Never Just One Thing, Pt. XIX: Dylan, the Countercultural Outsider

All the people we used to know

They’re an illusion to me now

Some are mathematicians

Some are carpenters’ wives

Don’t know how it all got started

I don’t know what they’re doin’ with their lives

But me, I’m still on the road

Headin’ for another joint

We always did feel the same

We just saw it from a different point of view

Tangled up in blue

- Bob Dylan, "Tangled Up In Blue"

Last year I was really triggered by all the references I was seeing from young music writers and others who kept referring to Taylor Swift as "the Dylan of our generation." This, of course, struck me as preposterous. The question, though, is why? I wrote about that question here, and hit on matters of depth, range, lyrical ambition, historical and theological foundations, and the like as things that distinguish Dylan, not only from Swift, but from just about everybody. At the end, though, I arrived at the idea that what's really unique about Dylan is that even after he was a world famous figure, what mattered most to him was what someone like the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg thought of his work. Which contrasts starkly with Taylor Swift who, whatever the artistic merit of her work, cares greatly about getting that Record of the Year at the Grammies. Greatly. And though Dylan himself won one for Time Out of Mind, you can bet that it was all gravy to him. I mean, the man could barely get worked up over winning the Nobel Prize.

Countercultural Soil

Caring about such things is foreign to those steeped in the virtues and values of what we know as the counterculture, especially in the form of the Bohemian life of the artist or outsider who seeks a life of spiritual and artistic meaning beyond of the guardrails of social norms. It's a timeless, borderless tradition, but the American version was staked out early on by Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass celebrates a vision of being in the world that is exalted without relying on conventional terms of success. For Dylan and those of the rock and roll generation it was Kerouac's On the Road that served as the motivating document. Though the artistic value of that novel is perennially debated, there is no denying its importance as a cultural rallying cry. For Dylan, it was both-and; the influence was not only in terms of life orientation, but also artistic.

One of the highlights of Scorsese's No Direction Home documentary on Dylan's early rise was when Ginsberg was moved to tears recalling how, upon hearing "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," he knew the torch of the Beat approach to language and lyricism -- loose, incantatory, vivid, prophetic -- had been passed to a new generation. We should pause here and note that when Dylan brought his unique poetic language (which also harkened back to the Symbolist poetry of Rimbaud) into the popular song of 60s, it blew the lid off everything for everyone going forward. Blew the walls out on the house of love song. Punk. Rap. Cosmic country. Classic rock. Everything was freed to go more places, to be more ambitious.

Another main strand, of course, was the drifter-hobo-poet in the mold of Woody Guthrie, Dylan's most immediate inspiration for going folk and making the pilgrimage to NYC. Before Kerouac and the On the Road crew covered the country in cars and on buses, the hobo rode the rails, often running afoul of the law, but more than that, just trying to live whatever version of a free man the early-20th century could offer. Dissolute and disrespectable as they were, they calculated that the deal was better than working 60 hours a week in a filthy factory. Guthrie took that basic stance but gave it an upgrade as it were into the realm of socialist politics for the working man. Dylan himself would toggle for a while between the political and apolitical versions of the ethos before settling more or less into the latter. Dylan's predecessor in fashioning a neo-hobo artistic persona for the post-war years was Ramblin' Jack Elliott, a great if minor artist who really epitomized mid-century Bohemianism and the driftin' way of life.

Watching the very interesting documentary about him directed by his long-suffering (naturally) daughter, I was really struck by an episode that seemed to sum up the ragged glory of those days while also pointing to what we have lost. It seems that as Jack (born Elliott Charles Adnopoz in Brooklyn in 1931) started expressing his musical and general philosophical leanings, some people he knew there said, Jack, if you like this stuff, you really need to go the Bay Area; that's where the people like you are. So he went, an act filled with resonances now forgotten. Your goal of personal or artistic growth is enacted by the physical accumulation and eclipse of miles. Scenes pass outside your window, women take your orders in diners. And you muse and think. What you don't do is communicate with those left behind or those waiting ahead. And when you arrive you step into the unknown, gratified at having done the work to get there and filled with anticipation for what is to come. What you didn't do was sit in your room and connect with new people that way. Where is the rite of passage there? I don't need to deny the benefits of what we gain by being online to wonder what is lost. Adding in the sheer cost of living now, I do get concerned that outsider artistic communities are harder to come by. That's a spiritual loss for the world.

The last piece of the countercultural soil that nurtured Dylan was its anti-commercialist nature. At that point there really wasn't noncommercial popular music, and the folk scene that Dylan was in, which was part of the larger experimental and nonconformist art and music scenes thriving in NYC at the time that included such outré personages as Ornette Coleman, set itself in direct opposition to the postwar consumerist culture of the time, which in artistic terms was considered immature and shallow, concerned with the cost of that doggie in the window. Folk was deep and it didn't spring from the mind of an ad man. Today such a separation seems quaint. What once was offensive or difficult is now big business. Transgressive forms like punk and hip hop are huge commodities. There's nothing the marketers won't take a shot at, which is just an observation not a judgment. But more important than the popularity angle is the artistic one. It is the melding of art music and pop music in fresh and long-lasting ways that is our main concern here. Certainly during the heyday of Tin Pan Alley and jazz-as-popular-music we saw plenty of high art enjoyed by a great many people. But that era had passed, and jazz had become something just for the cognoscenti by the time the 60s hit, while at the same time rock and roll was seen as simplistic music for kids.

Even Dylan was on this wavelength at first. One thing that jumped out at me in the Clinton Heylin Dylan bio that set this whole essay series in motion a couple years ago was Dylan's original reaction to the Beatles. That's nothing but teeny bopper music, he said. Now, it's true that the original Beatles hits were, lyrically speaking, simple love songs voicing youthful sentiments. But there was the seed of something more in there. The sophisticated chords, the energy, the joy, the assimilation of all the antecedent rock forms, and, most importantly, the fact that they wrote their own songs. Before long Dylan was influencing the Beatles in terms of stretching their subject matter and the Beatles influenced everyone back, not least the Byrds, who created an early apotheosis of what the new poetry-as-pop-music could sound like.

While Dylan incorporated the jangle rock sound into some of his music, such as "I Want You," it's interesting to note that when Dylan "went electric," there was little about how he did it that was "commercial." So it's simply not true that he calculated that way. His first electric guitarist was Mike Bloomfield who was a pure blues player and whose work on cuts like "Tombstone Blues" were raucous as hell. True, "Like A Rolling Stone" had a killer hook thanks to Al Kooper's organ riff, but, as we know, Dylan's move made a lot of people angry. When Dylan did his world tour with Robbie Robertson on electric guitar they generated an unholy noise that found them getting showered with boos at every stop. Talk about punk! Long story short: Dylan brought people along with him, and not vice versa, as did the Beatles. Commercial versus non-commercial soon became a distinction without a difference.

Songs of the Outsider

Dylan's songs tell us the story of the countercultural life over and over, so let's take a look at a few. What we won't be citing as Exhibit A is "Ballad of the Thin Man," with it's vivid refrain, "Something is happening but you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones." The implication was that there was a new, widespread youth counterculture that the "straight" Mr. Jones wasn't hip to. What an illusion that turned out to be! Call it the conformity of nonconformity. Years ago I saw a terrific PBS American Experience episode on "The Summer of Love." What manifested in the Bay Area as idealistic counterculture for, say, a couple weeks turned by the end of August into a dumpster fire of runaways and hard-core, self-interested drug addicts. Famously, that fall the San Francisco anarchist, photo-hippie group called the Diggers performed a "death of hippie" ritual in the Haight. Now, to be sure, the culture of the 60s did change America. Much of that emerged from the Civil Rights movement, which, built as it was on deep Christian themes, was not countercultural, though its insistence on nonviolence and Brotherly Love in the face of American racism and close-mindedness, was indeed radical. And the hippie movement, at least as understood by the thinkers as opposed to the opportunists, opened the way for more inclusive conceptions of personhood and community.

But, no, the counterculture we are considering here, must always be the way of outsiders. This is the counterculture detailed by the narrator of "Tangled Up in Blue," the iconic opening track on Blood on the Tracks. This is the guy for whom perfectly good, no, excellent, jobs like carpenter and mathematician are unthinkable in terms of what people might "do with their lives." But ones does need bread to get by, which for this outsider means he

Had a job in the great north woods
Working as a cook for a spell
But I never did like it all that much
And one day the ax just fell
So I drifted down to New Orleans
Where I happened to be employed
Workin’ for a while on a fishin’ boat
Right outside of Delacroix

In "Maggie's Farm," Dylan laid out the philosophy in more didactic terms. There, Maggie's brother "hands you a nickel / He hands you a dime / He asks you with a grin / If you’re havin’ a good time," and Maggie's pa "Well, he puts his cigar / Out in your face just for kicks." No wonder that so many back in the day said, "it's the hobo life for me." I guess it's always a balancing act in modern life to assess what does and does not offer the common man the better shot at dignity. These are the concerns of Dylan's songs, though certainly not the concerns of today's top musical stars, every one of whom it seems was a full-on professional by the age of 12 performing on Disney's New Mickey Mouse Club. That or a member of a producer-originated boy band.

I guess in my lifetime I've only known a few people who made a living without working for The Man somehow. It's a tough life to make it without the perks of institutions -- the insurance, the vacations, etc. I tell you what, though, it's a good life indeed if you never have to deal with a Human Resources department, the source of so many woes in American working life. That is, if you just want to keep your head down, do your job, and keep your life and integrity your own. As for me, well, as I put it in my poem "Days on the Precipice", "I tried to be Henry Miller but failed!" I've lived my life working conventional jobs. Though that's not quite true. I realized I need the 9 to 5 to do well, but I also knew just a regular job environment wouldn't cut it. After much searching and many missteps I did achieve that, and for the last 20 years have been as close to being an "inside outsider" as you can get. But through it all, I have indeed developed some sympathy for what Thoreau derided as "lives of quiet desperation." The key for me has been to live in a fairly conventional manner, but to try to keep my mind as unconventional as possible.

But I digress. Let's stick with Blood on the Tracks for our consideration here. The lines from Blood's classic track "Shelter From the Storm" that always stick with me most vividly are from the first verse: "I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form / 'Come in,' she said, 'I’ll give you shelter from the storm.'” As Dylan sang in "Absolutely Sweet Marie," to live outside the law you must be honest. Well, to go out into the countercultural wilderness, you must have a strong constitution and fair bit of luck otherwise you become void of form. You must also have enough fortitude to maintain your identity when the conventional makers of such are stripped away. In "Shelter," the narrator barely makes it back to the safe port: " I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail / Poisoned in the bushes an’ blown out on the trail." I know that when I emerged from my wild years, my Henry Miller years, I felt like I had survived a battle. Self imposed, yes, but a battle nonetheless, one I have appreciated going through. Like Delbert McClinton sang in his song "I Had a Real Good Time," "You learn a lot more about life from the things you're not supposed to do." That way, when I got clean I wasn't squeaky clean, that annoying clean of a glass that's never been used.

Elsewhere on Blood, in the epic masterpiece "Idiot Wind," we find lines that are among the greatest Dylan ever wrote, and which point to deeper meanings of the outsider's life. "There’s a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door / You didn’t know it, you didn’t think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars / After losin’ every battle." Here is the hobo, the drifting explorer, as martyred Christ figure. There is the sense in Dylan, then, that the outsider can contain an element of holiness, that stepping beyond norms is not descending into irresponsibility but arising into a free and self-directed state. In Kohlberg's theory of moral development this is identified as the pre-conventional, post-conventional dynamic -- also known as the pre - / post- fallacy when the observer can't tell the difference between rebellion and misbehavior as ways of blindly acting out frustrations and rejecting or transcending certain norms out of principle or integrity.

By placing this dynamic in the realm of spirituality Dylan gets to the heart of this existential quest, and the way he does so sheds light on what the Beat generation was all about. Indeed, Dylan will forever be more of a beatnik than a hippie. In fact he wasn't any kind of hippie at all! One thing that attracted me to the Beat movement was its explicit sense of being on a spiritual quest. This is not something common to other schools of poetry or literature. Nor is it inherent to any other contemporary outsider cultural movement that I know of. But it's right there in the name. "Beat" is generally understood two ways. The first is connected to the blissful "beatific" state of being. Certainly the Beats were chasing after bliss, or kicks as they called it back then. Like John Trudell said, "there's something good in feeling good," especially in ways not experienced at the church social, shall we say. But like Paul Revere and the Raiders said, "kicks just keep gettin' harder to find." Which connects to the second meaning of beat, which references being "beat" as the weariness of the kind that comes from having pushed past normal limits. There's actually a third meaning, which builds on the weariness aspect. When asked by Steve Allen for his definition of Beat, Kerouac replied, simply, "sympathetic." The optimum benefit from gaining experiences beyond prescribed ones is to no longer stand in judgment of others. What a gift that is.

It isn't just all exalted though. There are plenty of outsiders in Dylan's world who aren't on any quest. I think of them as characters in noir films or books, those losers who mistakenly think they can pull one over on society or who like a chump fall for the femme fatale and get taken for a ride. I think of the narrator of "Simple Twist of Fate" who met his lover "down by the waterfront docks" and then goes searching for her there when she vanishes, leaving him with "an emptiness inside." Or the drifter in "Mississippi" who has "been in trouble since he set his suitcase down." These are pure American types. They also are the types of the old British ballads that Dylan loved: ne'er-do-wells and rounders and scoundrels. With Dylan it's never just one thing, and surely the sacred and profane coexist in his conception of the outsider, a synchronous dichotomy better experienced beyond boundaries than within. Inside the system, it's mostly profane, with the divine safely roped off inside "houses of worship." 

On Your Own Terms

Of course, once you get a taste for being outside, for whatever reason, noble or ignoble, it's hard to go back in. The rules and regulations and routines seem like a hallucination. I think of Dylan on his never-ending tour: Musician as lifer, going from town to town to town. Maybe there's no reason for it other than at a certain point it's the only way that makes sense. Being a civilian is out of the question, but you still need to be with people. As a musician at Dylan's level you can do it on your own terms when you perform. But isn't that the goal for all of us? Most of us are in the system and always will be, but even so, you've got to find a way to do it on your own terms. Even mathematicians and carpenter's wives need to.