Unit 2 The United States of America in the 1960s
Bob Dylan, the Beat Generation, and the Counter-cultural Movement
Self Portrait by Bob Dylan (1970)
Introduction to
Bob Dylan (1941-): the Song-Dance Man in the 1960s’
American Culture

Bob Dylan:
I had ambition to set out and find like an
Odyssey of going home somewhere I set out to find this home that I’d left a while back; I couldn’t remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way home there. And encountering what I remembered on the way, was how I envisioned it all. I didn’t really have any ambition at all. I was born far from where I’m supposed to be, and I’m on my way home. You know---.
(From the film No Direction Home )

Conference in Chicago in December, 1965
Reporter: “Do you think of yourself primarily as a singer or a poet?”
Dylan: “I think of myself more as a song and dance man , you know.”
Dylan: “I didn’t consider myself as a song writer at all, but I need to wrote that and I needed to sing it. So that’s why I needed to write it. ’Cause it hadn’t been written and that’s what I needed to say.”
“I’m only Bob Dylan when I have to be Bob Dylan.”
“Most of the time I’m just myself.”

I. Before Dylan’s appearance: the Beat Generation and the
Folk song tradition
A. Beat Generation in the 1950s: Allen Ginsberg
“Beat” means beat down and/or beatific. It was a movement that promoted freedom of the self in the ideal classless society.
Ginsberg’s most famous two poems can be regarded as the bible of the Beat counterculture.

“Howl”
(1955 ~ 56)
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, […]
“America”
(1956)
America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
[….]

B. Folksongs Tradition and the folk-song revival of the late
1950s and the 60s: Woody Guthrie
The folk music revival of the late 1950s and the 1960s was a discrete cultural phenomenon largely supported by young, relatively affluent, well-educated members of the middle classes as an alternative to mass popular entertainment. It was a time of reinterpretation, when a new generation became immersed in a journey of cultural discovery through music on recording, in coffeehouses, on street corners, in dormitories, in living rooms, at folk festival, and anywhere else young people gather. (Millie Rahn, “The Folk Revival,”
American Popular Music , 193)

Wood Guthrie (1912 - 1967)
The representative figure of the folk-song revival movement.
His famous songs, the Dust Bowel Ballads , precisely depicted the devastation of the 1930s’ Dust Bowel event.
And his other song, “This land is your land,” also sang the voices of the oppressed people in the
American society and searched for the new image of the American identity.

“This land is your land”
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me
As I was walking a ribbon of highway
I saw above me an endless skyway
I saw below me a golden valley
This land was made for you and me
[….]

• Both of Guthrie and Dylan were strongly influenced and inspired by the blues, folk song, country music, and etc..
• Mark Spoelstra, a singer and song writer:
“Like, Woody was very important to both of us. Bob, I think, wanted to be more like Woody than I did. He was able to adapt a kind of theater about himself. Actually , the very first time that I met him, he was really acting, in a way. And that was good because you can go anywhere when you’re somebody else.”

• Dave Van Ronk:
“The folk revival was postponed by almost 10 years by the witch hunt. I mean when US
Army publishes pamphlets on how to spot a communist that have lines in them like, ‘He will sometimes play the guitar.’ That kind of thing had a very repressive and suppressive effect. ”
“By the time McCarthy, I think, started to wane, the folk music thing started to come up.”

II. “Bob Dylan” on the stage of the 1960s: Who is the man called “BOB DYLAN?”
A. Minnesota Stage:
1. Robert Allen Zimmerman, born in Duluth, north
Minnesota, on May 24 th , 1941, the son of Abraham and
Beatrice Zimmerman.
2. His parents were descended from East European Jews, immigrated before WWI.
3. Hibbing: a typical American country place where Dylan spent most of his adolescent times; a cold, conservative, boring Iron Range where Robert completed his junior and high school education in
1959. Mostly learned pop culture from radios and TVs.

4. Enrolled at the University of Minneapolis in 1960, but soon abandoned the degree.
a. Started using the name “Bob Dylan”
5. Turning Moment of Dylan: First contact with Woody
Guthrie’s music, the poet of dust bowl and of folksong tradition
6. Left Minneapolis and bound for Greenwich Village, New
York City on January 1961.
Dylan: “I don’t know folk music was delivering me something, which was the way I always felt about life, you know, and people, and institutions, and ideology, and it was just , you know, uncovering it all .”

B. New York Stage:
• Dylan wrote a fictionalized autobiography to Izzy Young, the owner of the Folklore center:
I was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941. Move to Dakota, Kansas,
North Dakota for a little bit, started playing in carnival when I was 14 with guitar and Piano. Arvella Grary taught him blues songs; a blind street singer from Chicago about four or five years ago used to know a guy name Mance Lipscomb from Navasota, Texas, listened to him a lot, met him through his grandson, a rock ‘n’ roller.”

1. Folk song period: 1961 ~ 1963
• Self Learning and performing in Greenwich Village folk clubs like Gaslight Club etc..
• Dylan appeared at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1961.
• 1962 His first album, Bob Dylan , in which the song
“Blowin’ in the Wind” became the greatest hit and the anthem of the 60s’ culture.
• 1963 The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Newport Folk Festival:
“When the Ship Comes In” / “We
Shall Overcome”

• Awarded by The Emergency Civil Liberties Union
• Dylan’s speech to the members:
“I look down to see the people that are governing me and make my rules, and they haven’t got any hair on their head. I get very uptight about it. There’s no black and white, left and right to me anymore. There only up and down, and down is very close to the ground. And I’m trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial, such as politics. ”
• 1964 Newport Folk Festival
• Dylan: “I wrote the songs to perform the songs, and I needed to sing, like, in that language.”

2. Transitional period: 1963 ~ 1964

• Moving from the theme of social protest toward self introspection
• 1964: Another Side of Bob Dylan and The Times They
Are A-Changin' a. Concert at Philharmonic Hall in 1964: A Time Before the
Storm
Dylan: “I wrote a lot of songs in a quick amount of time. I could do that then, because the process was new to me.
I felt like I’d discovered something no one else had ever discovered and I was in a sort of an arena artistically that no one else had ever been in before, ever, although I might have been wrong about that.”

Dylan: “In taking all the elements that I’ve ever known, to make wide-sweeping statements which conveyed a feeling that was in the general essence of the spirit of the times. I think I managed to do that I thought that I needed to press on and get as far into it as I could.”

3. The Turn From Acoustic to Electric Set: Going “Electric” from 1965
• “Electrified folk rock in the mid- and later 1960s and
1970s”
• Harold Leventhal, the folk manager and concert promoter:
“Suddenly to have stopped; that meant that he was going away as getting away from to his and that bother us.”
Dylan: “An artist has got to be careful, never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s ‘at’ somewhere. You always have to realize that you’re constantly in the state of becoming. You know. And as long as you can stay in that realm, you’ll sort of be all right. I can’t selfanalyze my own work, and I wasn’t going to cater to the crowd, because I know certain people would like it and certain people didn’t like it. I had gotten in the door where no one was looking. I was in there now and there was nothing; anybody from then no could ever do about it.”

a. 1965 Newport Folk Festival: plugged his guitar
Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited
• a turmoil at the concert started from “Maggie’s Farm”
• Peter Seeger: “if I got an axe, I’d chop the mike cable right now.” b. A Press Conference in Chicago in December, 1965
• Promoting Rock-music elements in his songs
• Highway 61 Revisited (1965): Dylan turned fully to rock music.
• “Like A Rolling Stone” (1965): a hallmark of rock music c. Plugged His Music:
• Dylan: “It was electric but doesn’t necessary mean that it’s modernized just because it’s electric. You know. It was like a country music was electric too.”

4. “American Invasion”: Dylan in the World Tour a. England’s trip:
• Booing and Praising from the audience:
• In France: A French asked
Dylan why he changed and thought that his first album was better than the others.
Dylan replied, “Is he American?
If not, he can’t understand.”

London, 1966. Booing! Huge American flag behind Dylan.
• “Go home. Get off, Bobby.”
• “Traitor! Why don’t you hear yourself?”
• “He’s fake.”
• “We paid to see a flipping folk singer not a big group.”

New Castle, England, May 21, 1966.
• “He’s just changed altogether. He’s changed from what he was. He’s not the same as what he was at first. You don’t even recognize him. NO.”
• “You know, I thought he just couldn’t improve if he tried.
Then the next thing that happened was he went really commercial with this backing group. And I didn’t like that very much. I don’t know what he’s trying to do. I think he’s conceding, you know, to some sort of popular taste.
I think it’s a bad thing. I think he’s prostituting himself.”
• “I don’t think the spirit of the Dylan songs has been portrayed with this incredibly corny group behind him. I like his earlier records as on this Freewheelin’ LP, etc..
But this, I just can’t stick.”

C. After the motorcycle crash on July 29, 1966: “But to live outside the law, you must be honest.”
1. The metamorphosis of Dylan’s songs: Away from the early “Dylan” a. The Influence of Country Music:
John Wesley Harding (1967) and Nashville Skyline
(1969)
2. Dylan in the 1970s a.
Self Portrait (1970) and New Morning (1970) b. A prose and poetry assemblage, Tarantula (1971) c. Acted in the film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)
Blood on the Tracks (1975) and later Desire (1976) got a commercial success.

3. Dylan in the 1980s
Demonstrating “his newfound Christian faith” Saved
(1980)
4. Dylan in the 1990s a. The folk-oriented
World Gone Wrong (1993) was awarded a traditional-folk Grammy
Award b. Time out of Mind (1997) won the album-of-the-year
Grammy.

5. After 2000 a. In 2001 Dylan won an Academy Award for his song
"Things Have Changed" from the film Wonder Boys
(2000).
b. Love and Theft (2001; Grammy Award) c. The feature-length documentary No Direction Home
(2005), directed by Martin Scorsese d.
Modern Times (2006), debuted at number one on the
Billboard Top 200 Albums chart. e. Awarded Pulitzer Prize in 2008, "for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."

III. The language power of Dylan’s lyrics: the folk song, Civil
Right Movement and the American Culture.
Allen Ginsberg:
“the torch [the spirit of ‘beatnik’] had been passed to another generation from earlier bohemian or beat illumination and selfempowerment.”
• 1961 John Fitzgerald Kennedy won the presidential election as the 35th President of the United States on January 20, 1961.
Peace Corps created by Pres. Kennedy
• 1962 The Cuban Missile Crisis began on October 14,
1962.

• 1963 Lyndon Johnson becomes President of the United
States
• 1964 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was amended to include gender.
The Beatles arrive at John F. Kennedy International
Airport on February 7 th , 1964. (British Invasion)
Vietnam War (1964-1973)
• 1965 Malcolm X was assassinated.
American’s direct involvement in the Vietnam War
• 1968 Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, in
Memphis, Tennessee.
Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June 6.

• 1969 The success of the Apollo 11 mission of landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969.
Woodstock music festival
A. Civil Right Movement:
• Suze: “These were traumatic times to live through. And just the way I felt was the insane. It was insane. Why should this be happening? And I’m sure Bob had the same thing. You just can’t live through this. You live in your own little world and your own interests, but the other worlds is definitely part of it.”
• Peter Yarrow on “March on Washington” on August 1963:
“it was a moment of the confirmation of the possibility of that hope become reality. That was the moment of recognition of what people could do to change history.”

• Bob Dylan: “I’m not a topical song writer. No. I don’t really even like that word. I mean it’s not a song about a certain event; it’s beyond that.”
(WFMT Radio, Chicago, 1963)
• Dylan: “I was up close when King was giving that speech. To this day it still affects me in a profound way. I looked out the podium , I looked out at the crowd and I remember thinking myself!
Man, I’ve never seen such a large crowd.”

B. His songs: Protest? Topical Songs?
1. “Master of War” ( The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan 1963)
Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks
[….]

2. “Talkin‘ World War III Blues” ( The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
1963)
Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody’s having them dreams
Everybody sees themselves
Walkin’ around with no one else
Half of the people can be part right all of the time
Some of the people can be all right part of the time
But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that
“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”
I said that

3. “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall” ( The Freewheelin' Bob
Dylan 1963)
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
[….]

4. “Chimes Of Freedom” ( Another Side of Bob Dylan 1964)
Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind
Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind
An’ the unpawned painter behind beyond his rightful time
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
[….]

5. “When the Ship Comes In” ( The Times They Are A-
Changin‘ 1964)
A song will lift
As the mainsail shifts
And the boat drifts on to the shoreline
And the sun will respect
Every face on the deck
The hour that the ship comes in [….]
Then they’ll raise their hands
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered
And like Pharoah’s tribe
They’ll be drownded in the tide
And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered

6. “Only A Pawn in Their Game” ( The Times They Are A-
Changin' 1964)
A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood
A finger fired the trigger to his name
A handle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man’s brain
But he can’t be blamed
He’s only a pawn in their game
[…]

7. “With God On Our Side” ( The Times They Are A-Changin'
1964)
Oh my name it is nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I’s taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that the land that I live in
Has God on its side
[….]

Dylan proved to be a rare rock star who recognized the artificiality of the image, “Bob Dylan” he had helped create, and with his recurrent attempts to set things right, he selfconsciously struggled the dialectic of authenticity and artifice. He disappointed fans and critics at the end of the
1960s when he sought to demystify his earlier work ….
There was some truth here, for Dylan achieved the finest songwriting of this time. (Howard Brick, Age of
Contradiction , 86)

IV. Reference
• Appell, Glenn and David Hemphill. American Popular
Music: A Multicultural History . New York: Thomson &
Wadsworth, 2006.
• Brick, Howard. Age of Contradiction: American thought and Culture in the 1960s . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001.
• Rahin, Millie. “The Folk Revival: Beyond Child’s Canon and Sharp’s Song Catching.”
• American popular Music . Eds. Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey
Melnick. U of Massachusetts Press, 2001.
• Scorsese, Martin. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan . New
York: Apple, 2005.
• Williams, Richard. Dylan: A Man Called Alias . London:
Bloomsbury, 1992.

V. Further reading:
A. Books:
1. Dettmar, Kevin J. H. The Cambridge Companion to
Bob Dylan . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.
B. DVD:
1. Martin Scorsese. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan . New
York: Apple, 2005.
C. Websites:
1. Bob Dylan’s official site: http://www.bobdylan.com/#
2. American Cultural History: http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decade60.html
3. Kamin, Jonathan. “Dylan, Bob.” Grolier Multimedia
Encyclopedia . 2008. Grolier Online. 26 Dec. 2008
<http://gme.grolier.com/cgi-bin/article?assetid=0092130-
0>.