Dylan on Dylan

by Jeff Burger

  R: It’s like taking in until the time comes to put out, right. But people who don’t care don’t put anything out. It’s a whole frozen thing where nothing’s happening anywhere; it’s just the maintenance of status quo, of existing circumstances, whatever they are . . .

  D: People who don’t care? Are you talking about gas station attendants or a Zen doctor, man? Hey, there’s a lot of people who don’t care; a lot don’t care for different reasons. A lot care about some things and not about others, and some who don’t care about anything. It’s not up to me to make them care about something—it’s up to me not to let them bring me down and not to bring them down. It’s like the whole world has a little thing: it’s being taught that when you get up in the morning, you have to go out and bring somebody down. You walk down the street and, unless you’ve brought somebody down, don’t come home today, right? It’s a circus world.

  R: So who is it that you write and sing for?

  D: Not writing and singing for anybody, to tell you the truth. Hey, really, I don’t care what people say. I don’t care what they make me seem to be or what they tell other people I am. If I did care about that, I’d tell you; I really have no concern with it. I don’t even come in contact with these people. Hey, I dig people, though. But if somebody’s going to come up to me and ask me some questions which have been on his mind for such a long time, all I can think of is, “Wow, man, what else can be in that person’s head besides me? Am I that important, man, to be in a person’s head for such a long time he’s got to know this answer?” I mean, can that really straighten him out—if I tell him something? Hey, come on . . .

  Here we’ll break the interview and call it Part Two. The last section of this—which discusses Dylan’s attitude about rock & roll, money and fame, Civil Rights, education, his new book, and a host of popular favorites—will be in next week’s Free Press.

  Part Three: Conclusion

  Dylan, eyebrows up and lids down, spoke in intense staccato. He’d throw words out in rhythmic phrases, testing the articulation of his thought by speaking it. He would smoke distractedly, bob his knee as if dandling a kid, and diddle with his fingers . . . continually nervous. We’d been introduced by mutual friends and the talk had been straight and communicative for an hour or so. His nervousness wasn’t irritation, it was restlessness. Dylan is a quester, a grower, a doer; and growth is a nonsleep engagement.

  Off and on, during breaks and lulls, he’d negotiate a few licks and changes on his guitar; he had a concert that night. The discussion continued.

  Robbins: A local disc jockey, Les Claypool, went through a whole thing on you one night, just couldn’t get out of it. For maybe 45 minutes, he’d play a side of yours and then an ethnic side in which it was demonstrated that both melodies were the same. After each pair he’d say, “Well, you see what’s happening . . . This kid is taking other people’s melodies; he’s not all that original. Not only that,” he’d say, “but his songs are totally depressing and have no hope.”

  Dylan: Who’s Les Claypool?

  R: A folk jockey out here who has a long talk show on Saturday nights and an hour one each night, during which he plays highly ethnic sides.

  D: He played THOSE songs? He didn’t play something hopeful?

  R: No, he was loading it to make his point. Anyway, it brings up an expected question: why do you use melodies that are already written?

  D: I used to do that, when I was more or less in folk. I knew the melodies, they were already there. I did it because I liked the melodies. I did it when I really wasn’t that popular and the songs weren’t reaching that many people, and everybody around dug it. Man, I never introduced a song, “Here’s the song I’ve stole the melody from, someplace.” For me it wasn’t that important; still isn’t that important. I don’t care about the melodies, man; the melodies are all traditional anyway. And if anybody wants to pick that out and say, “That’s Bob Dylan,” that’s their thing, not mine. I mean, if they want to think that. Anybody with any sense at all, man; he says that I haven’t any hope . . . Hey, I got FAITH. I know that there are people who’re going to know that’s total bullshit. I know the cat is just up tight. He hasn’t really gotten into a good day and he has to pick on something. Groovy. He has to pick on me? Hey, if he can’t pick on me, he picks on someone else. It don’t matter. He doesn’t step on me, ’cause I don’t care. He’s not coming up to me on the street and stepping on my head, man. Hey, I’ve only done that with very few of my songs, anyway. And then when I don’t do it, everybody says they’re rock & roll melodies. You can’t satisfy the people—you just can’t. You got to know, man: they just don’t care about it.

  R: Why is rock & roll coming in and folk music going out?

  D: Folk music destroyed itself. Nobody destroyed it. Folk music is still here, it’s always going to be here, if you want to dig it. It’s not that it’s going in or out. It’s all the soft mellow shit, man, that’s just being replaced by something that people know is there now. Hey, you must’ve heard rock & roll long before the Beatles, you must’ve discarded rock & roll around 1960. I did that in 1957. I couldn’t make it as a rock & roll singer then. There were too many groups. I used to play piano. I made some records, too.

  R: Okay. You’ve got a lot of bread now. And your way of life isn’t like it was four or five years ago. It’s much grander. Does that kind of thing tend to throw you off?

  D: Well, the transition never came from working at it. I left where I’m from because there’s nothing there. I come from Minnesota; there was nothing there. I’m not going to fake it and say I went out to see the world or I went out to conquer the world. Hey, when I left there, man, I knew one thing: I had to get out of there and not come back. Just from my senses I knew there was something more than Walt Disney movies. I was never turned on or off by money. I never considered the fact of money as anything really important. I could always play the guitar, you dig, and make friends—or fake friends. A lot of other people do other things and get to eat and sleep that way. Lot of people do a lot of things just to get around. You can find cats who get very scared, right? Who get married and settle down. But, after somebody’s got something and sees it all around him, so he doesn’t have to sleep out in the cold at night, that’s all. The only thing is he don’t die. But is he happy? There’s nowhere to go. Okay, so I get the money, right? First of all, I had to move out of New York. Because everybody was coming down to see me—people which I didn’t really dig. People coming in from weird-ass places. And I would think, for some reason, that I had to give them someplace to stay and all that. I found myself not really being by myself but just staying out of things I wanted to go to because people I knew would go there.

  R: Do you find friends—real friends—are they recognizable anymore?

  D: Oh, sure, man, I can tell somebody I dig right away. I don’t have to go through anything with anybody. I’m just lucky that way.

  R: Back to Protest Songs. The IWW’s work is over now and the unions are pretty well established. What about the civil rights movement?

  D: Well, it’s okay now. It’s proper. It’s not “Commie” anymore. Harper’s Bazaar can feature it, you can find it on the cover of Life. But when you get beneath it, like anything, you find there’s bullshit tied up in it. The Negro Civil Rights Movement is proper now, but there’s more to it than what’s in Harper’s Bazaar. There’s more to it than picketing in Selma, right? There’s people living in utter poverty in New York. And then again, you have this big Right to Vote. Which is groovy. You want all these Negroes to vote? Okay. I can’t go over the boat and shout, “Hallelujah!” only because they want to vote. Who’re they going to vote for? Just politicians; same as the white people put in their politicians. Anybody that wants to get into politics is a little greaky anyway. Hey, they’re just going to vote, that’s all they’re going to do. I hate to say it like that, make it sound hard, but it’s going to boil down to that.

  R: What about the drive for education?


  D: Education? They’re going to school and learn about all the things the white private schools teach. The catechism, the whole thing. What’re they going to learn? What’s this education? Hey, the cat’s much better off never going to school. The only thing against him is he can’t be a doctor or a judge. Or he can’t get a good job with the salesman’s company. But that’s the only thing wrong. If you want to say it’s good that he gets an education and goes out and gets a job like that, groovy. I’m not going to do it.

  R: In other words, the formal intake of factual knowledge—

  D: Hey, I have no respect for factual knowledge, man. I don’t care what anybody knows, I don’t care if somebody’s a living encyclopedia. Does that make him nice to talk to? Who cares if Washington was even the first president of the United States? You think anybody has actually ever been helped with this kind of knowledge?

  R: Maybe through a test. Well, what’s the answer?

  D: There aren’t any answers, man. Or any questions. You must read my book . . . there’s a little part in there about that. It evolves into a thing where it mentions words like “Answer.” I couldn’t possibly rattle off the words I use for these, because you’d have to read the whole book to see why I use these specific words for Question and Answer. We’ll have another interview after you read the book.

  R: Yeah, you have a book coming out. What about it? The title?

  D: Tentatively, “Bob Dylan Off the Record.” But they tell me there’s already books out with that “off the record” title. The book can’t really be titled, that’s the kind of book it is. I’m also going to write the reviews for it.

  R: Why write a book instead of lyrics?

  D: I’ve written some songs which are kind of far out, a long continuation of verses, stuff like that—but I haven’t really gotten into writing a completely free song. Hey, you dig something like cut-ups? I mean, like William Burroughs?

  R: Yeah. There’s a cat in Paris who published a book with no pagination. The book comes in a box and you throw it in the air and, however it lands, you read it like that.

  D: Yeah, that’s where it’s at. Because that’s what it means, anyway. Okay, I wrote the book because there’s a lot of stuff in there which I can’t possibly sing . . . all the collages. I can’t sing it because it gets too long or it goes too far out. I can only do it around a few people who would know. Because the majority of the audience—I don’t care where they’re from, how hip they are—I think it would just get totally lost. Something that had no rhyme, all cut up, no nothing, except something happening which is words.

  R: You wrote the book to say something?

  D: Yeah, but certainly not any kind of profound statement. The book don’t begin or end.

  R: But you had something to say. And you wanted to say it to somebody.

  D: Yeah, I said it to myself. Only I’m lucky, because I could put it into a book. Now somebody else is going to be allowed to see what I said to myself.

  R: You have four albums out now, with a fifth any day. Are these albums sequential in the way that you composed and sung them?

  D: Yeah, I’ve got about two or three albums that I’ve never recorded, which are lost songs. They’re old songs; I’ll never record them. Some very groovy songs. Some old songs which I’ve written and sung maybe once in a concert and nobody else ever heard them. There are a lot of songs which could fill in between the records. It was growing from the first record to the second, then a head change on the third. And the fourth. The fifth I can’t even tell you about.

  R: So if I started with Album One, Side One, Band One, I could truthfully watch Bob Dylan grow?

  D: No, you could watch Bob Dylan laughing to himself. Or you could see Bob Dylan going through changes. That’s really the most.

  R: What do you think of the Byrds? Do you think they’re doing something different?

  D: Yeah, they could. They’re doing something really new now. It’s like a danceable Bach sound. Like “Bells of Rhymney.” They’re cutting across all kinds of barriers which most people who sing aren’t even hip to. They know it all. If they don’t close their minds, they’ll come up with something pretty fantastic.

  * * *

  The interview part was over. I stayed in the hotel room until we all left for the concert at which point he asked me if I wanted his guitar case. Since my cardboard case had long since fallen in, I took his. After the concert, we stopped back in his room before going to a party at his agents’. There he gave me two or three bottles of wine. It wasn’t Bob Dylan handing out souvenirs or some sort of useable autograph, it was merely that he had something which he didn’t necessarily need which I could use. It was a friendly gesture, an easy act done by someone who doesn’t get much chance to be friendly with anyone except old friends.

  When we left the concert, he insisted someone was following us and I felt this touch of paranoia to be a bit curious—until we actually discovered a car definitely following. There were also the groovy open friendly faces at the stage entrance when we went into the concert hall—hippies who wanted to get in free. Dylan said no and it also struck me as curious—until I realized what a continual Give is demanded of him, even by those who should know enough to make their own scenes.

  Next time you hear a Dylan put-down story, remember that he’s just as human as human beings are—and it’s his very humanity which makes him the power he is.

  DYLAN ON

  How His Songwriting Was Changing

  “The big difference is that the songs I was writing last year, songs like ‘Ballad in Plain D,’ they were what I call one-dimensional songs, but my new songs I’m trying to make more three-dimensional, you know, there’s more symbolism, they’re written on more than one level. . . . I wrote ‘Hard Rain’ while I was on the streets, I guess that was the first three-dimensional song I wrote. It took me about—oh, about two days.”

  —from interview with Jenny De Yong and Peter Roche, Darts (UK), May 1965

  DYLAN ON

  News Magazines

  “If I want to find out anything, I’m not going to read Time magazine, I’m not gonna read Newsweek. I’m not gonna read any of these magazines. I mean, ’cause they just got too much to lose by printing the truth. You know that . . . They’d just go off the stands in a day if they printed really the truth . . . There’s no ideas in Time magazine.”

  —from interview with Horace Judson of Time (US), London, May 9, 1965

  DYLAN ON

  Disc Weekly

  “Listen, I couldn’t care less what your paper writes about me. Your paper can write anything, don’t you realize? The people that listen to me don’t read your paper, you know, to listen to me. I’m not going to be known from your paper . . . You’re using me. I’m an object to you. I went through this before in the United States, you know. There’s nothing personal. I’ve nothing against you at all. I just don’t want to be bothered with your paper, that’s all. I just don’t want to be a part of it. Why should I have to go along with something just so that somebody else can eat? Why don’t you just say that my name is Kissenovitch? You know, and I came from Acapulco, Mexico. That my father was an escaped thief from South Africa. OK. You can say anything you want to say.”

  —from interview with Laurie Henshaw, Disc Weekly (UK), May 22, 1965

  INTERVIEW

  Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston | August 1965 (interview) | Publication Unknown

  As Paul Jay Robbins reported in part one of his Los Angeles Free Press series, a Hollywood Bowl audience in September 1965 had not been “too receptive to the New Amplified Dylan.” And that wasn’t the first time that plugging in had cost him some cheers: listeners also booed and cried “sellout!” when Dylan mingled folk with rock at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island in July and at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in New York that August.

  Any rebellion was short-lived, however; in fact, it was during the latter half of 1965 that Dylan solidified his hold on a mass audience. At the end of August, he issued Highw
ay 61 Revisited, which peaked in Billboard at number three and became his second bona fide hit album, thanks to rock landmarks such as the title cut, the lyrically stunning “Desolation Row,” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” The latter came out as a 45 in July and reached number two on the charts, becoming Dylan’s first hit single; “Positively 4th Street” would follow in September and make it to number seven.

  The month Columbia Records released Highway 61 Revisited, New York Post “Teen Talk” columnist Susan Edmiston got an appointment to interview Dylan. Nora Ephron—who would later break the news of the singer’s November 1965 marriage to Sara Lownds and who would much later become a famous Hollywood screenwriter—was then a reporter at the Post and asked to come along.

  “We both wrote pieces based on the interview,” Edmiston told me. “I did a column and she did a large feature. Afterward, I took both of our notes and typed them up as an interview.

  “I don’t know how word of it got around,” Edmiston continued, “but after I’d already agreed to the first publication, Jann Wenner [the editor and publisher] at Rolling Stone called me and tried to get me to give it to him instead. He offered to take me out to dinner, as if that was an incentive. I declined.”

  Today, Edmiston can’t recall where this widely reprinted interview first appeared. Two sources cite a fanzine called Positively Tie Dream as the place of initial publication, but I’ve been unable to independently confirm that.

  At any rate, you can see why Wenner would want the piece. Ephron and Edmiston hit Dylan with unusual questions, ranging from “Do you see the world as chaos?” to “Where did you get that shirt?” His answers suggest self-confidence, and a head full of ideas. —Ed.

  This interview took place in late summer of 1965 in the office of Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman. Dylan had just been booed in the historic Forest Hills concert where he abandoned folk purity to the use of electric accompaniment. He was wearing a red-and-navy op-art shirt, a navy blazer, and pointy high-heeled boots. His face, so sharp and harsh when translated through media, was then infinitely soft and delicate. His hair was not bushy or electric or Afro; it was fine-spun soft froth like the foam of a wave. He looked like an underfed angel with a nose from the land of the Chosen People.