a life of its own. Dylan didn’t turn up at the protest marches of 1965 and later to sing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” but singers like Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and others unknown and without fame would take over for him, at marches, in student unions, in student apartments, wherever the antiwar movement was to be found, in the United States, in Auckland, and throughout the world. As student protest leader Todd Gitlin put it: “Whether he liked it or not, Dylan sang for us. … We followed his career as if he was singing our songs.”
Seven years after those songs came out, as Dylan relates in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, it was the message, not the music, that the media and general public recalled. By 1970 he had been off the road for four years, trying to dodge the demands of those who wanted him to return either to the antiwar song or to the sound and the lyrics that he had invented in 1964–66, the true basis of his musical fame by that point. After Dylan stopped touring in 1966, now raising his family with Sara Dylan in Woodstock and New York City, and writing very different music, as we’ll see, he still couldn’t get away from the old labels. In his memoir, Dylan recalls receiving his honorary degree from Princeton University in June 1970, annoyed at being labeled “the conscience of America”:
“Though he is known to millions, he shuns publicity and organizations preferring the solidarity of his family and isolation from the world, and though he is approaching the perilous age of thirty, he remains the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of Young America.” Oh Sweet Jesus! It was like a jolt. I shuddered and trembled but remained expressionless. The disturbed conscience of Young America! There it was again. I couldn’t believe it! The speaker could have said many things, he could have emphasized a few things about my music.
For Dylan, it is the art of the song that matters. And song has powerful effects, especially when it responds to human conflict, to perceived injustice, to oppression. It is through song that we give depth to the sentiments for which mere speech is at times of crisis insufficient. And the more perfect the song, the more authentic the singer becomes in the minds of those who hear the song. How can a songwriter who creates songs with such fundamental and persuasive messages not believe those messages? That has always been the shackle from which Dylan has struggled to free himself. The message of a handful of Dylan’s songs was what lingered in the consciousness of those who had heard them and had been involved, on one side or the other, for or against the war in Vietnam. To this day, the attitude of anyone old enough to have had a position on that war probably lines up pretty well with what they think of Bob Dylan the man, even after all these years.
“Blowin’ in the Wind” is part of Dylan’s poetry and art, exquisite in its classical structure and form. The song is written in three verses, each with three questions, each question extending over two lines, and each followed by the same answering couplet:
How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
Yes, ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
How many years can a mountain exist
Before it’s washed to the sea?
Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head
Pretending that he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky
Yes, ’n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
The urgent refrain that supposedly provides an answer really gives no answer at all, but rather creates its own questions: “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind / The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” Is the wind blowing the answer away from us, never to be heard, or blowing it toward us, about to right the injustices of those nine urgent questions? Roman critics had a saying, “The art of poetry is to not say everything.” That is precisely what Dylan’s refrain does, indeed what much of Dylan’s art does; it implants the possible answer in our imaginations, and the rest is up to us.
It is the height of irony that Dylan’s main fear about how the song would be labeled may have lain elsewhere. One of his earliest and most famous interviews took place in May 1963, on Studs Terkel’s radio show on WFMT in Chicago. The young Dylan was in town to play at a local club, the Bear. Not included in Terkel’s 2005 published collection of interviews, And They All Sang, and therefore not to be found in Jonathan Cott’s The Essential Interviews, the following exchange took place in the lead-up to Dylan’s closing song and may be heard on a tape of the show:
ST: What’s one way to sign off … a signing-off song?
BD: Sign-off song, let’s see. Hmm. Oh, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” there’s one I’ll sing you.
ST: Isn’t that a popular song, that’s a popular song, I believe.
BD: God, I hope not.
ST: By “popular” I mean in a good sense. A lot of people are singing it.
BD: Oh, yeah.
After an eight-year hiatus, the song came back twice on August 1, 1971, in Dylan’s afternoon and evening performances at the Concert for Bangladesh. “Blowin’ in the Wind” returned to his setlists for good in January 1974. By then Watergate and Nixon were more in his fans’ consciousness, and the song, obviously not a pop song, could finally take its place in his repertoire as part of his art in performance. I heard Dylan sing the song twice in 2016, in Boston in July and in Clearwater, Florida, in November and twice again in June 2017, on each occasion as the first of the two encores to close his concerts, its regular place in setlists of recent years—and he has now sung it at more than 1,400 concerts, a world away from the acoustic version recorded by the twenty-one-year-old Dylan. The song is still urgent in its questions, but it can’t, couldn’t ever, be attached to any one historical event or condition.
The same goes for “Masters of War,” in terms of its enduring resonance. Dylan had performed the song 884 times by the end of 2016. Vietnam had become a dim backdrop by this time even in the minds of baby boomers, but the masters of war (“You that build the death planes / You that build the big bombs”) never really go away. They were close at hand when Dylan performed acoustic versions of “Masters of War” in Australia and New Zealand in early 2003, including on March 15, when millions of demonstrators in those two countries and across the globe took to the streets
