Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
How many years can a mountain exist
Before it’s washed to the sea?
Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head
Pretending that he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky
Yes, ’n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
The urgent refrain that supposedly provides an answer really gives no answer at all, but rather creates its own questions: “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind / The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” Is the wind blowing the answer away from us, never to be heard, or blowing it toward us, about to right the injustices of those nine urgent questions? Roman critics had a saying, “The art of poetry is to not say everything.” That is precisely what Dylan’s refrain does, indeed what much of Dylan’s art does; it implants the possible answer in our imaginations, and the rest is up to us.
It is the height of irony that Dylan’s main fear about how the song would be labeled may have lain elsewhere. One of his earliest and most famous interviews took place in May 1963, on Studs Terkel’s radio show on WFMT in Chicago. The young Dylan was in town to play at a local club, the Bear. Not included in Terkel’s 2005 published collection of interviews, And They All Sang, and therefore not to be found in Jonathan Cott’s The Essential Interviews, the following exchange took place in the lead-up to Dylan’s closing song and may be heard on a tape of the show:
ST: What’s one way to sign off … a signing-off song?
BD: Sign-off song, let’s see. Hmm. Oh, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” there’s one I’ll sing you.
ST: Isn’t that a popular song, that’s a popular song, I believe.
BD: God, I hope not.
ST: By “popular” I mean in a good sense. A lot of people are singing it.
BD: Oh, yeah.
After an eight-year hiatus, the song came back twice on August 1, 1971, in Dylan’s afternoon and evening performances at the Concert for Bangladesh. “Blowin’ in the Wind” returned to his setlists for good in January 1974. By then Watergate and Nixon were more in his fans’ consciousness, and the song, obviously not a pop song, could finally take its place in his repertoire as part of his art in performance. I heard Dylan sing the song twice in 2016, in Boston in July and in Clearwater, Florida, in November and twice again in June 2017, on each occasion as the first of the two encores to close his concerts, its regular place in setlists of recent years—and he has now sung it at more than 1,400 concerts, a world away from the acoustic version recorded by the twenty-one-year-old Dylan. The song is still urgent in its questions, but it can’t, couldn’t ever, be attached to any one historical event or condition.
The same goes for “Masters of War,” in terms of its enduring resonance. Dylan had performed the song 884 times by the end of 2016. Vietnam had become a dim backdrop by this time even in the minds of baby boomers, but the masters of war (“You that build the death planes / You that build the big bombs”) never really go away. They were close at hand when Dylan performed acoustic versions of “Masters of War” in Australia and New Zealand in early 2003, including on March 15, when millions of demonstrators in those two countries and across the globe took to the streets urging two politicians not to proceed. American president George W. Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair had for months been building the case for bringing war to Iraq. I myself heard the song in those months reflecting on how relevant its message seemed, forty years on. After the bombs started falling on Baghdad on March 18, and in concerts for the rest of 2003, Dylan stopped playing the song. We’ll never know why, but perhaps Dylan felt that would make it too overtly a “protest song,” the old label. It returned the following year, however, and stayed on setlists until November 23, 2010, when it disappeared, so far for good, except for one performance on October 7, 2016, at the Desert Trip music festival in Indio, California, a weekend extravaganza where some of those particular fans would have expected to hear the song, along with hits by Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Roger Waters, and the Who.
Throughout December 1974, as my first semester as a Ph.D. student was drawing to a close, I regularly stopped in at the local record store on campus to pick up Dylan’s new album, Blood on the Tracks, unaware that Columbia Records had held up its release. My pilgrimages to the record store became part of the rhythm of life, and I made some friends in the process, leading to late nights throughout my Ann Arbor years with music and revolution in the air at a blues club called the Blind Pig, or the Del Rio, which offered free jazz on Sunday evenings. The Ann Arbor Blues Festival had debuted a few years before I got to campus, in the fall of 1969, and featured artists like Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Son House, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. There were funding issues and by 1974 the festival had finished its run, but there was still good music from local bands and musicians attracted to that town’s entertainment market of more than thirty thousand students.
As fans would later discover, Blood on the Tracks was delayed because Dylan had gone back to Minnesota, where he rerecorded some of the songs. But in due course Blood on the Tracks turned up in January 1975 and soon took its place right up there with Blonde on Blonde, a new classic for a new decade. The characters of that earlier album had been mysterious and lovely: Louise and Johanna in “Visions of Johanna,” the sad-eyed lady in “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” The first girlfriend of my imagination had bits of each even before she materialized. After those eight years, things had changed with the romantic visions of Blood on the Tracks: “Situations have ended sad / Relationships have all been bad,” Dylan sang on “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” He later denied that the album was about getting divorced from Sara Dylan. Sara Lownds had married Dylan on November 22, 1965, and their divorce would come almost three years after the songs were written. But there is no denying that with Blood on the Tracks, the art and the beauty seem to come more from a sense of hurt and loss, and seldom is experience not an ingredient of art, as Dylan himself has said. All these years later, the emotion in those songs is as palpable as ever, in the studio versions and thousands of versions recorded in concert. That is what literature, song, and the way they work on memory and experience conspire to give us. Poetry and music are compensations for the pain that comes along with the human condition, and they are what can help us along. That’s what Virgil’s words on the Nobel medal mean, honoring those “who enriched our lives with the newfound arts they forged.”
The music that Dylan produced in the eight years between these two great albums indicates anything other than decline. But it’s hard to articulate the disappointment back through those years that the particular sound of Blonde on Blonde had gone away, never to return. The music he made between that album and Blood on the Tracks was all part of Dylan’s continuing evolution, particularly in mid-1967 as he worked with members of the Band, in seclusion in upstate New York. Some of this material was released on The Basement Tapes in 1975, and much of the rest was long available on unofficial bootleg versions, eventually to be released in 2014 in a six-CD set. Then came the relative simplicity