“Listening to his records…” – L’Express

In a polarized country like the United States, the music popular – pop, rock, folk, jazz, country, rap – remains the last common language of Republicans and Democrats. The White House has therefore always been interested in its stars: Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Kanye West, Taylor Swift and others. Before the election of November 5thL’Express tells you, in eight episodes, the story of the unlikely couples formed by the beasts of the music scene and the presidential political animals. Very pop’n’pol duos!

EPISODE 1 – Kennedy and Sinatra: An epic bromance, a shattering breakup

EPISODE 2 – Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon: This crazy interview between the “King” and the president

There was a time, well before the “Never Ending Tour”, when Bob Dylan no longer gave concerts. Too much hysteria around his performances, his songs, his person, the myth that he embodied in the eyes of young people – a prophet of the counterculture – all this exasperated him. His North American tour in early 1974, after eight years away from the stage, aroused considerable enthusiasm among his many admirers. Among them were three young men and their father, a 49-year-old peanut farmer convinced that he could become the next president of the United States, Jimmy Carter.

For now, he is governor of Georgia. And on January 21, after the first of two concerts scheduled in his city of Atlanta, which he attended with his family, he received in his residence, during a party, Dylan and his musicians of the time, the group The Band. “My three sons were dying to meet him,” Carter says in a 2020 film, Jimmy Carter, the rock’n’roll president. It was through them that he discovered Dylan, whose songs he also plays on repeat. “When I met Jimmy, he quoted my lyrics to me,” the singer says in the documentary. “He knew how to put me at ease and showed a sincere love for what I had done.”

Between the democrat and the committed singer, the exchange will not stop. “The evening of his arrival, we had the opportunity to talk about his music, the changing times [une référence au morceau The Times They Are a-Changin’] and the repressed emotions of young people,” the future president explained to the magazine Playboy in 1976. Overcoming his shyness, Dylan also asked to have “a private conversation,” reported four decades later by Carter: “He asked me about my Christian faith and its principles.” Was the artist already thinking about converting to evangelicalism, his host’s religion? This would happen in 1979.

Many American presidents have had relationships with musicians. None can claim, like Jimmy Carter – now 99 years old and in palliative care for a year and a half –, to have gotten along so well with so many of them, including that living rock ‘n’ roll legend, Bob Dylan, whom he describes as “one of [ses] best friends.” Carter publicly claimed the singer’s influence, just three months after their first meeting, during a speech at the University of Georgia in front of lawyers and judges: “The other source of my understanding [après le théologien Reinhold Niebuhr] of what is right and wrong in this society is a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan. Listening to his records […]I learned to appreciate the dynamics of change in a modern society.”

“What the hell did I just hear?”

Then he explains, still during the same speech, that he never “realized the relationship that exists between the landowner and those who work on a farm” better than by listening to the song. Maggie’s Farm. In the audience, a reporter from the magazine Rolling Stonewho is accompanying Ted Kennedy – brother of the late John and Robert Kennedy –, can’t believe that a politician of this rank would take Dylan as a reference. “What the hell did I just hear?” sighs Hunter Thompson – pope of gonzo journalism and author of Las Vegas Fear and Loathing – in the article he devotes to candidate Carter, Jimmy Carter and the Great Act of Faith (included in the collection Last Tango in Las VegasEd. Tristram). A few lines later, the journalist adds: “I then decided that Jimmy Carter interested me.”

This infatuation with Carter also inspired Gregg Allman, the leader of the group The Allman Brothers Band, very popular at that time. He arrived late to the party given after Dylan’s concert and addressed “a guy on the porch of the residence in old jeans with holes in them, no shirt”. It was Carter himself, who had taken off his evening wear. Another rocker’s crush: “He was cool, he liked our music, he was authentic, we became friends”, recounted the singer and guitarist living in Georgia and originally, like Carter, from the Deep South.

This connection quickly took a political turn. As governor, Jimmy Carter (1971-1974) succeeded Lester Maddox, a defender of segregation who boasted of chasing blacks with a pickaxe handle. Carter embodied a “new South”, with room for whites and blacks, whose music he appreciated. This was particularly the case for gospel, discovered in African-American churches, whose religious fervor he loved because it resonated with him. Born in a county where the descendants of slaves were in the majority, but in a state where they suffered from racism, the Southerner projected an image of openness and integrity that struck a chord with progressives and beyond, after the lies of the Richard Nixon years.

Carter opens White House to musicians

Determined to support him, the Allman Brothers and other groups took to the stage to fund Carter’s campaign and make him known. “The kids thought, ‘If the Allman Brothers like Carter, we can vote for him,'” Carter jokes in the film about the saga. It worked so well that one of his opponents in the Democratic primary, Jerry Brown, also put on fundraising concerts with the Eagles – but without their megahit. Hotel Californiareleased in 1977. It was a waste of time, Carter won. During his inauguration by the party, he again quoted the author of the brilliant album Bringing It All Back Home : “Our America is, in the words of Bob Dylan, busy being born, not dying.”

In keeping with his campaign, Carter threw open the White House to musicians. The Crosby, Stills and Nash trio was welcomed there at the drop of a hat, as were tenor Luciano Pavarotti and Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash and June Carter, who came to lunch. Bluesman Muddy Waters gave a concert there, as did jazzman Dizzy Gillespie and pianist Vladimir Horowitz. Although he never played music, Carter loved music. “He became passionate about classical music as a child,” recalls Jonathan Alter, author of a biography, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life. At the Naval Academy, he had a record player. He started an eclectic record collection, because he likes all genres.”

Bob Dylan, however, never came to visit him at the White House, unlike country singer Willie Nelson, whom Carter considered his other great friend – the latter even smoked a joint there, in the company of the president’s son, Chip. This cultural openness did not benefit Carter, defeated at the end of his only term by the Republican Ronald Reagan, in a gloomy economic and international context, with the overthrow, in Iran, of the Shah, whose regime was held at arm’s length by Washington. “The operation to rescue the hostages from the United States embassy in Tehran turned into a fiasco, Carter’s image will never recover,” recalls historian Françoise Coste. Carter’s America, that of the 1970s, with the defeat in Vietnam and inflation, was considered that of the loose.”

It was not until the turn of the millennium that Jimmy Carter was rehabilitated. His constant commitment to peace and charitable causes, through the foundation that bears his name, earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Here again, he could count on a rocker friend, Willie Nelson, for the gala organized in Oslo, the Norwegian capital. In a singular echo of their friendship, Bob Dylan would also be awarded a Nobel Prize, but this time for literature, fourteen years later.