On Watching Patti Smith singing 'Hard Rain' in Stockholm
It is well worth watching, on YouTube, the performance of Bob Dylan’s ‘Hard Rain’ by Patti Smith at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm last Saturday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2SPNT1lwBg
It provokes all kinds of thoughts, which I will come to.
I think I heard this song for the first time in 1964 or 1965, some years after Dylan wrote and first performed it (I am told this was a month *before* the Cuban missile crisis to which many think it was a response).This was when news of the young Hibbing genius was still filtering into our steam-age nation. I was entranced by its ancient rhythm and prophetic tone.
As with all Dylan songs, I found that the more I thought about it the more I wondered whether he was just toying with us, or had a serious point to make. But I decided, at that self-righteous Utopian phase in my life, to believe it was serious, and that it was intended as a warning. I still think it *was* but that Dylan himself has long ceased to be the person who originally wrote it. See his interesting song ‘My Back Pages’ for a general repudiation of his more grandiose earlier attitudes, and presumably of the mainline Communist ideas he got from Suze Rotolo, the rather lovely girl who is shown clutching his arm in the snow in the picture on the cover of ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’. Suze (confusingly pronounced Suzie), who broke up with Dylan in very sad circumstances and died quite recently, in 2011, had been brought up in a Communist home, and there are few places more doggedly unflinchingly Communist than an American Communist home. I quite like (though don’t wholly agree with) her remark, made not long before her death that ‘The sixties were an era that spoke a language of inquiry and curiosity and rebelliousness against the stifling and repressive political and social culture of the decade that preceded it. The new generation causing all the fuss was not driven by the market: we had something to say, not something to sell.’
Adolescents, at least my sort of adolescent, love a bit of doom. The idea that heedless adults have got it all wrong and will be pulled down into a general collapse is appealing to the moody and sulky teen, such as I was.
I suppose it was a good choice for the Stockholm evening (though I would have picked ‘Chimes of Freedom’ as being the song which most sums up what Dylan stands for in the minds of his generation, whatever he might think now) , and others have pointed out that Patti Smith, despite a brief memory lapse, made a good, solemn job of it. In fact, they have pointed out that she probably made a better job of it than Dylan would have done had he turned up. When he performs his old classics now, he tortures them. Patti Smith looked, with her hawk-like, weathered face and in her high white collar, like the rather fearsome pastor of some austere feminist Calvinist sect, if such a thing is possible, which almost anything is nowadays. She also looked very definitely unyoung, as the sixties lot tend to do nowadays, much as it displeases us.
And it is prophetic. Who, hearing the words written in 1962 ‘I saw a young woman whose body was burning’, does not nowadays immediately think of the 1972 picture of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the Vietnamese girl yelling in pain and fear after being (unintentionally) napalmed by her own side as she fled down the road? Well, I do, anyway. The really surprising thing about this is that she survived, but at the time we just thought (I did, anyway) that the lid had come off human barbarism and that the only thing to do was to be against everything that was established. And so I was.
Much of the rest of the song seems to come out of a lost book of the Bible, or at least a lost chapter of ‘Revelation’. And it prophesies devastation and ruin, if in some way we don’t heed the warning. Humph. As it happens, we didn’t heed the warning, and a good thing too. In fact the world is as it is, and not a good deal worse, because we didn’t pay much attention to the implicit nuclear disarmament message that I and plenty of other teenage minds took from it. Those stifling , repressive old Masters of War were quite right to mistrust the Soviet empire, which was in its own way quite capable of any atrocity you care to mention, and for a much worse cause.
And I am still amused by how extremely unpopular it was to take that view (as I came to do in the 1980s) with the Dylan generation. As someone who feared and disliked the Soviet regime and the KGB *when they still existed*, I am endlessly amused to meet people who were indifferent at the time, and who now feign – or genuinely feel – a horror at post-Soviet Russia, who have no idea how bad the USSR was and how (comparatively) harmless Russia is. For they are often the same people who belittled the Soviet threat when it existed.
Just as I was amused to see Ms Smith (who stumbled rather movingly in the song and recovered with what can only be called grace), being reverently heard in Stockholm’s concert hall by an audience of extreme respectability, including royalty. Goodness, if we had foreseen such establishment acceptance back in 1965, we would have been enraged by what we would have seen as the ability of the powerful to co-opt everyone. What was that line from ‘It’s all right, Ma’? I seem to recall it is ‘One who sang with his tongue on fire now gargles in the rat-race choir’.
Yet we would have been wrong. The truth is that the white-tie establishment have more or less adopted the ideas in ‘Hard Rain’, and have certainly adopted those in ‘Blowing in the Wind’. Or at the very least they think they have.
For instance, the modern pseudo-pacifist fury at the atrocities, alleged or actual, of outcast regimes, is the nearest a lot of secular liberals get to real, fire-and-brimstone moral passion. They aren’t allowed to disapprove of anything they themselves do, or that their neighbours do. And all domestic crimes, even including rape and murder and racism, are subject to the liberal Code of Excuses, under which the perpetrators aren’t entirely responsible for what they do, owing to poverty, bad housing, bad parenting or some other thing they couldn’t control.
But a foreign despot who can be accused of atrocities, now there at last is an outlet for all the things the modern liberal needs to feel but can’t. The modern liberal can hate, can rage, can denounce, can demand long prison sentences or even look tactfully the other way if the said despot is actually hanged, and in public too. Remember Saddam? I didn’t see the abolitionists making much of a fuss about that? In fact he can indulge almost all the illicit pleasures of the lynch mob, while still feeling wholly civilised.
Could this explain the performance of the USA’s ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, who speaks (without producing any evidence that I can see) of ‘atrocities’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBFCRNm-zyY and compares events in Aleppo to Halabja, Srbrenica the Rwanda genocide.
WE shall see which will endure. Ms Power’s denunciation, or the retort of the Russian ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, who said Ambassador Power had constructed her statement ‘as if she were Mother Teresa’, mentioned the West’s role in fomenting the Syrian war, and added ‘Please remember what country you represent. Remember your own country’s record before you start opining from the position of moral or any other kind of supremacy. History and God will judge who is guilty of what.’
The world turns upside down and inside out. Bejewelled monarchs applaud anti-authority subversive songs. The United States, no longer the villains of Vietnam, now thunders against the alleged atrocities of others. The Masters of War, in the Pentagon and the State Department, have now become the Protest Song Army, strumming away about the wickedness of brutal dictators.
As I listened to this exchange, this verse from ‘My Back Pages’ seemed to have some relevance. ‘Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth, "rip down all hate!" I screamed. Lies that life is black and white spoke from my skull, I dreamed. Romantic facts of musketeers foundation’d deep, somehow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now’.
While waiting for a new post by our host, I would like to add something I have wanted to mention about Bob Dylan – namely about what Mr Hitchens expressed several times; ‘to suspect that Bob Dylan was having us on, which I think he has been doing for a long time.’ (11 Nov 2016)
I had been thinking whether it was true or not - since I take both gentlemen’s words rather seriously. (I should add that I love and trust my husband’s words first, but of course the Bible is the first of all…. No, I am not joking.)
I was, however, glad to hear that Professor Horace Engdahl depicted so well about this kind of ‘suspicion’ on Mr Dylan with a word ‘alchemical’. I suspect that it has something to do with the art of ‘storytelling’ as Shakespeare was doing as well.
“Even after fifty years of uninterrupted exposure, we are yet to absorb music's equivalent of the fable's Flying Dutchman. He makes good rhymes, said a critic, explaining greatness. And it is true.
His rhyming is *an alchemical substance* that dissolves contexts to create new ones, scarcely containable by the human brain. It was a shock. With the public expecting poppy folk songs, there stood a young man with a guitar, fusing the languages of the street and the bible into a compound that would have made the end of the world seem a superfluous replay.
At the same time, he sang of love with a power of conviction everyone wants to own. All of a sudden, much of the bookish poetry in our world felt anaemic, and the routine song lyrics his colleagues continued to write were like old-fashioned gunpowder following the invention of dynamite.”
(Emphasises are mine. Translated from Swedish by The Nobel Foundation)
Posted by: Ky | 27 December 2016 at 12:50 PM
Or better still, 'rest in pieces'!
Posted by: Alan Thomas | 23 December 2016 at 01:13 PM
Michael Wood
May your case rest in peace.
Posted by: Alan Thomas | 23 December 2016 at 10:19 AM
Alan Thomas..."Jumping to the aid of such supporters appears, to me, to simply add a final tarnish."
There you go again - and I rest my case.
Posted by: Michael Wood | 22 December 2016 at 06:34 PM
Michael Wood
Hardly necessary for me (or any others, come the that) to attempt to besmirch the name of some Brexit supporters when they have, in my view, made such a jolly good job of it themselves. Jumping to the aid of such supporters appears, to me, to simply add a final tarnish.
Posted by: Alan Thomas | 22 December 2016 at 12:11 PM
Alan Thomas..."Well, that does surprise me, as does the fact that you offered a comment without first spending a minute or two finding out the nature of the 'party' in question..."
Come, come, Mr Thomas, quaint I ain't.
A party or group cited by you, entitled, "Britain First", associated with British independence and a member of it with criminality hardly requires googling to see right through your latest attempt to link it all as one and the same to besmirch the good name of the Brexit campaign, again, now does it...?
Or maybe you are unaware that this is what many of your points appear to imply.
Posted by: Michael Wood | 21 December 2016 at 08:01 PM
@ Ian Brendan Bell
"My research is leading me to some pretty dark places ..."
Lilith Vantablack couldn't have put it better, though I say so myself. (Google: 'Lilith' and 'Vantablack' separately and you'll see why).
"The title is (The D:Ream) Delusion..."
Google the term 'How the Ouija works' and you might see just how well this suggestion of mine for a book title really fits in with your concept.
"Wish me luck."
I do wish you luck, 'Lilith', I really do.
Posted by: Kevin 1 | 21 December 2016 at 09:55 AM
Thank you for your guidance in recent times. And for giving Abigail the strength to see the seeds of totalit.. with her own two eyes. Now she has seen it with her own two eyes. Our bond is unbreakable. It might be a bit croaky right now. But I have found my voice and 6000mg a day of whatever drugs the NHS want to push into me will never be able to touch my soul. I love you like your family. And I will always fight for your freedom as well as anybody else, whether they ask for my help or not. IBB
Posted by: Ian Brendan Bell | 21 December 2016 at 06:22 AM
Michael Wood
'...never heard of 'Britain First'...
Well, that does surprise me, as does the fact that you offered a comment without first spending a minute or two finding out the nature of the 'party' in question...
Perhaps I should change my pen name to 'Joe Bloggs', but on second thought, that might possible deny me the pleasure of our little exchanges.
Posted by: Alan Thomas | 20 December 2016 at 12:23 PM
This is a wonderful place to share thoughts that may not make sense to anyone, but I never get shouted down, people's comments are never offensive to my instincts like the sea of mainly Guardian,Metro and Independent 'click-bait' have always been in the Northern chapter of my life. My eyes are open to something that once I saw it, I can never un-see the simple truths you have dangled in front of me. I've been taught by having faith that someone is trying to listen, even if they don't quite know a lot of these comments of someone who is hopeful that the demise of civilisations can be a little less barbaric and intolerant. A fog has lifted. There are fewer and fewer safe havens like this, where respect is earned in a way that can inspire art with a slightly higher purpose than gaining fans and easy insta-respect.
I saw a comment with my name mentioned. And all I can say is if I ever have the courage to write this book in a way that doesn't preach dogma and arrogance, it only asks for people in debate shows to be able to express their opinions without being called a phobe or denier. By dropping examples of how blind we all are to how sinister the next chapter of Britain's dying version of democracy really could be. The title is The D:Ream Delusion. Wish me luck. My research is leading me to some pretty dark areas that are explained probably quite easily by becoming obsessed with documentaries about insect colonies and their inevitable demise. It a case of when, not if. We just have to work harder on the how. I am hoping that reading Great Expectations on a dark stormy Cornish night is a must for the impatience in my justly troubled soul.
How did Prof Brian Cox become a professor with an obe? What really hard obsacles did he really have to face to become Britain's great educator.
Compare that with Albert Einsteins rise to greatness. Imagine Albert Einstein with access to the internet. Think about what problems he could be solving in this age.
What do you think would happen if instead of dishing out mind raping drugs to the mentally ill, they gave these potential independent minded thinkers access to computers and the internet and a chance to unlock the unique properties of their mind in a way comprehensive education just stifles the unconventional minds of future generations. Is it any coincidence that the Science that the like of Hitler relied upon, was quite quick to know it needed to rid it's society of people who stand out from the crowd?
Just a thought or two I felt like putting out there, I hope you have fun ripping my babble apart. I really do. Because if what I'm writing here is easily ripped apart, I can probably get an extra hour of sleep each night.
Posted by: Ian Brendan Bell | 20 December 2016 at 12:14 PM
The article unfairly implies Dylan was an uncritical part of the pacifist politics of the early sixties, in the same way as Suze. Not only was Hard Rain written before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Dylan himself said (in the Studs Terkel interview, I believe) 'it's not a nuclear rain...it's a HARD rain.' The distinction was important to him. Dylan was never a Communist, though he moved in some Communist and Socialist circles (see Dave Van Ronk's comments on this; also his brilliant, underread memoir 'Mayor of MacDougal Street'). Most people close to Dylan at that time have acknowledged that he was either elusive or naive, politically (as Van Ronk comments, it turned out that they were the naive ones). Dylan, and his songs, have mostly resisted being directly applicable or reducible to any one situation or political stance. And, as for associating him with pseudo pacifist self-righteous fury, witness his own lacerating Brechtian (but not socialist) view of such hypocrisy in The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll:
Ah but you, who philosophize disgrace,
And criticise all fears,
Take that rag away from your face,
Now ain't the time for your tears.
Posted by: Robert Duncan | 20 December 2016 at 07:58 AM
@ I B Bell
I'd suggest using a good pen name and follow that up with a catchy book title. Do that and I think you could pretty much get away with writing anything. How about 'How The Ouija Works' by Lilith Vantablack ?
Posted by: Kevin 1 | 19 December 2016 at 09:10 PM
Alan Thomas.."It might also help were you to clarify the motives behind your intervention in this manner. The second paragraph of my post of 18/12 refers.Thanks"
which was.... "Please clarify if your comment was meant as some form of apology (as in 'apologist') for Britain First and its one-time leader, or as some form of attack on me. It might, of course, have been a bit of both."
Having never heard of 'Britain First' - no, it was not an apology for it/them.
Nor was it an attack on you - merely an observation of your ongoing attempts at linking any and all negative news to the Brexit campaign - which I suspect you will now deny.
Posted by: Michael Wood | 19 December 2016 at 08:34 PM
Phillip R
Yes, it can be annoying, but perseverance usually pays off.
Posted by: Alan Thomas | 19 December 2016 at 01:49 PM
Michael Wood
I'm really none the wiser. Whose version of 'face value' should I consider? That of Phillip R, who has never returned to offer any glimmer of light in respect of the two question I raised in my post of 17/12 at 10.58?
As the person involved in this 'trumped up charge', and subsequent imprisonment, pleaded guilty and had previously been convicted for a similar offence (this based on a recent press report) that, at face value, seems to be that.
It might also help were you to clarify the motives behind your intervention in this manner. The second paragraph of my post of 18/12 refers. Thanks
Posted by: Alan Thomas | 19 December 2016 at 12:18 PM
Alan Thomas.."I really cannot make any sense of your post...."
Of course you can, Mr Thomas, 'glisters' is the original word used in the phrase that advises against judging things solely on their face value - you can also work out the rest from that.
Posted by: Michael Wood | 18 December 2016 at 04:34 PM
Michael Wood
A second attempt to respond to your post of 17/12 at 3.38pm:
I really cannot make any sense of your post - the use of a capital 'A' in arbitrary and the archaic version of 'glisten' didn't help either.
Please clarify if your comment was meant as some form of apology (as in 'apologist') for Britain First and its one-time leader, or as some form of attack on me. It might, of course, have been a bit of both.
I can then respond accordingly.
Thanks
Posted by: Alan Thomas | 18 December 2016 at 11:53 AM
"Goodness, if we had foreseen such establishment acceptance"
They haven't accepted it Peter.
They have been driven to accommodate it. Contemporary culture is dying whether in art, writing or music. As Suze says, we had something to say, not sell.
Well our culture is now only selling lies.
The powerful in the audience looked like ivory mannequins and Patti Smith sung like a voice from beyond the grave accusing them. They looked guilty, guilty, guilty.
As for you saying the "Masters of War" were right. Well the time is too short, the "flowers of evil" take time to bloom. We are a sick culture and are being threatened and warned in so many ways.
Posted by: Patrick | 18 December 2016 at 02:03 AM
I'm trying to turn raw and extremely hard to prove truth into a fictional book, do you possess any good tips on revealing all pieces of the puzzle, but avoiding being sued?
IBB
Posted by: I B Bell | 17 December 2016 at 11:35 PM
Horace..."Peter, you wrecked a very interesting article by turning it into yet another puff for the 'sinister tyrant' (your own words from previous blogs, which in this case are totally correct) who runs the Kremlin murder gang. A person who orders the death of opponents including members of your profession, who invades neighbours, steals their land and promotes lies and hate via his troll media outlets, does not deserve the unswerving support you provide. Russia has not had such an implacably evil ruler since Stalin's time."
Horace, in any court faithful to the principles of truth and justice the crimes you list above can be directed at many past and present leaders of the west and would, without doubt, convict them.
The west's 'crimes' include unprovoked invasions of many countries, regime toppling, mass slaughter, murder of innocents as well as untried suspects by drone, creating millions of casualties, destroying cities and countries, lying to their own public and the world in order to wage war, depriving their own nation's vital civil and social services of funds while running up colossal national debts to finance their wars and more, which makes Putin and Russia look good!
Posted by: Michael Wood | 17 December 2016 at 10:11 PM
John Main | 17 December 2016 at 10:11 AM :
*** It has certainly been an interesting week. I heard some bigwig whose name I don’t recall likening the events in Aleppo to the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. ***
That would be 'Plebgate' Mitchell of the Tories.
Fervently keen on the conservation of jihadists; suspiciously so, some might think.
*** I have read about the Warsaw Ghetto and I don’t remember any descriptions of the SS allowing anybody free passage out to a safe enclave where they could renew the fight. ***
Doubt any inhabitants of that Warsaw ghetto would be overly chuffed at being likened to murderously sectarian Al-Nusra terrorists.
*** Yet that is what the BBC and other MSM has been reporting. Convoys of buses ferrying anti-Syrian government forces to rebel-held areas. ***
Strange how there's such mass-media silence about the carnage being inflicted on non-combatants by US forces at Mosul.
Which also seem to have induced many IS / Al-Nusra terrorists to go from there to Palmyra .... a rather big military convoy linking up with others of the same and re-equipped with heavy weapons and tanks somewhere on the way .... all fortuitously not noticed by US drones, airforce, surveillance satellites or special forces.
Or so we are supposed to believe.
Posted by: C. Morrison | 17 December 2016 at 07:05 PM
"Britain First? I thought that fellow recently jailed for the murder of an MP was involved with that lot."
All that glisters... !
The Arbitrary joining of dots can lead to an injudicious pot and kettle phobia, Mr Thomas.
Posted by: Michael Wood | 17 December 2016 at 03:38 PM
Phillip R
Thanks for your reply.
Britain First? I thought that fellow recently jailed for the murder of an MP was involved with that lot. What was this other chap up to? How were the charges against him 'trumped up?
Posted by: Alan Thomas | 17 December 2016 at 10:58 AM
It has certainly been an interesting week. I heard some bigwig whose name I don’t recall likening the events in Aleppo to the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.
I have read about the Warsaw Ghetto and I don’t remember any descriptions of the SS allowing anybody free passage out to a safe enclave where they could renew the fight.
Yet that is what the BBC and other MSM has been reporting. Convoys of buses ferrying anti-Syrian government forces to rebel-held areas.
Posted by: John Main | 17 December 2016 at 10:11 AM
Alan Thomas:
Paul Golding of Britain First.
PTB - 'Powers that be.'
Posted by: Philip R | 17 December 2016 at 06:33 AM