“Some Half-Formed Ramblings on the Straw Business Man in Classic Rock”

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Now, one admission I have to make right away in this piece is that I was not alive in the 1960s — I was born in 1983. With this being the case, I’ve never been alive in any time when America was more ideologically divided than it was at the onset of the Vietnam War and between assassinations of John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert. The closest I’ve ever come was probably the war in Iraq in 2003, to which I was vehemently opposed, and even then we never went so far as they did in the ’60s, I wouldn’t say.

What I’m particularly talking about, in specific, is this sort of holistic manufacture of opposition to people based on things like profession, image and general aesthetics, whereas nobody in 2003 was walking around like, “Look at that guy in a suit… what a war monger!” This extrapolation into wardrobe or something adjacent, though, is something I do perceive as having happened in Bob Dylan songs like “All along the Watchtower” and “Ballad of a Thin Man,” then perhaps acknowledged and even diffused to an extent in Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” Part of my idea in writing this post is that I just always had a distaste for this overly hippie-ish vilification of people who come across too official or reliant on tradition — people are people, even if it is the’ 60s, and I think Stephen Stills was seeing things pretty clearly in “For What it’s Worth” when he critiqued the agenda in both parties of “Mostly saying ‘hooray’ for our side”. 

And I mean, come on, what kind of business man would come around and drink your wine and come and take your herb? Don’t get me wrong, I love this song, but a line this ridiculous just has to ring of rampant, occlusive drug use on the part of an entire populace, and on the part of the applicable artist, too, as well. Actually, it sounds like acid casualty paranoia, more than anything, or at least some acceptance of such a disposition, provided that it allows for wielding a certain compunction, whether well justified or not, against anyone even apparently associated with the “establishment.” 

And then there’s “Ballad of a Thin Man.” Don’t even get me started on this one. It’s like when the decadents took over France and were so sure that they could do no wrong morally that they devolved into a life of vulgarity and sexual horrors. And in a way what Bob Dylan does in “Thin Man” is even worse because the tangible misconduct and lowbrow thrill-seeking is replaced by pure petulance and abstract yammering. And of course, I get that Dylan is throwing shade at people who don’t smile, but part of my problem with this song is that he seems to be taking the semblance of an individual and blowing it up so to something metaphoric, as if this one individual is supposed to represent the “system” that is corrupt, or “The Man,” briefly, if you prefer. But “For What it’s Worth” is such a better song and it’s just so much less plaintive — the message is that we all have to stop, listen and just absorb, and if this “thin man” in Bob Dylan’s song is really meant to represent “The Man,” then how would things like calling him a cow and giving him his neck back pertain to other at-hand events like large-scale war, religious proselytizing and political assassinations? It just seems like a high school kid’s stoned rant against a “square” teacher he doesn’t like, meant to rally people around this drug-induced, ditzy approach to life without really having a point other than hating people who are old and who “don’t know what’s going on,” of course nothing about these proceedings guaranteeing that Mr. Dylan knew what the He** was going on, either. In fact, a myopic view of society on his part would be more than implied by all the goopy, schizophrenic drivel lining the lyrics of this song. 

But I mean, people were people, in the ’60s, just like anyone. A case in point would be the vinly copy of the Jefferson Airplane album Volunteers that I bought for my mom, with Grace Slick’s special quote being “Point that thing somewhere else” (um, she wasn’t talking about a gun, just to hint). And then there’s that Airplane quote at the end of “A Small Package of Value Will Come to You, Shortly” of “A man is not an island… he’s a peninsula.” And of course I’m not trying to preach but what I’m trying to get at is that this purported pure youth of hippies and “enlightened” people might be kind of a myth and that even people at the epicenter of the ostensible “cultural movement” were capable of the most lowbrow, mammalian discourse, as they ever had been. For reasons partly related to this, I give thanks for Billy Joel for coming along with “Piano Man” and infusing some signs of life back into the “businessman” image, as well as, at least implicitly, illustrating how desperation and destitution leave no stones unturned — anybody is liable to fall prey to them and in that bar where he plays piano is a holistic cross-section of humanity, partly capable of taking part in profound things like “sharing a drink they call loneliness,” and definitely not some cartoon caricature of a buffoon or thief that Dylan seems to be attempting to portray in his frankly drug-addled political masquerades of the mid-’60s.