Dylan on Dylan

by Jeff Burger

  Vincent: Going back to your Budokan [Japan] tour—that was a different feel, different look for you too, as far as the way you dressed on stage and the way you did the songs. In fact, I remember when you did it here at the Oakland Coliseum you made the statement, “You’ve been reading that this tour is show-bizzy and disco but we know better than that.” In a way, I thought that you were maybe goofing on a bunch of us or maybe on the world with that tour.

  Dylan: No. . . . It’s always misinterpreted in some way, like the last show we had out [reporters said it] was like a gospel show. Well, it was because most all my stuff at that time was influenced or written right off the gospel, but that was no reason to say it wasn’t a musical show. . . . A lotta people may read something like that and say, “Wow, I can read my own Bible. I don’t have to get it preached at me.” That’s when they decide not to come. There’s also a lot of people just turned off by the Bible, which is the case nowadays, too.

  Vincent: Maybe it could be something as simple as people knowing and loving your older songs so much and they mean so much to them that they so much wanted to hear them.

  Dylan: Yeah, that’s true. But don’t forget now, people say a lot of stuff they don’t mean and there’s different reasons for saying this and that. You may say one thing in a certain predicament and you find yourself in another predicament. You may find yourself saying the totally opposite thing. So when I hear that people expected me to sing the old songs, well, I was singing those old songs—we did a tour for it must’ve been nine months, singing them all over the world and there was a lot of complaints about that. In fact, that had more complaints than on the last tour we did because people said, “He doesn’t sound like he used to sound and their arrangements are disco and they’re slick.” Well, that wasn’t necessarily true. It wasn’t disco, it wasn’t slick, and people couldn’t see beyond that. It’s like when you have your hand up in front of your eye you can’t see your hand.

  Vincent: You’ve had those problems before—the Newport Folk Festival way, way back when you did the acoustic set and then came back with Mike Bloomfield and a bunch of people and did the electric.

  Dylan: I don’t know how I keep going. [Laughs.] I don’t have any plan [Laughs.] I’ll tell you that much. It’s day by day. That’s all I can think.

  [Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” plays.]

  Vincent: You do some great new songs in the sets, here at the Warfield, too. Are you working currently on a new album?

  Dylan: Umm . . .

  Vincent: . . . ’Course you’re performing now. What are your plans on the new—

  Dylan: I don’t know. Like I say, I may record an album when the time feels right. I’ll take whatever I have into the studio and record it.

  Vincent: Financially, you could have retired ten, fifteen years ago. [Laughs.]

  Dylan: If you just think financially, I think you can retire when you’re born really, but . . .

  Vincent: What gives you a feeling of fulfillment now, at this point in your life?

  Dylan: Just seeing growth in people, trying to love as much as I can.

  Vincent: Your religious beliefs may stay the same. Do you foresee continuing recording songs of that nature for very much longer?

  Dylan: Well, I don’t know what’s gonna change, which way it’s gonna go. I’m sure it’s gonna have some change. You can’t record every album and have it be a Saved-type album, because you just don’t get that many kinda songs all in a row like that. So I’m sure there’ll be some difference but I couldn’t say what it would be.

  Vincent: You have a yacht now. Are you enjoying yachting?

  Dylan: It’s not a yacht, it’s a sailing ship. It’s like an old schooner. Me and this other guy have it. It took about three years to build it. It was built from the ground up.

  Vincent: There was another story I remember reading in the press that when the yacht was unveiled you weren’t there.

  Dylan: I couldn’t make it. I was on the road. We were playing in Cincinnati that night, I think.

  Vincent: They expected you to be there, too. You can’t please everybody, can you?

  Dylan: You can’t be in two places at the same time. [Laughs.]

  Vincent: How is it to live with that all the time—everything you say being picked apart, knowing that the world is watching you at all times?

  Dylan: I don’t pay no mind to it. It just don’t have any concern for me, really.

  Vincent: What’s in the future for you? That you can talk about?

  Dylan: Well, we’re just gonna play these shows and I’ll be doing different things, probably go ’round the world one of these years again.

  Vincent: Just for pleasure? Not performing?

  Dylan: No, we’ll probably be going to perform and for pleasure. I like to mix business with pleasure.

  Vincent: You’re on the road a lot, aren’t you?

  Dylan: Yeah. Well, half the year. Some people are on more, some people are on less. But about half the year.

  Vincent: Bob, thank you very, very much. I’ve certainly appreciated it, and I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.

  DYLAN ON

  His Born-Again Experience

  “I truly had a born-again experience. If you want to call it that. It’s an overused term, but it’s something that people can relate to. It happened in 1978. I always knew there was a God or a creator of the universe and a creator of the mountains and the seas and all that kind of thing, but I wasn’t conscious of Jesus and what that had to do with the supreme creator. . . . I was sleeping one day and I just sat up in bed at seven in the morning and I was compelled to get dressed and drive over to the Bible school. I couldn’t believe I was there.”

  —from interview with Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, November 23, 1980

  DYLAN ON

  European Audiences

  “I think people in England react more spontaneously to the stuff that I do than the people here. You sit here for so long and they take you for granted, and anyway, I’ve taken a lot of my earlier songs from a lot of old English ballads and stuff like that, so people will probably relate to that a lot more over there than they do here. Here, I’m not really sure if people are aware of where songs like ‘Masters of War’ or ‘Girl from the North Country’ really originate.”

  —from telephone interview with Tim Blackmore,

  Capital Radio (London), June 15, 1981

  RADIO INTERVIEW

  Paul Gambaccini | June 20, 1981 | Rock On, BBC Radio 1 (UK)

  Seven months after he spoke with DJ Paul Vincent, Dylan was preparing for the release of Shot of Love, a motley collection that mingles more religious material with a few other tracks, including one that pays tribute to the late Lenny Bruce. He was also getting ready for a new European tour, which prompted this June 12, 1981, phone interview with the BBC’s London-based Paul Gambaccini. Dylan—who was in Detroit, Michigan at the time of the call—sounds upbeat and more than a bit pleased about the forthcoming album. As it turned out, few critics shared his view of it.

  Paul Gambaccini: Who’s coming in the backing band this time? What’s the music gonna be like?

  Bob Dylan: I’m bringing the same band that I have been touring with for the last two years.

  Gambaccini: You’d be at Earl’s Court, which is where you were last time. Were you surprised last time by the friendly response?

  Dylan: Ah, sometimes the response is less than friendly, and sometimes it’s friendly, but over the years you just kind of get used to any kind of response.

  Gambaccini: I know that recently in the States you’ve been performing a lot of your inspirational material. Will you be doing that in London?

  Dylan: We’ll be doing some of it. Most of the stuff comes from all the albums. And then we just finished an album, so we’ll be including some new songs, too. The name of the new album is Shot of Love.

  Gambaccini: Does that continue in the inspirational vein?

  Dylan: Well, you kind o
f have to decide that for yourself. It’s different than the last, it’s different than Saved, and it’s different than Slow Train, and it sounds old but it’s new.

  Gambaccini: Does it feature any of your recent players, like Barry Beckett?

  Dylan: No, I didn’t do this one down in Muscle Shoals. I did it in California. So Barry’s not on this one. I did use my usual band. Actually, Ronnie Wood played on one song. So did Ringo.

  Gambaccini: I’ve received some very exciting mail on the last couple of albums, because some people who shared your sense of what might be called ministry or message were very excited that you were with them on it and other people had thought, well, what is Bob doing now?

  Dylan: Yeah, I don’t know. Sometimes it takes . . . you know, the older albums don’t really mean something to some people until they’re hearing the new one and in retrospect they go back and hear something else from the past that’ll seem like it takes the steps that lead up to the new one.

  I think this new album we did, for me, I think it’s the most explosive album I’ve ever done. Even going back to Blonde on Blonde or Freewheelin’ or any of those, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61, or whatever they were. I think this one, for its time right now, will be perceived in the same way and I may be totally wrong in saying that, but I feel that same way about this album as I did about when we recorded Bringing It All Back Home, that was like a breakthrough point.

  It’s the kind of music I’ve been striving to make, and I believe that in time people will see that. It’s hard to explain it. It’s that indefinable thing that people can write about, but they can only write about and around it, you can’t really take charge over it, because it is what it is and you can’t really expound on it. It itself is the beginning and the end of what it is.

  Gambaccini: In Blood on the Tracks, which was another of my favorite albums, you were speaking right from the heart. Is that the kind of feeling you have lyrically on this album?

  Dylan: Well, that was a different sort of thing. That was a breakthrough album for me, too, in another sense of lyrics. I’ve done things I’ve never done before. This is just a different sort of thing, it’s like the thing I’ve always wanted to do. And, for one reason or another, I have always been bound in certain areas where I couldn’t have the right structure around some kinds of things to make it come off, in a way, because mainly, when I don’t do that much talking, so when I’m playing, you have to be able to communicate with the people around you in order to get your point of view across. And if you have to do too much of that communication it gets confusing and something is lost along the way. And this time that didn’t happen. Everybody was pretty much together.

  Gambaccini: Do you feel then, that you now have accomplished what you want to as an artist, or . . . ?

  Dylan: I think so. I think I will do an instrumental album now.

  Gambaccini: You think so?

  Dylan: Yeah. I’ve come as far as there is to come and now I’m gonna start just doing instrumentals.

  Gambaccini: Are you finding at the moment inspiration from any other artists, as I think you probably found from Dire Straits a couple of years ago?

  Dylan: Oh, yeah, well, I just spoke with [Dire Straits’] Mark [Knopfler] recently. I’ve always liked Gordon Lightfoot . . .

  Gambaccini: Recently here, Bruce Springsteen’s gone down very well. Do you like him?

  Dylan: Yeah, Bruce is a very, very talented guy.

  Gambaccini: Did you know that Bruce has included “This Land Is Your Land” in his concert program?

  Dylan: Oh, he has? That’s amazing! That’s good. Well, maybe he’ll start doing “Blowin’ in the Wind”! Maybe he’ll do an album with Bob Dylan songs!

  Gambaccini: Well, funnily enough, I heard on the radio recently, Manfred Mann’s version of “With God on Our Side.” And I thought that in this current atmosphere where there is so much talk about nuclear disarmament and the missile talks, particularly in Europe, where it is a great concern at the moment, that these songs of yours from the early albums about the nuclear disarmament situation take on a new timeliness. Do you ever think about that?

  Dylan: No. Not really, but it doesn’t surprise me. I thought they were timely then, and just as sure they’re timely now.

  DYLAN ON

  How He Makes Records

  “I learned how to make records when I started recording . . . which is, going into the studio and making a record, right then and there. I know the other way and I know a lot of people do it the other way and it’s successful for them . . . but I’m not interested in that aspect of recording. Laying down tracks and then coming back and perfecting those tracks and then perfecting lyrics . . . I’m a live performer. I have to play songs which are gonna relate to the faces that I’m singing to. And I can’t do that if I was spending a year in the studio, working on a track. It’s not that important to me. No record is that important.”

  —from interview with Dave Herman,

  WNEW-FM (New York), July 27, 1981

  DYLAN ON

  Working with Producer Daniel Lanois

  “Lanois can get passionate about what he feels to be true. He’s not above smashing guitars. I never care about that unless it was one of mine. Things got contentious once in the parking lot. He tried to convince me that the song [“Mississippi,” from Love and Theft] had to be ‘sexy, sexy and more sexy.’ . . . I tried to explain that the song had more to do with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights than witch doctors, and just couldn’t be thought of as some kind of ideological voodoo thing. But he had his own way of looking at things, and in the end I had to reject this because I thought too highly of the expressive meaning behind the lyrics to bury them in some steamy cauldron of drum theory.”

  —from interview with David Fricke, Rolling Stone, September 27, 1981

  DYLAN ON

  His Big California House

  “I bought this house on about an acre of land, past Malibu. And my wife looked at it and said, ‘Well it’s OK, but it needs another bedroom.’ . . . So we had architects come in and right away, they said, ‘Oh, yeah, Bob Dylan, right. We’ll really make something spectacular here.’ . . . So I went out there one day to see how the room was progressing, and they’d knocked down the house! I asked the guys who were workin’, ‘Where’s the house?’ And they said they had to knock it down to restructure it for this bedroom upstairs. . . . So one thing led to another, and I said as long as they’re knocking this place down, we’re just gonna add more rooms to it. And anytime some craftsman came by . . . we’d say, ‘Hey, you wanna do some work on this place?’ And they’d do woodwork, tilework, all that kinda thing. And eventually it was built. But then they closed the school out there, and the kids moved away, and Sara moved away . . . So I was stuck with this place. As a matter of fact, I’ve never even put anything on the living room floor. It’s just cement.”

  —from interview with Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone, June 21, 1984

  “JESUS, WHO’S GOT TIME TO KEEP UP WITH THE TIMES?”

  Mick Brown | July 1, 1984 | Sunday Times (UK)

  “I’d been sent by the Sunday Times to Madrid, where Dylan was performing,” music journalist Mick Brown told me, “in the wildly optimistic hope that I might be able to secure an interview with him prior to his arrival in Britain. The tour was being promoted by Bill Graham, whom I had met previously when he was managing Santana. I found out where Graham was staying and went to meet him. He was predictably pessimistic about the prospects of an interview, but said he’d try. After much to-ing and fro-ing, at the eleventh hour, I was told to wait in my hotel room and I might get a telephone call.

  “At the moment when it finally seemed clear to me that I would not be interviewing Bob Dylan,” Brown continued, “the telephone rang. I was told to be at the Cafe Alcazar at 7:30 PM [on June 27, 1984 —Ed.]. I arrived at 7:40. No sign. Obviously, I thought, he had come and gone. I have no idea what made me think that Dylan would be a fastidious t
imekeeper.

  “Forty minutes late,” Brown recalled, “he came through the door alone. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a straw hat that looked like a disguise. It worked, at least for a while. Nobody seemed to notice him as he walked to the table. His manner was courteous and accommodating. Every question I asked he had heard before, but he treated them all with good grace.”

  When it was over, said Brown, “I seem to remember having about two hours to turn the piece around and was writing in a furious panic.” —Ed.

  This week Bob Dylan comes to Britain. The folksinger-cum-folk hero of the 1960s has not always had a good reception here. In 1965 purists attacked him for “going electric.” In 1981 his new-found evangelism left many of his fans cold. What should they expect this time? Last week Mick Brown had an exclusive interview.

  * * *

  Bob Dylan tugged at a cigarette, stroked the beginnings of an untidy beard and gazed pensively at the stream of traffic passing down the Madrid street. “What you gotta understand,” he said at length, “is that I do something because I feel like doing it. If people can relate to it, that’s great; if they can’t, that’s fine too. But I don’t think I’m gonna be really understood until maybe 100 years from now. What I’ve done, what I’m doing, nobody else does or has done.”

  THE MESSIANIC tone grew more intense. “When I’m dead and gone maybe people will realise that, and then figure it out. I don’t think anything I’ve done has been even mildly hinted at. There’s all these interpreters around, but they’re not interpreting anything except their own ideas. Nobody’s come close.”

  But a lot of people, it seems, still want to. Bob Dylan may no longer sell records in the consistently enormous quantities he once did—a fact to which he will allow a tinge of regret—but his capacity to hold his audience in thrall seems undiminished.