sedate, the next furiously paced. There is an improvisational quality, too, in
Piano Player
that must have appealed to Dylan, not least given Patti Smith’s comments on the origins of Rolling Thunder and her claim that he was ‘thinking about improvisation’. Though Shepard’s job would amount to nothing important, he was not misinformed. Not content with preparing for an album and plotting a tour, Dylan had a movie in mind. Obviously, Bob Dylan would be its star, but someone else would pretend to play ‘Bob Dylan’.
*
Saigon had fallen – or been liberated – in the last days of April amid humiliating scenes of panic. The overloaded choppers had staggered from the compound of the Defense Attaché Office and the roof of the US embassy while the People’s Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front closed in. Military radio had played Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’, oblivious to any and all symbolism, as a signal to Americans that the evacuations had begun and that it was time finally to leave.
Before the end, President Gerald Ford, broom to Nixon’s dust, had ordered the evacuation of 2,000 orphans, a mere handful of the tens of thousands of children set adrift from their homes and parents, Caucasian, black or Asian, during the upheavals of America’s longest war. Over 100,000 Vietnamese adults – civilian employees, common-law wives, dependants, the rich and formerly powerful – had also managed to escape, but many more desperate people had been abandoned as the US withdrew its last representatives. Reprisals and massacres had been feared before the helicopters had scurried away. There had been a concern, too, that the people of the city would turn against their former protectors once it became clear that the Americans were deserting the country. The last US Marines had left the embassy just before 8 a.m. on 30 April.
What had it all been worth? Even the question soon began to sound banal. Vietnam had dominated the lives of Dylan’s generation. It had defined and divided them, for or against, for better than a decade, with eight miserable years of fighting at its heart. Combat deaths, at a minimum 47,000, had almost matched the number of American dead on the battlefields of the First World War and easily exceeded the total of those killed in action in Korea. In one manner or another, 58,000 young Americans had died in South East Asia and over 300,000 had been wounded. It would take years for America to come to terms with Vietnam, far less to honour the fallen. Returning veterans felt they were spurned, at best ignored. In 1975, many of them believed that their country didn’t want to know about them, what they had done, or why – willing or not – they had done it. Suddenly the country seemed to be repressing every memory.
Three million had served; a million and a half had seen combat. For all that, the entire military might of the US had failed against a small and often primitive nationalist movement, a ‘fourth-rate power’ in the hubristic words of Henry Kissinger. Too often, the psychological effects on those young Americans who otherwise survived were profound, indelible. It took a distinct collective effort to set their experiences and their memories aside. That, nevertheless, became the burden of the veterans’ complaints while the politicians pretended to draw their strategic lessons.
The larger effect, the abiding effect, was a wholesale loss of faith in government. Until they began to hear and believe that amends could somehow be made for Vietnam through still more military power and preparedness, Americans doubted their leaders. If you got your news from rock and roll, as so many young men in combat had got their news, Dylan’s doubting songs and his spurning of politics could seem like good, simple common sense.
By 1975, in any case, the erstwhile New Left was old news. In January, an attempt by the remnants of the Weather Underground to bomb the Department of State
Piano Player
that must have appealed to Dylan, not least given Patti Smith’s comments on the origins of Rolling Thunder and her claim that he was ‘thinking about improvisation’. Though Shepard’s job would amount to nothing important, he was not misinformed. Not content with preparing for an album and plotting a tour, Dylan had a movie in mind. Obviously, Bob Dylan would be its star, but someone else would pretend to play ‘Bob Dylan’.
*
Saigon had fallen – or been liberated – in the last days of April amid humiliating scenes of panic. The overloaded choppers had staggered from the compound of the Defense Attaché Office and the roof of the US embassy while the People’s Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front closed in. Military radio had played Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’, oblivious to any and all symbolism, as a signal to Americans that the evacuations had begun and that it was time finally to leave.
Before the end, President Gerald Ford, broom to Nixon’s dust, had ordered the evacuation of 2,000 orphans, a mere handful of the tens of thousands of children set adrift from their homes and parents, Caucasian, black or Asian, during the upheavals of America’s longest war. Over 100,000 Vietnamese adults – civilian employees, common-law wives, dependants, the rich and formerly powerful – had also managed to escape, but many more desperate people had been abandoned as the US withdrew its last representatives. Reprisals and massacres had been feared before the helicopters had scurried away. There had been a concern, too, that the people of the city would turn against their former protectors once it became clear that the Americans were deserting the country. The last US Marines had left the embassy just before 8 a.m. on 30 April.
What had it all been worth? Even the question soon began to sound banal. Vietnam had dominated the lives of Dylan’s generation. It had defined and divided them, for or against, for better than a decade, with eight miserable years of fighting at its heart. Combat deaths, at a minimum 47,000, had almost matched the number of American dead on the battlefields of the First World War and easily exceeded the total of those killed in action in Korea. In one manner or another, 58,000 young Americans had died in South East Asia and over 300,000 had been wounded. It would take years for America to come to terms with Vietnam, far less to honour the fallen. Returning veterans felt they were spurned, at best ignored. In 1975, many of them believed that their country didn’t want to know about them, what they had done, or why – willing or not – they had done it. Suddenly the country seemed to be repressing every memory.
Three million had served; a million and a half had seen combat. For all that, the entire military might of the US had failed against a small and often primitive nationalist movement, a ‘fourth-rate power’ in the hubristic words of Henry Kissinger. Too often, the psychological effects on those young Americans who otherwise survived were profound, indelible. It took a distinct collective effort to set their experiences and their memories aside. That, nevertheless, became the burden of the veterans’ complaints while the politicians pretended to draw their strategic lessons.
The larger effect, the abiding effect, was a wholesale loss of faith in government. Until they began to hear and believe that amends could somehow be made for Vietnam through still more military power and preparedness, Americans doubted their leaders. If you got your news from rock and roll, as so many young men in combat had got their news, Dylan’s doubting songs and his spurning of politics could seem like good, simple common sense.
By 1975, in any case, the erstwhile New Left was old news. In January, an attempt by the remnants of the Weather Underground to bomb the Department of State
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