Thanks Gabi
Among his tales of police brutality and revolutionary fervour, Seale inserted a chapter entitled ‘Huey Digs Bob Dylan’. The setting is the home of radical lawyer Beverly Axelrod in 1966: Newton and Seale are laying up the pages for the first issue of their party newspaper, cunningly titled The Black Panther. ‘While we were laying that paper out, in the background we could hear a record, and the song was named “Ballad of a Thin Man” by Bob Dylan. Now the melody was in my head... but I didn’t really hear the words. This record played after we stayed up laying out the paper. And it played the next night after we stayed up laying out the paper. I think it was around the third afternoon that the record was playing. We played that record over and over and over.
‘Huey P. Newton made me recognize the lyrics. Not only the lyrics of the record, but what the lyrics meant in the record. What the lyrics meant in the history of racism that had perpetuated itself in the world. Huey would say: “Listen, listen – man, do you hear what he is saying?” Huey had such insight into how racism existed, how racism had perpetuated himself. He had such a way of putting forth in very clear words what he related directly to those symbolic things or words that were coming out from Bobby Dylan. ‘I remember that the song got to the point where he was talking about this cat handing in his ticket and he walked up to the geek, and the geek handed him a bone. Well, this didn’t relate to me, so I said: “Huey, look, wait a minute, man”. I said, “What are you talking about a geek? What is a geek? What the hell is a geek?” And Huey explains it.’
Newton’s explanation runs for almost a page: ‘“a geek”, he tells Seale, “is usually a circus performer”, who has been badly injured and can’t work any longer. But he knows no other life than the circus, so he agrees to do the lowliest jobs just to stay in the community. Maybe he even agrees to eat live chickens in a cage as a freak attraction.’ Newton continues: ‘These people who are coming in to see him are coming in for entertainment, so they are the real freaks. And the geek knows this, so during his performance, he eats the raw chicken and he hands one of the members of the audience a bone. ‘Then to put it on the broader level, what Dylan is putting across is middle-class people or upper-class people who sometimes take a Sunday afternoon off and put their whole family into a limousine, and they go down to the black ghettos to watch the prostitutes and watch the decaying community.(...) That makes the middle-class and upper-class people, who are down there because they get pleasure out of it, freaks.
And this goes into the one-eyed midget. What is the one-eyed midget? He screams and howls at Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones doesn’t know what’s happening. Then the one-eyed midget says, give me some juice or go home. And this again is very symbolic of people who are disadvantaged. They’re patronizing Mr. Jones, the middle-class people. You know, they’re not interested in them coming down for entertainment. But if they’ll pay them for a trick, then they’ll tolerate them, or else they’ll drive them out of the ghettoes. This song is hell. You’ve got to understand that this song is saying a hell of a lot about society.’
Seale digests this explanation, and notes: ‘Bobby Dylan says, you don’t know what’s happening, do you, Mr. Jones? And to hand him the naked bone was too much – was really too much.’
An insignificant if amusing interlude, you might think, suggesting that Huey P. Newton missed his vocation as a literary critic. But as Seale explains later in the chapter, ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ came to occupy a key place in the imaginative landscape of the Panthers: ‘This song Bobby Dylan was singing became a very big part of that whole publishing operation of the Black Panther paper. And in the background, while we were putting this paper out, this record came up and I guess a number of papers were published, and many times we would play that record. Brother Stokely Carmichael also liked that record. This record became so related to us, even to the brothers who had held down most of the security for the set.
http://www.judasmagazine.com/pages.asp/peterdoggettj1.asp