by Mitchell Greenhill –
When Bob Dylan wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” I doubt that he had Donald Trump’s authoritarian takeover in mind.
But then again, I doubt that Bob imagined that he himself would someday release the Times They Are A-Changin’ Collection of products, including a “hand-crafted” bourbon called Heaven’s Door. (Don’t knock it if you haven’t sipped it.)
In the early 1960s, as Dylan was establishing himself as a protest singer in the Woody Guthrie tradition, all of us who were of draft age feared being conscripted into an unjust and unwinnable war in Vietnam. The times may have been changing, but it was not clear how many of us would survive the transformation. We took those songs seriously. Some brave people – including David Harris, husband of Joan Baez, whom our company represented – went to jail. Others went to Canada or concocted ways to flunk the army physical. I took the side door: got married and had children.
Domestically, the big struggle was for Civil Rights, especially the right of Black people to vote. I spent a couple of weeks registering voters in Cambridge, Maryland, for the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee. In its wisdom, the committee decided I could be most effective – or perhaps do least harm – in the local pool hall, where I may have registered a few hustlers. Some weeks later, tens of thousands of us, optimistic and determined, gathered for the March on Washington.
Meanwhile, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a nuclear arms race under the rubric MAD: mutually assured destruction.
In this world of danger and injustice, Bob Dylan’s songs – along with those of his contemporaries like Phil Ochs, Len Chandler and Peter LaFarge – posited a generational change of hope and truth-telling. It was a welcome antidote to the bullshit coming out of a clueless government.
Then the Beatles came along and told us that all we needed was love. But love was not powerful enough to stop the assassins’ bullets that ushered in the decade’s end.
Our company was founded on my father’s quirky idea that he could present Pete Seeger in concert, despite the McCarthy Era blacklist. Encouraged by the concert’s success, Manny Greenhill went on to present Bob Dylan, as well as Miriam Makeba and Mercedes Sosa – singers who were taking brave stands against oppressive regimes in South Africa and Argentina respectively — and a host of other socially conscious artists. He managed Joan Baez for the first 15 years of her storied career. (We still administer her publishing.)
Among all the songs and songwriters that those changing times inspired, I feel that Dave Van Ronk’s work has been too often overlooked. Is there a more powerful anti-war song that his “Luang Probang,” which begins “When I came home from Luang Probang, I didn’t have a thing where my balls used to hang”? It’s a dark, almost Brechtian counterpart to Country Joe McDonald’s better know “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag.” Both songs find ironic humor in a life-or-death situation.
It’s a tradition that goes back at least as far as that old folksong “Jimmy Crack Corn,” in which a slave not-so-innocently forgets to protect his master’s horse from a flying insect, with dire results. “He died and the jury wondered why,” the song reports. “The verdict was the blue tail fly.”
Continuing the tradition, Bob Dylan’s “Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues” eviscerates the greed that led to numerous injuries on a very real and overcrowded ferry boat. He concludes that it’s safer to “have a picnic in my bathroom.”
2025 is a different time and we probably need different songs. I don’t know what songs Donald Trump was listening to back then. But as he now rushes to dismantle so much of what his contemporaries struggled to build, we can draw knowledge and perhaps inspiration from the soundtrack that underscored our younger lives. Hopefully new songwriters can avoid the temptation of cynicism even as they call out the absurdity of today’s politics. As we navigate a new time of political chaos and trauma, love is not all we need; it remains part of what we need.
Bob Dylan doesn’t owe us any more protest songs. If he wants to spend his last chapters knocking back Heaven’s Door, he’s entitled. He did his part. We now need new voices who can make musical sense out of the current ferment. Like the young Dylan, like Dave Van Ronk and Country Joe, like the enslaved narrator of “Jimmy Crack Corn,” we need to take our situation seriously even as we retain humor, hope and affirmation.