In a piece for the AP, writer Hillel Italie reflects on “Michael Jackson — In the culture wars.” The paragraph that’s interesting to me isn’t about Michael Jackson:

Musicians have often served as irresistible, and frustrating candidates, for political branding. Elvis Presley was a counterculture pioneer who later requested, and received, an audience with President Nixon to offer his help in the government’s war on drugs. Bob Dylan taunted his admirers by implying that he was for the Vietnam War. Louis Armstrong, accused by fellow blacks of being a grinning Uncle Tom, shocked the world when he called President Eisenhower “two-faced” on civil rights and said “the government can go to hell.”

Of all the offhand comments in the mainstream media regarding Bob Dylan, this one is like nothing I’ve seen before. Usually he is being inaccurately labeled as a writer of antiwar songs, or as a leader of the Vietnam-era protest movement or the counterculture generally. But taunting his admirers by implying that he was for the Vietnam War?

At last: progress! Hillel Italie’s offhand characterization of Dylan’s posture on the war during those years is closer to the truth than that which we usually see. He did challenge an interviewer (Happy Traum, as it happens) in an interview with Sing Out! magazine in 1968, when Traum was going on and on about how no decent person could even be friends with someone who was in favor of America’s actions in Vietnam (Dylan was friends with a pro-war painter at the time). Dylan responded:

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?

The subject got dropped there.

In addition, there’s the San Francisco press conference, where Dylan is asked if he’ll be attending an antiwar protest later that day, and he just laughs and says that he’ll be busy. There’s the Playboy interview with Nat Hentoff, where Dylan scorns those who burn their draft-cards to make themselves feel more important, and makes light of “Joan Baez and her income-tax problems” (Baez was refusing to pay taxes in protest of the war).

So Hillel Italie has some facts on his side — a lot more facts, I would suggest, than those in the media who more commonly characterize things the other way around.

Still, I wouldn’t put it exactly like he does; i.e., that Dylan was taunting his admirers with his posture. They may well have felt taunted — there’s probably plenty of evidence of that — but that doesn’t mean that this was his intent. He was just being true to himself, and shaking off the labels and expectations that others were foisting upon him.

It’s not taunting, after all, when you’re just answering the question.

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