Bob Dylan by David Yaffe

Author:David Yaffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-04-05T16:00:00+00:00

“White Brother”

From Odetta to the folk scene, civil rights to Judas, Mavis to “aretha”: in five years, Robert Zimmerman had become the celebrity Bob Dylan, an icon imprisoned by his own fame. A few years after Dylan attempted to liberate his image of black female sexuality in attempting to write a novel, he also reentered the fray of political songs—a realm he had otherwise relinquished—for two scorching anthems in support of two black men in prison. He would have nothing to do with Woodstock Nation, but in 1971, a newspaper article about the shooting of Black Panther George Jackson, gunned down while trying to escape San Quentin, inspired a return to his protest mode of 1963. “Some of us are prisoners, the rest of us are guards,” sang Dylan in the single “George Jackson.” He was clearly identifying with the former, aligning himself with a violent, controversial radical figure at a time when he seemed politically complacent. (The song would never be issued on an album or performed live.) Four years later, he was among the celebrities sent copies of Hurricane Carter’s prison memoir, The Sixteenth Round, which claimed that Carter had been framed by a racist judge and jury for a crime he didn’t commit. There has been much debate about Carter’s claim, but Dylan put himself on a mission as a kind of identification: “The first time I saw him, I left knowing one thing . . . I realized that the man’s philosophy and my philosophy were running down the same road, and you don’t meet too many people like that.” Dylan did not simply don black causes like a pair of Miss Lonely’s earrings; he identified with the story and the man, although once some of the facts about Carter came out, he may have thought twice. He has not performed the song live since 1976.

In his film Renaldo and Clara, a sprawling, improvised account of the Rolling Thunder Revue, there is a section where Dylan is outside the Apollo Theater in Harlem, three decades before his duet with Wynton Marsalis. As a roving reporter, unknown as celebrity Bob Dylan, he asks a group of African American locals on 125th Street about the Carter case and, interspersed with a rehearsal take from the song, they all avow his innocence. (For contrast there is an interview with a seventy-two-year-old white cop, who tells Dylan he’s afraid to express his opinion.) The line it is drawn, and Dylan, called a “white brother” by Carter, comes down on the boxer’s side. When Dylan played a benefit for Carter at Rahway Penitentiary in New Jersey, a photo-op was staged for People magazine. Dylan was wearing whiteface, which he wore throughout the tour as part of the commedia dell’arte ambience, and also, he said, “so the audience could see me.” Here he turns minstrelsy inside out, reversing the poles of significance and showing the artificiality of the social constructs of race. Carter is behind a cage (brought in for the shoot) in shadow, beaming in Dylan’s presence.

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