Dylan on Dylan

by Jeff Burger

  PLAYBOY: But your early ballads have been called “songs of passionate protest.” Wouldn’t that make them “message” music?

  DYLAN: This is unimportant. Don’t you understand? I’ve been writing since I was eight years old. I’ve been playing the guitar since I was ten. I was raised playing and writing whatever it was I had to play and write.

  PLAYBOY: Would it be unfair to say, then, as some have, that you were motivated commercially rather than creatively in writing the kind of songs that made you popular?

  DYLAN: All right, now, look. It’s not all that deep. It’s not a complicated thing. My motives, or whatever they are, were never commercial in the money sense of the word. It was more in the don’t die-by-the-hacksaw sense of the word. I never did it for money. It happened, and I let it happen to me. There was no reason not to let it happen to me. I couldn’t have written before what I write now, anyway. The songs used to be about what I felt and saw. Nothing of my own rhythmic vomit ever entered into it. Vomit is not romantic. I used to think songs are supposed to be romantic. And I didn’t want to sing anything that was unspecific. Unspecific things have no sense of time. All of us people have no sense of time; it’s a dimensional hangup. Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. The leaders of the world take the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about. My older songs, to say the least, were about nothing. The newer ones are about the same nothing—only as seen inside a bigger thing, perhaps called the nowhere. But this is all very constipated. I do know what my songs are about.

  PLAYBOY: And what’s that?

  DYLAN: Oh, some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve.

  PLAYBOY: Can’t you be a bit more informative?

  DYLAN: Nope.

  PLAYBOY: All right. Let’s change the subject. As you know, it’s the age group from about 16 to 25 that listens to your songs. Why, in your opinion?

  DYLAN: I don’t see what’s so strange about an age group like that listening to my songs. I’m hip enough to know that it ain’t going to be the 85-to-90-year-olds. If the 85-to-90-year-olds were listening to me, they’d know that I can’t tell them anything. The 16-to-25-year-olds, they probably know that I can’t tell them anything either—and they know that I know it. It’s a funny business. Obviously, I’m not an IBM computer any more than I’m an ashtray. I mean it’s obvious to anyone who’s ever slept in the back seat of a car that I’m just not a schoolteacher.

  PLAYBOY: Even though you’re not a schoolteacher, wouldn’t you like to help the young people who dig you from turning into what some of their parents have become?

  DYLAN: Well, I must say that I really don’t know their parents. I really don’t know if anybody’s parents are so bad. Now, I hate to come on like a weakling or a coward, and I realize it might seem kind of irreligious, but I’m really not the right person to tramp around the country saving souls. I wouldn’t run over anybody that was laying in the street, and I certainly wouldn’t become a hangman. I wouldn’t think twice about giving a starving man a cigarette. But I’m not a shepherd. And I’m not about to save anybody from fate, which I know nothing about. “Parents” is not the key word here. The key word is “destiny.” I can’t save them from that.

  PLAYBOY: Still, thousands of young people look up to you as a kind of folk hero. Do you feel some sense of responsibility toward them?

  DYLAN: I don’t feel I have any responsibility, no. Whoever it is that listens to my songs owes me nothing. How could I possibly have any responsibility to any kind of thousands? What could possibly make me think that I owe anybody anything who just happens to be there? I’ve never written any song that begins with the words “I’ve gathered you here tonight . . .” I’m not about to tell anybody to be a good boy or a good girl and they’ll go to heaven. I really don’t know what the people who are on the receiving end of these songs think of me, anyway. It’s horrible. I’ll bet Tony Bennett doesn’t have to go through this kind of thing. I wonder what Billy the Kid would have answered to such a question.

  PLAYBOY: In their admiration for you, many young people have begun to imitate the way you dress—which one adult commentator has called “self-consciously oddball and defiantly sloppy.” What’s your reaction to that kind of put-down?

  DYLAN: Bullshit. Oh, such bullshit. I know the fellow that said that. He used to come around here and get beat up all the time. He better watch it; some people are after him. They’re going to strip him naked and stick him in Times Square. They’re going to tie him up, and also put a thermometer in his mouth. Those kind of morbid ideas and remarks are so petty—I mean there’s a war going on. People got rickets; everybody wants to start a riot; 40-year-old women are eating spinach by the carload; the doctors haven’t got a cure for cancer—and here’s some hillbilly talking about how he doesn’t like somebody’s clothes. Worse than that, it gets printed and innocent people have to read it. This is a terrible thing. And he’s a terrible man. Obviously, he’s just living off the fat of himself, and he’s expecting his kids to take care of him. His kids probably listen to my records. Just because my clothes are too long, does that mean I’m unqualified for what I do?

  PLAYBOY: No, but there are those who think it does—and many of them seem to feel the same way about your long hair. But compared with the shoulder-length coiffures worn by some of the male singing groups these days, your tonsorial tastes are on the conservative side. How do you feel about these far-out hair styles?

  DYLAN: The thing that most people don’t realize is that it’s warmer to have long hair. Everybody wants to be warm. People with short hair freeze easily. Then they try to hide their coldness, and they get jealous of everybody that’s warm. Then they become either barbers or Congressmen. A lot of prison wardens have short hair. Have you ever noticed that Abraham Lincoln’s hair was much longer than John Wilkes Booth’s?

  PLAYBOY: Do you think Lincoln wore his hair long to keep his head warm?

  DYLAN: Actually, I think it was for medical reasons, which are none of my business. But I guess if you figure it out, you realize that all of one’s hair surrounds and lays on the brain inside your head. Mathematically speaking, the more of it you can get out of your head, the better. People who want free minds sometimes overlook the fact that you have to have an uncluttered brain. Obviously, if you get your hair on the outside of your head, your brain will be a little more freer. But all this talk about long hair is just a trick. It’s been thought up by men and women who look like cigars—the anti-happiness committee. They’re all freeloaders and cops. You can tell who they are: They’re always carrying calendars, guns or scissors. They’re all trying to get into your quicksand. They think you’ve got something. I don’t know why Abe Lincoln had long hair.

  PLAYBOY: Until your abandonment of “message” songs, you were considered not only a major voice in the student protest movement but a militant champion of the civil rights struggle. According to friends, you seemed to feel a special bond of kinship with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which you actively supported both as a performer and as a worker. Why have you withdrawn from participation in all these causes? Have you lost interest in protest as well as in protest songs?

  DYLAN: As far as SNCC is concerned, I knew some of the people in it, but I only knew them as people, not as of any part of something that was bigger or better than themselves. I didn’t even know what civil rights was before I met some of them. I mean, I knew there were Negroes, and I knew there were a lot of people who don’t like Negroes. But I got to admit that if I didn’t know some of the SNCC people, I would have gone on thinking that Martin Luther King was really nothing more than some underprivileged war hero. I haven’t lost any interest in protest since then. I just didn’t have any interest in protest to begin with—any more than I did in war heroes. You can’t lose what you’ve nev
er had. Anyway, when you don’t like your situation, you either leave it or else you overthrow it. You can’t just stand around and whine about it. People just get aware of your noise; they really don’t get aware of you. Even if they give you what you want, it’s only because you’re making too much noise. First thing you know, you want something else, and then you want something else, and then you want something else, until finally it isn’t a joke anymore, and whoever you’re protesting against finally gets all fed up and stomps on everybody. Sure, you can go around trying to bring up people who are lesser than you, but then don’t forget, you’re messing around with gravity. I don’t fight gravity. I do believe in equality, but I also believe in distance.

  PLAYBOY: Do you mean people keeping their racial distance?

  DYLAN: I believe in people keeping everything they’ve got.

  PLAYBOY: Some people might feel that you’re trying to cop out of fighting for the things you believe in.

  DYLAN: Those would be people who think I have some sort of responsibility toward them. They probably want me to help them make friends. I don’t know. They probably either want to set me in their house and have me come out every hour and tell them what time it is, or else they just want to stick me in between the mattress. How could they possibly understand what I believe in?

  PLAYBOY: Well, what do you believe in?

  DYLAN: I already told you.

  PLAYBOY: All right. Many of your folksinging colleagues remain actively involved in the fight for civil rights, free speech and withdrawal from Vietnam. Do you think they’re wrong?

  DYLAN: I don’t think they’re wrong, if that’s what they see themselves doing. But don’t think that what you’ve got out there is a bunch of little Buddhas all parading up and down. People that use God as a weapon should be amputated upon. You see it around here all the time: “Be good or God won’t like you, and you’ll go to hell.” Things like that. People that march with slogans and things tend to take themselves a little too holy. It would be a drag if they, too, started using God as a weapon.

  PLAYBOY: Do you think it’s pointless to dedicate yourself to the cause of peace and racial equality?

  DYLAN: Not pointless to dedicate yourself to peace and racial equality, but rather, it’s pointless to dedicate yourself to the cause; that’s really pointless. That’s very unknowing. To say “cause of peace” is just like saying “hunk of butter.” I mean, how can you listen to anybody who wants you to believe he’s dedicated to the hunk and not to the butter? People who can’t conceive of how others hurt, they’re trying to change the world. They’re all afraid to admit that they don’t really know each other. They’ll all probably be here long after we’ve gone, and we’ll give birth to new ones. But they themselves—I don’t think they’ll give birth to anything.

  PLAYBOY: You sound a bit fatalistic.

  DYLAN: I’m not fatalistic. Bank tellers are fatalistic; clerks are fatalistic. I’m a farmer. Who ever heard of a fatalistic farmer? I’m not fatalistic. I smoke a lot of cigarettes, but that doesn’t make me fatalistic.

  PLAYBOY: You were quoted recently as saying that “songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.” We take it you don’t share Pete Seeger’s belief that songs can change people, that they can help build international understanding.

  DYLAN: On the international understanding part, that’s OK. But you have a translation problem there. Anybody with this kind of a level of thinking has to also think about this translation thing. But I don’t believe songs can change people anyway. I’m not Pinocchio. I consider that an insult. I’m not part of that. I don’t blame anybody for thinking that way. But I just don’t donate any money to them. I don’t consider them anything like unhip; they’re more in the rubber-band category.

  PLAYBOY: How do you feel about those who have risked imprisonment by burning their draft cards to signify their opposition to U. S. involvement in Vietnam, and by refusing—as your friend Joan Baez has done—to pay their income taxes as a protest against the Government’s expenditures on war and weaponry? Do you think they’re wasting their time?

  DYLAN: Burning draft cards isn’t going to end any war. It’s not even going to save any lives. If someone can feel more honest with himself by burning his draft card, then that’s great; but if he’s just going to feel more important because he does it, then that’s a drag. I really don’t know too much about Joan Baez and her income-tax problems. The only thing I can tell you about Joan Baez is that she’s not Belle Starr.

  PLAYBOY: Writing about “beard-wearing draft-card burners and pacifist income-tax evaders,” one columnist called such protesters “no less outside society than the junkie, the homosexual or the mass murderer.” What’s your reaction?

  DYLAN: I don’t believe in those terms. They’re too hysterical. They don’t describe anything. Most people think that homosexual, gay, queer, queen, faggot are all the same words. Everybody thinks that a junkie is a dope freak. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t consider myself outside of anything. I just consider myself not around.

  PLAYBOY: Joan Baez recently opened a school in northern California for training civil rights workers in the philosophy and techniques of nonviolence. Are you in sympathy with that concept?

  DYLAN: If you mean do I agree with it or not, I really don’t see anything to be in agreement with. If you mean has it got my approval, I guess it does, but my approval really isn’t going to do it any good. I don’t know about other people’s sympathy, but my sympathy runs to the lame and crippled and beautiful things. I have a feeling of loss of power—something like a reincarnation feeling; I don’t feel that for mechanical things like cars or schools. I’m sure it’s a nice school, but if you’re asking me would I go to it, I would have to say no.

  PLAYBOY: As a college dropout in your freshman year, you seem to take a dim view of schooling in general, whatever the subject.

  DYLAN: I really don’t think about it.

  PLAYBOY: Well, have you ever had any regrets about not completing college?

  DYLAN: That would be ridiculous. Colleges are like old-age homes; except for the fact that more people die in colleges than in old-age homes, there’s really no difference. People have one great blessing—obscurity—and not really too many people are thankful for it. Everybody is always taught to be thankful for their food and clothes and things like that, but not to be thankful for their obscurity. Schools don’t teach that; they teach people to be rebels and lawyers. I’m not going to put down the teaching system; that would be too silly. It’s just that it really doesn’t have too much to teach. Colleges are part of the American institution; everybody respects them. They’re very rich and influential, but they have nothing to do with survival. Everybody knows that.

  PLAYBOY: Would you advise young people to skip college, then?

  DYLAN: I wouldn’t advise anybody to do anything. I certainly wouldn’t advise somebody not to go to college; I just wouldn’t pay his way through college.

  PLAYBOY: Don’t you think the things one learns in college can help enrich one’s life?

  DYLAN: I don’t think anything like that is going to enrich my life, no—not my life, anyway. Things are going to happen whether I know why they happen or not. It just gets more complicated when you stick yourself into it. You don’t find out why things move. You let them move; you watch them move; you stop them from moving: you start them moving. But you don’t sit around and try to figure out why there’s movement—unless, of course, you’re just an innocent moron, or some wise old Japanese man. Out of all the people who just lay around and ask “Why?”, how many do you figure really want to know?

  PLAYBOY: Can you suggest a better use for the four years that would otherwise be spent in college?

  DYLAN: Well, you could hang around in Italy; you could go to Mexico; you could become a dishwasher; you could even go to Arkansas. I don’t know; there are thousands of things to do and places to go. Everybody thinks that you have to bang your head against the wall, but it’s s
illy when you really think about it. I mean, here you have fantastic scientists working on ways to prolong human living, and then you have other people who take it for granted that you have to beat your head against the wall in order to be happy. You can’t take everything you don’t like as a personal insult. I guess you should go where your wants are bare, where you’re invisible and not needed.

  PLAYBOY: Would you classify sex among your wants, wherever you go?

  DYLAN: Sex is a temporary thing; sex isn’t love. You can get sex anywhere. If you’re looking for someone to love you, now that’s different. I guess you have to stay in college for that.

  PLAYBOY: Since you didn’t stay in college, does that mean you haven’t found someone to love you?

  DYLAN: Let’s go on to the next question.

  PLAYBOY: Do you have any difficulty relating to people—or vice versa?

  DYLAN: Well, sometimes I have the feeling that other people want my soul. If I say to them, “I don’t have a soul,” they say, “I know that. You don’t have to tell me that. Not me. How dumb do you think I am? I’m your friend.” What can I say except that I’m sorry and I feel bad? I guess maybe feeling bad and paranoia are the same thing.

  PLAYBOY: Paranoia is said to be one of the mental states sometimes induced by such hallucinogenic drugs as peyote and LSD. Considering the risks involved, do you think that experimentation with such drugs should be part of the growing up experience for a young person?

  DYLAN: I wouldn’t advise anybody to use drugs—certainly not the hard drugs; drugs are medicine. But opium and hash and pot—now, those things aren’t drugs; they just bend your mind a little. I think everybody’s mind should be bent once in a while. Not by LSD, though. LSD is medicine—a different kind of medicine. It makes you aware of the universe, so to speak; you realize how foolish objects are. But LSD is not for groovy people; it’s for mad, hateful people who want revenge. It’s for people who usually have heart attacks. They ought to use it at the Geneva Convention.