Daily Ramblings:
Hope I Don't Find Out Anything ...03/03/2005 10:45:09 am
Sean Wilentz, who wrote the liner notes for the Live 1964 bootleg series
release, has a nice column here in The Chronicle of Higher Education
(linked on Expecting Rain today). It's a
reflection on his writing of those notes, and
subsequent nomination for a Grammy, and some of his
experience at the Grammys.
There's a section in those liner notes that goes
like this:
Dylan included the banned
number on his 1964 Halloween program, introducing
it, with a mixture of defiance and good humor, as
"Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" - a
title that now seemed to cover the craven
mainstream media as well as the right-wing
extremists who were currently thumping their tubs
for their favorite, Senator Goldwater. It was a
thrilling moment for us in the audience, getting
to hear what CBS had forbidden the nation to hear
while also exulting in our own political
righteousness against the forces of fear and
blacklisting.
It's interesting re-reading that passage now, in
the light of some revelations since then. One,
of-course, being Dylan's statement on page 283 of his
memoir Chronicles that Senator Barry
Goldwater was his "favorite politician," at
least circa 1962. (No information on whether he
thumped his tub for Goldwater, though, with the other
extremists.) The other revelation is relevant to that
virtually mythological moment when Dylan walked off
the Ed Sullivan show because they didn't want him to
play Talkin' John Birch. As
covered in this space back
here, David Gates, who interviewed Dylan for
Newsweek last September, says that Dylan told him
that he now regrets walking off that show. (Of-course
that didn't become part of the published interview
and we have no further details.)
In fairness to Wilentz, he was not, in his liner
notes, trying to say "how intelligent and right
we were, and how wrong was everyone else."
Rather he's painting a picture of the times, the
audience and the atmosphere - a portrait that I'm
sure is as accurate as any that anybody could write.
As he says in the article linked today:
I tried to braid the background
together with my memories, hoping to recapture
the sense of what it was like to see things
through my 13-year-old eyes (and say it with a
bit of my 13-year-old voice), while sustaining
what authority I have as a hindsight-blessed
history professor who is now more than twice as
old as Bob Dylan was that night. I tried to evoke
the feeling of being a teenage cultural insider,
self-consciously nestled as close to the center
of hipness as possible, with an edge of callow
smugness and little awareness of my own good
fortune. Few of us in the audience had worked an
honest day in our lives, or come close to getting
our skulls cracked defying Jim Crow. But
we thought we were advanced and special; and for
us, the concert was partly an act of collective
self-ratification. I wanted my notes to evoke the
joy as well as the folly of that youthful New
York moment.
Well, I fin'ly started thinkin'
straight
When I run outa things to investigate.
Couldn't imagine doin' anything else,
So now I'm sittin' home investigatin' myself!
Hope I don't find out anything . . . hmm, great God!
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