I recently got an email from a man in Italy named Mauricio Acerbo. At first it puzzled me because my memory is now a colander. I thought I’d once written a review of Bob Dylan’s album “Rough & Rowdy Ways,” not the piece referred to in the email. Here's our exchange:
MA: Dear Fred, I read your article of yours on Bob Dylan and Karl Marx in Counterpunch . I'm a communist and at the same time an admirer of Dylan. So I would like to understand better. I have always had the feeling that during the 1960s Dylan went -as happened to so many in recent decades- from an idealistic enthusiasm for the causes championed by communists, to a crisis resulting from a growing awareness of the crimes of Stalinism. I see this shift in Dylan in the 1965 records with electric guitars. It seems to me that Dylan moved from the initial inspiration of personalities like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger to a critical vision like that of Allen Ginsberg. Not surprisingly, Ginsberg appreciated the electric turn and the lyrics that were no longer immediately political but much more “beat.” The beat poets - Kerouac and Ginsberg - had been communists but had moved away from Marxism-Leninism by the late 1940s. It seems to me that Dylan contemporarily discovered anti-communist (it would be better to say anti-Stalinist) literature, the Koestler quote in It's alright ma (Darkness at the break of noon) being evidence of this.
FG: The parents of his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, were CPers, and Suze influenced him for sure. His friend Dave Van Rank was a Trotsky fan, so he would have gotten an exposure to that perspective, too. Koestler's book was a bestseller when we were coming of age. Bob might have heard the phrase and grabbed it without having read the book.
MA: We could see his changes from 1964 onward in lyrics as a leap beyond an overly zdanovian version dl the role of popular song. but in this in addition to the beat generation he may also have been inspired by the avant-garde tradition of twentieth-century communist artists. i have read that he was fond of Pablo Picasso's painting. It seems to me, however, that - as in Ginsberg's case - distancing oneself from Communism did not mean abandoning progressive positions and even courageous stances. This is evidenced by songs such as “George Jackson”
FG: Homage to Leadbelly. Probably written in 15 minutes.
MA: Or “Hurricane”
FG: Great song. You don't have to be a Marxist to denounce police frame-ups.
MA: Or in the 1980s “Unions sundown.”
FG: Now that's an explicitly political song. And there's another song, maybe on Tempest, where the boss wants to hire "the cheapest labor money can buy." Meaning… Dylan understands capitalism as well as Drs Gramsci and Marcuse ever did.
MA: In short, as Ginsberg wrote in the liner notes to Desire, Dylan has periodically returned to writing “songs of redemption.” From what you write, however, it seems to me that you intend to argue that our poet has become a religious reactionary.
FG: Not my point at all. I think he knows where it's at.
MA: I confess that the records of the Christian religious turn I have never listened to carefully.
FG: They are some of the most radical politically. "When you gonna wake up?"
MA: I would like to understand your opinion better. Let me conclude by saying that I am a democratic communist in the Italian tradition of Antonio Gramsci and as Herbert Marcuse wrote I think that a democratic communism other than Stalinist and post-Stalinist communism is possible, which I would more correctly call state socialism with its corollary of Marxist-Leninist ideology.
FG: Here's a piece about Dylan's politics way back when: https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/11/24/highway-66-revisited/ From where are you writing? Are you a student? A worker? Have you read Elena Ferrante? If so, what do you think? I never met him but I think of Bob Dylan as My Brilliant Friend.
MA: I'm the national secretary of the Communist Refoundation Party of Italy (http://www.rifondazione.it/). I have always been a music lover and for decades a radio host and DJ. In 1980 I founded a communist youth club named in honoring Wood Guthrie. Even though I was a boy in the era of punk and post-punk, I have always cultivated a parallel interest in the music of the 1960s. I always saw for example the Dylan of 1965 as an antelitteram punk. I have always had a particular interest for the history of your workers movement, the Beat Generation, the counterculture and the movement in the US. I lectured for years on Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg, Gar Snyder and ecology, IWW and many other things. Dylan has always been a constant interest for me.
FG: Was Togliatti a real Stalinist or might he have been an Italian Tito? Here's a song explaining where I'm at. https://fredgardner.bandcamp.com/track/exit-stage-left
MA: Togliatti is a complex figure. He was actually close to Bucharin but at some point realized that it was not possible to save the party except by conforming to Stalin's directives. It should be kept in mind that he was Gramsci's comrade from his younger years and therefore his political culture was more sophisticated than the crude Stalinist Marxism-Leninism. Togliatti was certainly a Stalinist, in the sense of loyal to Stalin and the USSR, but because of his intelligence and culture he was able to carve out a relatively original role for himself. This is demonstrated by his elaboration with Dimitrov of the Popular Front strategy and then the elaboration of an Italian way to socialism that distanced itself in fact from the USSR model. Lukacs called him "the greatest tactician of the Third International." Certainly for him a break with the country that had first undertaken the transition to socialism was not possible. Back in Italy he elaborated a democratic vision of socialism, rooted in the traditions of our labor movement and the progressive currents of our national history, and it seems to me that in fact in his work he went beyond Tito because he assumed the principle of political pluralism. He is a controversial figure who has always been attacked by the extreme right and liberal anti-communists as well as the extreme left who blamed him for giving up the revolution. Togliatti already in 1943, based on Gramsci's Notebooks, had said that in Italy we should not do as in Russia.
FG: America was great in many ways for many people in the 20th century. The post office and the public school system, to name two. Bob Dylan’s statement when he accepted the Nobel Prize For Literature is a testament to the education provided at a public high school in a little Minnesota town. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zf04vnVPfM&t=3s
This is not Dylanology which is the extrapolation of Bob’s poetry.
Weberman… A.J. Weberman… This is the guy who used to root through Bob Dylan’s garbage in Greenwich Village!
I didn’t know you could extrapolate poetry (or own a word). Can I call it Dylanalogy?
The poster wants us to believe he’s that A.J. Weberman, but could simply be some anonymous wag riffing off the title of your piece and Weberman’s pamphlet Dylanology. I’m leaning toward anonymous fake, the genuine Weberman would be less laconic.
How many roads*? How many jobs can a (Black) man undertake before you realize he can amount to nothing more than a man servant? Man: “A male servant or subordinate” as in the novel Robinson Caruso or as portrayed by Hollywood in the character Stepin Fetchit, a befuddled, mumbling, shiftless fool. If man didn’t have two meanings it would be redundant. / How many sea’s – countries – must a White Dove – a European immigrant – white is important here. Who ever heard of a black dove? / traverse before she is raped and sleeps as in “sleep together” – have sexual relations but this time on the sandy ground. In other words how long will she be in America before she is raped by a freed slave. How many times must some people who behave in a way that you cannot predict, often with serious or damaging consequences – loose cannons fly off the handle: Informal become suddenly enraged Before they’re forever banned? Before the Negroes are banned from interacting with Whites and are segregated as they were during Jim Crow.
The South African apartheid regime used banning as a repressive extra-judicial measure against its political opponents from 1948–1994. The legislative authority for banning orders was the Suppression of Communism Act, 1950, which defined almost all opposition to the ruling National Party as communistic. The answer, my friend, is a good ole fashioned necktie party, string ‘em up, and watch ‘em blowin’ in the wind.
Poem follows plot of Birth of a Nation
Well, can’t say I quite grasp what y’all talkin’ about poor Bob here, he has always refused all labels, esp political, but on a more local level here’s a little slice from West Marin, c1973….
Peter Rowan: I had moved to Stinson Beach on the coast, north of San Francisco, where I was reunited with Earth Opera partner David Grisman. David was producing my two younger brothers, Christopher and Lorin, for Columbia Records. Dave and I were starting to jam with Jerry Garcia in what became the bluegrass band, Old & In The Way.
I got a call from Seatrain lyricist, Jim Roberts, over in Bolinas. Bob Dylan had shown up at his door. [He] must have been on a walkabout from life as a rock and roller! Jim said that Bob was looking to replace his favourite guitar, which had been stolen. I had my treasured 1936 Martin 000 Sunburst guitar and [he wanted to know] did I maybe want to sell it to Bob? Well, Bob got on the line and we talked. But I still thought it was a hoax, a prank, a joke on me.
I gave Bob directions how to find my place, Old Sheriff Selmer’s barn-workshop-home. ‘Yeah, ya just follow the Bolinas Lagoon south and turn at the first unpaved road that heads towards the ocean, Stinson Beach. Call from the phone booth right there.’ So he called. ‘Okay, ya see that wooden tower just to your right? Drive up and park in front of it, the big yellow barn. Calle del Ribera. That’s me upstairs in the window!’
I watched the blue van pull up. Out stepped a man in brown corduroy clothes and cap. I watched him find his way and listened to his footsteps on the wooden stairs. In the room was my partner Leslie, and Milan and Mimi Melvin (aka Fariña), just returned from Tibet. We were used to visits from various world travellers and alias members of the Free Mexican Airforce. We waited. Only Bob’s nose entered the doorway, sensing like radar the vibes! I went to greet him, he seemed taller than expected, wearing shades. ‘Someplace we can go?’ he asked quietly. We went downstairs to the empty front room with ocean light filling it. We both were wearing Ray-Ban shades against the glare of the wave-tossed sea outside.
I took the old Martin 000 out of the case and handed it to him. He strummed it gently and hummed a melody. He handed it back and said, ‘Here, you play it.’ Really? So I sang him one of my songs, and asked him for one. He took the guitar and started to sing all the material from the unreleased Blood On The Tracks. We sat there for hours trading songs. The ocean outside with wild-horse waves, the glinting afternoon light reflecting on the old wooden walls of the room. It grew dark, and still the songs came! My brother [Lorin] showed up. It was dark and the candle lit, and still he wore his shades, so I kept mine on! Upstairs was silent, not a shoe scrape. ‘Hey, ya know where Jerry Garcia lives?’ And he went on his way in the blue van …
Late the next day I went up to Garcia’s house and his wife Caroline – [the] ‘Mountain Girl’ – and I were talking. I tapped an ash into a full ashtray and she said, ‘Careful, those butts are Dylan’s cigarettes!’