by Jeff Burger
More famously, around this time Dylan forged a bond with Ginsberg, whose poem “Howl” Dylan had practically memorized line by line. “I like Ginsberg when he invented his own language,” Dylan says. “When he put his—nobody I don’t think did that before—language down on paper. There’s definitely a Ginsberg-ian language. And I don’t think anybody uses it, because nobody has ever caught on to it. But it’s powerful, confident language. All that neon jukebox and lonesome farms and grandfather night stuff. The way he puts words together. The ways that, you know, he used the English vocabulary, sharp words that seem to sweat as you read them.”
Ginsberg once told me a story about a night in the 1980s when Dylan raced over to his East Village apartment, hungry for a title to what eventually became the album Empire Burlesque. I ask Dylan whether he recalls the incident. “Yeah, of course!” he says. “I went over to see Allen. I think I played [the songs] to him over at his place at 5th Street and Avenue B. I played it for him because I thought he would like it. I never dreamed that Ginsberg would latch on to the pop-music world. I always thought they were jazz guys. I asked Allen what he would think a good title for this record was. And he listened. And he thought for a moment. And he said, ‘Razzmatazz.’” Dylan laughs and says, “I was kind of speechless. It was not the kind of title that I was expecting. I wasn’t sure about that idea. Later on, though, I realized that he might be right. I probably should have called it that.”
When tabulating literary influences, Dylan summons the name Walt Whitman, for Leaves of Grass continues to inspire him. Toward the end of his life, Whitman was preparing a “Death-Bed” edition of Leaves of Grass, reflecting on the indignities and ragged joys of growing old. “I don’t think the dream of Whitman has ever been fulfilled,” Dylan says. “I don’t know if Whitman’s spirit is still here. It’s hard to say if it holds up except maybe in a nostalgic sense. That westward-expansion thing has been dead for a while now. When Whitman started out, he had such great faith in humankind. His mind must have been destroyed when the War between the States fell at his front door. His vision, which was so massively phallic, suddenly must have become plundered, ruined and emasculated when he saw all that indescribable destruction.”
We talk about Whitman serving as a nurse in a Washington, D.C., hospital during the Civil War, draining gangrene from a wounded soldier’s limbs. “I think you can see the change in Whitman,” Dylan says. “Before that and after that. He had the most grand view of America. Almost like he’s America himself. He’s just so big, and he’s all that there is. The Greek Empire. The Roman Empire. The British Empire. All of European history gone. Whitman is the New World. That’s what Whitman is all about. But it isn’t the New World anymore. Poor man. He was hounded and mistreated, too, in his lifetime. And ridiculed. Emerson, Thoreau, all those guys, you don’t know what they really thought of him.”
If any American personifies life on what Whitman called the “open road,” it’s Bob Dylan. Traveling allows Dylan’s aloofness to ferment into clarity. Woody Guthrie, Blind Willie McTell and Jack Kerouac treasured this rootless way too. “On the Road speeds by like a freight train,” Dylan tells me. “It’s all movement and words and lusty instincts that come alive like you’re riding on a train. Kerouac moves so fast with his words. No ambiguity. It was very emblematic of the time. You grabbed a hold of the train, hopped on and went along with him, hanging on for dear life. I think that’s what affected me more than whatever he was writing about. It was his style of writing that affected us in such a virile way. I tried reading some of his books later, but I never felt that movement again.”
Sometimes on the road Dylan stops by the homes or graves of musicians he admires. He once went to Tupelo, Mississippi, to soak in the essence of Elvis. He’s made pilgrimages in Texas to search out Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison. I ask Dylan if he minds people visiting Hibbing or Duluth or Minneapolis searching for the root of his talent. “Not at all,” he surprisingly says. “That town where I grew up hasn’t really changed that much, so whatever was in the air before is probably still there. I go through once in a while coming down from Canada. I’ll stop there and wander around.” As for Duluth, where his grandparents lived, he thinks it’s one of the country’s forgotten gems. “You’ll never see another town like Duluth,” he says. “It’s not a tourist destination, but it probably should be. Depends what season you’re in there, though. There are only two seasons: damp and cold. I like the way the hills tumble to the waterfront and the way the wind blows around the grain elevators. The train yards go on forever too. It’s old-age industrial, that’s what it is. You’ll see it from the top of the hill for miles and miles before you get there. You won’t believe your eyes. I’ll give you a medal if you get out alive.”
Dylan then recounts a recent side excursion he made from Minnesota to Manitoba. “I went to see Neil Young’s house in Winnipeg,” he says. “I just felt compelled. I wanted to see his bedroom. Where he looked out of the windows. Where he dreamed. Where he walked out of the door every day. Wanted to see what’s around his neighborhood in Winnipeg. And I did just that.”
“How did you do that?”
“I don’t know,” he answers. “Somebody found out for me where he used to live. I mean, there’s no marker or anything. And some people were living in his house. He lived in an upstairs duplex with his mother. I wanted to walk the steps that Neil walked every day.”
“Does he know you did that?” I ask.
“I don’t think so,” Dylan says with a grin. “I was meaning to send him a card afterward and tell him that. That I’d been there. Where he used to hang out and where he started out. Neil, I respect him so much.”
Long a master of disguise, Dylan can slip into truck stops or taprooms with relative ease. He’s learned the art of blending in. If necessary, there is always a sweatshirt hood. Irregular in his daily routine, mainly a night owl, Dylan sometimes draws sketches for his paintings. For years, Dylan’s artwork was mostly monochromatic, but recently, in his Drawn Blank series, he has added bursts of color to his drawings. He likes dazzling purples, pinks and sunflower yellow. For all of his bouts of lyrical darkness, Dylan, like Van Gogh, relishes color, and he lets it show; even when the subject matter is a dismal rail yard or a ramshackle house.
When I question Dylan about his genius for disconnecting from the rat race, he quotes Scipio. “Scipio, the great conqueror of Hannibal, who says, ‘I’m never in such good company as when I’m alone.’” To Dylan, this is ancient folk wisdom to live by. Wisdom that Hank Williams understood. Later in our conversation, he quotes Scipio again. “‘I’m never so busy,’” he says, “‘as when I’ve got nothing to do.’” (I get the weird feeling that this maxim will soon show up in a new Dylan lyric.) “A person’s solitude is important,” Dylan tells me in teacher mode. “You have to learn about yourself and figure things out, and that’s a good way to do it. Obviously, though, too much of it is no good. You can abuse anything.”
Dylan has become habituated to eminence. Wherever he goes, people treat him like a king. A cross eye from Dylan can have a devastating effect on a roadie or band member’s psyche. Deeply idiosyncratic, mood changing by the minute, Dylan has an unerring ability to make anyone in the room feel they’re not equal to the talent present. But he also plays shaman and sprinkles your life with magic dust. When a musician friend turns ill, Dylan plays one of that musician’s songs in concert as a personal tribute. Months before Mike Bloomfield died of a drug overdose, Dylan, learning he was struggling, reunited with him in San Francisco to play “Like a Rolling Stone” one last triumphant time. Playing the role of passing angel, Dylan has sung the songs of Jerry Garcia, Warren Zevon, Frank Sinatra, George Harrison and Waylon Jennings, to name just a few, soon after they died, as a spontaneous tribute to their artistry.
Dylan spends most of the afternoon of April 9th at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. I am not allowed to come along. But later he recaps to me what crossed his mind, like who his favorite artists are. “Well,
of course, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko are good as far as Americans go, and I guess George Bellows and Thomas Hart Benton are OK,” he says. “But this guy here, from this town, Rembrandt, is one of my two favorite painters. I like his work because it’s rough, crude and beautiful. Caravaggio’s the other one. I’d probably go a hundred miles for a chance to see a Caravaggio painting or a Bernini sculpture. You know who I like a lot is [J.M.W.] Turner, the English painter. Art is artillery. And those guys, especially Caravaggio and Rembrandt, used it in its most effective manner. After seeing their work, I’m not even so sure how I feel about Picasso, to tell you the truth.”
“Why’s that?” I ask.
“Lots of reasons,” he says. “He was a renegade painter. He just painted what he wanted. He didn’t have anybody over him. I don’t think he was ever pushed to the degree that those other guys were. I don’t feel Picasso’s paintings like I feel the other work I just mentioned. I like Jacques-Louis David a lot, too, although he was a propagandist painter. David’s the artist who did the emblematic painting of ‘Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass’ and ‘The Death of Marat.’” As for Andy Warhol, Dylan glares at me for bringing his name into the heavyweight mix. “Only as a cultural figure,” he says. “Not as an artist.”
After that evening’s show at the Heineken Music Hall—at around 11:30 p.m.—I interview Dylan again. Because it is Easter weekend, I decide to push him on the importance of Christian Scripture in his life. “Well, sure,” he says, “that and those other first books I read were really biblical stuff. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur. Those were the books that I remembered reading and finding religion in. Later on, I started reading over and over again Plutarch and his Roman Lives. And the writers Cicero, Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius . . . I like the morality thing. People talk about it all the time. Some say you can’t legislate morality. Well, maybe not. But morality has gotten kind of a bad rap. In Roman thought, morality is broken down into basically four things. Wisdom, Justice, Moderation and Courage. All of these are the elements that would make up the depth of a person’s morality. And then that would dictate the types of behavior patterns you’d use to respond in any given situation. I don’t look at morality as a religious thing.”
But to Dylan, morality is often about holding firm to personal principles. We talk about his refusal to capitulate to CBS censors back in 1963 when he was to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. The network had wanted Dylan to play a Clancy Brothers song, even though he had rehearsed “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” The censors refused to allow a so-called “commie” protest song into America’s Cold War living rooms. Dylan wouldn’t give in. He now views the walk-off as a seminal event in his early career. “Ed [Sullivan] was behind me, but the censors came down, and they didn’t want me to play that particular song,” he says. “I just had it in my mind to do that particular song. I’d rehearsed it, and it went down well. And I knew everybody back home would be watching me on The Ed Sullivan Show. But then I walked off The Ed Sullivan Show, and they couldn’t have a chance to see me. So I don’t know what that says about me as a person. That was the biggest TV show ever at that time, and it was broadcast on Sunday night. Millions of people watched from coast to coast. It was a dream come true just to be on that stage. Everybody knew that.”
Bolting from The Ed Sullivan Show was the true turning point in Dylan’s life script, even more significant than going electric at Newport. From that moment onward, Dylan would only play by his rules. His spine stiffened. When a recording artist blew off Ed Sullivan . . . well, the James Dean outsider avenue was the only option left. But how did Dylan’s mother and father back in Minnesota feel about little Bobby stiffing Mr. Sullivan? “Well, we grew up without TV, really,” Dylan explains. “TV came in when I was maybe 16. We didn’t get the network shows up north. We only got TV from about 3:00 till 7:00 when it began to come in. We had no consciousness of TV. None. It was all live entertainment that would come through town. Those days are long gone. Even the memories have been obliterated. I think maybe I was in the last generation that grew up like that. We didn’t see Dick Clark. I think Ed Sullivan came in the last year I was at home. Didn’t see Elvis on Ed Sullivan because we didn’t get that. It was a more innocent way of life. Imagination is what you had and maybe all you had.”
More than any recent American artist, with the possible exception of the late collage painter Robert Rauschenberg, Dylan has repeatedly challenged his own intellect and faith. Nothing is ever fully settled. His mind is always crowded with future projects: a series of Brazil-inspired paintings, the next installment of Chronicles, a TV special, an orchestra playing new arrangements of his timeless standards, and the composition of more song-poems for the ages sometimes casually written on hotel letterhead. He is going out in life as a gnarled bluesman able to hold his head high, a tried-and-true folkloric figure who’s outfoxed even B’rer Rabbit.
When President Sarkozy, looking to make small talk, asked Dylan, “Where do you live?” the quick response was a few simple words: “Right here. . . . No. I’m just joking. I’m from the Lone Star State.” (Dylan ended by giving Sarkozy a Texas-style belt buckle as a gift.)
Technically, Dylan’s answer wasn’t true. Dylan belongs to no city or state. There is Dylan the family man who spends time in California with his children and grandchildren in Malibu, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Sometimes Dylan lingers in the Bay Area for weeks at a time, sketching fishmongers and longshoremen. As a New York Yankee fan, he can be found sitting behind first base in the Bronx on random autumnal nights, wishing Mickey Mantle were still batting cleanup. But it’s Minnesota’s north country, which seems to always lie just over the frozen brow of a long-remembered field, where the road still reaches into the void on below-zero blue winter days, that remains Dylan’s touchstone place. That’s the American landscape, which has influenced him most. The Great Lakes region is where he learned Mexican conjunto music by way of Polish polka bands. You can’t find the real Dylan spirit in Greenwich Village or an L.A. studio, a Yazoo River juke joint or a Laredo cafe. For underneath all the mercurial antics and standing ovations, Dylan is so down-home that he considers the boondocks of Hibbing-Duluth to be far grander than Paris.
“The air is so pure there,” he says. “And the brooks and rivers are still running. The forests are thick, and the landscape is brutal. And the sky is still blue up there. It is still pretty untarnished. It’s still off the beaten path. But I hardly ever go back.”
DYLAN ON
His Mainstream Music Contemporaries
“Those guys you are talking about all had conspicuous hits. They started out anti-establishment and now they are in charge of the world. Celebratory songs. Music for the grand dinner party. Mainstream stuff that played into the culture on a pervasive level. My stuff is different from those guys. It’s more desperate. Daltrey, Townshend, McCartney, the Beach Boys, Elton, Billy Joel. They made perfect records, so they have to play them perfectly . . . exactly the way people remember them. My records were never perfect. So there is no point in trying to duplicate them. Anyway, I’m no mainstream artist.”
—from interview with Bill Flanagan, HuffingtonPost.com, May 16, 2009
DYLAN ON
Receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom
“Oh, of course it’s a thrill! I mean, who wouldn’t want to get a letter from the White House? And the kind of people they were putting me in the category with was just amazing. People like John Glenn and Madeleine Albright, Toni Morrison, and Pat Summitt, John Doer, William Foege, and some others, too. These people who have done incredible things and have outstanding achievements. Pat Summitt alone has won more basketball games with her teams than any NCAA coach. John Glenn, we all know what he did. And Toni Morrison is as good as it gets. I loved spending time with them. What’s the alternative? Hanging around with hedge-fund hucksters or Hollywood gigolos?”
—from interview with Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, September 27, 2012
; DYLAN ON
Iron and Gates
“I’ve been around iron all my life, ever since I was a kid. I was born and raised in iron ore country—where you could breathe it and smell it every day. And I’ve always worked with it in one form or another. Gates appeal to me because of the negative space they allow. They can be closed but at the same time they allow the seasons and breezes to enter and flow. They can shut you out or shut you in. And in some ways there is no difference.”
—from website of London’s Halcyon Gallery,
which displayed Dylan’s iron-gate creations in a show called
“Mood Swings” that ran from 2013 to 2014
DYLAN ON
The Basement Tapes
“I’d known I wasn’t gonna write anything about myself. I didn’t have nothin’ to say about myself that I’d figure anybody else would be interested in, anyway. You kind of look for ideas . . . The TV would be on, like As the World Turns or Dark Shadows or somethin’ and just any ol’ thing would create a beginning to a song—names out of phone books and things. When China first exploded that hydrogen bomb, that just kind of flashed across the headlines in newspapers, so we just go in and write ‘Tears of Rage’. Things were just happening, there was riots in the street, they were rioting in Rochester, New York, and that wasn’t that far away, so we write ‘Too Much of Nothin’. And just one thing led to another. You know, the human heart . . . that’s the first time that anybody ever heard of a human heart being transplanted. That was incredible. It was a real breakthrough, so we came up with a song, and then after we got the lyrics down, we took the song to the basement.”
