"[...] be friends with you"
One important aspect of Another Side Of Bob Dylan (1964) were songs challenging traditional male and female role stereotypes. "It Ain't Me Babe" is on one level a kind of diatribe against female possessiveness while "All I Really Want To Do" with the line "be friends with you" makes fun of male possessiveness. In the words of Michael Gray:
"[...] it was clear to plenty of people at the time, and is all the more so looking back, that the love songs Dylan offered on this album were more true and real and ultimately more radical than protest songs. 'All I Really Want to Do' and 'It Ain't Me Babe' are historically important songs: they questioned the common assumptions of true love and the male-female relationship; they not only avoided possessiveness and macho strut but explained why as well. This was years before any of us understood that love and politics weren't opposites - that there was such a thing as sexual politics [...] in 1964, when people first heard that line from 'It Ain't Me Babe', 'A lover for your life and nothing more', it was radical: it rocked you back on your feet, because in pop songs there never had been anything more: 'to be a lover for your life' was the ultimate ideal" (Gray, Encyclopedia, p. 22, 236)
In these years there was revolution in the air, in so far this is purely subjective view. Every generation tries to start its own "revolution" and tends to think that the older generation - who had been at least as smart in their heyday - is a bunch of boring conservatives. That is of course factually wrong, as wrong as the claim that to be "a lover for your life" had always been the "ultimate ideal" in popular songs bB ( = before Bob). In fact these ideas weren't that new. "Sexual politics" in popular songs wasn't an invention of the 60s, it was well known before that although they didn't call it that way. An outstanding example - although barely known today - is Irving Berlin's "I Don't Want To Be Married", a quasi-feminist comical duet written for Face The Music, a 1932 depression era musical show. It's interesting not only because it uses the phrase "to be friends" in a comparable context, in a song challenging gender stereotypes.
[VERSE:]
[Girl:]
You're compromising me
But that's exactly as it ought to be
I simply fell for you because I wanted to fall
Don't speak of wedding chimes
Because we mustn't be behind the times
Besides a wedding isn't necessary at all
[1st REFRAIN:]
Don't worry because I fell
You don't have to do right by Nell
'Cause I don't wanna be married, I just wanna be friends
Don't worry 'cause I gave in
Best of families live in sin
'Cause they don't wanna be married, they just wanna be friends
While all the happy married couples sit and fight
We'll be still going strong
And fifty million Frenchmen say it's quite alright
And that many can't be wrong
I never would change my name
Even after the baby came
'Cause I don't wanna be married, I just wanna be friends
[2nd REFRAIN:]
[Boy:]
My father would give me hell
If I didn't do right by Nell
[Girl:]
But I don't wanna be married, I just wanna be friends
[Boy:]
Please grant me my father's wish
Shotgun weddings are just his dish
[Girl:]
I don't wanna be married, I just wanna be friends
[Boy:]
The kiddies wouldn't like it, they'd be awfully mad
'Twould be known near and far
[Girl:]
To be a little "who's-this" isn't really bad
For some of my best friends are
[Boy:]
If not for the family
Make an hon'rable man of me!
[Girl:]
But I don't wanna be married, I just wanna be friends
This song - surprisingly, not to say shockingly modern in 1932 - was not recorded at that time, it was not even published as sheet music but exclusively performed on stage. Musical theater from the 30s to the 50s was modern up-to-date art that offered artistic freedom to the writers and performers far greater than what was possible in recording studios, in movies or on the radio. In that genres censors - official and unofficial - were busy trying to implement what they thought were middle class moral values although they had often enough serious problems with reality, for example when the Hays Office censored double beds out of movies. And especially in music they did not always succeed. In fact the idea that Pop music was something dangerous didn't exactly start with Elvis and Rock'n Roll.
There were no censors in New York City on Broadway, the shows only sometimes got problems when they went out of town, especially. to puritanical Boston. And with book writers like Moss Hart or George Kaufmann musicals surely weren't square. So songwriters had much more freedom to write about love and sex, they were able to make fun of everybody, from politicians to moralists and reformers of all kind and they knew that satire and humor was a most effective weapon. As Irving Berlin said at that time: "There are some persons [...] who need no distortion to caricature, and the same is true for much of the world's news...It is satire in itself and has only to be photographically reproduced to be the most gorgeous kind of irony" (Furia, p. 153).
Especially during the depression musical shows were far from being purely escapist entertainment. The Gershwins' political satires like Of Thee I Sing and Let 'em Eat Cake are fine examples. Then here was Cole Porter who didn't give a penny for American puritanism and whose songs obviously were regarded as a serious threat to American middle class sexual mores. Irving Berlin may serve as another example. He was surely no dark reactionary nor unpolitical or only a composer of catchy dance tunes. Many of his songs were far from being harmless or square and often he was way ahead of his time. Personally he knew very well what love had to do with politics. In the 20s he had run into serious problems when he wanted to marry a girl - who was very emancipated herself - from a rich, catholic family and her father deeply resented him because he was an eastern European Jewish immigrant. But in the end he simply stole that girl and won a highly publicized major victory against bigotry and snobbism.
Face The Music was an innovative musical show, both racy and critical, built around a story about the corrupt police, an important topic at that time in New York as there were actually investigations against the police and mayor Walker. The personnel of the play included for example a streetwalker, an elephant, mobsters thanking Senator Volstead and "the members of his crew" for "the law that started people drinking" and a prosecutor investigating an "obscene" show. Berlin's sources and inspirations were ranging from a popular broccoli cartoon ("I Say It's Spinach (And The Hell With It)") to President Hoover's absurd announcement at the height of depression that "prosperity is just around the corner" ("Let's Have Another Cup Of Coffee"). Not at least he alluded to and quoted from many well known songs of that era and systematically parodied the cliches of the popular music.
This may also be the case with "I Don't Want To Be Married" and it's possible that Berlin is referring to "I Don't Want To Get Married (I'm Havin' Too Much Fun)", a somehow subversive minor hit in 1925. But his lyrics are ultimately more radical and provocative than both "I Don't Want To Get Married" and Dylan's 60s songs. First he shows how moral values are undermined by the harsh reality: that couple can't marry even if they would like to because they - it was at the height of depression - had no money. That was a perspective different from the "we've got the money, let's have fun" attitude of the 20s and the "our parents have the money, let's have fun" attitude of the 60s. Then it should be noted that it's the girl who's challenging the stereotypes and traditional role models. In fact she shows considerable self-confidence when she admits that "I fell for you because I wanted to fall" and when she says no to the boy's pledges to please his family and "make an hon'rable man of me". Here Berlin very elegantly mocks that old cliche of the "honorable woman". Not at least this song was also an ironic riposte against contemporary bigotry and those from the "best of families" who always speak of morals but are no paragons of virtue themselves.
At that time it was far more challenging to write something like "I Don't Want To Be Married", not at least because allusions to extra-marital children weren't that usual. Here he phrase "to be friends" had a much more provocative effect. But on the other hand the song was only known to a those sophisticated folks who went to the theater and there was no way get it into wider circulation. In the 60s songs like "It Ain't Me Babe" or "All I Really Want To Do" were far from being "radical", they were more a sign for how society and music business had already changed. As far as I can see Dylan had no problems publishing, recording and performing these songs.
One of the ground stones of modern day "rockism" is the illusion that popular songs with a more realistic, more risky and more open approach to love and sex started with Rock'n Roll in 50s or even with Bob Dylan et al. in the 60s. That's not exactly correct, in fact it's terribly wrong as the real watershed was not so much between pre-war and post-war popular music but between 19th and 20th century style. "In the 19th century [...] love in songs was usually considered everlasting" (Tawa, p. 98), eternal love was celebrated and lasted even beyond death. In a slow process since the last decades of the 19th century love turned out to be a much more casual affair, lovers parted for more profane reasons, eternal love was more of an illusion than reality. All these torch songs lamenting the loss of love as well as the great number of more or less comical or suggestive songs wouldn't have been possible without the "20th century concept [of the] possibility of impermanent love" (Tawa, p. 98).
The reasons for this development were manifold but among those responsible for the change of style were songwriters from immigrant families who didn't give that much for Victorian values and were busy undermining them with many of their songs. Exactly this kind of music was regarded as dangerous by the conservative WASP establishment that in turn promoted "Folk songs" á la "Barbara Allen" as a counter model to the morally doubtful products of immigrants and blacks. Irving Berlin had started out in the era of rowdy Vaudeville and a notable number of his early works were non-ethnic suggestive songs that made fun of mainstream morals. Songs like "My Wife's Gone To The Country (Hurrah! Hurrah!)” and “Call Me Up Some Rainy afternoon” - big hits in 1909/10 - may sound harmless today but at that time they actually raised the ire of the usual suspects who attacked the songwriter for "laughing openly at the sacred institution of marriage" and called for censorship (Hamm, p. 56).
Berlin's earliest "rhythmic ballads" (see this article for more about that era) written since 1910 - that's exactly the date when the spell of "eternal love" in in the mainstream popular ballad was broken - "have female protagonists who, rather than swearing romantic, faithful and lasting love to their male partners, instead offer immediate, willing, and enthusiastic physical gratification [...] What emerges in these pieces is a type of ballad that differs from those of the nineteenth century [...] in the representation of women. The voice of the song is no longer that of the songwriter, hoping to find (or expressing his delight at having already found) a mate "just like the girl that married dear old Dad" [...], someone adept at keeping the house clean while tending to the children and being faithful until death to her husband [...] There is no mention of marriage in these songs or of children" (Hamm, p. 168). "I've Got To Have Some Lovin' Now"(1912) is a typical example:
I've got to have some lovin' now
Won't you let me show you how
Now hug me like a bear
Come and muss my hair
Give me a kiss on the brow
Come, be a nice sweet honey like you should
And love me while the lovin's good
I may die in the morning
So I want some lovin' now
In Berlin's and his fellow songwriters' repertoire there are many songs painting images of active and independent women as well as of relationships that are very different from 19th century cliches and mainstream moral values. These were all songs for an urban audience at a time when women's roles in society were changing: "Many young women from small towns, had come to New York and other large cities to find jobs [...] with a freedom unheard of a generation before, they lived on their own in apartments and pursued their own recreation unchaperoned" (Furia, Berlin, p. 103). It was the era of the first wave of feminism , in the 20s the "flapper" came to prominence and there were female performers from Emma Carus to Fanny Brice and Irene Bordoni and in the 30s Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers who personified the role model of the clever, self-confident or even tough woman for whom the male songwriters had to write songs. These ladies were no helpless little girls nor easy victims of male chauvinism.
One example is Ira Gershwin's "Sam And Delilah", 1930, written for Ethel Merman in Girl Crazy:
Delilah was a floozy
She never gave a damn
Delilah wasn't choosy
Till she fell for a swell buckaroo
Whose name was Sam
Delilah got in action
Delilah did her "kootch"
She gave him satisfaction
And he fell 'neath her spell
With the aid of love and "hootch"
But one day, so they tell us
His true wife, he did crave
Delilah, she got jealous
And she tracked him, and hacked him
And dug for Sam a grave
It's always that way with passion
So cowboy, learn to behave
Or else, you're liable to cash in
With no tombstone on your grave
Delilah, oh Delilah
She's no babe in the wood
Run cowboy, run a mile-ah
If you love that kind of woman
She'll do you no good
Ira Gershwin's "He Hasn't A Thing Except Me" (1936, for Fanny Brice) was a spoof of male chauvinism and female masochism:
Let me introduce a gentleman
High class people call a louse;
Not a very sentimental man,
Nothing you'd want 'round the house.
Oh, I really can't tell
Why I'm under his spell;
The chances are slim
I'll ever see what I see in him.
Refrain
I give you his highness,
A pain worse than sinus.
Though I felt all hopped up
The minute he popped up,
It's easy to see
He hasn't a thing except me.
I help out his brother,
Pay rent for his mother;
Feel when I took him in
I carry his women.
He's living for free,
And hasn't a thing except me.
He's Mon Homme;
He can take my heart and break it
Mend it when he starts to clown.
Just a bum
But the guy can make me take it
When he ups and lets me down.
[spoken:]
(Well, you get the idea. You know, I've been singing about this bum for twenty-five years under different titles and making a pretty good living out of him. He's always the same low-life, always doing me dirt, but I keep on loving him just the same. Can you imagine if I really ever met a guy like that what I would do to him?)
Though I brought this on me,
How long can he con me?
Still, it's not too late for
The day that I wait for:
The day he'll agree
He hasn't a thing except me.
The most radical songwriter of that era was of course Cole Porter, not an immigrant but a francophile emigrant, who often enough wrote up to the limits of what was possible and even regularly overstepped those limits. Porter “connected with his audiences above all by how tellingly [...] he could write about emotional relationships and their transient nature. His songs were at home with the extremes of passion and the moods of loss [...]" (Kimball, p. xv). In "Its All Right With Me" (1953) for example he was much more explicit than any other songwriter at that time:
That if some night you're free,
Dear, it's all right,
It's all right
With me.
In many of his comical songs Porter systematically undermined and made fun of mainstream morals. One drastic example was "Hey Good Lookin'", written for Something For The Boys (1943) with Ethel Merman taking the female lead.
[i]BLOSSOM:
When there's a sun above
I always find
Romantic thoughts of love
Never enter my mind
But when the day is done
I find that instead
I just love ev'ryone
And as Elizabeth Barrett Browning once said......
Hey, good-lookin'
Say, what's cookin'?
Do you feel like bookin'
Some fun tonight?
He, hey, hey, hey, good-lookin'
If you're not already tooken
Could you meet me soon
In the moon-
Light?
Why don't we two go roamin'
Through the gloamin'
While the stars are combin'
The skies above?
Hey, hey, hey, hey, good-lookin'
Give in and we'll begin cookin'
That delish
Little dish
Called love
ROCKY:
Your voice, Miss Ovaltine
Has me impressed
You're the missing link between
Lily Pons and Mae West
But I must warn you, Ma'am
If later you're free
That I'm half wolf, my lamb
And as the famous Tallulah muttered to me......
[refrain]
This song - a parody and joyful deconstruction of the romantic 'moonlight' cliches - is taking place in a world where monogamy was obviously never heard of and where the woman is as active as the man and there is no sign that they intend to marry and have a bunch of kids calling them 'Ma' and 'Pa'.
The songs from this era were often enough about women - and sometimes men - who were busy freeing themselves from the constraints of traditional relationships and family values. One last example: Irving Berlin's "No Strings" was originally written for Fred Astaire and when he sang it in "Top Hat" (1935) it was surely not a song praising the ideology of the happy family. Ginger Rogers recorded it too and she could sing it with just the same right:
I'm fancy free and free for anything fancy
These ladies all look somehow different from some of the women painted in Dylan's songs. The girl in Berlin's "I Don't Want To Get Married" obviously was much more sophisticated and emancipated than the girl in "It Ain't Me Babe" more than thirty years later. In some way Dylan's 60s songs may have been the step backwards compared to what was possible before WWII. Maybe Dylan's anti-love-songs are about men freeing themselves from the constraints of emotional relationships with emancipated and independent women?
Literature:
- Philip Furia, Irving Berlin. A Life In Song, New York 1998
- Michael Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, London & New York 2006
- Ira Gershwin, Lyrics on Several Occasions. A Selection Of Stage & Screen Lyrics Written For Sundry Situations; And Now Arranged In Arbitrary Categories. To Which Have Been Added Many Informative Annotations & Disquisitions On Their Why & WhereFore, Their Whom-For. Their How; And Matters Associative, New York 1997 (1959)
- Charles Hamm, Irvig Berlin, Songs From The Melting Pot: The Formative Years 1907 - 1914, New York & Oxford 1997
- Robert Kimball (ed.), Cole Porter, Selected Lyrics, The Library Of America: American Poets Project, 2006
- Robert Kimball & Linda Emmet (ed.), The Complete Lyrics Of Irving Berlin, New York 2000.
- Nicholas Tawa, Supremely American. Popular Song In The 20th Century, Lanham, Toronto & Oxford 2005
- Face The Music (lyrics & music by Irving Berlin, book by Moss Hart), 2007 Encores! Cast Recording, DRG-CD-94781
© LostChords
lostchords@morerootsofbob.de
MoreRootsOfBob.com
24.11.2007