Hibbing Minnesota was: especially with my upbringing”
But then there was the work of that Dylan had to do inside his head and heart to pull from the fragments of experience; the merging worlds of beat poetry, folk music, political activism who he was and what he wanted to say. How should he view the nuclear bomb as part of the worlds’ general irrationaility for which there is no real answer or explanation, or as part of a horrific evil game played by the Masters of War who “hide behind desks” and expect never to be accountable. What really stirred Dylan’s imagination though was whether he could like a prophet help turn the world back from embracing the darkness of nuclear apolclpse. No song in the folk singer catalogue had ever attempted to paint on quite so an ambitious canvas, one that describes a nightmarish landscape of a child who has seen a vision of suffering and finds his only meaning in helping the millions of people poised between suffering and complete loss
And what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son ?
And what'll you do now my darling young one ?
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin'
I'll walk to the deepths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are a many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
….
But I'll know my songs well before I start singin'
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
Written at the time of the Cuban crisis, Dylan describes the Hard Rain as one of “desperation..what could we do? Could we control the men on the verge of wiping us out? The words came fast – very fast. It was a song of terror. Line after line, trying to capture the feeling of nothingness.” The first time Allen Ginsburg heard Dylan’s “Hard Rain” he marked it as a changing of the guard in the social protest movement, believing that “the torch had been passed to another generation from earlier Beat illumination and self-empowerment.” Bob Weir of the 1960s’ Grateful Dead rock group said of the song: “It’s beyond genius… I think the heavens opened and something channeled through him.” But then there was also a third option in terms of encountering and addressing the prospect of nuclear extinction--humor--Talkin World War Three Blues captures the tradition that Woody Guthrie had perfected of satire using himself as the figure of fun who in this case wakes up from a world destroyed by nuclear war.
Well, I spied a girl and before she could leave,
"Let's go and play Adam and Eve."
I took her by the hand and my heart it was thumpin'
When she said, "Hey man, you crazy or sumpin',
You see what happened last time they started."
What was the pose that suited the artist the best? Well all of them and more that was the point. This was the birth of the singer song writer album -the songs now chosen to reflect different parts of the self rather than just for the songs themselves. He gave the singer songwriters who came after him artists like Neil Young, Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell, a license to be themselves, contradictory, opinionated, passionate, self mocking and political. Van Morrison
when he first heard the record “thought it wasincredible that this guy's not singing about 'moon in June' and he's getting away with it. That's what I thought at the time. The subject matter wasn't pop songs, ya know, and I thought this kind of opens the whole thing up ... Dylan put it into the mainstream that this could be done."
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