Bob Dylan (57 page)

A month after that, on November 2, on election night 2004, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with the votes cast but the outcome still unknown, Dylan sang the song once more, again in the middle of a war—a middle, that night, without an end. At first his delivery was clipped, the words rushed and stuttered. As certain lines seemed to draw more from him, the song seemed to rewrite itself. “You put a gun in my hand,” Dylan sang to the arms merchants in an old-cowboy voice; it sounded like “You put a gun to my head.” An electric guitar came down hard, and the music turned fierce. “I’ll stand over your grave till I’m sure that you’re dead”—as the words came out of Dylan’s mouth his voice was shaking, or he was making it shake. And none of this matched what happened in Boulder, Colorado, at Boulder High School, the very next day.

The day after the election, students staged a sit-in in the school library: “Bush will directly affect our generation’s future,” one Boulder freshman said, “and we were upset we didn’t have a voice in that.” The principal refused to have the students removed. Congressman Mark Udall came to the school to speak with the students; so did U.S. senator-elect Ken Salazar. TV crews arrived. And then the stakes were raised.

The annual school talent show was scheduled for November 12; a teacher named Jim Kavanagh helped bring a group of students together as a band. “Your basic juvenile delinquent types,” he said later, in plain English, then dropping into teacher’s language: “at
risk.” Fooling around on guitar, someone began playing in D Minor. “That sounds like ‘Masters of War,’” one student said. That wasn’t what the guitar player thought he was playing, but in a moment it was what the group was playing. The students came up with a name for their group: the Taliband. A singer came forward, a student named Allyse Wojtanek. “Not a singer,” Kavanagh said: “a very brave kid.” The group went to the audition. “Nobody did anything close to what we did,” Kavanagh said—at the start, he and another teacher were in the group—“and we really sucked. I never heard such a horrible sound. We found out the next day that not only did we make the show, we were the last act. And at this point, one of the kids who was doing karaoke stuff went home and said to her mother, ‘I didn’t make the show, but this other band that wants to kill Bush did.’” Instead of “I hope that you die,” the student had heard “Die, Bush, Die”—or so she said.

The mother got on the phone to the local right-wing radio stations—and once again news trucks hit the school. Talk show hosts called for the Taliband to be kicked out of the talent show. And then the Secret Service arrived. They collected the lyrics to “Masters of War” and left. The story went over the AP wire. The principal had to take his phone off the hook.

The band changed its name—to Coalition of the Willing.
²³
They opened negotiations with the school administration over video footage to be projected onto the musicians as they played: they wanted footage of Bush and Iraq. “Does it have to be
Bush?
” the
principal asked. “Why not
lots
of masters of war,” a student suggested: Bush, Hitler, and Stalin. “Why do there have to be
any
faces?” the administration begged. Finally they settled for generic war footage and the American flag. It was in 1958 that Bob Dylan, leading the Golden Chords, played his own high school talent show. The story has always been that a teacher, outraged by the noise from the likes of “I Want You to Be My Girl” and “Let the Good Times Roll,” brought the curtain down while the band was still playing. “That never happened,” Monte Edwardson, the guitarist in the Golden Chords, recently told a reporter—but the Coalition of the Willing had to worry that they were setting themselves up for the same fate.

As the talent show began, three gangly boys came on to MC the show, miming to ZZ Top’s “Sharp-Dressed Man.” They didn’t miss a step all night.

A twelve-student assemblage did the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” A young woman played a classical piano piece. Another danced. The crowd gave everyone wild applause.

As one of the MCs began a joke, an off-stage electric guitar drowned him out. “I can’t work under these conditions!” he shouted. “I’m going to protest this next act!” “Oh my God,” said a second MC. “You’re
protesting
it? Can you do that? This could be national newsworthy!” Dressed now in a black suit, the third MC pulled out a video camera and began filming the other two. The
three accused each other of planning to burn down the school—not a casual joke, thirty-five miles from Columbine High School, just five years before the site of the worst school shooting in the history of the country. “This next act,” said one MC, “is the controversial act you’ve been waiting for—the Russian Jugglers!”

Aside from Coalition of the Willing, brother and sister Olga and Vova Galdrenko were the highlight of the show. There were ten more acts—and then the seven-student Coalition came out, with Allyse Wojtanek in a black halter. There were video battlefield images of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq then, Iraq now, projected right onto the musicians.

The sound was big and atonal, with guitar and saxophone on the top and Wojtanek screaming. When she got to “I hope that you die” she talked the line, making each word stand alone. When she hit “SURE THAT YOU’RE DEAD” she all but tore her throat out.

Backstage, students came up to Wojtanek to congratulate her. “Perspiration had run Allyse’s thick black eyeliner into her bright green eye shadow,” wrote Brittany Anas, a reporter for the
Boulder Daily Camera.
“We were misunderstood,” Wojtanek told Anas. “People thought we were like communists, and that was not it at all.” “We think that the war we are involved in is wrong, and that people need to come to their senses,” said Brian Martens—he had played guitar. One student announced that she and her friends were going to get fake IDs so they could vote.

The band and its audience got through the night, and nobody got hurt. They made their moment. For the moment, the war was theirs, perhaps waiting for them six months or a year down the line—and the song was theirs, waiting for them for more than forty years.

 

 

People continue to sing the song. One of the most memorable performances came on 7 November 2007, at the Beacon Theatre in New York, at a show celebrating the release of Todd Haynes’s film
I’m Not There,
by the Roots.

The Philadelphia band—never definable, not as hip-hop, not as soul, but closer to rock ’n’ roll as the word made sense in 1965 than anything else—was, this night, singer and guitarist Captain Kirk Douglas, drummer Questlove, and Damon “Tuba Gooding Jr.” Bryson, playing a sousaphone so enormous he looked as if he had an elephant wrapped around his neck. There was a long military drum roll. Douglas cleared his throat and sang the first two verses of “Masters of War” in the exact cadence of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Barely strumming his guitar, with Questlove and Bryson waiting silently behind him, Kirk sang in the clearest tone imaginable, filling the room with sound, hitting every note. When he came to that point where, in the National Anthem, the word “free” is shot into the sky—
—Kirk held the word “far”—
—for a gorgeous, shattering twelve seconds before the tune broke back to its original body and Questlove and Bryson came into the song.

The greatest protest song of all time wasn’t even on the
Mojo
poll: Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As both “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Masters of War” go back to “Nottamun Town,” the Roots’ “Masters of War” twice reaches back to Hendrix: for the National Anthem at the beginning, and, for the rest of their performance, to Hendrix’s “Machine Gun,” from 1970, the year after Woodstock, the year Hendrix died. And it wasn’t altogether a new idea. That same year, 1970, the singer-songwriter Leon Russell sang a single verse of “Masters of War” to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” called it “Old Masters,” and put it out as the last track of his first solo album. It
was just him at a piano, fooling around; within weeks it had disappeared from the record. Because the idea was too controversial? Because it was so obviously a rehearsal, a throw-away? When the album was reissued in 1995, the little song was put back on. Had the Roots ever heard it? “Very much so,” Questlove said when I asked. “My dad had that record when I was younger and actually I remember hearing that before I even heard the Dylan version.”

Shouldering “Machine Gun,” the Roots smashed their way through the song after those first two verses. They were so alive to the theatricality buried in “Masters of War” it came across as an action movie: you could see Jim Brown and Bruce Willis in it. The band pushed a stair-climbing rhythm—Questlove playing ever more quietly, running a parade-ground funeral march through the firefight Douglas was orchestrating with his guitar. With strange, displacing, seemingly endless instrumental breaks thrown in between the last two lines of each verse after the “Star-Spangled” beginning, it went on and on, unpredictably, all the familiarity one might have brought to the song blown away. And those instrumental passages opened up the territory the song claimed. It no longer had any limits. It seemed as if it could speak any language, mark any spot—that it could expand, year after year, into the future, taking in the whole of the country, all of its wars.

As the Roots played, you could feel how the song had outlived its callow adolescence. And it was the Iraq war, five years on that night, with, some were planning as the Roots played, lifetimes of it to come, that let the song walk the land like someone who had lived to see the world, his or her own country, double down on every bad dream.

People are still afraid of the song. Joan Baez could never bring herself to sing the last verse; she couldn’t say “I hope that you die.” The late historian Howard Zinn’s
Artists in Times of War,
from 2003, is a return-with-us-now-to-the-golden-days-of-yesteryear book of left-wing American martyrs that has almost nothing to do with art or artists; still, as an example of great art produced in times of war, Zinn quoted in full the first seven verses of “Masters
of War”—and like Joan Baez he omitted the last verse. To have associated his heroes—Thomas Paine, Emma Goldman, Helen Keller, Kurt Vonnegut—with such venom might have robbed them of their saintliness. “I hope that you die”? Howard Zinn wouldn’t sing that song either.

But songs play tricks. In 2008, a Boston public television station put on
The People Speak,
in part a series of dramatic readings based on Zinn’s best-known book,
A People’s History of the United States.
The actor Viggo Mortensen, the heroic killer of David Cronenberg’s daunting movies
A History of Violence
and
Eastern Promises,
appeared to sing “Masters of War.”

He sang it, probably, as no one ever sang it before. He sang with no accompaniment, the way a murder ballad like “Omie Wise” or “Tom Dooley” would have been sung in the Appalachian mountains a hundred or two hundred years ago. Dressed in a brown suit and an orange T-shirt, he began with a deep, otherworldly hum—a burrowing sound that might have come out of the ground. Sometimes looking into a distance, sometimes turning to face the camera directly, he sang quietly but in a full voice, reading from a lyric sheet as if giving a speech, ringing certain words near the ends of lines: “won,” “eyes,” “watch.” His demeanor was considered, as if he’d thought through what he was saying many times. As the song went on Mortensen seemed to gather authority from the speech he was giving; when he reached “Let me ask you one question,” you saw a prosecutor from
Law & Order.
When he came to the beginning of the last verse, and said the words “I hope that you die,” he nodded, as if confirming the judgment of a higher court; at the end of the verse, he dragged out the last word, “dead,” until the harsh, grating vowels dissolved the word and returned it to the hum with which he’d begun. He sang the song as if it were itself the old folk song that had passed unchanged from then to now, from old England to Kentucky, from there to New York, and now to Boston, one place where the nation began.

Following these stories, it becomes clear that, beyond new wars, what has kept the song alive is its melody, and its vehemence: that
final “I hope that you die.” It’s the elegance of the melody and the extremism of the words that attract people—the way the song does go too far, to the limits of free speech. Those are scary words to sing; you need courage to do it. You can’t come to the song as if it’s a joke; you can’t come away from it pretending you didn’t mean what you’ve just said. That’s what people want: a chance to go that far. Because “Masters of War” gives people permission to go that far, the song continues to make meaning, to find new bodies to inhabit, new voices to ride.

 

“The Mojo 100 Greatest Protest Songs,”
Mojo,
May 2004.

 

Bob Dylan, “Masters of War” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, from
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
(Columbia, 1963).

———. “Masters of War,” Grammy Awards, 21 February 1991. The performance can be found on YouTube. See Amy Taubin, “From There to Here,
” Film Comment,
Nov./Dec. 2005.

———. “You Been Hiding Too Long,” Town Hall, New York, 12 April 1963; see
Bob Dylan at Town Hall—The Complete Concert
(bootleg) and
The Genuine Bootleg Series
(bootleg).

———.
Chronicles, Volume One.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004, 219.

 

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara,
directed by Errol Morris (Sony Pictures Classics, 2003).

 

Jackie Washington, “Nottamun Town,” on
Jackie Washington
(Vanguard, 1962). The best known traditional version, from which Washington worked, was recorded in 1957 by Jean Ritchie, who, after threatening to sue Dylan over “Masters of War,” claimed “Nottamun Town” as “a Ritchie Family song” and attempted to copyright the number along with the likes of “O Love Is Teasin’” and “Lord Randal,” on which Dylan based “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Come.” (Cecil Sharpe apparently took down his version of “Nottamun Town” from a Ritchie great-aunt; Ritchie’s story is that the song was brought to America by a great-great grandfather, that it would have been lost to history had he not done so and had she not kept it alive, and that it was thus part of her legal patrimony.)
For “Nottamun Town” see Ritchie’s
Mountain Hearth & Home: Jean Sings the Songs of Her Kentucky Mountain Family
(Elektra Rhino, 2004, recorded 1952-1965); for “Lord Randal” see her
Ballads from her Appalachian family tradition
(Smithsonian Folkways, 2003, recorded 1961).