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.
