(3 of 4)
Both Dylan and his followers have mellowed. The angry faces of the '60s are softer now, and evidences of the future generations we were trying to save can occasionally be seen toddling along the crowded aisles. The arrogance of both poet and pupils is diminished, but the lyrics of songs like A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, Mr. Tambourine Man and Desolation Row have grown in potency. Adult perspective makes songs, like My Back Pages, more meaningful:
Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats Too noble to neglect Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect Good and bad. I define these terms Quite clear, no doubt, somehow. Ah, but I was so much older then I'm younger than that now.
"He's all of us," cried one Pittsburgh coed, as she hurried for the subway after one of Dylan's concerts in Philadelphia. "He's all the things we always felt but could never eloquently express."
Dylan's eloquence stems partly from a salutary imprecision. His throbbing harmonica, Delphic imagery and occasional Chaplinesque two-step are constants, but his message, like the times, is continually changing. "This show is definitely not nostalgia," he whispered last week between silences and long stares. "To my mind, I deal with certain problems. It's an up-to-date show."
In ending his exile, Dylan once more takes up his subtle revolution. His fans, nurtured on unstructured polemic and cinema verite, are being invited on a new journey, and if their expectant faces are to be believed, they are ready to follow. Each night on the tour, Dylan receives an ovation when he sings the line, "But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked," from It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding). In Dirge, a song from his soon-to-be-released album Planet Waves, his forceful lyrics are an eloquent, melancholy study of an individual searching for a niche in an anonymous society dominated by "progress."
I hate that foolish game we played And the need that was expressed And the mercy that you showed to me Who ever would have guessed I went out on lower Broadway And I felt that place within That hollow place where martyrs weep And angels play with sin.
Yet the thrust of his performances is one of cautious optimism: a guarded belief that conditions can improve. In Forever Young, he says:
May your hands always be busy May your feet always be swift May you have a strong foundation When the winds of changes shift May your heart always be joyful May your song always be sung May you stay forever young.
They were exciting iconoclastic times, those '60s. "We"—the baby boomers—had the schools, the attention of the media, a good proportion of the nation's disposable income, and most important, we had a distinct music. The strange new sound of folk rock took over radio. Soon the white-middle-class blues, a lament where computers and corporations replaced landlords and scabs, was stirring an entire society.