MR. DYLAN'S SELF PORTRAIT Bob Dylan cast such a spell over a whole generation of young North Americans-all those whose political and musical consciousness was formed during the 60's-that it's no wonder he has become an object of vested interest. First it was 'new left' of the civil rights movement, then the heads of the acid explosions, that sought to make capital out of him. More recently Dylan seems to have been officially adopted by the U.S. ruling class.
What degeneration! In 1962 the guy used to raise money for freedom riders. In June 1970, with a million students on strike after Cambodia and Kent State, he's photographed dressed in academic gown and re ceiving an honorary degree from the Dean of Princeton University.
Dylan's career might seem one great cop-out, clams to be a musician. Does polities necessarily mean bad music? In Dylan's case particularly, the left politicos have a lot to answer for. Back in 1964 when Dylan switched from protest to surrealism and teamed up with an electric band, these would-be mentors were unanimous in condemnation. But Subterranean Homesick Blues, which so shocked the campus liberals at Newport 64, was not only a mammoth musical advance-all sixties rock derives from it-but also ideological dynamite. 'Protest', the bastard musical progeny of popular liberalism could not be the music of a revolutionary anti-capitalist movement. How much more subversive is Ballad of a Thin Man than The Lonesome Death Hattie. Carrol, or Desolation Row compared with Masters of War. The new freedom from the narrow demands of political expediency was itself a step forward. Music cannot do the work of politics, though it can complement politics-real politics, the expression of class forces-at its own level.
MUSIC AND MASSES In time Dylan, in his second phase (from Bringing It All Back Home to Blonde on Blonde), found himself once more in tune with a mass radical social base. This relationship was necessarily a changed one. Liberalism-an essentially idealist ideology-can kid itself that music and polities become one when politicaland sub-political!-demands take over the lyric: "if god's on our side he'll stop the next war. After all, liberalism is a protest addressed to the powers that be Revolutionary polities, which recognises political power as an object to be fought for, cannot delude itself that its aims will be realised through a dialogue with the ruling class. So it can accept that music is not merely an instrument of political agitation; music is already related to politics when it expresses, in its own language, a common social/cultural base. This is why Dylan's music remained so impor tant, not just to the acid freaks on the fringe of the student movement, but to vanguard fighters in the anti-imperialist as the movement made the painful transition from reform to revolution; from Berkely to Chicago. It was no gimmickry that led the RYM 1 faction at the 1969 SDS convention to choose the Weatherman' title for their position paper: this was their world of cultural reference. Dylan certainly rejected the movement in 1964—I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now'- -but his subjective consciousness shouldn't be confused with the objective meaning of his music. The charge that Dylan copped out in 1964 only reflects the limitations of his accusers.
DYLAN'S THIRD PHASE How then does Dylan come to be where he is in 1970, and what is the meaning of his most recent records? Self Portrait is the culmination of Dylan's third phase, the process first evident with John Wesley Harding. It confirms the direction of his subsequent development. The main determinant of this new departure was undoubtedly the ideological refuge Dylan found in American populism. Culturally, he rejected the city for the country, acid for alcohol, surrealism for naturalism, and beCalle moderate man-all this following his accident in summer 1966, which cut short almost two years uninterrupted touring with The Band. This trauma didn't lead to immediate musical disaster; witness the superb set of songs (Tears of Rage/Down in the flood/1 shall be Released etc.) Dylan wrote in 1967 and recorded with The Band on the pirated "basement tape.' But Dylan's new-found rural traditionalism made it impossible for him to start touring again, and this increasing distance from social reality (live audience) allowed his populist ideology to run amok in his music, and eventually turned him into that sorrowful figure of the star, whose isolation from the discourse of the masses-the fount of all artistic creation-dooms him to a descending spiral of repitition.
In John Wesley Harding Dvlan still used the country-and-western idiom without collapsing into it. He wrote a set of songs around the populist theme of morality, but gave them a surreal twist: Frankie Lee and Judas Priest play out their archetypical moral tale against a kaleidoscopic landscape that shatters and re combines the elements of real social relations. On Nashville Skyline. this tension is resolved in favour of the straight and Dylan stands at the edge of the abyss. He has only card to play to save himself from banality. It is perhaps the most startling and unexpected fact of Dylan's career that he should have ended up relying first and foremost on his qualities as a vocalist.
Make no mistake-Dylan's singing, previously remarkable for its functionality, is now what he wants you to listen to, what he demands to be judged by. His lyrics used to be delivered in the literal sense: words thrust at the audience whose aesthetic value depended on the tensions between their meaning, the tone and cadences of speech itself, and the instrumental backing. Their function now is to support a vocal line conceived as an aesthetic object in itself. Compare Like a Rolling Stone from Self Portrait (live at the Isle of Wight August 1969) with the recora ing on Highway 61 Revisited. Dylan has learnt to sing beautifully, there is no question of that. His model is obviously the smoothly shaped vocal lines of early Presley (1954-56), but even if he could match Presleywhich he can't-there is no artistic value in repetition, and this attempt to return to a primordial state musical bliss is inevitably forced and false.
OUT INTO LIMBO About Self Portrait itself there is little that be said. Firstly, Dylan's new songs have degenerated into almost unmitigated vacuity. The author not ont of Tomhstone Rlues Pensive and beardless, the early Dylan And below Dylan 1970, at Princeton being honoured with a Doctorate in Music for giving "authentic expression of the dis turbed and concerned conscience of young America". and Maggie's Farm, but also of love songs like One Too Many Mornings and It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, can now actually write, and sing 'For me there is no other damsel than my blooming bright star Belle Isle', while the string section attests to his sincerity. Secondly, though the use of female choirs, string orchestras, brass etc. does not in itself go against artistic integrity, the striking fact is that almost every track on this double album is a production whose true author is not Bob Dylan but the country music industry. For the first time in his re cording career, Dylan has lost control of the medium C.B.S. The tragedy is that he abdicated this conAMER voluntarily. Thirdly, Nashville Skyline, for all its contrived innocence, was saved by the sense of humour and self-irony that had mared Dylan's music from the start. Self Portrait shows Dylan finally taking himself seriously, and this invests much of the record with an aura of living death.
The Isle of Wight concert was in many ways Dylan's finale as a creative musician. . The messianic setting of an open-air festival could not have been more favourable. Dylan sang a retrospective cross-section of his work and, in harness with The Band. he all but succeeded in welding this varied material into a new artistic unity around his new vocal style. At least it seemed so at the time. But finales unrepeatable. Dylan's self-portrait in 1970 is that of a pathetie and isolated figure, drifting off into the limbo that Presley left for in 1957. Dylan's demise is not yet fatal. I doubt whether we shall yet-a-while find him playing at the International Hotel, Las Vegas. But that is the inevitable end of his present road
Black Dwarf July 7 1970 Oxford Street: the VSC AL VICINAM SOONE Sally Fraser