Dylan on Dylan

by Jeff Burger

Reporter: Is it a strange experience?

  Dylan: No. It’s more or less like a heavenly kind of thing.

  Reporter: What do you think of Joan Baez’s interpretations of your earlier songs?

  Dylan: I haven’t heard her latest album or the one before that. She does ’em all right, I think.

  Reporter: What about Donovan? “Colours.” Do you think he’s a good poet of love ballads?

  Dylan: Nah. [Pause.] He’s a nice guy, though.

  [Laughter.]

  Reporter: I’m shattered.

  Dylan: Well, you needn’t be.

  Reporter: Are there any young folksingers or rock groups that you would recommend for us to hear?

  Dylan: I’m glad you asked that. [Laughter.] Oh, yeah, the Sir Douglas Quintet I think are probably the best that are going to have a chance of reaching the commercial airways. They already have with a couple songs.

  Reporter: What about Paul Butterfield’s group?

  Dylan: They’re good.

  Reporter: Mr. Dylan, you call yourself a completely disconnected person—

  Dylan: No, I didn’t call myself that. They sort of drilled those words in my mouth. I saw that paper.

  Reporter: A-ha. How would you describe yourself? Have you analyzed why you appeal to people?

  Dylan: I certainly haven’t. No.

  Reporter: Mr. Dylan, I know you dislike labels and probably rightly so, but for those of us who are well over thirty, could you label yourself and perhaps tell us what your role is?

  Dylan: Well, I’d sort of label myself as “well under thirty.” [Laughter.] And my role is to just stay here as long as I can.

  [Laughter.]

  Reporter: Phil Ochs wrote something in a recent Broadside magazine to the effect that you have twisted so many people’s wigs that he feels that it becomes increasingly dangerous for you to perform in public before an audience.

  Dylan: Well, that’s the way it goes. I can’t apologize, certainly.

  Reporter: Did you envision the time when you would give five concerts in one area like this within ten days?

  Dylan: No. No, this is all very new to me.

  Reporter: If you were draftable at present, do you have any feelings of what your actions might be?

  Dylan: No. I’d probably just do what had to be done.

  Reporter: What would that be?

  Dylan: Well, I don’t know. I never really speak in terms of what if, so I don’t really know.

  Reporter: You’re considered by many people to be symbolic of the protest movement in the country for the young people. Are you going to participate in the Vietnam Day Committee demonstration in front of the Fairmont Hotel tonight?

  Dylan: No, I’ll be busy tonight.

  [Laughter.]

  Reporter: Are you planning any demonstrations?

  Dylan: Well, we thought of one. I don’t know if it could be organized in time.

  Reporter: Would you describe it?

  Dylan: Well it was a demonstration where I make up the cards. You know, they have a group of protesters here, perhaps carrying cards with pictures of jack of diamonds and the ace of spades on them. Pictures of mules, maybe words and, oh, maybe about twenty-five, thirty thousand of these things printed up and just picket. Carry signs and picket in front of the post office.

  Reporter: What words?

  Dylan: Oh . . . camera [laughter], microphone [laughter], loose. Just words. Names of some famous people.

  Reporter: Do you consider yourself a politician?

  Dylan: Well, I guess so. I have my own party, though.

  Reporter: Does it have a name?

  Dylan: No. There’s no presidents in the party. There’s no presidents or vice presidents or secretaries or anything like that, so it makes it kinda hard to get in.

  Reporter: Is there any right wing or left wing in that party?

  Dylan: No. It’s more or less in the center. Kind of on the uppity scale.

  Reporter: Do you think your party could end the war with China?

  Dylan: I don’t know. I don’t know if they have any people over there that would be in the same kind of party. So it might be kind of hard to infiltrate. I don’t think my party would ever be approved by the White House or anything like that.

  Reporter: Is there anyone else in your party?

  Dylan: No. Most of us don’t even know each other. It’s hard to tell who’s in it and who’s not in it.

  Reporter: Would you recognize them when you see them?

  Dylan: Oh, you can recognize the people when you see them.

  [Laughter.]

  Reporter: Are there still tickets available for your concerts in this area?

  Dylan: I would imagine so. At least some, I guess.

  Reporter: How long do you think before you finally will quit?

  Dylan: Gee, I don’t know. I could answer that but it would mean something different probably for everybody, so we want to keep away from those kind of things.

  Reporter: What did you mean when you said I don’t think things will work out too easily . . .

  Dylan: It’s not that I don’t think things can turn out. I don’t think anything you plan ever turns out the way you plan it. That’s all.

  Reporter: Is that your philosophy?

  Dylan: No, no. Doesn’t mean anything.

  Reporter: Do you think that it’s fun to put on an audience?

  Dylan: I don’t know. I’ve never done it.

  Reporter: I heard a song called “Baby, You Been on My Mind.” Has it been recorded?

  Dylan: No.

  Reporter: Do you sing it in concert?

  Dylan: No, I haven’t.

  Reporter: Are the concerts fun still?

  Dylan: Yeah. Concerts are much more fun than they used to be.

  Reporter: Do you consider them more important than your albums, for instance?

  Dylan: No. It’s just a kick to do it now. The albums are the most important.

  Reporter: Because they reach more people?

  Dylan: No, because it’s all very concise, and it’s easy to hear the words. There’s no chance of the sound interfering, whereas we’ve played some concerts where sometimes they have very bad halls. You know, microphone systems so it’s not that easy for somebody to come and just listen to a band as if they were listening to one person.

  Reporter: Will you make all those lyrics of songs available in a book sometime?

  Dylan: Oh, they all are, yeah.

  Reporter: You say you no longer sing your older songs. Do you consider them less valid than the ones you’re putting out now?

  Dylan: No, I just consider them something else—in another time, another dimension. It would be kind of dishonest for me to sing them now, because I wouldn’t really feel like singing them.

  Reporter: What is the strangest thing that ever happened to you?

  Dylan: You’re gonna get it, man.

  [Laughter.]

  Reporter: But what is the weirdest thing that ever happened to you?

  Dylan: I’ll talk to you about it later. [Laughter.] I wouldn’t do that to you.

  Reporter: What areas of music that you haven’t gotten into do you hope to get into?

  Dylan: Writing a symphony with different melodies and different words, different ideas, all being the same, which just roll on top of each other and underneath each other.

  Reporter: Mr. Dylan, when will you know that it’s time to get out of the music field into another field?

  Dylan: When I get very dragged.

  Reporter: When you stop making money?

  Dylan: No. When my teeth get better or, God . . . when I start to itch. When something just goes to a terrifying turn, and I know it’s got nothing to do with anything and it’s time to leave.

  Reporter: You say you’re gonna write symphonies. Is this in the terms that we think of symphonies?

  Dylan: I’m not sure. Songs which are all written as a part of a symphony—different melodies, different changes—with words or without them.
. . . I mean, they say that my songs are long now. Well, sometime I’m just gonna come up with one whole album, consisting of one song. I don’t know who’s going to buy it. That might be the time to leave.

  Reporter: What’s the longest song you’ve recorded?

  Dylan: I don’t know. I don’t really check those things. They just turn out long. I guess I’ve recorded one about eleven, twelve minutes long. “[Ballad of] Hollis Brown” was pretty long on my second record [Actually, on his third. —Ed.] and “With God on Your Side” was kind of long. But none of them, I don’t think, were as much into anything as “Desolation Row” was, and that was long, too. Songs shouldn’t seem long. It just so happens that it looks that way on paper, that’s all. The length of it doesn’t really have anything to do with it.

  Reporter: Doesn’t this give you a problem in issuing records?

  Dylan: No, they’re just ready to do anything that I put down now, so they don’t really care.

  Reporter: But what happens if they have to cut a song in half, like “Subterranean Homesick Blues”?

  Dylan: They didn’t have to cut that in half.

  Reporter: They didn’t have to, but they did.

  Dylan: No, they didn’t. You’re talking about “Like a Rolling Stone.”

  Reporter: Oh, yeah.

  Dylan: They cut it in half for the disc jockeys. Well, you see, that song, it didn’t matter for the disc jockeys if they had it cut in half because the other side was a continuation and if anybody was interested they could just turn it over. But we just made a song the other day which came out ten minutes long, and I thought of releasing it as a single but they would have cut it up but it wouldn’t have worked that way, so we’re not gonna turn it out as a single. It’s called “Freeze Out.” You’ll hear it on the next album.

  Bill Graham: Of all the people who record your compositions, who do you feel does most justice to what you’re trying to say?

  Dylan: I think Manfred Mann. They’ve done about three or four, and each one of them has been right in context with what the song was all about.

  Reporter: What is your new book about?

  Dylan: Oh, it’s just about all kinds of different things. Rats, balloons. They’re about the only things that come to my mind right now.

  Reporter: Is that the same book that Macmillan—

  Dylan: Yes, yes.

  Reporter: Do press conferences oppress you?

  Dylan: No, I don’t really do too many of them. I wouldn’t do it if I was oppressed or depressed. There’s nothing wrong . . . it’s just kind of silly to come up here, that’s all.

  Reporter: Mr. Dylan, how would you define folk music?

  Dylan: How would I define folk music? As a constitutional replay of mass production.

  Reporter: Do you call your songs folk songs?

  Dylan: No, no.

  Reporter: Are protests songs folk songs?

  Dylan: I guess, if they’re a constitutional replay of mass production.

  [Laughter.]

  Reporter: Do you prefer songs with a subtle or obvious message?

  Dylan: I don’t really prefer those kind of songs at all. Message . . . you mean like—

  Reporter: Well, like “Eve of Destruction” and things like that.

  Dylan: Do I prefer that to what?

  Reporter: I don’t know, but your songs are supposed to have a subtle message.

  Dylan: Subtle message?

  Reporter: Well, they’re supposed to.

  [Laughter.]

  Dylan: Where’d you hear that?

  [Laughter.]

  Reporter: In a movie magazine.

  [Laughter.]

  Dylan: Oh, my God. Well, we don’t discuss those things here.

  Reporter: Are your songs ever about real people?

  Dylan: Sure. They’re all about real people.

  Reporter: Particular ones?

  Dylan: Particular people? Sure. I’m sure you’ve seen all the people in my songs at one time or another.

  Reporter: Who’s Mr. Jones?

  Dylan: I’m not going to tell you his first name. I’d get sued.

  [Laughter.]

  Reporter: What does he do for a living?

  Dylan: He’s a pin boy. [Laughter.] He also wears suspenders.

  [Laughter.]

  Reporter: Can you explain your attraction as a performer and a writer ?

  Dylan: Attraction to what?

  [Laughter.]

  Reporter: Your attraction, your mass popularity.

  Dylan: No, no. I really have no idea. That’s the truth. I always tell the truth.

  Reporter: What are your personal hopes for the future, and what do you hope to change in the world?

  Dylan: To be honest, I don’t have any hopes for the future, and I just hope to have enough boots to be able to change them. That’s all, really. It doesn’t boil down to anything more than that. If it did, I would certainly tell you.

  Reporter: What do you think of a question-and-answer session of this type, with you as the principal subject?

  Dylan: Well, I think we all have different—I think I dropped an ash on myself somewhere; you’ll see in a minute here—I’m not going to say anything about it, though. I . . . what was the question?

  Reporter: What are you thinking about right now?

  Dylan: I’m thinking about this ash.

  [Laughter.]

  Reporter: Right before that.

  Dylan: The ash is creeping up on me somewhere. I’ve lost touch with myself so I can’t tell where exactly it is.

  Reporter: Was that an inadvertent evading of the question—what you feel about meetings of this kind, question-and-answer sessions—

  Dylan: Oh, no, no. I just know in my own mind that we all have a different idea of all the words we’re using, so I really can’t take it too seriously. Like if I say the word “house,” we’re both going to see a different house. So we’re using all these other words like “mass production” and “movie magazine” and we all have a different idea of these words, too, so I don’t really know what we’re saying here.

  Reporter: Is it pointless?

  Dylan: No, it’s not pointless. If you want to do it, and you’re there, it’s not pointless. It doesn’t hurt me any.

  Reporter: Is there anything in addition to your songs that you want to say to people?

  Dylan: Good luck.

  Reporter: You don’t say that in your songs.

  Dylan: Oh, yes, I do. Every song tails off with “good luck, I hope you make it.”

  [Laughter.]

  Reporter: What do you bother to write the poetry for if we all get different images and we don’t know what you’re talking about?

  Dylan: Because I got nothing else to do, man.

  [Laughter.]

  Reporter: Do you have a rhyme for “orange”?

  Dylan: A-ha. Just a rhyme for “orange”?

  Reporter: Is it true that you were censored from singing on The Ed Sullivan Show because they wouldn’t let you sing what you wanted to?

  Dylan: I’ll tell you the rhyme in a minute.

  Reporter: Did they censor you from singing what you wanted to on The Ed Sullivan Show?

  Dylan: Yes. It was a long time ago.

  Reporter: What did you want to sing?

  Dylan: I don’t know, it was some song which I wanted to sing and they said I could sing. It’s more to it than just censorship there. They actually said I could sing the song, but when we went through the rehearsal of it, the guy came back afterwards and said I have to change it and he said, “Can’t you sing some folk song like the Clancy Brothers do?” And I didn’t know any of their songs and so I couldn’t be on the program. That’s what it came down to.

  Allen Ginsberg: Have you found that the texts of the interviews with you which have been published are accurate to the actual conversations?

  Dylan: No. That’s another reason I don’t really give press interviews or anything, because even if you do something—there are a lot of
people here, so they know what’s going on—but if you just do it with one guy or a few guys, they just take it all out of context, split it up in the middle or just take what they want to use and they even ask you a question and you answer it and then it comes out in print that they just substitute another question for your answer. It’s not really truthful to do that kind of thing, so I just don’t do it. That’s just a press problem there.

  Reporter: Do you think the entire text of your news conference today should be printed in the newspaper?

  Dylan: Oh, no, nothing like that. But this is just for the interviews, when they do interviews in places like Omaha or Cincinnati. I don’t do it and then they write bad things.

  Reporter: Well, isn’t this partly because you are often inaudible? Like, for most of this dialogue or monologue you have been inaudible, and now when you’re touched personally by the misquotation, your voice rises and we can hear you.

  Dylan: Yeah, well, I just realized that maybe people in the back there can’t hear me, that’s all.

  Reporter: I was going to ask you, in your songs you sing out—

  Dylan: Yes, I do.

  Reporter: —and whether in your conversations you cultivate—

  Dylan: You see, the songs is what I do—write the songs and sing them and perform them. That’s what I do. The performing part of it could end, but I’m gonna be writing these songs and singing them on records for . . . I see no end, right now. That’s what I do. Anything else interferes with it, I mean anything trying to get on top, making something out of it which it isn’t, it just brings me down, and it just makes it seem all very cheap.

  Reporter: Well, it made me feel like you were almost doing a kind of penance of silence here—

  Dylan: No, no.

  Reporter: —for the first part—

  Dylan: No, no, I’m not one of those kind of people at all.

  Reporter: You don’t need silence?

  Dylan: No, no silence. It’s always silent where I am.

  Reporter: Mr. Dylan, when you’re on a concert tour how many people travel in your party? Do you travel alone or do you have a—

  Dylan: We travel with about twelve people now.

  Reporter: Do the number of people seem to increase as you make more money?

  Dylan: Oh, yes, of course.

  [Laughter.]

  Reporter: Is that known as Dylan’s Law?

  Reporter: Why do you need so many people when you travel?