Dylan Ping
Posted on 07/01/2008 9:26:41 AM PDT by ETL
"Those who later formed the Weatherman organization produced a paper at the Students for a Democratic Society Convention in Chicago in June of 1969. With a nod to Bob Dylan, the sponsors titled their epistle: 'You Don’t Need A Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Is Blowing.'"
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=26243
"Dubbing itself the Weathermen, this new organization took its name from a line in Bob Dylan’s 'Subterranean Homesick Blues'—'you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows'—and within months had set off bombs at the National Guard headquarters and set in motion plans to bomb targets across the country"
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/weatherunderground/film.html
Unless I (and HumanEvents) got the time line wrong, and he wrote the song AFTER the bombings began, this is really weird. Check out the following lyrics from the Dylan tune. It almost seems like he knew in advance what Ayers and company were planning. Yet Dylan claims today he wasn't even in to the radical politics of the sixties and seventies.
Here, from BobDylan.com, are the first four lines from his 'Subterranean Homesick Blues'...
"Johnny's in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I'm on the pavement
Thinking about the government"
Here's some other interesting lines...
"Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin' that the heat put
Plants in the bed but
The phone's tapped anyway
Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early May
Orders from the D. A.
Look out kid
Don't matter what you did
Walk on your tip toes
Don't try 'No Doz'
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows"
http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/subterranean.html
I report, you decide.
Nostradamus!! Dylan was a prophet! Or...everybody who was around at the time knows this was about dope.
“”Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot”?
I was in college 1969-1973 and my cousin who is just a bit older than me told me all about the SDS. Now my mother, an Oklahoma Democrat, thinks that cousin is a wierdo. Even my mother has been fooled by the liberal democrat party. When you try to tell her about the Weathermen and SDS and liberals taking over her party she thinks the messenger is nuts. She won’t believe it. Well, I lived it, and it is true, they took over the Democrat party. It is sick and sad.
He disliked women wearing eyeliner.
I have decided that this is my nominee for "Lamest Post of the Year"
Please refer her to my home page:
http://www.freerepublic.com/~etl/
What about the line,”The pump don’t work cause the vandals took the handle”?
My guess is that he was referring to white women putting on a “black pose”to be more authentic.
Kind of similiar to the line in Like a Rolling Stone that goes,”You used to be so amused,by Napoleon in rags and the language that he used,go to him now,you can’t refuse,when you ain’t got nothing,you got nothing to lose”
To me,an obvious reference to the white liberal guilt tendencies of the time.
I thought Maggie owned a farm...
You’re probably right. But with the situation at the time and many other artists writing alarmingly anti-American lyrics, it certainly wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Never mind.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-xIulyVsG8
Have no idea. Does it have something to do with today's high gas prices? You mean he knew that ahead of time too! :)
I wasn't claiming he was a fortune teller predicting the future, but rather that he might have been in with the young revolutionaries. There are lots of artists and entertainers today who are still calling for revolution. Maybe he thought he cleverly coded the message and that law enforcement would be too dumb to figure it out.
I think Dylan was thinking more in terms of”monkey wrenching”along the lines of the Earth First clique.
There is a major difference between now and then. Now, the American people will fight back. These revolutionaries had a pass during the 70’s. They’ll try, especially if Obama loses.
But that isn't the first time he's been accused of clairvoyance. He did actually begin performing A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall some time before the Cuban Missile Crisis. Creeped a lot of people out.
There are some people who don't like his voice - the Guardian once called it a "catarrhal death rattle." I sense a certain negativity there...
Are you kidding? The state of the country is much worse today. There are more wussies around than ever before -a direct result of "liberal incrementalism".
Maybe some are wimpier, but not everybody. And those are the ones who will not back down to these cretins.
In his song about boxer 'Hurricane Carter', he has a line: "and to the white folks, he was just a revolutionary bum". I suspect Carter, like many black (and white) celebs today, had ties to some revolutionary orgs.
huh?
What do you mean,”huh’?
Earth First loved to sabotage construction equipment by tampering with the machinery.The called it monkey wrenching.Dylan’s vandals did the same thing in so many words.
I pray you are correct. But it wouldn’t be just scrawny college kids that would take part in their ‘revolution’. It would include street gangs and other vicious thugs, freed inmates, the illegal immigrant community, etc, etc.
I know about ELF and other such orgs. I just didn’t make the connection to Dylan.
I may be full of hot air but I have a long history of interpreting lyrics in weird ways.
Well, a whole lot of lyrics ARE very weird. I’ll bet your interpretations are no more weird than the actual meanings.
I STILL have figured out Hypmotized by Fleetwood Mac and I’m not sure I even want to try!
Don't bother. You'll only go nuts trying to understand these people.
Unless I (and HumanEvents) got the time line wrong, and he wrote the song AFTER the bombings began, this is really weird. Check out the following lyrics from the Dylan tune. It almost seems like he knew in advance what Ayers and company were planning. Yet Dylan claims today he wasn’t even in to the radical politics of the sixties and seventies.
[snip]
I report, you decide.
________
The song in question was released in april of 1965. You can look it up.
Ayers and company did not use bombs until, what, 1969?
You got the timeline wrong, all right.
*Subterranean ping*
Earth First loved to sabotage construction equipment by tampering with the machinery.The called it monkey wrenching.Dylan’s vandals did the same thing in so many words.
_____
Who were Dylan’s vandals? Was Robbie Robertson one of them? Levon Helm? Rick Danko?
He was speaking metaphorically,not literally.
Hey,I remember thinking I was one of those much heralded vandals when I would tear off messages from the college bulletin board in 1966 just for the sheer hell of it!
18 year olds do a LOT of stupid things.
So, what is "Louie, Louie" really about?
And what are the lyrics?
;-)
The pump don’t work cause the vandals broke the handle...I HATE when that happens, although I live in a state where I don’t have to pump my own gas.
Not sure about Louie,Louie.
Just know that “I felt that bone in her hair”made a lot more sense to me at 17 than”I smelled that rose in her hair”
/sarcasm
I was saying that my timeline would have been wrong if he wrote the song AFTER the bombings. He did not. ie, "wrong" = "he wrote the song AFTER the bombings began".
As it turned out there probably isn't anything weird about it at all, since the song was *probably* about drugs or something else altogether. Plus, as you point out, it was apparently written several years before the bombings began, although that doesn't necessarily mean he wasn't sympathetic towards the revolutionary movement.
"Unless I (and HumanEvents) got the timeline wrong, and he wrote the song AFTER the bombings began, this is really weird."
Who ever said it was "proof positive"? I just thought, considering the nature of the Weather Underground group, that the lyrics seemed 'interesting'. If you don't think there's a whole bunch of folks in the music and entertainment industry, still to this day, that aren't sympathetic to the cause of revolutionary communism, then you don't know squat about what's going on. There are democrat leaders that are hooked up with these bums. In fact, one of them is running for president. Others are chairing powerful House committees, such as Ways and Means and the Judiciary.
Dylan wrote basically one album worth of explicit “finger pointin’ songs”. After that he branched out into other things and being far more of a rock singer/songwriter rather than a folk singer.
His protest songs came very early in his career which is as much a product of his idolization of Woody Guthrie as any deeply held beliefs.
He has never gone to protests and joined in all the liberal causes. He was always more into music than political beliefs. His contemporaries from the time, who were into the protests and movements, said Dylan was (and presumably is) apolitical.
Is the song most likely about disaffected youth? Yes. Is it hiding some revolutionary call in its lyrics? Highly doubtful.
First, I directed the post to Scott, not to you, but of course you are free to chime in. However, in directing it to Scott, who knows me fairly well, he will recognize my sarcasm as being directed towards earlier threads here, ones where we have discussed Dylan, his lyrics and his politics (or lack there of).
I also saw the article the other day with the same reference to the weather underground and Bob Dylan so I expected someone would post on this subject.
There are many interpretations to Dylan's lyrics, but one thing that is certain is that they will invariably be wrong, unless they are made by Dylan himself.
I also was not diminishing the threat of the leftist agenda, merely commenting on Dylan's potential association with it, which I believe there is none.
my point about your timeline being wrong was, as you suggest, based on the fact that too much time elapsed between the events for there to be a credible connection.
Dylan was, and still is, a guy who will reinvent himself on a regular basis and completely reject those who would define him (Dylan) for themselves.
"Johnny's in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I'm on the pavement
Thinking about the government"
"Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin' that the heat put
Plants in the bed but
The phone's tapped anyway
Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early May
Orders from the D. A.
Look out kid
Don't matter what you did
Walk on your tip toes
Don't try 'No Doz'
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows"
http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/subterranean.html
Are you heading back to the sandbox soon?
Hope you had a Good R&R, and God Bless!
JD
There are many interpretations to Dylan's lyrics, but one thing that is certain is that they will invariably be wrong, unless they are made by Dylan himself.
And he, himself, probably changes the 'interpretations' on a continuing basis. :)
Thanks for the response and enjoy the Fourth!
Thanks! You too.
Very, very, very soon. (Sigh...) But hey, at least I get to spend the Fourth of July stateside. First time I've gotten to do that since '03.
Hope you had a Good R&R, and God Bless!
Thank you. It's been wonderful and it went by so fast! ;-)
strange thread
I’ll take a stab....think pot and assorted drugs
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