The Vibes They Are A-Changin

What Pete Seeger and Dylan can teach us about our current vibe-shift

I’m almost done with Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric. The story of Bob Dylan plugging in and going electric serves as a possible analogy by which we can understand the current vibe shift in media and politics. We are living amidst the shift from a before time into an after time.

Dylan was one of my first idols, and instead of doing math and chemistry in high school (I always read the novels and history stuff) I spent most of my time doing deep dives into classic rock, as well as root-sleuthing into blues and country precedents in old record stores. As an earnest proto-hipster youth in the late 80’s, the pop music scene was pretty abominable to me, and with the influence of my older brother Mark, I loved music from the late 60’s and early 70’s. I went through various phases, but stumbling upon Dylan led me to look into his own various transformations and turbulent career. Naturally, the legends and myths led me to that fateful July day in Newport when Dylan plugged in and ticked off the old fuddy duddies gathered at Festival Field. Because I had followed all the influences backwards from Dylan I naturally landed on Pete Seeger, the great performer and organizer, and was, for a short time, obsessed with him and his earnest banjo. But Dylan would prove to be a much more interesting if enigmatic figure to my imagination. He was cool. He wanted differently. I identified with that kind of disgust with normiedom and I loved that he went his own way.

Wald’s book is fantastic, and provides so much richer of a story than the grabby headlines. But what struck me in reading it was how Dylan seemed to sense, almost unconsciously, that the tectonic plates of culture were shifting, and some kind of spirit moved him to call a halt to his informing pieties for Guthrie and roots music, and step into something much more, well, electric and modern. He didn’t so much create the vibe-shift, but he sensed it early, and almost on a whim decided to surf it. He caught an electric wave, and in so doing, rode that energy and emergent spirit into legend. Some of it was even true.

But I don’t really want to talk about this Dylan story today alone. I still haven’t seen the new movie starring Timothée Chalamet, but given his recent media blitz I find myself really pulling for him. He seems like a real one to me.

I’ll watch it and let y’all know what I think. Chalamet’s acceptance speech was amazing and unique: he just said out loud what almost everyone else is scared to admit: “I am chasing greatness.”

Dylan would not have said such a thing, but he certainly thought that. He is the most conscious fabrication of all of our national idols. Chalamet is remarkably wise for his age, but he’s young yet. I’d say he’s worth watching. We’ve seen young talented actors get churned up by the usual distractions. Channeling Dylan is no small feat.

But it got me thinking about Dylan’s one-time sponsor Pete Seeger. The grandee of the scene, a beleaguered and committed leftist, he thought what he was doing was pure and righteous, and that folk music would be the fuel that would help us overcome injustice. He felt we could group-sing into the Christian escheton, here and now. For Seeger, the Newport Folk Festival was church. And Dylan was the chosen one who would bring in the next generation.

Dylan and Seeger in the before times