Book review #5: Dylan, Lennon, Marx and God
Rock guitarist turned popular music lecturer wins his PhD honours with this fine double portrait of two musical giants. Rock and the Beat Generation takes a view from a Beat perspective
Dylan, Lennon, Marx and God by Jon Stewart (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
BOB DYLAN and John Lennon. Karl Marx. Oh, and God. There is no doubt that the prevailing triumvirate of the Beat Generation had relationships with all of these cultural figureheads ancient and modern, sometimes embracing them and, on occasions, resisting, even fervently rejecting, their influence.
So, when I come to contemplate the ideas interrogated most intriguingly here by Jon Stewart, indie guitarist turned rock academic, through a Beat microscope, the lines of inter-section are many but not necessarily congruent. And the presence of a quite determined disconnection at times certainly complicates the process. Yet it makes such an analysis an invigorating challenge.
Stewart attempts a relatively novel form dubbed dual biography, claiming that an assessment of two towering contemporaries in tandem can cast new light on subjects and topic. And I think this volume suggests he’s onto something. But let’s begin by attempting a summarising overview of the volume’s headline names and their links to the Beat principals.
The man born Robert Zimmerman became a close friend of Allen Ginsberg and even recorded and toured with him. And Ginsberg was a shining light of support in the early 1970s when Lennon was fighting US expulsion in the anti-war hotbed of New York City. Further, in 1971, Lennon even funded, Stewart informs us, a joint recording session for the poet and Dylan.
Kerouac influenced Bob hugely but never met him. William Burroughs did connect with the Zim at least once and even played a part in prompting a stream of consciousness novel penned by the singer, 1971’s Tarantula.
Lennon agreed to the incorporation of Burroughs into the crowd collage of the Sgt Pepper’s cover, though that inclusion was more likely driven by Paul McCartney’s closer association with the Hombre Invisible in the London of the mid-1960s.
Dylan had religious phases, quite brief, in which he at least acknowledged his Hebrew background and later found Christ, even though the late 1970s alliance was controversial, divisive and quickly abandoned.
John saw the altruistic agape of Christ – one third at least of the Holy Trinity – as an appealing source for his hopeful political statements. But he never made a commitment to that faith, preferring for a period the Eastern manifesto of the Maharishi.
Ginsberg was a secular Jew who did not jettison that spiritual aspect entirely, willing to respond to Old Testament myth in his work – see Moloch in ‘Howl’ – and sometimes cite it in his work but was more drawn to lessons of the Buddha.
Jack spent a whole short life both inspired and tortured by the demands of God, Christ and Catholicism. He found a peaceful escape through Buddhism in the mid-1950s but returned to the devotions and trials of Christianity in his later, declining years.
Burroughs despised religion in all its forms. He saw both Christianity and Buddhism as systems of control and nothing infuriated him more than the constraints imposed by any organisation which might attempt to entangle him and restrict his own freedoms. If he had a god, it was almost certainly narcotic.
As for Marx, Ginsberg was temperamentally drawn to the ideas of the great 19th century economic philosopher. His mother was a Communist, his father was a socialist and he had early aspirations to be a labor lawyer. But, ultimately, if the poet was a liberal humanitarian, he was also an individualist. Few poets are otherwise – and Dylan certainly was.
Kerouac, too, was a somewhat self-obsessed, if deeply insecure, individual. How else, without an over-developed ego, could he have turned the chapters of his life into fictional art with such dedication? But he was particularly antipathetical to Marx and his Communist ideas.
Perhaps the collision of such materialist notions with his own profound spiritual credo involved an irresistible force striking an immoveable object. Yet he expressed general sympathies with the downtrodden, as did Ginsberg.
The American 1950s, of course, provided space for an anti-left sensibility to prosper. Kerouac must have found the dismissive media device ‘beatnik’ particularly galling as it elided the Beats with sputnik, the Soviet nation and subversive entryism. No wonder the author of On the Road was rattled by this cheap populism.
Burroughs shared the solipsism of his two friends. He was certainly no joiner – more Groucho than Karl, in that sense – or party to any dreams of an idealised state. As with religion, the binds of political ideology were anathema to him. He was, after all, the most resistant of the trio to suggestions a Beat Generation existed at all. He rather thrived off signs of societal fracture: dystopia was virtually a guiding inspiration.
Even if the writer of Naked Lunch joined in 1968 Chicago protests – with Ginsberg, Terry Southern and Jean Genet alongside him – it was a rare blip in Burroughs’ much-more-than-arm’s-length policy towards such progressive campaigning. The hippies and their peace and love doctrine could hardly have been further from his own playbook.
But, parking the Beat matrix for a moment, what about Jon Stewart’s original attempt to unpack the double phenomena of Dylan-Lennon in a single overview? There is some good, revealing, often entertaining and generally highly readable material to delve into in this book’s 200 plus pages.
The theoretical frameworks the writer, once of the band Sleeper and more recently a member of the long-running Wedding Present, employs – this is, after all, a version of a doctoral thesis and issued by an academic publisher – might take some unpacking from time to time yet, to repeat, there is plenty here for the serious follower of Bob and John to digest and enjoy.
He points out how the two songwriters had diametrically opposed routes in their political progress: Dylan begins with protest songs at the start of his career and moves away from them; Lennon starts by penning some outstanding romantic pop tunes then gravitates later to pieces that provide substantial reflection on the volatile times.
Dylan appears to fear the darkening atmosphere in the US as Kennedy and Oswald are murdered, to be followed by other charismatic victims, and distances himself from the Civil Rights movement moving on to anti-war action.
Meanwhile, with Vietnam at its terrible peak, Lennon knowingly places his head in the lion’s mouth of Nixonian Republicanism and very nearly pays a high price, even though his ‘Give Peace a Chance’ becomes the anthem of choice in a highly-charged era.
Fascinatingly, Ginsberg is both mentioned in that classic composition and appears, with lover Peter Orlovsky, on the recording. Somewhat paradoxically, the poet himself writes long verses which attack the conflict in South-East Asia – many of them recited to a Uher tape recorder Dylan has bought him in the mid-60s – but never manages to get his folk rocker friend to truly put his head above the parapet and join an anti-war cabinet.
Amid necessary diversions to important theoreticians like R. Serge Denisoff and Fredric Jameson, Dylan, Lennon, Marx and God is not bogged down too much in ivory-towered commentary. It casts fresh light on the 1964 summit in which Bob met the Fab Four and allegedly turned them onto marijuana, offers some astute insights into Dylan’s shift away from the protest bandwagon and reminds us that even the naturally adversarial Lennon knew where to draw the line.
The fact that the ex-Beatle’s perceived return to singles form with ‘Mind Games’ in 1973 originally had the title ‘Make Love Not War’ maybe confirms that, with his intensifying Green Card struggle, even he perhaps had something of a pragmatic streak after all.