Heroes - #3 (cont.)

Bob Dylan – Part Two

[NB: Anyone arriving at this blog for the first time at this point, who would like to read this essay from the beginning, should scroll down to the August 2, 2007 entry “Reflections: Heroes.”]
In 1964, I had an opportunity to see Bob Dylan live in concert, in the auditorium of my high school. Fortunately, I don’t need to reconstruct my reflections on that event from the shards of memory, as I can provide, unedited, with period adolescent, mid-Western, naïveté fully intact, my contemporaneous journal entry from the day after the concert.

But I have already hyped this Dylan thing well beyond my ability to propound it convincingly. It is necessary here to cop out, to state that to understand what Dylan was by 1965, you had to have been there: I can’t translate it into words. For a year, or two, or four…Dylan was the embodiment of the Zeitgeist for a particular subspecies of American youth, of which I was one dazed and confused specimen. We wanted a hero. We needed a leader. We tried to seize Bob Dylan by main force to anoint him our philosopher-king, our warrior-prophet, our King David. And Bob Dylan, as if by magic, slipped unnoticed out of the mob, and, from a safe distance, flipped us the bird. “Don’t follow leaders*,” he snarled. And I haven’t had a hero since.

In his refusal to be idolized, Dylan instructed me in two things: Don’t examine the random contingencies of my life, he said, examine my work. And in examining my work, he added, don’t ask me what it means—ask your self.

Yeah…well…if you think about it, that’s about the same attitude that, say, Shakespeare took.

______________________
* Look out kid
You're gonna get hit
By losers, cheaters
Six-time users
Hangin' 'round the theaters
Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin' for a new fool
Don't follow leaders
Watch the parkin' meters

Heroes - #3

Bob Dylan – Part One


If you have come with me this far, you will have noticed that, while the Al Kaline part was mostly about Al Kaline, by the time we get into the Dylan Thomas part, it has come to be largely about me. Ain’t that just what happens when your balls drop, though? You start to think that you’re Alpha Male Man. You are, as the old joke goes, a Legend in Your Own Mind. The world is your gig, and the rest of the poor schmucks are just your contemptible audience. And this is the perfect intro for a short discussion of my third, and final, hero: Bob Dylan.

I may not have been certain how I was introduced to Dylan Thomas, but I know exactly how I encountered the phenomenon that was Bob Dylan. When I say “exactly” I say it in full awareness that memory is a tricky and iffy thing. I have had demonstrated to me over and over again how memory takes the scattered events and contingent emotional elements of one’s past and reassembles them into a mosaic which satisfies the psychological/emotional needs of one’s present. Language provides us with the tools to usurp this role of memory and to construct such a scenario for ourselves. By rummaging through that catch-all drawer where the memorable events of the past have been carelessly tossed over the years, we can select the pieces that seem to match and cobble them together into shoes that fit the feet on which we now stand. The long story made short(er) is this:

I was afflicted in those days with a chronic insomnia. It left me tossing and turning nightly until 2 or 3 a.m., in a hormonal fever that no amount of self-abuse could quench. The only other ameliorating resort was listening to late night AM radio . After a certain hour, it was possible to catch DJ, Dick Biondi, on WLS out of Chicago. Sometimes it was even possible to pick up WBZ out of Boston, the name of whose late-night jock I can no longer recall. But the usual choice was either WJBK, out of Detroit, or the powerful CKLW, broadcast out of Windsor, Ontario. In those days, the role of AM radio stations, whose staple content was pop music aimed at a teenage audience, was to play the top 100 or top 50 hits, in rotation, over and over again. Playing album cuts on the radio did not become the thing until the ascendancy of FM, still several years up the road from 1963.

Nonetheless, one fateful night, either on WJBK, or after his subsequent move over to CKLW, my favorite local DJ, Terry Knight, in the wee small hours of the morning, broke the mold and played together in one mini-program, three cuts from Bob Dylan’s 1963 album, The Freewheelin’. And thus, he blew my mind.

As I recall, Knight played three songs: Blowin’ in the Wind, with which the world was already familiar from the Peter, Paul and Mary rendition; Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright; and A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall. First of all, nobody had ever heard a voice like that on AM radio. Secondly, nobody in middle-class America knew the sound of a blues harp being played on a rack, while the artist’s hands were busy banging on his guitar. But then – (Oh, my God!) – there were the lyrics. Blowing in the Wind, we’ve discussed. Don’t Think Twice is a good lyric and has always been one of my favorite Dylan songs. Given a different arrangement, however, one could easily imagine somebody like Johnny Cash doing that tune convincingly, or even having written it. But, Hard Rain? That was an earthquake! That was a sea change! After hearing that song, spun by Terry Knight in 1963 or 1964 – I don’t know which – nothing was ever the same again.

Let’s compare and contrast. We remember that the top song in 1963, the year that Bob Dylan released The Freewheelin’, was Surfin’ USA by the Beach Boys. I’m not going to be a hypocrite and claim today that I didn’t dig the Beach Boys in 1963. I was as appreciative of their pre-Beatles vocal harmonies and Chuck Berry guitar riffs as the next guy. But once I had heard Hard Rain, it was like Double Bubble compared to Red Man. But, observe:

The Beach Boys saw this:

You'd seem 'em wearing their baggies
Huarachi sandals too
A bushy bushy blonde hairdo
Surfing U. S. A.

Bob Dylan’s vision was:

I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin',
I saw a white ladder all covered with water,
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

The Beach Boys left you with:

We'll all be planning that route
We're gonna take real soon
We're waxing down our surfboards
We can't wait for June
We'll all be gone for the summer
We're on surfari to stay
Tell the teacher we're surfing
Surfing U. S. A.

And Dylan’s agenda is:

I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin',
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Is my point made?

Heroes - Interlude: 1963

1963

In the late 1950’s, a collegiately-styled group consisting of two acoustic guitars and a stand-up bass, calling themselves The Kingston Trio, introduced “folk music” to Top 50 AM radio with their #1 SMASH HIT, Tom Dooley. Their success, which continued through several more Top 50 hits, as well as three or four successful albums, gave rise to a rash of imitators, and kicked off the folk music craze.

Scroll down to 1963. Another trio, calling itself Peter, Paul and Mary, and significantly more authentic than the Kingston Trio--Greenwich Village-wise--recorded the classic anti-war ballad, Blowin’ in the Wind. Of course, in 1963 there was not yet any war going on that anybody knew about, so Blowin’ in the Wind didn’t really become an anti-war anthem until several years later. But in 1963 it did reach #17 on the pop charts. And it was different. Lyrically, it was almost poetry. (My more alert readers will have picked up on the Dylan Thomas segue here.) It caught my attention. I bought the 45 rpm single and noted that the composer’s name was B. Dylan.

The number one tune that year was the Beach Boys’ Surfin’ USA. Little Stevie Wonder was kicking off his career with a two-sided hit (45s had two sides, children) Fingertips, Pts. I & II, which came in at #8. The Motown Sound was majestically represented that year by Martha and the Vandellas’ hit, Heat Wave (#32). Yeah, 1963 was smokin’. Roy Orbison put out Mean Woman Blues (#45) that year. And one of my favorite tunes (as it was so clearly about me) was He’s So Fine (#7) by the Chiffons, a black girl group. 1963 was at the height of the surf music craze. The Surfaris scored with the tom-tom and guitar-driven instrumental, Wipe Out (#18). The Chantays were blasting their own instrumental offering, Pipeline (#27), and Jan & Dean came in at #28, harmonizing on Surf City. Some 1950’s hold-outs, such as Dion (Ruby Baby #40), Bobby Darin, Andy Williams, and even Eydie Gorme (#30, Blame It on the Bossa Nova), were still hanging around the Top 50. And the folkies were represented by Trini Lopez, with his Tex-Mex rendition of If I Had a Hammer, a tune that Peter, Paul and Mary had previously scored with; and by The Rooftop Singers, with Walk Right In.

That gives you the general picture. Next time around, the story of the late night radio, virtual Damascus Road revelation, that was my introduction to the transformational, mind-bending, phenomenon that was Bob Dylan.

Heroes - #2

Dylan Thomas

By the time I was hormonally well syncopated with the clammy, rhythmic grip of adolescence, it was no longer cool (in my mind, anyway) to idolize mere athletes. The wrong type of girls—the ones with trowelled on make-up and bouffant hair-dos which were varnished into breeze-proof helmets by frequent applications of hairspray—admired those conceited jerks. Swaggering through the halls of the high school, the jocks lorded it over the rest of us, receiving unwarranted female adulation in return for their moronic posturing, preening, arm-punching displays. I was made of more sensitive stuff than that. The female companion for whom I yearned was a reader of Shelley and Keats, a sensitive soul who would understand the hellish agonies of my unquenchable and perpetual horniness and turn it into a thing of beauty: I would become a poet.

I’m not too sure how I first encountered my second hero and role model, Dylan Thomas, but I think that it must have been in the Modern Poetry anthology that was required for my AP English course. Thomas was represented therein by several of his better-known works. It was probably the hard-driving cadence of his perfect villanelle, the magnificent Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, that first hooked me. The sheer bravado of this endgame challenge, or desperate plea, for the beloved father to howl in the face of death, to go down, as they say, kicking and screaming, was very attractive to the nascent rebelliousness of a mid-western “good boy,” yearning to be a man.

But surely, it was it was the urgently hydraulic and conspicuously phallic message of The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower that alerted me to the irresistible mixture of sex, death, and sheer joy that the drives the best of Thomas’ poems. That he died tragically young; that he died of drink; that he had a reputation as a rake, did nothing to hurt his appeal, on the cusp, as we were, of the Eisenhower years and the ‘Sixties. If not for the photograph of the young Dylan Thomas displayed here, I may well never have started smoking.

For all that, it was the final lines of what I considered to be his greatest poem, Fern Hill, which conquered me utterly. Dylan Thomas taught me, at that most difficult age, what my essential nature was, where I was inevitably bound, and how I should conduct myself during the brief interim of my journey:

"Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, /Time held me green and dying/ Though I sang in my chains like the sea."

The patent and eternal Truth of those words left me no choice but to believe.

Heroes - #1

Al Kaline

The first of my heroes is an athlete--for more than two decades the star of my "hometown" team, the Detroit Tigers: Al Kaline. This was a man who combined skill and class. Kaline was a gifted player, a triple threat: he could run, throw, and hit. He was a reliable clutch hitter, an extraordinary right-fielder, and a smart, if not super-fast base runner. With Kaline patrolling right-field, players on opposing teams did not take the extra base. Kaline’s arm was extraordinary. He once threw a man out at home from the seat of his pants.

Al Kaline was the star of the Detroit Tigers—the only team he ever played for—from the time I first began to follow baseball as a ten-year-old boy, playing pick-up games on the sandlots of Ann Arbor, until I was a graduate of the University of Michigan; a jaded and cynical survivor of the ‘sixties; married, employed, and living in New York City. Al Kaline was a stabilizing constant throughout the manifold crises of that turbulent era.

Kaline never embarrassed himself or his team, either on or off the field. Although he was elected to the Hall of Fame as soon as he was eligible, I’ve heard it argued that Kaline wasn’t really a great ballplayer. His life-time batting average was just under .300 and, although he collected over 3000 hits, he finished his career one short of 400 home runs. But if Kaline was only a “good” ballplayer, he elevated good to the level of greatness by being consistently very good over a span of two decades.

Near the end of his playing days, his gifts finally beginning to fade, the Tiger management offered to reward Kaline’s long and stellar career with a $100K contract—superstar pay for that era. Kaline turned it down. He didn’t feel that his productivity in the previous season had earned him a raise. They don’t make them like that any longer.

Reflections: Heroes

Heroes

The contemporary cinematic and video game fixation on comic book Super Heroes seems to me to be symptomatic of a subconscious, global hunger for the real thing. In the frailty of our fleeting, often isolated, existences, we desperately wish for a Superman – a force for Good--out there somewhere--ready to swoop down and apply his perfect and inevitable justice against any and all evils which threaten to render our anxiety-prone lives as terrible as we fear they may one day become. It is these Super Heroes—these dumbed-down, mass-produced avatars of Nietzsche’s Übermensch —which prove how far out of touch with the Transcendent our culture has become. Our hiding of our herky-jerky eyes behind the fantastic reality of a comic book, or in the pixilated virtual depths of a video screen, is symptomatic of our inability to place our faith in either real human heroes, with their Achilles’ heels, feet of clay, and fatal tragic flaws--or in Eternity. We are able to love neither Fate, nor Father.

You may have guessed that I am not a fan of comic books. And I haven’t seen even one of the Batman flicks. Not even the nearly nude body of Angelina Jolie can lure me into a theater where my head will be overwhelmed by a soul-numbing mixture of too loud sound, too fast quick-cut editing, and too little real meaning. I can’t humble myself before an ersatz god. Have a blast, but deal me out.

So I have no heroes today, whether tragically flawed, but human--or super. I am as afflicted as the next guy by existential nausea. But as a younger person, and not yet so thoroughly acquainted with the frailties that the flesh is heir to, there were three men who, I must admit, each served a stint as hero in my life. In the next few days, I will briefly expound on each of them.

Readings: Religion

One the things that kept Simone Weil, that most orthodox of non-Catholic Catholics, from being baptized and partaking of the Eucharist, was what she saw as the rejection by the Church of eternal Truths as expressed by other religions. A Christian Platonist, she learned Sanskrit in order to study the Hindu scriptures, particularly the Bhagavad Gita, in their original language.

I am currently reading, at the pace of about two pages per day, The Way of the Sufi by Idries Shah. The quote below expresses very well, I think, the dangers of orthodoxy and organized religion to the quest of the spiritual pilgrim:

Religion

All religions, as theologians – and their opponents – understand the word, is something other than what it is assumed to be.

Religion is a vehicle. Its expressions, rituals, moral and other teachings are designed to cause certain elevating effects, at a certain time, upon certain circumstances.

Because of the difficulty of maintaining the science of man, religion was instituted as a means of approaching truth. The means always became, for the shallow, the end, and the vehicle became the idol.

Only the man of wisdom, not the man of faith or intellect, can cause the vehicle to move again.

--Arif Yahya

It is my understanding that the "man of wisdom" referrred to in the final sentence is a teacher, or spiritual guide--a guru if we want to admit that much-abused word. I do not take it to mean that men of faith, or even intellectuals, are forever barred from the Kingdom.

Sufism, which is often understood to be the "mystical expression of Islam," is similar to Christianity in its emphasis on love. This would seem to position it well as a possible mediator in the current troubles between Islam and the West.