by Jeff Burger
J: It’s become a way of imparting information. Like someone will come with an idea, a whole thesis, and then they’ll ask, “Is this so?” and you might not have thought of it before, but you can crawl on top of it.
B: It’s this question and answer business. I can’t see the importance of it. There’s so many reporters now. That’s an occupation in itself. You don’t have to be any good at it at all. You get to go to fancy places. It’s all on somebody else.
J: Ridiculous questions get ridiculous answers, and the ridiculous response becomes the great moment.
B: Yes, well you have to be able to do that now. I don’t know who started that, but it happens to everybody.
J: I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but to me, you’ve moved away from it . . . gotten beyond it.
B: I don’t know if I’ve gotten beyond it. I just don’t do it anymore, because that’s what you end up doing. You end up wondering what you’re doing.
J: Hey. In the film, was that John Lennon with you in the car, where you’re holding your head? He was saying something funny, but it was more than that . . . it was thoughtful.
B: He said “Money.” . . .
J: Do you see the Beatles when you go there or they come here? There seems to be a mutual respect between your musics—without one dominating the other.
D: I see them here and there.
J: I fear that many of the creative young musicians today may look back at themselves ten years from now and say “We were just under the tent of the Beatles.” But you’re not.
B: Well, what they do . . . they work much more with the studio equipment, they take advantage of the new sound inventions of the past year or two. Whereas I don’t know anything about it. I just do the songs, and sing them and that’s all.
J: Do you think they are more British or International?
B: They’re British, I suppose, but you can’t say they’ve carried on with their poetic legacy, whereas the Incredible String Band who wrote this “October Song” . . . that was quite good.
J: As a finished thing—or did it reach you?
B: As a finished song it’s quite good.
J: Is there much music now that you hear, that reaches you?
B: Those old songs reach me. I don’t hear them as often as I used to. But like this other week, I heard on the radio Buell Kazee and he reached me. There’s a lot. . . Scrapper Blackwell, Leroy Carr, Jack Dupree, Lonnie Johnson, James Ferris, Jelly Roll Morton, Buddy Bolden, Ian and Sylvia, Benny Fergusen, Tom Rush, Charlie Pride, Porter Wagoner, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. . . . Everything reaches me in one way or another.
J: How do you view the music business?
B: I don’t exactly view it at all. Hearing it and doing it, I’ll take part in that—but talking about it . . . there’s not much I can contribute to it.
J: I recall in Billboard, a full-page ad of you with electric guitar like in the movie. . . .
B: Sure, I was doing that.
J: I’m interested how you talk of it in the past tense, as if you don’t know what’s coming next.
B: Well, I don’t in a sense . . . But I’ve been toying with some ridiculous ideas—just so strange and foreign to me, as a month ago. Now some of the ideas—I’ll tell you about them—after we shut off this tape recorder.
* * *
J: I was pleased that you know the music of Dillard Chandler, and that you were familiar with some unaccompanied ballads on a New Lost City Ramblers record. Do you think you’ll ever try to write like a ballad?
B: Yes, I hope so. Tom Paxton just did one called “The Cardinal,” quite interesting . . . it’s very clean . . . sings it unaccompanied. The thing about the ballad is that you have to be conscious of the width of it at all times, in order to write one. You could take a true story, write it up as a ballad, or you can write it up in three verses. The difference would be, what are you singing it for, what is it to be used for. The uses of a ballad have changed to such a degree. When they were singing years ago, it would be as entertainment . . . a fellow could sit down and sing a song for half an hour, and everybody could listen, and you could form opinions. You’d be waiting to see how it ended, what happened to this person or that person. It would be like going to a movie. But now we have movies, so why does someone want to sit around for a half hour listening to a ballad? Unless the story was of such a nature that you couldn’t find it in a movie. And after you heard it, it would have to be good enough so that you could sing it again tomorrow night, and people would be listening to hear the story again. It’s because they want to hear that story, not because they want to check out the singer’s pants. Because they would have a conscious knowledge of how the story felt and they would be a part of that feeling . . . like they would want to feel it again, so to speak.
J: It must be terrific to try to write within those dimensions.
B: Well once you set it up in your mind, you don’t have to think about it any more. If it wants to come, it will come.
J: Take a song like “The Wicked Messenger.” Does that fit?
B: In a sense, but the ballad form isn’t there. Well the scope is there actually, but in a more compressed sense. The scope opens up, just by a few little tricks. I know why it opens up, but in a ballad in the true sense, it wouldn’t open up that way. It does not reach the proportions I had intended for it.
J: Have you ever written a ballad?
B: I believe on my second record album, Boots of Spanish Leather. [That song actually appeared on Dylan’s third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’. —Ed.]
J: Then most of the songs on John Wesley Harding, you don’t consider as ballads.
B: Well I do, but not in the traditional sense. I haven’t fulfilled the balladeer’s job. A balladeer can sit down and sing three ballads for an hour and a half. See, on the album, you have to think about it after you hear it, that’s what takes up the time, but with a ballad, you don’t necessarily have to think about it after you hear it, it can all unfold to you. These melodies on the John Wesley Harding album lack this traditional sense of time. As with the third verse of “The Wicked Messenger,” which opens it up, and then the time schedule takes a jump and soon the song becomes wider. One realizes that when one hears it, but one might have to adapt to it. But we are not hearing anything that isn’t there; anything we can imagine is really there. The same thing is true of the song “All Along the Watchtower,” which opens up in a slightly different way, in a stranger way, for here we have the cycle of events working in a rather reverse order.
* * *
J: One suggested interpretation of “Dear Landlord” is that you wrote it to bring out the line “each one has his own special gift” . . .
B: I don’t know about that. These songs might lay around in your head for two or three years, and you’re always writing about something previous. You learn to do that, so that the song would not tend to be a reaction, something contemporary would make it a reaction. I don’t know what it seems to explain any more than anybody else. But you always have to consider that I would write the song for somebody else. He might say something, or behave in a certain manner, or come right out and offer information like that. And if it’s striking enough, it might find an opening. And don’t forget now John, I’ll tell you another discovery I’ve made. When the songs are done by anybody on a record, on a strange level the songs are done for somebody, about somebody and to somebody. Usually that person is the somebody who is singing that song. Hear all the records which have ever been made and it kinda comes down to that after a while.
J: Could you talk about where you were going when you first started out from home?
B: As I think about it, it’s confusing to me to think of how I reached whatever place this is. I tend not to wonder about it anyway. It’s true, I have no goal so to speak. I don’t have any more intentions than you do.
J: I intend to do my work.
B: Yes, me too, and to make the work interesting enough, in order to keep doing it.
J: A danger of such a position is that you can be accused of only living in the present. People will say you’re just living for the minute—with no plan and no care for the past.
B: I have more memories for the past than for the future. I wouldn’t think about the future. I would only have expectations, and they’d all be very good. For the past I just have those memories. We were just talking of this “past” business the other night. Say this room is empty now, except with just myself. Now you enter the room, but you’re bound to leave, and when you do, what’s to guarantee that you’ve even been in this room. But yet you were in this room, if I want to reconstruct it, sit here for the rest of the day . . . if I take enough notes while you are in the room, I could possibly sit here for a week, with you in the room . . . something like that anyway.
J: It’s elusive. Anyway, back to the thought of “each one has his own special gift.”
B: That would be . . . just a fact.
J: But if everybody felt it, perhaps the American army wouldn’t be so capable of killing, and Kennedy might not be killed—King might not be killed.
B: But we’re talking now about things which have always happened since the beginning of time, the specific name or deed isn’t any different than that which has happened previous to this. Progress hasn’t contributed anything but changing face . . . and changing situations of money, wealth . . . that’s not progress, really. Progress for disease—that’s progress . . . but putting in a new highway through a backyard is getting rid of the old things.
J: The real progress each person makes is not going outwards, but going inwards. I have the feeling that a change has come over you . . . you seem to have discovered that same idea.
B: Well, I discover ideas here and there, but I can’t put them into words.
J: You mean, that by the time they are songs, they’re said?
B: Well, the songs are a funny thing. If I didn’t have the recording contract and I didn’t have to fulfill a certain amount of records, I don’t really know if I’d write down another song as long as I lived. I’m just content enough to play just anything I know. But seeing as how I do have this contract, I figure my obligation is to fill it, not in just recording songs, but the best songs I can possibly record. Believe me, I look around. I don’t care if I record my own songs, but I can’t sometimes find enough songs to put on an album, so then I’ve got to do it all with my songs. I didn’t want to record this last album. I was going to do a whole album of other people’s songs, but I couldn’t find enough. The song has to be of a certain quality for me to sing and put on a record. One aspect it would have to have is that it didn’t repeat itself. I shy away from those songs which repeat phrases, bars and verses, bridges . . . so right there it leaves out about nine-tenths of all the contemporary material being written, and the folk songs are just about the only ones that don’t . . . the narrative ones, or the ones with a chorus like “Ruben’s Train.” I don’t know, maybe then too I’m just too lazy to look hard enough.
J: Do you consider that there’s been a change of pace in your life over the past three years?
B: “Change of pace” if you mean what I was doing before. I was touring for a couple of years. That’s a fast pace, plus we were doing a whole show, no other acts. It’s pretty straining to do a show like that, plus a lot of really unhealthy situations rise up. I was just going out there performing these songs. Everyone else was having a good time. Right now I don’t think about it anymore. I did it, and I did it enough to know that there must be something else to do.
J: In a way, you had the opportunity to move into it and move out of it at your own choice.
B: It wasn’t my own choice. I was more or less being pushed into it—pushed in and carried out.
(enter Happy Traum)
HT: Has anyone picked up on your new approach—like on the album, clear songs and very personal, as opposed to the psychedelic sounds?
B: I don’t know.
HT: What do you know?
B: What I do know is that I put myself out of the songs. I’m not in the songs anymore, I’m just there singing them, and I’m not personally connected with them. I write them all now at a different time than when I record them. It used to be, if I would sing, I’d get a verse and go on and wait for it to come out as the music was there, and sure enough, something would come out, but in the end, I would be deluded in those songs. Besides singing them, I’d be in there acting them out—just pulling them off. Now I have enough time to write the song and not think about being in it. Just write it for somebody else to sing, then do it—like an acetate. At the moment, people are singing a simpler song. It’s possible in Nashville to do that.
J: I heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” played on the radio after the most recent assassination.
B: By who?
J: It was Muzak style . . . music to console yourself by.
B: Airplane style.
J: Do you think you’ll ever get a job playing for Muzak? The best musicians do that work, Bob.
B: Well I’d give it a try if they ask.
J: No one calls you into the studio to “Lay down some music” as they say.
B: Before I did the new album, I was waiting to meet someone who would figure out what they would want me to do. Does anybody want any songs written about anything? Could Bob be commissioned, by anybody? Nobody came up with anything, so I went ahead and did something else.
J: For a while a number of years ago, the songs you were writing, and that others were writing along similar lines, were played a lot on popular radio. Today it’s not completely disappeared, but it certainly is going in some other direction.
B: You just about have to cut something tailor-made for the popular radio. You can’t do it with just half a mind. You must be conscious of what you’re involved in. I get over-anxious when I hear myself on the radio, anyway. I don’t mind the record album, but it’s the record company, my A&R man, Bob Johnston—he would pick out what’s to be played on the radio.
H: Did you ever make a song just to be a single?
B: Yes I did. But it wasn’t very amusing because it took me away from the album. The album commands a different sort of attention than a single does. Singles just pile up and pile up; they’re only good for the present. The trend in the old days was that unless you had a hit single, you couldn’t do very well with an album. And when you had that album, you just filled it up. But now albums are very important.
J: You’ve tried movies and books . . .
B: In both cases, in shallow water.
J: In that book of photographs of you [Bob Dylan, by Daniel Kramer —Ed.] that was published, when I finished looking at it, I came away knowing not one bit more than when I started.
B: Yes, well what can you know about anybody? Book or photographs, they don’t tell you too much about a person.
H: For years now, people have been analyzing and pulling apart your songs. People take lines out of context and use them to illustrate points, like on “Quinn, the Eskimo” . . . I’ve heard some kids say that Quinn is the “bringer of drugs.” Whatever you meant doesn’t matter . . . the kids say “Dylan is really into this drug thing . . . when the drugs come, everybody is happy.” This kind of thing is always happening with all of your songs.
B: Well, that’s not my concern.
J: Many of the songs have set up conditions where people can read whatever they want into them.
H: People pull them apart and analyze them.
B: It�
�s not every one who does that—just a certain kind. People I come in contact with don’t have any questions.
H: Perhaps that’s come back lately in the very spontaneous art, in the whole multi-media kind of thing. Response to impulses . . . you can’t respond any other way.
J: I think it’s to anyone’s favor that they can follow what’s on their mind, what comes from within them, rather than getting swept up in all these other possibilities . . . which might be just a reaction against the analytic approach anyway. There is another way . . . someone might just follow his inner course . . . without being unaware of what is going on. Bob, how do you respond to multi-media?
B: When you say multi-media, would that be like the clothes stores?
J: Never having been to one, I’ll say yes.
B: I’ve never been to one either.
H: It’s also stage presentations where music, dance, lights and the rest are jumbled together, piled on the viewer, where all the senses are used.
J: In that context of multi-media, where are you?
B: Well I’m a very simple man. I take one, maybe two . . . too much just confuses me. I just can’t master confusion. If I don’t know what’s happening and everyone who goes and tells me just says that they don’t know what happened any more than I do, and they were there, then I’d say that I didn’t know where we were.
H: Do you feel the same way about the psychedelic sound on records?
B: No, I don’t.
H: A lot of the music today is not only very loud and very fast, but it’s structured in such a way that a lot of instruments are playing at once, with a lot of distortion.
B: That’s fine. A lot of people playing it.
H: You seem to have made a conscious effort away from that on your last record.
B: It was a conscious effort just to begin again. It wasn’t a conscious effort to go in a certain direction, but rather like put up or shut up so-to-speak. So that’s all.
J: I see that picture of Muhammed Ali here. Do you know him?
