by Jeff Burger
When all is said and done, Bob Dylan is keen that I understand where he’s coming from, and for me to understand that, I have to grasp what he saw in the artists who went before him. “If you think about all the artists that recorded in the Forties and the Thirties, and in the Fifties, you had big bands, sure, but they were the vision of one man—I mean, the Duke Ellington band was the vision of one man, the Louis Armstrong band, it was the individual voice of Louis Armstrong. And going into all the rhythm & blues stuff, and the rockabilly stuff, the stuff that trained me to do what I do, that was all individually based. That was what you heard—the individual crying in the wilderness. So that’s kind of lost too. I mean, who’s the last individual performer that you can think of—Elton John, maybe? I’m talking about artists with the willpower not to conform to anybody’s reality but their own. Patsy Cline and Billy Lee Riley. Plato and Socrates, Whitman and Emerson. Slim Harpo and Donald Trump. It’s a lost art form. I don’t know who else does it beside myself, to tell you the truth.” Is he satisfied? “I always wanted to stop when I was on top. I didn’t want to fade away. I didn’t want to be a has-been, I wanted to be somebody who’d never be forgotten. I feel that, one way or another, it’s OK now, I’ve done what I wanted for myself.” These remarks, it should be noted, are yet another occasion for laughter. “I see that I could stop touring at any time, but then, I don’t really feel like it right now.” Short of promising the third part of the trilogy-in-progress, this is good-enough news for me. May the Never Ending Tour never end. “I think I’m in my middle years now,” Bob Dylan tells me. “I’ve got no retirement plans.”
DYLAN ON
Not Feeling the Urge to Write
“If you don’t have to write songs, why write them? Especially if you’ve got so many you could never play—there wouldn’t be enough time to play them all, anyway. I’ve got enough where I don’t really feel the urge to write anything additional.”
—from interview with Jann S. Wenner, Rolling Stone, May 3, 2007
DYLAN ON
How the Music World Compares with the Book and Art Worlds
“The music world’s a made-up bunch of hypocritical rubbish. I know from publishing a memoir that the book people are a whole lot saner. And the art world? From the small steps I’ve taken in it, I’d say, yeah, the people are honest, upfront and deliver what they say. Basically, they are who they say they are. They don’t pretend. And having been in the music world most of my life [laughs], I can tell you it’s not that way. Let’s just say it’s less . . . dignified.”
—from interview with Alan Jackson, Times (UK), June 2008
DYLAN ON
Hitler
“How you take a failed landscape painter and turn him into a fanatical madman who controls millions—that’s some trick. . . . In hindsight, you can see that someone would have to take control. But still, it’s so perplexing. Look at the faces of the millions who worshipped him and you see that he inspired love. It’s scary and sad. The torch of the spoken word. They were glad to follow him anywhere, loyal to the bone. Then of course, he filled up the cemeteries with them.”
—from interview with Bill Flanagan, Telegraph (UK), April 13, 2009
BOB DYLAN’S LATE-ERA, OLD-STYLE AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM
Douglas Brinkley | May 14, 2009 | Rolling Stone
On April 7 and 9, 2009, a few weeks before the release of Dylan’s superb Together Through Life, he spent hours talking with author and university professor Douglas Brinkley in Paris and in Amsterdam, Holland.
“He’s very old-fashioned,” Brinkley later told radio personality Don Imus. “He’s really a 1950s kind of guy, when America was in black and white, not the psychedelic ’60s that’s in Technicolor. And he champions American poetry, novelists . . . There’s a touch of nationalism in him, which is I think surprising to some people.”
What was it like to interview Dylan? “He couldn’t have been warmer and more of a gentleman,” Brinkley said on MSNBC-TV. “We had a great time talking. . . . And I went to areas he likes to talk about. Y’know, he’s an expert on Civil War songs, both from the South and the North. We talked about that. We talked about Walt Whitman. He misses the kind of poetic vision of Whitman’s America, when everything was very big. We talked about John Ford, the movie director. He loved those old westerns and in some ways it [those films] informs this new ten songs that he’s just written.” —Ed.
On April 7th, French president Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, stroll into the Palais des Congrès in Paris. Nobody in the sold-out auditorium, however, pays the First Couple much attention. Bob Dylan, who in 1990 was named a Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Art et des Lettres, the highest cultural award France can bestow, is about to take the stage for an evening of nostalgie (as the tickets read). After an old-style-vaudevillian introduction, out walks Dylan with his five-member band, all sharply dressed in Pretty Boy Floyd suits and fedoras. As Dylan launches into a hard-rock version of “Cat’s in the Well,” from his Under the Red Sky album, the cheering crowd holds up cellphones, trying to film the enigmatic legend, who immediately ensconces himself behind an electric piano. Dylan plays guitar on only a single song—as is usually the case—but throughout the night his harmonica riffs soar through the cavernous hall. Everyone feels energized by his charismatic presence. After about two and a half hours, he ends the performance with a defiant version of the crowd-pleasing “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
After the show, the Sarkozys wander backstage, anxious to meet Dylan. The French president is attired in a black turtleneck and jeans. In a single swooping motion, Sarkozy seizes Dylan’s hand, welcoming him to France. “It was like looking at my mirror image,” Dylan tells me later, about the encounter. “I can see why he’s the head of France. He’s genuine and warm and extremely likable. I asked Sarkozy, ‘Do you think the whole global thing is over?’ I knew they just had a big G-20 meeting and they maybe were discussing that. I didn’t think he’d tell me, but I asked him anyway.”
While Dylan—who will be playing around 30 concerts in minor-league baseball stadiums this summer along with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp—is celebrated in America, he is lionized in Europe. The French periodicals were all abuzz that Dylan had just collaborated with the popular 41-year-old film director Olivier Dahan on a new movie soundtrack. The following evening, at Dylan’s second sold-out Paris show, I chatted with the genial Dahan, a scruffy-looking guy straight from the pages of Oliver Twist. In 2007, Dahan directed La Vie en Rose, the celebrated biopic of Edith Piaf that won two Academy Awards. Last year, he brazenly solicited a handful of songs from Dylan, via a letter, for his new road movie, My Own Love Song. Starring Forest Whitaker and Renée Zellweger, My Own Love Song is the tale of an infirm female singer who journeys across America, from Kansas to Louisiana. “I wanted the songs to feel Southern,” Dahan says. “Real songs of the American spirit. What that meant for me, like millions of others worldwide, is Bob Dylan’s songs.”
“At first this was unthinkable,” Dylan recounts. “I mean, I didn’t know what [Dahan] was actually saying. [In faux French accent] ‘Could you write uh, 10, 12 songs?’ Ya know? I said, ‘Yeah, really? Is this guy serious?’ But he was so audacious! Usually you get asked to do, like, one song, and it’s at the end of the movie. But 10 songs?” Dylan continues, “Dahan wanted to put these songs throughout the movie and find different reasons for them. I just kind of gave the guy the benefit of the doubt that he knew what he was doing. I always liked those movies, ya know, those black-and-white movies where, like, Veronica Lake all of a sudden out of nowhere is singing in a nightclub. Or Diahann Carroll is singing in a cafe. All those movies where the action stops and the heroes are represented as walking past a barn dance where the Sons of the Pioneers are playing on a truck. It’s so musical. They don’t put that kind of thing in movies anymore. Now it’s come down to just an end-title song—which has nothing to do with the movie, and basically people are walking out.”
The audiences at the Pa
lais des Congrès were cross-generational: The gray-hairs and the body-pierced youths sat side by side. At this juncture Dylan’s audience is . . . well, everybody. The French troubadour Charles Aznavour attended that second Paris show with one of his sons. Dylan, in homage to Aznavour, played the Frenchman’s melancholic composition “The Times We Have Known” with sublime grace. After the show, the 84-year-old Aznavour joined Dylan backstage for a bit of banter. Wearing a suede coat with a sky-blue scarf around his neck, the deeply tanned Aznavour epitomized to Dylan how a popular musician can comport himself with dignity in the fourth quarter of life. “I finally caught up with you,” Dylan tells him. “I saw you in 1963 at Carnegie Hall. It was filled with French people and me. I was the only American there, really.”
After a round of Obama fist bumps, Dylan heads down a flight of stairs and onto his touring bus for the five-hour drive to Amsterdam, where he will be playing three more shows. For Dylan, it seems, life is always the next gig. Changing pace and location are essential to his survival as an artist. Contrary to reputation, however, he is no recluse. People populate his waking hours (although they’re primarily of the worker-bee kind). “You’re always aware of what town you’re in,” Dylan says of the millions of miles logged. “But in another sense, touring is like being on a freighter out on the open sea. You’re really out there for days and months.”
Critics have claimed that since 1988 Dylan has been on a Never Ending Tour, playing more than 100 concerts a year. The aggrieved Dylan bristles at the term. “Critics should know that there’s no such thing as forever,” he says. “So that speaks more about them who would use that phrase as if there’s some important meaning in it. You never heard about Oral Roberts and Billy Graham being on some Never Ending Preacher Tour. Does anybody ever call Henry Ford a Never Ending Car Builder? Is Rupert Murdoch a Never Ending Media Tycoon? What about Donald Trump? Does anybody say he has a Never Ending Quest to build buildings? Picasso painted well into his 90s. And Paul Newman raced cars in his 70s. Anybody ever say that Duke Ellington was on a Never Ending Bandstand Tour? But critics apply a different standard to me for some reason. But we’re living in an age of breaking everything down into simplistic terms, aren’t we? These days, people are lucky to have a job. Any job. So critics might be uncomfortable with me [working so much]. Maybe they can’t figure it out. But nobody in my particular audience feels that way about what I do. Anybody with a trade can work as long as they want. A welder, a carpenter, an electrician. They don’t necessarily need to retire. People who have jobs on an assembly line, or are doing some kind of drudgery work, they might be thinking of retiring every day. Every man should learn a trade. It’s different than a job. My music wasn’t made to take me from one place to another so I can retire early.”
Dylan has spent a lifetime dodging people’s attempts to define him. He scorns “newsy people” who constantly try to pin him down about his personal life. Random strangers sometimes come up to him asking for a critique of Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home documentary about his life. “I’ve never seen it,” he tells me. “Well, a lot of that footage was gathered up from the Sixties. So I’d seen that, and I thought that was like looking at a different character. But it certainly was powerful. And I don’t, or can’t, do that anymore.”
Dylan’s principal frustration, however, is that he feels misunderstood as an artist: “Popular music has no, whatever you call them, critics, that understand popular music in all of its dynamic fundamentalism. The consensus on me is that I’m a songwriter. And that I was influenced by Woody Guthrie and sang protest songs. Then rock & roll songs. Then religious songs for a period of time. But it’s a stereotype. A media creation. Which is impossible to avoid if you’re any type of public figure at all.” Where critics think he’s deconstructing old songs, he instead sees himself as an old-time musical arranger. “My band plays a different type of music than anybody else plays,” Dylan says. “We play distinctive rhythms that no other band can play. There are so many of my songs that have been rearranged at this point that I’ve lost track of them myself. We do keep the structures intact to some degree. But the dynamics of the song itself might change from one given night to another because the mathematical process we use allows that. As far as I know, no one else out there plays like this. Today, yesterday and probably tomorrow. I don’t think you’ll hear what I do ever again. It took a while to find this thing. But then again, I believe that things are handed to you when you’re ready to make use of them. You wouldn’t recognize them unless you’d come through certain experiences. I’m a strong believer that each man has a destiny.”
These days, Dylan has largely decommissioned the electric guitar in favor of an electric keyboard. Does he have arthritis? Or was he sick of jamming on “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” for the thousandth time? The answer is neither. “I was looking for a keyboard player to play triplet forms for a long period of time,” he explains. “I tried different musicians for it, and we couldn’t find anybody who understood the style of what we were doing and to stay within the boundaries. And, finally, you’ve just got to do it on your own. As far as guitar, I was looking for a guitar player who could play exactly like me, only better. I can’t find that person either. The same thing applies to keyboards. I’m looking for a piano player who can play just like me, only better. If I could find him or her, I would hire that person. So far it hasn’t happened. I wish it would. We could do more if I was freed up there.”
I ask whether, as bandleader, Dylan had ever played a set with the perfect guitarist. Dylan jumps at the opportunity to answer rather reminiscently. “The guy that I always miss, and I think he’d still be around if he stayed with me, actually, was Mike Bloomfield,” Dylan says of his collaborator on Highway 61 Revisited (who also famously played electric guitar with him at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965). “He could just flat-out play. He had so much soul. And he knew all the styles, and he could play them so incredibly well. He was an expert player and a real prodigy, too. Started playing early. But then again a lot of good guitarists have played with me. Freddy Tackett, Steve Ripley—Mick Taylor played with me for a minute.”
Full of memory lane, Dylan goes on to tell a story about first meeting Bloomfield in Chicago at a headhunt on the South Side. A social misfit, Bloomfield was the rare white guitarist who had recorded with the likes of Sleepy John Estes and Big Joe Williams. “He could play like Willie Brown or Charlie Patton,” Dylan says. “He could play like Robert Johnson way back then in the Sixties. The only other guy who could do that in those days was Brian Jones, who played in the Rolling Stones. He could also do the same thing. Fingerpicking rhythms that hardly anyone could do. Those are the only two guys I’ve ever met who could . . . from back then . . . the only two guys who could play the pure style of country blues authentically.”
Dylan, who is about to turn 68, continues to be a force of nature, a veritable one-man Johnstown Flood. It’s impossible to categorize or comprehend his confounding output of new songs. His youthful rebelliousness has now matured into an old-style American individualism. As a composer, Dylan now fits comfortably alongside George Gershwin or Irving Berlin, though he grumpily refuses to wear any man’s collar. Casually dressed in jeans and a sweater vest, Dylan offers me coffee for our interview in a second-floor suite at Amsterdam’s Intercontinental Hotel along the Amstel River. Dylan’s curly hair is still tousled, his deeply creased face full of mischief. He has a razor-sharp memory. For two evenings, he proves to be a lucid, if circumspect, conversationalist.
Like the dour-faced farmer in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” Dylan seems to have the American Songbook in one hand and a raised pitchfork in the other, aimed at rock critics, politicians, Wall Street financiers, back-alley thieves, the World Wide Web—anything that cheapens the spirit of the individual. His nostalgia is more for the Chess Records Fifties than the psychedelic Sixties. He believes that Europe should lose the euro and go back to its old currencies (“I miss the pictures on the old money,” he sa
ys). If Dylan had his way, there’d be Sousa bands on Main Street and vinyl albums instead of CDs. Teenagers would go on nature hikes instead of watching YouTube. “It’s peculiar and unnerving in a way to see so many young people walking around with cellphones and iPods in their ears and so wrapped up in media and video games,” he says. “It robs them of their self-identity. It’s a shame to see them so tuned out to real life. Of course they are free to do that, as if that’s got anything to do with freedom. The cost of liberty is high, and young people should understand that before they start spending their life with all those gadgets.”
Ever since 2001’s Love and Theft, Dylan has been producing his own albums under the pseudonym Jack Frost. “It’s better that I produce,” he says. “It saves a lot of time. A lot of rigmarole. A lot of communication, ya know? It’s just easier for me to make records. Translating my own ideas directly rather than having them go through somebody else. I know my form of music better than anyone else would.”
Right now, Dylan is focused on Together Through Life, the new studio album he recorded last fall. The album’s genesis was the song “Life Is Hard,” his first gift to Dahan. With a pocket full of lyrics and melodies, Dylan booked a studio to lay down nine other new tracks. To help capture the Texas-Mexico-escapism aura, Dylan hired Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter to work with him. The 68-year-old Hunter had previously written two songs with Dylan, for Down in the Groove in 1988: “Silvio” and “Ugliest Girl in the World.” It’s rare, but not unprecedented, for Dylan to collaborate on songs. Over the years, he’s shared songwriting credits with the likes of Tom Petty, Willie Nelson, the late Rick Danko of the Band—even Michael Bolton. (When he was in the Traveling Wilburys, Dylan wrote numerous songs with George Harrison. He hopes one day to sit down and work with Paul McCartney: “That’d be exciting to do something with Paul! But, ya know, your paths have to cross for something like that to make sense.”)
