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.