A Gaslight in History's Basement

This is what happened, as told by fools and freaks and the faithful, this is what happened at Royal Albert Hall in South Kensington on May 26, 1966. A world-historical force in the skin-tight suit of a tonic-selling minstrel, a changeling event embodied, was about to take the stage and recalibrate the subtly pernicious rules of the Folk – a granitic demographic whose milieu, as Greil Marcus documents in his subterranean history The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, "was that of the folk revival – an arena of native tradition and national metaphor, of self-discovery and self-invention…it was a place of the spirit, where authenticity in song and manner, in being, was the highest value – the value against which all forms of discourse, all attributes inherited or assumed, were measured." The man left his dressing room as on so many other previously overdetermined nights, more than willing to, initially, proffer what his expectant constituency, a constituency that considered the man to be the very mouthpiece of the totality of their value system, a man whose voice was a sort of communal univocal device that promised to sustain and, if need be, revaluate musty values and reinvent new ones. This is what happened, partially told as anything can be that irrevocably lapses into the omnivorous lapsed-ness of the Past – the man was prepared and willing to take the stage and alter the foundation not only of folk and its disingenuous ideology, but reinvent that ideology and transform it with a single song, backed by a band comprising mostly ubur-talented Canadians and a single brilliant Arkansan, a band called the Hawks, about to rise aloft into the nebulous stratosphere of best-rock ‘n roll-band in the world. Marcus adds with a tingling necessity: "He knew that when he sang his folk songs – most of them no more folk songs than a Maytag washing machine, except unlike a Maytag washing machine, they didn’t require electricity – a few older numbers, to please the crowd, or tease it, but mainly those long, odd songs than no longer made anyone laugh, "Visions of Johanna," "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Desolation Row," when he stood still, picked strings, and appeared as any singer might have appeared in the years or centuries before him, the people in the audience would show respect, even approval. He knew that when he finished the set, left, and came back with the Hawks …the trouble would start; the problem was, he never knew just when it would start." Sure enough, it did start, as soon as Bob Dylan began singing Leopard- Skin Pillbox- Hat. The cascading sound of the resultant indignation was caustic, cruel, and unfair: as visually documented in Martin Scorsese’s masterful 2005 cobbled-collage of the early Dylan, keying on footage in recursive "flashbacks" to the event, the first salvos from the folk "faithful" were launched. This is what they sounded like, from the young U.K. mass (an arguably cancerous mass through the 20/20 hindsight of History) full of screams and terror and petulance: "TRAITOR! SELL-OUT! MOTHERFUCKER! YOU’RE NOT BOB DYLAN." Stop. Any kind of history, subterranean and homesick or otherwise, must begin at the beginning.

Marcus sets up the tone and time of when this cultural cavity began to form: "It began at the Newport Folk Festival without any plan. On June 15, in New York City, Dylan had recorded "Like a Rolling Stone" with a band that included New Yorker Al Kooper on organ and Chicagoan Mike Bloomfield, of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, on lead guitar…the notion of a festival surprise seemed irresistible. Electric music had never been played at Newport…but the equipment was there…backstage Pete Seeger and the great ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax attempted to cut the band’s power cables with an axe…the band moved into a slow, stately introduction to "Like a Rolling Stone" – which immediately regressed almost to its studio beginnings as a waltz."

To hear, or, more viscerally, to see the performance of "Like a Rolling Stone" – with Dylan’s heretofore acolytes ready to murder him in this oddly anglicized Roman venue – is a form of a-historical apostasy. From Dylan’s preternatural readiness to his demand of Rick Danko – "Play it fucking loud," a new era was birthed between the abyss of those who would, as a de facto reflex, equate art with life and life with art, and the men on the stage, the heroes to history and the enemy of what Folk had meant to that very moment, a moment exploded with, literally, the electricity of a new age, a new genre, a new era. Listening (and, better, watching) the performance is an exercise, a fire-drill for the apocalypse, between what stood beyond downstage – stolid adherents to a form that no longer had any viability with Dylan’s agenda and Dylan’s age – and what fronted the abyss on-stage, the radicalism of a cultural transmogrification, one necessary and painful to birth but, nonetheless, indispensable.
From the first wails of the organ cueing Dylan’s biggest and longest song, nothing less than the world and the presumptive identity of what he and the Hawks were capable of was unleashed to those not yet ready to understand why it was necessary, why no other possibility could have unlocked a freedom latent and hidden in the Folk movements and revival so potent and leveling, so immediate and incandescent.

Marcus makes note of the species of phenomenon transpiring before everyone present at the performance – "One could make oneself up as Bob Dylan did – creating a persona that caught Charlie Chaplin, James Dean, and Lenny Bruce in talk and gesture. Woody Guthrie and the French symbolists in writing, and perhaps most deeply such nearly forgotten 1920s stylists as mountaineer balladeer Dock Boggs and New Orleans blues singer Rabbit Brown in voice – but only if, whatever one’s sources, the purest clay was always evident, real American red earth." To quote a line from "Ballad of a Thin Man," Dylan’s masterful track from Highway 61 Revisited: "Because something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?" Marcus cites historian Robet Cantwell’s words from 1993, to bring it all back home: The folk revival "made the romantic claim of folk culture – oral, immediate, traditional, idiomatic, communal, a culture of characters, of rights, obligations, and beliefs, against a centrist, specialist, impersonal, technocratic culture, a culture of types, functions, jobs, and goals." If "Like a Rolling Stone" turned these claims on its head, it is because the song has nothing to do with those claims held so dear to the folk community that, perhaps, made the mistake of casting Dylan as the Moses figure of the revival itself. If anything, "Like a Rolling Stone" is a fuck-you speedball waltz into an age of total war, an age of national security states and the imperative of a retreat into some form of solipsism, not the solipsism of the nihilist punk-rockers who would arrive decades later privately threatening to end the world with a needle in the zeitgeist’s vein, but a solipsism all its own, a solipsism of nothing less than identity in the most American idiom. Again Marcus’ commentary is essential – "As Bob Dylan sang…he embodied a yearning for peace and home in the midst of noise and upheaval, and in the aesthetic reflection of that embodiment located both peace and home in the purity of, the essential goodness, of each listener’s heart." Dylan’s sound was the sound of "another country, – a country that, once glimpsed from afar, could be felt within oneself. That was the folk revival."

And yet something had to give; if, as Marcus claims convincingly, that the "social movement…emerged out of the aggressively American Communist Party, the ideology of the Popular Front, and the vast and fecund art projects of the New Deal," then why did the chameleonic Dylan feel the need to (literally) electrify his sound and identity in order to progress beyond such ostensibly noble boundaries? Without doubt the folk revival was concomitant with the world-historic flow of the Civil Rights Movement, "something much bigger, more dangerous, and more important," whence came its indomitable moral energy, its refusal to lose what Destiny decreed to be won. It was 1963 when the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., channeled all the genius not only of Christianity and the peace-upholding core-dictums of all faiths of the world, but brought that selfsame world to its knees with his flawless and immortal speech in Washington, D.C.:

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, and the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh will see it together.

If only Dr. King could have foreseen the disintegrating aftermath that history held in store for his sublime dream, if only he could have felt in some remote region of his GI tract the doomed shards of the "identity politics" to come, the claim of myriad segmented factions and academics – cults, in essence – that would expropriate his Ideal and mutate that same Ideal into the self-serving bile of willful self-victimization, a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the separation from the community of "all flesh" that King glimpsed in valleys now nearly unimaginable; if he could have had even sensed the slightest inkling of what was to come, we must ask a painful question: would he still have spoken those sacred words? Would the stakes have been worth it? Would he have had the heart to speak the notion of an identity which the inhabitants of the age to come would lacerate and rape, disfigure, until the originary perfection of what lay beyond his beatific valleys had become an eyesore on par with a metaphysical exit off of the New Jersey Turnpike?

Time for Time, Time for Time Travel (Or, Let’s Go: Age of Anxiety)

Before Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Kant, or the seminal German Idealist thinkers to come, there was the Greek thinker Parmenides. Before preemptively striking with questions as to what an ancient Greek thinker has anything to do with Bob Dylan, The Band, The Basement Tapes, and the subterranean American mythography they collectively mapped together, we must address a question as ancient as philosophy and metaphysics itself: how does one define and describe the problem of identity? For Parmenides, the statement came in the form of "thought and being are the same," with, as the nonpareil Heidegger translator Joan Stambaugh elucidates in her introduction to the first English translation of Heidegger’s Identity and Difference, "a radicality and simplicity perhaps never again possible for later thinkers." Martin Heidegger, arguably the most significant Western thinker of the twentieth century, had long contemplated Parmenides’ statement, continually returning to it again in his writings. Indeed, Heidegger considered Identity and Difference "to be the most important thing he ha[d] published" since his landmark work of phenomenology Being and Time. In the latter, Heidegger’s primary concern was with the essential problem of man and Being, the ontological ur-mystery he approached systematically with his notion of Da-Sein (an analytic of the meaning of man toward a temporalized horizon of understanding through Being).

Anyone who has even a cursory familiarity with Being and Time understands the painstaking and unique methodology employed to come asymptotically closer to an understanding of Da-Sein (literally, being-there) as a form of being about whose being it is concerned, that is, human being. With Identity and Difference, however, Heidegger sought to ask, and, transitively, delineate the elusive and eliding relation of human identity to Being as "that very ‘relation’ itself as the relation of man and Being." As Stambaugh brilliantly notes in her introduction, "In the history of Western philosophy, identity was at first thought of as unity, as the unity of a thing with itself…[as] Heidegger remarks, it took philosophy two thousand years to formulate the problem of identity in its fully developed form as mediation and synthesis. With Leibnitz and Kant preparing the way, the German Idealists Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling place identity in the center of their thought on the foundation of transcendental reflection. These thinkers are not concerned with the simple unity of a thing with itself, but with the mediated syntheses of subject and object, of subjectivity and objectivity as such…the principle of identity A=A becomes reformulated by Fichte as I=I…" Stambaugh, who was perhaps Heidegger’s star pupil and the inheritor of the torch toward becoming his undisputed translator from German to English par excellence, succinctly notes the ambitious genius with which Heidegger broached the seemingly insurmountable peak of codifying identity in a philosophico-phenomenological sense – "Heidegger conceives the problem of identity as in such a fundamental way that what is ‘identical,’ Being and man, can only be thought from the nature of identity itself…[he] questions Parmenides’ statement that thought and Being are the same, interpreting the statement to mean: Being belongs – together with thought – into the Same. A=A has become A is (transitively) A, and the ‘is’ now takes on the meaning of belonging together. Heidegger understands the ‘is’ in identity as the relation of belonging together, and it is this new meaning of identity which concerns him…" By originating from the ground zero of identity rather than some subset of Being, Heidegger’s project is nothing less than a plosive revaluation of how we navigate the complexities and currents that flow between the "I" and the "Other," and it is precisely this exciting idea that found its way, through the Zyklon-dreams and mushroom night terrors of generations, across the elastically warped arc of time, onto the thin red line where Dylan and the Hawks faced the abyss, that stage at the Royal Albert Hall, between what was once an oversimplified subject-object divide. What Dylan and the Hawks (later The Band) left in their wake was the wreckage of soothing leftist syllogisms about justice and poverty and social forces, and, in their place, a new Age of Electric was born – loud, to be sure – but undeniably of that moment whose penumbra has expanded like the circumferential surface of a bubble into an Age of Anxiety.

The Age of Anxiety was not an inevitability in evolutionary terms, but it has become an accident of it. Once upon a time the determined hunter-gatherer expended enormous quantities of energy and effort, organically emblazoned onto the fabric of his reality, struggling to survive, his fight-or-flight instinctive core enabling him to learn through an imperative of action. Time passed. Empires rose and soon enough crumbled into what American vernacular has deemed "the dustbin of history," and, almost without warning, the twentieth century – the hundred years of solitude that paradoxically signifies both erasure and enlightenment – arrived. The necessities of "mere" survival spiraled outward, and the advent of comfort-technologies and a decadent leisure culture created a new psychic space for anxiety to flourish and conquer. Against the magnificently public crises, plagues, bombings, bomb threats, coups, holocausts, and hellstorms, the individual learned to frame her private dramatized affairs within the frieze of any given geopolitical nightmare scenario, and, suddenly, the most trivial event had come to belong to a dangerous equation where, much like the folk faithful's "art = life" expression, the coincidences and unities that had in ages past animated a search, given value to the human being's sacred quest for higher forms, had degenerated into insomnia and infomercials. In his collection of essays spanning nearly twenty years (1975-1993), titled, appropriately enough, The Dustbin of History, Marcus offers what must stand as one of the finest recent introductions to a work of nonfiction. He begins with a personal history familiar enough to any Southerner, probably any American, the tragic and bizarre case of posthumously published Pulitzer-winner John Kennedy Toole. As most readers surely know, the "hero of the book was one Ignatius Reilly, a joyous paranoid who goes to movies solely to be outraged; a scholar of Boethius for whom the whole of the modern world is a travesty confirming his mission as a holy fool and gnostic prophet…who stalks the streets of New Orleans with a sword and a shield, dreaming of leading ‘many protest marches complete with traditional banners and posters, but these would say, "End the Middle Class," "The Middle Class Must Go." I am not above tossing a small Molotov cocktail or two, either.’ " That Ignatius Reilly now more than ever reveals an artery-hardened American identity that only became more of a norm in the wake of the book’s publication in 1980 – fifteen years after the author’s suicide and the radioactive dawn of Reaganism and the all-volunteer army – is fairly obvious. Less obvious is the newspaper clipping that haunted Marcus enough to introduce the reader to his Dustbin via the story of a double-structured historical category called, well… John Kennedy Toole. Marcus writes: "Four years later, on 15 January 1984, San Francisco Examiner staff writers Charles C. Hardy and John Jacobs filed this report on the looming New Hampshire presidential primary:
Hanover, N.H. – One would think that the Democratic National Convention was being held this week at the old Hanover Inn here at Dartmouth College rather than six months from now in San Francisco.
On the eve of today’s televised debate on public television between the eight major Democratic presidential candidates, this elegant old inn was buzzing with ramrod straight Secret Service agents, hordes of media workers with multicolored identification tags around their necks and, here and there, a certified presidential candidate.
As the candidates talked to a crowd of reporters in a large room with antique chests, sedate sofas and brass chandeliers, a lonely, well-dressed man paced outside the hotel carrying a yellow sign that read: "Why Won’t the Democrats Let Toole Debate? What Are They Afraid Of?"
The man holding the sign, John Kennedy Toole, a 39-year-old New Yorker, said he is running for president to call attention to the 2 million homeless in this country "who are out in the cold."
"The criterion for being part of this debate," he told the only reporter in sight, "seems to be national media coverage. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that."
"No one will talk to me. I’d much rather do that than stand out here holding this sign in the cold, you understand."

Describing his alarm at this pairing of Toole(s) into one moment, Marcus writes that "[i]f this was not the John Kennedy Toole who wrote A Confederacy of Dunces…then it was someone who had read the book and, honoring its author by taking his name, had decided to act it out." The implications of the event, nearly any rational person would wager are, at best, trivial and inconsequential, coincidences hanging from two random threads through time. And yet, all of this dustbin dust – it seems to want to mean more than we could ever describe. The questions at stake suddenly inflate to gigantic proportions. Has a psychical change in our relationship to individual identities in history precluded our chances for regaining the organic holisms and unities promised and present in great art, events, and performances? Are those same holisms and unities just imaginary dust clouds in our readings – close or loose – of history? The answers are arguably unattainable, but they are powerful enough for analyses such as those of Marcus’, whether in The Dustbin of History or The Old, Weird America. He notes that the Toole(s) story "crystallized the suspicion and worry…that our sense of history, as it takes shape in everyday culture, is cramped, impoverished, and debilitating; that the commonplace assumption that history exists only in the past is a mystification powerfully resistant to any critical investigations that might reveal the assumption to be a fraud, or a jail. The suspicion is that we are living out history, making it and unmaking it – forgetting it, denying it – all of the time, in far more ways than we have really learned."

How Am I Not Myself?
Returning to that fateful stage and night at the Royal Albert Hall, armed with at least the beginnings of a more defined idea of what sorts of identities were and continue to be at stake, it is instructive is to consider two key German words Heidegger employs in order to distinguish amongst differences in identity as an equation with Being. Stambaugh notes that Heidegger "characterizes this difference as the difference between Overwhelming and Arrival. The difference grants a "Between" in which the Overwhelming of Being and the arrival in beings are held toward each other and yet held apart. This Between is perdurance." The German word Heidegger uses for this phenomenon is Austrag, a word that literally translates as "carrying out" or "holding out." Already the pieces of the puzzles start to coalesce when one considers that "Between" – on the one hand, the literal physical space separating the event of the performance from the spectators and audience, and, on the other, the distance and difference of what Heidegger would name (in German) the Ereignis, a word that, in English, translates as the event of appropriation. The word Ereignis is a derivation of another essential German word for the purposes of this discussion – er-eignen – a word that, serendipitiously, means to "come into one’s own," to claim an authentic and existential ownership of an event unto oneself.

Let us return to Dylan and the Hawks and the abyss and the excitement. Marcus warns that a "complete dissolution of art into life is present in such a point of view: the poor are art because they sing their lives without mediation and without reflection, without the false consciousness of capitalism and the false desires of advertising. As they live in an organic community – buttressed, almost to this present day, from the corrupt outside world – any song belongs to all and none belongs to anyone in particular. This is not the singer who sings the song but the song that sings the singer, and therefore in performance it is the singer, not the song, that is the aesthetic artifact, the work of art. In a perfect world, in the future, everyone will live this way." But this is not what happened, not in the least. Everyone made private and painful choices precisely not to live this way, and the reactionary backlash (a term all too common amongst contemporary political currency) has reverberated since Dylan and the Hawks left the stage that fate-full spring night. And is spring merely a season by which we calculate the ineluctable modalities of the visible, of the olfactory, to steal a non-melodic phraseology from James Joyce? Heidegger says this: "In the event of appropriation vibrates the active nature of what speaks as language, which at one time was called the house of Being.

‘Principle of identity’ means now: "a spring demanded by the essence of identity because it needs that spring if the belonging together of men and Being is to attain the essential light of appropriation." And just what exactly is that light? The stage-lights the camera captures roving around onstage at Newcastle or the Royal Albert Hall? The light of electroshock therapy that Dylan and the Hawks tear into with the second halves of the sets they played in the U.K.? Surely, surely, the answer is more complex than any of that. Again, the thinker, the German, the one-time National Socialist party member Heidegger: "The event of appropriation is that realm, vibrating within itself, through which man and Being reach each other in their nature, achieve their active nature by losing those qualities which metaphysics has endowed them…assuming we could look forward to the possibility that the frame – the mutual challenge of man and Being to enter the calculation of what is calculable – were to address us as the event of appropriation which first surrenders man and Being to their own being…" And yet Heidegger, clear as he may be in his attempt at an unconcealed thinking, still somehow misses the mark, or, rather, his mark is the technological framework that is always already happening around man, everywhere and all at once and so close that its shock is a subspecies of afterthought. He writes that what we experience "in the frame as the constellation of Being and man through the modern world of technology is a prelude to what we call the event of appropriation." In other words, "Play it fucking loud," because if no one can hear the music, the performance might as well never have happened. - K.W. Graves