nearly a dozen Cooke songs including “Chain Gang,” “Wonderful World,” and “A Change Is Gonna Come”) and Detroit (the Temptations’ “My Girl” and “It’s Growing”).
Many Motown artists reciprocated the admiration they received from their peers. Marvin Gaye saw the growing popularity of Southern soul as a harbinger of larger changes: “The era was changing the music. Gutbucket soul – like Aretha and Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding – had gotten popular . . . Anyway, the white kids wanted a different kind of music. They wanted to hear about something besides love.” By the mid-sixties, Motown’s response to Southern soul could be heard in the funk rhythms and the uncompromising lyrics of the records produced by Norman Whitfield for Gaye, Gladys Knight, and the Temptations. Sam Cooke’s onetime protégé Johnnie Taylor was only one of the Northern singers who capitalized on the changing scene; his number one hits, “Who’s Making Love” and “I Believe In You (Believe In Me),” were both released on Stax.
Part of the black community’s broader struggle to redefine the ground rules of American society, the dissonant harmonies emanating from Memphis drew on and spoke to the beloved community. Like gospel, Southern soul spoke to the burdens of life and the need to reach for something higher. The rough edges reflect something fundamental about life in a place where rednecks and the children of the ghetto shared enough of a comon culture to challenge everything they’d been taught about race. It wasn’t smooth, but neither was the life outside the studio. And, for a while, there was reason to think that the dialogue that began in Memphis might spread across the world.
15
Bylan, the Brits, and Blue-Eyed Soul
When he wrote the blues classic “Rolling Stone,” Muddy Waters wasn’t overly concerned with Hibbing, Minnesota, where Bob Dylan was setting out on a journey that would eventually take him down Highway 61 into the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Muddy certainly didn’t lose much sleep over the London School of Economics, where Mick Jagger was studying the Chicago blues as seriously as the Chicago school of economics. At first glance, it’s hard to imagine anyone with less in common than the Delta-born bluesman and the young rock and rollers who responded to his call in ways that threatened to change the world.
Which tells you something about the blues impulse: it isn’t confined to one musical form, and it isn’t, at least literally, about race. The best work of Dylan and the Rolling Stones doesn’t suffer when you listen to it back to back with Howlin’ Wolf and Tina Turner. The strongest white blues—Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, the Stones’ great run of singles from “Satisfaction” through “Paint It Black,” the Animals’ “It’s My Life” and “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”—hold the promise of a conversation built on a more trustworthy foundation than the earnest liberalism of the folk revival. The fact that it didn’t work out doesn’t mean it was a bad idea.
Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” responds to the blues on levels that have nothing to do with liberal politics or nostalgic authenticity. The song returns obsessively to the most fundamental blues question: “How does it feel?” It isn’t about the consolations of philosophy or the dodge of ideology. It’s about how it feels to be existentially adrift, a broken piece of a fallen world. Muddy knew the feeling well, and about all he had to say in words was “oh well.” But his guitar, and the way he bent the syllables around the words that never quite told the whole story, expressed with killing precision how the world felt to a black man who was about to head up Highway 61 toward a Chicago that he knew damn well wasn’t the promised land. Dylan reversed the motion, headed down into the mythic heart of darkness, and unleashed a flood of imagery about how it felt to be “on your own with no direction home / a complete unknown / like a rolling stone.” As in Muddy’s call, the blues intensity of Dylan’s response lies in the music, in the things that couldn’t quite be said. Devils as real as the ones that stalked Robert Johnson haunt Al Kooper’s gospel-organ drone, Mike Bloomfield’s Chicago-bred guitar, Dylan’s moaning harmonica. Kooper, who’d never played organ before the Highway 61 Revisited session, described the sound of “Like a Rolling Stone” as his “twisted Jewish equivalent of gospel” mixed with Dylan’s “primitive, twisted equivalent of rock and roll.”
You can hear “Like a Rolling Stone” as a blues cry out of the singer’s own brutal experience. Or you can hear it as cutting social satire, a classic put-down of a shallow chick who doesn’t share the poet’s superior insight into the human condition. I hear “Like a Rolling Stone” as pure, deep blues: Dylan’s confession that he’s as lost as the rest of us. The closest thing to a political message on Highway 61 Revisited is from “Ballad of a Thin Man”: “There’s something happening and you don’t know what it is.” When asked for a statement opposing the Vietnam War, Dylan sardonically bounced the question back at the interviewer: “How do you know that I’m not, as you say, for the war?”
Defying the pious condescension of the folk audience that booed him throughout the 1965-66 tour where he plugged in his guitar and waved good-bye to authenticity, Dylan forged a music that challenged his audience to finger the jagged grain of the blues. Like “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” probably the least ideological of the great political rock songs, “Like a Rolling Stone” casts the listener into a vortex of political paranoia where the good guys and the bad guys exchange clothes and read from the same scripts. Dylan’s lyrics affirm the tradition of rock poetry that originates with Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business,” “Nadine,” and “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.” Social satire, the blues impulse, and straight-out rock and roll collide, releasing a burst of poetic energy that would inspire John Fogerty’s mythic bayou, Jim Morrison’s archetypal apocalypse, and Jimi Hendrix’s voodoo soup.
While Dylan was changing the way musicians thought about the possibilities of rock, the British bands that invaded the United States in 1964 and 1965 played an equally crucial role in preparing the audience for the new take on the blues. Much more consciously immersed in the Chicago blues and Southern soul than their contemporaries in the colonies, the Animals, Rolling Stones, and Yardbirds introduced black music to multitudes of white Americans who didn’t know John Lee Hooker from John Hope Franklin. However often Dylan called his songs blues—”Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Outlaw Blues,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” “Tombstone Blues,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”—his electric music wasn’t about race. At least explicitly.
By the time Highway 61 Revisited redefined American rock in the fall of 1965, the Rolling Stones had paid homage to both Chicago and Memphis, the sacred cities of their racially aware genealogy of rock and roll. At least in the early days, the British response to black music took on near-religious overtones. Van Morrison, who began singing with a Belfast blues band when he was fourteen, sounded the dominant note when he said simply, “The blues are the truth.” Morrison’s pursuit of that truth brought him to something like an Irish version of the gospel impulse. Astral Weeks, Moondance, and the underrated Period of Transition may not be washed in the blood, exactly, but they are awash in blues and gospel spirit.
At times, the British reverence for Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker resembled the folk revival’s sense of the Delta blues. But there were some crucial differences, most notably an underlying belief that the blues addressed shared experience. The Animals’ lead singer, Eric Burdon, observed: “If I heard John Lee Hooker singing things like ‘I been working in a steel mill trucking steel like a slave all day, I woke up this morning and my baby’s gone away,’ I related to that directly because that was happening to grown men on my block.” Equally important, the British bands felt none of the aversion to rhythm and volume that drove pacifist Pete Seeger into a violent rage when he threatened to cut the electric cords plugged into Dylan’s guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Every British group with a harder edge than Herman’s Hermits traced its roots to modern black American music; and even the Hermits had hits with the Rays’ doo-wop classic “Silhouettes” and Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World.”
A quick survey of early albums by British bands highlights their