Dylan on Dylan

by Jeff Burger

  H: Well, he separated his work from his other activity. My feeling is that with a person who is for the war and ready to go over there, I don’t think it would be possible for you and him to share the same basic values.

  B: I’ve known him for a long time, he’s a gentleman and I admire him, he’s a friend of mine. People just have their views. Anyway, how do you know I’m not, as you say, for the war?

  J: Is this comparable? I was working on a fireplace with an old local stone mason last summer, while running off to sing at the New Politics Convention. When I returned I was chopping rocks with him, and he says, “All the trouble today is caused by people like Martin Luther King.” Now I respect that man, not for his comments on Dr. King, but for his work with stone, his outlook on his craft, and on work and life, in the terms he sees it. It is a dilemma.

  H: I think it is the easy way out, to say that. You have to feel strongly about your own ideas, even if you can respect someone else for their ideas. (to Bob) I don’t feel there is that much difference between your work now and your earlier work. I can see a continuity of ideas, although they’re not politically as black and white as they once were. “Masters of War” was a pretty black and white song. It wasn’t too equivocal. You took a stand.

  B: That was an easy thing to do. There were thousands and thousands of people just wanting that song, so I wrote it up. What I’m doing now isn’t more difficult, but I no longer have the capacity to feed this force which is needing all these songs. I know the force exists but my insight has turned into something else. I might meet one person now, and the same thing can happen between that person (and myself) that used to happen between thousands.

  J: This leads right to the last statement on my interview list: On your latest album, the focus has become more on the individual, axioms and ideas about living, rather than about society’s doings or indictments of groups of people. In other words, it’s more of how one individual is to act.

  B: Yes, in a way . . . in a way. I would imagine that’s just the way we grow.

  DYLAN ON

  His Early Songs

  “Those songs were all written in the New York atmosphere. I’d never have written any of them—or sung them the way I did—if I hadn’t been sitting around listening to performers in New York cafés and the talk in all the dingy parlors. When I got to New York, it was obvious that something was going on—folk music—and I did my best to learn and play it. I was just there at the right time with pen in hand.”

  —from interview with Hubert Saul, Newsweek, April 4, 1969

  PRESS CONFERENCE

  August 27, 1969 | Isle of Wight, England

  As it turned out, John Wesley Harding did not mark a return to a heavy recording schedule. It took Dylan nearly a year and a half to issue a follow-up and, when he did, in April 1969, the LP proved as surprising as any he had issued to date. Recorded in Nashville with the cream of its studio musicians, Nashville Skyline found Dylan immersed in traditional country music. His voice sounded completely different, and so did his songs, which took him further into the territory he’d flirted with on John Wesley Harding’s “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.”

  Four months after Nashville Skyline’s release came another surprise: Dylan performed at the Isle of Wight Festival in England. It was his first paid performance since his motorcycle accident three years earlier (though he had appeared at a Woody Guthrie tribute in January 1968, on the Johnny Cash Show in June 1969, and at a Band gig the following month). It would also be his last public performance for two years.

  This press conference, at the now-demolished Halland Hotel, took place on the Isle of Wight four days before the gig there. Probably the most remarkable thing about this brief session with the media is how unremarkable it is. Dylan provides direct albeit mostly unrevealing answers, and he seems to have lost his interest in sparring with or putting on reporters. At the end, someone asks him whether he “has a personal message for the kids today.” His answer sounds as if it is a message he has sent to himself. —Ed.

  Ronnie Burns [of BBC TV South]: Why did you come to the Isle of Wight?

  Bob Dylan: I wanted to see the home of [British poet] Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

  Burns: Why?

  Dylan: Just curious.

  Reporter: With, say, seventy-five thousand or a hundred thousand teenagers, there could possibly be some sort of drugs problem. Are you concerned about it or do you feel it doesn’t concern you at all?

  Dylan: I hope there isn’t any.

  Burns: Can you tell us your general views on drug taking among teenagers and young people these days?

  Dylan: I don’t have any of those views. I wish I did. I’d be glad to share them with you, but I think everyone should lead their own life.

  Burns: You used to, I believe, make public pronouncements on your views on things, like Vietnam, and it has been noticed in certain quarters you haven’t been doing this recently, making your views known on big political and international issues. Is this deliberate policy on your part?

  Dylan: No. I think that’s more a rumor than a fact. You check your old newspapers. You won’t be able to find too many statements I’ve made on those issues.

  Burns: I’ve heard it said here today by some of your fans that the new Bob Dylan is a bit of a square. Is this true? [Laughter.]

  Dylan: You’ll have to ask the fans.

  Lon Goddard [of London’s Record Mirror]: Do you feel your days of protesting are over?

  Dylan: I don’t want to protest anymore. I never said I’m an angry young man.

  Goddard: Can you tell us exactly what happened when you suffered an accident a while ago?

  Dylan: It’s true I suffered a broken neck. It’s awful hard to explain. I have to take it easy sometimes.

  Reporter: Do you think you have changed very much since we last saw you in London? Your clothes and hair have changed.

  Dylan: I believe there’s a conscious thing since the accident. I haven’t really changed. It had more to do with the show I was doing than anything else. It really had nothing to do with me personally. That stuff was all for publicity. I don’t do that kind of thing anymore.

  Reporter: Can you tell us what songs you will be performing?

  Dylan: Everything we will do is on record. I’m not going to sing anything new. Things you will have heard before but with new arrangements.

  Reporter: Because of your lack of public appearances, do you still like doing shows?

  Dylan: We appeared a month ago in St. Louis. [A reference to a July 14 surprise appearance at the Mississippi River Festival, in Edwardsville, Missouri, near St. Louis, where the Band headlined. —Ed.] The more shows the better.

  Reporter: Who are you looking forward to meeting while you’re here?

  Dylan: I’m hoping to meet anybody who’s around. I’d like to meet the Who and maybe Georgie Fame.

  Reporter: What about the Beatles?

  Dylan: George Harrison has come to visit me. The Beatles have asked me to work with them. I love the Beatles and I think it would be a good idea to do a jam session.

  Reporter: What about reports that various people will perform with you on stage?

  Dylan: Great, great.

  Reporter: Do you feel that cameras are like guns?

  Dylan: I don’t know.

  Goddard: Do you feel this change that has come over you and your music is due to domestic effects? Are you chiefly a family man now?

  Dylan: I would think so.

  Reporter: There is a very large crowd expected here for your performance. Any comments on that?

  Dylan: I just hope it’s a good show.

  Reporter: Do you have a personal message for the kids today?

  Dylan: Take it easy and do your job well.

  Reporter: What exactly then is your position on politics and music?

  Dylan: My job is to play music. I think I’ve answered enough questions.

  DYLAN ON

  Why His Voice Sounds Different on Nashville Sky
line

  “I stopped smoking. When I stopped smoking, my voice changed—so drastically, I couldn’t believe it myself. That’s true. I tell you, you stop smoking those cigarettes [laughs] and you’ll be able to sing like Caruso.”

  —from interview with Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone, November 29, 1969

  DYLAN ON

  Performing to Survive

  “I had to hold a lot of things back before [in the period prior to the recording of The Times They Are A-Changin’]. That’s why I was doing other kinds of writing, because I could of never got away with it in song. People would never understand, they would have killed me. I would have been dead, they would have chased me off the stage, I would have been a total failure. I held it back because I had to survive, I had to make it back then, I couldn’t go too far out. If somebody was going to give me three hundred dollars for doing a certain thing, it wouldn’t be too hard to do that thing. I’d just do it. My ideals aren’t that important to me, what you might call ideals. I didn’t really care. I didn’t have what people call ideals. So it didn’t matter a damn. I needed bread, and I had to scuffle. That’s all. But I don’t have to scuffle anymore. I can do it my way now.”

  —from Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography by Anthony Scaduto, 1971

  DYLAN ON

  His 1974 Tour

  “The last tour we did, in 1965–’66, was like a hurricane. This one is more like a hard rain. The last tour, we were going all the time, even when we weren’t going. We were always doing something else, which is just as draining as performing. We were looking for Loch Ness monsters, staying up for four days running—and making all those 8 o’clock curtains, besides. There won’t be any of that on this tour—for me, anyway.”

  —from interview with John Rockwell, New York Times, January 8, 1974

  DYLAN ON

  Publicity and the Public

  “All this publicity. Sometimes I think they’re talking about somebody else. I take it as it comes but I’m not certain it’s beneficial to my life. . . . I try not to deal with the audience response. Too synthetic. Besides, it would be more than I could handle. I’m just basically interested in real things.”

  —from interview with David DeVoss, Time, January 21, 1974

  DYLAN ON

  Fame

  “Fame threw me for a loop at first. Until I learned how to swim with it and until I learned to turn it around—so you can just throw it in the closet and pick it up when you need it. . . . The turning point was back in Woodstock. A little after the accident. Sitting around one night under a full moon, looked out into the bleak woods and I said, ‘Something’s gotta change.’”

  —from interview with Ben Fong-Torres, Rolling Stone, February 14, 1974

  RADIO INTERVIEW

  Mary Travers | April 20, 1975 | Mary Travers and Friend, KNX-FM (Los Angeles)

  The first half of the 1970s marked a career low point for Dylan, whose record releases garnered much less acclaim than his earlier LPs had enjoyed. June 1970 brought Self Portrait, a covers-dominated double album whose review in Rolling Stone by Greil Marcus famously began, “What is this shit?” New Morning, which followed four months later, was better but the next few years delivered only Greatest Hits, Vol. II, with a few previously unreleased tracks; the instrumentals-heavy Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, which did include the memorable “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”; the disastrous Dylan, a thrown-together package that was widely viewed as Columbia Records’ revenge for his departure from the label; the relatively so-so (although chart-topping) Planet Waves; and Before the Flood, a document of his 1974 return to touring with the Band after about seven years away from the road.

  But 1975 was another story. Having re-signed to Columbia Records, Dylan in January offered Blood on the Tracks, an album that many fans and critics (including this one) still regard as a highlight of his entire career. Five months later, the label issued the first official version of the often-bootlegged Basement Tapes, a series of wonderful informal recordings that Dylan had made with the Band near Woodstock, New York, in the late ’60s. In between those two releases, in early 1975, he gave his first broadcast interview in years, to Mary Travers, whose group Peter, Paul, and Mary had been instrumental in popularizing his early work. Travers talked with Dylan in Oakland, California; her program originated from KNX-FM in Los Angeles and was syndicated nationally.

  I was disappointed by this much-anticipated interview when it aired in April 1975. “With Travers playing some forty minutes of music, running commercials, and carrying on extended monologues,” I wrote after the broadcast, “it’s a wonder Dylan had time to say anything on the hour-long program.”

  A shortage of time wasn’t the only problem. Granted, Dylan doesn’t seem eager to volunteer much commentary, and there are indications that boundaries have been set for the conversation. (Travers implies at the beginning that the exchanges will be limited to “musical questions” and, later, when he says, “I think we might be crossing a line here,” she quickly responds, “OK, we’ll drop that.”) Still, Dylan does appear willing to answer intelligent questions, and Travers, who is clearly unprepared, doesn’t take much advantage of that willingness.

  She begins the first aired Dylan interview in ages by asking him a yes/no question (“Did you ever meet him [Woody Guthrie]?”) that he has already answered many times. And you don’t spark great dialogue with observations like these: “I suppose Peter, Paul, and Mary and Pete Seeger and the Weavers and yourself even were caught up in that social commentary,” or “You wrote a lot of good topical songs.” Most such comments elicited from Dylan the response they deserved: “Mm-hmm.”

  All that said, the interview seems a good deal more interesting to me today than it did when it aired. I still think Travers fell short, but in retrospect, some of Dylan’s answers are as memorable as they are brief. Note, for example, his observations about cover versions of “Just Like a Woman” as well as his reaction when Travers mentions having “enjoyed” Blood on the Tracks. —Ed.

  Mary Travers: Hi. This is Mary Travers and you’re listening to Mary Travers and Friend. And tonight’s guest is Bob Dylan. We’re here in the studio with Bob and there are a lot of good musical questions to talk about. First, I’d like to talk a little bit about some of the folks that the two of us were listening to in the early ’60s, people like Woody Guthrie. And let’s open, if we may, with a song you wrote about Woody Guthrie.

  [Dylan’s “Song to Woody” plays.]

  Travers: And now let’s play the real Woody Guthrie. Shall we?

  [Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty” plays.]

  Travers: What about Guthrie? Did you ever meet him?

  Bob Dylan: Yes, I did. I met him.

  Travers: Was he very sick then?

  Dylan: Well, I didn’t meet him in his prime time, I guess. When I met him he was pretty laid up. But he was still alive and alert. I made many visits out to see him in the hospital.

  Travers: Right, he had Huntington’s chorea, which is—

  Dylan: Kind of a shaky thing.

  Travers: This is Mary Travers and I’ll be right back after this message, with Bob Dylan.

  [Commercials air.]

  Travers: You’ve done an album that isn’t released yet, called Basement Tapes. Want to tell me about that?

  Dylan: That was recorded in ’66, ’67 up in Woodstock, before the big Woodstock festival, before Woodstock was discovered, exploited. We were just all up there sort of drying out.

  Travers: You and the Band?

  Dylan: Yeah. The members of the Band and various other people, up there making music and planting gardens and just watching time go by. So in the meantime we made this record. Actually, it wasn’t a record, it was just songs which we’d come to this basement and record, out in the woods. That’s basically it, really. The record’s been exposed throughout the years so somebody mentioned it was a good idea to put it out as a record, so people could hear it in its entirety and just exactly what we were doing up there in those
years, and it’ll be out shortly.

  Travers: Do you wanna play a track off of it?

  Dylan: We can play all the tracks.

  Travers: OK. Let’s play one track now and play some more later.

  [Dylan and the Band’s “Lo and Behold” plays.]

  Travers: Do you think that that period was a good period to hang out and kind of relax and get back to what music was about for you?

  Dylan: For me? What do you mean?

  Travers: I mean, I write poetry, I don’t write songs, but I find it very difficult to write on the road, between getting on and off a plane and bad food—

  Dylan: Right.

  Travers: —and taking in a Holiday Inn . . . It saps you of the kind of contemplative time you need to sit around and really think, and you also don’t play so much together.

  Dylan: Yeah, well, these songs basically on the tape, they were written in five, ten minutes. We’d just come off a ferocious tour of Australia, Europe, England.

  Travers: These were more for fun.

  Dylan: Yeah. Needed some time to let the—

  Travers: —dust settle.

  Dylan: Let the dust settle and the waves come in.

  Travers: Well, I think a lot of people go through periods like that. If you forget how to have fun with music, you’ve just destroyed it for yourself, and I think, unfortunately, that’s what heavy touring often does to us all. It becomes a job.

  Dylan: It becomes a business.

  Travers: And perhaps that’s kind of the genesis of The Basement Tapes, is to go back and have fun with the music. Let’s play another track from that.

  [“Yazoo Street Scandal” plays.]

  Travers: This is Mary Travers, and we’ll be right back after this message.

  [Commercials air.]

  Travers: In a sense, this is a kind of a retrospective album for you, and you’ve had some funny albums in the sense that—well, I take that back, not funny albums, but most people do albums because the record company says you’ve got to do X number of albums a year. And then when you get tired or I get tired—and it’s happened to me, too—you throw out a “Best Of” and kind of hang around and try to figure out what it is you really want to say musically.