Free Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus Page B

if she was never alive. She didn’t die so Dylan could sing about her, and so we could applaud our own rejection of her killer’s punishment, but that’s all the song can do for her. Well, much of the crowd cheered and even stood up for morality, for justice, for better times, for when the world was black and white. It’s said that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded Oakland’s Black Panther Party for Self-Defense after listening to “Mr. Tambourine Man” over and over, but this night, likely in the same town, perhaps only a few miles from the place where Bob Dylan was playing, you could have found the Symbionese Liberation Army and Patty Hearst—if you knew where to look.
    The songs that hit had new meanings—as events. With barely an exception they seemed to be sent out to every member of the audience, to roll out and change us and then bounce back to change the way we saw the singer on the stage. “When You Go Your Way and I Go Mine” was presented as Dylan’s declaration of independence, and we cheered it as such (again, it was exhilarating to hear someone make so strong a statement), but the performance had room for us, too. “Ballad of a Thin Man”—I used to see Dylan sing that song, and I knew who Mr. Jones was: everyone who wasn’t cool enough to buy a ticket to a Bob Dylan concert, the folkies who booed, the others. This night I had no doubt at all that I was Mr. Jones, that the image did not have to stretch to take in those around me, that Dylan meant much of the rage and contempt of the song for himself. Here the new style made it home—Dylan screaming “MISTER JO- HONES! ” and flipping Jerry Lee Lewis riffs off his piano—and if the song condemned anyone, it wasn’t those who didn’t know, but those who wouldn’t learn. When he sang “Wedding Song,” it seemed not merely a tribute to his wife (if that’s all it is, why bother to sing to anyone else?), but a challenge to live with the kind of extremes that must be communicated with words like “blood,” “sacrifice,” “knife,” and “kill.” Even with the
context of Dylan’s private life, the song seemed less a victory to claim than a goal to reach for, and that mood was perhaps at the heart of the show. When I borrowed binoculars and looked at Dylan’s face, it was clear that his work is not easy for him to do, and the intensity in his face was staggering.
     
     
    It no longer makes much sense for me to see Dylan’s career in terms of progression; to look for a point of view refining or growing or slipping from year to year; to see a style at work in and against a changing world. All that is there, but somehow it’s not very interesting. What sticks in my mind are a handful of songs—“All Along the Watchtower,” “Down the Highway,” “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” “Highway 61 Revisited”—and a feeling for how tough they are. For the moment, the rest slips away, just as it did at the shows. There is much that does not and may never reach me on Planet Waves, but “Wedding Song,” for one, sounds more to me like the real ending of John Wesley Harding than it sounds like anything else. If the question What does it all mean? is worth asking about Dylan’s performance—it’s usually worth asking about anything—this might be part of it.
    A man goes out into the world; he is bedeviled by its traps, seduced by its delights. If he is a fool he is determined not to remain one; he tries to read the signs God and the devil have scattered in the world, and he builds slowly toward a moral stance. He makes choices, and suffers by them, and grows both stronger and more wary. He tries to get across what he has learned to the crowd, but finds they don’t listen too well; whether they do or not, he feels he has at least told the truth. Finally he returns home and meets his wife, down there at the cove, and the two of them take off to have a drink, to make love, to get some rest. He’s worked hard, and he’s earned his reward.