by Jeff Burger
I first met him at a promotion party thrown by Columbia Records in a highly selfconscious and slick hotel bar. The people were incompatible with anything Dylan stands for and I ate and drank free goodies and finally saw Dylan enter. He didn’t so much enter the party as forcibly indulge himself in it. My fingers were sticky with free barbecued rib sauce as I shook his hand and he was a warm and halated [sic] human being. We talked a while (during which we composed a brief interview which was later run in the Free Press) and made a date to meet the next afternoon for a taped interview.
That second interview worked beautifully. Dylan became a purely natural person, candid and friendly—with indigenous exceptions. He is quite a nervous cat; his knee bobs like a yoyo, he darts at each sound, listens to all conversations at once, seems to enjoy doing more than two things at once. He is smallboned and very finely featured; he resembles an MGM idea of a Romantic Poet doomed by consumption. He speaks in a rambling chant of softspoken clip phrases. With brows raised and lids lowered, he leans forward into your words.
The purpose of the dialog was to get Bob Dylan down as Bob Dylan. I believe it was also his purpose. It is far too easy to suggest listening to his records to know where he is because much cannot come through songs. And the part which remains hidden is just that part, by definition, which his public wants to see.
Unwillingly, Dylan has been shoved or extruded onto the podium for all Hipdom. Being a person aware of his fallibility and fragmentary perplexity—as well as of his freedom and the significance of individuality—it is hard for him to speak with certainty and weight. He constantly qualifies and insists on his ephemeral subjectivity, constantly underscores his right to privacy and unimportance. In doing so, he communicates a certain insecurity about his desired position in the fuzzy texture of his prefabricated and other-imaged life.
The taped interview lasted about 1½ hours. We stayed in his room and then went to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium with him. After the concert, we went to a party given by his agent. All during this time I became exposed to the incessant gluts of hungry folk who beset and nibble at him. It must be rare for him to shut the bathroom door without a voice cutting through, “Hey, why are you sitting there like that? What does it mean?”
He returned here for a Hollywood Bowl engagement Sept. 3. The audience for this concert, as a whole, were not too receptive to the New Amplified Dylan. The first half was done with Dylan and his acoustic guitar laying out old songs and new in a clear, almost analytic voice. The second half found him backed by a group of musicians playing a tasty and unique brand of rock & roll. The lead guitarist, Robbie Robertson, was highly competent and inventive, but the group lacked the unity of a highly polished performance. This may be for the better; this group (and Dylan plans to keep working with them) carried a sparkling randomness in its actions and Dylan moves in it with comfort and joy.
I’ve heard Dylan playing electric guitar in private goofings off and asked why he didn’t play lead guitar . . . he’s certainly good enough. “Robbie does things I can’t do which the songs need done.”
Onstage, Dylan carries himself and his voice with an aloofness, a careful detachment from both his material and his audience. Is he interested in actively communicating his songs, in getting through to his audience? “I don’t have to prove anything to anyone. Those people who dig me know where I’m at—I don’t have to come on to them; I’m not a ballroom singer.” What about those in the audience who aren’t grooving with him? “I’m not interested in them.”
His songs for this concert were a dappled barrel of easily accessible lyrics together with highly subtle and allusive strings of chanted jewels. The newer songs go quite deep in meanings and methods. Why the change towards this delicate structure of complexity? “My mistake was keeping my earlier stuff simple.”
The above quotes are from a press conference held the day after the concert. The personnel for this tennis set were various representatives of major news periodicals and teenage fan mags. Dylan clearly wanted no part of the glib questioning—never does. He had been cajoled into presenting himself for dissection. After a long exchange of basically meaningless trivia, I asked Dylan if it were true that nothing of any consequence happened at these things, that it was all redundant and silly. He agreed. “Interviewers will write my scene and words from their own bags anyway, no matter what I say. I accept writers and photographers. I don’t think it’s necessary at all, but it happens anyway. I am really uninvolved.”
The interview tolled leadenly on.
Q. Do you feel you’re using more “urban imagery” than in the past? That your lyrics are becoming more sophisticated?
A. Well, I watch too much TV, I guess.
Q. What about Donovan?
A. I like everybody, I don’t want to be petty.
Q. A word for your fans?
A. The lamppost leans on folded arms . . .
Q. What do you think of the New Bob Dylan?
A. What’s your name?
Q. Dave Mopert.
A. Okay, what would you think if someone asked you what you think of the new Dave Mopert? What new Dave Mopert?
Q. Is Joan Baez still relevant?
A. She’s one of the most relevant people I know.
Q. Do you feel you’re living a real life?
A. What’s that mean? If I’m not living it, who is? And if I’m not, whose life am I leading? Who’s living mine? What’s that?
Q. Do you feel you belong to your public now?
A. No. I don’t have any responsibility to the people who are hung up on me. I’m only responsible for what I create—I didn’t create them.
Q. Has your success infringed on your personal life?
A. What personal life? Hey, I have none.
This sort of ping-pong continued about an hour before the interviewers left. Many hostilities and befuddlements had been formed and blurted and I’m sure he’ll be just as misquoted and little understood in the reports of this press set as in all the others.
After seeing this typical interview, I realized how lucky I had been to speak with him so easily and so openly. I also realized how essentially meaningless this transcription must be. He lays out many attitudes and concepts which, in their precise articulation and directness, will strike the public as shocking and unique. However, his larger meaning is to be found in his material. To know precisely what he thinks of Donovan or what year he began writing songs is extraneous. To make him come out for “No War Toys” or anti-police brutality is redundancy. Just listen to his songs.
However, we must shine flashlights down our hero’s mouths and count their cavities. With that rider, what follows is probably the most meaningfully candid interview Dylan has ever indulged in. I only hope it will give you the deep understanding of and respect for Dylan which I gained.
Part Two
The introduction to this transcribed dialog was printed in last week’s Free Press. The major point in Part One was that Dylan’s privacy and complexity have been the targets for an all-out assault by reporters, photographers, fans, friends and enemies. His reaction to this attempt to reduce him to a known and predictable quantity comprises his public image as you probably know it—either from hearsay or reportage (both being equal and minus).
This interview is something of a rarity in that it is one of the very few—if any—in which Dylan volunteered to talk to and with his interviewer in a manner honest and meaningful. However, I do not claim to have caught Dylan in it—I have only caught a segment of his shadow on that day . . .
Robbins: I don’t know whether to do a serious interview or carry on in that Absurdist way we talked last night.
Dylan: It’ll be the same thing anyway, man.
R: Yeah. Okay . . . If you are a poet and write words arranged in some sort of rhythm, why do you switch at some point and write lyrics in a song so that you’re singing the words as part of a Gestalt presence?
D: Well, I can’t define that word poetry. I wouldn’t even attem
pt it. At one time I thought that Robert Frost was poetry; other times I thought that Allen Ginsberg was poetry, sometimes I thought Francois Villon was poetry—but poetry isn’t really confined to the printed page. Hey, then again, I don’t believe in saying, “Look at that girl walking; isn’t that poetry?” I’m not going to get insane about it. The lyrics to the songs . . . just so happens that it might be a little stranger than in most songs. I find it easy to write songs. I been writing songs for a long long time and the words to the songs aren’t written out for just the paper; they’re written so you can read it, you dig. If you take whatever there is to the song away—the beat, the melody—I could still recite it. I see nothing wrong with songs you can’t do that with, either—songs that, if you took the beat and melody away, they wouldn’t stand up. Because they’re not supposed to do that, you know. Songs are songs . . . I don’t believe in expecting too much out of any one thing.
R: Whatever happened to Blind Boy Grunt? (a name Dylan recorded a couple of his first folk sides under)
D: I was doing that four years ago. Now there’s a lot of people writing songs on protest subjects. But it’s taken some kind of a weird step. Hey, I’d rather listen to Jimmy Reed or Howlin’ Wolf, man, or the Beatles, or Francois Hardy, than I would listen to any protest song singers—although I haven’t heard all the protest song singers there are. But the ones I’ve heard—there’s this very emptiness which is like a song written “Let’s hold hands and everything will be grand.” I see no more to it than that. Just because someone mentions the word “bomb,” I’m not going to go “Aaiee!,” man, and start clapping.
R: It’s that they just don’t work anymore?
D: It’s not that it don’t work, it’s that there are a lot of people afraid of the bomb, right. But there are a lot of other people who’re afraid to be seen carrying a MODERN SCREEN magazine down the street, you know. Lot of people afraid to admit that they like Marlon Brando movies. . . . Hey, it’s not that they don’t work anymore but have you ever thought of a place where they DO work? What exactly DOES work?
R: They give a groovy feeling to the people who sing them, I guess that’s about it. But what does work is the attitude, not the song. And there’s just another attitude called for.
D: Yeah, but you have to be very hip to the fact about that attitude—you have to be hip to communication. Sure, you can make all sorts of protest songs and put them on a Folkways record. But who hears them? The people that do hear them are going to be agreeing with you anyway. You aren’t going to get somebody to hear it who doesn’t dig it. People don’t listen to things they don’t dig. If you can find a cat that can actually say, “Okay. I’m a changed man because I heard this one thing—or I just saw this one thing . . .” Hey, it don’t necessarily happen that way all the time. It happens with a collage of experience which somebody can actually know by instinct what’s right and wrong for him to do. Where he doesn’t actually have to feel guilty about anything. A lot of people can act out of guilt. They act because they think somebody’s looking at them. No matter what it is. There’s people who do anything because of guilt . . .
R: And you don’t want to be guilty?
D: It’s not that I’m NOT guilty. I’m not any more guilty than you are. Like, I don’t consider any elder generation guilty. I mean, they’re having these trials at Nuremberg, right? Look at that and you can place it out. Cats say, “I had to kill all those people, or else they’d kill me.” Now, who’s to try them for that? Who are these judges that have got the right to try a cat? How do you know they wouldn’t do the same thing?
R: This may be a side trip, but this thing about the Statute of Limitations running out and everybody wants to extend it? You remember, in ANIMAL FARM, what they wrote on the wall? “All animals are equal.” But later they added, “. . . but some are more equal than others.” It’s the same thing in reverse. That some are less equal than others. Like Nazis are REALLY criminals, so let’s REALLY get them; change any law just to nail them all.
D: Yeah, all that shit runs in the same category. Nobody digs revenge, right? But you have these cats from Israel who, after TWENTY years, are still trying to catch these cats, who’re OLD cats, man, who have escaped. God knows they aren’t going to go anywhere, they’re not going to do anything. And you have these cats from Israel running around catching them. Spending twenty years out of their lives. You take that job away from them and they’re no more or less than a baker. He’s got his whole life tied up in one thing. It’s a one-thought thing, without anything between: “That’s what it is, and I’m going to get it.” Anything between gets wiped all away. I can’t make that, but I can’t really put it down. Hey: I can’t put ANYTHING down, because I don’t have to be around any of it. I don’t have to put people down which I don’t like, because I don’t have to be around any of those people. Of course, there is the giant great contradiction of What Do You Do. Hey, I don’t know what you do, but all I can do is cast aside all the things NOT to do. I don’t know where it’s at, all I know is where it’s NOT at. And as long as I know that, I don’t really have to know, myself, where’s it at. Everybody knows where it’s at once in a while, but nobody can walk around all the time in a complete Utopia. Dig poetry. You were asking about poetry? Man, poetry is just bullshit, you know? I don’t know about other countries, but in this one it’s a total massacre. It’s not poetry at all. People don’t read poetry in this country—if they do, it offends them; they don’t dig it. You go to school, man, and what kind of poetry do you read? You read Robert Frost’s “The Two Roads,” you read T.S. Eliot—you read all that bullshit and that’s just bad, man, it’s not good. It’s not anything hard, it’s all softboiled egg shit. And then, on top of it, they throw Shakespeare at some kid who can’t read Shakespeare. Hey, everybody hates Shakespeare in high school, right? Who digs reading HAMLET, man? All they give you is IVANHOE, SILAS MARNER, TALE OF TWO CITIES—and they keep you away from things which you should do. You shouldn’t even be there in school. You should find out from people. Dig; that’s where it all starts. In the beginning—like from 13 to 19—that’s where all the corruption is. These people all just overlook it, right? There’s more V.D. in people 13 to 19 than there is in any other group, but they ain’t going to ever say so. They’re never going to go into the schools and give shots. But that’s where it’s at. It’s all a hype, man.
R: Relating all this: if you put it in lyrics instead of poetry, you have a higher chance of hitting the people who have to be hit?
D: I do, but I don’t expect anything from it, you dig? All I can do is be me—whoever that is—for those people that I do play to, and not come on with them, tell them I’m something that I’m not. I’m not going to tell them I’m the Great Cause Fighter or the Great Lover or Great Boy Genius or whatever. Because I’m not, man. Why mislead them? That’s all just Madison Avenue, that’s just selling. Sure Madison Avenue is selling me, but it’s not really selling ME, ’cause I was hip to it before I got there.
R: Which brings up another thing. All the folk magazines and many folk people are very down on you. Do they put you down because you changed or—
D: It’s that I’m successful and they want to be successful, man. It’s jealousy. Hey, anybody with any kind of knowledge at all would know what I’m doing, would know by instinct what’s happening here. Somebody who doesn’t know that is still hung up with success and failure and good and bad . . . maybe he doesn’t have a chick all the time . . . stuff like that. But I can’t use comments, man. I don’t take nothing like that seriously. If somebody praises me and says “How groovy you are!” it doesn’t mean anything to me because I can usually sense where that person’s at. And it’s no compliment if someone who’s a total freak comes up and says, “How groovy you are!” And it’s the same if they don’t dig me. Other kinds of people don’t HAVE to say anything because, when you come down to it, it’s all what’s happening in the moment which counts. Who cares about tomorrow and yesterday? People don’t live ther
e; they live now.
R: I’ve a theory which I’ve been picking up and shaking out every so often. When I spoke with the Byrds, they were saying the same thing that I’m saying—a lot of people are saying it—you’re talking it. It’s why we have a new so-called rock & roll sound emerging, it’s a synthesis of all things, a—
D: It’s further than that, man. People know nowadays more than before. They’ve had so much to look at by now and know the bullshit of everything. People now don’t even care about going to jail. So what? You’re still with yourself as much as if you’re out on the streets. There’s still those who don’t care about anything, but I got to think that anybody who doesn’t hurt anybody, you can’t put that person down, you dig, if that person’s happy doing that.
R: But what if they freeze themselves into apathy? What if they don’t care about anything at all anymore?
D: Whose problem is that? Your problem or theirs? No, it’s not that, it’s that nobody can learn by somebody else showing them or teaching them. People got to learn by themselves, going through something which relates. Sure, you say how do you make somebody know something . . . People know it by themselves; they can go through some kind of scene with other people and themselves which somehow will come out somewhere and it’ll grind into them and be them. And all that just comes out of them somehow when they’re faced up to the next thing.