by Jeff Burger
J: I liked this quality of having things that would normally not be used, that would be discarded, suddenly put together in such a way . . .
B: Well, we had to do that because it’s all we had. The reason it didn’t get seen was that the program (TV) folded and by the time we handed it in, they had already a state-wide search begun to confiscate the film, because it was the property of ABC. So we were a little pressured here and there. What you saw was a rough work print.
J: What I liked was that the trip had such wildness, such insanity, it looked to me like things could only get worse, they couldn’t get better while you were on such a thing. As the film built up, everything seemed to contribute to that. The nature of the crowds, the nature of the reporters . . . I don’t know if it was the film, or if it was where we were sitting when we saw it, but . . . well I’m sure one person is capable of doing both things . . .
B: The subject and the director?
J: . . . Or the editor.
B: Well the editor and director were two different people.
J: Let’s say the subject and one of the editors was the same person.
B: Well, you have a lot of major films where the subject himself might be the director. Marlon Brando. Charlie Chaplin. Frank Black.
J: But the nature of the person in the film . . . maybe to you that wasn’t so wild.
B: I can imagine something a lot wilder . . . maybe not on a singing tour, but as a film. On the screen, what do you say is wild, and what do you say when wildness turns into chaos? Cecil B. DeMille made “Samson and Delilah” . . . that’s pretty wild.
J: But that was a stage set . . . I had the feeling that your film was really happening. You didn’t set up the reporters, . . . well, that girl who maybe jumps out the window, and maybe doesn’t . . . it’s hard to draw the line where play leaves off.
B: It’s hard to do a tour, and in the after hours make a movie. What we were doing was to try to fulfill this contract, to make a television show, and the only time I had to do it was when I was on tour, because I was on tour all the time.
J: I never saw you perform when you were touring with an electric band, except the last time I saw you which was at Newport, in 1965, when the public first became fully aware of what you’d been writing and thinking. But by the time this movie was shot in England, why you were really flying . . . your hands going all over, above the mouth harp . . . I got the feeling that you don’t necessarily have to predetermine these things, that they grow by themselves. When reporters ask such questions, and audiences scream at nothing, it invites you to become something that you didn’t necessarily intend to be.
B: That’s true, but I know quite a few people who accept it as a challenge. I used to see people who’d take off their tie and dangle it over the first row, and it would be almost hypnotic. P. J. Proby used to do that, there are people who actually invite it, who actually enjoy being pulled, you know . . . it’s something having to do with contact. It’s very athletic in a way.
J: I take that film as very different from the new record you made . . . it might be opposite sides of the same coin. I think it’s great, that in the period of three years, you can be the same person who did both.
B: Well, you can do anything if it’s your job. When I was touring, it was my line of work, to go out there and deliver those songs. You must accept that in some way. There’s very little you can do about it. The only other thing to do is not do it. But you certainly can’t tell what’s going to happen when you go on the stage, because the audiences are so different. Years ago the audience used to be of one nature, but that’s not true anymore.
J: You talked of it in the past—that was your job. But is it necessarily now your job?
B: It is in a way. I like to play music on the stage, I expect to be playing music endlessly. So this period of time now isn’t important to me; I know I’m going to be performing again, it’s just a matter of the right time. And I’ll have different material—so there’ll be a change there.
J: I recall a conversation we had in 1962 . . . I don’t know if I was seeing something, or wishing something on you—but I had just come back from Kentucky and you showed me “Hard Rain,” at Gerde’s or upstairs at the Gaslight . . .
B: I believe at the time, you were wondering how it fit into music. How I was going to sing it.
J: That was my initial reaction. That’s really ancient history now because a whole aesthetic, a whole other approach has come into music since then, to make it very possible to sing that kind of song.
B: Yes, that’s right.
J: Before then it wasn’t so possible. The question I asked you on seeing this stream of words was, if you were going to write things like that, then why do you need Woody Guthrie? How about Rimbaud? And you didn’t know Rimbaud . . . yet.
B: No, not until a few years ago.
J: Back then, you and Allen Ginsberg met.
B: Al Aronowitz, a reporter from the Saturday Evening Post, introduced me to Allen Ginsberg and his friend Peter Orlovsky, above a bookstore on 8th Street, in the fall of ’64 or ’65. I’d heard his name for many years. At that time these two fellows had just gotten back from a trip to India. Their knapsacks were in the corner and they were cooking a dinner at the time. I saw him again at Washington Square, at a party . . .
J: At that time, for you, was there a stronger leaning towards poetry, and the kind of thing that Allen had dealt with? . . . as opposed to what Woody had dealt with.
B: Well, the language which they were writing, you could read off the paper, and somehow it would begin some kind of tune in your mind. I don’t really know what it was, but you could see it was possible to do more than what . . . not more . . . something different than what Woody and people like Aunt Molly Jackson and Jim Garland did. The subject matter of all their songs wasn’t really accurate for me; I could see that they’d written thousands of songs, but it was all with the same heartfelt subject matter . . . whereas that subject matter did not exist then, and I knew it. There was a sort of semi-feeling of it existing, but as you looked around at the people, it didn’t really exist the way it probably existed back then, there was no real movement, there was only organized movement. There wasn’t any type of movement which was a day by day, liveable movement. When that subject matter wasn’t there anymore for me, the only thing that was there was the style. The idea of this type of song which you can live with in some kind of way, which you don’t feel embarrassed twenty minutes after you’ve sung it; that type of song where you don’t have to question yourself . . . where you’re just wasting your time.
J: I don’t know which was the cart and which was the horse, but people were asking about your music (and Phil Ochs’ and others’), “Is this stuff poetry or is this song?”
B: Yes, well you always have people asking questions.
J: What I’m trying to get at is whether you were reading a lot then, books, literature? Were your thoughts outside of music?
B: No, my mind was with the music. I tried to read, but I usually would lay the book down. I never have been a fast reader. My thoughts weren’t about reading, no . . . they were just about that feeling that was in the air. I tried to somehow get a hold of that, and write that down, and using my musical training to sort of guide it by, and in the end, have something I could do for a living.
J: Training!
B: Yes, training. You have to have some. I can remember traveling through towns, and if somebody played the guitar, that’s who you went to see. You didn’t necessarily go to meet them, you just went necessarily to watch them, listen to them, and if possible, learn how to do something . . . whatever he was doing. And usually at that time it was quite a selfish type of thing. You could see the people, and if you knew you could do what they were doing, with just a little practice, and you were looking for something else, you could just move on. But when it was down at the bottom, everyone played the guitar, when you knew that they knew more than you, well, you just had to listen to everybody. It wa
sn’t necessarily a song; it was technique and style, and tricks and all those combinations which go together—which I certainly spent a lot of hours just trying to do what other people have been doing. That’s what I mean by training.
J: It’s hard for me, because this is an interview and can’t be just a conversation . . . like the tape recorder is a third element . . . I can’t just say to your face that you did something great, that I admire you . . .
B: Well in my mind, let me tell you John, I can see a thousand people who I think are great, but I’ve given up mentioning any names anymore. Every time I tell somebody who I think is pretty good, they just shrug their shoulders . . . and so I now do the same thing. Take a fellow like Doc Watson, the fellow can play the guitar with such ability . . . just like water running. Now where do you place somebody like that in this current flow of music? Now he doesn’t use any tricks. But that has to do with age, I imagine, like how long he lives.
J: I think it’s also got to do with the age he comes from, he doesn’t come from yours or mine.
B: No, but I’m a firm believer in the longer you live, the better you get.
J: But Doc is different from you and me. I know people who hate your voice. They can’t stand that sound, that kind of singing, that grating. The existence of your voice and people like you, like Roscoe Holcomb, it challenges their very existence. They can’t conceive of that voice in the same breath as their own lives.
B: Well my voice is one thing, but someone actually having hate for Roscoe Holcomb’s voice, that beautiful high tenor, I can’t see that. What’s the difference between Roscoe Holcomb’s voice and Bill Monroe’s?
J: I don’t think Bill likes Roscoe’s voice. Bill sings with such control. Roscoe’s voice is so uncontrolled.
B: Well Bill Monroe is most likely one of the best, but Roscoe does have a certain untamed sense of control which also makes him one of the best.
J: I don’t think Doc Watson’s voice and your voice are compatible, it doesn’t bother me.
B: No, no . . . maybe someday, though.
* * *
J: I’d like to talk about the material in the songs.
B: All right.
J: Well, I mean your music is fine, it’s complete . . . but what I’m asking about is the development of your thoughts . . . which could be called “words.” That’s why I was asking about poetry and literature. Where do these things come upon a person? Maybe nobody asks you that.
B: No, nobody does, but . . . who said that, it wasn’t Benjamin Franklin, it was somebody else. No, I think it was Benjamin Franklin. He said (I’m not quoting it right) something like, “For a man to be—(something or other)—at ease, he must not tell all he knows, nor say all he sees.” Whoever said that certainly I don’t think was trying to cover up anything.
J: I once got a fortune cookie that said “Clear water hides nothing” . . . Three or four years ago, there was an interview with you in Playboy. One particular thought stuck with me. You said it was very important that “Barbara Allen” had a rose grow out of her head, and that a girl could become a swan.
B: That’s for all those people to say, “Why do you write all these songs about mystery and magic and Biblical intonations? Why do you do all that? Folk music doesn’t have any of that.” There’s no answer for a question like that, because the people who ask them are just wrong.
J: They say folk music doesn’t have this quality. Does rock and roll music have it?
B: Well, I don’t know what rock and roll music is supposed to represent. It isn’t that defined as a music. Rock and roll is dance music, perhaps an extension of the blues forms. It’s live music; nowadays they have these big speakers, and they play it so loud that it might seem live. But it’s got rhythm . . . I mean if you’re riding in your car, rock and roll stations playing, you can sort of get into that rhythm for three minutes—and you lose three minutes. It’s all gone by and you don’t have to think about anything. And it’s got a nice place; in a way this place is not necessarily in every road you turn, it’s just pleasant music.
J: You’re part of it aren’t you? Or it’s part of you.
B: Well, music is part of me, yes.
J: From what I saw in that film, you were really in it.
B: I was in it because it’s what I’ve always done. I was trying to make the two things go together when I was on those concerts. I played the first half acoustically, second half with a band, somehow thinking that it was going to be two kinds of music.
J: So acoustic would mean “folk” and band would mean “rock and roll” at that moment?
B: Yes, rock and roll is working music. You have to work at it. You just can’t sit down in a chair and play rock and roll music. You can do that with a certain kind of blues music, you can sit down and play it . . . you may have to lean forward a little.
J: Like a ballad, or one of your “dreams”?
B: Yes, you can think about it, you don’t necessarily have to be in action to think about it. Rock and roll is hard to visualize unless you’re actually doing it. . . . Actually too, we’re talking about something which is for the most part just a commercial item; it’s like boats and brooms, it’s like hardware, people sell it, so that’s what we’re talking about. In the other sense of the way which you’d think about it, it’s impossible.
J: But the kids who are getting into it today, they don’t want to sell brooms.
B: It’s an interesting field . . .
(aside to daughter)
Hello, did you just get home? Well maybe you better ask mamma. How was school? You learn anything? Well that’s good. “My shoes hurt right here.” Well, we’ll see what we can do about it.
J: Could we talk about your new record John Wesley Harding?
B: There were three sessions: September, October and December, so it’s not even a year old. I know that the concepts are imbedded now, whereas before that record I was just trying to see all of which I could do, trying to structure this and that. Every record was more or less for impact. Why, I did one song on a whole side of an album! It could happen to anybody. One just doesn’t think of those things though, when one sees that other things can be done. It was spontaneously brought out, all those seven record albums. It was generously done, the material was all there. Now, I like to think that I can do it, do it better, on my own terms, and I’ll do whatever it is I can do. I used to slight it off all the time. I used to get a good phrase or a verse, and then have to carry it to write something off the top of the head and stick it in the middle, to lead this into that. Now as I hear all the old material that was done, I can see the whole thing. I can’t see how to perfect it, but I can see what I’ve done. Now I can go from line to line, whereas yesterday it was from thought to thought. Then of course, there are times you just pick up an instrument—something will come, like a tune or some kind of wild line will come into your head and you’ll develop that. If it’s a tune on a piano or guitar—you’ll just uuuuuhhhh (hum) whatever it brings out in the voice, you’ll write those words down. And they might not mean anything to you at all, and you just go on, and that will be what happens. Now I don’t do that anymore. If I do it, I just keep it for myself. So I have a big lineup of songs which I’ll never use. On the new record, it’s more concise. Here I am not interested in taking up that much of anybody’s time.
J: That’s why I gave you Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes, because those stories really get to the heart of the matter, and yet you can never really decipher them.
B: Yes, but the only parables that I know are the Biblical parables. I’ve seen others. Khalil Gibran perhaps. . . . It has a funny aspect to it—you certainly wouldn’t find it in the Bible—this type of soul. Now Mr. Kafka comes off a little closer to that. Gibran, the words are all mighty but the strength is turned into that of a contrary direction. There used to be this disc jockey, Rosko. I don’t recall his last name. Sometimes at night, the radio would be on and Rosko would be reciting this poetry of Khalil Gibran. It was a rad
iant feeling, coming across it on the radio. His voice was that of the inner voice in the night.
J: When did you read the Bible parables?
B: I have always read the Bible, though not necessarily always the parables.
J: I don’t think you’re the kind who goes to the hotel, where the Gideons leave a Bible, and you pick it up.
B: Well, you never know.
J: What about Blake, did you ever read . . .?
B: I have tried. Same with Dante, and Rilke. I understand what’s there, it’s just that the connection sometimes does not connect . . . Blake did come up with some bold lines though.
* * *
J : A feeling I got from watching the film—which I hadn’t considered much before folk music and rock & roll got so mixed together—is about this personal thing of put ons, as a personal relationship. Like with the press, they ask such idiotic questions that they are answered by put ons.
B: The only thing there, is that that becomes a game in itself. The only way to not get involved in that is not to do it, because it’ll happen every time. It even happens with the housewives who might be asked certain questions.