Tears of Rage

Addendum #34

The death of Garth Hudson, also known as “Honey Boy” who was the last man standing in the group known as The Band, brought me back to their first album, although, in truth, I am never far away from those songs. They exist within me like so many cautionary tales compounded of lament, vision, fortitude, and sheer out-of-the-box imagination. I remember hearing The Band live for the first time and feeling time stop during Garth’s organ intro to “Chest Fever,” a sort of measured rhapsody, at once self-aware yet poised to spring into the thrust of the melody. So beautiful to hear that organ emerge from the background of the group’s sound and proclaim its untethered importance.

Many words have been written about those songs but their mystery remains, which is surely part of their enduring magic. I think immediately of the initial song, “Tears of Rage,” and hearing that song for the first time and feeling I was entering some realm that I didn’t know about, some realm that was ancient yet alive on a vinyl record in July of 1968. That was one month after the assassination of Robert Kennedy and three months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. I’ve written a novel about the first half of 1968 but I still find myself shaking my head when I note those deaths and what it did to me and countless others and how Music from Big Pink made a degree of karmic sense, the voice of the ages speaking through some musicians (mostly Canadian) who consorted with Bob Dylan to ends no one could have predicted.

In “Tears of Rage” we are thrown into an immediacy that we feel but cannot parse, not an uncommon situation with a Bob Dylan tune, though “Tears of Rage” was coauthored with Richard Manuel who sang the song. “Sang” is the simple descriptive but hardly does justice to Manuel’s voice that pleads, laments, worries, and wonders. It is a strange singing, far from the domain of pop music. We find ourselves in the land of confrontation but it is hard, if not impossible, to say what beyond the Hydra of regret is being confronted. That, however, is part of the pity and terror, how much regret we can feel. And that is one import of the song, that willingness to feel at what seems like any cost. His voice is vulnerable but, again, that is only part of it. Naked, also part of it. Throbbing yet inflected with baffled emotion. A personal dirge for someone in the midst of a life that seems, at every turn, to undo him. A recognition of bonds that have dissolved. As in the song, my statements beg to be questions.

Words can go anywhere. That seems a just epitaph for such a song and for Bob Dylan’s songs overall. For many, that notion has meant a sort of higher irresponsibility, metaphorical freedom in the name of art. With Dylan (and with Manuel in “Tears of Rage”) the uncertainty of where to turn next plays out as a metaphysical wake-up call: Nothing has to be. The original feeling of desolation as it finds words (and notes) is more than sufficient because the song is not representing anything, not mimicking anything, not supposed to be like anything. Yet a powerful moral force resides in “Tears of Rage”, a version of testifying that adheres to the observation that Dylan’s songs often have the sentiment of religion. Or the memory of tragedy, of frustrated grandeur. Or all the above.

A drama is unfolding and the narrator watches a drama unfold. The feeling of powerlessness is something like unbearable. At times I feel that Manuel’s voice is going to break and the song will shatter. But that isn’t true. The song is a perseverance song because, by and large, that is what people do even as one seeming impossibility follows another, as one seeming connection turns out to be not a connection but a doorway into a larger perspective that envelops more futility than most of us would care to know about.

“Why must I always be the thief?” The question is sprung by a rhyme but Dylan has always been jumping off that cliff. The answer of sorts in the refrain is: “Come to me now, you know we/re so alone / And life is brief.” Understandably, one might not categorize this as consolation. As in the Bible, one feels one is confronting a quandary that only the supernatural could finally sort out and that such a final sorting out doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with human affairs as they go “from bad to worse” (to quote the last words of the second verse). Wrongdoing goes without saying yet the saying must be done. In Manuel’s pleading, one hears the grief that accompanies the rage of frustration, the woe of impotence, of trying and failing, of being avoided, of not being heard, of watching something happen that you can do nothing about, of believing you could do something when you couldn’t. It’s precisely this welter of feeling, the narrative specifics that go nowhere yet evoke a powerful ethos, that can’t be denied.

Such a song had everything to say to the United States in July 1968 but as Dylan and the members of The Band would have been the first to say, “It’s only a song.” That’s a very dismissive truth but a truth nonetheless. Art takes us somewhere and then leaves us. Time picks up the spare change as other moments ensue, moments that have their threads of feeling but that are random and subterranean and all that gets subsumed within the mundane. I think of Garth’s organ and that sound that beckons in the most basic way: This bell tolls for thee. An old sentiment and one we accordingly push aside. How much we want to let ourselves see our own vulnerability is our concern. One can certainly say that it doesn’t pay in any way the workaday world understands. The Band carried on in various shapes and Dylan has carried on and one day Manuel stopped carrying on. It’s all in that one song and will stay there.