The Judas! Interview

I was fortunate enough to interview Mike Marqusee earlier in the year at the home of David and Marie Bristow. An engaging conversationalist, Mike discussed all manner of Dylan topics at length and this is an edited version of what went down that morning. We hope to bring you further extracts in later issues.

AM We are going to be talking about your book, Wicked Messenger, but it should be noted firstly that this grew out of an earlier publication, Chimes Of Freedom which was a hardback only release. And that came out, if my memory serves well, at a time when we were flooded with Dylan books.  

MM The Christopher Ricks book in particular.

AM And the Christopher Ricks’ book was covered everywhere and there was little scope to review all the others. Despite being impressed by Wicked Messenger I ended up pulling my review and merely recommending it in the editorial for the Judas! issue of the time. I presume all this was galling for you?

MM Well these things happen in publishing and it was just a bit of bad luck the book actually came out 6 weeks after Christopher Ricks’s which was the absolutely worst time, because if it had come out at the same time then it might have got picked up in the reviews but, as I say, these things happen. 

It was probably because of that that the publisher, Seven Stories Press, wanted to re-package and re-design, because they felt it hadn’t happened properly and I agreed with them that it had not reached its maximum potential audience. Also, in the meantime, Chronicles had come out and Masked And Anonymous and both of those raised so many questions that were pertinent to everything I had written in the earlier version that it seemed ridiculous not to go back and do it again. So, the publishers asked me to go back and expand the book. I took advantage of that opportunity to make a few corrections which Dylan fans had kindly pointed out to me, as they are wont to do, and also to refine a few of the observations and to add material in response to some of the comments I had from the earlier edition, and then to re-title. 

I love the old title but I think this is better because ‘wicked messenger’ is a little more expressive of what the book is about and of the tone of the book. It is about the tensions within Dylan’s work and within the movement, the social movement, and how they interacted. 

Anyway the new material of the book deals with Masked And Anonymous and Chronicles someways, but also, one thing that quite a few Dylan fans took me up on from the first book was that, I was very dismissive of Nashville Skyline and I wanted to respond to that. I have to say, I still think it’s a pretty mediocre album. Although there are some extremely well written songs on it, this guy could produce a slickly written song in almost any genre at almost any time of his life and I looked to Bob Dylan for more than that. Other than that, Nashville Skyline is weak also because it is only 27 minutes long and I can assure you that in 1969 if you were going to spend that much money on an album for that much time, it was a rip off.

In Chronicles he describes it as ‘tame and house-broken’ version of country music but I also felt that that wonderful relationship between Dylan and country tradition was kind of slanted in the first version so I went back and talked a bit more about Hank Williams’ and Johnny Cash’s influence on him. I love country music but I actually like the raw and difficult country music, whereas in Nashville Skyline Dylan is producing something more slick than the tradition which is most interesting to me.

Another couple of things added in Wicked Messenger are in the whole section that dealt with the late 60’s. This was definitely always the most difficult to address and I think you said that and when you wrote about that I was fascinated. I realised that its essence is partly the subject matter and I had not quite found my way through that so I went back and revised some of that. So, see what you think of the new bits. Also, I added some things to it, not only stuff about country music, but a bit about Frank Zappa because I was interested in particular in what you might call the ‘counter-counter-cultural expressions of 1968’; those people who are clearly inside the movement of rebellion against conventional society – Dylan and Frank Zappa and the Band – but who had become pretty scathingly irritated by this counter-culture and many of its indulgences which I completely understand. I am a big fan of We Are Only In It For The Money; it’s a spectacular album and of course it’s produced by Tom Wilson so there is definitely a connection with Dylan there. And it’s something I wanted to juxtapose to John Wesley Harding as responses that were very ambivalent and very profound to a deep social crisis; incomplete but that’s okay with me.

AM You make the connection very strongly in the book between Dylan and Zappa. Zappa’s quotes had me laughing; they brought back a number of memories, I expect?

Hey punk, where you going with those beads around your neck?
I’m goin’ to the shrink so he can help me be a nervous wreck.’

I’ll buy some beads, some feathers and bells and a book of Indian lore
I will ask the chamber of commerce how to get to Haight Street and smoke an awful lot of dope.
I will dance around barefoot
I will love everyone,
I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street

MM I had not listened to that in quite a while. Actually, when it came out, I listened to it non-stop. As a kid, it was my bible. I went to a school where that was exactly that kind of high school that he dropped out of, so I could relate. I mean, just putting beads around your neck and smoking dope doesn’t make you any better than your daddy. ‘Daddy is a fascist but you’re a hippy fascist’, that was challenging, really challenging.

AM And he even covers the hair thing, singing that it doesn’t matter if you’ve got long hair or short hair, which seemed such a great divide at the time but in the long term has proved so irrelevant as to be risible.

Who cares if hair is long or short or sprayed or partly gray
We know that hair ain’t where it’s at

MM That is the same stylistic polarization which I think is what made Dylan extremely uneasy in the late 60’s and rightly so. I think the conclusions he drew from it were wrong in some ways. But I think the fault of our movement especially in the States, less so here, was that it became an ‘us’ and ‘them’ movement, and you were either ‘hip’ or ‘straight’, you were either radical or reactionary. The reality is that the times were complicated – the point I am trying to make in the book is that all kinds of people were moving out of their fixed positions but at different rates, with different emphasis, and we didn’t exactly make the move welcoming to them at all times. I mean, Dylan was right to be irritated with us.

AM Yes, and his comments in Chronicles leave no doubt as to how irritated. One thing is important to point out for the readers who already have Chimes Of Freedom and who were wondering about whether to buy the updated version. And that is, you also do now have Chronicles quotes throughout and I find those made a huge difference. Actually, I was thinking I was going to be buying the same book with a couple of extra chapters but the Chronicles quotes on the way through are just a goldmine as they support the ongoing arguments.

MM I kept reading Chronicles and it was irresistible not to type them back in and I think in some ways they are more considered than anything else he has said. Which doesn’t of course, mean they are true but rather what he wants people to see as the authorized version, so they carry weight. And there are a few other things I added too, which are things I picked up subsequently.

Like the famous gig in Greenwood, Mississippi from where there was that one clip in Dont Look Back when he sings ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’ at Silas Magee’s farm. This is something that turns up in lots of Dylan books, it’s a farm just outside of Greenwood. Who was this guy? Well the late Stokeley Carmichael has published an autobiography in which he describes the Magee family at great length. He stayed with them, he wasn’t there the week that Dylan was there, but he was there. I put it in the book, just briefly. This was a black family who owned their own land which was unusual and that gave them autonomy from the white system and these guys never went anywhere without shotguns because they had to defend themselves. Carmichael describes them as the most ‘stand up’ black people he had ever met in the South. It is only a few sentences but for me it enriched the picture.

The other thing that I hadn’t read before I wrote the first edition and I have now referred to it, is Ed Cray’s biography of Woody Guthrie which I highly recommend. It is much better than the Joe Klein one. It’s not well written, but it is much better researched and it comes up with a great line about Woody that I couldn’t resist that, it sums up my feelings anyway.  The Ed Cray book is great.

AM My next question is going to be about what I think is possibly the core message of the book. It’s from page 51 of the book and I think it is the central feature, this is what you wrote:
The freedom songs, more even than the example of Guthrie, inspired Dylan to adapt traditional material to new ends, specifically the ends of political intervention. It was the great participatory drama of the civil rights movement that infused Dylan, and others, with the desire, confidence, and capacity to make the old traditions anew, as Alan Lomax had demanded. It also stirred deeper longings. ‘Singing voiced as studying the basic position of the movement, of taking action on your life;’ said protests, Johnson Reagon. That mingling of the movement, the songs and the lure of self-fulfilment unleashed the creative energies of the folk revival and its major artist.

MM That is what I wanted to say about, as it were, Dylan’s first, topical, period. I don’t think it exhausts what happens from 64, 65 on other elements come into it. That sums what I want to say about what makes Dylan, how Dylan became such a great author of protest songs.
 
AM It’s almost unfashionable nowadays to read about Dylan as a political songwriter, partly because the things he has said, such as his ‘Masters of War’ comments, claiming it was not anti-war…

MM I feel that people are too willing to accept, in particular in quality Dylan biographies… people want to be as hip as they think Dylan was in 65 & 66 – and no one can be more hip than Dylan was then – and to that end they take for granted his sneering repudiation of his previous incarnation.

I don’t blame him for that, that was his strategy for survival and he had to pursue but at this stage the argument between the political and the anti (or less) political Dylan or the protest Dylan is completely redundant. All of these things brought out of different facets, essential facets, of a really great artist and I wouldn’t want to do without any of it. I think he was an incredibly great writer of political song. And the proof of that is that he wrote, for example, ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ which might be the best of all. It is something that anyone that hears that is immediately struck and moved by. I have watched young people listen to that for the first time and they are completely bound up with the story and it’s message about institutionalized race and class injustice.  You can go to a park here in Harringay and you will see some of the same stuff going down and it was that ability to find in the particular something that was universal that made him a great artist at that time. But even though there is definitely a change between the classic protest Dylan, which is really all of 20 months of his life, and what comes after, I also think there is continuity that underlines compulsions and concerns and I try to talk about that in the book.