Dylan on Dylan

by Jeff Burger

  Reporter: When you’re looking back on your poetry, which ones do you think are the most successful at expressing Bob Dylan’s point of view?

  Dylan: You know, I never listen to them. I’m sure they’re all successful in their way and I’m sure they all have failures in their own way.

  Reporter: But you expressed great discontent with producers and when we talked about Love and Theft you expressed discontent with the way it was produced but some of them must hold up better than others in your own opinion even though you don’t listen to them that much.

  Dylan: I don’t listen to them because I never feel the songs have been perfected. I used to have a problem—I don’t anymore—with working on some record album where a song might have been recorded but I didn’t particularly think it had been recorded very well or the right way or the way I hear it in my mind or . . . for myriad reasons. And then the song as it exists gets out. People you trust make copies and they put it out for the public to hear, and I feel like that’s happened too much in my case with people we have no reason to distrust at the time. I’ve been asked, “How come you’re such a bad judge of your material? You don’t put the best stuff on your record.” Well, I don’t know who judges what the best stuff is, but I’m not judging the material. I would love to put certain things on. I just don’t think they were recorded right. And then once it gets out, I’m not really that keen on going in and rerecording it—except on this record that you all just heard.

  Reporter: “Mississippi.”

  Dylan: Yeah, we had that on the Time Out of Mind record but it wasn’t recorded particularly well, and thank God it never got out. [Alternate versions of “Mississippi” from the Time Out of Mind sessions did ultimately surface on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs. —Ed.] So we went and rerecorded it again but something like that would never have happened ten years ago. You’d have probably all heard the trash version of it. And I never would have rerecorded it.

  Reporter: You mean you take more care in—

  Dylan: Well, you just don’t trust anybody. It’s that simple.

  Reporter: Do you think sometimes a record needs a second chance? There was a remixed version of Street-Legal that came out two years ago. Do you think some of these albums were overlooked because they came out at a time when people were interested in something else than Bob Dylan?

  Dylan: Well, I don’t know about Street-Legal. There were probably other artists who were being featured in the media, and the cultural landscape was a little different back then, probably. I know that I’ve always been with the same record company. [Actually, Dylan left Columbia Records briefly; in 1974, the Asylum label released Planet Waves and Before the Flood. —Ed.] They tried everything to sell it; it probably wasn’t what people wanted to hear at that time.

  Reporter: You said about this [Love and Theft] record: it’s a greatest-hits album without the greatest hits.

  [Laughter.]

  Dylan: Yeah—yet. Well, you’re all gonna have to really even see about this particular album. It just might be a landmark album. I mean, we never know these things until much later than the event itself, even though it might be an invisible event that we’re talking about. However, you all in this room have the responsibility of saying what this record is and knowing that in ten years’ time, people are still gonna be writing about it. And not commenting on the record because the record will be set in stone at that time. But everything you all say, that’s what everybody’ll be commenting on.

  Reporter: It’s a great album, and I think most of the people here are enjoying listening.

  Dylan: Well, you’re gonna have to listen a whole lot more. Like you do those early albums.

  Reporter: You’re playing your songs onstage year after year. Do you feel that they change? That they are different each time you sing them?

  Dylan: Well, that goes back to what I said earlier. My records are undeveloped from day one. Basically, I sing a song and I strum it on the guitar. In recording technology, that’s called making demos. It’s no accident that other singers have had better hits with my songs than I have. Because they’ve sensed there’s a structure to them. But I have never been allowed to develop that structure working with slipshod producers or fakes or a bunch of non-entities. And so be it. But I was willing to allow that to happen because I was always able to go on stage and rectify it.

  Reporter: So the songs are getting better—

  Dylan: No, what I’m saying is that songs need structure, stratagems, codes, and stability. And then you can hang lyrics on . . . I mean, I’m speaking here as someone who sings a song that’s written. And when we transfer these songs to the stage, that’s where all that comes into play. They don’t come into play on a record because my cohorts at the time never really sought to develop any of that stuff. And I can’t do it at the time of recording because the song at the time is new to me. I’m more concerned with getting this lyric to fit into this frame. And does this line work here and can we change the key to make it work better or can we change the tempo? Can we change the dynamic of a tune? Can we use different syncopation? I’m more concerned with those things. I’m not concerned with what exactly is the structure and I’ve been disappointed because no one outside of myself has ever come in and given me one. All these people who claim to know my music and songs so well, they don’t have a clue.

  Aide to Dylan: We have time for one more question.

  Reporter: On this record, it seems like you have a real cohesive sound, a sort of Bob Wills or Spade Cooley type thing—

  Dylan: Let’s stop talking about Bob Wills! And Spade Cooley. Let’s put them on the pedestal where they belong and let’s stop.

  Reporter: I just mean there’s a lot of music going on. It feels very cohesive. It doesn’t feel collected.

  Dylan: You know what my comment is on that? It should. It should sound that way. It was intentionally delivered that way.

  Reporter: Is Love and Theft the best album you ever made?

  Dylan: I’ll tell you one thing: it’s the most current album I’ve ever made.

  [Laughter.]

  Aide to Dylan: Thank you all. [Applause.]

  Dylan: Now I’m gonna go see the Coliseum . . . Gentlemen, pleased to have met ya. Pleasure always.

  DYLAN ON

  His Marriages

  “I’ve been married a bunch of times. [Only two marriages are publicly known. —Ed.] I mean, I’ve never tried to hide that. I just don’t advertise my life. I write songs, I play on stage, and I make records. That’s it. The rest is not anybody’s business.”

  —from interview with Edna Gundersen, USA Today, September 10, 2001

  DYLAN ON

  His Destiny

  “I’ve had a God-given sense of destiny. This is what I was put on earth to do. Just like Shakespeare was gonna write his plays, the Wright Brothers were gonna invent an airplane, like Edison was gonna invent a telephone, I was put here to do this. I knew I was gonna do it better than anybody ever did it.”

  —from interview with Christopher John Farley, Time, September 17, 2001

  DYLAN ON

  Receiving His Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award

  “The only thing I remember about that whole episode, as long as you bring it up, was that I had a fever—like 104. I was extremely sick that night. Not only that, but I was disillusioned with the entire musical community and environment. If I remember correctly, the Grammy people called me months before then and said that they wanted to give me this Lifetime Achievement honor. Well, we all know that they give those things out when you’re old—when you’re nothing, a has-been. Everybody knows that, right? So I wasn’t sure whether it was a compliment or an insult.”

  —from interview with Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, November 22, 2001

  DYLAN ON

  Johnny Cash

  “Johnny was and is the North Star; you could guide your ship by him . . . There wasn’t much music media in the early Sixties, and Sing Out! was the magazine covering all
things folk in character. The editors had published a letter chastising me for the direction my music was going. Johnny wrote the magazine back an open letter telling the editors to shut up and let me sing, that I knew what I was doing. . . . the letter meant the world to me. I’ve kept the magazine to this day.”

  —statement on the death of Johnny Cash, September 2003

  DYLAN ON

  Songwriting

  “There are so many ways you can go at something in a song. One thing is to give life to inanimate objects. Johnny Cash is good at that. He’s got the line that goes, ‘A freighter said . . . “She’s been here, but she’s gone, boy, she’s gone.”’ That’s great. ‘A freighter says, “She’s been here.”’ That’s high art. If you do that once in a song, you usually turn it on its head right then and there.”

  —from interview with Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, August 4, 2004

  DYLAN ON

  Writing Songs and Books

  “I’m used to writing songs, and songs—I can fill ’em up with symbolism and metaphors. When you write a book like this [his autobiographical Chronicles, Volume One], you gotta tell the truth, and it can’t be misinterpreted. Lest we forget, while you’re writing, you’re not living. What do they call it? Splendid isolation. I don’t find it that splendid.”

  —from interview with David Gates, Newsweek, October 4, 2004

  DYLAN ON

  What Mattered to Him

  “My family was my light and I was going to protect that light at all cost. That was where my dedication was, first, last and everything in-between. What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing. Not a damn thing. The press? I figured you lie to it. For the public eye, I went into the bucolic and mundane as far as possible. In my real life I got to do the things that I loved the best and that was all that mattered—the Little League games, birthday parties, taking my kids to school, camping trips, boating, rafting, canoeing, fishing.”

  —from Chronicles, Volume One, October 5, 2004

  DYLAN ON

  Why He Continues Performing

  “Well, because I don’t really feel like anybody else’s doing what I do. That’s probably the long and short of it right there.”

  —from interview with Steve Inskeep,

  National Public Radio (US), October 12, 2004

  TV INTERVIEW

  Ed Bradley | December 5, 2004 | 60 Minutes, CBS (US)

  Dylan’s first television interview in almost two decades—undoubtedly prompted by the recent release of his memoir, Chronicles, Volume One—is among the conversations I most wanted to include in this anthology. Journalist Ed Bradley, who met with the artist on November 19, 2004, in Northampton, Massachusetts, covers wide-ranging topics, including how Dylan managed to write his early masterpieces, his parents, why he changed his name, and why he continues to work. And the artist’s answers are uniformly memorable, albeit sometimes strange. While he laughs often during many interviews, incidentally, he almost never even hints at a smile in this one—at least not until the end, when questions about his “destiny” twice bring hearty laughs. —Ed.

  Ed Bradley: [In studio.] For as long as I have been here with 60 Minutes, I’ve wanted to interview Bob Dylan. Over his forty-three-year career, there is no musician alive who has been more influential. His distinctive twang and poetic lyrics have produced some of the most memorable songs ever written. In the ’60s, his songs of protest and turmoil spoke to an entire generation. While his life has been the subject of endless interpretation, he has been largely silent. Now, at age sixty-three, he’s written a memoir called Chronicles, Volume One. I finally got to sit down with him in his first television interview in nearly twenty years. What you will see is pure Dylan—mysterious, elusive, fascinating—just like his music.

  [Video of Dylan performing “Blowin’ in the Wind” plays.]

  Bradley: I read somewhere that you wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” in ten minutes. Is that right?

  Bob Dylan: [Nods.] Probably.

  Bradley: Just like that?

  Dylan: Yeah.

  Bradley: Where did it come from?

  Dylan: It just came. It came from . . . right out of that wellspring of creativity, I would think.

  Bradley: [Voiceover, with snippets from “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Positively Fourth Street,” and “Like a Rolling Stone” playing.] That wellspring of creativity has sustained Bob Dylan for more than four decades, and produced five hundred songs and more than forty albums.

  Bradley: Do you ever look at music that you’ve written and look back at it and say, “Whoa! That surprised me!”?

  Dylan: I used to. I don’t do that anymore. I don’t know how I got to write those songs.

  Bradley: What do you mean you “don’t know how”?

  Dylan: Well, those early songs were almost magically written. “Darkness at the break of noon / Shadows, even the silver spoon / A handmade blade, a child’s balloon…” [Video of Dylan performing “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” the song Dylan is quoting, plays.]

  Bradley: [Voiceover.] This Dylan classic, “It’s Alright, Ma,” was written in 1964.

  Dylan: Well, try to sit down and write something like that. There’s a magic to that, and it’s not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, you know? It’s a different kind of a penetrating magic. And I did it. I did it at one time.

  Bradley: You don’t think you can do it today?

  Dylan: Uh-uh.

  Bradley: Does that disappoint you?

  Dylan: Well, you can’t do something forever. And I did it once, and I can do other things now. But I can’t do that.

  Bradley: [Voiceover.] Dylan has been writing music since he was a teenager in the remote town of Hibbing, Minnesota. The eldest of two sons of Abraham and Beatty Zimmerman.

  Bradley: Did you have a good life—a good, happy childhood growing up?

  Dylan: I really didn’t consider myself happy or unhappy. I always knew that there was something out there that I needed to get to. And it wasn’t where I was at that particular moment.

  Bradley: It wasn’t in Minnesota.

  Dylan: No.

  Bradley: [Voiceover.] It was in New York City. As he writes in his book, he came alive when at age nineteen, he moved to Greenwich Village, which at the time was the frenetic center of the ’60s counterculture. Within months, he had signed a recording contract with Columbia Records.

  Bradley: You refer to New York as the capital of the world. But when you told your father that, he thought that it was a joke. Did your parents approve of you being a singer/songwriter? Going to New York?

  Dylan: No. They wouldn’t have wanted that for me. But my parents never went anywhere. My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, to them, was the capital of the world.

  Bradley: What made you different? What pushed you out of there?

  Dylan: Well, I listened to the radio a lot. I hung out in record stores. And I slam-banged around on a guitar and played the piano and learned songs from a world which didn’t exist around me.

  Bradley: [Voiceover.] He says even then he knew he was destined to become a music legend. “I was heading for the fantastic lights,” he writes. “Destiny was looking right at me and nobody else.”

  Bradley: You use the word “destiny” over and over throughout the book. What does that mean to you?

  Dylan: It’s a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does—the picture you have in your mind of what you’re about will come true. It’s kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it’s a fragile feeling. And you put it out there, somebody will kill it. So it’s best to keep that all inside.

  Bradley: [Voiceover.] When we asked him why he changed his name, he said that was destiny, too.

  Bradley: So you didn’t see yourself as Robert Zimmerman?

  Dylan: No, for some reason I never did.

/>   Bradley: Even before you started performing?

  Dylan: Nah, even then. Some people get born with the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens.

  Bradley: Tell me how you decided on Bob Dylan?

  Dylan: You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.

  Bradley: [Voiceover.] Bob Dylan created a world inspired by old folk music, with piercing and poetic lyrics, as in songs like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” [Video of Dylan performing that song plays.] Songs that reflected the tension and unrest of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the ’60s. It was an explosive mixture that turned Dylan, by age twenty-five, into a cultural and political icon—playing to sold-out concert halls around the world, and followed by people wherever he went. He was called the voice of his generation—and was actually referred to as a prophet, a messiah. Yet he saw himself simply as a musician.

  Dylan: You feel like an impostor when someone thinks you’re something and you’re not.

  Bradley: What was the image that people had of you and what was the reality?

  Dylan: The image of me was certainly not a songwriter or a singer. It was more like some kind of a threat to society in some kind of way.

  Bradley: What was the toughest part for you, personally?

  Dylan: It was like being in an Edgar Allan Poe story. And you’re just not that person everybody thinks you are, though they call you that all the time. “You’re the prophet.” “You’re the savior.” I never wanted to be a prophet or savior. Elvis maybe. I could easily see myself becoming him. But prophet? No.

  Bradley: I know that, and I accept, you don’t see yourself as the voice of that generation, but some of your songs did stop people cold. [Dylan nods.] And they saw them as anthems, and they saw them as protest songs. It was important in their lives. It sparked a movement. [Clip of Dylan performing “The Times They Are A-Changin’” plays.] I mean, you may not have seen it that way, but that’s the way it was for them. [Dylan nods.] How do you reconcile those two things?