by Jeff Burger
That was a matter I didn’t get to explore because, as quickly as Dylan can enter a room, he can also leave one. “It’s late. I should go,” he said, standing up, offering his hand and heading for the door. Looking out and realizing that night had fallen, he finally took off his sunglasses. It was nice to look, even if just for a moment, into those clear blue eyes.
In a way, I was glad that the question had gone unasked. How was I going to put it: Are you going to redeem every promise we’ve ever inferred from your work and legend? It was fitting to remember something Sam Shepard once said of Dylan: “The repercussions of his art don’t have to be answered by him at all. They fall on us as questions and that’s where they belong.” That his art still inspires such questions tells me everything I need to know about his remaining promise.
DYLAN ON
His Album Releases
“I really haven’t had that much connection or conversation [over the years] with the people at Columbia [Records]. Usually I turn in my records, and they release them. But they really like this record [Empire Burlesque], so they asked me to do some videos and a few interviews to draw attention to it. But that doesn’t mean I want to sit around and talk about the record. I haven’t even listened to it since it came out. I’d rather spend my time working on new songs or listen to other people’s records. Have you heard the new Hank Williams album, the collection of old demo tapes? It’s great.”
—from interview with Robert Hilburn,
Los Angeles Times, November 17, 1985
DYLAN ON
Psychiatry and Parents
“I don’t think psychiatry can help or has helped anybody. I think it’s a big fraud on the public. Billions of dollars have changed hands that could be used for far better purposes. A lot of people have trouble with their parents up until they’re fifty, sixty, seventy years old. They can’t get off their parents. I never had that kind of problem with my parents.”
—from interview with Scott Cohen, Spin,
December 1985
DYLAN ON
The “Mass Monster”
“What I can see is the mass monster . . . in America, it’s everywhere. It’s invaded your home, your bed, it’s in your closet. It’s come real close to kicking over life itself. Unless you’re able to go into the woods, the back country, and even there it reaches you. It seems to want to make everybody the same. People who are different are looked at as being a little bit crazy or a little bit odd. It’s hard to stand outside of all that and remain sane.”
—from telephone interview with Toby Creswell,
Rolling Stone (Australia), January 16, 1986
ASK HIM SOMETHING,
AND A SINCERE DYLAN
WILL TELL YOU THE TRUTH
Don McLeese | January 26, 1986 | Chicago Sun-Times
Dylan talked in Los Angeles with music writer Don McLeese about four months after he’d met with Gilmore. He seems to have been in a good mood, perhaps partly because of developments in his personal life that at the time were a well-guarded secret. On January 31, 1986, he became a father again when girlfriend Carolyn Dennis gave birth to a daughter, Desiree. (Dylan would marry Dennis in June, but they would divorce only a little more than six years later.) On the musical front, Dylan was working on Knocked Out Loaded, which would come out in July. —Ed.
LOS ANGELES “You got any questions for me? I love to talk,” said Bob Dylan, as he motioned me toward the piano for a chat after rehearsal. He seemed sincere, even friendly, if a little guarded.
There was a time when hearing Dylan say he loved to talk would have been as surprising as hearing Mike Ditka say he loved to lose, or Elvis Presley confiding that he loved to diet. An interview with Bob Dylan offered the same prospects for congeniality as a Sean Penn photo session. Twenty years ago, Dylan’s dealings with the press ranged from cryptic to combative. As the “Don’t Look Back” documentary made plain, he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and he seemed to find signs of foolishness everywhere. From behind his dark glasses, he preferred to let his lyrics—his parables and paradoxes, his amphetamine-fueled flights of surrealism—speak for themselves. He seemed like a hard man.
The Dylan that I encountered was far softer—a softer handshake, a softer demeanor—than I had expected. Maybe now that people aren’t prying so much into his personal life—remember the self-proclaimed “Dylanologist” who dedicated himself to sifting through Dylan’s garbage for revelations?—he can allow himself to be a little more open. Maybe religion or age or both have mellowed him a little. Maybe he tired of inventing and shedding new skins, new shields, new identities. Maybe he is simply more willing these days, in light of his declining commercial impact, to meet his audience halfway.
Whatever the case, Dylan’s lyrical approach has become more straightforward in recent years, and his personal manner seems more open as well. The man who once sang “Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’, I just might tell you the truth,” had asked me if I had any questions. And he seemed to mean it. And, yeah, I had some.
Why New Zealand, Australia and Japan, rather than the long-awaited return to Stateside touring?
“I’ve never been offered that much here in the States,” he said with a laugh. “There’s really very little reason for most of the stuff I do. There’s not very much logic behind it. I haven’t been in Australia since ’78 or so.”
Why the Heartbreakers [Tom Petty’s band, who played with Dylan on tour]?
“This just kinda fell into place for me,” he said. “Mutual friends I know. It just happened. It wasn’t like I woke up one morning and decided that I wanted to work with a particular band.”
The band’s guitar-and-keyboard sound reflects the enduring influence of Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited”/“Blonde on Blonde” period, and the fact that the Heartbreakers would interrupt their own projects for a chance to tour with Dylan suggests that his stature in musical circles hasn’t diminished with the passage of time. With the exception of Elvis Presley, it is hard to imagine another artist who has so completely reshaped the face of popular music in his own image.
When he turned to rock, his impact was so profound that it was impossible to ignore. Not only did he radically transform what was being sung, but he also revolutionized how it would be sung. Just listen to John Lennon singing “Norwegian Wood” or Mick Jagger singing “She Smiled Sweetly,” and you’ll hear imitation Dylan. Just listen to the Four Tops’ “Reach Out (I’ll Be There),” and you’ll hear Dylan in the way Levi Stubbs phrases the lyric.
A few years later, when glitter was the vogue in England, both David Bowie and Marc Bolan penned odes to the master. Bruce Springsteen reportedly drew the blueprint for his early career from a biography of Dylan, and took his music to the same man who had signed Dylan to Columbia Records.
Among the best of today’s new bands, Dylan’s influence stretches from Jason and the Scorchers to Mike Scott and the Waterboys. Few producers these days are hotter than the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart, who felt privileged to collaborate with Dylan on a recent video and tracks for his next album. And what are such socially conscious efforts as Live Aid, Farm Aid and “Sun City,” but the reflowering of the seeds sown by Dylan in the early ’60s? Although the five-record “Biograph” set should reinforce the breadth and depth of Dylan’s accomplishments for a new generation of listeners, there’s no question that his commercial impact has diminished as the quality of his recorded work has become more erratic. Does it bother him to be away from the forefront of popular consciousness?
“Not really,” Dylan said. “I mean, I’ve done what I wanted to do, and I really can’t complain. Everybody gets their time to do whatever it is they’re doing. You know what I mean: You gotta start out when you’re young. Sometimes I forget I’m not that young.”
How important are record sales to the 44-year-old Dylan?
“At this point really not that important, because of my contract. But in the future, it might be,” he said. “There’s more great records that don’t sel
l, in a real crushing sort of way: Leonard Cohen’s last record was a brilliant record. John Prine’s last record I thought was incredible. Lou Reed always makes a great record.
“I’ve found, and I think it’s true, that most people get their inspiration from records that they have to seek out, and really aren’t that popular. I know that’s the way it was with me. Whether it was folk music or rhythm and blues or rock ’n’ roll, it wasn’t that popular when we were growing up. You really had to be dedicated to seek that out, and make that a part of your life.”
Of course, where the music that initially attracted Dylan represented an outsider’s voice of expression—raw, vital, unpolished—much of what has passed for rock in recent years has been a triumph of mainstream merchandising. Little wonder that a man who never sang a song the same way twice has seemed increasingly uncomfortable in an era of rhythm-machine rigidity and frozen video images.
“I definitely think and believe that the popular music of today, it’s not gonna work,” Dylan said. “Because there’s not really substance behind it. There’s a lot of machines and a lot of riffs, and people are going to get tired of it, if they’re not tired already.”
When he’s playing with people who once idolized him—or still do—is there any sense of intimidation that he has to dissolve?
“When they see what I’m about, you know it’s all about being able to follow what I’m doing and stick with that,” he said. “It really doesn’t amount to any kind of intimidation. Maybe I might play with somebody who’s really young, and they’re kinda shaky, but then you have to encourage those people to play.
“When I play, people can play around what I play. I give people a lot of space.”
Although Heartbreaker keyboardist Benmont Tench says that Dylan is an easy artist to work with, he remembered his initial experiences for the “Shot of Love” sessions.
“The first day that I worked with him, he didn’t say a word the whole session, and I didn’t know anybody at the session,” he said. “At the end of the day, when I was leaving, he said, ‘Can you come tomorrow?’”
At that point, Tench figured that he probably had done all right.
DYLAN ON
America
“To me, America means the Indians. They were here and this is their country, and all the white men are just trespassing. We’ve devastated the natural resources of this country, for no particular reason except to make money and buy houses and send our kids to college and shit like that. To me, America is the Indians, period. I just don’t go for nothing more. Unions, movies, Greta Garbo, Wall Street, Tin Pan Alley, or Dodgers baseball games. It don’t mean shit. What we did to the Indians is disgraceful. I think America, to get it right, has to start there first.”
—from interview with Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, July 17, 1986
THE INVISIBLE MAN
David Hepworth | October 1986 | Q magazine (UK)
Neither fans nor critics were knocked out by Dylan’s Knocked Out Loaded, which hit stores on July 14, 1986, though the following article at least suggests that it received some good reviews. The album, which seems as cobbled together as Self Portrait, contains an ill-fitting batch of material, including a Junior Parker blues cover, a Kris Kristofferson track, and collaborations with Tom Petty and, of all people, mainstream pop songwriter Carole Bayer Sager. There is also one often-overlooked eleven-minute classic, the abstruse, sometimes funny, and consistently fascinating “Brownsville Girl,” which Dylan coauthored with playwright Sam Shepard.
Maybe the artist wasn’t too happy with the album himself because, as UK journalist David Hepworth reports in this piece, Dylan performed for three successive nights at New York’s Madison Square Garden following Knocked Out Loaded’s release, and he failed to play anything from it.
Hepworth, who talked with Dylan during his three-night mid-July stand at the Garden, wrote this article for the debut issue of the now more than three-decades-old British rock magazine Q, which he cofounded. The piece contains fewer Dylan quotes than most of the features in this book, but it’s at least as evocative as many of them. —Ed.
The man in the denim jacket hugs the battered guitar further into his chest and launches into the final verse of Shelter From The Storm, the backlighting picking out every starpoint of his tangled hair as he sings of beauty walking a razor’s edge and pipes out a final solo on the harmonica attached around his neck. Awkwardly acknowledging the audience’s applause he hops off the small, low stage. As he walks through the crowd people offer their muttered congratulations.
“Great, Bob.”
“You did real good, Bob.”
“Bob, thanks for everything.”
The master of ceremonies takes the mike: “A big hand, ladies and gentlemen, for the legendary Bob Dylan.”
Pause.
“And now, would you welcome to the stage, the one, the only . . . Bob Dylan!”
With a sweep of his arm he indicates a fair-haired man in glasses. This character is so small he’s having trouble hoisting his backside on to the tall stool without dropping his guitar. The crowd stiffens. Bob Dylan is five feet, tops. And, yes, he’s going to sing Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues . . .
* * *
THIS IS THE FIFTH annual Bob Dylan imitators contest, taking place in a Greenwich Village club called The Speakeasy. Entries are invited in six categories: folk-protest, amphetamine-rock, post-motorcycle accident, born again, freestyle and contemporary. Here on MacDougal Street they know their Dylan. When he first arrived in New York he headed like a homing pilgrim straight for the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal, making his reputation at The Gaslight, Café Rienzi, Gerde’s Folk City and the other Village clubs and coffee houses, some of which still cluster around that holy intersection.
That was a quarter of a century ago. Tonight the “contemporary” Bob Dylan is midtown with Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, playing the second of a three night engagement at Madison Square Garden, an ice-hockey facility that seats 22,000. Earlier that evening in his dressing room I’d mentioned the contest to him, saying I intended to drop by. He shook his head.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it? How would you feel if they were doing that about you?”
This is not something I often consider, Bob, but, well, flattered at first and then maybe a bit spooked. Don’t you like the flattery?
“No, because you do get spooked by it and so you can’t afford to get flattered by it. You can get trapped if you fall victim to flattery.”
It would have been hard to persuade Bob Dylan that there was more affection for the spirit of his music in that cramped little alternative comedy joint than there had been in the gusty reaches of the Garden. The Speakeasy audience may have been traditionalists to the point of pedantry—applauding a particularly well-observed imitation of Dylan’s harmonica work on Just Like A Woman and clicking their tongues in disapproval when a competitor tried to pass off Bringing It All Back Home material with Nashville Skyline intonation—but they were probably having a better time than those who’d paid twenty dollars and more to watch a distant silhouette act out the fiction of his rebirth for the umpteenth time.
* * *
BOB DYLAN came off his motorbike the difficult way on July 29th 1966. That’s twenty years ago. George Michael was in nappies. Every live performance he’s undertaken since then has been greeted as the beginning of a Return to Form. The 1986 True Confessions tour of America and Australasia—for even Dylan tours have brand names these days—is no exception.
Critics claim that his alliance with The Heartbreakers has magically invoked what Dylan called that “wild mercury sound” of Blonde On Blonde. In actual fact they no more resemble the men who played on Obviously Five Believers than The Smiths do. Instead they sound like many of the line-ups Dylan has taken on the road since he ceased working with The Band—loud, approximate and confused.
This is not necessarily their fault. Dylan is notorious for refusing to articulate what he wants. The musicians who worked with him i
n Dave Stewart’s North London studio late last year were amazed that anyone could spend two weeks leading a band without feeling the need to give instructions from time to time. Eric Clapton, an old friend, simply watches his hands for the changes and hopes for the best.
Ronnie Wood recalls the day before Live Aid when he and Keith Richards sat around with Dylan trying to familiarise themselves with his material. Dozens of songs were picked out and arranged. The next day, just a matter of minutes before they were due to follow Mick Jagger and Tina Turner on stage in front of the world’s largest television audience, Dylan announced that they would begin with the Ballad Of Hollis Brown. This was one of the few numbers they hadn’t rehearsed.
Ronnie hadn’t even heard it: “I thought, Hollis Brown? That’s cough medicine, isn’t it?” The rest you know.
* * *
IN STRICTLY COMMERCIAL TERMS Dylan had no more right to top that Philadelphia bill than The Hooters. Last year in New York CBS presented him with an award for lifetime’s sales of 35,000,000 records. Respectable but no more. Michael Jackson has sold more copies of Thriller alone than Bob Dylan has of his thirty albums over twenty five years. And yet when Jack Nicholson used the adjective “transcendent” you know you weren’t about to see Cyndi Lauper.
The three song shambles that followed would have finished most people’s careers. Dylan claims never to have had one. Then he compounded the debacle by suggesting that some of the money raised by the event should be diverted to the over-mortgaged farmers of the mid-West. To the British artists sitting watching the American telecast on a large screen in a West End nightclub this seemed like typically tasteless isolationism. Picking his words carefully, Bob Geldof later commented: “I find it hard to get as concerned about people losing their livelihoods as I do about people losing their lives.”
