Here is your woke back, thanks for the moan… shame of the Dylan accusers

At 11:50am on August 15, 2018, Bob Dylan’s Hurricane was broadcast by New Zealand’s Coast FM radio.

Then a single complaint from a listener flooded in.

Somebody called Grant Avery claimed that the 43 year old ‘outlaw’ song about boxer Reuben Carter was racist.

Avery’s complaint flopped like a floundering fish on the station manager’s desk.

Just one word in the song’s lyric had offended him but suddenly this protest song written by Dylan and sometime co-writer Jacques Levy, went up on ‘trial’.

Mr Avery – who some might call a Mr Jones – probably settled back smugly into his useless and pointless woke knowledge, and never once thought ‘oh my God am I here all alone, attacking Bob Dylan for racism..?’

Far from being a song of dissent Hurricane actually blows angrily at the racist punches Carter rolled with before his wrongful conviction and imprisonment in 1966.

And yet Grant Avery had decided that he should try and pull this song in to shadows of disrepute. Dylan sings: ‘To the white folks who watched he was a revolutionary bum / And to the black folks he was just a crazy ******/ No one doubted that he pulled the trigger’.

Yep, the N-bomb.

A word we have decided not to use, for one simple reason, the mindlessly woke robots and spiders of social media will take offence, just like Mr Avery did.

But I will defend to the hilt of a sword-swallower’s blade, Bob’s right to use the word in a literary sense, within context and in the narrative of a true story about racism. After all he is steeped by choice in black music and culture.

Mr Avery’s complaint eventually ended up on the hallowed desks of the Broadcasting Standards Authority which, after some deliberation, quite rightly dismissed it.

The authority had taken into consideration the historical and social significance of the song and Bob Dylan as an artist, and the use of the word in the narrative of a 1970s political protest song.

Something Mr Avery obviously hadn’t thought about in his shallow black and white world.

Dylan has always written songs about the injustice of racism – songs like The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll  and Joey about Brooklyn mobster Joey Gallo.

And last year he dedicated his only interview to the awful death of George Floyd.

Dylan told the New York Times he was “sickened” to see Floyd “tortured to death” by a police officer.

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But Avery wasn’t the first to distort Dylan’s political world… France – yes the country! – threatened him with jail after accusing him of ‘inciting racial hatred’.

In 2012 he had been speaking to the French version of Rolling Stone. Just before he was nominated to receive the Legion d’Honneur  from France’s then Socialist government.

This was a government that at times seemed to spout his lyrics more often than their own political policies.

But a group of Croatian political activists – a year after the interview – had taken offence at Dylan saying: ‘Blacks know that some whites didn’t want to give up slavery – that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can’t pretend they don’t know that. If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.”

So, France charged him with incitement to race hatred. Croation activist Vlatko Maric publicly condemned Dylan saying: “You cannot compare Croatian criminals to all Croats.”

They had ignored the fact that Dylan had also said in the interview: “It’s like the United States burned and destroyed itself for the sake of slavery. The USA wouldn’t give it up. It had to be grinded out. The whole system had to be ripped out with force. A lot of killing. What, like, 500,000 people? A lot of destruction to end slavery. And that’s what it really was all about.

“This country (the US) is just too fucked up about colour. It’s a distraction. People at each others’ throats just because they are of a different colour. It’s the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back – or any neighbourhood back. Or any anything back.”

The charges were a backlash about Dylan receiving the Legion d’Honneur.

But if Dylan had been convicted of this charge, he would have faced a sentence of a year in prison and a fine of up to 45,000 euros.

After five months a judge threw out the case case saying that as Dylan had not provided his consent for his Rolling Stone statements to be published in France – where hate speech is illegal – he didn’t incite anything in the country and shouldn’t face the charges.

***

And in another show of political chicanery that went wrong, there was a howl of protest from the Secret Police in Czechoslovakia when Bob’s second album hit the shops in 1963.

Freewheelin’ was being seen as a call for freedom across the world and became one of the anthems adopted by hippies who were bringing revolution to the streets and music to cafes like Gerdes Folk City.

In fact its most famous song was just an opaque piece of poetry which posed question after question but left everything Blowing in the Wind when it came to answers…

However, it was seen as enigmatic and powerful enough to be latched onto by the Civil Rights Movement and immediately placed Dylan firmly at the top of the list of  folk luminaries like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seger and Utah Philips.

However, somebody in Czechoslovakia’s State Office of Censorship had decided to give the go-ahead for the album’s release in what, at the time, was  one of the most oppressed countries in the world.

They had obviously missed the point of the nuclear war protest of Hard Rain, the attack on governments and war mongers in Masters of War and the strange Talkin’ World War Three Blues – and, an anathema to any communist state, a song called I Shall be Free.

Supraphon, one of the three major state-owned labels, jumped the gun so-to-speak and rushed the album out. Supraphon had come into being in 1932 and was better known for its offerings of Czech classical music.

Jan Sestak, later to be known as the country’s shadowy Railway DJ, told me: “It was spell-binding when we heard of the release, I couldn’t believe it, the world’s most dissident and political song-writer had his album released in our oppressed country. Songs about America, the Empire of Evil were in our record shops…”

But the joy didn’t last long as the hard reign of communism caught on to the  mistake and the whole of the management at Supraphon’s head quarters disappeared.

Still, Jan, who for many years had been listening to Western music under his pillow in his bedroom, with the Secret Police prowling the streets near his home, by now had his copy.
Jan, who is now in his 70s, but still lives in Brnu, near Prague, translated Dylan’s convoluted lyrics and distributed them to fans of Western music and local bands who played the songs in dark and dingy clubs across the city.

#bobdylan #hisroyalbobness #racism #woke #avery #france #croatia