Dylan on Dylan

by Jeff Burger

  RA: When you were there, were you already making plans to go to New York?

  BD: Yeah, I had made plans to go to New York. Most of the people were leaving anyway. And I had done about as much as I could there in Minneapolis. I went to Chicago first and stayed there. Then I went up to Wisconsin, which was more or less the same general scene as it was at the school in Minnesota. And from there I went to New York. That was quite a trip . . . another guitar player and myself got a ride with a young couple from the campus whose parents were from Brooklyn. They were goin’ there and wanted some more drivers, so we just drove.

  RA: So what does it feel like when you go back to Minnesota and—

  BD: Well, it feels the same. I relax more there than I do out here or anywhere else.

  RA: Do you like LA—Malibu?

  BD: I don’t think in terms of liking it, I think of it in terms of a place I have to be. Now I have to be here because it is centrally located to what I’m doing.

  * * *

  We are sitting in a stark room in a reconverted furniture factory that Dylan has rented as a rehearsal hall. He’s working hard at whipping a new band into shape for his upcoming tour of Japan and Australia. Throughout the interview the band can be heard jamming upstairs.

  It’s a rainy day in Santa Monica, California. Earlier, I had rendezvoused with Paul Wasserman, Dylan’s press agent, at his Beverly Hills offices. Together we drove down to the rehearsal hall, chatting amiably about—among other things—Dylan, the interview, the movie Renaldo and Clara. (It’s been reported that after Dylan screened his long, cryptic movie for Wasserman—the man he had picked to launch the publicity campaign—Dylan said, “It’s not Star Wars, is it Paul?”).

  During our engaging conversations, Wasserman tells me that Dylan felt he was burning himself out with these interviews, that he was having trouble coming up with new answers and that he was repeating himself.

  “I told him not to worry about it, that it would add to the mystique,” Wasserman says. “He didn’t find that too humorous.”

  After the interview, as we walked toward his car in a torrential downpour, Wasserman asks me, “Was he mystical?” I replied in the negative.

  But that mystical stuff can get to you when you’re sitting in this room alone for an hour and a half waiting for the man to appear. Wasserman, a very kind and considerate man (contrary to reports), keeps bringing me coffee and at one point apologizes for Dylan’s lateness (it seems he’s stopped off at the doctor’s on the way in from his much-publicized, copper-domed Xanadu in Malibu). Band members, sound men and security guys come in and out, by and large a friendly bunch. One of them leans over to me and says, “This waiting—I think it’s part of the technique.”

  The waiting does give me chance to drink in the environment, to get relaxed. I make a list of everything in the room: two non-descript beige couches; a big color TV; a grade school-level mural painting of a rainbow (red, yellow and green), some clouds and some birds; two huge speakers; two closed circuit TVs; a huge sound board behind me; and on top of a coffee table, a TV Guide, a white painter’s hat, and a list of something. I lean over to check on the list—it’s a list of songs: “Tambourine Man,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Positively 4th Street,” “Ballad of a Thin Man” and on and on—I couldn’t look anymore. It was the one thing in the room that seemed to be a grim reminder of the enormity of Dylan’s contribution. I manage to avoid looking at it for the remainder of my wait, turning around to stare at the mixing board behind me and at a crazy drawing in orange, purple and green chalk on a blackboard behind that. I decide to kill time by sketching it.

  I look closely at the smudged caption and it looks something like, “Another Self-Portrait.” I chuckle to myself and hope that, yes indeed, there is some levity among these people.

  I continue staring at the gray concrete floor and suddenly there’s a noise, somebody walks in and plops down on the other couch. I look up and it’s Dylan, unshaven and looking scruffy as usual (still “the unwashed phenomenon, the original vagabond,” that strayed into Joan Baez’ heart) with a Big Apple hat pulled over his riotous black locks. He’s wearing a black leather jacket, an off-white collarless shirt, blue jeans and a pair of white, California penny loafers. We exchange nervous pleasantries and begin to talk about Minnesota.

  As we talk, I notice that Dylan has many different rhythms to his speech—depending on how interested he is in the topic or how sure he is of what he’s saying. Sometimes, he talks in a New York, street-jive style, sometimes in our bland Midwestern style and at other times, in a curious Southern drawl. He has a habit of taking long pauses when he’s conversing with someone, something I’d luckily picked up beforehand in reading what others had said. Also, I knew he had once written: “experience teaches that silence terrifies people the most.” I decide to gut those silences out, and soon I find he doesn’t do it to offend anyone or to appear spacy, but to think, consider his words, or to show that he has nothing to say at the moment. He leans forward and talks faster when he’s interested or has got something prefabricated to relate. And, he’s obviously in shape to talk about Renaldo and Clara.

  * * *

  RA: How important is spontaneity to your art?

  BD: Well, the movie wasn’t spontaneous. It might seem that way cuz it was so natural. But it wasn’t a spontaneous movie at all. People like to think it was because some of it’s improvised. But not really, it wasn’t a spontaneous movie in the sense that people go out and do anything they want to do and that will find its way into the movie. It was outlined by fact.

  RA: You put things down on paper.

  BD: Hmm—well, it seems so natural that people think that—well, it must be spontaneous.

  RA: That’s really hard to do, though.

  BD: Yeah it is hard to do.

  RA: What were some of your techniques?

  BD: You just have to get that drama out of people. You have to have control and you have to know what it is you’re doing, want to do and what the end result will be, and you can make it happen like that. Personally, I would rather see it happen like that. Your best actors are people who, when you’re lookin’ at ’em, you do think that they’re acting spontaneously. (begins to slip into his street jive manner, sounding very sure and slightly defiant) You see Jack Nicholson in a movie—I mean you never think he’s acting. You think he’s thinkin’ of them lines right at the time he’s sayin’ ’em.

  RA: There were a lot of people who were not known as actors before who were able to pull that off.

  BD: There were. Well, it’s in everyone, everyone wants to act you know.

  RA: How do you mean?

  BD: Well, given the opportunity, people do want to act out a role other than themselves.

  RA: Do you share that interest? Or, are you more interested in the directing end of it?

  BD: To a certain degree, but I’m more related to the music.

  RA: Do you find it’s difficult to put words to a piece of art like the film? Would you rather have the music and visual images speak for themselves?

  BD: Oh yeah, yeah, that’s my preference. My preference isn’t to talk about the film because it isn’t explainable. Either it works for you or it doesn’t work for you. And if it doesn’t work for you, me explaining it isn’t going to make it work for you.

  RA: Exactly. Reading between the lines of some of the articles written about Renaldo and Clara, one gets the idea that the movie’s inaccessible. But it’s not—though it is inexplicable. Saying that it is can turn people off.

  BD: It isn’t an inaccessible movie, it isn’t at all. It’s a very simple movie to follow. It’s inaccessible to people who are burdened down with their own logic, who have preconceived ideas. Those people aren’t going to let themselves be affected by what they’re seeing.

  RA: Who do you think the audience is for the movie?

  BD: Anybody who’s been through any of those things at all is going to be a receptive audience for that movie. Anybody who’s be
en through that struggle.

  RA: What struggle?

  BD: That alter-ego struggle against the subconscious which is always going through there. But we don’t like to call it that or say that because it’s an awful big undertaking. But that’s exactly what is happening in that movie. It’s the sub-conscious mind against the alter-ego in that movie. Something is wishing to become something else. Whether it’s possible or whether it succeeds, we don’t know that. The movie doesn’t provide any answers. But nothing provides any answers—War and Peace doesn’t provide any answers.

  RA: But that’s what people want, especially American moviegoers. They want simplicity, they want everything explained, they want that storyline.

  BD: It doesn’t have any of that.

  RA: Europeans are more used to films as opposed to movies. Most Americans go to movies to be entertained. Renaldo and Clara is a film and you don’t necessarily go to it to be entertained.

  BD: Well, my songs aren’t explainable, either. And there shouldn’t be any reason why this movie or this film should be any different than a song I feel close to.

  RA: Have you ever met Keith Jarrett?

  BD: Yeah, I think so.

  RA: I talked to him awhile back about popular music and he claimed that virtually all popular music is a waste of time, because if the words are good enough people aren’t going to pay attention to the music, and if the music’s good enough it doesn’t need any words.

  BD: I don’t find that true.

  RA: We went on about this, and he finally brought up your name, saying that you were the only person who is able to pull that off—mixing words and music. And of course, he has done some of your tunes on his early records.

  BD: That’s probably because subconsciously I’m aware of both as being equal. I’m always aware of that fact. I can’t write something where the music is heavier or more loaded than the lyric or the lyric is more loaded than the music. It would just be something I couldn’t do. That’s why some of the tunes that have an emotional quality, an intense emotional quality, will have a very simple melody—a folk melody.

  RA: Most of what happened to me as a moviegoer during Renaldo and Clara was in the realm of feeling. Sometimes I was depressed, sometimes I was exhilarated, at times my mind wandered—the times my mind wandered made the intense scenes that much more powerful by contrast—but comparing emotional notes with the person I saw the movie with, well, both of us felt very sad after the movie. Do you think that’s a strange reaction?

  Dylan: No, no, not at all. There’s a lot of sadness that develops in that movie. A lot of dead ends. But the overall picture shouldn’t be one of sadness, it should be one of—what’s the word?—it should be one of resolve. It is resolved. But you’re—there is a great deal of sadness in it, but it doesn’t leave you sad—

  RA: I don’t follow you.

  BD: —but it could, though. Well, it leaves you at the end with an out—because it is the morning of this man’s life.

  RA: Yeah.

  BD: No matter what he’s gone through, no matter who he knows, no matter what’s been done to him, it still is the morning.

  RA: Hope?

  BD: Hope, yeah. So, although there is a great deal of sadness that develops, it is conceivable that the sadness will be broken after the movie ends.

  RA: If I said there was a lack of humor and lightness in Renaldo and Clara would that strike you as wrong?

  BD: No, no. Ummm . . .

  RA: Every once in a while I wished for something to break the tension cuz I was concentrating so hard. Sometimes the music did that.

  BD: Uh-huh. That’s just the nature of the film to be that way. It is intense. There is no out.

  RA: I think that’s where the depression comes in, at least my feelings of it. I was very moved by parts of the film, but I’m wondering whether the mass audience will . . .

  BD: Well, we don’t know if the mass audiences will, but it’s not really for a mass audience. The mass audience doesn’t go for my music either. So there’s no real reason why it should have to appeal to a mass audience to be successful.

  RA: But you still have to sell a lot of tickets.

  BD: You do have to sell tickets—

  RA: And that’s probably why we’re doing the interview in the first place—to help out the film.

  BD: I’m hopin’ we would help out the film, so people know that there’s a film to see. But we can’t explain the film. There’s no way we can do that.

  RA: But do you see what I mean? There’s a problem here. It’s the old money and art problem I guess—a cliché but it’s very real.

  BD: It is, yeah. Well, we just do the best we can and that’s all we can do, you know—we can try.

  RA: Do you read any of the articles written about the film? You’re old enough now, maybe that stuff doesn’t affect you anymore.

  BD: Personally, I don’t believe that critical acclaim or denunciation is going to affect the movie one way or another. I think it’s the people who see the movie which will decide for themselves whether they want their friends to see it.

  RA: So the jury is still out as far as you’re concerned?

  BD: Well, there really isn’t a jury—

  RA: Well, there’s a critical consensus from the masses or the people.

  BD: (six second pause) Well, I think in 20 years we’ll see. If that movie’s still playin’ in 20 years, well then I guess it’ll have something to say that’s speaking to the people. If it isn’t, well then it just didn’t reach enough people.

  RA: I’m glad you brought that up, because another feeling I had was that the film had an aura of timeliness to it . . . Do you think in 20, 50 or 100 years, people will say Renaldo and Clara was “the ’60s” or “the ’70s”—like Saturday Night Fever is in the ’70s—or will they say that it’s a real timeless movie, that you just can’t place it?

  BD: Yeah, it’s a timeless movie. There’s nothing that locks that movie into any age.

  RA: Except maybe the ’60s a little bit.

  BD: Well, there’s a sign on a theater up in Harlem, showin’ Earthquake—

  RA: You mean the Apollo Theater scene.

  BD: Yeah, so that’ll date it if you want to get that specific.

  RA: Speaking of the Apollo Theater, you once wrote: “the fact that the white house is filled with leaders that’ve never been to the apollo theater amazes me.” (from the jacket notes to Bringing It All Back Home) Which made me think that this film has been simmering on your backburners for a few years and that you picked out scenes like the Apollo Theater that mean something to you.

  BD: Yeah, this film—this is the right time for this film. I couldn’t have made it before, but I’ve been thinkin’ about it.

  RA: For a long period of time?

  BD: Off and on, yeah.

  RA: . . . You’ve been up to the Apollo Theater in Harlem haven’t you?

  BD: Yeah, I used to go there on Monday nights a lot.

  RA: You can’t do that anymore, can you?

  BD: Oh, well, I’ve never had any trouble walking around in neighborhoods.

  RA: Think black people would be interested in the film?

  BD: In this film?

  RA: Yeah.

  BD: (sincerely) I really don’t know. It’s a truthful film. And we’re not lookin’ at people as either black or white. It’s an experience beneath the mind, it’s—I don’t think you have to be any certain color to relate to the film.

  RA: But one of the things that you pick up in your film or your art is a great sensitivity and love for minorities and the disadvantaged.

  BD: Well, it’s not that so much as a love for truth. Ah, I don’t love black or green or white or blue or whatever happens to be the color of different people. But in a search for truth you find different elements that happen to be involved with how certain people treat other people—economically, socially or personally.

  RA: The quest for truth brings to mind Moby Dick—ever read it?

  BD:
Yeah.

  RA: . . . Melville’s book wasn’t appreciated until long after he was dead—people never really read it until the 1920s.

  BD: Right.

  RA: Did you ever think Renaldo and Clara might be something like that?

  BD: Probably. It probably is.

  RA: You might not even be around to see it appreciated.

  BD: I could believe that. Sure. Joseph Conrad wasn’t appreciated either in his time. Look at Van Gogh, I mean he couldn’t even sell a painting to eat.

  RA: Does that bother you?

  BD: Well, yeah, in a work like this it does. Because you know, you can’t expect people to go out there and accept it the way they would the Mona Lisa. People lookin’ at the Mona Lisa—they might just say, “Well, it’s a picture of a woman with a smile.” You know, that’s all they might see. And in this movie too, they might go to it and say, “Well, it’s a movie about Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.” And that’s all they might see. I understand that’s where people are comin’ from. But still I’ve got a belief that you have to do whatever it is that you’re doing. You can’t compromise with the fact that you must do what you must do.

  RA: Compromise is an anathema to being an artist?

  BD: Uh-huh. Yeah, the artists that are really successful, that make platinum records and that are makin’ movies and all that—I mean, they’re compromisin’ a whole lot. I mean, they’re just calculatin’ what the audience will want.

  RA: Is there any value at all in any of that stuff?

  BD: I don’t look at those people as true artists.

  RA: Just production people—

  BD: No, they’re just intelligent people who can get it together to superficially satisfy a lot of people.

  RA: That seems to be what a lot of Americans are after—fast food, McDonald’s hamburgers—

  BD: Yeah, yeah.

  RA: —and a record is just like a hamburger, just consume it and it’s over.

  BD: Yeah.

  RA: Do you find yourself alienated from the average, common person, leading the life that you do?

  BD: Maybe so, maybe so. I don’t know. I never eat in restaurants. I won’t eat in one. Once in a while I will, but as a rule I won’t eat in a restaurant. I don’t go places most people go to ah—