Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

Printer friendly E-mail article Subscribe Order reprints

By SEAN WILENTZ

For 30 years I have tried to write history. It is extremely hard work, but gratifying over the long haul. Landing a Grammy Award nomination for a brief historical piece was never in the cards, but a fluke, the result of strange twists of good fortune.

Forty years ago, as a 13-year-old, I attended a Bob Dylan concert at Philharmonic Hall in New York City. My family ran a bookshop in Greenwich Village that helped nurture the beat poets of the 1950s and the folk revivalists of the early 1960s, and my father, Elias Wilentz, edited The Beat Scene, one of the earliest anthologies of beat poetry. Down from the bookshop, on MacDougal Street, was one of the epicenters of the folk-music explosion, the Folklore Center, run by my father's friend Izzy Young, an outsized enthusiast with an impish grin and a heavy Bronx-Jewish accent. On pleasant Sundays, we'd take family strolls that almost always included a stop at Izzy's place, which was wall-to-wall with records and stringed instruments and had a little room in the back where musicians hung out. My first memories of Bob Dylan are from there, although they are dim, despite my later efforts to brighten them. (Only much later did I learn that Dylan first met Allen Ginsberg, late in 1963, in my uncle's apartment above the bookshop.) Nothing in that setting was anything I had sought out, or had any idea was important, or was going to become important.

By the time I attended the Philharmonic Hall show, I was acutely aware of Bob Dylan's work. A slightly older friend had presented Dylan's second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, to a little knot of kids in my (liberal, Unitarian) church group as if it were a piece of just-revealed scripture. I didn't understand half of the album. Of what I did understand, some of it was funny, some of it was uplifting, and a lot of it was also frightening: The line, "I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin'," from "Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," chilled me. I loved the music and Dylan's sound, the guitar, harmonica, and a voice that I never thought raspy or grating, just different from anything I'd ever heard. Getting the chance to see him in concert was a treat -- and much later proved to be a matter of great luck.

The next turn in the story, decades later, is more mysterious to me. After a long and deep attachment, my interest in Dylan's work faded about the time Shot of Love appeared in 1981. After his early, gripping gospel recordings at the end of the 1970s, Dylan's music sounded to me tired and torn, as if mired in a set of convictions that, lacking deeper faith, were substituting for art. I was drawn back in the early 1990s when he released a couple of albums of traditional ballads and folk tunes, sung in a now aging, melancholy voice, yet with some of the same sonic sensations I recalled from the early records. My father fell mortally ill not long after that, and Dylan's hushed rendition on the second of the albums, World Gone Wrong, of the 1830s-vintage hymn "Lone Pilgrim" brought me tears, and consolation I wouldn't have gone looking for in any church or synagogue.

By now I was writing about the arts as well as about history, and over the next few years I published a few articles about Dylan and his work. Somebody, possibly from the old days, must have noticed, because in 2001 a phone call came from out of the blue asking if I would like to write something about a forthcoming album, called Love and Theft, for the official Dylan Web site. I agreed, with the provision that if I didn't like the album I wouldn't do it. Fortunately I loved what I heard, the people who had contacted me liked what they read, and it was the beginning of a beautiful set of friendships. I wrote more for the Web site over the ensuing months, and took the somewhat facetious title of its "historian-in-residence," a job nobody else seemed to be angling for, its home office suspended in cyberspace.

Sometime in 2002, plans took shape for an official release, as part of a retrospective series, of the tape made on that long-ago night I first heard Bob Dylan in concert. I knew nothing about the project; nor did Dylan's management know I'd attended the show, until, apropos of something I forget, I mentioned it to someone at Dylan's office. Soon after, the offer arrived to write the liner notes for what would become Bob Dylan Live 1964.

It was an intimidating assignment. When he hasn't written the notes himself, Dylan has always managed to land some exceptionally fine writers and experts, including Johnny Cash, Tony Glover, Pete Hamill, Nat Hentoff, Greil Marcus, and Tom Piazza. Could I even come close to their level? I also worried about what it would be like trying to describe a scene from so long ago without sounding either coy or pedantic. How much would I even remember?

The memory part turned out to be easy. Listening to the tape brought back in a rush the feel of the occasion -- the evening's warmth; the golden glow of the still new Philharmonic Hall in the still-under-construction Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; the intimate, sometimes giddy rapport that Dylan had with the audience (unimaginable in today's arena rock concerts); the special thrill of watching Joan Baez walk on stage during the second half of the show to sing some duets; and most of all, the pounding, modal shock of listening to a brand new song that Dylan was then calling "It's Alright Ma, It's Life And Life Only," a song I could only comprehend in shards, but whose images of tongues on fire and glowing plastic Christs were stunning.

As a historian, I felt a responsibility to fill in the larger context: what the world was going through and what Dylan was up to in the autumn of 1964. The murders of the civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi, the first signs that America would escalate its involvement in Vietnam, the successful test of an atomic weapon by Communist China, had all marked the beginning of a scarier phase in national and world affairs. Dylan, meanwhile, had been moving away from the fixed moral position of his earlier work into a more personal and impressionistic vein, and would soon return, though in wholly new ways, to the electrified music that had been his first love as a teenager.

I tried to braid the background together with my memories, hoping to recapture the sense of what it was like to see things through my 13-year-old eyes (and say it with a bit of my 13-year-old voice), while sustaining what authority I have as a hindsight-blessed history professor who is now more than twice as old as Bob Dylan was that night. I tried to evoke the feeling of being a teenage cultural insider, self-consciously nestled as close to the center of hipness as possible, with an edge of callow smugness and little awareness of my own good fortune. Few of us in the audience had worked an honest day in our lives, or come close to getting our skulls cracked defying Jim Crow. But we thought we were advanced and special; and for us, the concert was partly an act of collective self-ratification. I wanted my notes to evoke the joy as well as the folly of that youthful New York moment.

A year later, the notes were nominated for a Grammy, which was another kind of ratification, though the idea of grown-up folly occurred to me as well. The attention that the nomination received surprised me. The recording industry's manufacture of spectacle has become so grand that even the low-priority Best Album Notes category gets newspaper play. I tried not to kid myself too much about the hoopla: An Ivy League history professor getting picked to go to Los Angeles along with Usher and Green Day and Alicia Keys is an obvious "man bites dog" story. I did, though, take pride in how what I wrote spoke to people well outside my usual orbit. As awards day closed in, I began to get that self-consciously hip feeling back again: Going to the Grammys was pretty cool. By the time I arrived in Los Angeles, I badly wanted to win.

I didn't. It hurt when the presenter read someone else's name, and I couldn't hide it. From the row in front of mine, an elegantly dressed woman, older than me, noticed my dejection and extended her hand.

"Don't you worry, honey, I didn't win myself, and ain't it great being here?"

I kissed her hand, suddenly feeling better, welcomed, if only for a weekend, into the ranks of hard-working musicians and artists.

Sean Wilentz is professor of history and director of the program in American studies at Princeton University.