PODCAST: BOB DYLAN A HEADFUL OF IDEAS Season Two 6) Hurricane and Joey

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Hurricane and Joey

Dylan was sometimes criticised when writing his early protest songs for ‘bending’ or exaggerating the facts of the case. William Zantzinger, who in Hattie Carroll is called ‘Zanzinger’ maintained up until his death that the song portrayed him in an unfair light. In both cases here Dylan idealises the protagonists. Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter was a successful middleweight boxer who was imprisoned for murder of three people in a shoot out in a bar in 1966. After he wrote his autobiography, The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to Number 45472, (while still in jail), he became a cause célèbre. Many celebrities including Muhammad Ali supported the campaign for his release. Dylan’s song was a successful single and one of the Rolling Thunder Shows, at Madison Square Garden on 8^th December 1975, was played as a fundraiser for the campaign. He was subsequently briefly released but was soon imprisoned again. Only in 1985 did his final release occur, when the judge decided that he had been the victim of racial prejudice. Carter’s case remains controversial, with some maintaining that he was indeed a violent criminal while others see him as an innocent victim of a racist American justice system.

Having read The Sixteenth Round and visited Carter in prison, Dylan declared that he felt a special connection with the boxer and felt that they had similar philosophies of life. The nature of this philosophy was outlined in Carter’s book and in the 1999 movie The Hurricane, which is graced by an outstandingly nuanced performance by Denzel Washington in the title role. Washington powerfully expresses the way in which Carter buried himself in reading and writing as a way of ‘freeing himself’ from the physical boundaries of his prison. Dylan seems to have identified strongly with this devotion to literature and quite genuinely believed in Carter’s innocence. But neither the film nor Dylan’s song can really be said to be unbiased or historically accurate. In both cases, ‘Hurricane’ is romanticised as a character but remains a powerful symbol of resistance against oppression.

Hurricane and Joey

Much of Dylan’s attitude to the composition of such songs originated in his devotion to his early mentor Woody Guthrie, who specialised in writing topical ‘anti-establishment’ songs. His Pretty Boy Floyd – which Dylan recorded a compelling version of on a 1988 tribute album A Vision Shared –  is the tale of a ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ type figure, based on the character of a notorious bank robber from the 1920s. The song relates how ‘Pretty Boy’ begins his career when he kills a policeman for …using vulgar words of language… in front of his wife. He later becomes a notorious bank robber from the 1920s who turns into a kind of popular hero, frequently helping the poor and providing ….a Christmas dinner for the families on relief… The song ends with some pointedly ironic moralising:

… as through this world I’ve wandered

I’ve seen lots of funny men;

Some will rob you with a six-gun,

And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,

Yes, as through your life you roam,

You won’t never see an outlaw

Drive a family from their home…

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