The Pathway to Freedom Dennis Mcnally on the Deep, Black Roots of Bob Dylan and the American Counterculture by RICHARD B

DEADICATED The Pathway to Freedom Dennis McNally on the deep, black roots of Bob Dylan and the American counterculture BY RICHARD B. SIMON As the Grateful Dead’s publicist, Dennis McNally was Much of the book takes place deep connection to black music, pugnacious, but first and foremost, he was the band’s at the birth of the blues and McNally explains. “The first is, official historian, tapped by guitarist Jerry Garcia in 1980 jazz in the late 1920s, in the he says, being at the head of the on the strength of his book Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, intertwined stories of Buddy river and how it connected him Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Ma with African-American music The Beat Generation and America. Garcia and McNally saw Rainey, Bessie Smith, Charlie in the Deep South—specifically the band as part of a tradition that stretched back through th Patton, King Oliver, Louis through the airwaves, through the Beats to at least the 19 -century writer Henry David Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and the radio show that he listened Thoreau. McNally’s A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History Charlie Parker. Bebop rises as a to,” broadcast up the flood plain of the Grateful Dead (2002) followed that line, telling the response to World War II and by a monster transmitter in story of America in the 1960s and ‘70s through the lens of the ongoing interplay between Louisiana. the Grateful Dead. freedom and oppression at “The other story,” McNally Today, McNally’s hair is shorn and on artists of all stripes, is the home, in the work of Miles adds, “is the affinity he felt for close to his head. His eyes, book’s thematic core. Davis, Thelonius Monk and Robert Johnson the first time magnified by strong glasses, are McNally riffs around that John Coltrane. The painters, he heard him.” When John soulful and blue. He’s wearing a core, layering on the details, artists and writers of the left Hammond signed Dylan to T-shirt from the Zen Center, on character by character, covering intelligentsia frequent the Columbia Records, he gave him whose board he sits. It says the same time period from many clubs. Blind Lemon Jefferson, a few pre-release albums in “Inquire Within.” On the news, different points of view. Robert Johnson and Lead Belly white sleeves. One of them was the shooting of an African- He tracks the evolution of influence Hank Williams, the the not-yet-released Johnson American teenager by a Ferguson, the music itself, how particular political folk of Woody Guthrie collection King of the Delta Mo., police officer has been met techniques begin with one and Pete Seeger, and the next Blues Singers. with outrage and protest, and individual and spread from generation of blues players like “It electrified him,” McNally that protest met by the local musician to musician, from city Muddy Waters and Howlin’ says. police with what looks to all the Wolf. All that music, spread by The pinnacle in this telling world like warfare. the radio and the jukebox, gives is the coincidence of Dylan’s “Everything that’s happening rise to rock and roll. earliest records, particularly in Ferguson could have been Many of the stories we’ve The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan predicted by the last five pages of heard before. The trick is in the and Highway 61 Revisited, my book,” McNally says. context. The music, America’s coinciding with the culmination In On Highway 61: Music, Race culture, is in dialogue with of the Civil Rights Movement and the Evolution of Cultural freedom itself, with a need in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Freedom, McNally re-traces the for spiritual liberty, a response which guaranteed African- roots of America’s counterculture, to that liberty as it takes Americans the right to vote focusing on the hundred years root in the lives of for the first time in history. that followed the Civil War. African-Americans, and The book climaxes in Dylan’s The story runs from Thoreau’s the infectiousness of that performance, backed by The back-to-the-woods response to emotional response that Paul Butterfield Blues Band, of an industrializing America; through generates movement in “Like a Rolling Stone” at Newport Samuel Clemens’ writings as Dennic McNally the broader culture. That Folk that summer. Dylan had Mark Twain, particularly The generates desire for more escaped the literal political into Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to city. Newly freed freedom. the macrocosmic perspective on at its heart, an evisceration of slaves sing spirituals, This feedback loop life, war and death that made slavery and Southern racist inspiring the morally complex culminates in the civil rights rock and roll an intellectual feudalism; and through the songs blackface minstrelsy and its movement, the role in it of the medium—a vehicle for deep and of African-American slaves and sometimes-subtle satire of popular folk music scene and transcendent thought. former slaves, rooted in African the Southern “way of life.” folk’s rising avatar, Bob Dylan. After that, rock is corporatized. tradition and informed by a Minstrelsy gives rise to ragtime, McNally retells Dylan’s The Civil Rights Movement falls straining against the yoke. These syncopated orchestral music. biography to highlight the apart. A series of riots sweeps songs give rise to the spirituals, In New Orleans, jazz is born profound influence of black American cities. to minstrelsy, to ragtime, to the from “ragged” funeral marches, music, casting Dylan as a “The Civil Rights Movement earliest forms of jazz—all of the second line. Riverboats bluesman deeply influenced by reaches its high-water mark and which respond to an evolving and trains carry the musicians growing up at the headwaters of then ends,” McNally asserts. “And freedom in a rapidly changing and the music up the river, the Big River that drains much the notion of black-white America. McNally calls this to Chicago. Louis Armstrong of the continent, the onward reconciliation guided by an artistic expression of the “establishe[s] the hot solo as flow of its energy juxtaposed enlightened federal government yearning for spiritual freedom the focus of jazz and replace[s] with the bound-up shackling of dies. So fast. And certainly any- “the freedom principle.” And the ragtime two-beat with the the people pressed against it. thing the federal government has its profound effect on black flexible 4/4.” Musicians migrate “There were two quotes, in done in this regard since has been music, on white writers, and to New York. The Harlem particular, in Chronicles, Dylan’s almost accidental. It was never their influence on each other Renaissance blooms. autobiography, that suggest his a cause again.” 28 | WWW.RELIX.COM | OCTOBER_NOVEMBER 2014.

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