Dylan and the Beats - part one

Sometime during the documentary, "The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg," writer Norman Mailer says: "Allen was all about the 'politics of ecstasy'... and this changed everything." (CORRECTION: I JUST GOT A NOTE FROM THE FILM'S DIRECTOR WHO REMINDED ME THAT IT WAS TIMOTHY LEARY - NOT NORMAN MAILER - WHO SPOKE OF THE POLITICS OF ECSTASY. PLEASE FORGIVE...)I believe this is what inspired Bob Dylan to return to his first love - rock and roll - after creating a monster career as a "protest folk singer" in the early 60s. James Miller, in his most excellent book, Flowers in the Dustbin: the Rise of Rock and Roll 1947-1977, writes:

It was on a meandering, month-long trip from New York to San Francisco in quest of America, by way of Harlan Country, Kentucky (to meet coal miners), Hendersonville, North Carolina (to speak with poet Carl Sandburg), New Orleans, Louisiana (to celebrate Mardi Gras), Dallas, Texas (to see where President Kennedy had been shot), and Denver, Colorado (to look up the folk singer Judy Collins), that Bob Dylan experienced - again - the rush of musical excitement he had first felt, years before, in high school listening to Little Richard. It was February, 1964. Dylan, twenty-two, was the most widely admired, young folk singer and songwriter in America, thanks to "Blowin' in the Wind" - a song of wistful longing and defiant hope, sung the previous summer at the civil rights March on Washington led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On the road, Dylan meant to consort with the ghost of Walt Whitman, the muse of Allen Ginsberg, the wayward spirit of Jack Kerouac... in search of America.

Instead, he discovered something else... blaring from his car radio: the Beatles! Dylan said, "We were driving through Colorado, we had the radio on and eight of the Top Ten songs were Beatles songs... they were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous and their harmonies made it all valid. You could only do that with other musicians... and it started me thinking about other people and forming a rock and roll band." It was that Beat spirit and the politics of ecstasy at work: the joy, the hope, the possibilities of humanity and the bold sensuality of rock and roll as filtered through an insistent back beat that knocked Dylan on his ass and gave him a reason to play music again.

He had been ready to throw in the towel: the political correctness of the New York radical unions and leftists had rendered him physically exhausted, intellectually sterile and emotional vacant. Jumping through the hoops of one political cause after another was NOT what drew him to music back when it was fresh. Again, Miller is so right:

... like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan had grown up with Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry and doo-wop rhythm and blues. While still in high school... he had formed a rock band... in the fall of 1959, when he went off to college at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, he discovered a bohemian student milieu similar to what Lennon hand found at the Liverpool College of Art and Keith Richards had found at Sicdup College of Art: a world of cheap wine, beat poetry and coffeehouse music - mainly jazz and folk.

So, Dylan took up what was happening - he listened and absorbed the Beats - and created identity after identity after identity: first it was an art student, then a hobo a la Woody Guthrie, then a protest singer rallying the idealism of America until it burned him out. He was experimenting - searching for integrity and ecstasy - not bull shitting. And when he heard the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" the world was suddenly filled with possibilities again and he knew he had to give it a shot.

A uniquely American shot, if you please. He was VERY conscious of creating a new American poetry of rock and roll within the politics of ecstasy. Listen to his first attempt on Another Side of Bob Dylan - clearly his first rock and roll album (albeit without a band) - as he sings "All I Really Want to Do." He is a wild man. Same with "It Ain't Me, Babe." He took it to another level on Bringing it All Back Home where one side was Ginsberg meets LSD on an acoustic guitar. While side two was Walt Whitman and Arthur Rimbaud in a blender fueled by a bank of Fender amps and guitars. All of it, however, grounded in American folk and blues, yes?

Tomorrow I hope there will be time to go into more detail re: the electric connections between Dylan and the Beats because they are profound and under-represented. For now Mikal Gilmore's words will have to suffice in his brilliant essay about Ginsberg:

As much as Presley, as much as the Beatles, Bob Dylan or the Sex Pistols, Allen Ginsberg helped set loose something wonderful, risky and unyielding in the psyche and drams of our times. Perhaps only Martin Luther King Jr.'s brave and costly quest had a more genuinely liberating impact upon the realities of modern history, upon the freeing up of people and voices that much of established society wanted kept on the margins.

(NOTE: I just LOVE the sincere tenderness of Ginsberg talking about the first time he heard Dylan here; he is one of my saints - broken and wounded to be sure - but also so totally human and alive.)

Just as Dylan would later change what popular songs could say and do, Ginsberg changed what poetry might accomplish: how it could speak, what it would articulate and whom it would speak to and for. Ginsberg's words - his performances of his words and how he carried their meanings into his life and actions - gave poetry a political and cultural relevance it had not known since the 1840s' Transcendentalists (Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau among them) or since the shocking publication of Walt Whitman's 1855 classic, Leaves of Grass. Indeed, in Ginsberg's hands, poetry proved to be something a great deal more than a vocation or the province of refined wordsmiths and critics. Ginsberg transformed his gift for language into a mission - trying to save and heal the spirit of America - as he wrote... And in the process, he not only influenced subsequent writers like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Jim Carroll, but his effect could also be found in Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself, in the writings and deeds of Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel, in the lives and exploits of the 1960s insurrectionists like Timothy Leary, Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman. And one can also hear Ginsberg's effect on later-generation artists such a s Sonic Youth, Beck, U2 and several of our finer hip-hop poets.

What's more - and Ginsberg himself was clear about this - Dylan was the artist who very intentionally picked up his challenge to save and heal the soul of America through the politics of ecstasy. And when he strapped on the electric guitar... well, that is a whole other story still to come!