The Times They Are a’Changin’ included numerous songs that addressed current events and real crimes. “Only a Pawn in their Game” deals with the assassination of civil rights worker Medgar Evers by Byron De La Beckwith; “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” deals with the murder of a young black hotel barmaid by William Zantzinger, a wealthy white tobacco farmer; and “North Country Blues” addresses the personal and social despair created by the erosion of the American small-town mining community (although no one is murdered, everyone’s life changes), much as “Ballad of Hollis Brown” addresses the erosion of the small-town farming community.
Dylan’s original performances from this era are still powerful, somber, and sobering:
“Only a Pawn in Their Game” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”
“North Country Blues”
In particular, to watch this kind of gravity emanate from such a young-looking Dylan in “North Country Blues” – in which he sings from the perspective of the woman in the devastated family – really gets to me. Say what you will about his singing or his authenticity (we’ll get to that again), these performances create for me a real and rare sense of reverence.
The Times They Are a’Changin’ and its predecessor, The Free Wheelin’ Bob Dylan, heralded the first of many significant shifts that Dylan would make in American songwriting, setting current social commentary against traditional folk forms and stringing it all together with a series of devastating single images.
Forget for a moment about the influence of Woody Guthrie (did I just say that?) — the poet Allen Ginsberg, Dylan’s lifelong friend and mentor, claimed the technique was inspired by Jack Kerouac:
“Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan by Elsa Dorfman” by Elsa Dorfman
[Dylan] pulled Mexico City Blues from my hand and started reading it and I said, ‘What do you know about that?’ He said, ‘Somebody handed it to me in ’59 in St. Paul and it blew my mind.’ So I said ‘Why?’ He said, ‘It was the first poetry that spoke to me in my own language.’ So those chains of flashing images you get in Dylan, like ‘the motorcycle black Madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen and her silver studded phantom lover,’ they’re influenced by Kerouac’s chains of flashing images and spontaneous writing, and that spreads out into the people. > Read the full interview here.
This technique is critical to “Ballad of Hollis Brown” as an exercise in awareness and empathy — as noted earlier this week, the string of vivid images anchored by the second person “you” bring the audience directly into the head of the unfortunate, desperate and increasingly unanchored South Dakota farmer, making us see exactly what he sees and hear exactly what he hears. (In this regard Dylan goes far, far beyond the kind of sympathy that Johnny Cash demonstrated, don’t you think?)
At least, this is the case right up until the moment when Hollis Brown actually commits the murders, when the lyrics suddenly turn and all we see is the wind and all we hear are the shotgun blasts.
Your brain is a-bleedin’
And your legs can’t seem to stand
Your eyes fix on the shotgun
That you’re holdin’ in your hand.There’s seven breezes a-blowin’
All around the cabin door
There’s seven breezes a-blowin’
All around the cabin door
Seven shots ring out
Like the ocean’s pounding roar.
Awareness and empathy do have their limits. (Unless you think that perhaps this is all that Hollis Brown actually himself saw in the final moment? Is this an instance of blind rage or other blind emotion? Discuss.)
Dylan ran headlong into the limits of “Ballad of Hollis Brown” itself when, on July 13 of 1985, he walked onto the stage at Live Aid — the dual-venue, globally aired concert organized by Bob Geldolf to raise funds to provide relief for victims of the Ethiopian famine – and performed the song. It was the finale of the historic concert, the audience had just been treated to a final series of images of starving children, and Dylan was introduced by Jack Nicholson and backed by Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. It was a truly terrible performance.
Dylan performing “Ballad of Hollis Brown” at Live Aid, 1985
That probably could have been forgiven, however, as it had been forgiven before. But Dylan then said to the global audience of just under two billion people: “I hope that some of the money … maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe … one or two million, maybe … and use it to pay the mortgages on some of the farms and, the farmers here, owe to the banks.”In his autobiography, Bob Geldof described his and the general reaction thus:
For me the biggest disappointment of the evening was Dylan…the performance was catastrophic. He had met Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood in a night club in New York the night before and they had offered to back him. So, there they were – pop music’s seminal songwriter and the world’s greatest rhythm guitarist and his partner. But they were out of time, they couldn’t stay in tune and they seemed to treat the songs with disdain…Then [Dylan] displayed a complete lack of understanding of the issues raised by Live Aid by saying, unforgivably, ‘It would be nice if some of this money went to the American farmers.” Something so simplistic and crowd-pleasing was beyond belief. Live Aid was about people losing their lives. There is a radical difference between losing your livelihood and losing your life. It did instigate Farm Aid, which was a good thing in itself but it was a crass, stupid, nationalistic thing to say. It was to have been the finale but thank God Ken Kragen had persuaded Lionel Richie to come and sing “We Are the World.”
Well then. In six minutes Dylan goes from being a “[spokesman] for a generation,” “one of America’s greatest voices of freedom,” and “transcendent” to being completely incapable of understanding the issues at hand as well as “simplistic and crowd-pleasing,” “crass, stupid, and nationalistic,” and “unforgivable” – less suitable even as a voice of change than Lionel Richie.
And the conduit for this radical shift was “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” which itself completely loses its identity here. In this moment, in Geldof’s words, this devastating murder ballad about a man who annihilates his entire family actually ceases to be a story about the loss of life at all.
That’s not the end of the story, however. As Geldolf notes, and has so often been the case with Dylan, the badly received note struck a chord – later that same year, motivated by Dylan’s comments, Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young organized Farm Aid, the first in a series of still ongoing annual benefit concerts that raise money for family farmers in the United States. Two years later, Nelson and Mellencamp brought family farmers to testify before Congress about their plight, leading to the passage of the Agricultural Credit Act of 1987. Today, Farm Aid is an organization that promotes public awareness of the struggles faced by family farms and raises money to help farmers. This includes funds used to help pay bills, buy food, secure legal and financial help, and provide farming families with psychological assistance.
From left: Willie Nelson, Neil Young, Dave Matthews, and John Mellencamp. Image source: http://homegrown.org/
Dylan performed at the first Farm Aid in September 1985 — just two months after Live Aid — in good spirits and, all things considered, in good form. His set list contained six songs and was not surprisingly a bit irreverent, starting with “Clean Cut Kid” — a song about how Vietnam-era America turned its young men into killers — and concluding, of course, not with “Ballad of Hollis Brown” but with the loaded personal and political messages of “Maggie’s Farm.”
Dylan performing “Maggie’s Farm” at Farm Aid, 1985
