To Live Outside the Law You Must Be Honest: Rebellion, Music And Personal Truth

Sometimes I Wonder If Everyone Is As Transgressive As I Am

Genet died in 1986

I wasn’t really a Bob Dylan early adapter. I missed the 1962 eponymous debut entirely. I had just turned 14 the month before. Nor did I pick up on Freewheelin’ a year later, although it later became a staple in my college years. By the time The Times They Are A-Changin’ came out I was in my junior year in high school. I had already made my big hitchhiking trip to the West Coast and experienced something in life different than my sheltered childhood. The title track, “With God on Our Side” and “The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll,” got me thinking this guy might be better than The Beatles or Stones. By the time Another Side and especially Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited in 1964 and 1965 (my freshman year at Stony Brook) I no longer had any doubt. And then Blonde on Blonde blew my mind entirely. The most brilliant album ever made? I loved every song. I had already been taking acid to listen to his music when the albums were released. My friend Harold and I split an acid tab to listen to Blonde on Blonde one night. For me it was another great trip. For Harold… he never came back. After that, he thought every Dylan song was written directly to him and thought I was an idiot for not understanding that. 

I knew every song from the 4 sides. I still do. I didn’t like “Absolutely, Sweet Marie” any more than any of the others. I loved it… like all the songs on that album. And— like his songs did to Harold— it spoke to me.

Well, six white horses that you did promise

Were finally delivered down to the penitentiary

But to live outside the law, you must be honest

I know you always say that you agree

Alright, so where are you tonight, Sweet Marie?

“To live outside the law, you must be honest…” right up my alley.

They say Dylan picked it up from Stirling Silliphant’s 1958 film The Lineup: “When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” Set in San Francisco, the brutal, police-oriented film noir could well have been impacted by the relatively new Thief’s Journal, the first book by Jean Genet to be published (if Silliphant read books in French; it wasn’t translated and released in English until 1964). I’m certain David Bowie, Morrissey, John Cale and Patti Smith were not the only artists profoundly influenced by The Thief’s Journal.

Patti wrote it was Genet’s “most exquisite piece of autobiographical fiction. He is the transparent observer reclaiming the suffering and exhilaration of his own follies, trials, and evolution. There are no masks; there are veils. He does not retreat; he extracts the noble of the ignoble. The sullied thug advances into the night as a coquette in tattered tulle sewn with scattered spangles, bits of tin caught in the lamplight transposing as glittering stars. The conversion of these rags, emblematic of the interior brightening his chronicles, generates not through facts but a luxurious truth. For within his poetic form of memoir, facts are not necessary, as they shift through a shifting perspective.” Long before I worked in the music business, Genet was one of my favorite writers and The Thief’s Journal, a book I read and reread. 

When I was hired to run Reprise Records, the first thing I did on the first day was to find an old tape of “Piss Factory” that had been financed by Seymour Stein but never released by Sire and not available digitally. I immediately set the digital release in motion… which, technically, might have been living outside the law— or at least stretching it. I didn’t care and no one ever called me out for it. One for Team Genet!

I was immediately drawn to Morrissey whose band, The Smiths, had been signed to Sire. I befriended him, at least in part because he expressed admiration for how Genet depicted alienation and outsider status. I totally shared Morrissey’s fascination with the rebellious spirit and romanticization of the outlaw at the heart of Genet’s work.

Like Genet’s writing, Dylan’s “Sweet Marie” implies that living outside conventional laws requires a personal code of integrity to avoid the chaos of dishonesty. Genet exploration of criminality and marginalization— portraying outsiders who maintain their own ethical systems even while violating societal norms— attracted me as I grappled with my own homosexuality, which I saw as much as rebellion as sexual expression per se, especially in the years when I was still, in effect, bisexual. It was a lot harder for Genet in the 1930s than for me in the 1960s. 

In The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet explores the idea of living outside societal norms and laws through the lens of his own experiences as a thief and a homosexual in 1930s Europe. Genet's work delves into the contradictions of crime, morality, and identity, where traditional concepts of good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, are constantly challenged.

When Dylan sang “To live outside the law you must be honest” he was pointing towards a tension that Genet builds his narrative around: the need for a personal code in a world that the law excludes you from. For Genet, those who live on the margins— thieves, outlaws, and social and sexual deviants— are not bound by societal laws, but they construct a strict personal ethic. It’s an ethic not really aligned with conventional morality but a form of dignity and likely necessary for survival. In The Thief's Journal, crime is an existential act, imbued with a sense of beauty and rebellion, where theft and deception paradoxically require a form of honesty and self-awareness.

Genet’s thieves operate in a world that forces them to define their own sense of loyalty and integrity—qualities that make their dishonesty toward society not hypocritical but rather an honest rejection of that society’s imposed values. There’s a sharp distinction between living dishonestly in a corrupt society and being dishonest in a personal sense. I imagine Genet sees himself finding beauty in his acts of crime and transgression— within a world of thieves and criminals, with its unspoken code that includes the necessity to maintain loyalty and authenticity in one's actions, which is a different kind of “honesty.” Dylan suggests that being outside the law doesn’t mean a free-for-all of immoral behavior, but instead, a different moral plane where we have to be more principled in order to function. In Genet’s world, this kind of honesty is not about truth-telling or following society’s rules, but about being true to oneself and to the roles one plays in defying the law, unable to afford the luxury of deception or self-delusion. In The Thief’s Journal, crime becomes not just an act of rebellion but a form of art that requires a higher sense of personal integrity: living outside the law demands a radical form of honesty, not to society but to oneself.

I’ve written about the book before and there’s no need to repeat myself except to say that mostly I was attracted to the book because of his rebellion against conventional norms and Genet’s sense of alienation— “and what 15 year old studying for his SATs wouldn’t get hung up in that kind of challenge to conventional morality of a young man seeking liberation through transgressive experiences?… [M]onotony, conformity, mundanity, chains of judgment… that was never going to be for me. Putting myself through college as a drug dealer and dodging the police had more appeal. Traveling through Europe and Asia as a smuggler made more sense than going to grad school. Once I left I had forsaken America and was a European, I loved driving to Paris in my VW van to walk the city’s streets like Genet’s anti-hero, defying norms, crossing boundaries without end, claiming first Amsterdam, then Paris, then London and Berlin as my kingdom, my dearest friend… the beat of the night, Jack Kerouac's restless spirit vagabond soul, roaming the open road, tasting freedom of misfits, dreamers, those who dare roam, creating our own reality.