The moment Bob Dylan “sold out”, according to Tom Morello
“Progressive, radical, or even revolutionary change has always come from below,” Tom Morello once said. Nobody embodies that more than Bob Dylan. The original vagabond was completely unknown when he arrived in Greenwich Village. Soon enough, he was singing: “Your old road is rapidly agin’, Please get out of the new one, If you can’t lend your hand,” and the world was listening to these revolutionary words.
Coinciding with the rise of technology, he was communicating with a mass hitherto unknown, and his signal was very clear: this aggression will not stand, man. “He was 22, but he sounds like he’s 80, like this wizened guy who’s had a long life as a vigilante, croaking out songs of hard truth,” Morello says. In his view, this wizened truth reached its potent peak with the 1964 folk classic, ‘With God on Our Side’.
Singling it out as Dylan’s finest effort, he explained, “[It] is not some historical relic. It is a living exposé of war crimes, past, present and future. In the song, Dylan lays bare the hypocrisy of war and unmasks the whitewashing of America’s military ventures.”
He told Rolling Stone India, “He’s singing about the people who make war, profit by it, and the poor families that send off their children to die”.
For all the song might masquerade as a dogeared old shanty of the folk tradition of old, it remains as timeless and prescient as ever. “From shock-and-awe to Abu Ghraib, dead civilians to the morass in Afghanistan, those phrases can very much be applied to our exploits today,” Morello says. In many ways, its agelessness is a sorry indictment of our failures to learn from history, but from an artistic standpoint, it showcases how enduring an acoustic guitar and a smattering of heartfelt words can be.
So, in Morello’s view, it was a crying shame when Dylan got on board with the zeitgeist and plugged in. “I may be the last person alive who still believes that Dylan sold out at Newport in 1965 when he went electric,” Morello opines. “The pressure was on him to lead a movement, something he didn’t sign up for and wasn’t interested in. I think he missed an opportunity to see if there was a ceiling to what music could do to push forward radical politics.”
Morello believes that when Dylan changed towards a more rock ‘n’ roll and politically reserved style, the cause for a cultural revolution was sequestered with it. Needless to say, Dylan would disagree. In his own way, the movement into rock ‘n’ roll and away from traditionalised political folk was inherently just a different form of politics and progressive action.
Take, for instance, ‘Like a Rolling Stone‘ that soon followed—in essence, with that searing anthem, Dylan turned his attention towards the political agitators who clung to his coattails and questioned their own morals.
If they were stringing up the guillotines, then wasn’t it proper and fit that they weren’t poseurs and fair-weather pretenders and had their virtues in order before putting the world to rights? Even the completely apolitical, more spiritually leaning era of New Morning, which saw him regress from the limelight for the first time, had a personal political swing to it akin to Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised that came shortly afterwards.
However, as Morello says, it certainly became less direct after Newport, and with a band marching behind him, it would’ve been interesting to see where it could’ve led before electricity drove the mob towards division. My guess is that if it wasn’t positively charged ions, something equally as petty might’ve caused them to splinter. So, Dylan’s own corroboration of the day and the events that followed are perhaps the most justified and true.
As the story goes, the beatnik crowd at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 sat quietly and reserved under the summer sun. All was heavenly and peaceful as hopeful spectators awaited the arrival of the man who had been crowned king—a boy of only 24 years named Bob Dylan. The only thing that could possibly upset the peace, love, and acoustic harmony is if some daft punk disavowed the Amish standards of folk authenticity and plugged in.
They did not expect the betrayal at hand from the man who had been introduced as literally belonging to them. As Dylan would later exclaim, “What a crazy thing to say! Screw that. As far as I knew, I didn’t belong to anyone then or now.” With his bold iconoclasm, Dylan was about to prove just that. He went his own way, as he always did, and others went there’s. Alas, it is not without an irony that Morello accepts that tracks like ‘With God on Our Side’ still stand, showing his path.
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