by Jeff Burger
It seems like we’re going in a straight line, but then you start seeing things that you’ve seen before. Haven’t you experienced that?
It seems we’re going around in circles.
When you look ahead now, do you still see a Slow Train Comin’?
When I look ahead now, it’s picked up quite a bit of speed. In fact, it’s going like a freight train now.
DYLAN ON
Time Out of Mind
“Some people, when it comes to me, extrapolate only the lyrics from the music. But, in this case, the music itself has just a far-reaching effect, and it was meant to be that way. It’s definitely a performance record instead of a poetic literary type of thing. You can feel it rather than think about.”
—from Columbia Records press release, July 10, 1997
DYLAN ON
Jimmie Rodgers
“When I was growing up, I had a record called Hank Snow Sings Jimmie Rodgers, and that’s the first clue I had that Jimmie was unique. The songs were different than the norm. They had more of an individual nature and an elevated conscience, and I could tell that these songs were from a different period of time. I was drawn to their power. I like his songs, anyway, because on the surface their lyrics seem really funny and bright, but underneath, they could be alarmingly dark and dreary.”
—from interview with Nick Krewen, Toronto Star, September 8, 1997
DYLAN ON
Performing in Concert
“A lot of people don’t like the road, but it’s as natural to me as breathing. I do it because I’m driven to do it, and I either hate it or love it. I’m mortified to be on the stage, but then again, it’s the only place where I’m happy. It’s the only place you can be who you want to be. You can’t be who you want to be in daily life. I don’t care who you are, you’re going to be disappointed in daily life. But the cure-all for all that is to get on the stage, and that’s why performers do it.”
—from interview with Jon Pareles, New York Times, September 28, 1997
DYLAN ON
The Life-Threatening Fungal Infection He Suffered in 1997
“It was intolerable pain, where it affects your breathing every waking moment. I didn’t have any philosophical profound thoughts. The pain stopped me in my tracks and fried my mind. I was so sick my mind just blanked out. I’m getting better; that’s all I can say right now.”
—from interview with Edna Gundersen, USA Today, September 28, 1997
DYLAN ON
Growing Up in Minnesota in the 1950s
“Knife sharpeners would come down the street, and the coal man, too, and every once in a while a wagon would come through town with a gorilla in a cage or, I remember, a mummy under glass. People sold food off of carts, and it was a very itinerant place—no interstate highways yet, just country roads everywhere. There was an innocence about it all, and I don’t recall anything bad ever happening. That was the ’50s, the last period of time I remember as being idyllic.”
—from interview with Alan Jackson,
Times on Saturday (London), November 15, 1997
DYLAN ON
His Youthful Ambitions
“I knew growing up that I wanted to do something different than anybody else. I wanted to do something that no one else did or could do, and I wanted to do it better than anyone else had. I didn’t know where that was going to lead me, but where it did lead me was to folk music at a time when it was totally off the radar screen. Maybe there were 12 people in all of America who even heard of Woody Guthrie, Roscoe Holcomb, the Carter Family, Lead Belly—at least 12 people my age. They were free spirits who took chances, and I never wished to annul any of that spirit.”
—from interview with Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, December 14, 1997
DYLAN ON
Buddy Holly
“When I was about sixteen or seventeen years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory and I was three feet away from him and he looked at me. And I just have some kind of feeling that he was . . . I don’t know how or why but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.”
—from acceptance speech for Album of the Year Grammy for Time Out of Mind, Radio City Music Hall, New York, February 25, 1998
DYLAN ON
His Earlier Albums
“Records that were made in that day and age were all good. They all had some magic to them because the technology didn’t go beyond what the artist was doing. It was a lot easier to get excellence back in those days on a record than it is now. . . Those records seem to cast a long shadow. But how much of it is the technology and how much of it is the talent and influence, I really don’t know.”
—from interview with Murray Engleheart, Guitar World, March 1999
NO DIRECTION HOME OUTTAKES
2000 (interview) | Broadcast Date Unknown | WBAI-FM (New York)
Some excellent interview material, including much about Dylan’s early years in Minnesota, wound up on the cutting-room floor during the making of Martin Scorsese’s fine 2005 Dylan biopic, No Direction Home. The following are Dylan’s answers to questions posed sometime in 2000 by his manager, Jeff Rosen. (WBAI’s recording of this conversation does not include the questions.) —Ed.
I was playing guitar pretty early on, actually. Maybe when I was about ten or eleven. Had a guitar in the house that my father bought. And I found something else in there that had kind of mystical overtones. The people who had lived in the house previous to that time, they had left some of their furniture, and among the furniture was a great big mahogany radio. It was like a jukebox. And it had a 78 turntable when you opened up the top. And I opened it up one day and there was a record on there, a country record. It was a song called “Drifting Too Far from Shore,” but I think it was the Stanley Brothers; if not, Bill Monroe. I played the record, and it just brought me into a different world.
And when I began listening to the radio, I began to get bored being there. But up until I heard stuff coming over the radio, I don’t remember really being bored. I don’t remember the name of the station that came out of Mexico. There was some station that came out of Mexico, and then there was one that came out of some place in Louisiana. I don’t remember the call letters, but those stations would come on toward the later part of the evening. And the earlier part of the evening would be the radio shows like Fibber McGee and Molly and Inner Sanctum and FBI and those kind of things. I don’t ever remember being entranced by anything on the radio really, except maybe when Grand Ol’ Opry came on.
* * *
OK, so what was the entertainment around town? Well, I’ll tell you who the heroes were. Gorgeous George, the wrestler, he’d come through maybe three, four times a year with his troupe. There’d be boxing shows. The Flanagan Brothers [professional boxers from Minnesota] were top draws; we always watched them. Bobo Olson, a middleweight champ, came through. And then there were country western shows, somebody like Slim Whitman or Hank Snow, a lot of those guys. Ferlin Huskey, he’d be in ’em. A lot of spangled suits. And then the carny shows would come through, and there’d be the stock-car races and bands playing in the park in the summertime. And small Big Bands kinda music, pop music from the ’40s and ’50s, dance bands playing stuff like “Begin the Beguine,” and then I started listening to the radio and hearing songs which were different, like “Mule Train” and “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky.” Songs in a minor key. And when rock and roll came in, it seemed to be a kind of an extension of all that and it was accessible to me so I kind of jumped on that bandwagon and rolled on down the road.
* * *
At that time, my favorite rock and roll performer was the inimitable Little Richard. And I played all of his songs. They were easy enough to play and I could scream them out. Eddie Cochran songs, Gene Vincent stuff, we played just about all those songs that we heard, that’d come across on the pop radio stations. But then I was also listening to the more deeper stations that came across late in the evening.
* * *
The circuses came through. There were tent shows and carny midways. There was an awful lot of stock-car races, like the old cars with the country stock-car races—those were popular. I think it was the last days of carny shows. We’d see anything from the snake woman to pygmies to, God, the fat man, the snake woman, and some pretty risqué shows. Oh, risqué’d be hard-core burlesque. And guys in blackface. You’d see that, too. George Washington in blackface. And Napoleon wearing blackface. Weird Shakespearean things. People playing stuff that didn’t even make any sense at the time. But actually it did. I probably retained a lot of it because when I started writing songs, I started subliminally writing a lot of songs which I probably wouldn’t have even attempted to even think about unless I had some concept of that type of reality of mixing genres and ages and different historical figures.
As far as being bad, it was so cold that law and order prevailed. But there was very little law and order. I think our town had maybe three policemen.
* * *
I did get to see Woody [Guthrie]. I got the impression I was one of the few people if not the only person that came to visit him. I visited him at the Morristown [New Jersey] hospital. I think it was an insane asylum. Maybe he was misdiagnosed at that time. I don’t know. But it was obvious to me that he was in control of his mind. He asked me to bring him things. I was young and impressionable and I think I must have been shocked in some kind of way to find him where I found him.
* * *
I heard Lead Belly singing some “Becky Deem” or “Walk from East St. Louis” [Probably a reference to Jimmie Rodgers’s “Out on the Road.” — Ed.] with only “One Thin Dime.” I thought, I want to sing that. I don’t want to sing “Hound Dog” or whatever. I wanted to sing like Blind Lemon [Jefferson] song, like, “She’s got eyes like diamonds, hair like an Indian squaw.” [I thought], That’s what I want to sing. I want to sing that. I don’t want to listen to the popular radio anymore.
Folk music was delivering me something which was the way I always felt about life. And people. And institutions. And ideology. And it was just uncovering it all. And finding it all there.
Lonnie [Johnson, the blues and jazz artist] was playing at Folk City and I thought he was just great. He could play rings around anybody and he sang fantastic. One night he showed me something on the guitar that didn’t make any sense to me at the time. But it was a style of playing that was mathematically different than any other kind of way to play. This was just one of the ways that he knew how to play. He could play very intricately also. But he showed me this mathematical formula that worked anywhere on the scale. It didn’t mean anything to me at the time, and I never got to develop it until many, many years later. That’s about the only thing anybody ever taught me that was profound on the guitar, which I’ve been able to use in my songs.
* * *
You would have to make an impression on somebody. I picked that up from [Dave] Van Ronk. There was many, many singers who were good but they couldn’t focus their attention on anybody. So they couldn’t really get inside somebody’s head. So that person would be ambivalent towards them and not really care if they pass ’em by. But I learned you gotta be able to pin somebody down like where they couldn’t get away so easy. You have to make yourself memorable in some kinda way.
* * *
Café Wha. The place opened about noon and it would be nonstop entertainers, if you want to call them that, from noon until eight. Everyone played I think twenty minutes. I played with Freddy Neil, a guy who later wrote “Everyone’s Talkin’.” [Actually, “Everybody’s Talkin’.” —Ed.] He was a big star down there. He would play mostly chain-gang songs and popular blues-based ballads and maybe some calypso-type folk songs. And he was the ringmaster besides, so I played in his band all day, played the harmonica for him, and I fit in. I didn’t really learn much. I did that until about eight and they got fed and he would give me what he could. And the place was usually packed from twelve to eight with sailors or tourists and lunch-hour secretaries and people like that.
And then at eight, all the rest of the houses would open, like where you’d pass the basket and play. You had to be somewhat good to even play at those places. They had auditions but they didn’t pay you anything and you made what you could. But the place that did pay was the Gaslight. That was a tough place to get into for someone without a reputation. And the guy down there that was the star of the street at the time was Dave Van Ronk. I’d heard his records when I was in Twin Cities. I’d heard some compilation records that he was on, and I thought he was really great.
* * *
Folklore Center was where all the folk music in the world was happening. It was all going on there. Records and books and there weren’t any tapes then but instruments, dulcimers, and banjos, and autoharps and harmonica racks. I’d never seen a harmonica rack before, a real one. I was makin’ ’em out of a coat hanger. And records, of course. So it was a place to stay warm in the winter and just listen to records and learn stuff and meet all the folksingers that were coming in and out of town.
* * *
All these people were monumental performers. John Jacob Niles was just incredible. He sounded like an old woman, but like an old, scary woman out of a Shakespeare play with a high, piercing, eerie, wailing voice, and he had long, white hair and he played a strange instrument that I don’t think anybody’d ever seen. Something that maybe only came over from the old country and didn’t have many of them. That’s where I got the song “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” from listening to him play. He used to sing a song called “Go Away from My Window.” He used to play a bunch of eerie, spooky ballads and I only saw him a few times but he was highly impressive, left a lasting memory. Van Ronk himself was a colossal performer. He drove people crazy.
The New Lost City Ramblers played at schoolhouses and churches. They were never on the scene but I always made an attempt to see them. And I’d see the gospel shows. I’d go see Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Dixie Hummingbirds and Swan Silvertones, I heard a lot of Blind Willie Johnson in Sister Rosetta Tharpe and I thought if she wasn’t singing gospel, she would be a great blues singer. She was singing gospel blues. And she played electric hollow-body guitar. I just loved the way she sounded and with a driving rhythm.
But I’d never really seen who I’d wanted to see. I would have wanted to see Blind Willie Johnson a lot. Like, “The Holy Ghost is a mystery” [A line from Johnson’s “I’m Gonna Run to the City of Refuge.” —Ed.], that kind of thing. I thought he was the deepest singer but I’d only heard him on records. The Robert Johnson record at that time was astounding. I played it for Van Ronk, and Van Ronk was like, “Who’s this guy?” No one had heard of him before. That was an astounding record. What was astounding was just the sheer songwriting. I hadn’t heard that before. I hadn’t heard twelve-bar songs which could be each one identifiable in its own genre. And so many different rhythms that he’d set up just with his one guitar. I was pretty overwhelmed, actually.
* * *
I never listened to any of the records I made. Once we completed the record and it was released, I didn’t have any real reason to listen to them again and I never did. I never really thought they were perfect records in any kind of way. They weren’t well-produced. You can say what you will about pop music; all the pop records were extremely well-produced and my records weren’t well-produced. A lot of the sound on them was distorted. I always wanted to make the song come through in the best way possible. That’s all I was concerned with. So, therefore, the performances weren’t ideal on any of the records that I made.
* * *
John Hammond. Yeah, he was [laughs] . . . John Hammond. He was kind of like a Damon Runyon character. [Runyon, a journalist, was also known for his short stories about the world of Broadway. —Ed.] One of these old Broadway guys. Buzz-cut haircut. Conservative dress, little narrow tie, well-schooled in all the music that we all loved. Before I left that day, he gave me some records . . . he gave me the Robert Johns
on record. At the time, Columbia was putting it out and no one had ever heard any Robert Johnson songs. Maybe they were on a few of the reissue things here and there but they had ’em all in the vaults and they issued that record called King of the Delta Blues. He gave me one of the first copies of it. So that was early 1961 probably. And he gave me Bessie Smith records and Charlie Christian and a lot of stuff that he thought would interest me and then he told me, come back at a certain time to record.
It came to me that a producer really didn’t do that much—Hammond didn’t, the one that followed him didn’t, the one after that didn’t. After a certain period of time, the producer, whoever they were, assumed that I would bring in a preconceived song, which meant that they didn’t have to do that. Usually a producer in charge of a session is in charge of everything, including the song. Well, if an artist is writing his own song, he doesn’t have to do that. So what does the producer do? Beats me. On my records, it was more important to have a good engineer, I would think.
* * *
I wrote a lot of songs in a quick amount of time. I could do that then, because the process was new to me. I felt like I’d discovered something no one else had ever discovered, and I was in a certain arena artistically that no one else had ever been in before, ever. Although I might have been wrong about that, considering some of the old troubadours who were in the days before recording but I thought that I needed to press on and get as far into it as I could.
