by Jeff Burger
He has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Music. In 2011, he was a 5-1 favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, according to London bookies. (It went to a Swedish poet.) Writing in The New Yorker (Oct. 31, 2011), Dan Chiasson declared that, had Dylan won, “. . . I would have joined the worldwide chorus of hallelujahs, for Bob Dylan is a genius, and there is something undeniably literary about his genius, and those two facts together make him more deserving of this prize than countless pseudo-notables who have won it in the past.”
One shudders, however, to imagine Dylan’s conspicuous misery, seated onstage before the Swedish royal family, hearing himself described as a prophet and sachem of the benighted masses. “I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he wrote in his memoir.
Dylan suffered a self-inflicted wound in April 2011 when he let the Chinese and Vietnamese governments censor concerts he gave in those countries. Gone from his set list were counterculture faves such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” “He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left,” Maureen Dowd grouchily wrote in her New York Times op-ed column.
At Corral Beach, Dylan parked the car on the highway’s shoulder and slid down the embankment to the beach. I threw the six-pack of Coors down to him and followed. Once settled in the sand, I remarked on the catholicity of his musical tastes—as a teen-ager in Minnesota he’d sponged up the music of the 1950s rockers and rhythm and blues artists, then onward to Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, Josh White, Reverend Gary Davis, George Jones, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dave Van Ronk, Robert Johnson. And Frank Sinatra. Listening to Sinatra sing “Ebb Tide,” he later wrote, “I could hear everything in his voice—death, God and the universe, everything.” (Uncharacteristically, Dylan performed on a nationally televised tribute to Sinatra in 1995. The aging crooner watched him, wide-eyed, clearly pleased and flattered that Dylan—who called him “Mr. Frank”—came to honor him. In May 1998, Dylan attended Sinatra’s funeral at a Catholic church in Los Angeles.)
Dylan popped a can of beer as I mentioned the Beatles.
“They took all the music we’d been listening to and showed it to us again,” he said. “They have everything in their music from Little Richard to the Everly Brothers. They helped give America’s pride back to it. There ought to be statues to the Beatles.”
What had he been reading lately?
He laughed. “You don’t want to know. It would sound stupid. I’m open to everything. Whatever I have the stamina for. I have no information. I just have life—through these eyes and hands, what I’ve been given as I walk the earth.” After a pause: “Rimbaud has been a big influence on me. When I’m on the road and want to read something that makes sense to me I go to a bookstore and read his words. Also Melville. He wrote The Confidence Man, didn’t he, and Moby-Dick? He’s someone I can identify with because of how he looked at life. Being in California, I’ve seen some whales.” He grinned. “I’d like to see some more on my sailing trip to the moon.”
Anybody else?
“Joseph Conrad. I also like him a lot.”
Allen Ginsberg had accompanied Dylan the year before on the famous Rolling Thunder Revue tour, along with Joan Baez, Jack Elliott, Bob Neuwirth, Ronee Blakely, and others.
“Ginsberg is always a great inspiration,” Dylan said. “I read Howl in Minnesota. That blew my mind. He’s real balanced. A bit sentimental.”
Had Ginsberg’s immersion in Buddhism rubbed off on him?
“Just between you and me?” A long pause. “No, not at all.”
Around his neck Dylan wore a lapis lazuli pendant with a star of David on one side and a bas relief lyre on the other.
“It’s something from the earth,” he explained. “It’s energy. How do I know that? It’s been written about in ancient books.”
That opened the door a crack to Dylan’s spiritual beliefs, a subject of tortuous speculation by his exegetes. After a serious motorcycle accident in 1966, he had disappeared from view, lived quietly in Woodstock, New York, and didn’t return to touring for 8 years. But in 1967, Dylan released his John Wesley Harding album, which was rich with Old Testament allusions and imagery. One of the songs, “All Along the Watchtower,” derived from the Book of Isaiah, 21:5–9
“That was the first biblical rock record,” Dylan said, peering out to the ocean. “As opposed to spiritual rock. Biblical rock leans more toward what is tangible than what is spiritual. We take our symbols from the bible. The stories in the bible are stories we’ve all been through.”
Then in 1971, he made a pilgrimage to Israel. “There was no great significance to that visit,” he said. “It was part of the journey of life, but it wasn’t really a spiritual occasion. There was an old rabbi there who kept trying to wrap the tallis around my arm and throw a yarmulke on my head. I had to deal with him. I wanted to experience the wall but the guy just wouldn’t let it happen. I’m interested in what and who a Jew is. I’m interested in the fact that Jews are Semites the same as Babylonians, Hittites, Arabs, Syrians, Ethiopians.” But Jews are different, said Dylan, and many people in the world perceive them differently. “People hate gypsies, too. Why? I don’t know. Human beings are all the same behind the eyes.”
All right then. Let’s just cut to the meat-and-potatoes question: What is Bob Dylan’s conception of God?
He laughed and leaned back in the sand. “How come nobody ever asks Kris Kristofferson questions like that? I should have read some books and studied up on this.” And then: “God is a combination of man and woman and everything else. I can see God in a daisy. I can see God at night in the wind and the rain. I see creation just about everywhere. See that seagull? The highest form of song is prayer. King David’s, Solomon’s, the wailing of a coyote, the rumble of the earth. It must be wonderful to be God. There’s so much going on out there that you can’t get to it all. We’re all mystical beings. There’s a mystic in all of us. It’s part of our nature. Some of us are shown more than others. Or maybe we’re all shown the same but some of us make more use of it. I know taxi drivers who have it. It’s not a continual feeling of ecstasy. Gurus tell you you can have ecstasy twenty-four hours a day. That means you have to give up everything else for that continual feeling. All the teachings of the gurus, like the Maharishi, are a way of quieting your mind so that you can be aware of the world.”
In the late 1970’s, Dylan’s albums—Slow Train Coming, Saved, Shot of Love—began reflecting a deepening interest in Christianity; in live concerts he’d often deliver a brief sermonette. Then in the 1980s, he sported a renewed interest in Judaism, causing Jewish exegetes to redouble their ethnopaleontology to prove he is profoundly Semitic, and, indeed, a version of an Old Testament prophet. That scenario collapsed when—astonishingly—Dylan released an album in the winter of 2009 called “Christmas in the Heart,” flaunting a Currier and Ives-style jacket and a medley of holiday chestnuts like “The First Noel,” “O, Come All Ye Faithful,” “Little Drummer Boy,” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Once again, Dylan had confounded his acolytes. The royalties went to feed the homeless and the hungry.
Dylan adjusted his position in the sand and popped another can of beer. “I’m not really very articulate. I save what I have to say for what I do. Somebody said I’m the Ed Sullivan of rock ’n’ roll.” Laughter. “I don’t know what that means but it sounds right.”
So why hadn’t he written an autobiography setting the record straight once and for all, thus confuting the Dylan obsessives, stalkers, and wackos who had spread rumors and often made his life miserable. Dylan had been the least reliable witness to the facts of his own life, improvising biography outrageously during unwelcome encounters with the press.
No chance, he replied. “I’d rather work on other things. I doubt I’ll ever do one.” Wrong again. Chronicles, Volume One, earned rave reviews, some of them overwrought and foolish: “. . . the
greatest and most important Western writer since Shakespeare . . .” (Capital Times, Madison, Wisc.); “. . . may be the most extraordinarily intimate autobiography by a 20th-century legend ever written . . .” (Daily Telegraph, London); “. . . the most influential cultural figure alive . . .” (Newsweek). The book is good sport for Dylan adepts, to be sure, in spite of its casual grip on chronology. If his habits in the early sixties, as related in the book, are to be believed, he has been a gluttonous reader: Thucydides, Machiavelli, Dante, Rousseau, Ovid, Sophocles, Simon Bolivar, Faulkner, Albertus Magnus, Byron, Shelley, Longfellow, Poe, Freud, Milton, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Luke Short, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Clausewitz, Robert Graves, biographies of Thaddeus Stevens, Robert E. Lee, Frederick the Great.
“I can’t tell you how Bob Dylan has lived his life,” he was saying. “And it’s far from over. If you play your cards right . . .” His voice trailed off. I watched him as he fell silent. I thought of the many Dylan performances I’d seen. His guitar playing is rudimentary, the melodies often are borrowed or adapted, the lyrics sometimes forced and unpoetic. But the effect is one of unique power and range. Bob Dylan had invented an inimitable self. In 2014 at age 73, he was still touring the country and the world, playing 100 concerts a year.
An orange sun was dipping below the Pacific. It was time to go. Dylan hoisted himself upright.
“I hope there’s not a snake in my beer,” he said.
We returned to the car and I drove him to the foot of his driveway in Malibu. He wanted to walk the rest of the way, so we shook hands and he wandered off. After a minute, I noticed he’d left behind on the car seat the pastrami sandwich he’d bought at the roadside deli. I shouted after him, waving the sandwich above my head. He returned, nodded, smiled gratefully, retrieved the package, and strolled up the roadway.
I watched him go. Years later, in April 2012, it surprised me not at all—although it surely caused him to squirm—that he was awarded (along with John Glenn, Toni Morrison, Madeleine Albright, and Justice John Paul Stevens) the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor given by the United States for being among “the most influential American musicians of the 20th century.”
Yeah, we sort of know that. Let’s just posit that there’s never been anybody like Bobby Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota, and there isn’t going to be.
DYLAN ON
Drawing
“One time I was doing it all day for a couple of months in New York. This was a couple of years back; it was ’74, ’75. I did it every day from eight till four with a break or something, and it locked me into the present time more than anything else I ever did. More than any experiences I’ve ever had, any enlightenment I’ve ever had. Because I was constantly being intermingled with myself and all the different selves that were in there, until this one left, then that one left, and finally I got down to the one that I was familiar with.”
—from interview with Karen Hughes, Rock Express (Australia), 1978
DYLAN ON
Filmmakers He Admires
“[Andy] Warhol did a lot for American cinema. He was before his time. But Warhol and [Alfred] Hitchcock and [Sam] Peckinpah and Tod Browning . . . they were important to me. I figured [Jean-Luc] Godard had the accessibility to make what he made, he broke new ground. I never saw any film like Breathless, but once you saw it, you said ‘Yeah, man, why didn’t I do that. I could have done that.’ OK, he did it, but he couldn’t have done it in America . . . I think American filmmakers are the best. But I also like [Akira] Kurosawa, and my favorite director is [Luis] Bunuel.”
—from interview with Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone, January 26, 1978
AN INTERVIEW WITH DYLAN
Randy Anderson | February 17, 1978 | Minnesota Daily
By the late 1970s, Dylan was granting interviews mostly just to major media outlets, but he spent a long time with Randy Anderson of the Minnesota Daily, the small, student-run campus newspaper at his alma mater, the University of Minnesota.
“Say, did you have any misgivings about granting us an interview?” asks Anderson at one point. “I mean . . . we’re not exactly Rolling Stone or Playboy.”
“No . . . not at all,” answers Dylan, who seems to enjoy the opportunity to talk with someone who knows his old home turf.
The conversation took place shortly after the January 25, 1978, release of the singer’s film Renaldo and Clara. It was also about seven months after Dylan’s divorce. At the time, he had not issued any new music in about two years, just the live Hard Rain. But Street-Legal was only four months away. —Ed.
After spending half my life living closely with his words and music, I am now face to face with the most important artist of my generation. Bob Dylan shakes my hand weakly, puts down his coffee cup next to mine and bums a Marlboro.
* * *
RA: Greetings from the Midwest—it’s ten below there. Which coffee cup’s mine?
BD: This one’s mine, that must be yours.
RA: Mine’s starting to curdle . . . I’m running out of cigarettes.
BD: I just got over the flu. Actually, I think I still got the flu.
RA: I heard that . . . Are you tired of doing this?
BD: Interviews?
RA: Yeah.
BD: (In an encouraging tone of voice.) No, not at all. (Strains of “Lay Lady Lay” in the background.)
RA: . . . Would you be interested in talking about your days at the University of Minnesota?
BD: Yeah, sure.
RA: When I talk about those days—and I don’t even remember how long they were—what kind of feelings does that conjure up? Good times? Bad times?
BD: Well, I remember people more than events, you know. Ah, David Wicker, Hugh Brown, Ernie Washington—you know any of those people?
RA: No, I’m younger than you are—about six years.
BD: Ah, John Koerner—Dave Ray was just getting out of high school. [A reference to the Minneapolis blues trio Koerner, Ray, and Glover. —Ed.]
RA: . . . So how long were you in school at the U?
BD: (Taking a long drag on cigarette) I was registered there for about six months (1960). I never did get an academic rating. I registered there for six months and I was there beyond that time. I don’t remember much about it—Scott Hall, Ford Hall.
RA: What classes did you take?
BD: I took, ah, . . . English. I remember an anthropology course I took, which took place in a big auditorium most of the time. Umm, I think those are the only classes I actually even attended. (smiles)
RA: Was there anything valuable about your academic experience? What turned you off or on?
BD: No, ah, nothing . . . I would hang around mostly at the café. What’s the name of that place?
RA: The Scholar?
BD: No, no on campus there—
RA: Is it still there?
BD: Yeah, they turned it into an auditorium. I saw because I played there when I got back from New York the first time. You know the Little Sandy Review [Influential folk-music journal published 1960–’68. —Ed.] was published in Minneapolis?
RA: Yeah.
BD: And that was just starting up when I was there. So there was that type of general atmosphere and that was the atmosphere that I was only interested in. I didn’t much get interested in any other activity school-wise. I figured after high school my schoolin’ days were over.
RA: How was your high school experience?
BD: Ah well, I was playin’ music in high school too and I was workin’ in high school so (five second pause)—
RA: That must seem like light years away.
BD: (quickly) It does, it does now. (with an air of admission) My mind was always outside the classroom.
RA: Really?
BD: Yeah, I don’t think I was compelled in any way in the classroom.
RA: Never any teachers or professors that meant anything to you?
BD: There were some good ones, some good teachers at Hibbing Hi
gh. But I had teachers that my mother had so—
RA: They’re probably still there! How important is Minnesota, Hibbing and Minneapolis to you?
BD: I feel very comfortable there. And I do get back every so often. I was up in Hibbing a few years ago. (six second pause)
RA: How was that?
BD: (quickly) Well it hasn’t changed. I was glad to see that. (ten second pause) You know, like a lot of people go back to their hometown and they find their hometown’s been replaced by a supermarket or something.
RA: When was the last time you saw the West Bank [A Minneapolis neighborhood that borders the Mississippi River. —Ed.]?
BD: Well the West Bank has changed since when I was there. The University has changed a lot, Minneapolis has changed a lot, but Hibbing hasn’t.
RA: How has Minneapolis changed?
BD: All the recent development. I think that when I was goin’ to school there, there was about 20,000 students, maybe 25,000. I don’t know how many there are now but I think it’s much more.
RA: Maybe 50,000.
BD: 50,000? So, there wasn’t any development on the West Bank. There was that Seven Corners area where it was undeveloped. It was like London or New York or the Soho district. But I see they’ve taken all that and developed it and made it into dormitories or ah—
RA: Highrise apartments.
BD: Yes. There wasn’t any of that there when I was there. It had a different look to it and a whole different feel. They didn’t have any of that stuff when I was there, it was just old old houses.
