Dylan Bob - Grown-up anger: the connected mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet massacre of 1913

How do the living live with the dead?

John Berger, Hold Everything Dear

I was thirteen and angry.

You could start elsewhere.

You could start with geology. Michigans Upper Peninsula has some of the oldest rocks on the continent: gravel and sand and silt deposited by a billion-year old sea. Mixed in are rich lodes of iron and other minerals. Northern Michigan is the only place on earth where this pure a copper lode is found this close to the surface.

Or you could start with anthropology. Native Americans were mining Keweenaws copper at least seven thousand years ago. And early Jesuit missionaries discovered boulders of copper along the banks of Lake Superior. Eventually, immigrants poured into the regionCornish, Russian, Bulgarian, Finnishhired to work the mines that would make Michigan the source for half the worlds copper.

Or you could start with economics. The first transaction, the basic source of wealth, is what we take from the earth: wood, fish, metal. Economists call this harvesting traditional work: the beginning of commerce, of exchange, of money itself. In northern Michigan, traditional work met modern industrialization after the Civil War. The railroad network expanded, electrification began, the nation started to see its first large corporations. Copper was a key component in the change. Capital from the victorious Union was invested in the isolated Keweenaw Peninsula, and that, combined with the influx of relatively cheap European labor, helped create the American empire.

But I started with anger. Partly because all these other approaches smack of history, and when I was thirteen, history was dull. It smelled of chalk dust, had the slick feel of textbook pages, spoke in the modulated voice of authority. History happened in a classroom. I didnt (voluntarily) approach the world that way.

I connected, instead, via anger. And through rock & roll. Specifically, through a voice on the radio. More specifically, the voice of Bob Dylan.

The first time that sound cut across my airwaves, the song was Like a Rolling Stone, and it was as if someoneDylanhad found a crack in the surface of day-to-day life and pushed up through it, erupting.

Like a Rolling Stone was six minutes long, outrageous in a world of two-and-a-half-minute records. It wasnt the opening smack of drums that got my attention. Or the bluesy roll of organ and guitar. And it wasnt the lyrics, though everyone said they were deep. I could barely hear themjust the slightly chill rush of hip, distorted description and the big chorus that began, How does it feel?

No, what made this thirteen-year-old take notice was the soundespecially of Dylans voice. Strung-out, slurred but piercing, its delayed attack would lag behind the beat, then rush forward, then drop back again: the keening of a tool being sharpened. For all the singers humor and apparent ease, it was the sound of anger.

It didnt really matter what he was angry about. At thirteen, I recognized the sound and was amazed and delighted: somebody was fighting back. The song amounted to a long, rich, unstoppable rant that kept rising in intensity, as if whatever had pissed him off (or whomeverhe kept shouting,... you... you!) wouldnt quite die, needed another cut of the bladeand another. The song was one extended build, ratcheting up between each triumphant chorus until six minutes didnt seem long enough. The anger never got resolved; it just blew out through a harmonica before fading into the distance. When the tune finally ended (I couldnt believe a radio station would actually let a song go this long: that was part of the thrill), I only had to wait a little while before it appeared again: a pop hit in regular rotation.

The more I heard Like a Rolling Stone, the better it got, especially the way the anger didnt seem to need to justify itself. Dylan started pissed. His first words were Once upon a timelike a fairy taleand from that point forward, he was on the hunt. Here was music that declared business as usual a sham. Outrage was the only way to respond to the world, the only way to get out from under the crust of lies to something like the truth.

I was thirteen, and I believed in the truth. As I believed in anger. But that wasnt something you could say out loud. If you did, it led to the inevitable adult question: What are you angry about? What, exactly, is wrong? The answer was everythingI was angry about everythingbut you couldnt say that. If you did, you got a look that meant, Oh, yes, youre a child.

I swore Id never forget that look. Never forget how adults dismiss what kids say, assume theyre wrong, treat them like something that isnt finished. Sure, the present system is messed up, some grown-up would say in a sympathetic voice, but its still the best that.... And so on, and so on, till I just wanted to change the channel.

Part of what was great about Like a Rolling Stone was it seemed to laugh at all that, brush it aside. Dylan sang as if the whole superstructureschool, government, newspaperswas just so much bullshit. His voice was an outsiders: nobody in power drew out their words like that, pitching them like insinuations, cutting them off abruptly. He had an unacceptable nasal voice that amounted to a challenge. Never mind history, never mind practical solutions: those were just more layers added to the ongoing accumulation of half-truths and injustices and deceptions. Hearing Dylan lash outat what? at everythingwas like hearing an alternative national anthem.

In July of 1965, a week after Like a Rolling Stone was released, President Lyndon Johnson announced that forty-four additional combat battalions would be sent to Vietnam. I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle,... the president intoned. I think I know how their mothers weep and how their families sorrow. But send them he did. We cannot be defeated by force of arms. We will stand in Vietnam.

And the same force, as far as I could tell, would stand at home. The February before Dylans hit was released, Malcolm X was assassinated. Soon after the record came out, the president signed the Voting Rights Act, which was supposed to be one of the culminating achievements of the modern civil rights movement. But five days later, the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts exploded in rebellion. Black power challenged nonviolence, calling for militant action, rejecting the idea of assimilation, mocking the countrys institutions as clearly racist. This in an American economy thatpumped by the escalating Vietnam Warwas creating the last great lift of a postWorld War II golden age.

Dylans song didnt seem to be about any of this. Not overtly, anyway. In fact, after hearing it a bunch of times, I wasnt sure it was about anything. It was sound. And that corrosive, uncompromising sound felt to me like the news. Much more so than anything I read in the paper or saw on TV. Its six-minutes proclaimed, maybe confirmed, that the country was going through its own adolescenceconfused, trying to figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up.

The radio was more than Dylan, of course. 1965 saw an almost daily outpouring of great new music, from the Beatles to Motown. When Like a Rolling Stone came out, the year had already produced Eight Days a Week, Stop in the Name of Love, Youve Lost that Lovin Feeling, (I Cant Get No) Satisfaction. Demographics explained part of it. There were lots of us born after the Second World War, coming of age in prosperous, changing times. We helped create the demand for something new, for our own version of the truth. People were beginning to call this upswelling a counterculturecounter to the business culture, the government, schools. To my ears, pop radio signaled that beneath the way things worked, there was an alternative: the way things might work.