The Passage of Bob Dylan

Extract

Tomorrow is a long time At the time of John F. Kennedy’s assassination Dylan was afraid that he too might be killed. Leaving aside his proverbial paranoia, what this fear showed is the extent to which Dylan considered himself ‘involved’ : he obviously thought that he was making a statement in his music radical enough for him to be made the target of a politically- directed bullet. Dylan was connected professionally with the Civil Rights Movement and was made into a young hero by that amorphous political and social group, but at certain points in his early career his own perspectives transcended the liberal optimism of the Civil Rights slogans.

Some of Dylan’s early songs were not in that one-dimensional rhetorical accusative one came to expect of the New York City folk crowd. Dylan became aware very quickly that there was only a simple answer to everything if you were simple enough to accept it. He did not wish to be made into a solo version of Peter, Paul and Mary, megaphoning easily-digestible platitudes to an auditorium full of hungry college students. In an early, unreleased song about Heze- kiah Jones he ‘accuses’ the white ‘rednecks’, the undifferentiated, anonymous, philistine mass who hide behind their respectable beliefs. But he was really more intelligent than that: he knew that the poor whites were as much victims of ‘society’s pliers’ as the exploited blacks (though often less spectacularly so).

His song, Only a Pawn in their Game, must surely rank as one of the most intelligent contemporary political comments upon the murder of Medgar Evans.