by Jeff Burger
B: No, I’ve seen him perform a few times.
H: Do you follow the fights?
B: Not any more. When he came down to Bleecker Street to read his poetry, you would have wished you were there.
J: He really made a point that lasted afterwards—beyond that someone got conked.
H: Not being particularly interested in fighting, what impressed me is how he stayed true to himself—his own stand as a human being was more important to himself than the championship.
* * *
J: Could you talk about some of the diverse elements which go into making up one of your songs, using a song from which you have some distance?
B: Well, there’s not much we could talk about—that’s the strange aspect about the whole thing. There’s nothing you can see. I wouldn’t know where to begin.
J: Take a song like “I Pity the Poor Immigrant.” There might have been a germ that started it.
B: Yes, the first line.
J: What experience might have triggered that? Like you kicked the cat who ran away, who said “Ouch!” which reminded you of an immigrant.
B: To tell you the truth, I have no idea how it comes into my mind.
J: You’ve said there was a person usually in it.
B: Well, we’re all in it. They’re not any specific people . . . say, someone kicks the cat, and the cat writes a song about it. It might seem that way, during some of the songs, and in some of the poetry that’s being passed around now-a-days. But it’s not really that way.
J: You said that often a song is written for a certain person.
B: That’s for a person, not about him. You know, you might sometimes be with someone who’s got no song to sing, and I believe you can help someone out, that’s the extent of it really.
J: Well, “Quinn the Eskimo” wasn’t that way.
B: You see, it’s all grown so serious, the writing-song business. It’s not that serious. The songs don’t painfully come out. They come out in a trick or two, or from something you might overhear. I’m just like any other songwriter, you pick up the things that are given to you. “Quinn the Eskimo,” I can’t remember how that came about. I know the phrase came about, I believe someone was just talking about Quinn, the Eskimo.
J: Someone told me there was once a movie with Anthony Quinn playing an Eskimo. Did you know of that?
B: I didn’t see the movie.
J: But that could have triggered it.
B: Of course.
J: This makes a lot of sense, in the sense that you can travel down a road, and see two signs advertising separate things, but where two words come together, it will make a new meaning which will trigger off something.
B: Well, what the songwriter does, is just connect the ends. The ends that he sees are the ones that are given to him and he connects them.
H: It seems that people are bombarded all the time with random thoughts and outside impulses, and it takes the songwriter to pick something out and create a song out of them.
B: It’s like this painter who lives around here—he paints the area in a radius of twenty miles, he paints bright strong pictures. He might take a barn from twenty miles away, and hook it up with a brook right next door, then with a car ten miles away, and with the sky on some certain day, and the light on the trees from another certain day. A person passing by will be painted alongside someone ten miles away. And in the end he’ll have this composite picture of something which you can’t say exists in his mind. It’s not that he started off willfully painting this picture from all his experience. . . . That’s more or less what I do.
J: Which and where is Highway 61?
B: I knew at one time, but at this time it seems so far away I wouldn’t even attempt it. It’s out there, it’s a dividing line.
J: Is it a physical Highway 61?
B: Oh yes, it goes from where I used to live . . . I used to live related to that highway. It ran right through my home town in Minnesota. I travelled it for a long period of time actually. It goes down the middle of the country, sort of southwest.
J: I think there is an old blues about Highway 61.
B: Same highway, lot of famous people came off that highway.
J: Can you keep contact with the young audiences who perhaps buy most of your records?
B: That’s a vague notion, that one must keep contact with a certain illusion of people which are sort of undefinable. The most you can do is satisfy yourself. If you satisfy yourself then you don’t have to worry about remembering anything. If you don’t satisfy yourself, and you don’t know why you’re doing what you do, you begin to lose contact. If you’re doing it for them instead of you, you’re likely not in contact with them. You can’t pretend you’re in contact with something you’re not. I don’t really know who I’m in contact with, but I don’t think it’s important.
J: Well, on the airplanes, they have these seven channels of stereo, and your music is marked as “for the kids” rather than anywhere else, and it sort of bothered me. Do you have a chance to meet the kids?
B: I always like to meet the kids.
J: Do you get a chance?
B: Not so much when I’m touring as when I’m not touring. When you’re touring, you don’t get a chance to meet anybody. I’ve just been meeting people again in the last few years.
J: It’s a strange phenomenon, for you reach them the most when you are on tour yet you can’t reach them at all.
B: Well yes, but the next time I go out, it’s going to be a little bit more understandable. Next time out, my hopes are to play the music in a different way.
H: How can you get around the problems you encountered last time?
BD: I’m not really aware of those problems. I know they exist because it was very straining, and that’s not the way work should be. But it’s a situation that’s pretty much all over . . . the screaming. Even some musician like Jimi Hendrix gets people seeing him who aren’t coming there to scream—they’re coming to hear him.
H: Do you see any way you can approach your music in a public way, that would give a different perspective to an audience?
B: Yes. Just playing the songs. See, the last time we went out, we made too much of a production of the songs. They were all longer, they were all my own songs, not too much thought had gone into the program, it just evolved itself from when I was playing single.
J: And the film we’ve been discussing, is that a fair summary of that kind of tour?
B: Yes it was. I hope people get a chance to see that film.
J: Why do you think your music appeals to American Indians?
B: I would hope that it appeals to everybody.
J: I know suburban people who can’t stand it.
B: Well, I wish there was more I could do about that.
J: We just heard your record being played at an elegant store in New York City, as the background for people shopping.
H: Pete Seeger told me the John Wesley Harding album is great to skate to. He said some records are good to skate to and some aren’t, and that’s a good one.
B: I’m awfully glad he feels that way about it.
J: What is your relationship to student groups, or black militants, like the kids at Columbia or at Berkeley?
B: If I met them at all, I would meet them individually; I have no special relationship to any group.
J: Do you follow these events, even from a distance, like reading a newspaper?
B: Just like anyone else. I know just as much about it as the lady across the street does, and she probably knows quite a bit. Just reading the papers, talking to the neighbors, and so forth.
J: These groups feel more about you than they do about that lady next door.
B: I can assure you I feel the same thing. There are people who are involved in it and people who are not. You see, to be involved, you just about have to be there, I couldn’t think about it any other way.
J: Someone like Pete Seeger, who is different from all of us in this room, he reaches out.
B: But how much of a part of it is he?
H: Do you foresee a time when you’re going to have to take some kind of a position?
B: No.
H: You don’t think that events will ever reach you?
B: It’s not that events won’t reach me, it’s more a case of what I, myself would reach for. The decisions I would have to make are my own decisions, just like anyone else has to make his own. It doesn’t necessarily mean that any position must be taken.
J: Although I asked it, this is not really the kind of question I’m really concerned with. After all, if someone asked me, I could only say I do what I can, I sing my own music, and if they like to hear it, well, fine.
B: Yes, but I don’t know . . . What was the question again? You must define it better.
H: I think that every day we get closer to having to make a choice.
B: How so?
H: I think that events of the world are getting closer to us, they’re as close as the nearest ghetto.
B: Where’s the nearest ghetto?
H: Maybe down the block. Events are moving on a mass scale.
B: What events?
H: War, racial problems, violence in the streets.
J: Here’s a funny aspect; we’re talking like this here, but in a strange way, Bob has gone further than you or I in getting into such places. I just have heard from Izzy Young that the songs they were singing at Resurrection City were “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are [A-] Changin’.” So in a sense by maintaining his own individual position, Bob and his songs are in the ghetto, and the people there are singing them—to them they mean action.
H: Well, the kids at Columbia University are taking a particular stand on what they see as the existing evils. They’re trying to get their own say in the world, and in a way trying to overcome the people ruling them, and there are powerful people who are running the show. They can be called the establishment, and they are the same people who make wars, that build the missiles, that manufacture the instruments of death.
B: Well, that’s just the way the world is going.
H: The students are trying to make it go another way.
B: Well, I’m for the students of course, they’re going to be taking over the world. The people who they’re fighting are old people, old ideas. They don’t have to fight, they can sit back and wait.
H: The old ideas have the guns, though.
J: Perhaps the challenge is to make sure that the young minds growing up remain open enough so that they don’t become the establishment that they are fighting.
B: You read about these rebels in the cartoons, people who were rebels in the twenties, in the thirties, and they have children who are rebels, and they forget that they were rebels. Do you think that those who are rioting today will somehow have to hold their kids back from doing the same thing?
* * *
J: Are your day-to-day contacts among the artists, crusaders, businessmen or lumberjacks?
B: Among the artists and lumberjacks.
J: Crusaders?
B: Well, you mean the people who are going from here to there, the men in long brown robes and little ivy twines on their head? I know quite a few crusaders but don’t have much contact with them.
J: How about leaders of the student groups? Did you know Malcolm X, or the kids from SNCC?
B: I used to know some of them.
J: Social crusaders, someone like Norman Mailer.
B: No.
J: What about businessmen?
B: I get a lot of visitors and see a lot of people, and who’s a businessman? I’m sure a whole lot of businessmen have passed by the past few hours, but my recollection really isn’t that brilliant.
J: Does your management serve as a buffer in translating your artistic works into business?
B: I’m just very thankful that my management is there to serve what purpose a management serves. Every artist must have one these days.
* * *
J: Would you talk of any of the positive things that drugs have to offer, how they might have affected your work?
B: I wouldn’t think they have anything to offer. I’m speaking about drugs in the everyday sense of the word. From my own experience they would have nothing positive to offer, but I’m not speaking for anyone else. Someone else might see them offering a great deal.
J: But in the way of insights or new combinations, it never affected you that way?
B: No, you get those same insights over a period of time anyway.
* * *
J: For a while you were working on a book, they gave it a name Tarantula. Have you tried any other writing since then, or did you learn anything from the experience of trying?
B: Yes, I do have a book in me, it’ll be out sometime. MacMillan will publish it.
J: Did you learn from the one you did reject?
B: I learned not to do a book like that. That book was the kind of thing where the contract comes in before the book is written, so you have to fulfill the contract.
J: In thinking over this interview thus far, it seems like that has happened to you several times over the recent years, not necessarily of your choosing.
B: Yes, that’s true. But it happens to other people and they come through. Dostoevsky did it, he had a weekly number of words to get in. I understand Frederick Murrey does it, and John Updike must . . . For someone else it might be exactly what they always had wished.
J: In trying to write it, was it a difficulty of structure or concept?
B: No, there was no difficulty in writing it at all. It just wasn’t a book, it was just a nuisance. It didn’t have that certain quality which now I think a book should have. It didn’t have any structure at all, it was just one flow. It flowed for ninety pages.
J: I’m thinking of a parallel. You know some of these old crazy talking blues? They go on where just the last phrase of a sentence connects up to the next sentence, but the two thoughts aren’t related. “Slipping up and down the mantel piece, feet in a bucket of grease, hunting matches, etc.” Did it go that way?
B: More or less. They were short little lines, nothing within a big framework. I couldn’t even conceive of doing anything in a big framework at that time. I was doing something else.
H: Do you think future writings will use the poetic form or the novel?
B: I think it will have everything in it.
* * *
J: Listening to the car radio, I heard that you have a song on the country music stations, “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” I can’t remember the singer’s name, but I understand that Burl Ives has also recorded it.
B: A lot of people record them, they always do a good job.
J: When did you first hear Burl Ives?
B: I first heard Burl Ives when I was knee-high to a grasshopper.
J: Was that folk music to you when you first heard it?
B: Yes, I guess everybody’s heard those old Burl Ives records on Decca, with a picture of him in a striped T-shirt, holding a guitar up to his ear, just wailing.
J: Did you know that his first recordings were for Moe Asch (of Folkways records)? Alan Lomax had brought him in. Who made the first recordings you are on?
B: I recorded with Big Joe Williams.
J: Where did this Blind Boy Grunt thing come in?
B: Someone told me to come down ’cause they were doing some kind of an album. So I was there and singing this song, and it only had a couple of verses and that’s all, so someone in the control booth said, “Do some more.” I said well, there is no more, I can’t sing any more. The fellow says “If you can’t sing, GRUNT.” So I said “Grunt?” Then someone else sitting at a desk to my left says, “What name shall I put down on this record?” And I said “Grunt.” She said “Just Grunt?” Then the fellow in the control booth said “Grunt.” Somebody came in the door then and said “Was that Blind Boy Grunt?” and the lady at the desk said “Yes it was.”
J: Was this Moe Asch and Marion Distle
r?
B: It could have been.
* * *
J: My last question is really a rehash of one aspect we’ve already discussed; at the moment, your songs aren’t as socially or politically applicable as they were earlier.
B: As they were earlier? Could it be that they are just as social and political, only that no one cares to . . . let’s start with the question again. (J. repeats question.) Probably that is because no one cares to see it the way I’m seeing it now, whereas before, I saw it the way they saw it.
H: You hear a lot about the word “engaged” artists. Painters, film makers, actors, they’re actively involved in current events, through their art.
B: Well, even Michelangelo though . . .
H: Many artists feel that at this particular time in history, they can’t just do their thing without regarding the larger scale around them.
B: The thing is, if you can get the scales around you in whatever you create, that’s nice. If you physically have to go out there and experience it time and time again, you’re talking about something else.
H: Probably the most pressing thing going on in a political sense, is the war. Now I’m not saying any artist or group of artists can change the course of the war, but they still feel it their responsibility to say something.
B: I know some very good artists who are for the war.
H: Well I’m just talking about the ones who are against it.
B: That’s like what I’m talking about; it’s for or against the war. That really doesn’t exist. It’s not for or against the war. I’m speaking of a certain painter, and he’s all for the war. He’s just about ready to go over there himself. And I can comprehend him.
H: Why can’t you argue with him?
B: I can see what goes into his paintings, and why should I?
H: I don’t understand how that relates to whether a position should be taken.
B: Well, there’s nothing for us to talk about really.
J: Someone just told me that the poet and artist William Blake harboured Tom Paine when it was dangerous to do so. Yet Blake’s artistic production was mystical and introspective.