Downsizing Dylan (and the Democrats)

Bob Dylan has experienced more phases in his career than most recording artists - engineering some of them deliberately. Perhaps most famously, he disappeared from view in 1966, putting the breaks on the methamphetamine-paced 4 year period that saw him release 7 albums between 1962 and 1966. During that time he had become, alongside the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, one of the most important figures in rock music. But even more than those acts, at least in the years preceding the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Dylan mattered. He was the "voice of a generation" and a "protest singer" during a time of protest and generational change.

By 1966 he was sick of all of this, tired of the hullabaloo, the fame and the obsessed fans, and the exaggerated expectations, which positioned him alongside the freedom marchers as an agent of social change. As early as 1964, while recording Another Side of Bob Dylan, Dylan opened up to Nat Hentoff in an interview, expressing his exhaustion with the role that had been thrust on him - the role of spokesman - and his weariness with the consequence, trapping him in writing what he called "finger-pointing" songs. Years later, in his memoir, Chronicles Volume One, Dylan wrote of this period, revealing how burdened he was being a "Prophet, Messiah, Savior," and how eager he was to leave these titles behind.

As Dylan amplified his music, and transformed his lyrics from observational and crusading to surreal and personal, many of his followers grew angry. Ugly invective follow Dylan through 1965 and 1966, culminating in the famous Royal Albert Hall concert - which was really performed in Manchester - where Dylan fans howled as he and the Band ripped through a set of his songs in full rock and roll fashion.

Dylan's burden became transparent: he was a false prophet, a messiah who had turned his back on the work of redeeming the world. And his followers were angry. By moving beyond his origins in protest music and swapping the authenticity of folk music for the perceived commercial phoniness of rock and roll, Dylan was branded a Judas. British folk musician Ewan MacColl said of him: "Dylan is to me the perfect symbol of the anti-artist in our society. He's against everything - the last resort of someone who really doesn't want to change the world." Dylan went from being viewed as a champion of social change, to being vilified as a nihilist and pariah, an agent of the status quo. He was hemmed in: incapable of living up to the standards imposed on him, hated for his supposed missteps, his creative freedom inhibited by the expectations of others, yet pushed to produce new recordings and tour (and tour and tour and tour) by his management and record label.

On July 29, 1966 Dylan had a motorcycle accident. Some believe he spent the weeks of late summer 1966 recovering from a drug addiction or merely exhaustion, rather than injuries, and the motorcycle crash was a convenient cover story. In comments over the years, Dylan has talked about the accident as an opportunity for him to get off the merry-go-round - not deliberately manufactured but fortuitous . Recently married, and relishing his role as a father, and weary after years of touring, always pursued by exhaustingly fanatical (and increasingly angry) followers, he wanted to reframe his role. And he began doing this by gathering the members of the Band, who had accompanied him over the past several years, and playing a range of music in the basement of a house in West Saugerties, New York.

Contemporary marketing consultants might call his effort to redefine his role a rebranding.

It started out simply, with Dylan and the Band immersing themselves in traditional music, playing some covers, and writing new music shaped by their visit to the America recalled in those inherited songs. From that, they started recording, with simple equipment, over a hundred songs. Some old, some borrowed, some new. This was a new approach for Dylan, who had recorded his prior albums with efficiency, spending several days, seldom more, recording an entire album. Which, in turn, would be released a few weeks later.

The new compositions from the Tapes were copyrighted, transferred to an acetate, and offered to other artists. The Byrds and Manfred Mann and Peter, Paul and Mary recorded some of the songs. At the time, there seemed to be no intention to release the original recordings - although a selection would be in 1975. Yet, clearly inspired by this detour into Appalachia and the dusty corners of America, these recordings shaped the two albums Dylan released after reappearing from hiding, John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline.

In the end, Dylan chose to reject the roles he had engineered for himself (rock star, poet, surrealist) and the titles imposed on him (activist, prophet, ambassador), and put forward something that was simpler and easier to defend. Frustrated that he couldn't follow his increasingly sophisticated song-writing instincts wherever they might lead, Dylan wanted to renegotiate his informal contract with the world that managed and consumed his music. Dylan was attempting to find a way past the noise and commotion that surrounded him. And, as he convalesced from his injuries and recovered from the dementia of his sudden stardom, he mapped out steps to shrink his role in the public consciousness and, as importantly,I think, reshape his own expectations about who he was and where we was headed. He wanted to be indistinguishable from other recording artists, who routinely stumble and fail and disappoint. He wanted his conversation to be with other musicians, not the public. He wanted to respond to what other artists were doing, filter it through his own gifts, without a need to reply to the demands placed on him by his fans.

In Chronicles Volume One, Dylan wrote of this period: "I'd have to send out deviating signals, crank up the wrecking train, create some different impressions.... My outer image would have to be something a bit more confusing." And more pointedly: "I had assumed that when critics dismissed my work, the same thing would happen to me, that the public would forget about me." Once forgotten, he could regroup, and emerge in a role that suited him better, that better fit his new view of what he wanted from the world and his career.

Dylan's repositioning continued even after he returned to the airwaves and began producing new albums. John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline were seemingly deliberately out of step with everything going on around him. As American youth embraced flower power and dropped acid, Dylan went country. He began the work of reclaiming his career four months after Self Portrait, a perplexing, critically dismissed album, full of easy-listening arrangements and layers of over-dubs, when he released the appropriately titled New Morning, a recording cautiously hailed at the time as a return to form. But baffling choices followed over the years that followed. It was as if he was on the run: changing labels, releasing a greatest hits album that offered few hits, acting in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. Over and over again, defying what was expected of him. It wasn't until Blood on the Tracks, nearly a decade after his motorcycle accident, that Dylan produced something that seemed to capture all of his gifts.

Maybe one way to view this period is as a strategic intervention, designed by Dylan to end the parade and disperse his followers. The time I want to focus on began in the basement in upstate New York and ended with Nashville Skyline. Dylan surrendered his role as his generation's troubadour, opting instead to become, at least for a time, a musical archaeologist, unearthing American musical traditions with the Band and, when he returned to the recording studio, embracing country music, a conservative sound, rooted not in America's cities, where change was unfolding rapidly, but the rural backroads. Yet it was in America's hollows and dells where, for generations, one's fame as a musician was shaped by your skill and technique, and your ability to take a traditional tune, and transform it, to make it new by infusing it with something only you could conjure up. Here, within this musical landscape, Dylan would seek to reposition himself as singer and musician.

Like Dylan in 1966, the Democratic Party - and Barack Obama in particular - can choose to reject a definition imposed on it (and him) by others. The party can refashion its identity, not by asserting new claims or donning new disguises, but by boiling down what it does to the simplest terms. The party can reclaim its title as the country's liberal party. It's a simple claim, easy to defend (although there will still be those who think liberal policies are wrong for America) and, like Dylan's redefinition of himself as a singer and a songwriter, it rescales the party's (and Obama's) public image among liberal Democrats and progressive activists.

I'm a proud Democrat, but I am comfortable saying the Democratic Party has seldom been heroic, even if some of its signature legislative achievements have been sweepingly transformative. The party's accomplishments - bringing immigrants into the political process, defending the right of African Americans to vote, improving work conditions for laborers - were often the products of cagey political choices, securing votes so politicians getting rich from public office could remain in office. It has been the party of corruption and compromise, machine politics and patronage. The Democratic Party has always been less a leading man, more a colorful character actor. Now and then, like Ernest Borgnine in Marty, the party brought home the big prize, delivering a social safety net to keep Americans from falling into destitution as they age, guaranteeing civil rights, fighting a war on poverty.

But that's about right. Political parties and the politicians who guide them aren't great causes or prophets. Our prophets - Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams, and Martin Luther King and others like them, who took on our society's inequalities and division - weren't politicians. Dylan was a musician and an entertainer. He knew that, but he need to remind us of it. Obama is a politician and he knows that. We need to be reminded.

On the Republican side, of course, especially in the dark realm of the Tea Party, Obama and the Democratic Party has been cast as the midwife to America's failure, another out-sized claim that doesn't match the reality. The flip side for Dylan, too, of course, was that the forces of reaction and conservativism, also powerful in the 1960's, yet fearful of changes they saw on the horizon, demonized him alongside the youth culture they despised.

Dylan, knowing he was neither the messiah nor the cause of American decline, slipped into hiding and rewrote his role. And, as we saw with the Stones on Exile on Main Street, he managed to do it in a way that repositioned himself as an inheritor of a long history of traditional forms of musical experience - blue grass, country, Appalachian fiddle music, back porch blues, and more.

The Democratic Party needs to do something similar. Dip into the traditions of American liberal political thought and draw inspiration from the great advancements these traditions made possible: emancipation, the eight hour workday, occupational health and safety regulation, social welfare for the poor, Social Security for the aged, regulations that made our food safe and our environment livable, political and legal guarantees that secured the vote for Blacks and Latinos and women, and the right to abortion. The party needs to reject the labels imposed by progressives and Republicans. It is a political party, not the last best hope of the nation, nor the devil's ambassador, facilitating America's decline.

I won't waste time exploring the Republicans' role in this. They are cynical manipulators, refashioning the Democratic Party and the nation's first African American president into props in their haunted house, using the party and Obama to scare Americans who feel the floor dropping out from under them.

As far as progressives go, they have a fundamentally mistaken impression about the country we live in, however much I share their hopes. We aren't a Disneyland of racial and ethnic harmony, a haven for gays and lesbians, a magical land of equality. These are all goals we have yet to achieve, and the Democratic Party is one vehicle for doing that, if it can be repurposed and given a new road map. But it is not the last line of defense - Gandalf on the bridge facing the Balrog while we, the timid hobbits, scramble away from the forces of darkness. In fact, much like Frodo, the simpler people have often carried the greatest responsibility for inching us step by step toward becoming a more inclusive, more equal society. Unions, not the Democratic Party, campaigned for years to improve work conditions and improve benefits for workers. Rosa Parks and freedom marchers put civil rights on the nation's front pages before LBJ managed to work his legislative magic to make it the law of the land. Elevating the Democratic Party beyond what is reasonable is misguided and historically unjustified.

The party needs to be deliberate in playing a role in this redefinition of its role. Dylan had enough confidence in his songwriting and performing skills to know he could make it in a world where he was measured by these criteria alone. The Democrats need a similar, realistically-sized sense of confidence about its policy instincts. My impression is that Dylan, unsteady on his feet perhaps when he first withdrew from public view in 1966, regained confidence in his songwriting and performing skills by jamming with the Band, and releasing some of the resulting recordings to a small circle within the music business. The reaction to the recordings was encouraging, but surely, too, was the feeling of exploration, mastery, excitement, and renewed confidence that the sessions provided. In the end, Dylan resumed his role as a songwriter and performer. And, I think importantly, he rediscovered that he was a collaborator in the making of his music. Those early years of the decade surely placed Dylan on a pedestal, and, it seems clear, altered his own understanding of his role. Most of his best music from the period was a product of borrowing and collaboration, taking musical ideas from the treasure chest of American folk music, being paired with sympathetic and experienced producers, finding Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper and the Band to work with. His successes were not his own alone, but, I suspect, he forget that as his myth grew. Only when he wanted to escape the weight of his fans' out-sized expectations, and he hid away in Woodstock and jammed with the Band, did he get a chance to recall this.

The Democratic Party leadership (and the Obama White House in particular) needs to similarly recall that the party didn't accomplish their landmark achievements alone: activists and unions and sympathetic courts all played indispensable roles. And getting out of Washington, as Dylan fled New York, and reconnecting with past collaborators - activists and unions and organizers - is necessary for the party to move forward. The product of this would be a renewed agenda, positioned not as the final line of defense, but as a set of policy proposals that would make life in America more fair, for the greatest portion of the nation's population, while laying a foundation for accelerated progress into the 21st century.

Finding the Democrats' Villa Nellcote

In the picture above Keith Richards and Mick Jagger are working on a song, their producer Jimmy Miller is sprawled on the floor, some partially eaten melons sit nearby, a bong and a liquor bottle sit on an acoustic partition. Is this what leadership looks like? Is this a glimpse into the moment of inspiration and renewal? Not exactly, but to pick up the thread I began (and immediately dropped) in my last posting, the Stones were on to something when they recorded Exile on Main Street in a villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer. And, through my lens, their situation, and their approach to the recording process, resembles the circumstances that surrounded the recording of three other great rock and roll albums - Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town, and the Clash's London Calling.

In each case, something happened that interrupted the artists' normal creative process. Instead of simply churning out the next album expected by their fans and their eager record labels, they paused, immersed themselves in torrents of music - gospel, blues, rockabilly, soul, Preservation Hall-style jazz, carnival music, and country - and jammed, for extended periods, in rehearsals and with the tape rolling. Many songs were written in the studio, inspired by this tour through the musical legacy that makes up the foundations of rock and roll. In each case, the band worked as a unit - not always harmoniously - yet as if they were moving with a shared instinct, like they were a single organism. Years of work together had fashioned quick reflexes, band members anticipated chord changes, shifts in tempo, moods.

For me, this suggests a process for refashioning the political message, machinery, and mission of the Democratic Party. I'll try to unpack this over the next several posts. In a Cliff's Notes version: The Democratic Party has to realize that they can't think of the next election - in 2012 - as just another election. They have been led from the path they had been following. The 2010 elections suggested something that smart Democrats knew, but party leaders were stubbornly ignoring. The party is corrupt and lost and wandering through a landscape they no longer comprehend. The Democratic Party leadership should dig into the vast legacy of their party's sweeping interventions into American life - FDR's New Deal, the decisions handed down by liberal courts filled with Democratic appointments, LBJ's signature poverty and civil rights legislation - as well as the work of civil rights leaders and social activists that inspired and shaped this transformative effort. Then, with a preliminary blue-print in hand, the party should assemble as much of its rank and file as can be assembled, reach out to bloggers and commentators from what Robert Gibbs dismissively called "the professional Left," bring in union leaders and representatives from the vast network of agencies and organizations that take care of our poor, and create something new. The process is what matters, and this is what the Stones did right in the summer of 1971.

I'm not recommending party leaders indulge in vast quantities of heroin. Or shag each others' spouses. You're getting too caught up in the details. The Stones lived where they worked. They recorded everyday from 8 at night until the early morning. With all the tension between band members, and legal problems, and the allure of new love - Mick had just married Bianca - not everyone showed up everyday. But those who did, shook off the effect of the drugs and the wine, and worked through the songs. Long hours spent jamming, working on material that was being written as it was being recorded. Six hours spent playing one segment of Tumbling Dice, with the tape rolling. So many songs went on and on (only to fade out when they are sequenced on the album). Band members played instruments they don't normally play - Keith playing bass and producer Jimmy Miller playing drums.

But the result is alive, in ways no Rolling Stone album would ever be again. The music has sinew and purpose and character and swagger. To worry about the drugs and the marital infidelities and car crashes and arrests and everything else that accompanied the making of the album that summer is to miss the point. Rather - despite the drugs and the marital infidelities and car crashes and arrests and everything else the Stones had to push past, their creative process that summer produced a recording that was remarkable: shaped by gospel and rhythm and blues and gritty roadhouse rock and roll, authentic and persuasive.

The Democratic Party needs to recreate this. Retreat to its own Villa Nellcote, and dip deeply into the past, rehearse its message, fight things out, all with the tape rolling. Author the party's new mission while the conversation is going on. Make it something spontaneous and alive. Work for long hours, to grab hold of the thread of the thing that has always called to you. For the Stones it was rock and roll. For the Democratic Party it should be social justice, restoring a role for the marginalized, educating kids, keeping the promise the nation made in its founding documents and the 14th Amendment. In the end, refashion everything in a way that is conscious of the present. If you have to, carry the result back to be polished by experienced tweakers. The Stones did, overdubbing a few tracks in a studio in L.A. But don't spoil the authenticity of it, don't dispel the magic. And whatever you do, don't erase the lines that trace what you have created back to its origins. That's what makes it real and meaningful and relevant. Exile on Main Street wasn't just the latest Stones LP, in stores, as always, about a year after the last, ready to satisfy the appetites of the band's fans. It was the latest chapter in a long history, part of a conversation that included Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, Clyde McPhatter and Memphis Slim, Bo Diddley and Hank Williams, and an endless list of innovators and authentic voices. It was bigger than the commercial impulse that pushed recording artists to put out albums each year. And that's what the Democrats need. They need to shake off the dull repetition of competing every two years, sleep-walking through the process with a satchel full of old battle hymns. They need to go back to the wellspring of their inspiration, drink deeply, and return with something authentic and simultaneously timeless and contemporary.

While you're thinking about this, go listen to Sweet Virginia, and marvel at it. After starting out as a little country ditty, there's a point, after everyone has climbed on board, including Bobby Keys, playing an improbably swaggering sax, when Jagger sings: "You've gotta scrape that shit right off your shoes." That's what the Democrats need to do. Then, learn to thrill the audience. Not with cheap gimmicks, but with the real thing. After you're done listening to Sweet Virginia, skip ahead to Shine a Light. The gospel-style backup vocals, Mick Taylor's liquid guitar, Billy Preston's persistent keyboards. Doesn't that song make you want to cheer and cry at the same time? It's thrilling. The Democrats need that too.

Lessons for Escaping our Cul-de-sac from Dylan, the Clash, the Stones, and Springsteen. Really.

This blog started out as a grab-bag, I thought I would talk about music, politics, my (supposedly) amusing thoughts about life as a dad, wry comedic reports from the day-to-day. It would be like my friend Andrea's blog. I couldn't do it though. I didn't have the gifts to make it work, and I started the blog when Barack Obama was trying to win the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton, so the blog became a platform for me to rant about and report on politics. I sometimes slip into old habits, and write about the Kinks or the Chi-Lites or Joel R.L. Phelps or X, always trying to tie them to politics in some way. This post is something flabbier and less focused than even those efforts at mixing music and commentary.

I've been thinking about how America can back out of the cul-de-sac in which it has been trapped. The conversation around the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords shows how lost and divided we are. After the shooting, as everyone knows, we began a conversation about vitriol in our political discourse, we timidly asked some questions about gun control and the care we provide to the mentally ill. But the conversation will lead nowhere, the questions about automatic weapons and high capacity magazines will remain unanswered, and we'll continue to ignore the needs of the mentally ill. This is inevitable. We've seen it time and time again. And, most of all, we'll continue to argue about the future of the country from entirely different corners of the universe. I've talked about this elsewhere; part of the problem is an irreconcilably different vision about who we are as a nation, and what the fundamental requirements are for membership. Bob Dylan, once wrote about America, in his memoir, Chronicles: "You wonder how people so united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies. After awhile you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, of evil for evil." He was writing about the years preceding the Civil War, but it could be today. We are still divided by that schism.

Politics as usual cannot be a path out of this. Our political process is corrupted by money and irresponsibility and demagoguery, devoted to preserving wealth, dividing us, to serve the commercial and corporate interests and the wealthy, who view our splintering as a gift. Occasionally more hopeful politics percolate up, showering mercy on those left destitute by the Great Depression, redeeming the promise made to those freed from bondage one-hundred years after emancipation, fighting a war on poverty, promising health care to those previously denied coverage. But there is nothing sustained, and the forces of darkness or merely apathy and drift are restored to their place, and we roll back. Our politics are sisyphean.

Where does redemption come from? Or is it renewal we need? Innovation? Whichever, there are many places we can look for some directions, some examples or guidance. My inspiration was a realization that Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street, Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town, and the Clash's London Calling all had similar origins. Something occurred - a motorcycle crash, tax exile, a break with management and resulting legal action - to disrupt the normal creative process. The response was prolonged immersion in their recording studios, writing and revisions and group collaboration that drew on themes new to the artists, blending longstanding obsessions with new interests, reaching into the deep bubbling stew of musical expression, drawing on bluegrass, and gospel, and rhythm and blues, rockabilly, jazz, dub in the case of the Clash. What was put down on tape was a product of prolonged jamming, rehearsals, multiple versions of songs, some fast, some slow, some gentle, others savage. But the bands were in each case already so accomplished at what they did, that they found the groove in each song, even across its multiple embodiments.

There's something here. And, like I have said before, it requires collaboration. These performing artists jumped off the merry-go-round. They stopped, for at least a time, worrying about the annual obligation to deliver a new album into the hands of their fans and their record label. They went back to what inspired them, and spent time there, with musicians they trusted. This is a model for collaboration for Democrats. Over the next couple of posts, I'll try to unpack why.

Tombstone Story

While watching the 1961 movie version of West Side Story with Natalie Wood Saturday night, my wife and I were struck by the relevance of Maria’s lines as she holds the dying Tony. Tony has just been shot by a rival gang member. Maria looks at the assembled gangs and in a cold hard voice (she had been the essence of sweetness and innocence until now) says, “You all killed him. Not with bullets and knives! With hate! Well I can kill too! Because now I have hate!” She doesn’t though. She learns the film’s lesson: Hate initiates a spiral of responses, including, in the case of Tony’s murder, unpredictable eruptions of violence.

Revisiting the replies from the right following the shooting of Rep. Gabriel Giffords and the killing of six others, we were reminded of the film’s message. Sarah Palin and Tea Party leaders from Arizona were quick to distance themselves, despite the fact that their campaign sites had talked of “targeting” Rep. Giffords. Rank and file tea partiers and Republicans spent the day filling comments pages on web-sites with breathy arguments, dismissing any claim that overheated rhetoric caused Jared Lee Loughner to take aim at Rep. Giffords. But as Maria learned, hate metastasizes and spreads, and we shouldn’t be surprised when it erupts in unpredictable moments, with tragic results.