Bob Dylan on Lenny Bruce: more of an outlaw than you ever were.

• Author: Harmon, Louise
• Position: Bob Dylan and the Law

This Essay seeks to compare and contrast two contemporary performing artists: Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce. An Essay that "compares and contrasts" is a traditional academic exercise. The genre may seem artificial, even corny, because it arbitrarily takes two subjects and analyzes how they are the same and how they are different. The exercise always yields insights about both, however. For me, comparing and contrasting still has value as a heuristic device. It is also the basis of metaphor.

To be "contemporaries" means to be two individuals who are, or were, coexistent in time. (1) Contemporaries in any given culture, depending upon their geographic location and choice of parents, share common history and social, economic, and political conditions. Bruce and Dylan both became artists in the middle of twentieth-century America--in the same stew of ideas, myths, and shared assumptions. Both experienced the same winds of change, albeit at different stages of life, in the 1950s and 1960s, the post-World War II Cold War period, the burgeoning civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. Both responded to these winds of change, and in so doing, transcended and transformed their respective art forms. Both became cultural icons: Bruce as a fierce warrior against governmental censorship, and Dylan as a symbol of all the myriad meanings that have been laid upon him--the gravely-voiced folksinger, the artist as protestor against war and injustice, the rock-and-roll poet, and the hoary prophet on the road, peddling his songs and his wisdom.

Almost a generation apart, both Dylan and Bruce were born of Jewish families; both changed their last names, perhaps to make them more palatable to the mainstream. (2) Leonard Schneider was born on Long Island in 1926; the comedian Lenny Bruce died at his home in Hollywood Hills in 1966 from an overdose of morphine. (3) Robert Zimmerman was born in Minnesota in 1941; (4) the musician and songwriter, Bob Dylan, at the time of this writing, is about to celebrate his seventieth birthday. Their arrival on the planet's surface was staggered. The month before Bruce's death, Bob Dylan had wrecked his Triumph 500 motorcycle in Woodstock, New York, suffering a mysterious trauma to his body and spirit that caused him to go underground for a long time. (5) Dylan was twenty-five years old at the time of that accident; it was the same summer that Bruce died at age forty.

Lenny Bruce began his career as a stand-up comic. Stand-up comedy derived from various popular modes of entertainment of the late nineteenth-century, such as vaudeville, music halls, minstrel shows, humorous monologists (e.g., Mark Twain), and even the antics of a circus clown. (6) Comedians of this earlier era often assumed an ethnic persona and drew on popular stereotypes. The early stand-up comics all started out in vaudeville: Jack Benny, Frank Fay, Bob Hope, Fred Allen, and Milton Berle. (7) They stepped out alone onto the stage, often in front of the curtain, and spoke directly to a live audience. (8) Bruce started out in this vaudevillian tradition--one that his mother had belonged to as a stage performer. (9) In the late 1940s, Bruce's act was "hokey. He was a living black-and-white Brylecreem ad: greased-down hair, bow-tie, wide lapels. His movements only slightly exaggerated the stock-in-trade gestures of comic impersonators .... For the most part, Lenny echoed his burlesque-comedian mother's routine." (10)

But Bruce was a lover of jazz, and of the lives that jazz musicians led. (11) He began to take on the trappings of the beat generation, using drugs, wearing casual clothes and dark glasses on stage, and becoming radically anti-establishment. (12) From the jazz scene, Bruce borrowed the notion of spontaneous rifling, sometimes taking himself by surprise on stage by his free association of ideas. (13) By the 1950s, Bruce's work had taken an edgier, confrontational, political, irreverent, and for some, vulgar, turn. In his own words, Bruce was "'chang[ing] the architecture' of comedy in America," claiming that "my humor is mostly indictment." (14)

That was an understatement. The scope of his indictment was broad. Bruce took on institutionalized religion, race relations, homophobia, violence, social conventions of speech, and almost any form of hypocrisy. Audiences flocked to hear him violate social taboos, and he delighted in using words that shocked and disturbed his audiences. "Are there any niggers here tonight?" he would growl at his audience who sat stunned, uncomfortable in shocked silence. (15) But Bruce was always intentional; he wanted to say the "N" word out in the open. Bruce claimed, "It's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness." (16)

Lenny Bruce was first arrested for obscenity for using the word "cocksucker," and for playing with the concept of "'to' is a preposition, and 'come' is a verb" during a stand-up performance at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco in 1961. (17) A jury acquitted him, but the case put Bruce on the radar of various law enforcement officials who began to monitor his appearances closely, resulting in frequent arrests on charges of obscenity. (18) In April 1964, Lenny Bruce played the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village twice. A phalanx of undercover cops lined the wall of the room, waiting for Bruce to utter an obscenity. Both times, Bruce was arrested as soon as he left the stage, and he and the club owner, Howard Solomon, were prosecuted in a widely publicized six-month trial, presided over by a three-judge panel. Despite testimony in support of Bruce and the social value of his free-wheeling stand-up style, as well as petitions of support from luminaries such as Woody Allen, Jules Feiffer, Allen Ginsberg, Normal Mailer, William Styron, James Baldwin, sociologist Herbert Gans, and a young folksinger named Bob Dylan, both Solomon and Bruce were convicted. (19) Lenny Bruce was sentenced to four months in the workhouse on Rikers Island for his crime and was set free on bail during the appeal process.

Bruce was in dire straits by then. He was bankrupt from mounting legal fees, and his prosecution had made it virtually impossible for him to get work. (20) On the day that he got the news that he had lost his Hollywood Hills home, Lenny Bruce died of a morphine overdose. The appeal of his conviction was never completed, although thirty-nine years later, Governor Pataki granted the state's first posthumous pardon of a criminal defendant, as a "declaration of New York's commitment to upholding the First Amendment." (21) Depending on one's metaphysical views, Pataki's pardon came too late for Bruce to have derived any satisfaction from it. But it was important to Bruce's family that his name be cleared, and more importantly, the pardon sent a message that Bruce's work had value, that the comic had not been "sick," only the society that had prosecuted him. (22) It was an unprecedented gesture that perhaps, in retrospect, the State of New York had been mistaken--that Lenny Bruce had indeed been a martyr for freedom of expression.

Just as Lenny Bruce had started his performing career fitting squarely within a traditional category, so had Dylan first walked on the stage as a recognizable and predictable prototype--the denim-clad, suede-jacketed acoustic guitar-playing folk singer. Dylan dropped out of the University of Minnesota to come to New York to become part of the folk scene and to sit vigil by the bedside of his idol, Woody Guthrie. He slid right into the groove of folksinger, becoming a regular in the coffee houses and folk venues of Greenwich Village. For many years, the folk genre permeated his work. The music of Masters of War was appropriated from a traditional English folk song. His first album had only two original songs on it--the rest being covers from the folk and blues repertoire. His album The Free Wheelin' Bob Dylan had only two "folk" songs penned by Dylan. (23) The first is Blowin'in the Wind, a melody based on a spiritual. (24) And second was A Hard Rain is Gonna Fall, (25) a ballad that was "cribbed heavily" from Lord Randall, a song that "some speculate was written about the sixth Earl of Chester, who died in 1232." (26)

Like Lenny Bruce, Dylan broke out of the mold of the traditional category in which he first emerged. The moment in July 1965 when Bob Dylan plugged in his guitar at the Newport Folk Festival and was booed by those who had sworn fealty to "traditional" folk music, marked his departure into unchartered territories. (27) The albums that followed in the middle 1960s, Highway 61 Revisited (28) and Blonde on Blonde, (29) were an amalgam of poetry, music, narratives, anger, pulsing energy, and beauty--and I believe, some of Dylan's most enduring works. But just as no one knew how to classify Lenny Bruce's scathing monologues, many in the 1960s were stopped dead in their tracks trying to categorize the new work of Bob Dylan. For me...