Dylan’s arrival in Greenwich Village in 1961, to a scene informed equally by poetry and politics as it was jazz and folk, found him mastering pointed and topical song form early on, from “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” to “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Only A Pawn In Their Game,” “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” He followed his first act with his famous retreat from political songs and folk music. Resisting the tag, “voice of a generation,” he leaned more toward poetical and philosophical lyric forms, rather than those polemical or topical and developed his own world of song perhaps best exemplified by the rambles, “Like A Rolling Stone,” “Desolation Row,” and other epics on the trilogy of albums, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. From 1966 through much of 1971 Dylan remained in self-imposed exile, off the road and away from the spotlight.
Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards
Dylan cut two versions of “George Jackson” for a double sided seven-inch: A “big band” version featuring Kenny Buttrey (drums), Ben Keith (steel guitar), and Leon Russell (bass), and a solo acoustic version. Among the various issues of the single—and there are many—is a picture sleeve with an image of Dylan performing at the Concert for Bangladesh; it remains sought-after by record collectors.
The details of the George Jackson case are still debated today by scholars, historians, and those who remember the events. Last year, the last incarcerated member of the San Quentin Six, Hugo Pinell, was killed while serving his life sentence, much of it in solitary confinement.
The following is a live recording of Joan Baez singing “George Jackson.”
Filed under: Black Power,, Bob Dylan, California, Civil Rights, video, Black August, George Jackson, Joan Baez, Prison reform
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why I’ve
devoted the majority of my professional writing life to researching the lives of the heroes and sheroes of American arts and letters and where they meet the political and social issues of our own lives and times. When my last two assignments concerned two iconic men who made an imprint on the culture at large in the late ’60s and early ’70s, I must admit I paused to check if I was locked in some kind of retro-groove, reliving a past that I wasn’t quite old enough to participate in firsthand. Though very quickly, it became clear to me that both subjects made contributions to the national dialogue that remain of absolute and vital relevance to the here and now. It is precisely that reason why two very serious people, Frank Zappa and Bobby Seale, are of interest to me…
A righteous pundit, Loudon Wainwright III has been pursuing music since the late ’60s, debuting with a self-titled album in 1970. Aside from his honest and deeply felt songs on relationships and life circumstances, he’s long written satirical work, a style he calls “musical journalism,” best demonstrated over an album’s length on 1999’s Social Studies (he sticks it to O.J. Simpson, Tonya Harding, and Jesse Helms). For awhile he was the in-house songsmith for Nightline and is occasionally commissioned songs for NPR. His latest is a hilarious nightmare vision of this year’s U.S. Presidential election.
at the water’s edge. Born on an avenue named after the sea, the story goes my parents met at San Francisco’s public beach and I took some of my earliest steps there. Of my not-so-many teenage accomplishments, I took most pride in holding what I think was the land speed record of 30 minutes by Mustang, from high school parking lot to Sunny Cove in Santa Cruz. As an adult, I’ve lived life either blocks away or on a bus line to the water. I’m comfortable wearing the scars of a weather-worn Californian who knows her Coast, from Del Norte to Coronado.
Five days after ending their hunger strike, on Thursday morning the 
Denise Sullivan 