Dylan on Dylan

by Jeff Burger

  I can clearly remember this callow 17-year-old playing Spanish Harlem Incident on the school’s mahogany-panelled Ferguson gramophone and then telling us that with this album, Another Side Of Bob Dylan, the artist had moved on and matured, leaving protest music behind him for good. I felt vaguely cheated. So it had all scarpered already, before I’d even got my denim cap.

  Nobody in popular music has been measured in such a relentlessly chronological fashion as Dylan. Every review harks back to the last album. Ever since 1964 somebody somewhere has been wistfully referring to the “Dylan of old.” Some said it was all over before he’d made his first record. And still people are enquiring where he’s been and where he’s going as if Bob Dylan has a list of tasks to discharge in his lifetime and we’re worried that he might not get them all done.

  “I don’t know if I’ll still be doing this in twenty years’ time. Twenty years ago I couldn’t have imagined myself still doing it now. Actually I could if you don’t think in terms of time. I try not to think in terms of time; years, minutes, hours and all that sort of thing. It’s destructive for me to do that.”

  In actual fact, when people in the music business talk about time, what they’re actually discussing is fashion. Pop stars aspire, above all things, to stay contemporary. It’s this very prospect that Bob Dylan views with the most horror. Talking to him about the vicissitudes of the British music scene is like trying to explain the tax system of a distant planet. He doesn’t understand and he doesn’t care to either.

  Bob Dylan reckons the proudest achievement of his entire career was to introduce the name of Woody Guthrie to a wider audience. He says, what the hell, if he were to remake Highway 61 tomorrow nobody would recognise it. And what if they did? What would they say then? What’s a simple folk singer to do?

  If there does need to be an argument for Bob Dylan it was provided last year by Biograph, an impeccably compiled and annotated five record box set that put All Along The Watchtower next to Solid Rock; Every Grain Of Sand next to Visions Of Johanna; and Caribbean Wind next to Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?. It proved that this was a singer who’d always lived by his own lights, more concerned with the mystery of a moment than the need to make a statement; funnier, acuter, more spiritual and more musically sophisticated than most of us had ever guessed. And there wasn’t a single song among the 52 recordings [Actually, fifty-three. —Ed.] that sounded even remotely dated. Needless to say Dylan denies having any part of it: “I didn’t put it together and I haven’t been very excited about it.”

  Instead he’s spent the last year or so recording in studios all over the world with a bewildering variety of musicians and then shelving most of the results, boxing to keep fit and then smoking two packs of Kools a day to achieve the opposite effect, visiting Moscow at the invitation of the Soviet Writers’ union and then professing to be perplexed with the experience: “To tell you the truth I didn’t understand too much of it because I didn’t understand the languages too well. The peculiar thing was there wasn’t anybody at this particular poetry reading that I figured had even heard of me a little bit.”

  There was, however, an invitation to return with his guitar: “They said, don’t do what Elton John did. He played 3,000-seat halls and the only people who got in to see him were bureaucratic people and there are a lot of bureaucrats there. It’s really spooky.”

  What about the current squabbles between America and Russia?

  “I don’t know why America has got this problem with Russia because didn’t the Russians finance the American Revolution? I’m sure they did. Who else would have? They finance revolutions all over the world, right? They did it then too. I think we ought to be grateful to them rather than trying to fucking blow them off the planet. But that’s just my opinion and I’m not running for nothing.”

  Surely somebody ought to run for office?

  “I don’t know if there needs to be any office.”

  What about your fellow entertainer, the one in the White House?

  “I don’t know. I’ve seen a lot of Presidents come and go. I like the King and Queen idea. I like the idea of somebody . . .”

  “. . . somebody you can trust?”

  “Yea,” he laughs. “Somebody you can look up to.”

  A queue is building up in the corridor. There are familiar raddled Manhattan faces like Andy Warhol and Ric Ocasek alongside the newer Hollywood generation represented by Timothy Hutton, Debra Winger and Maria McKee. Judy Collins, who hit Greenwich Village at the same time as Dylan, is there, looking faintly matronly and talking about Farm Aid II and “the movement” as if it were still 1962. She is charming, well-mannered and completely lacking in the mystique that helped her old friend “Bobby” make it to where the air is rare. Everybody—Tom Petty, Ronnie Wood, even Dylan’s girlfriend Carole Childs—waits to be admitted to the presence. [Carole Childs was a Geffen Records executive with whom Dylan reportedly had a long affair; be that as it may, he had secretly married backup singer Carolyn Dennis only weeks before the concerts discussed here. —Ed.] They all have one thing in common—they’re all scared of him.

  * * *

  BACK AT THE SPEAKEASY the party is in full swing. Some misguided soul has embarked on an ill-advised version of When The Ship Comes In and the crowd up by the bar at the back are making their own entertainment.

  “Goddamn, you’ll never guess who’s in the bathroom!”

  “The legendary Bob Dylan?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Excuse me. I’d like three Heinekens and a gin and tonic for the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan . . .”

  “Hey mister. Did anybody ever tell you you didn’t look a bit like the enigmatic Bob Dylan?”

  “Could you call a cab for the spokesman of a generation?”

  DYLAN ON

  Whether Blood on the Tracks Concerns His Divorce

  “Yeah. Somewhat about that. But I’m not going to make an album and lean on a marriage relationship. There’s no way I would do that, any more than I would write an album about some lawyers’ battles that I had. There are certain subjects that don’t interest me to exploit. . . . I’ve got to think I can do better than that. It’s not going to positively help anybody to hear about my sadness. Just another hard-luck story.”

  —from interview with Bill Flanagan,

  Written in My Soul, November 1986

  DYLAN ON

  Recovering from His July 1966 Motorcycle Accident

  “Spent a week in the hospital, then they moved me to this doctor’s house in town. In his attic. Had a bed up there in the attic with a window lookin’ out. Sara stayed there with me. I just remember how bad I wanted to see my kids. I started thinkin’ about the short life of trouble. How short life is. I’d just lay there listenin’ to birds chirping. Kids playing in the neighbor’s yard or rain falling by the window. I realized how much I’d missed. Then I’d hear the fire engine roar, and I could feel the steady thrust of death that had been constantly looking over its shoulder at me. [Pause.] Then I’d just go back to sleep.”

  —from interview with Sam Shepard, Esquire, July 1987

  DYLAN ON

  Mick Jagger

  “I love Mick Jagger. I mean, I go back a long ways with him, and I always wish him the best. But to see him jumping around like he does—I don’t give a shit in what age, from Altamont to RFK Stadium—you don’t have to do that, man. It’s still hipper and cooler to be Ray Charles, sittin’ at the piano, not movin’ shit. And still getting across, you know? Pushing rhythm and soul across. It’s got nothin’ to do with jumping around. I mean, what could it possibly have to do with jumping around? . . . Showbiz—well, I don’t dig it. I don’t go to see someone jump around.”

  —from interview with Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone, November 5, 1987

  DYLAN ON

  His Influences and What’s Important

  “I’d like to thank a couple of people who are here tonight who helped me a great deal coming up. Little Richard, who’s sitting ove
r there. I don’t think I’d have even started out without listening to Little Richard. And Alan Lomax, who is over there somewhere, too. I spent many nights at his apartment house, visiting and meeting all kinds of folk music people which I never would have come in contact with. And I want to thank [the Beach Boys’] Mike Love for not mentioning me. [Love had just made an acceptance speech during which he’d criticized various other musicians. —Ed.] I play a lot of dates every year, too, and peace, love, and harmony is greatly important indeed, but so is forgiveness.”

  —from acceptance speech at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York, January 20, 1988

  DYLAN ON

  His Concert Tours

  “I’ve always loved to travel and play my songs, meet new people and see different places. I love to roll into town in the early morning and walk the deserted streets before anybody gets up. Love to see the sun come up over the highway. Then of course, there’s playing on the stage in front of live people, feeling hearts and minds moving. Everybody don’t get to do that. Touring to me has never been any kind of hardship. It’s a privilege.”

  —from interview with Edna Gundersen, USA Today, July 20, 1988

  DYLAN ON

  Why He Doesn’t Talk Much in Concert

  “It’s not stand-up comedy or a stage play. Also, it breaks my concentration to have to think of things to say or to respond to the crowd. The songs themselves do the talking. My songs do, anyway.”

  —from interview with Edna Gundersen, USA Today, September 21, 1989

  DYLAN ON

  What His Father Taught Him

  “Well, my daddy . . . he didn’t leave me a lot, but what he told me was this. He did say, ‘Son . . .’ He said . . . [Ten-second pause, a little nervous laughter.] He said so many things, you know? [Laughter.] He said, ‘You know, it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you. And if that happens, God will always believe in your own ability to mend your own ways.’”

  —from acceptance speech for Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award,

  Radio City Music Hall, New York, February 20, 1991

  RADIO INTERVIEW

  Elliot Mintz | May 1991| Westwood One (US)

  Elliot Mintz, a DJ turned public relations man, was serving as Dylan’s spokesman by the late 1980s. In early 1991, he interviewed Dylan in Los Angeles for a three-hour special that aired on the Westwood One radio network. The conversation was wide-ranging but the impetus for it was The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1–3 (Rare and Unreleased), 1961–1991, which hit the stores on March 26, 1991.

  The Westwood One broadcast interspersed material from Mintz’s 1991 interview not only with music but with clips from earlier conversations, including a 1987 Q&A with Mintz and the 1984 discussion with Bert Kleinman and Artie Mogull that appears earlier in this book. I’ve done my best to limit the transcript that follows to the 1991 interview but because the program was so heavily edited, I can offer no guarantees about exactly when or in what order the quotes originated. —Ed.

  Elliot Mintz: A couple of weeks ago, on a rainy California night, I sat down with Bob at a Los Angeles hotel, where we embarked on an evening of conversation. It began like this.

  Bob Dylan: When you did your first interview with John [Lennon], was it like this? You did interviews with him all over the world, correct?

  Mintz: All over the world—

  Dylan: You could have been in Osaka, Japan, at a hotel.

  Mintz: And I was.

  Dylan: Like this.

  Mintz: And I interviewed him once in this hotel.

  Dylan: In a bungalow?

  Mintz: Yes.

  Dylan: We got it, let’s go. [He strums guitar.]

  Mintz: When you listen to the Bootleg collection, you hear a demo for “Like a Rolling Stone.” Not a demo but, obviously, you’re playing it for other musicians in a studio and it’s done as a waltz. The first and obvious question: when Rolling Stone did a list of the hundred best songs ever written, “Like a Rolling Stone” was way up there. You responded to a questionnaire of theirs where you talked about the song. Is it fair to say that you would consider that one of the best songs, if not the best song, you’ve ever written?

  Dylan: Oh, to me it’s not any better or any worse than any of the other songs I’ve written in that period. It just happened to be one of the ones that was on the Hit Parade and it’s managed to survive because of that.

  Mintz: But you don’t have any particular affection for that song?

  Dylan: Oh, yeah, to me it’s alive.

  Mintz: In the past twelve to eighteen months, the highest cultural award in France, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, Lifetime Achievement Award Grammy . . .

  Dylan: Yeah, but you’re not talking about Nobel Peace Prizes. Come on, really . . .

  * * *

  Dylan: [Regarding his Whitmark demos.] You sit there in a room with a guitar or a piano, and there’s a tape recorder and then you just sing your song into the recorder. In that particular room, they had photographs up, they had boxes stacked up at the sides of the wall, and mimeographed songs, and photographs of people with cigars in their mouth at parties. And formal photographs of earlier people who started these things.

  Mintz: Tin Pan Alley.

  Dylan: Well, no, it wasn’t that. Tin Pan Alley, wasn’t that that Brill Building thing at the front? It was in the same neighborhood. It seems like so long ago, don’t it?

  Mintz: It was thirty years.

  Dylan: I had to write what I wanted to sing because what I wanted to sing nobody else was writing.

  Mintz: “Who Killed Davey Moore,” the song on the Bootleg collection, is played with a tremendous power, tremendous strength, tremendous indignation, and a bit of anger as well. Can you recall the circumstances under which you created that?

  Dylan: No, but it was done at the same time as the “Hattie Carroll” song. It’s like those two songs kinda went together. One got left off the record for some reason. Maybe those songs were done the same week, the same night even. They’re very similar.

  Mintz: Here are two songs where the question was always one of blame.

  Dylan: Blame?

  Mintz: Yeah, blame. “Hattie Carroll was just a maid in the kitchen.”

  Dylan: Well, but to me those songs were never about blame. They were more about justice than anything else.

  Mintz: “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” You know that there are an awful lot of people who spend a great deal of time looking for those Bob Dylan lines, just those great lines. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

  Dylan: Like a treasure hunt or something, right?

  Mintz: Like a treasure hunt.

  Dylan: Yeah, like you get a map and go off and find the treasure somewhere.

  Mintz: Or you hear things in your brain and it kinda goes back and forth.

  Dylan: Exactly, yeah.

  Mintz: And this particular tune has got a lot of those in ’em. I’m sure it must be very, very boring to you to hear your lines quoted back to you, but for the listeners . . . Does it, by the way? That’s an assumption. Does it bore you to hear your own lines quoted back to you?

  Dylan: Not really.

  Mintz: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” or “twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.” “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” how fast did it come to you? Do you have any recollection of where you were when you wrote that song? How it came down? If it was all done in one sitting? Any recall at all?

  Dylan: No. Something like that, you can’t be sure how much of it was made up beforehand, how much you made up right on the spot. A lot of it could have been made up right there.

  Mintz: When you say “right there,” do you mean at the recording studio?

  Dylan: I mean right there, during it.

  Mintz: Do you have any recollection about “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” creating the song?

  Dylan: Not really, just maybe the b
and that was playing the song, the atmosphere where it was done. It was just thrown out with a bunch of other stuff. It was kicked around.

  Mintz: Do you ever just tire of having to be Dylan, of having to subject yourself to all the stuff that Bob Dylan has to be subjected to?

  Dylan: Well, Bob Dylan doesn’t really have to subject himself to anything more than me.

  Mintz: Yes, he does.

  Dylan: You mean like this interview?

  Mintz: Yes, that would be one example.

  Dylan: All right. Yeah, it’s important to encourage me to do things, if that’s the question. Everyone needs some encouragement to do something. It’s hard for me to start my own motor, but outside of that, there’s not really that much of a problem.

  Mintz: I have a couple of Bob Dylan quotes that I would like to get your comments on, if anything comes through. First quote: “The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands on the Blonde on Blonde album. It’s that thin, that wild, mercury sound. It’s metallic, it’s bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That’s my particular sound.” First of all, did you say that?

  Dylan: No, it doesn’t sound like anything that would have come out of my mouth.

  Mintz: I was quoting from Playboy magazine, the last interview that was done with you.

  Dylan: Well, there you go. They could have just—

  Mintz: So, first of all, you are not acknowledging that the quote is—

  Dylan: Look, with me they do all kinds of things. If people can’t have an interview—God knows why they would want one—but if they can’t have one and they must have one, they’ll write their own on me. They’ve done it. That’s not a crime to do that. So when you say this was attributed to me, it may be or it may not be true.