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.
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.
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