WEEK THREE: ‘Masters of War’ and ‘Talkin’ World War Three Blues’ by Bob Dyan (1963)
Masters of War (1963) submitted by R. Shurmer
He claims to have written it only for the money, put then even that statement impishly plays with those too ignorant or too content to see reality. Dylan, ever the social provocateur. But the politics he was embracing by the early sixties was out of sync with the majority of young people of the time. If it was all about the money, then there were easier ways to spin a hit in 1962-63. Pointing a finger at the heart of American hypocrisy, conformity, money-grubbing, and political recklessness was not the way to make a living in 1962. Making a stand with the growing voice of the civil rights movement places Dylan in the vanguard of a generational tide that come in against the status quo and eventually sweep it aside. Dylan tells us that as a high school student in Minnesota, he was baffled by what he considered the perverse popularity of fall-out shelter mania. Anxiety only grew with the election of Kennedy who had been thumping away for years about a ‘missile gap’ and finally got the opportunity to increase military spending and launch a (botched) invasion of communist Cuba. In 1962, Washington DC saw the largest protest march since the 1930s, this one made up of mostly students protesting nuclear testing and the White House’s increasingly belligerent rhetoric against the Soviet Bloc. The first ‘bomb song’ Dylan penned was ‘Let Me Die in My Footsteps’, a cowboy-style ranch song that seeks sanity and an acknowledgement of the individual in the face of international nuclear lunacy. “Let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace.” And finally Dylan, qua narrator, speculates that the entire country might just be dupes of their own government — “I don’t know if I’m smart but I think I can see, When someone is pullin’ the wool over me.” — and seeks to be left alone to wander among wildflowers and mountains. This was the last time that Dylan employed such a sentimental ‘America the beautiful’ hobo nostalgia to his protest songs. What followed in the next couple of years were increasingly sarcastic, mocking, and vituperative lyrics that masterfully drew up a grand indictment of the jingoist American establishment that was both denying basic rights to its own people and threatening to annihilate them by nuclear war.
Dylan penned ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ in a cafe across the street from the Gaslight in Greenwich Village in April of 1962. When Peter, Paul and Mary released their version as a single in the summer, it sold 300,000 copies, the fastest selling single in Warner Brothers’ history. That got the attention of the money-men and the media, which collectively wondered about this new and enigmatic shaggy-haired hero of the young generation. At the end of 1962 Dylan visited Great Britain where he soaked up the local folk scene and absorbed a great deal from the indigenous music there. Confronted with the prospect of total annihilation by a loaded system that seemed increasingly out of control and the military-industrial complex that pushed it along. Lifting the tune from an old English mummer’s song he probably picked up in England, Dylan crafted ‘Masters of War’, a rage-filled song that lifted the veil from the mechanisms of power that were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. This is the Dylan who couldn’t stay quiet about the stupidity and injustice he saw everywhere. “Man, there’s things going on in this world you got to look at, right?” asked Dylan. “You can’t pretend they ain’t happening. I was in New York when that Cuba business came over the radio, and you think that don’t put something in your head? Man, you can keep on singing about Railroad Bill and Lemon Tree, or you can step out, right?” The song appeared on the album ‘A Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ (released on 27 May 1963), arguably Dylan’s best collection of so-called protest songs and the work that catapulted him as the ‘voice of a generation’ into the center of the incipient Youth Movement.
As Mike Marqusee writes about the album: “Dylan expresses the embitterment of a generation of politically innocent young Americans who discovered with shock that the people they had been told were the good guys were actually something else entirely.” In the face of new realities about the arms race, racism, and war, the pie-eyed social activism of the early sixties seemed woefully naive, and so did the dreadfully sincere songs that had accompanied it. The anti-war songs that appeared on ‘A Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ are now mostly associated with the escalating war in Vietnam, but Dylan was writing well before that war reached the consciousness of most Americans. Only 77 American servicemen had been killed in the Vietnam conflict by the start of 1963. These songs are instead an indictment of the Cold War mentalities that had brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. The fact that they became anthems of the anti- Vietnam War movement later in the decade reveal their adaptability and universal truths that make them relevant today.
The Global 1960s 