Free Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus Page A

Farm.” On the last two, Dylan was flat out the ultimate rock ’n’ roll singer; the Band was the final band. Any comparison between this combination and an earnest, talented group like the Allman Brothers Band—forget the lyrics—would be a joke. This was rock ’n’ roll at its limits.
    Other numbers were less songs than incidents in a struggle rock ’n’ roll—or the blues, or country music—embodies but hardly contains: staying alive, keeping the faith, building and fighting for a life where humor, anger, and love are not only the means, but the ends. What hit me, so many times, was the strength of the man at the center of this struggle; I felt more alive being in the same room with such strength. This passed into the songs: they were stronger, as signs of life as well as comments on it. “He loves these songs as much as we do,” said the woman next to me.
    When Dylan first walked out on stage with Hudson, Manuel, Danko, Robertson, and Helm, the applause died away even before they cut into “When You Go Your Way and I Go Mine.” (“No bull-shit,” that fast start said.) The crowd (and who can say who was in the crowd? I saw professors I’d had when I was a sophomore in college, students I’d taught when they were sophomores) seemed caught between reverence and celebration, between worship and caution.
    It was only when Dylan came out alone that genuflection and nostalgia took over the night. If the response to Dylan’s first electric numbers had been uncertain, the applause for the Band’s first
familiar set loud and passionate, here the cheers dwarfed all that had come before and all that followed. Part of the crowd didn’t want to share their hero with backup musicians (not unless that was all they were, and it wasn’t); some people wanted to hear the words; a lot of people still hate rock ’n’ roll, especially the impolite version the Band was serving up. They wanted that old-time harmonica religion, and they cheered harmonica solos the way the rest of rock ’n’ roll America cheers drum solos. They wanted noble sentiments and enemies to hate; they wanted the ambiguity the last few years have enforced on life washed away, and Dylan, on his own, had such things to offer. Here he was submitting to the worst desires of his audience, and raising the most tired ghosts of his past. That’s all it seemed like—most of the acoustic numbers had none of the aggressive novelty, really a new sense of time, that was so striking in the electric sets. It’s not a matter of genre: “Wedding Song” sounds as if it could have come from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, but that doesn’t make it a throwback.
    Here was “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” even more lifeless and impersonal in 1974 than in 1964; “The Gates of Eden,” which was ridiculous in 1965 and still is; and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.”
    The title of that last song implies that the singer wants to reach out to a friendless woman, but the song is morally closed exactly where “George Jackson” is morally open, and a true attempt at friendship. I think Dylan would recognize, today, that Hattie Carroll’s death was more important than William Zantzinger’s six-month sentence. But while I thought how much better it would have been for Dylan to have sung “George Jackson,” and tried to understand why that song seems both more modest and more important than “Hattie Carroll,” I got a sense of why it would have been wrong for Dylan to sing the newer song. It had to do, as in so much of what’s at the heart of Dylan’s recent songs, with privacy. Jackson was a human being to Dylan—a man, not a principle—and while the record Dylan made when Jackson was killed expressed that, there is a way in which singing the song in front of
16,000 people would have been a shameful invasion of the privacy even dead men deserve: a man’s right not to be made into a symbol. Hattie Carroll was a symbol, and she remains a symbol, as