The 1963 song that taught Neil Young what artists are for: “That’s what we do”
In January 1961, a 19-year-old Bob Dylan moved to New York City hoping to make some sort of unknown impact.
Like so many others flooding into Greenwich Village, he had been inspired by the beat bible of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. In fact, he says as much in his testimony now printed onto the inside sleeve of recent editions: “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.”
But as no more than a boy, how could Dylan – a school drop-out with ragged clothes and a few dollars – have known that he would go on to make a seismic impact of his own within two years?
Such was the profundity of his rapid uprising and the mark it made on the world as the 1960s roared into focus amid assassinated presidents, moon landings, war, great movements and mass liberation; there is almost a mystic quality to it all.
“I love Bob Dylan. I think he’s great. In the very beginning, I knew he was great,” Neil Young once said to Charlie Rose, recalling the days when he was holed up in his sleepy hometown of Canada and hearing about this vagrant kid from Minnesota, steadily changing the world with four chords and the truth.
Dylan himself was caught up in the storm of it all. His songs were striving for a “liberated republic”, and that’s no ordinary way to write pop music. He didn’t know where they were coming from, and quite often, he lost track of them. Joan Baez recalls often finding hits that had quite literally fallen down the back of her piano.
“You’ve got to have power and dominion over the spirits” to write like that, Dylan says in his memoir. Sometimes, on a clear day, you can still viscerally feel that wonder in the songs that remain. They feel inspired and beyond the reach of one young lad with a dogeared acoustic.
Young noted this when he was simply walking through the streets of some unknown city back in 2008. A rumble was erupting from an idling car stuck in downtown traffic as Young strolled by. He heard the owner blaring ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ from the stereo system. The 30-year-old guy in a suit was screaming along to the lyrics, entombed in a Cadillac that was now under the dominion of Bob’s genius.
Alas, it wasn’t the odd sight, the man inside the car, nor the music in a nebulous sense that caught Young’s attention, but the power of Dylan’s voice. He’d heard it countless times before. In fact, he mightn’t have a career without it, but for some reason, in the strange way that music occasionally does, he was hearing it as if for the first time again.
“This is the essence of his feeling in the moment he was delivering that song,” the awed peer recalled. “You can’t keep that; it comes and goes through you. You can’t strive to be that. There is no way you own that. It’s a gift.” That is often how Dylan’s songs feel to the world, like gifts that were meant to happen to keep the world in check.
The role of an artist
As another luminary who both Young and Dylan greatly admire, Nina Simone, once said: “An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times”.
She added: “I choose to reflect the times and the situations in which I find myself. That, to me, is my duty. At this crucial time in our lives when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don’t think you can help but be involved.” Dylan was doing this in an almost subconscious haze, and the Promethean marker of his feat was ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’.
Since its release in 1963, it has never since lost its prominence. Rather than preaching to his audience or claiming to have all the answers, Dylan’s anthem framed the biggest questions of the day in a way that invited listeners to confront them for themselves. At a time when America was wrestling with civil rights, nuclear anxiety and the prospect of generational change, Blowin’ in the Wind eclipsed the pointed finger of a protest song, developing into poetry that simply inspired others.
This was reaffirmed to Young in 1991 when the world found itself hurtling towards a war yet again, this time the Gulf War. Ahead of his tour with Crazy Horse, Young decided to add the ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ to his set. “Basically, the songs took on the ambience of the times,” he told Pulse regarding his decision to cover it.
He added, “That’s all we do–we just reflect on what’s going on. It just seems like we go out and it all comes from the audience; we just pick it up and send it back. So, whatever’s happening, there’s no reason to just go out and entertain.”
This is a point that Dylan has always made himself. At the age of 19, when just about nobody else was thinking along these lines, he released the profound potential of pop music, later explaining: “Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic.”
Young’s appraisal of his hero’s first masterpiece follows a similar train of thought. He continues: “Entertainment, all by itself, is great; it’s a great thing to do. But when something like [the war] is happening, certain songs just seem trite. Why bother doing them? It’s just natural that the songs reflect what was happening in the country. You’d see it in people’s faces as they came in and out of the concert–the slogans they had on the signs they were holding. But there’s room for everybody. Some people might want to forget about the war. Some people might not.”
In truth, Dylan’s spiritual anthem offers the chance for both. That’s what makes it such an enduring masterpiece. It emerged as the Vietnam War was escalating, but it is no more about war than it is about the melodrama of a spinster looking for love and every other struggle we face and search for reason in.
Oddly enough, it seemed to define the purpose of an artist to Dylan, too. “Art is the perpetual motion of illusion,” the original vagabond put it. “The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but to inspire them?”
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