August 9–16, 2001

music

Love and Theft

A look through Bob Dylan’s back pages and Washington Square Memories.

by A.D. Amorosi

Square bob: Dylan was a central figure of early ’60s Washington Square.

More than any other image from 2001 — and there’ve been some doozies — Bob Dylan’s win on Oscar night is etched onto my retinas. It’s hard to forget him wincing and whining "Things Have Changed" into a video camera, looking as campy and spectral as Vincent Price, pencil mustache and all. Despite U2 and Madonna hamming it up, 2001 has been the year of Dylan — America’s finest emotional semiotician.

It’s a year in which to remember the Dylan pals, peers and enemies he’s likely to have forgotten or simply, calmly, put out of his mind. Consider recently dead old folkies Fred Neil and Mimi Fariña, two songwriters who all but created the last great Bohemia that was NYC’s Greenwich Village-centered folk scene in the early ’60s. They’re celebrated, with others, on Rhino’s recently released three-CD Washington Square Memories.

It was a woozy wordy scene that birthed the diverse likes of operatic tenor and Spanish guitarist Richard Dyer-Bennet (whose Requests volumes 2 and 5 are just out via Smithsonian Folkways), croaky sessioneer Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, high-flying bird-like Judy Henske, the bronchial blue team of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and heartfelt politicos like Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. A scene that birthed avant-socialist wackos Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg and Ken Weaver — the Fugs — whose four mid-’60s LPs are compiled onto the new three-CD Electromagnetic Steamboat: The Reprise Recordings (RhinoHandMade), the only collection where you’re likely to find Hebraic sing-alongs, hillbilly ballads and psych-e-deli-sized Gregorian chants about screwing and smoking dope. ("I ain’t ever gonna go to Vietnam/ I prefer to stay here and screw your mom," goes Sanders’ mad rant.)

This was pre-Disney New York City: one that coincided with the bitchier blocks-away scene of Pop, Warhol and the Velvets while maintaining its own brand of darkness and deceit. Washington Square’s true memories are that of the great urban folk boom that occurred via Woody Guthrie, Odetta and Dave Van Ronk in the latter ’50s when dustbowl-born Guthrie — the true godfather — moved his mordant guitar and plaintive protest poetry to the Village. Thus the stage was set for Dylan — a Minnesota twerp with a predilection for mimicry and rock ’n’ roll and an ear for the mythopoetic, who became the Big Bob upon arrival in the Big Apple.

All of which is a hearty intro to the highly romanticized scene inhabited, disassembled, disemboweled and sold as product by Dylan and his manager Albert Grossman in David Hadju’s new grippingly gossipy book Postively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña (Farrar, Straus, Giroux). It’s a scene that was finally and fatally rocked out upon, as displayed in D.A. Pennebaker’s grainy gab-fest documentary DVD Don’t Look Back (Docurama).

Dylan of course never has looked back. While most of the world was celebrating his 60th birthday in dry, sermonic texts and craggy cover songs (ugh), the master of the universe was preparing his new CD, Love and Theft (Columbia), for September release, a gently grinding hard folk whir sped up and cooled down by his coarse road band which he fronts with often savage guitar licks — a six-string sound finally as effective as his crusted vocals and reverent phraseology.

It is a shame the world won’t be as excited about Dave Van Ronk, the grandfatherly centerpiece of Washington Square, the intellectual songwriter and manic git-picker who gave Dylan his start. His new Sweet & Lowdown (Justin Time) is raw and funny and charmingly literate. It’s also certain that new Dylan oceanic epics like "Floater" and "Highwater For Charlie Patton" will overshadow the sanctified soliloquies of Odetta’s new Looking For a Home. A shame. Since 1954’s spartan folk-gospel classic The Tin Angel, this spiritual daughter of Paul Robeson and Bessie Smith has made conversational folk music with feminine grace. Her age (she’s in her early 70s) deters neither her mezzo-soprano nor her interpretive skills in essaying another spiritual godfather — Leadbelly.

But hey, that’s showbiz.

And that’s exactly what Bob Dylan brought to indigenous American folk and protest sounds. In a truly cynical cycle of greed and betrayal, Dylan and Grossman — by the time they hit Britain for the bullying, bitchy tour of the U.K. portrayed in Don’t Look Back— had all but turned protest folk into mere entertainment, emptying it of all original spirit.

Sure, all underground music gets co-opted. But here the co-opting was an insider job: Dylan bloodlustingly barreling his way through death-bound Woody Guthrie’s bedroom, befriending the dying emphysemic so his own legend would grow, and eventually doing likewise to good friends who treated the poor Minnesota Elvis copycat like a hyper-godlike waif.

Joe Strummer once wrote, "You think it’s funny turning rebellion into money?" Dylan would’ve answered heck no. Folk music’s a serious business. Let’s cash out.

The heartache of folk’s death — the demise of serious text and humorous poetry, of the lyrical soul that was folk’s humanity — is beautifully documented, too, in Fred Goodman’s crisp quick read, The Mansion On The Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen and the Head-On Collision of Rock and Commerce, that will completely blindside all faith you’ve held in rock. But it’s in Hadju’s Positively 4th Street that you get the real sense of fucked-over romances and near-thieving scenarios.

Through Positively and Washington, we see and hear people transformed by monster Bob. We see the wolfman-esque transformation from Zimmerman to Dylan. We see Dylan meeting Washington Square’s prominent respected folkies (Van Ronk, Carolyn Hester, Phil Ochs), how he impresses them with his poetry, his wild youth. He not only sucks them dry and leaves them in the lurch; Dylan left these people spiritually bankrupt — confused as to their own place in the folk world.

Oh, and then he killed off folk, the one truly bohemian place left. (Remember, Dylan got a contract mere months after arriving in NYC — with a huge label — when these folks struggled for years to even get little indie label deals.) By the time we get to Pennebaker’s masterful mirth ’n’ maudlin-packed Don’t Look Back, Dylan’s transformation is complete. Folk has turned into big-time concert tours. Wash Square is made irrelevant. And together they make the first rock video that would become the title of Hadju’s book. Now, that’s synergistic!

So what did we learn: that Dylan and Grossman, by fucking the corpse of Woody Guthrie, turned the folk scene that adored him sour, made Washington Square’s once-altruistic artisans money-hungry so that they would devour each other, and forever gave whining Joan Baez a forum for the lovelorn. Yecch. Then Dylan dumped Grossman, dumped Baez, moved onto rock ’n’ roll, destroyed Canadian folkies (the Band), beat his wife, saved Hurricane Carter so that they could swap wife-beating tales, fell off a motorcycle, became a Christian, dated Raquel Welch, birthed Jakob — the Wallflower in those Coke commercials — starred in Band Of The Hand and won the Oscar Vincent Price never would for the same mustache. And for this he’s the greatest living American lyricist? Loving? Thieving?