speech when he accepted
the group's Tom Paine award, where he compared himself to Lee Harvey Oswald
and attacked bald politicians for being bald, and bourgeois Negroes for
wearing suits on the platform at the Great March on Washington, and
generally pissed on liberalism. That's a remarkable statement of its
own-based on the transcript, he's pretty clearly drunk and trying to avoid
what he winds up doing, which is to tell these people a certain set of
truths about themselves and the world.

But this apology letter is more amazing than that, by half, and I don't
think I've ever read it before. I've seen a line or two quoted here and
there but never the whole thing. (I'd love to be proved wrong about this so
please let me know if so.)

As a piece of writing, I'd judge it better'n any of his liner notes
pre-Bringing It All Back Home. As to content, the stuff about coming to New
York (and growing up in Minnesota) directly foreshadows Chronicles, Volume
One; I don't know anything else by him that does, certainly not this
plainly. It's funny (man, he was funny then), but then it has to be because
in a sense, he's being more self-revelatory than he is in Chronicles, even.
( See especially the passage about his moods.)

Most important, perhaps, it is not so much a farewell to protest politics
but extremely political in a different way: His allegiance to the radicals
of SNCC, and to the kids in the Venceremos Brigade, which I presume is what
he means by "the folks who went to Cuba." Note that he mentions Selma
almost eighteen months before Bloody Sunday-a message to those who believe
Dylan paid only lip service to his civil rights involvements. (Foreman
spoke to me in late 2003 about having actively recruited him as an ally for
SNCC and several SNCC people, notably Bernice Johnson Reagon and Cordell
Reagon emphasized that Dylan remained close to them after his protest
apostasy.)

The last reason finding this gave me joy, and it truly did, was that it
showed Dylan acting out (in advance of its articulation) the principle over
which SNCC 'broke'-that white people needed to be addressing the problems
of white people in their communities, not trying to solve problems for
black people in black communities. You can read a different version of the
rest of his '60s career (at least that much) in this. Maybe of his whole
career: Why he's sometimes seem unanchored and why he seems so completely
on target and sometimes both at once.

Maybe I see it, a little bit, as Bob's ultimate link to Elvis: Bob able to
articulate what Elvis never could say but always enacted. Something like that.

(The text and additional context is at the Corliss Lamont website; Lamont
led the ECLC. See www.corliss-lamont.org/dylan.htm)

A MESSAGE
from Bob Dylan

(Sent to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee after he received the Tom
Paine Award at the Bill of Rights dinner on December 13, 1963.)

full: http://www.counterpunch.com/marsh10012005.html


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