by Jeff Burger
Dylan: Musically? I play, and whatever comes out comes out. I don’t plan albums. All that pressure’s off. I don’t have to go in and make an album every six months. I don’t think of it that way. I just continue to play my guitar and if there’s a song in my heart to do, I’ll do.
[Dylan’s “Dirge” plays.]
Travers: Let’s maybe go back to Guthrie and see if we can’t explore that a little bit more. He obviously had a great effect on your music and on a great many writers of that period, and you can see his influence even now. I mean, the talking blues form is a very viable, and will always be viable, form of saying something. And he wrote songs like “Pastures of Plenty” and “This Land Is Your Land”—those songs most people know and many songs that are not as familiar.
Dylan: Mm-hmm.
Travers: But he was also a very social writer and cared very much . . . and came from a time when many artists were very involved in caring about the country and what was happening to it, and I suppose Peter, Paul, and Mary and Pete Seeger and the Weavers and yourself even were caught up in that social commentary way of talking, of viewing the world as we saw it at that time. There were certainly a lot of your songs that were like that. Do you feel that that’s not a reasonable position to take now or is it just that you’re caring about other things?
Dylan: No, it’s a very reasonable position to take now. It’s just that it’s hard to be specific about what we’re even talking about here, let alone try to write a song or do a play or make some kind of art form out of these big situations which are happening in the world, which are changing so fast now. From day to day, it’s like rolling over too fast to keep your eye on, whereas back then when Woody was doing all his writing, the media wasn’t so powerful.
Travers: And it also took longer to get something changed.
Dylan: It took longer to get anywhere. It took longer to get from here to there.
Travers: I guess what you’re saying, really, is that presents a special kind of problem for people who wanna write that kind of material.
Dylan: Well, it can be confusing if you wanna write what they call topical songs. It’s hard to find the frontier.
Travers: You wrote a lot of good topical songs, of course.
Dylan: I wrote those songs, though, before it was happening and before everybody’s on your case. Everybody gets on your case, you just don’t wanna do it anymore. It’s just like anything else—people tell you what to do, you don’t wanna do what you’re told to do. It’s discouraging. Plus, you’re just running over the same—
Travers: Same ground.
Dylan: Yeah.
Travers: Yeah. I mean, you have said it. I don’t think you have to say times they are a-changing twice.
Dylan: Right. “Say it again! Say it again!” That’s what they want.
Travers: Yeah. What they want. This is Mary Travers and I’ll be right back after this message with Bob Dylan.
[Commercials air.]
Travers: Did you ever meet Nina Simone?
Dylan: I met her at a table once somewhere in a club.
Travers: She did a couple of your tunes.
Dylan: Yeah.
Travers: And well, I thought.
Dylan: Yeah.
Travers: I thought she brought something.
Dylan: Roberta Flack did “Just Like a Woman,” but she got the words wrong.
Travers: She changed the words.
Dylan: I don’t think she changed them. I think she just got ’em wrong.
Travers: I know Nina Simone did “Just Like a Woman” as well. I think she makes a lyric change there.
Dylan: Yeah. Personally, I don’t understand why anybody would want to do that song, except me.
Travers: Richie Havens did it.
Dylan: Yeah, Richie. It made sense coming from Richie.
Travers: Let’s play Richie.
Dylan: Yeah.
Travers: I like Richie. When you say, “I like Richie,” that’s not true—I love his work.
Dylan: That’s an understatement, yeah.
Travers: Yeah. I love his work. I love him as a human being. I love him as a musician.
Dylan: He’s like a king.
[Havens’s version of “Just Like a Woman” plays.]
Travers: OK, let’s talk about the present since we can’t talk about the future, since it doesn’t exist yet. In the future right now, is this—
Dylan: Oh, it all exists. The present exists, the past exists, and the future exists. It all exists.
Travers: How do you see the future as existing?
Dylan: It exists as part of the present, in Zen philosophy. You just live in the present, but that statement is more complicated than meets the eye, or really meets the ear. But it’s all the same, the past, the present, and the future.
Travers: Historically, it would seem so.
Dylan: I think we might be crossing a line here . . .
Travers: OK. We’ll drop that. That’s fine. Those questions are philosophic questions and the program really isn’t about philosophy per se.
Dylan: Right.
Travers: It’s about music, although there’s a lot of philosophy certainly in music, and a lot in yours, which is self-evident.
Dylan: That philosophy in my music, I have to admit, is accidental.
Travers: You really think so?
Dylan: Yeah. None of it is preconceived. I can tell you that much.
Travers: Well, when you say “preconceived” . . . when I write a poem, I don’t sit around all day saying, “Gee, I’d like to write a poem about flowers,” or children or caring about people. I don’t think about what it is I’m going to write about. When you feel like writing, you sit down and out something pops. But it doesn’t mean that you haven’t been thinking about it.
Dylan: Yeah, that gets back to thinking again. My stuff has to do more with feeling than thinking.
Travers: OK.
Dylan: When I get to thinking, I’m usually in some kind of trouble.
Travers: Well, if you can trust your own feelings, you’re probably in better shape. Is it more truthful?
Dylan: Oh, yeah. It comes down to mutual trust.
Travers: Always. On Blood on the Tracks . . . Needless to say, I loved the album, I really enjoyed the album, and it was funny because when we had talked before, we talked about recording processes and how when they get very complex, much of the truth of a piece of music is lost. It becomes something else. And one of the things I enjoyed about Blood on the Tracks was that it was very simple.
Dylan: That’s the way things are, really. They are basically very simple. A lot of people tell me they enjoyed that album. It’s hard for me to relate to that. I mean, people enjoying the type of pain.
Travers: It is a painful album. Well, perhaps maybe the word “enjoy” is the wrong word. Maybe a better word is to say that you’re moved. I was moved by the album. There were things that I could relate to in that album—
Dylan: Mm-hmm.
Travers: —that made sense to me. You made sense to me. Let’s play “If You See Her, Say Hello,” ’cause I think that’s a very beautiful song.
Dylan: Very pertinent.
[Dylan’s “If You See Her, Say Hello” plays.]
Travers: For me, that is a very poignant song. And a very sad song. But together, one of the things I like about your work is that even when you’re feeling bad, it isn’t self-pity bad—it’s just “I don’t feel good.”
Dylan: Mm-hmm. Even when you’re feeling down you feel up.
Travers: Well, you’re feeling something, and that’s the positive as opposed to feeling destroyed by it.
Dylan: Do you write songs?
Travers: No. I’m writing a book.
Dylan: Mm-hmm.
Travers: I write a lot of poetry. But somehow I’ve never been able to figure out how to make poems into songs. It really seems to be a different way of writing.
Dylan: Yeah. It’s confining.
Travers: What�
��songs?
Dylan: Mm-hmm.
Travers: Well, yeah. Poetry seems to give you a bigger canvas to play with, and you don’t have to explain it the same way. Songs seem to have to be understandable. Somehow, in a poem you can ramble and deal with several thoughts and not have to necessarily connect the images. I know a song of yours that I think for me was most poem-like was “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” ’cause it really wasn’t a song, it was a series of images, and when you see it on a piece of paper it really looked like a poem.
Dylan: Play Leon [Russell]’s version. He did it, too.
[Russell’s version of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” plays.]
Travers: This is Mary Travers, and we’ll be right back after this message.
[Commercials air.]
Travers: The in-concert album [Before the Flood] that you did with the Band on the last tour, which was an incredible piece of business for someone who doesn’t do a lot of concerts . . . you sure made up for it with that tour.
Dylan: Mm.
Travers: I’d like to play something off of that album.
Dylan: Mm-hmm.
Travers: Was there something that you felt went well?
Dylan: Oh, you can play “All Along the Watchtower.”
[Dylan and the Band’s concert version of “All Along the Watchtower” plays.]
Travers: Let’s finish off with a track from The Basement Tapes. Your choice.
Dylan: OK. Oh, “Apple Suckling Tree.”
Travers: OK, we’ll finish with that.
Dylan: Yeah.
Travers: And thank you.
[Dylan and the Band’s “Apple Suckling Tree” plays.]
DYLAN ON
Whether He Was Living with His Wife
“When I have to, when I need to. I’m living with my wife in the same world . . . Do I know where she is most of the time? She doesn’t have to answer to me . . . She has to answer to herself . . . Right now, things are changing in all our lives. We will always be together.”
—from interview with Jim Jerome, People, November 10, 1975
BOB DYLAN: “. . . A SAILING SHIP
TO THE MOON”
Neil Hickey | August 1976 (interview) | March 4, 2015 |
Adventures in the Scribblers Trade
This article appeared in 2015, in a book by Neil Hickey, but the fascinating Dylan encounter it describes dates from August 1976, when the New York–based journalist flew to California to interview the artist for a piece that ran in TV Guide in September of that year.
“The reason we did the article in TV Guide,” Hickey told me, “was that Dylan had made a prime-time music special for NBC.” Hard Rain aired September 14, 1976, and came out on LP that same week. “I contacted him and his people and said we might like to do a cover on the show,” Hickey continued. “I think it’s still the only such TV show he ever did.
“I got a phone call one Saturday at my house in [New York’s] Putnam County saying, ‘Can you be in Malibu on Tuesday?’ So I went out there, and Dylan and I spent most of a day knocking around.”
Hickey added that he’d been a fan “since Dylan’s arrival in New York and his early appearances on MacDougal Street—my apartment was in the Village—and at the Newport Folk Festival, to which I traveled every year.”
The interview took place a little more than six months after the release of Desire, the follow-up to Blood on the Tracks. The new album—which, like its predecessor, was a chart-topper—includes “Hurricane,” Dylan’s first overtly political song since “George Jackson,” a 1971 single; and “Sara,” one of his most openly personal records up to that time. —Ed.
He swung a sandaled foot over the roadside guardrail and slid down a sharp, 20-foot incline, then walked forward along Corral Beach and sat down in the sand. The whisper of surf mingled with the roar of traffic along Pacific Coast Highway. Bob Dylan wore jeans, a frayed lightweight black leather jacket, and a white burnoose over longish brown curls. The unshaved face enforced his resemblance to a hip shepherd from some biblical Brigadoon. As he popped a beer can, a teen-age girl approached, Frisbee in hand.
“Mister, is this yours?”
“No,” said Dylan politely. The girl strolled off down the beach, unaware that she had addressed a legend.
The day had begun badly when I drove up to Dylan’s house atop a Malibu hill and straight into a pocket of loose, deep sand near the front door. The car’s wheels spun as I tried to burrow out, to no avail. Cracking the door and looking down, I saw that the car was up to its hubcaps in the sand. A gaggle of children and teen-agers trotted from the house to study my plight. I put the oldest of them in the driver’s seat, motor running, and had the others join me at the rear bumper, rocking and rolling the vehicle vigorously to try to free it. Minutes elapsed without success in spite of my volunteers’ enthusiasm for the task. Head down, I continued to shove hard. In the next moment I became aware of a figure next to me, his shoulder to the car’s rear end and pushing vigorously with the rest of us. A minute later, the car rolled out of its sand trap onto firmer ground.
“Happens all the time,” Bob Dylan said.
We mopped perspiration, strolling to undo the knots in leg muscles. I stared about at the Malibu hills.
“It’s a long way from MacDougal Street,” I said.
He nodded. “Want to take a drive?” He was hungry, he said.
In my newly-exhumed car, we drove down the winding path away from the house, then south, with the ocean on our right. The chat in the car, in that campaign summer, was about Jimmy Carter’s race against President Gerald Ford. Carter had been quoting lines from Dylan songs in his stump speeches, and even in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention.
“I don’t know what to think of that,” Dylan said. “People have told me that there’s a man running for President and quoting me.” He laughed. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad.” If his songs had meaning for Carter, that’s OK with him, Dylan offered. “But he’s just another guy trying to be President. I sometimes dream of running the country and putting all my friends in office. That’s the way they do it now, anyway.”
Sports cars bearing surfboards on their roofs streamed past. Dylan pointed to a roadside luncheonette rimmed with picnic tables and suggested we stop. (“The Bagelah Delicatessen: Established 1973”) Getting out, he strode forward in a bent-kneed lope and ordered a pastrami sandwich and a can of beer.
Of all the major figures ever to populate the performing arts, Bob Dylan—he’s in his seventies at this writing—has been among the most protective about his private life. It’s still terra incognita to fans, journalists, and scholars who have tracked his career for more than half a century. “The press has always misrepresented me,” he said, when we were settled. His eyes were pale blue, his fingernails long. “They refuse to accept what I am and what I do as just that. They always find something to carp about. They always sensationalize and blow things up. I know multitudes of people who feel that way.” Instead of newspapers, he said, the country should get back to bulletins posted on walls. “I let them write whatever they want as long as I don’t have to talk to them. They can see me anytime they want, doing what I do. I’m not in any popularity contest. It’s best to keep your mouth shut and do your work.” It suited him to talk to me on that summer day in 1976 because he’d recently finished the only TV concert special he’d ever done, called “Hard Rain,” which would air soon on the NBC network.
I had first encountered Dylan in the dingy folk clubs that lined MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village during the “folk scare” of the 1960s when traditional and protest songs were about to dominate, ever so briefly, American popular music. I lived a block away on Sullivan Street and haunted Washington Square Park on Sunday afternoons for impromptu songfests. A ragamuffin Dylan showed up in New York in January, 1961, knowing nobody, having hitchhiked from northern Minnesota’s Mesabi iron range, and having abandoned the name Robert Allen Zimmerman. (His grandparents were Lithuanian, Russian
, and Ukranian Jewish immigrants.) As a teen-ager he’d been in thrall to rockers like Carl Perkins and Little Richard, and was a middling electric guitar player. After hearing Woody Guthrie’s powerful prole anthems and his raw Oklahoma voice, Dylan abandoned the electric guitar (he’d famously reclaim it later) for a steel-strung acoustic model and a harmonica on a chest rack. For the first time, among many, he recreated himself.
Arriving in New York, he went looking for the singers whose recordings he’d heard back in Minnesota: Ed McCurdy, Josh White, Dave Van Ronk, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Pete Seeger, the New Lost City Ramblers, Reverend Gary Davis, and especially Woody Guthrie. The Village clubs were home to edgy comedians like Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Shelly Berman, Woody Allen, and Richard Pryor.
A friend of my own, Israel “Izzy” Young, proprietor of a legendary, cluttered storefront at 110 MacDougal Street, took Dylan in and let him crash in the back room. The Folklore Center stocked musical instruments, along with books, vinyl records, and photographs. It was the first stop for every impoverished, traveling singer-songwriter with a cardboard guitar case. Izzy Young—exorbitantly generous and impractical—was kind to most of them, including the yearningly ambitious kid who claimed his name was Bob Dylan. The shop was “the citadel of Americana folk music,” as Dylan later called it. In the back room was a potbelly, wood-burning stove and a phonograph, where he listened to folk music by the hour. In his 2004 book Chronicles: Volume One, he described Young:
. . . an old-line folk enthusiast, very sardonic, wore heavy, horn-rimmed glasses, spoke in a thick Brooklyn dialect. . . . His voice was like a bulldozer and always seemed too loud for the little room. . . . To him, folk music glittered like a mound of gold. It did for me too . . . [He sold] extinct song folios of every type—sea shanties, Civil War songs, cowboy songs, songs of lament, church house songs, anti-Jim Crow songs, union songs—archaic books of folk tales, Wobbly journals, propaganda pamphlets. . . . People were always chasing him down for money, but it didn’t seem to faze him.