Bob Dylan’s bold rejection of ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’, and why it mattered
Bob Dylan‘s standing in pop culture is now unquestionable. However, in 1963, he was just a young folk singer with a small following— far removed from the mainstream appeal of The Ed Sullivan Show.
The show was a cultural powerhouse capable of making or breaking a career. For a young folkie like Dylan, despite his growing reputation, this was a chance to get on a national TV show capable of sending him into the fame stratosphere.
Yet the singer still decided that, after the show attempted to censor his performance, he would walk off set and refuse to sing, refuse the popularity and refuse any stardom bestowed upon him. It was quite the statement and one that would underpin his entire career.
After his self-titled album arrived in 1962, Bob Dylan suddenly became the name on everybody’s lips in the smoky coffeehouses of New York, and his sound began to travel through the land. The natural successor to his idol, Woody Guthrie, Dylan was given a chance to impress on a national, if not global, scale, when the team at The Ed Sullivan Show spotted the young singer and offered him an audience like no other.
It’s hard to quantify the impact of television at the time. A still relatively new commodity when it comes to widespread appeal, TV was the medium du jour, and just being given some airtime on any show was enough to make swathes of the population pay attention.
The Ed Sullivan Show, however, was a completely different beast. It brought in 60million viewers when Elvis shook his hips on an episode, and just a year later, as The Beatles took a hammer to truly crack America, it reached a mammoth 73million viewers. It was surely too good a chance for promotion to turn down.
Bob Dylan’s second album, his breakthrough, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, had not yet been released, and his appearance at the March on Washington had given him some national acclaim and local grounding but had certainly not catapulted him into the charts. So, one might have thought the chance to perform for a national audience on one of the biggest shows on TV was too tempting to avoid—but Dylan proved his authenticity when he walked out on the show.
The highest-rated variety show on television provided Dylan ample chance to play some of his folk songs and continue his ascendency, but network executives were keen to change the setlist and keep tight control over the show’s proceedings. While it may seem trivial in a world where minute details are planned to the nth degree, it would seem there was a sincere attempt to censor Bob Dylan.
The offending track was ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’—a satirical spoken-word blues number that aimed at the ultra-conservative John Birch Society. In particular, the track poked fun at the Society’s desperation to find Communist Party members under every rock. It was a sad tale of the decade that almost every new and upcoming, as well as the longstanding, artistic face, was given a check over for Communist affiliations by the government. Dylan saw fit to do his own check.
Much of the lyrics are humorous and inoffensive, but the executives at the network decided that the line: “Now Eisenhower, he’s a Russian spy/ Lincoln, Jefferson, and that Roosevelt guy/ To my knowledge there’s just one man/ That’s really a true American: George Lincoln Rockwell” was too much to handle. In defence of the family show, its reference to the founder of the American Nazi Party, only 20 years after the catastrophic war, may well have crossed a line for the variety show.
During dress rehearsals, the fear of a defamation lawsuit and a public backlash pushed the executives at CBS to ask Dylan to either scrap the lines or change the song for his performance. In pursuit of his own artistic integrity, Dylan would not comply with the censorship and instead politely walked out of the studio, turned his back on arguably the biggest opportunity of his life so far and refused to return.
“I explained the situation to Bob and asked him if he wanted to do something else,” recalls Ed Sullivan Show producer Bob Precht for History.com, “and Bob, quite appropriately, said ‘No, this is what I want to do. If I can’t play my song, I’d rather not appear on the show.’”
The walkout garnered a lot of attention from the press in the following days leading Ed Sullivan himself to denounce the decision to try to change the song. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan asserted himself as an authentic artist and only added to his credibility amid the swelling counterculture movement.
It was one of the first steps of a long road for a young Bob Dylan, who would use this as a catalyst for his anti-establishment leanings. In truth, the real reason the rejection was so important was that it gave credibility to Dylan’s words. He wasn’t here to sell his soul, he was here to bear it. In many ways, it was the moment an icon was truly born.
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