broadside magazine

chords & sheet music for let me die in my footsteps, written by bob dylan.

PHIL OCHS: The trouble with Newport 65 was that too many people forgot that it was supposed to be a festival. The cops were ridiculously harsh and rude. Many city performers were up tight about how well they would do professionally. And juvenile gossip seemed to be on too many peoples’ tongues. It should have been called the Newport Fuzz Festival. If people don't take it so seriously next year it should turn out to be a whole lot better.

NEWS REPORT: This year’s Newport Folk Festival was the biggest ever with 77,000 paid admissions. Festival officials plan to have next summer’s affair run a full week.

CARL MIRKEN (Broadside reporter): Fanatic screaming erupted when Bob Dylan appeared on stage Sunday night. His black leather sports jacket, red shirt, tapered black slacks and electric guitar startled some in the audience and dismayed many. Sight of the Butterfield Band backing him up deepened their dismay. By his third -- and most ‘radically’ rock and roll -- song, there was loud jeering and cat-calls from some parts of the audience. Then a regular battle between boos and cheers. Bob was obviously quite perturbed, the first time I have seen him so in front of an audience. (It must be said that he had rehearsed with the band for only an hour the night before and the poorly-balanced sound system made what could have been a great sound messy). Bob dismissed the band, exchanged his electronic guitar for his more familiar acoustic one. When a cry arose for him to sing “Mr. Tambourine Man” he responded almost apologetically “Okay, if you want me to.” And he did, and then once again he had the oldtime thunderous near-unanimous applause. All in all, it was a dramatic confrontation.

JACK SOLOMAN (manager): Dylan was out of his own element. Butterfield isn't a performer. He just lays down music.

JOAN BAEZ (performer): Tonight Bob was in a mess. He’s really very good. People just don't understand his writing.

CAROL ADLER (copywriter): This is the most hostile audience I've ever seen. I don’t understand it. Dylan completely knocked them out wherever he went in England.

THEODORE BIKEL (performer): You don’t whistle in church -- you don't play rock and roll at a folk festival.

NEW YORK TIMES (Robert Shelton): While the fresh, enthusiastic thousands of teenagers in the audiences comported themselves in a fashion that pleased Newport and festival officials, the conduct of older members of the folk leadership left much to be desired… A folklorist and a personal manager scuffled on the ground over a fine point of courtesy in the folklorist's introduction.

ALAN LOMAX (folklorist): I had been on stage for over three hours and I was hot and tired. At this point I wasn’t emceeing -- I was talking about the blues. When I came off stage there was Al Grossman and he said to me “That was the worst job of emceeing I’ve ever heard in my life.” And I said “It was no worse than some of the things you've done in your life.” Then he said something like “I ought to belt you in the nose.” I pushed my chest up against his and invited him to try it. I don’t remember swinging but there he was stretched out on the ground. Then he jumped up and grappled me around the waist and we were both down, rolling around. By that time people pulled us apart. That’s all there was to it. It couldn't have lasted more than 30 seconds. But I suppose it's already becoming a folk legend. (Editor’s note: The artist who apparently got a somewhat less than perfect introduction from Mr. Lomax belongs to Hr. Grossman’s stable).

CARYL MIRKEN (after the dust settled): The contemporary songs workshop was a high point of the festival, or could have been. It was the most eagerly awaited event and best attended. Large crowds jammed into the area the instant the gates were opened. Co-Host Peter Yarrow in a little speech said the contemporary writers are rightfully folksong writers because the whole folk tradition is with them. But although this was by far the workshop attracting the greatest interest the Newport Board this year seemed deliberately de-emphasizing contemporary songs and their writers. Most conspicuous by his absence from the program was Phil Ochs… Also absent were such of the country's leading topical songwriters as Tom Paxton and Eric Andersen. Also memorable at Newport 65: Joan Baez saluting “Johnson’s marvelous foreign policy” by singing “Stop, In The Name Of Love”... Another side of Pete Seeger: Pete managing to hang in while backing Spokes Mashiyane, the amazing South African pennywhistle jazzman (his music is really called “Kwela” but the closest term we have for it is jazz), along with Chicago blues piano player Lalayette Lee and bassist Willie Dixon. Spokes, who along with Mimi and Dick Fariña was probably the most brilliant performer at this year’s festival was brought to Newport largely through the efforts of Pete Seeger, who discovered him on his world tour a year or so ago… Fannie Lou Hamer: A great human being and a wondrous singer (“Mississippi, land of the tree and home ot the grave”)... Dick & Mimi Fariña holding an enthusiastic audience Sunday afternoon despite a sudden downpour as they sang their “House Un-American Blues Activity Dream”... Mark Spoelstra's new songs… Donovan the import from Britain is certainly much more than just an “imitation of Bob Dylan”. Donovan has his own style; his imagery is clear and meaningful without any trace at Dylan's semantic obscurity. Aside from his music Donovan is the sweetest, most “natural” guy going… John Koerner's parody of the gambler-sheriff song.

A bright new face in folk music is appearing at Gerde’s Folk City. Although only 20 years old, Bob Dylan is one of the most distinctive stylists to play a Manhattan cabaret in months. Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap. His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.

Mr. Dylan’s voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his porch. All the “husk and bark” are left on his notes and a searing intensity pervades his songs.

Mr. Dylan is both comedian and tragedian. Like a vaudeville actor on the rural circuit, he offers a variety of droll musical monologues: “Talking Bear Mountain” lampoons the over-crowding of an excursion boat, “Talking New York” satirizes his troubles in gaining recognition and “Talking Havah Nagilah” burlesques the folk-music craze and the singer himself.

In his serious vein, Mr. Dylan seems to be performing in a slow-motion film. Elasticized phrases are drawn out until you think they may snap. He rocks his head and body, closes his eyes in reverie and seems to be groping for a word or a mood, then resolves the tension benevolently by finding the word and the mood.

He may mumble the text of “House of the Rising Sun” in a scarcely understandable growl or sob, or clearly enunciate the poetic poignancy of a Blind Lemon Jefferson blues: “One kind favor I ask of you--See that my grave is kept clean.”

Mr. Dylan’s highly personalized approach toward folk song is still evolving. He has been sopping up influences like a sponge. At times, the drama he aims at is off-target melodrama and his stylization threatens to topple over as a mannered excess.

But if not for every taste, his music-making has the mark of originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his youth. Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up.

"Mr. Dylan's compositions don't fit into any pigeonhole; the minute you have one characterized, it flies away. His lyrics mix a solo sermon out of Guthrie's conversational folksay with a dash of Rimbaud's demonic imagery or even a bit of Yevtushenko's social criticism." Robert Shelton, New York Times, April 13, 1963

A lot of other people have been comparing Bob Dylan not only to Yevtushenko but to Garcia Lorca, especially after hearing Bob do his “Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall”.

It is difficult to fit any true poet in a “pigeonhole”. That's too small a space for a creative artist, too small for a roving singer like Bob Dylan. When asked how he writes his songs, Bob just says they're up there in the air, and he just picks them down, and if he didn't, somebody else would. I think there's more in this thought than merely modesty. In it there are many scatterings of truth.

Why is it when you read through great poets of different cultures and different times that much of their imagery is similar, and many times they talk about the same feelings and things? One way of answering this is to say there are certain common events all these poets see and react to -- war, love, nature, children; and that their images likewise come from common experience. The way Bob Dylan might answer it would be that these poets reached up into the same piece of air, and what they pulled down, in their individual ways, was their poems and their songs.

A number of people see Yevtushenko and Dylan as being close together. as both being social critics, and thereby playing a similar role in their respective countries. It seems to me that the impact of and the poetry itself are quite different. In Russia there is the tradition of the poet as an important social critic that dates back to Pushkin, and goes right through the Soviet period beginning with Mayakovsky and finally to the present day where Yevtushenko’s most recent book, published in 1962, sold out its edition of 100,000 copies. America's most important social critics have been her novelists, ie: Harriet B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and her journalists, ie: Lincoln Steffens’ Shame of the Cities. Our poets, even our popular ones like Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg, undergo book editions of 5 to 10 thousand with the publisher still taking a loss.

But we have had our great social poets, and I think when Bob’s work is fully evaluated he will number among them. Bob does not mince words when he speaks about the "masters of war”:

I hope that you die and your death will come soon, I’ll follow your casket by the pale afternoon, And I’ll watch while you’re lowered down to your death bed, Then I’ll stand over your grave ‘til I’m sure that you're dead.

Yevtushenko wishes death on the anti-semites in Babi Yar:

How horrible it is that pompous title the anti-semites calmly call themselves,  Society of the Russian Race. No part of me can ever forget it. When the last anti-semite on the earth is buried for ever let the International ring.

Yevtushenko sees in the death of the anti-semites a re-affirmation of the society in which he lives. Dylan in his songs too calls for the righting of the wrongs in his society, but they are so multitudinous and deeply imbedded what may be necessary is a new society as Woody Guthrie visualizes. A striking difference between Yevtushenko and Dylan is that Bob’s action is much more intense -- he will follow the war planner's casket to make sure that he is dead. And in “Emmett Till” he lashes out not only at the lynchers but at the great mass of us who by standing aside and failing to take action against racism permit it to continue:

If you can't speak out against this sort of thing, A crime that's so unjust,  Your eyes are filled with dead man's dirt, Your mind is filled with dust. Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, Your blood must refuse to flow, For you would let this human race, Fall down so godawful low.

Intensity added to a wide-ranging view gives us this Dylan verse in “With God On Your Side” which has implications much deeper than only the problem of anti-semitism:

When the second World War came to an end We forgave the Germans and then we were friends. Though they murdered six million, In the ovens they fried, The Germans now, too Have God on their side.

I get the feeling on hearing Dylan and reading Lorca that they both pull their poems out of the same body of air, although there are marked differences and Bob has never read Lorca. It is as though they met one night on a mountainside and looked out over the world’s lands and oceans and saw the same things and agreed to tell us, each in his own way, what they saw. Bob sings: “I heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warning” while Lorca says: “these clouds are broken by fistblows of coral that carry a fiery cocoon on their backs.”

Bob is much influenced by Woody Guthrie, of course, and I think it is here where comparisons become the most meaningful. Woody did not confine himself to “silo sermons” and those who say he “did not exceed the boundaries of talk song” should take another look at his work. His imagery many times is subtle, strong and lyrical:

I tell you about the winds and the weathers and oceans and the lands and the continents that have riz and sunk since this little hunk of dirt first whirled off the burning sun. I tell you of the men and the women that bathed their eyes in the zig zag lightning and hugged and kissed in the rumbling thunder and about every union wheel that ever did run down a union road…

Bob Dylan’s “Hard Rain” and “Blowin In The Wind” come to mind right away. He means it sincerely when he sings in his “Letter To Woody”:

Hey Woody, but I know that you know All the things that I’m sayin and many times more.

Broadside's home is a small little room that's got chairs and a sofa with a tape recorder finishing off the bottom wall space. First people Sis Cunningham welcomed in after me was two-thirds of the New World Singers. Gil Turner took out his 12-stringer, borrowed a flat pick, Sis took out the mike for the tape recorder, and out came a talking blues Gil just wrote about the newspaper strike that had us all quietly laughing. We didn’t want to laugh louder than quietly because that might get on the tape.

Before the song’s over, in walks Bob Dylan and Suzy [Suze Rotolo], who sometimes illustrate's Bob's songs. The last verse that Gil was singing had how he was going to see his friend, Bob Dylan, who is a walking newspaper and will give him the lowdown on what's happening in the world. Bob thought it was a great song just from hearing the last verse.

Then, Gil took out his 6-string Gibson, handed it over to Bob Dylan saying how Bob’s new song “Masters Of War” was a powerful and a great one, one of the best Bob had ever written. I kept on thinking he had written a lot of good ones, some that had real lyric poetry like “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” (which makes you think right away of Lorca), and I waited for the images of rain, and thunder, and lightning to come out in great spectacles.

But no, this time there was a different kind of poetry, one of great anger, accusation, just saying what the masters of war are, straight forward and without compromising one inch in its short sharp direct intensity. I got a hunch this is the most difficult Dylan song for others to sing right, 'cause it can so easily be over sung, made a melodrama. But when Bob sings it, it rings honest and true. I hope a record is made of Bob singing this song and that a lot of people will listen to the quiet voice that Bob sings this song in because there is a dignity in the words that comes from when they have been thought about for a long, long time.

And right after that, not waiting for a chance to get two breaths, Bob came along with “Playboys & Playgirls Ain't Gonna Run My World," a group song that like Pete Seeger said later in the evening "is going to be sung by a million people in the next year.” Its tune catches whole crowds easy, and the words come right along from the feeling, Hell man, I was born here and I live here, but I’m not goin’ to let rats knock things down where I was born, where I live.

In the meantime, Phil Ochs, his sidekick, and the third third of the New World Singers, Happy Traum, came in. Boy, this room was so jammed packed with people that there was real foot and banjo and guitar shifting necessary to get Phil Ochs close enough to the mike to record his three new songs. Phil Ochs. What a guy! Quiet, soft spoken, but there with his guitar he spun some of the most real verses that's goin' to be written about the death of N.Y. Youth Board worker Louis C. Marsh and the miners striking in Hazard, Kentucky. There was an immediateness about those two songs Phil did. I got a strong feeling that his song on Hazard is going to be remembered past this strike, and be resung in many strikes to come.

Phil’s last song, a fine one of hope with a great group chorus had the last half of it heard by Pete Seeger who later that night was going to sing at the Hazard strikers rally at Community Church. After hearing the tape of the songs, smiling all the way through, Pete sang a number of new songs sent him recently.

We were all out of breath without breathing hard, that feeling you get when a lot of good things happen all at once. Pete expressed it, leaning back in his chair, saying slowly in dreamy tones: “You know, in the past five months I haven't heard as many good songs and as much good music as I heard here tonight.”

That’s what makes Broadside, all that good singing and all that good writing, plus a lot of hard work, labor pains. In the sheets of paper there are many smiles and many glances of anger, and even more the strong hope that these songs just won’t stay on the mimeograph pages, but will live and be sung.