A few days ago, after reading Susie Rotorlo's memories of being with Dylan, a memoir about the years of the 60s, "Laissez-faire Time", I found that I had read four books about Bob Dylan and a biographical film in the past six months. They are "The Old American Chronicles" by American music critic and cultural researcher Greer Marcus, "Straight Along the Road - Bob Dylan' Biography" by British biographer Howard Thorns, "Chronicles" by Bob Dylan himself ("Like a Rolling Stone" is attached to the Chinese translation), and Martin Scorsese's four-hour long biographical feature film "Home Without Directions".
In Marcus's masterpiece "Old American Chronicles", which is smeared with historical facts and imagination, Bob Dylan is not the protagonist of the substance. It can only be regarded as the DJ at this grand, thrilling, bizarre masquerade party, and the one who jumps and swings on the stage and is called "American ghost" by Marcus is the protagonist of the party. In 1963, Federico Fellini's immortal masterpiece "Eight and a Half" came out, for the sake of elegance, Marcus's discount into half, so the title of the article was "Four and a Half ...", condensing and distilling the keywords in several books that may be of interest to fans but doubt, and the responses of these great writers to the keywords. Quan Dang commemorates the days and nights when he listens to the old man's music, and transforms it into a little solid talk, not to be completely washed away by the years.
The cover of Greer Marcus's Old American Chronicles Chinese introduced edition
60s
"The culture of the fifties was like an old judge who was going to retire in a few days. It's leaving. For the next decade, it will struggle to get up and yet fall to the floor. ”
——— Bob Dylan
Dylan, in his autobiography Chronicle, was about to set off to talk about the 1960s, when he first buried the 1950s with the sharpest and most brilliant sentences like his lyrics. A record guide to "1001 Records You Must Listen to in Your Lifetime" organized by American music critic Robert Di Murray gives five labels about the 60s: "Armstrong Walking on the Moon", "Contraceptives Begin to Sell", "Gagarin Became the First Man in Space", "The Assassination of Kendini", and "The Cuban Missile Crisis". A record guide gives two labels about "space", which is somewhat repetitive and funny. But the first album recommendation of the opening of the 60s was dylan's old lover Joan Bates's self-titled album, which was quite at its level.
Dylan has been called the "spokesperson of the 60s", so what exactly is the core of the 60s? This is not answered in Dylan's Chronicle, because all the old man tries to do in his memoirs is to break free of the "hat" that is buckled on his head about the 60s: "I don't want to be in that collective picture [of the 60s]," "I'm not the spokesperson for anybody or anything, I'm just a musician." Describing the '60s, Dylan described it as "lying and arguing." But this is more or less the "childishness" revealed by the old man, an excessive rebound of the labeling and hat activities that surround him. And the most talked about in these books, and it is Susie's memoirs that also focus on it. As a member of the "Red Diaper Baby" (a descendant of American leftists), Susie also acknowledges that "sex, drugs, rock and roll" can somehow sum up the 60s, but she prefers to summarize it with "experimental spirit", "idealism", and "social responsibility". Susie is also proud to say that the "Beat Generation" has cracked the conservative and rigid morality of the United States in the 50s, and the next generation of "them" has completely destroyed it. This is somewhat familiar with the smoke of revolution and the pride of revolutionaries.
Therefore, the breakup of Dylan and Susie I also imagined with wishful thinking is because of such huge differences, in essence, Dylan is somewhat "old-fashioned", but the reality is actually just a separation of ordinary people's trivialities and entanglements. Whether the 60s were really as optimistic as Susie, I am afraid that it cannot be easily judged, in fact, for the Chinese Wenqing in the 1980s, in 1985, a copy of Maurice Dickstein's "Gate of Eden" was published in China, and the book flowed with good insights, which interpreted the American 60s in a deeper dimension. But that's beyond four and a half parts.
Susie's words dealt a fatal blow to conservative and rigid morality in the United States in the 60s
Folk & Civil Rights "Renegades"
"It seems that the world always needs a scapegoat—someone who will lead the resistance against the Roman Empire." But the United States was not the Roman Empire, and someone else had to step forward and volunteer. I really was never just myself—a folk musician, gazing at the gray fog with tearful eyes, writing ballads floating in the hazy light. ”
——— Bob Dylan
Or turn back the time to the grand 60s, when Dylan and the Paul Batafield band, a blues electroacoustic band, sang such as "Maggie's Farm" and "Phantom Engineer" at the Newport Folk Music Festival on Rhode Island in 1965, most people sat there stunned. Meanwhile, backstage, Pete Seeger and another great folk musicologist, Alan Lomax, hated being able to cut off the band's power cord with an axe. Thanks to Peter Yarrow and Theodore Becker, they were stopped until the security guards arrived.
On May 26 of the following year, at royal Albert Hall, Dylan and the band prepared to play a song from their new album "Blonde on Blonde," "Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat." The shouts and curses from the audience gradually became louder and louder, and finally converged into shouts: "Traitor! treachery! You motherfucker! You're not Bob Dylan. "In an era when assassinations were all the rage, look at those long lists: John F. Kennedy. F. Kennedy, Civil Rights Leaders Madgar Evans, Malcolm E. Kennedy, and Others. X, Martin Luther King Jr. Even Andy Howall is doomed! (Shot and assassinated by lesbian Millie Surina in 1967 and never recovered from his assassination until his surgical death in '87) In response, another folk singer, Philip Oakes, said worriedly about Dylan's condition: "Dylan has become a part of some people's souls - but there are so many despicable people in the United States, and death has become one of the landscapes of today's America." ”
In the 1960s, when assassinations were rife, Andy Hovol, who was with Dylan, was also doomed
But why on earth would people think Dylan betrayed the ballad? Jazz in the 1950s, but why are the folk songs that flourished and reached their peak in the 60s regarded as the unspoilable "holy grail"? Greer Marcus's "Old America" reveals its deep connotation here. In combing through the vein of the folk revival movement, from the song collection activities of the 19th century and even the beginning of the 20th century, to the offensive defense of the "American spirit" proposed by the Communist Party of the United States during Roosevelt's New Deal, the "folk revival" is officially resurfaced. By 1958, the Kingston Trio had sung "Tom Dooley," and "Folk Revival" was becoming widely known. It was not until its peak in the summer of 1963 during the Newport Ballad Festival and the March on Washington campaign.
At this point, the face of the "co-ownership" of folk songs and politics has basically emerged, and in 1966, folk tale researcher Erin M. J. Stockett traces the philosophy of folk revival back to the communist folk music scene that was popular in New York in the 1930s, adding: "Urban audiences accept them more for political reasons than for artistic reasons — because these singers bring a certain sincere color to 'politics.'" "It is true that Bob Dylan has imitated, studied, and drawn rich nourishment from the folk revival to transform it into a more charismatic work than his contemporaries, but he has finally left behind this idea of folk that unconsciously associates with politics (life). For people in this wave of ideas, behind the concept of folk songs there is also a set of beliefs and axioms that judge right and wrong. So when Dylan and the band's electro-acoustic performance made people feel "the one who acted as if he was looking for an oasis in the spirit of democracy in his heart, as if he didn't exist." This is the source of their anger at dylan's betrayal.
The Kingston trio that kicked off the "Folk Revival"
And for the reason why Dylan struggled to get rid of the identity of the "spokesperson of the times", rushed to the steering wheel, and gradually moved away from the identity of the political singer in the creation, driving into the inner transformation of his heart, here is a dramatic, perhaps not just coincidental answer: The breakup of Bob Dylan and Susie Rotorlo happened at the beginning of all this.
Susie Rotorlo
"I hate being called Bob's 'horse' and I don't want to be a string on his guitar. I'm with Bob, and that doesn't mean I'm going to walk behind him and pick up the candy paper he's thrown on the floor. ”
—Susie Rotorlo
"I gave her my heart, but what she wanted was my soul."
—Bob Dylan, "Don't Think Too Much, Everything's Fine"
Susie and Dylan were together in the old days
In late February 2011, a month before Bob Dylan began his two-stop tour of China, Susie died of lung cancer in New York. In many articles written by the international media commemorating her, the word "muse" is used without exception, calling her "Dylan's muse and mentor". Born in November 1943 in Queens, New York, Susie was a young woman with radical left-wing ideas who was influenced by her parents to be a member of the United States Communist Party. Dylan first met Susie in his early 20s at Riverside Church in New York, and before he was 18 years old, Sheshi was already a full member of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), one of the most important civil rights organizations in the United States, and the Atomic Energy Law Sound Policy Committee (SANE), an anti-nuclear warfare group. In his memoirs, Dylan described the first sight of the meeting: "The first time I saw Susie, I couldn't look away. He was the most provocative creature I'd ever seen. Fair-skinned, blonde hair, purebred Italian... Cupid's arrow used to whistle in my ears, but this time it hit me in the heart... For the whole week I had a crush on her, and I knew that for the first time in my life I had fallen in love, and I could still feel her breath thirty miles away. ”
According to this, the media always called Susie Dylan's "first love", but british journalist and biographer Howard Thornes still unearthed Dylan's first real girlfriend in "Straight Down the Road", which was Ek Star Halstrom whom Dylan met in his hometown of Pennsytown, Minnesota, before leaving New York. But let's go back to the main line, Susie revealed in her memoirs the "thrill" of the encounter: if it weren't for a serious car accident with her mother in March, "I would have left the United States and moved to Italy in April of this year, and I wouldn't have met Bob." Fate left him stranded in New York and met Bob Dylan at a folk music festival at The Riverside Church in Manhattan on July 29, 1961.
Dylan's early creation of the muse
Where does Susie's name for "muse" come from? "Muse" is the collective name of the nine ancient literary goddesses of art and science in Greek mythology, and European poets often compare it to a symbol of inspiration and art.
So what inspiration did Susie bring to Dylan? In Laissez-faire, Susie talks about the "gift" she first gave Dylan: "I grew up in New York, and I grew up in a much more complex environment than the kid from the small town of Simbin, Minnesota, and I grew up with a much more diverse variety of books, music, information, and a variety of interesting but persecuted left-wing intellectuals. When we met, Bob didn't have a concept of politics yet, and I transferred my interest in politics and other things to him. Susie then transported her beloved Brecht to Dylan through a clever "pipe": "In order for Dylan to see the rehearsal of Brecht to Brecht, I asked him to come to the theater early to pick me up. I'd love for him to see the play, especially the scene where Mitch Grant sings Jenny the Pirate... He must have been deeply shaken. Sure enough, he lived there, so quiet that his usually rocking legs didn't move at all. From that moment on, Mitch Grant's performance of Jenny the Pirate became a part of his life, and with that, Brecht became a part of his life. Dylan "responded" in his memoir Chronicle: Jenny the Pirate, like "a potion," "thoroughly and completely" influenced his later creations. And how to desperately stuff Brecht, Rimbaud, T. The poetry of S. Eliot and Byron.
In the second half of 1962, Susie went to Perugia, Italy, to study art, and during this bitter day of lovesickness, Dylan wrote several love songs for Susie and included them in the album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan", including "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right": "I gave her my heart, but what she wanted was my soul." And in Down The Highway: "The sea took my girl, my girl took my heart, and she packed it into a suitcase and brought it to Italy, Italy." ”
Dylan's affair with his mentor and friend, Joan Baez, hurts Susie
Sadness is always inevitable, and with the album "Laissez-faire Bob Dylan", Dylan gained an unprecedented reputation. The rift in their relationship gradually deepened. Not only is dylan's secret affair with "folk queen" Joan Baez gradually being exposed outside of her work, but Susie, a feminist, cannot tolerate Dylan's strong desire for control. It all broke out one day in late March 1964, when Dylan got into a fight with Carla in her sister Carla B Avenue's apartment, which eventually turned into a fight that could not be recovered. It is said that Dylan used to cry at the camera during the filming of "Directionless Home" released in 2005, but Martin Scorsese did not include it in the documentary, probably out of respect for Dylan.
Dylan appeared in martin scorsese's documentary No Directions Without Home