The Shootist, the “Sicko,” and John: A Dylan Reflection
by Mason James
A friend suggests you write a song for——, one of the fallen. An innocent remark, too innocent, almost, to entertain. What does it mean to write a song for somebody? What she means, what most people mean, is that the song be written about said person, the way the song “George Jackson” is about George Jackson and “Joey” is about Joey Gallo.
Comes Tempest. I’m told it has a song for John Lennon on it. This brings a shrug. Hadn’t he talked himself through that? I had private reasons for thinking so. “Roll on John”: Doctor, doctor, tell me the time of day; another bottle’s empty, another penny spent. He turned around and he slowly walked away. They shot him in the back and down he went.
The Shootist (dir. Siegel) opens with a montage of a gunfighter’s past glories. The film is John Wayne’s last; the montage, a string of old movie clips, career highlights, the kind compiled when an actor’s “lifetime achievement” is celebrated. A voice-over imposes narrative: “His name was J.B.—John Bernard—Books” the voice begins (the name offering more than a clue to the origin of the legend). After hearing of his matching pair of 45s with ivory grips, we learn that he wasn’t an outlaw—at least not at first— but that “his fame was why somebody or other was always after him.”
We pick up with Books en route to some blandly humble town to visit a doctor (Jimmy Stewart plays the doctor), a friend, who saved his life fifteen years earlier. He meets a grim prognosis: cancer—advanced: “How much time do I have?” Doctor, doctor. How long, Doc, before my sun sets? Books is given two months to live and a bottle—not his last—of laudanum. The doctor forecasts Books’s end when he tells him that he (the doctor) would not die the painful and prolonged death awaiting Books, “not if I had your courage” (legends don’t die... of cancer). And indeed, his reputation preceding him, his courage is given ample exercise. Books is taunted and stalked in the town where he thought he might quietly and anonymously die. The film moves toward its climax with Books arranging an early-morning rendezvous at the local saloon with the town’s most menacing: three men (each thinks he is going to meet Books alone), each is cocky with a gun and believes he can take Books down.
Fired on, Books picks them off in High Noon fashion. He’s hit, but not with the fatal shot he was seeking. As Books lumbers down the bar, making his way slowly toward the door, the bartender returns from wherever he’s been hiding and fires both shotgun barrels. They shot him in the back and down he went. (We know who they are. Lord, Lord, they shot George Jackson Down. You only need one trigger man. They are the cowards, ahead of the execution, complicit in bringing the charge).
The opening verse of “Roll on John” condenses the essential narrative beginning of The Shootist (the visit to the doctor) and, almost straightaway, its ending; another penny spent—British slang for taking a piss—thrown in for sake of the rhyme. The song—specifically, the representation of Lennon in the song—has at least as much to do with the myth of John Wayne as it does with John Lennon. Lennon’s actual end merges in the song with the virtual end of Wayne, both effectively crucified: the death of a western outlaw, and man betrayed. Lord, you know how hard it can be.
“Lenny Bruce,” like all of the songs on Shot of Love (save for “Heart of Mine,” recorded in May), was recorded at Rundown studios in late April of 1981. Unlike all of the other songs on the album, it was not rehearsed at previous Rundown sessions, in September and October of 1980, or earlier that April. Dylan likely wrote “Lenny Bruce” between the October Rundown rehearsals and the April 1981 album session at Clover Studios. The theme linking “Roll on John” and “Lenny Bruce” is the demise of the outlaw redeemer.
He was an outlaw, that’s for sure, more of an outlaw than you ever were. For whom are these words intended? Perhaps this is an instance of self-reflection and self-indictment, the singer measuring himself against the so-called “sicko” comic whom even the hyper-rational Zappa considered a saint (an eloquent contempt for hypocrisy and sham being Zappa’s criterion for canonization). Maybe he had some problems, maybe some things that he couldn’t work out, but he sure was funny and he sure told the truth, and he knew what he was talking about. Telling the truth at personal costs might have impressed Dylan more in the early months of 1981 than it did in August of 1966 when Lenny Bruce died. But better still, more of an outlaw than you ever were serves as an injunction to the listener; that is, until that you is honed in on again, and it hits us that the singer is in fact addressing someone in particular.
The when and where of the song’s arrival puzzles people: fifteen years after Bruce’s death, on an album, though not strictly gospel, considerably Christian (in context “Lenny Bruce” follows “Property of Jesus”). But in putting the song where he does, Dylan is hurling gravel into a well-oiled machine. The born-again movement in America, aided immeasurably by the country’s troubles in the middle-east, had been building throughout the seventies. By 1981 the reborn were a lobby, well aware of Dylan and ready to absorb him in their ranks. But he’s hip to them. “Lenny Bruce” is thrown in with “Property of Jesus” and “Every Grain of Sand” for their edification. You don’t get me that easily. And don’t kid yourself into innocence. We can’t go back. After the fight for Civil Rights and the ERA, Kent State, Watergate, the war in Vietnam, and, yes, the death of Lenny Bruce, liberal handwringing had by the early eighties turned to collective handwashing; a will to forget and be cleansed; a dream of guiltless prosperity. As if Lady Macbeth herself could, on ceasing to sleepwalk, wake up renewed and go shopping. Sleep still in our eyes, presents under the tree. Dylan’s gospel turn was not inspired by some kind of wished-for innocence (rather Mavis Staples, Mahalia Jackson, Rosetta Tharpe). And dispatching “Lenny Bruce” was a declaration, as if he needed to say it again, that his identification was with the lamb, not the flock.
The febrile outbursts that made their way into Bruce’s routines had an air of indignation. His reverence for justice and belief in the Law registered in the eyes of the court as contempt. This is Lenny Bruce “Before the Law,” learning the hard way, to put it in the gentlest terms, that Kafka was a realist. Philip Roth, who admired “that joining of precise social observation with extravagant and dreamlike fantasy” in Bruce recalled, “The only time Lenny Bruce and I ever met and talked was in his lawyer’s office, where it occurred to me that he was just about ripe for the role of Joseph K. He looked gaunt and driven, still determined, but also on the wane, and he wasn’t interested in being funny—all he could talk about and think about was his ‘case.’” The lack of sympathy might have been a lack of comprehension (“the lower courts are all crap”). And in his vindication-lust there was more than a hint of narcissism. But behind Bruce’s last-ditch plea that he be allowed to perform his act in a superior court was not simply an infantile desire to be liked but the horrifying realization—horrifying because it came too late—that one’s “admittance to the Law,” or exclusion from it, is, in the final analysis, entirely personal. The practiced impartiality of the Gatekeeper, the appearance of objective fairness, is revealed to be what it always has been, an instrument of torture: “No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. Now I am going to shut it.”
Zappa, whom Dylan approached to produce the follow-up to Shot of Love, said of Bruce, “What the Big Machine of America did to Lenny Bruce was pretty disgusting… but nobody will ever really find out about it, I guess.” Zappa’s answer was to be a musical science-fiction horror story based on the Lenny Bruce trials. He settled for releasing The Berkeley Concert on his and Herb Cohen’s Bizarre record label in 1969. That same year, a memo from Lennon to Derek Taylor reads “Lennie Bruce must be on Zapple” (a short-lived imprint of Apple records). That Lennon and Zappa would both want to issue Bruce recordings isn’t surprising. It hadn’t been that long since Zappa named-checked Bruce on the sleeve of Freak Out, and since Bruce showed up, between May West and Stockhausen, on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s.
Yet Dylan characterized “Lenny Bruce” as “a song about recognition or lack of recognition.” Introducing the song during a concert in Nagoya, Japan, he quoted Tennessee Williams: “Tennessee Williams, it was who said, ‘I don’t ask for your pity, just your understanding—not even that, but just your understanding of me in you, and time, the enemy in us all.’” Dylan added: “Tennessee Williams led a pretty drastic life. He died all by himself in a New York hotel room without a friend in the world. Another man died like that.” The lines recalled, almost verbatim, for the Japanese audience are those of Chance Wayne in Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth. Dylan was almost certainly unaware that six years before, Lennon recorded his own melancholy tribute, a home demo—it would be almost only home demos from then on—, “Tennessee,” a song that is, in its own way, a call for recognition: America, America, your heroes are alive.
A song for John? Why should I write a song for John Lennon? I never wrote a song for Lenny Bruce. Does anybody remember Lenny Bruce? Lennon was gunned down in December of 1980 (between the initial Rundown rehearsals in October and their recommencement in March). Apparitional, “Lenny” appears. The phonetic overlay (lĕn) in their names could by itself spark association. The mind yields. Reflection makes a double exposure.
I rode with him in a taxi once conjures images captured in D. A. Pennebaker’s Eat the Document of Dylan and Lennon riding through London in a black cab. (Strung out and “sick of people thinking ‘What does that mean?’”, Dylan screamed at Royal Albert Hall attendees that night, “Read J.D. Salinger!”). I don’t know if he ever really rode with Bruce but his London sidekick’s kinship with the comedian is plain. Lennon’s recent remarks that The Beatles are “more popular than Jesus,” and his rarely quoted elaboration that “Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary,” might have been made by Lenny Bruce. The litany of ruses, politicians, felled idols and colossal disappointments at the core of Lennon’s “God” would have suited Bruce too. Both took a fiend-like glee in exposing hypocrites and toppling idols, even, perhaps especially, those hardest to shake for being held so close; as if another renunciation would not only heal some social ill but correct a devastating personal flaw.
He fought a war on a battlefield where every victory hurts.
Before he was hamstrung by the bureaucratic tangle of his immigration proceedings at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Lennon believed he could exploit commercial music to bolster the underdog (“Woman is the N***** of the World” in his mind being as viable a single as “All You Need is Love”). The extent to which his immigration trials, in the narrowest and broadest sense of “trials,” including the FBI’s surveillance, stifled and gagged him we will never know. Friends might have pointed to Lenny Bruce and issued a word of caution.
The trials of Lennon and the trials of Bruce were, of course, very different. For one, Bruce was hounded under the cover of a public mandate. But we might consider whether those who went to work on Lennon behind the scenes were any less malevolent and vindictive. Against the bureaucratic apparatus is the ego that wants to triumph, or that simply wants not to be cut down to size—or just plain cut down. The sooner you go, the quicker you’ll be back; you been cooped up on that island far too long, a warning in retrospect to flee ahead of the ambush.
Bloody murder transformed Lennon into the eternal househusband (a transformation that conveyed him a bit too smoothly to the “family values” ranks. At last, he was made good. And found happiness here, in America). Lennon sat for days and years in the Dakota, not a captive exactly, just waiting. Having extricated his self from the game—“Now it’s my turn to watch the river flow”—, he seemed to have lost the strength to fight. His September 5, 1979 audio diary finds him “age thirty-nine, looking out my hotel window, wondering whether to jump out or get back in bed.” (Lennon is paraphrasing Yoko Ono’s “Looking Over from My Hotel Window” from Approximately Infinite Universe). Whether or not he was in fact suicidal, his testimony contradicts the tale of the happy househusband. Far from finally happy or at peace, Lennon’s unfiltered ramblings reveal a man thrown back on his self, fighting hard with few defenses; a reminder that every successful expressive act is as much a victory over forces at play within as forces at play upon.
If not written about John Lennon, “Lenny Bruce” is decidedly, dedicatedly, for him. Lennon is that you, the lone (and lonely) outlaw whom Dylan pointedly addresses in the opening verse, and to whom, in the compassionate finale, he speaks once more, Lenny Bruce was bad. He was the brother that you never had.
Mason James has wasted a great many hours lamenting his genealogical proximity to Frank and Jesse James, and his seemingly infinite distance, in all respects, from William and Henry.
