by Jeff Burger
PLAYBOY: Are you concerned, as you approach 30, that you may begin to “go square,” lose some of your openness to experience, become leery of change and new experiment?
DYLAN: No. But if it happens, then it happens. What can I say? There doesn’t seem to be any tomorrow. Every time I wake up, no matter in what position, it’s always been today. To look ahead and start worrying about trivial little things I can’t really say has any more importance than looking back and remembering trivial little things. I’m not going to become any poetry instructor at any girls’ school; I know that for sure. But that’s about all I know for sure. I’ll just keep doing these different things, I guess.
PLAYBOY: Such as?
DYLAN: Waking up in different positions.
PLAYBOY: What else?
DYLAN: I’m just like anybody else; I’ll try anything once.
PLAYBOY: Including theft and murder?
DYLAN: I can’t really say I wouldn’t commit theft or murder and expect anybody to really believe me. I wouldn’t believe anybody if they told me that.
PLAYBOY: By their mid-20s, most people have begun to settle into their niche, to find a place in society. But you’ve managed to remain inner-directed and uncommitted. What was it that spurred you to run away from home six times between the ages of ten and eighteen and finally to leave for good?
DYLAN: It was nothing; it was just an accident of geography. Like if I was born and raised in New York or Kansas City, I’m sure everything would have turned out different. But Hibbing, Minnesota, was just not the right place for me to stay and live. There really was nothing there. The only thing you could do there was be a miner, and even that kind of thing was getting less and less. The people that lived there—they’re nice people; I’ve been all over the world since I left there, and they still stand out as being the least hung-up. The mines were just dying, that’s all; but that’s not their fault. Everybody about my age left there. It was no great romantic thing. It didn’t take any great amount of thinking or individual genius, and there certainly wasn’t any pride in it. I didn’t run away from it; I just turned my back on it. It couldn’t give me anything. It was very void-like. So leaving wasn’t hard at all; it would have been much harder to stay. I didn’t want to die there. As I think about it now, though, it wouldn’t be such a bad place to go back to and die in. There’s no place I feel closer to now, or get the feeling that I’m part of, except maybe New York; but I’m not a New Yorker. I’m North Dakota-Minnesota-Midwestern. I’m that color. I speak that way. I’m from someplace called Iron Range. My brains and feeling have come from there. I wouldn’t amputate on a drowning man; nobody from out there would.
PLAYBOY: Today, you’re on your way to becoming a millionaire. Do you feel in any danger of being trapped by all this affluence—by the things it can buy?
DYLAN: No, my world is very small. Money can’t really improve it any; money can just keep it from being smothered.
PLAYBOY: Most big stars find it difficult to avoid getting involved, and sometimes entangled, in managing the business end of their careers. As a man with three thriving careers—as a concert performer, recording star and songwriter—do you ever feel boxed in by such noncreative responsibilities?
DYLAN: No, I’ve got other people to do that for me. They watch my money; they guard it. They keep their eyes on it at all times; they’re supposed to be very smart when it comes to money. They know just what to do with my money. I pay them a lot of it. I don’t really speak to them much, and they don’t really speak to me at all, so I guess everything is all right.
PLAYBOY: If fortune hasn’t trapped you, how about fame? Do you find that your celebrity makes it difficult to keep your private life intact?
DYLAN: My private life has been dangerous from the beginning. All this does is add a little atmosphere.
PLAYBOY: You used to enjoy wandering across the country—taking off on open-end trips, roughing it from town to town, with no particular destination in mind. But you seem to be doing much less of that these days. Why? Is it because you’re too well known?
DYLAN: It’s mainly because I have to be in Cincinnati Friday night, and the next night I got to be in Atlanta, and then the next night after that, I have to be in Buffalo. Then I have to write some more songs for a record album.
PLAYBOY: Do you get the chance to ride your motorcycle much anymore?
DYLAN: I’m still very patriotic to the highway, but I don’t ride my motorcycle too much anymore, no.
PLAYBOY: How do you get your kicks these days, then?
DYLAN: I hire people to look into my eyes, and then I have them kick me.
PLAYBOY: And that’s the way you get your kicks?
DYLAN: No. Then I forgive them; that’s where my kicks come in.
PLAYBOY: You told an interviewer last year, “I’ve done everything I ever wanted to.” If that’s true, what do you have to look forward to?
DYLAN: Salvation. Just plain salvation.
PLAYBOY: Anything else?
DYLAN: Praying. I’d also like to start a cookbook magazine. And I’ve always wanted to be a boxing referee. I want to referee a heavyweight championship fight. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine any fighter in his right mind recognizing me?
PLAYBOY: If your popularity were to wane, would you welcome being anonymous again?
DYLAN: You mean welcome it, like I’d welcome some poor pilgrim coming in from the rain? No, I wouldn’t welcome it; I’d accept it, though. Someday, obviously, I’m going to have to accept it.
PLAYBOY: Do you ever think about marrying, settling down, having a home, maybe living abroad? Are there any luxuries you’d like to have, say, a yacht or a Rolls-Royce?
DYLAN: No, I don’t think about those things. If I felt like buying anything, I’d buy it. What you’re asking me about is the future, my future. I’m the last person in the world to ask about my future.
PLAYBOY: Are you saying you’re going to be passive and just let things happen to you?
DYLAN: Well, that’s being very philosophical about it, but I guess it’s true.
PLAYBOY: You once planned to write a novel. Do you still?
DYLAN: I don’t think so. All my writing goes into the songs now. Other forms don’t interest me anymore.
PLAYBOY: Do you have any unfulfilled ambitions?
DYLAN: Well, I guess I’ve always wanted to be Anthony Quinn in “La Strada.” Not always—only for about six years now; it’s not one of those childhood-dream things. Oh, and come to think of it, I guess I’ve always wanted to be Brigitte Bardot, too; but I don’t really want to think about that too much.
PLAYBOY: Did you ever have the standard boyhood dream of growing up to be President?
DYLAN: No. When I was a boy, Harry Truman was President; who’d want to be Harry Truman?
PLAYBOY: Well, let’s suppose that you were the President. What would you accomplish during your first thousand days?
DYLAN: Well, just for laughs, so long as you insist, the first thing I’d do is probably move the White House. Instead of being in Texas, it’d be on the East Side in New York. McGeorge Bundy would definitely have to change his name, and General McNamara would be forced to wear a coonskin cap and shades. I would immediately rewrite “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and little school children, instead of memorizing “America the Beautiful,” would have to memorize “Desolation Row” [one of Dylan’s latest songs]. And I would immediately call for a showdown with Mao Tse-tung; I would fight him personally—and I’d get somebody to film it.
PLAYBOY: One final question: Even though you’ve more or less retired from political and social protest, can you conceive of any circumstance that might persuade you to reinvolve yourself?
DYLAN: No, not unless all the people in the world disappeared.
DYLAN ON
Whether “The Times They Are A-Changin’”
Concerns Generational Conflict
“That’s not what I was saying. It happened maybe that those were the only wor
ds I could find to separate aliveness from deadness. It has nothing to do with age.”
—from interview with Joseph Haas,
Chicago Daily News, November 27, 1965
PRESS CONFERENCE
December 3, 1965 | KQED-TV (San Francisco)
When Bob Dylan arrived in San Francisco for a five-concert series in December 1965, he was riding high. “Positively 4th Street,” his catchy folk-rock follow-up to “Like a Rolling Stone,” was ending a seven-week run in the Top Forty. Only a year earlier, he had been traveling on airliners with only one helper; now he flew privately and with an entourage. As for his personal life, less than two weeks earlier he had secretly married Sara Lownds, who was eight months pregnant with their first child.
Someone had suggested that Dylan hold a press conference in the studios of San Francisco public television station KQED, and he had readily agreed. In the audience for the event were poet Allen Ginsberg, rock promoter Bill Graham, and the Band’s Robbie Robertson, along with reporters from several daily newspapers, local TV news crews, and some high school papers.
Critic Ralph J. Gleason, who would go on to cofound Rolling Stone, served as MC for the event. He later reported that Dylan “sat on a raised platform facing the cameras and the reporters and answered questions over a microphone, all the while smoking cigarettes and swinging his leg back and forth.”
Many of the questions were as ridiculous as the ones aimed at the early Beatles, but Dylan seemed less annoyed than amused. He smiled and laughed often throughout the hour-long event and appeared to be having a great time toying with the reporters and their questions. —Ed.
Ralph J. Gleason: Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to welcome you to the first KQED poets’ conference—press conference. A poet who also happens to be a singer I figure you all know. . . . Mr. Dylan is a poet. He will answer questions about everything from atomic science to riddles and rhymes. Go! Who’s first? Come on.
Reporter: I’d like to know about the cover of your forthcoming album, the one with “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in it. [A reference to Bringing It All Back Home, which had actually been released the previous March. —Ed.] I’d like to know about the meaning of the photograph of you wearing the Triumph T-shirt.
Bob Dylan: What would you want to know about it?
Reporter: Well, that’s an equivalent photograph. It means something. It’s got a philosophy in it. I’d like to know visually what it represents to you, because you’re a part of that.
Dylan: I haven’t really looked at it that much.
Reporter: I’ve thought about it a great deal.
Dylan: It was just taken one day when I was sitting on the steps. I don’t really remember too much about it.
Reporter: Well, what about the motorcycle as an image in your songwriting? You seem to like that.
Dylan: Oh, we all like motorcycles to some degree.
Reporter: Do you think of yourself primarily as a singer or as a poet?
Dylan: Oh, I think of myself more as a song-and-dance man.
[Laughter.]
Reporter: Why?
Dylan: Oh, I don’t think we have enough time to really go into that.
Reporter: You were quoted in the Chicago Daily News as saying that when you’re really wasted you may enter into another field. How “wasted” is really wasted and do you foresee it?
Dylan: No, I don’t foresee it, but it’s more or less like a ruthless type of feeling. Very ruthless and intoxicated to some degree.
Reporter: The criticism that you’ve received for more or less leaving folk music for folk-rock hasn’t seemed to bother you very much. Do you think you’ll stick with folk-rock or are you going on into more writing?
Dylan: I don’t play folk-rock.
Reporter: What would you call your music?
Dylan: I like to think of it more in terms of vision music. It’s a mathematical music.
Reporter: Would you say that the words were more important than the music?
Dylan: The words are just as important as the music. There’d be no music without the words.
Reporter: Which do you do first, ordinarily?
Dylan: The words.
Reporter: Do you think there will ever be a time when you will paint or sculpt?
Dylan: Oh, yes. [Laughs.] Oh, sure.
Reporter: Do you think there will ever be a time when you’ll be hung as a thief?
[Laughter.]
Dylan: You weren’t supposed to say that. [Laughs, then requests a match and lights cigarette.]
Reporter: Bob, you said you always do your words first and you think of it as music. When you do the words, can you hear it?
Dylan: Yes. Oh, yes.
Reporter: Do you hear any music before you have words? Do you have any songs that you don’t have words to yet?
Dylan: Sometimes, on very general instruments, not on the guitar, though. Maybe something like the harpsichord or the harmonica or autoharp, I might hear some kind of melody or tune which I would know the words to put to.
Reporter: You’d save that?
Dylan: Yes. Not with the guitar, though. The guitar is too hard an instrument. I don’t really hear many melodies based on the guitar.
Reporter: Do you sit down just to write a song or do you just write them on inspiration?
Dylan: I more or less write it on a lot of things.
[Laughter.]
Reporter: What poets do you dig?
Dylan: Oh . . . [Long pause.] [Arthur] Rimbaud, I guess. W. C. Fields. The family . . . you know, the trapeze family in the circus? Smokey Robinson. Allen Ginsberg. Charlie Rich is a good poet.
Reporter: In a lot of your songs, you are hard on a lot of people. Like in “Like a Rolling Stone,” you’re pretty hard on the girl, and in “Positively 4th Street” you’re pretty hard on a supposed friend. Are you hard on them because you want to torment them or because you want to change their lives and make them millionaires?
Dylan: I want to needle them.
[Laughter.]
Reporter: Do you still sing your older songs?
Dylan: No. I just saw a songbook last night. I don’t really see too many of those things, but a lotta songs in those books I haven’t even recorded. I’ve just written down, and put little tunes to and they published them. I haven’t sung them, though. A lotta the songs I don’t even know anymore, even the ones I did sing. There doesn’t seem to be enough time.
Reporter: Did you change your program when you went to England?
Dylan: No, no, I finished it there. That was the end of my older program. I didn’t change it. It was developed, and by the time we got there, I knew what was going to happen all the time. I knew how many encores there was, which songs they were going to clap loudest and all those kind of things.
Reporter: On a concert tour like this, do you do the same program night after night?
Dylan: Oh, sometimes it’s different. I think we’ll do the same one here, though.
Reporter: Did you in England do any of the songs like “Subterranean [Homesick Blues]”?
Dylan: No, I didn’t work with a band there.
Reporter: Will you be working with a band here?
Dylan: Oh, yeah.
Reporter: In a recent Broadside interview, Phil Ochs said you should do films. Do you have any plans to do this?
Dylan: No, I don’t. I do have plans to make a film but not because anybody said I should do them.
Reporter: How soon will this be?
Dylan: Next year, probably.
Reporter: Can you tell us what it will be about?
Dylan: It’ll be just another song.
Reporter: Who are the people making films that you dig, particularly?
Dylan: [Francois] Truffaut. I really can’t think of any more people. Italian movie directors, but not too many people in England or the United States which I really think that I would dig.
Reporter: You did a [Charlie] Chaplin bit as an exit line in one of your concerts once.
[Someone hands Dylan a photograph.]
Oh, thank you very much. Was that taken right here with a Polaroid? [Looks at photo, apparently of himself.] Hmm. Good God, I must leave right away.
[Laughter.]
Reporter: What do you think of people that analyze your songs? Do they usually end up with the same meaning that you wrote or—
Dylan: I welcome them [laughter] with open arms.
Reporter: The University of California mimeographed the lyrics to all the songs from the last album and had a symposium discussing them. Do you welcome that?
Dylan: Oh, sure. I’m just kinda sad I’m not around to be a part of it but it was nice.
Reporter: It’d have been pretty wild if ya had been.
Dylan: Yeah.
Reporter: Mr. Dylan, Josh Dunson in his new book, Freedom in the Air, implies that you have sold out to commercial interests and the topical song movement. Do you have any comment, sir?
Dylan: Well, no comments, no arguments. I certainly don’t feel guilty.
Reporter: If you were going to sell out to a commercial interest, which one would you choose?
[Laughter.]
Dylan: Ladies’ garments. [Thirty-nine years later, strangely enough, Dylan wound up being accused of selling out when he appeared in an ad for Victoria’s Secret. —Ed.]
[Laughter.]
Reporter: Bob, have you worked with any rock ’n’ roll groups?
Dylan: Professionally?
Reporter: Or just sitting in or on concert tours with them or sitting in with their sessions.
Dylan: No, no. I don’t usually play too much.
Reporter: Do you listen to other people’s recordings of your songs?
Dylan: Sometimes. A few of them I’ve heard. I don’t really come across it that much, though.
