Reason For This Website #586 - Bob Dylan and Vietnam - RightWingBob.com

RWB does not determine the content of GOOGLE Ads, but does benefit from your click.

Another side of Bob and more!

Daily Ramblings:

Reason For This Website #586 ...04/29/2005 10:50:15 am

Sometimes you think maybe you're breaking through - that maybe the mainstream media's conventional wisdom about Bob Dylan isn't so conventional anymore - and then along comes Newsday, happily proclaiming the old fallacies like they're new again.

Monday night's show in New York is reviewed by one Rafer Guzmán. He seems to see Dylan's performance as an effort to redeem himself from past sins - to prove he's still a "rebel" and not a "sellout." He's a sellout, of-course, for participating in that Victoria's Secret commercial, which according to Guzmán was "an occasion for weeping." Well, close, Rafer, but my only tears were from laughter.

Mr. Guzmán was however pleased to see that the Dylan playing Monday night sang his songs with a "frightening ferocity" and (this is indeed jarring!) "spoke barely a word to the audience."

It was heartening to see that the aging Dylan is not (to paraphrase a certain poet) going gently into that good night. Recent signs have indicated otherwise. For instance, while musicians from Bruce Springsteen to the Dixie Chicks raised their voices against the war in Iraq, Dylan was silent. Granted, he long ago outgrew folkie protest songs, but this seemed like a special case - did Bob Dylan really have nothing to say about the most polarizing war since Vietnam? Certainly, a person's politics are his own, and subject to change - but it was disappointing to hear so little from a man who once spoke so loudly and eloquently about such things.

If there were an email address published for Rafer, I would send him a note politely asking him to provide one example of Dylan speaking "so loudly and eloquently" about (let alone against) the Vietnam War.

Maybe this bit from the 1966 Playboy Interview with Nat Hentoff?

PLAYBOY: How do you feel about those who have risked imprisonment by burning their draft cards to signify their opposition to U. S. involvement in Vietnam, and by refusing - as your friend Joan Baez has done - to pay their income taxes as a protest against the Covernment's expenditures on war and weaponry? Do you think they're wasting their time?

DYLAN: Burning draft cards isn't going to end any war. It's not even going to save any lives. If someone can feel more honest with himself by burning his draft card, then that's great; but if he's just going to feel more important because he does it, then that's a drag. I really don't know too much about Joan Baez and her income-tax problems. The only thing I can tell you about Joan Baez is that she's not Belle Starr.

Or the Sing Out! interview from July of 1968, where fellow musician Happy Traum is pressing Dylan to say something (anything!) against the war, to give some clue of agreement with the anti-war activists:

Traum: Probably the most pressing thing going on in a political sense is the war. Now I'm not saying any artist or group of artists can change the course of the war, but they still feel it their responsibility to say something.

Dylan: I know some very good artists who are for the war.

Traum: Well, I'm just talking about the ones who are against it.

Dylan: That's like what I'm talking about; it's for or against the war. That really doesn't exist. It's not for or against the war. I'm speaking of a certain painter, and he's all for the war. He's just about ready to go over there himself. And I can comprehend him.

Traum: Why can't you argue with him?

Dylan: I can see what goes into his painting, and why should I?

Later in the interview:

Traum: My feeling is that with a person who is for the war and ready to go over there, I don't think it would be possible for you and him to share the same values.

Dylan: I've known him a long time, he's a gentleman and I admire him, he's a friend of mine. People just have their views. Anyway, how do you know that I'm not, as you say, for the war?

Traum finally lets the subject drop, probably not wanting to be remembered as the guy who got Bob Dylan to publicly endorse the Vietnam War.

I would also like to ask the Newsday writer to name one song that Bob Dylan wrote about (let alone opposing) the Vietnam War.

Since I'm feeling expansive and generous, I'll supply the answer right here: the only Bob Dylan song that mentions Vietnam is Clean-Cut Kid, from the 1985 album, Empire Burlesque. [ed: wrong, actually; see below*] The melody is jaunty and humorous, to go along with a lyric that is at once funny and extremely dark, about the impact on a promising young man of being forced to go to Vietnam. There's no question of that war's negative impact on so many - and of-course not least among the things veterans of it had to deal with was the attitude of people like Happy Traum above, who felt that anyone willing to fight in it must by definition be a bad person.

Mr. Guzmán might try to point to songs like Blowing In The Wind, Masters Of War, and The Times They Are-Changin' as reflecting some kind of vague endorsement of anti-war feelings. Of-course those songs were all written when the Vietnam War was nothing but a twinkle in JFK's eye, and, as for their use later by anti-war protesters, well, Dylan has that line in Chronicles about his songs' meanings being "subverted into polemic." He's not referring to William F. Buckley using them in his mayoral race.

It continues to amaze naïve-little-me how the public record with regard to Bob Dylan and Vietnam is one thing, and yet popular assumption continues to be something completely different. While I would not try to maintain here that Dylan did in fact eagerly favor the war (he clearly did not take a public position either way), why can't Newsday and other mainstream media outlets do a modicum of fact checking before once again labeling Dylan as some kind of prototypical anti-Vietnam War figure?

And this review was written by someone who obviously considers himself knowledgeable about both music and politics (since he doesn't hesitate to mix the two). How can he be so inaccurate about the easy-to-research facts on Bob Dylan and Vietnam?

It's stuff like this that makes one suspect not accidental inaccuracy, but a knowing attempt through the years to build up such a level of illusion that the Big Lie will ultimately be unquestionable.

Herman: But that sounds like it's conspiratorial?

Dylan: Yeah, it does, doesn't it?**

Well, as far as Newsday is concerned, Dylan seems to be putting behind him the disappointing distractions of Victoria's Secret and his silence on the Iraq War, and maybe we should now be giving him another chance:

The wiping of the slate might begin with this tour: Dylan breathed fire into every word of every song. Though he concentrated mostly on the world-weary tunes of his later years, he delivered them in an angry death-rattle.

Ah, that's alright then. The good old Dylan is back - not the one who is silent on the Iraq War, or who earned a nice pile of money in a funny Victoria's Secret commercial, but the one who delivers his songs with an "angry death-rattle." Dylan isn't just continuing his Never Ending Tour and plumbing the depths of his body of work in rich and varied re-arrangements of his songs - he's actually atoning for the things he's done that Mr. Guzmán doesn't like, and pleading for his credibility to be returned to him.

All this puts my own experience at that gig in an entirely different light. Instead of just clapping and cheering, I guess I should have shouted, "It's alright Bob! We forgive you!"

* Wrong! Clean-Cut Kid does not include the word "Vietnam," though its reference to a "napalm health-spa" and the overall story certainly leave the listener convinced that this is the military action that the "kid" was involved in. On the other hand, the 1986 soundtrack song Band Of The Hand DOES mention Vietnam ("for all of my brothers from Vietnam and my uncles from World War II") though the song occupies a different landscape. Likewise, the 1981 unreleased track Legionnaire's Disease includes this verse:

Granddad fought in a revolutionary war, father in the War of 1812,
Uncle fought in Vietnam and then he fought a war all by himself,
But whatever it was, it came out of the trees.
Oh, that Legionnaire's disease.

Finally, one of Dylan's presumed contributions to the Traveling Wilburys, a 1988 song called Tweeter & The Monkey Man, includes these lines:

Tweeter was a boy scout before she went to Vietnam
And found out the hard way nobody gives a damn
They knew that they found freedom just across the Jersey Line
So they hopped into a stolen car took Highway 99

So, my original statement that Clean-Cut Kid is the only Dylan song to mention Vietnam could hardly be more wrong, in a technical sense, and I'm indebted to a visitor named Michael M. for pointing this out. Nevertheless, I think that the intended point of my sloppily researched statement - that Clean-Cut Kid is the only Dylan song that directly deals with the "Vietnam question" in some way - remains true.

** 1981 interview with Dave Herman, talking about something else (abortion).

You are viewing an individual item from RightWingBob.com - click here to view the main page.

Original text copyright © 2005 by RightWingBob.com
Quotes from the works of others are linked to their source or are as otherwise attributed, and are used in accordance with Fair Use guidelines. Contact: rightwingbob(at)gmail.com