There is a video on Youtube, taken from one or another of the many Dylan tributes over the years, in which Roger McGuinn, Tom Petty, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, and George Harrison, all together on stage at the same time, take different verses of Bob Dylan’s 1964 classic “My Back Pages”.
“My Back Pages” is a rarity. There a great songs and there are great summations and there are great insights, but rarely are they combined into a single unified work– if you could call the mad sequence of disjointed images and ideas “unified”.
You have to hear “My Back Pages” in context. When Bob Dylan arrived in New York in 1961, he quickly established himself as the voice of the protest movement– funny name, isn’t it?– and wrote several defining songs of the civil rights era, including “Blowing in the Wind”, “The Times, They Are A’Changin'”, “A Hard Rain”, and so on. The intensity and power of his words moved people. He became a messianic figure, a prophet of change, and figure upon which an entire generation seemed to pin it’s hopes for remaking the world.
Had Dylan been a politician, he might have found this role congenial (see Obama). But as an artist, it alarmed him. First, he didn’t entirely believe in “the cause” of the protest movement– he embraced it’s values, but he was all too aware of how the cause could become corrupted, and how individuals within any movement can become “pawns in the game”. And with the death of John Kennedy, of course, he saw what was really going down.
It’s hard for anybody to admit they were wrong. It is impressive to see anyone embrace the idea that he was completely wrong about anything. But that’s what “My Back Pages” is about: “I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now.” A line of sarcasm. I was “wiser” when I embraced dubious causes. Now, I am younger, less confident that I get it. Less sure that this path leads to anywhere but disillusionment.
In some ways, “My Back Pages” could be construed as a neo-con’s lament: I used to believe in noble causes, that the world could be made better with grand schemes and revolutionary movements. Now I have come to realize that man’s nature itself is corruptible, and that causes become ideologies, and that evil must be addressed.
Dylan sings, “lies that life is black and white/spoke from my skull, I dreamed”. Pure Dylan– “spoke from my skull” and then, “I dreamed”. He doesn’t even offer you the consolation of thinking you should read his lips, or that he actually spoke the lies. Is this Dylan’s real, and most amazing, contribution: that truth is more important than any cause or dream? Of all the movements and causes that have come and gone, the most persistent outrage in the eyes of the world is to hold truth above all else. That communism failed. That humans really only seek after themselves. That victims can be complicit.
I don’t object that much to the term “protest movement”, though it sounds like it means to reduce visionary political action to “protest”, as if were defined only but what it was against, or by the act of being against anything at all. Why should I object? When you look at the state of American society and culture in the 1950’s, anybody with any kind of independence of spirit and sense of curiosity would be, by definition, in opposition to the prevailing values of that generation.
One of the best lines in any Dylan song: “Fearing not I become my enemy/ in the instant that I preach”.
The Who’s contribution (Pete Townshend): “Meet the new boss/same as the old boss”. (Won’t Get Fooled Again)
The Beatles: “When you talk about destruction/don’t you know that you can count me out” (Revolution)
Creedance Clearwater Revival: “Five-year plans and new deals/wrapped in golden chains”.
10 Years After Undead: “Tax the rich/feed the poor/’til there are no/rich no more” (I’d Love to Change the World)
Updated November 2008, in the cusp of an Obama victory.
What if Obama turns out to be a stooge of the establishment, a man who talks big but ultimately plays by the rules, compromises with mediocre corporate and military apparatchiks, and starts a war so he can look tough for the next election?
What if the Bush Administration– desperate– brokers a deal with Obama to relieve those soldiers and CIA agents who participated in the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo– and, of course, all the administration officials who authorized them to do it? What if Obama signs it, fearing divisions in the government, or the possibility of hard-right Republicans blocking the rest of his agenda?