Left wing? right wing? chicken wing!

     What follows is my critical analysis of a recent article, titled: “The Truth About Bob Dylan’s Falling Out With Pete Seeger”, written by Michael Moynihan, and published in The Free Press on January 5^th 2025 Link. The article is a commentary on the narrative that was presented in the recent James Mangold directed Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown”. The premise of the article is that Bob’s rejection of the folk music establishment, in favour of amplified Rock music, was due to an ideological shift away from the politics of the left in favour of a more conservative outlook. The author’s claim is that Bob’s “going electric” at the Newport folk festival, alleged squabble with Pete Seeger, and his apparent betrayal of the lefty folky folks and their movement, which Bob found himself to be the spearhead of in the mid 60’s, was REALLY his symbolic rejection of communism/Stalinism and therefore embracing of McCarthyism and the “Red Scare” (my words not his). This claim would require that Bob stopped believing in social justice, civil rights and left wing political causes in general, sometime between the release of “The Times They Are A Changin” (1964) and “Bringing it All Back Home” (1965).

In my humble opinion, Moynihan’s article suffers from bias and spin that are not surprising considering the author, the media company and its intended audience, all of whom veer towards right wing conservatism. Moynihan claims that the narrative portrayed in “A Complete Unknown” deliberately obfuscates Bob’s ideological shift to the right, as one might expect from a Hollywood leftist propaganda piece, but based on the generally accepted narrative it seems to be Moynihan that is the historical revisionist. Did Bob really reject those woke lefty folks and their politics? If so, what might we reasonably gleam as his reasons for doing so? Is it possibile that Dylan was simply inspired by a new artistic vision and was rejecting the huge amount of pressure associated with being anointed the spokesperson of a generation? To get to the bottom of this we have to look at Bob’s natural history.

Bob was raised in a mostly secular/Jewish home in the cultural backwaters of 1940s Minnesota. All indications are that he grew up, just like many young American boys of that era, wanting to ride a motorbike, impress his friends and get the girl. Wanting to be James Dean. This desire for success in any and all of its perceived forms, encompassed by the American dream, is a great motivator for kids and adults alike. In rare cases, a combustible desire combined with inherent talent and a Goldilocks context of nurturing circumstances can manifest in an artist with unparalleled creative genius, such as Bob. As we know, Bob was spurred on and inspired after his discovery of the American folk hero, iconoclast and rebellious wandering troubadour, Woody Guthrie. The James Dean of folk music. Guthrie, whose mythology and songs have come to represent the experience, the struggle, and the very spirit of America, was a lifelong socialist, political radical and social activist. Dylan absorbed Guthrie; his music, his identity, his social conscience and his humanist impulses. Shortly after becoming Guthrie, Dylan proceeded to compose some of the most powerful and iconic socially conscious political songs ever, including “Blowin’ in The Wind”. All evidence indicates that he was steeped in anti-war, pro-civil rights and other leftist causes, partly through the influence of his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo. Did he not stand on the stage behind Martin Luther King Jr. at the march on Washington in 1963 during the “I have a dream” speech, and travel across the country with Pete Seeger in support of civil rights? Certainly he did. Did he also write a-political love songs and ballads? absolutely. Bob, who is known for messing with his interviewers, once said that he never intended “Blowin’ in the Wind” as a protest song. Moynihan seizes upon this one quote as evidence that Bob was trying to distance himself from the protest movement by 1965, which, while possible, tells us nothing about his political affiliations. Although he largely disappeared from the scene, he remained a big inspiration for the social justice and anti-war movement that lasted right up to the late 60s; while others, such as Neil Young stepped up to fill the void.

Moynihan’s argument can be distilled thus: Bob rejected leftism. Bob is great. Leftist causes and social activism suck! Score one point for conservatives. Only the second proposition is patently true. Even IF Moynihan has some express access to the contents of Bob’s mind in 1964, things that have never been revealed in interviews or in print, so what? Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say he is right, Bob woke up one day and said “I don’t believe in all this leftist, communist bullshit”, as the author of the article seems to believe. We still have to ask, “so what”? If Bob jumped off a bridge would that be proof that it’s a good thing to do? If Bob accepts Jesus into his heart (which of course he did), should we all do the same? Should it impact our enjoyment of his music? Perhaps the world would be a better place if Bob had stuck with his activism and protest songs in the late 60’s.

The period of Bob’s career encompassed in the climactic sequences of “A Complete Unknown” was for sure an inflection point. But evidence that a political ideological change was behind it is lacking. By rejecting Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and essentially all his fans, while going electric, he was not necessarily rejecting the social justice movement, or the value system of the left. The most obvious explanation is rather that Bob was making a profound and personal protest. That is to say, rather than stepping away from protest, he was twisting the screw to transform the nature of his protest. He was now protesting the box. He was asserting that he was both less and much more than what his followers were making him out to be. His new songs were protest songs of a whole new sort, which demonstrated an artistry on a whole different level, to the extent that what was being protested was not always clear. It wasn’t protest songs that were being abandoned, but topical songs. His new material was more existential, the lyrics were surreal and toyed with meaning. Clear literal narratives were replaced with riddles. If there was anything Bob was rejecting it was the possibility that words could convey clear and specific meaning, that anything in this world could be cut and dry.

Apart from this simple explanation, Moynihan seems to miss or gloss over the fact that Bob was formatively influenced by the Blues, Country, Rockabilly and R&B, in addition to folk music, with evidence of this going back to his very first studio sessions (“Mixed Up Confusion”). Considering this, and Bob’s revolutionary nature, his alchemical shift in musical styles, which lead to the creation of a whole new genre, folk-rock, is not quite so surprising. Moynihan’s knowledge lapses make me wonder, does he know enough about Bob to be able to make just pronouncements about what motivated his change of tack? I get the sense that Moynihan is a bit green on the topic, and may not have any real insight into what makes Bob tick. Although I don’t doubt that he’s a big fan, he may not be “Aspergerian” enough. Critically, he doesn’t bring the receipts to back up his argument. His villainization of Pete Seeger, and by association all members of the folk revival, based on his undying support for Stalin, also seems to go too far. According to his Wikipedia page Seeger’s support for Soviet-style Socialism began to wane with increasing evidence of atrocities associated with the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Should Seeger have publicly renounced support for Stalin sooner? Probably. But his faith in communism can be separated from this lapse in judgement, and his belief in a fairer and better world is certainly his defining characteristic.  In 1995 he said: "I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it". Will we ever tire of flogging the communist straw-man?

In formulating his understanding of Bob Dylan, Moynihan seems to be erroneously projecting some of the characteristics of the lead character in the 1992 political satire “Bob Roberts” Trailer. The movie is about a right-wing conservative folk singing senator running for President. This character is figuratively and literally a mirror inverse of Bob Dylan. He sings “The Times They Are Changing, Back”, and “This Land is My Land”. The movie demonstrates the extreme (although not by modern standards) of what could happen with the assent to the presidency of the United States by a vapid and corrupt showman that is utterly devoid of any social or moral standard. The character just happens to be conservative, and not one of those woke lefties. And that’s pretty much how it ended up happening in real life, 24 years after the movie was released.

Did Bob reject leftism and social justice in the mid 60s? highly debateable. Did Bob become more conservative later in life? Likely. It is in fact a common trajectory that I will discuss below. Winston Churchill was falsely attributed as saying “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain”. While I disagree with the qualification of the phenomenon, there is truth to the trajectory as a general trend, and there are also exceptions. The British historian Paul Addison pointed out that Churchill himself had been a conservative at 15, and a Liberal at 35. However, in the flush of youth we generally start off filled with hope and naivety that the world can change, with total imaginative and creative plasticity. As we age, we become more set in our ways, more jaded. We ossify. The hard knocks of life and the biological/neurological damage that accrues naturally with age (and faster with the rockstar lifestyle of drug and alcohol abuse), makes us less dynamic. We become less able to dream in the metaphorical sense, and our literal ability to dream diminishes relative to the young. Our old curmudgeonly selves become more “conservative”. We decide that certain things that we precociously believed were possible are not possible. We clutch for the pearls in moral panic and fear. We become less tolerant of immigrants (instead of pitying them), homeless people (including hobo’s), and marginalized groups in society as our faculties wane, and we lose sight of the very thin line between good and evil. Young people have the advantage of a kind of beginners mind: free of all the meta-garbage, false-assumptions and propaganda that gets deposited in our brains through the banality of culture; Free of all the brain worms, and the thoughts not-our-own that have been implanted by parents, teachers and society at large, and left to suppurate. As Dylan sings counter-intuitively “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”. To be wise, we must get younger. To stay free, to continue to care we must stay forever young.

I’ll end this with a finer point on Moynihan’s folly. Early on in his piece he sets a trap that he proceeds to fall into himself. After noting that “with minimal quote-mining, one can create endless iterations of Dylan: left-wing or right-wing, evangelical Christian or messianic Jew, civil rights activist or subterranean racist”, he then proceeds to use quote-mining (badly) to create a version of Bob that suits his personal viewpoint or ideals (likely those of a subterranean racist, lol). It’s true that Bob wears many hats, and he has many faces, many personas, and many voices. He also likes to wear masks, some of which are indistinguishable from his actual face. He wants to be, as the movie title suggests, a complete unknown. All of this creates a kind of mystique that is part of his enduring allure. He is of course an artist and a performer, all of whom are engaged in building a public facing persona. He is an iconoclast, but he takes it even further; he plays with his public image and messes with people’s expectations, and what they “want him to be”, as if to say “I am all of these things, and more, but also none of this”. Therefore, Bob can be what you want him to be. If you want him to be a lefty, listen to his protest songs. If you want him to be God-fearing, listen to his gospel (which ironically is some of his best protest music), if you want him to be anti-Science listen to the last line in “Do Right To Me Baby”.

Just like any Bob fan, I find in him what I want to find. When I was an idealistic teenager I gravitated towards his early political content. “Where have you been my blue eyed son”, spoke directly to me. It painted a picture of an unjust and chaotic world, where human suffering was a consequence of natural disasters and man-made disasters (“I saw a white man that walked a black dog”). “God on our side” was pretty clear to me in its atheistic thrust. A clear condemnation of the twisted logic that allowed us to forgive ourselves for slaughtering the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and then to forgive the Germans for slaughtering the Jews. To my mind, the message was clear: how can there be a God at all if he is on the side of all of these evil actions throughout history? In what universe can a good and just God allow and condone genocide? Others have interpreted this song differently, and different spins are possible. This is a prime example of how the listener can develop a relationship to a song, which acts as a kind of touch stone or scaffold for a developing philosophical concept. That’s really what Bob’s music did for me. It helped me to learn, and to develop my personal philosophy about the world and place it in a historical context. In my particular case, coming from a left leaning upbringing, Bob’s songs served as a catalyst to help me grow my particular flavour of philosophy or ideology. This continues regardless of whatever his own political view points are currently. Bob fans that had a conservative upbringing, no doubt accentuated and amplified those messages that supported, based on their own set of biases and assumptions, a very different philosophical outlook. They probably spent more time listening to John Wesley Harding. Our minds look for points of congruence, that support our pre-existing psychological momentum. Although there may be moments where a song challenges us and our assumptions, it is unlikely that our goal in listening to music is to produce feelings of cognitive dissonance.

Bob is a mysterious human. Trying to understand him using his art is a difficult, but worthy exercise. His art is really a reflection of his inner world of dreams, nightmares and other subconscious stuff, and therefore represents a tussle with his inner demons and symbolic fragments of his personality; and since most of us struggle with universal ills and demons, Bob’s art is like a Rosetta stone for our own intellectual and philosophical journeys. We may never know the real Bob, and just like any of us his political views and rational perspectives on culture and politics must be shifting and evolving over time, and in response to changes in the world itself. Certainly he did return to protest songs in a more complex form in the 70’s (Hurricane, George Jackson) and 80’s (Infidels, the Gospel albums). Also, Bob was very friendly with Barak Obama, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, and not at all with any republican president (that I know of), which might be a subtle hint of his political leanings. On the 2018 album “Universal Love”, Bob contributes the first song, “He’s Funny That Way”. The album features various artists singing gender-specific love songs with pronouns adjusted to refer to same gender. He’s hardly an LGBTQ activist, however his endorsement of this project suggests that he is sympathetic to the cause. Ultimately, he cannot be categorized, and any effort to do so must be taken with a grain of salt. It’s like trying to ascertain the political ideology of Mount Everest. He transcends identity politics and always has. As his mentor Woody Guthrie said, “Left wing? Right wing? Chicken wing.”