The Erosion of Parental Authority
By Gene Aronowitz
Composing and recording songs can be a deeply personal process during which artists explore and express their emotions, experiences, and thoughts. As a man in my twenties and immersed in the Greenwich scene, I wondered what was in Bob Dylan’s mind when he composed “The Times, They Are A-Changin’”.
The song was written in 1962, and the recording was released in 1964, when I was 27 years old. I spent a considerable amount of time in New York City’s Greenwich Village from 1960 to 1962, when I attended NYU to earn my master’s degree in social work. There, I personally experienced the craze for topical folk songs. I spent a couple of nights a month at Gerde’s Folk City, a significant musical venue on West 4th Street in the Village, which helped launch Bob Dylan’s career. He gave his first professional performance there in 1961.
I have given “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” much consideration. I don’t know if Dylan was characterizing the times or influencing them, but the fourth stanza of that song struck me as troubling. If it did influence the young people in the 1960s, I think it may have been destructive. The fourth stanza said that parents should recognize their children were no longer under their control, and that if they didn’t understand what their children were doing, they should not criticize them. Further, if they were not going to help their children, they should just get out of the way.
That’s not how my contemporaries and I were raised. I was an adolescent in the late 1950s. The period that followed World War II was marked by economic prosperity. It underwent cultural shifts during the last half of that decade, primarily due to the prominence of the beatnik subculture, which peaked in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The beatniks and Bob Dylan were reacting, in part, to the sometimes stultifying emphasis on social conformity in the 1950s, when parental control was significant. There had been an emphasis on social etiquette and conformity. The kids, like it or not, followed societal expectations and avoided controversial issues. I don’t know whether Dylan saw parental influence eroding in the 1960s and wrote that stanza about it, or whether he was advising his many followers to disregard their parents. If he was, in fact, suggesting a change of lifestyle, and if those who loved his music bought into it, the stanza may have had some serious consequences. I don’t mean to imply that an entire generation was significantly influenced by the fourth stanza in their behavior, but it’s possible that the loudest voices and activist leadership were. Nevertheless, it is well known that a common belief among young people back then was to distrust anyone over 30.
Because of my upbringing in the 50s, it would have been extremely unlikely for me even to contemplate doing something like storming the United States Capitol with destructive and even lethal weapons. Neither my mother nor my father would have approved.
A version of this memoir is included in the book 23 More Memoirs.