Outlaw No More: How Dylan went from maverick to establishment man

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

On Tuesday last week, the leader of the free world seemed more than a little star-struck. Presenting the Medal of Freedom (the highest civilian honour awarded by the White House) to Bob Dylan, President Barack Obama said, “There is not a bigger giant in the history of American music. All these years later, he’s still chasing that sound, still searching for a little bit of truth. And I have to say that I am a really big fan.” Reminiscing about discovering Dylan’s music in his youth, Obama mentioned, “I remember in college listening to Bob Dylan and my world opening up because he captured something that -- about this country that was so vital.”  The legendary singer-songwriter was his usual stoic self through all the fanfare, eyes hidden behind dark shades, as he sat in the company of Nobel-winning author Toni Morrison, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and astronaut John Glenn, among others.

This is the latest, and unarguably the most prestigious award yet given to the 71-year-old Dylan, who has won 11 Grammys, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a special citation from the Pulitzer prize jury, and numerous other honours during the course of his nearly five-decade-long career. British bookmakers Ladbrokes even made him a 5-1 favourite to win the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. However, on the night that the very first of these awards came his way, Bob Dylan found himself embroiled in a bitter controversy, leading up to his being branded a traitor and a communist sympathizer . All of which is a wee bit different from the President of the United States waxing eloquent and expressing unabashed fanboy sentiment for the world to see…

On the night of December 13, 1963, the 22-year-old Bob Dylan was given the Tom Paine award by the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, recognizing the firebrand young artist’s contribution to the civil rights movement. Earlier that year in May, Dylan had released The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, his second album overall, but the first one comprising of primarily original material, including such iconic hits as Blowin’ in the Wind, A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall, Masters of War and Don't Think Twice, It's All Right. The impact of this album could hardly be overstated- as critic Janet Maslin noted in Rolling Stone, “These were the songs that established him as the voice of his generation—someone who implicitly understood how concerned young Americans felt about nuclear disarmament and the growing movement for civil rights: his mixture of moral authority and nonconformity was perhaps the most timely of his attributes.”

The increasingly reluctant messiah of a burgeoning folk song movement, Dylan turned up to receive the Tom Paine award- visibly drunk, slurring his way through one non-sequitur after another, until finally, he said something which would haunt him for a long time to come- “I got to admit that the guy who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don't know exactly where... what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I, too... I saw some of myself in him.” Coming just three weeks after JFK was assassinated in Dallas, on November 22, 1963, this remark proved to be too much for the audience to handle, and Dylan was soon booed off the stage.

The National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee had good reason to feel aggrieved. After all, these were the people who had been fighting-and often winning- several landmark legal battles just after the McCarthy Era, on behalf of artists and civil rights activists. (Before the Lee Oswald comment, Dylan had mentioned his satisfaction at “celebrating the anniversary when we overthrew the House Un-American Activities (Committee)”) For Dylan (who, like his idol Woody Guthrie, had already started to come under the scanner of McCarthy acolytes for his alleged Communist sympathies) to thus publicly embarrass them was a PR nightmare and then some. And in any case, why was Dylan feeling so very uncomfortable with the good people of the Communist Party?

On Talkin’ World War III Blues, one of the songs on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, he laments,

“Down at the corner by a hot-dog stand
I seen a man. I said, 'Howdy friend,
I guess there's just us two.'
He screamed a bit and away he flew.
Thought I was a Communist.”

On the famous cover of the same album, Dylan appears, walking arm in arm with Suze Rotolo, his then-girlfriend, a self-described “red-diaper baby”; born to parents who were working-class Communist Party activists. It was Rotolo who had helped Dylan with some of his earliest political songs, his “finger-pointing” songs as he called them. In critic Robert Shelton’s biography No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, Dylan is quoted as saying, “She’ll tell you how many nights I stayed up and wrote songs and showed them to her and asked her ‘Is this right?’. Because I knew her father and mother were associated with unions and she was into this equality-freedom thing long before I was. I checked the songs out with her”

However, Dylan’s increasing frustration at being typecast as a writer of “protest songs”, as well as the deterioration of his relationship with Rotolo (immortalized in the song Ballad in Plain D) was about to precipitate a shift away from acoustic folk music. In his own words, “It is a fierce heavy feeling thinkin’ something is expected of you but you don’t know what exactly it is... it brings forth a wierd form of guilt.” Dylan’s fans, as well as fans of the folk music movement in general, viewed electric or amplified music as the enemy- trashy pop, a by-product of Big Bad Corporations who were out to control you. Eventually, on July 25, 1965, Dylan kicked off his performance at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric version of the song Maggie’s Farm, backed by a rock band.

The legend which is most frequently told about that day involves Pete Seeger (the folk music hero who was among a bunch of artists sanctioned- blacklisted from TV appearances- for being Communist Party members in the 1950s) trying, unsuccessfully, to cut off the electric cables with an axe. (Both this legend and the night of the Lee Oswald comment have been dramatized in the 2007 Todd Haynes biopic I’m Not There) Seeger only admits to saying, “Damn it, if I had an axe, I'd cut the cable right now.” At any rate, the crowd didn’t take too kindly to the new, electric Dylan- once again, he was subjected to heckling and booing. He did, however, return to play a couple of acoustic songs as a conciliatory gesture. It seemed as if no matter what he did, Bob Dylan would find himself in the eye of a storm, and no matter how hard he tried to steer clear of politics (“I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics.”), politics would hound him as long as he wrote and performed.

Over the years, Bob Dylan has proven to be difficult to pin down: his persona has been as fluid and as improvisational as his ever-changing live arrangements. That he has mellowed down only proves that he is human like the rest of us- In an April 2011 tour of China, Dylan stayed away from making statements, and did not play any of his most famous protest songs, something which, surprise surprise, drew sharp criticism from many commentators. But then again, what even seasoned critics sometimes fail to grasp about Dylan is that it is this chameleon-like tendency, this capacity to constantly assimilate new and novel elements in his music (and his public life)that makes him the most enduring musical icon of the 20^th century. In this regard, director Todd Haynes’ casting of six different actors (including, most famously, Australian actress Cate Blanchett) to portray different aspects of Dylan’s life in the film I’m Not There has to be lauded as a genuine stroke of genius. The film ends with these lines as voice-over:

“People are always talking about freedom. Freedom to live a certain way, without being kicked around. 'Course, the more you live a certain way, the less it feel like freedom. Me, I can change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else. I don't know who I am most of the time. It's like you got yesterday, today and tomorrow, all in the same room. There's no telling what can happen.”

Bob Dylan’s Presidential Medal of Freedom is well-deserved: Indeed, one might argue that it has been due for a while now.