by Jeff Burger
Reporter: When you said earlier that you don’t necessarily look up to celebrities or people who are currently in the business or whatever, you did get on very well with Bono in the early 1980s. Did you tell him that because of what you knew in Greenwich Village, say from [unintelligible] Tommy Maken [unintelligible], maybe he should be looking back at [unintelligible] music because it’s obviously in his blood.
Dylan: I could’ve. I don’t remember verbatim or time and place. If I’m being held responsible for telling him that, I don’t really know that I could deny that.
Reporter: Are you still eagerly looking for poets that you may not have heard of or read yet? Or do you go back to the ones that have interested you? Like maybe Rimbaud or somebody?
Dylan: [Pause.] I don’t really study poetry—
Reporter: I didn’t mean that. Are you still searching for new writers to—
Dylan: Well, yeah, but I just don’t think there are any. Because we’re living in a different time. The media is all-pervasive. What can a writer think of to write that you don’t see every day in a newspaper or on television?
Reporter: There are emotions that need to be expressed.
Dylan: Yeah, but the media’s moving people’s emotions anyway. When Rimbaud was writing, or William Blake or Shelley or Byron or any of those people, there probably wasn’t any media. Just bulletins. And you could feel free to put down anything that came into your mind.
Reporter: Bob, do you feel free when you are writing? You are writing in this time.
Dylan: Well, like I say, I don’t particularly sit down and write. My lines go into songs and they have a certain structure and they have to conform to a certain idiom and they’re not free-form, and there’s no point to trying to throw in some ideological type of thing . . . well, you can’t do it in a song.
Reporter: You’ve done it.
Dylan: If I’ve done it, I did it de facto. But I’ve never intentionally started out with that in mind. Maybe some others have, but I haven’t.
Reporter: But you think that TV and the media have killed poetry and literature—
Dylan: Oh, absolutely. Because even literature is written for an audience. Everybody’s not Kafka—sit down and write something that you don’t want anybody to see. Most people want people to read it. They want a person’s reaction. They want some type of acceptance.
Reporter: All writers have wanted that?
Dylan: Yeah, of course. But the media is doing that for everybody now. And movies and TV. You can’t see any more horrific things than you see on the media. Especially in the news, which is showing people absolutely everything they’ve ever even dreamed about. Even thoughts that they might think and suppress forever. They’ll see it in the media so you can’t suppress those things anymore. What’s a writer to do if every idea is exposed in the media before he can get to it or let it evolve? What’s a writer gonna write about?
Reporter: How do you react to that?
Dylan: Well, it’s a science-fiction world. We’re living in a world that Disney has conquered. Disney is science fiction. Theme parks. Trendy streets. It’s all science fiction. So I would say if a writer has got something to say, he would have to do it in that—
Reporter: Outside of the real world?
Dylan: That is the real world. Science fiction has become the real world. Whether we’ve realized it or not, it has.
Reporter: In the liner notes to World Gone Wrong, you were talking about I’ll show you the real alternative lifestyle, the agrarian one. Do you think that’s one of the solutions, perhaps?
Dylan: I think so, but it’s quite difficult with corporate entities paying farmers not to grow things. It becomes a problem.
Reporter: Is that one of the issues that still moves you enough to—
Dylan: Well, yeah. I’m partial to the land, so . . .
Reporter: In the same liner notes he’s referring to in World Gone Wrong, you talk about the new Dark Ages in the contemporary world.
Dylan: Well, the Stone Age, maybe I put it that way. We talked about the ages before, the Golden Age, which was I guess the Age of Homer. And then we got the Silver Age. And you got the Bronze Age. You have the Heroic Age someplace in there. And then we’re living in what people call the Iron Age. But we could be living in the Stone Ages.
Reporter: Living in the Silicon Age.
Dylan: Exactly. [Laughter.] Silicon Valley.
Reporter: Do you go on the Internet?
Dylan: I’m afraid to go on the Internet. I’m afraid some pervert’s gonna lure me somewhere.
[Laughter.]
Reporter: Don’t you think that the emotions and the fears, and love and religion and the basic emotional feelings that humans have, are the same since the Romans or the Egyptians? Pretty much people look for the same thing. People look for a connection to another human being and connection to a higher being.
Dylan: Probably, but everybody knew their role and their place. Their class system was different in the Roman Age—
Reporter: Was that good?
Dylan: I don’t know; I wasn’t there. [Laughter.] You know it. You especially. ’Cause you weren’t there with me. [Laughter.]
Reporter: And I am Roman.
Dylan: Exactly.
Reporter: There seems to be an apocalyptic dimension to your work. The end is nigh. You sing, “If the Bible is right, the world will explode” in “Things Have Changed” [A song from the film Wonder Boys. —Ed.] and “People are crazy and times are strange.” Is this a particularly bad time we’re living in, beside it being the Stone Age?
Dylan: I don’t know. I mean, who knows?
Reporter: Do you go to religion for comfort? Do you go to some meditative state?
Dylan: Well, I try. [Laughter.] I mean, who would I be if I didn’t try?
Reporter: Do you read the Bible?
Dylan: Of course. Who doesn’t?
Reporter: Do you read Shakespeare?
Dylan: I do. Yeah.
Reporter: Your records are referring a lot to old lines from old movies. Empire Burlesque. Did you read those writers? [Dashiell] Hammett? [Raymond] Chandler?
Dylan: Did I read them? I don’t remember. I know what you mean but I think I just saw the movies.
Reporter: Do you listen to a lot of music now?
Dylan: Some. Yeah. Not any more than I ever did.
Reporter: Do you listen to any new music or is it all—
Dylan: I don’t know. Like who’s new?
Reporter: You did Stanley Brothers covers in your shows when I saw you in Horsens Theatre [in Denmark] last year. You played “I’m Ready to Go”—
Dylan: Me? Oh, yeah, but those aren’t new songs.
Reporter: I know. Those are old songs. But what is so special about the Stanley Brothers—
Dylan: It’s like the old thing, if somebody has to tell you then you’d never know.
Reporter: Talking about new music: Eminem . . . people tend to call him a poet. Do you think about this?
Dylan: I wouldn’t know anything about that.
Reporter: You don’t pay attention to hip-hop and soul? Do you recognize maybe a sort of folk quality to the storytelling? In the storytelling sense—Eminem is a good example. Some of the people will actually tell their life stories or reflect. Chuck D said that hip-hop is the CNN of music.
Dylan: Beats me. It never really occurred to me to pay attention to whatever is supposed to be going on.
Reporter: Sometimes when you’re standing with your guitar onstage it reminds me of somebody old: Elvis Presley poses from 1955, ’56. How do you react to that?
Dylan: No. Is that a compliment or—
Reporter: Yeah, it’s a compliment. But Elvis had a strong influence on you—
Dylan: He did. Growing up he did.
Reporter: He had a beautiful recording of your song “Tomorrow Is a Long Time.” Do you remember how you reacted to that?
Dylan: Oh, well, what can you say? When somebody like that records a so
ng I’m sure any songwriter would feel intensely gratified.
Reporter: Would you say that there’s a lineage? Somebody said that Elvis freed the body, Bob Dylan freed the mind.
Reporter: Bruce Springsteen [said that].
Dylan: Freed the mind? Well, it’s good to be liberated from whatever. [Laughs.] We should all feel that way.
Reporter: Did you play this record to your son Jacob?
Dylan: I think he got it maybe from one of his brothers but I’m not sure. I’ve been traveling for a while.
Reporter: One more Elvis question. Did you meet Elvis?
Dylan: I never did meet him. That’s what I’m supposed to say.
[Laughter.]
Reporter: Why aren’t you playing any new songs from Love and Theft live yet?
Dylan: Well, there’s no point to it because—
Reporter: Not tomorrow?
Dylan: No way. You won’t hear any of those songs.
Reporter: There’ll be twelve people in the audience who know those songs.
Dylan: Exactly.
[Laughter.]
Reporter: But some of the old folk songs that you played probably not more than twelve people in the audience have heard.
Dylan: That’s true.
Reporter: So what’s the difference?
Dylan: There is a difference. I’m not really free to say it right now but if you know the songs on this record and you know the songs that nobody’s heard before, then you would know how to tell the difference.
Reporter: There’s almost a religious feeling within your hard-core fans about you. How do you feel about that?
Dylan: I don’t really feel like I have any hard-core fans. I mean, I just don’t. There’s some people that do. I really just don’t. We have a few people who see an abundance of my shows but we don’t think of them as hard-core fans.
Reporter: But the religious feeling?
Dylan: Well, what religion are they? If they are, what sacrifices do they make and to who? Do they sacrifice, these hard-core religious fans? If they do, then we have hard-core religious fans. And I would like to know where and when they do make their sacrifices ’cause I want to be there.
[Laughter.]
Reporter: Somebody once told me that your collected work is like the Bible, because everything is in there somewhere.
Dylan: Well, that goes without saying.
[Laughter.]
Reporter: A short while ago, I had an interview with Leonard Cohen in which he told me that claiming to himself the fact of being a poet was too much of a burden and too much responsibility. Do you agree with that in your case?
Dylan: I know what he was trying to say, and he’s right.
Reporter: There are quite a few books published about you. Do you read biographies about you?
Dylan: I haven’t read any since that Bob Shelton book [No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan] . . . and I knew him. I don’t know these other people.
Reporter: Did you like the Shelton book?
Dylan: It’s difficult reading about oneself because in your own mind things really didn’t go that way, they don’t appear that way . . . it seems like you’re reading about other people. If it’s going to be fictitious, well, then where is all the good stuff?
Reporter: Have you had any temptation to write about—
Dylan: Me? Yeah, I have. And I will.
Reporter: Are you in the process of doing that?
Dylan: Mm-hmm.
Reporter: They just translated Tarantula [Dylan’s prose poetry collection, written in 1965 and 1966] in French, which is a scary concept.
Dylan: Mm-hmm.
Reporter: The ambition of being a poet that writes as opposed to a song-and-dance man . . . did you get it out of the way with Tarantula? Was that something that you sort of said, “I’ve done that”?
Dylan: Oh . . . things were running wild at that point and it never was my intention to write a book. . . . I had a manager who, when asked, “Well, he writes all these songs. What else does he write?” might’ve said, “What do you got?” And they said, “Well, does he write books?” And he might’ve said, “Of course he does.” And they said, “Well, we would like to publish one.” I think it was one of those kind of things where he arranged the whole thing and then it was up to me to write the book. It was never anything that I consciously set out to do. But he did that on different occasions. He had me on a television show being an actor whereas I didn’t know anything about it until the day I appeared. I thought I was gonna sing. These things would happen back in the early part of the last century.
[Laughter.]
Reporter: It’s a long time ago, isn’t it?
Dylan: Ages ago.
Reporter: You just did a TV sitcom in America. Dharma & Greg, I think. [“Play Lady Play,” first broadcast October 12, 1999. —Ed.]
Dylan: I did.
Reporter: Why?
Dylan: I don’t know. I wasn’t doing anything and I knew the guy who was writing it.
Reporter: Was it fun?
Dylan: Yeah. Why wouldn’t it have been?
Reporter: There was a rumor about you doing a variety show on television.
Dylan: Just a rumor.
Reporter: ’Cause that seemed like the craziest thing.
Dylan: I know.
[Laughter.]
Reporter: The thing that you’re writing now—is that a sort of a memoir?
Dylan: It is.
Reporter: Are you having any plans for publication of that?
Dylan: Mm-hmm.
Reporter: Is it coming quite soon?
Dylan: I think it will be published as I’m told in an article form but as a book. But articles because they’re ongoing and that’s about as much as—
Reporter About your own life.
Dylan: Yeah.
Reporter: Is that the only thing you’re writing now? Are you thinking of writing any fiction?
Dylan: No. I’m not writing any fiction.
Reporter: To come back to George Harrison, now that you’re here in Europe, are you gonna visit him?
Dylan: I don’t think I’m gonna have time but I probably will be eventually trying to see him when he gets back home or something.
Reporter: Does the fact that you wrote your own memoirs have an influence on the songs you play onstage?
Dylan: Well, that’s interesting that you say that because a lot of the memoirs, they use as a starting point certain songs. I find that that’s a good way to unlock a lot of memories.
Reporter: Are you writing on the road?
Dylan: I’ll write ideas but I won’t really develop ’em on the road. But I’ll write big blocks of where I want to get to.
Reporter: But you have not read any of the biographies after Robert Shelton?
Dylan: Well, I don’t know. Have there been any?
Reporter: Oh, yes.
Dylan: I’ll have to see. I’m not aware there were any.
Reporter: Why do you feel the time is right now for you to reflect on your past? Or were you preparing this years ago?
Dylan: You know, in this kind of stuff that I’m writing, I think it was just finding the right way to get into it rather than make it some kind of self-serving story of my particular past. It doesn’t come off that way. Well, it comes off that way but it’s dissimilar in a lot of ways. I can do it because I’m a famous person. So I use that fame. Because a lot of the things I write about other people know about, anyway. So, with a person like myself, the process of doing it this way works.
Reporter: Do you find it exhilarating, this writing, as opposed to the more deconstructed way of writing songs that you were describing?
Dylan: No, I don’t really think about it one way or another. I’m not making a real attempt to do this. I just do it almost in spare time.
Reporter: Is there any phase in your life that you see as a very difficult phase?
Dylan: I’m sure there’ve been many but—
Reporter: The
most difficult?
Dylan: Oh, man. [Long pause.] There have been a lot of tricky parts where you have to assume another character in order to survive.
Reporter: What part are you thinking of? What years?
Dylan: Well, basically you have to surrender your ambitions at a certain point in order to get to where you need to be.
Aide to Dylan: We’re going to have time for just a few more questions.
Dylan: That was a good one.
[Laughter.]
Reporter: What kind of ambition did you have to surrender?
Dylan: [Laughs.] Now that’s what you’re gonna have to find out.
[Laughter.]
Reporter: In one of those books or articles, it said that you are probably happier in the tour bus than in any of your seventeen homes. Is that correct?
Dylan: Well, the buses . . . yeah, they’re becoming quite luxurious now. I’m pretty happy anywhere. As far as happy goes, as far as feeling at home goes, I can’t say I don’t feel at home most anywhere. I feel at home at home and I feel it when I’m not there. It’s not like I’m longing for anything that’s not presently where I’m at.
Reporter: What’s it like being Bob Dylan nowadays? Is it easier than it was before?
Dylan: I’m not the one to ask. That’s a philosophical question for philosophical matters.
Reporter: Ever try being someone else?
Dylan: I’m sure. But we all try to be someone else when we’re starting from point zero.
Reporter: Bob, you mentioned earlier on that some of the stuff from the past you don’t really want to listen to that much. You don’t go back and listen to your old albums. Yet this autobiographical stuff you’re writing, the journals or whatever, you say the entry is the sounds, in which case you’re being forced to go back. It’s like somebody getting their greatest hits together.
Dylan: Well, I’m only looking at it from an angle that maybe it’s never occurred to me before to look at it. A lot of the things that happen to us, we just seem to go through without ever wondering if there’s a purpose to go from this to that. Or why did this happen? Could this have happened if that didn’t happen? And if this seemed so bad at the time, why it led to something so beneficial in the long run. So it’s written from a variety of angles, really. And it interests me to write it. But I’m not painstakingly doing it, no.
