Dylan on Dylan

by Jeff Burger

  By the time Bob Dylan arrives in Britain this week for performances at St. James’ Park, Newcastle, on Tuesday and Wembley Stadium on Saturday, he will already have performed to almost half a million people throughout Europe—half a million people singing the chorus of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” an esperanto that is as much a testament to Dylan’s abiding influence and charisma as it is to the insatiable interest of the world’s press in his activities.

  This interest is equaled only by Dylan’s determination to keep his own counsel whenever possible. As Bill Graham, the tour’s garrulous American promoter and Dylan’s closest adviser, keeps reminding you, Bob “is not your everyday folk singer.”

  All the German magazine Stern had wanted to do was touch base for five minutes in return for a front-cover. Dylan declined. The press conference that he had been persuaded to hold in Verona, attended by 150 excitable European journalists, had been a fiasco: photographers barred, and the first question from the floor—“What are your religious views nowadays?”—met by Dylan irritably brushing the table in front of him, as if to sweep aside that and all other questions to follow.

  “I mean, nobody cares what Billy Joel’s religious views are, right?” he tells me with a wry smile. “What does it matter to people what Bob Dylan is? But it seems to, right? I’d honestly like to know why it’s important to them.”

  One expects many things of Bob Dylan, but such playful ingenuousness is not one of them.

  * * *

  DYLAN PROTECTS himself well, not with bodyguards but by a smokescreen of privacy and elusiveness of the sort that encourages speculation and myth. Meeting him involves penetrating a frustrating maze of “perhapses” and “maybes,” of cautions and briefings—suggestive of dealing with fine porcelain—culminating in a telephone call summoning you to an anonymous cafeteria filled with Spanish families who give not a second glance to the figure in a Hawaiian shirt and straw hat who at last comes ambling through the door.

  He is surprisingly genial, youthful for his 43 years, lean, interested and alert, who treats the business of being Bob Dylan with an engagingly aw-shucks kind of bemusement.

  It was in striking contrast to the apparition Dylan had presented the previous night, on stage in front of 25,000 people in a Madrid football stadium, his black smock coat, high boots and hawkish profile suggesting some avenging backwoods preacher.

  The emphasis in his performance has shifted from the overtly evangelical songs heard in Dylan’s last visit to Britain three years ago. Now it spans every phase of his 21-year career. The themes of social protest, personal love and religious faith have never been more of a piece. Dylan remains what he has always been, an uncompromising moralist. And to hear songs such as “Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (about nuclear war) and “Maggie’s Farm” (about rebellious labor) invested with fresh nuances of meaning, not to say vitriol, is to realise that, while the sentiments may have become unfashionable in popular music, they are no less pertinent. Nobody else is writing songs like Bob Dylan. Nobody ever did.

  “For me, none of the songs I’ve written has really dated,” he says. “They capture something I’ve never been able to improve on, whatever their statement is. A song like ‘Maggie’s Farm’—I could feel like that just the other day, and I could feel the same tomorrow. People say they’re ‘nostalgia,’ but I don’t know what that means really. A Tale of Two Cities was written 100 years ago; is that nostalgia? This term ‘nostalgic,’ it’s just another way people have of dealing with you and putting you some place they think they understand. It’s just another label.”

  * * *

  LABELS EXERCISE Bob Dylan greatly. People have been trying to put them on him since he started, he says, “and not one of them has ever made any sense.”

  The furor about his religious beliefs puzzled him most of all, “like I was running for Pope or something.” When the word first spread that he had eschewed Judaism and embraced Christianity, and he toured America in 1979 singing overtly religious songs, the most hostile reception came not from rock audiences but when he played university campuses, “and the so-called intellectual students showed their true monstrous selves.”

  “Born-again Christians” is just another label, he says. He had attended Bible school in California for three months, and the book was never far from his side, but the idea that faith was a matter of passing through one swing door and back out of another struck him as ridiculous. “I live by a strict disciplinary code, you know, but I don’t know how moral that is or even where it comes from, really. These things just become part of your skin after a while; you get to know what line not to step over—usually because you stepped over it before and were lucky to get back.”

  Was he an ascetic? Dylan lit another cigarette and asked what the word meant. “I don’t think so. I still have desires, you know, that lead me around once in a while. I don’t do things in excess, but everybody goes through those times. They either kill you, or make you a better person.”

  By this time in the conversation it did not seem awkward to ask: did he believe in evil?

  “Sure I believe in it. I believe that ever since Adam and Eve got thrown out of the garden that the whole nature of the planet has been heading in one direction—towards apocalypse. It’s all there in the Book of Revelations, but it’s difficult talking about these things because most people don’t know what you’re talking about anyway, or don’t want to listen.

  “What it comes down to is that there’s a lot of different gods in the world against the God—that’s what it’s all about. There’s a lot of different gods that people are subjects of. There’s the god of Mammon. Corporations are gods. Governments? No, governments don’t have much to do with it anymore, I don’t think. Politics is a hoax. The politicians don’t have any real power. They feed you all this stuff in the newspapers about what’s going on, but that’s not what’s really going on.

  “But then again, I don’t think that makes me a pessimistic person. I’m a realist. Or maybe a surrealist. But you can’t beat your head against the wall forever.”

  He had never, he said, been a utopian: that was always a foreign term to him, something to do with moving to the country, living communally and growing rice and beans. “I mean, I wanted to grow my own rice and beans—still do—but I never felt part of that movement.”

  But he could still look back on the 1960s with something approaching affection. “I mean, the Kennedys were great-looking people, man; they had style,” he smiles. “America is not like that any more. But what happened, happened so fast that people are still trying to figure it out. The TV media wasn’t so big then. It’s like the only thing people knew was what they knew; then suddenly people were being told what to think, how to behave. There’s too much information.

  “It just got suffocated. Like Woodstock—that wasn’t about anything. It was just a whole new market for tie-dyed T-shirts. It was about clothes. All those people are in computers now.”

  This was beyond him. He had never been good with numbers, and had no desire to stare at a screen. “I don’t feel obliged to keep up with the times. I’m not going to be here that long anyway. So I keep up with these times, then I gotta keep up with the ’90s. Jesus, who’s got time to keep up with the times?”

  It is at moments such as this that Dylan—once, misleadingly perhaps, characterised as a radical—reveals himself as much of a traditionalist; an adherent of biblical truths; a firm believer in the family and the institution of marriage—despite his own divorce from his wife, Sara; a man disenchanted with many of the totems and values of modern life, mass communications, the vulgarity of popular culture, the “sameness” of everything. Did he read contemporary literature? “Oh yeah, I read a detective story, but I can’t remember what it was called.

  “At least in the 1960s it seemed there was room to be different. For me, my particular scene, I came along at just the right time, and I understood the times I was in. If I was starting out right now I don’t know w
here I’d get the inspiration from, because you need to breathe the right air to make that creative process work. I don’t worry about it so much for me. I’ve done it; I can’t complain. But the people coming up, the artists and writers, what are they gonna do, because these are the people who change the world.”

  Nowadays, he admits, he finds songwriting harder than ever. A song like “Masters of War” he would despatch in 15 minutes and move on to the next one without a second thought. “If I wrote a song like that now I wouldn’t feel I’d have to write another one for two weeks. There’s still things I want to write about, but the process is harder. The old records I used to make, by the time they came out I wouldn’t even want them released because I was already so far beyond them.”

  Much of his time nowadays is spent travelling. He was in Jerusalem last autumn for his son Jesse’s bar mitzvah—“his grandmother’s idea,” he smiles. Israel interests him from “a biblical point of view,” but he had never felt that atavistic Jewish sense of homecoming. In fact, he lives principally on his farm in Minnesota, not far from the town of Hibbing where he spent his adolescence. Then there is the domed house in Malibu, California, originally built to accommodate his five children—good schools nearby, he says—but which he has seldom used since his divorce, and a 63ft sailing boat with which he cruises the Caribbean “when I can’t think of anything else to do.”

  He had never contemplated retirement: the need to make money was not a factor—he is a wealthy man—but the impulse to continue writing was. “There’s never really been any glory in it for me,” he says. “Being seen in the places and having everybody put their arm around you, I never cared about any of that. I don’t care what people think. For me, the fulfillment was always in just doing it. That’s all that really matters.”

  As the conversation had progressed, more and more people had realised who the man in the straw hat was. A steady stream had made their way to his table, scraps of paper in hand. Dylan had signed them all, with a surprisingly careful deliberation—almost as if he was practising—but his discomfort at being on view was becoming more apparent. As peremptorily as he had arrived, Bob Dylan made his excuses and left.

  DYLAN ON

  Reaching a New Generation

  “I don’t reach anybody. They find me. It’s not for me to go out and reach somebody. If they can find me, they find me, and if they don’t, they don’t. That’s the way it’s always been. I don’t think it’s gonna change now.”

  —from interview with Martha Quinn,

  Wembley Stadium, London, MTV, July 7, 1984

  DYLAN ON

  Irish Music

  “Irish music has always been a great part of my life because I used to hang out with the Clancy Brothers. They influenced me tremendously . . . Liam Clancy was always my favorite singer, as a ballad singer. I just never heard anyone as good, and that includes Barbra Streisand and Pearl Bailey.”

  —from interview with Bono, Hot Press (Ireland), August 26, 1984

  RADIO INTERVIEW

  Bert Kleinman and Artie Mogull | November 13, 1984 | Westwood One (US)

  This extensive interview, which took place on July 30, 1984, at New York City’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, was conducted by radio programmer Bert Kleinman and Artie Mogull, the A&R man who in 1962 had signed Dylan to his first music-publishing contract. The conversation aired on stations belonging to the Westwood One radio network, beginning on November 13, 1984. —Ed.

  Bert Kleinman: Is it true that you taught yourself guitar and harmonica?

  Bob Dylan: Well, nobody really teaches themselves guitar and harmonica. When you don’t know anything, first of all you get yourself a book or something. What I remember is learning a couple of chords from some books and then going out to watch people, to see how they’re doing it. You don’t go so much to hear ’em, you just go to see how they do what they do, get as close as you can, see what their fingers are doing.

  In those early stages, it’s more like a learning thing, and that can sometimes take many years. But I picked it up fairly quickly. I didn’t really play with that much technique. And people really didn’t take to me because of that, because I didn’t go out of my way to learn as much technique as other people . . . I know people who spent their whole lives learning John Lee Hooker chords, just hammering on the E string, and that was all. But they could play it in such a beautiful way, it looked like a ballet dancer.

  Everybody had a different style and techniques, especially in folk music. There was your Southern mountain banjo, then flat picking, then your finger-picking techniques, and just all of these different runs, different styles of ballads. Folk music was a world that was very split up and there was a purist side to it. Folk people didn’t want to hear it if you couldn’t play the song exactly the way that Aunt Molly Jackson played it. And I just kind of blazed my way through all that stuff. [Laughs.] I would hear somebody do something and it would get to a certain point that you’d say, “What do you want from that?” You’d want to see what style they were playing . . . I just stayed up day and night, just barnstorming my way through all that stuff. And then I heard Woody Guthrie, and then it all came together for me.

  Kleinman: Do you remember the first Woody Guthrie record you heard?

  Dylan: Yeah, I think the first Woody Guthrie song I heard was “Pastures of Plenty.” And “Pretty Boy Floyd” and another song . . . he used to write a lot of his songs from existing melodies. “Grand Coulee Dam.” They just impressed me.

  Kleinman: Got to you?

  Dylan: Oh, yeah. Because they just had a mark of originality. Well, the lyrics did. I just heard all those songs and I learned them all off the records. All the songs of Woody Guthrie that I could find, anybody that had a Woody Guthrie record or that knew a Woody Guthrie song. And in St. Paul at the time, where I was, there were some people around who not only had his records but who knew his songs. So I just learned them all. Some of the best records that I heard him make were these records that he made on the Stinson label, with Cisco Houston and Sonny Terry.

  I don’t know if Leadbelly was on there, too. I learned a bunch of Leadbelly’s stuff too and learned how to play like that. But one of the biggest thrills I ever actually had was when I reached New York, whenever it was, and I got to play with Cisco Houston. I think I got to play with him at a party someplace. But I used to watch him. He used to play at Folk City. He was an amazing-looking guy. He looked like Clark Gable, like a movie star.

  Artie Mogull: He reminded me a little of Tennessee Ernie [Ford], actually.

  Dylan: Yeah.

  Mogull: Also very unheralded.

  Dylan: Oh, completely. He was one of the great unsung heroes. One of the great American figures of all time, and nobody knows anything about him.

  Kleinman: When do you think you started to develop something that was uniquely yours? You were talking about playing Woody Guthrie—

  Dylan: Well, when I came to New York that’s all I played—Woody Guthrie songs. Then about six months after that, I’d stopped playing all Woody Guthrie songs. I used to play in a place called Café Wha?, and it always used to open at noon and closed at six in the morning. It was just a nonstop flow of people. Usually they were tourists who were looking for beatniks in the Village. There’d be maybe five groups that played there.

  I used to play with a guy called Fred Neil, who wrote the song “Everybody’s Talkin’” that was in the film Midnight Cowboy. Fred was from Coconut Grove, Florida, I think, and he used to make that scene, from Coconut Grove to Nashville to New York. And he had a strong, powerful voice, almost a bass voice. And a powerful sense of rhythm. And he used to play mostly these types of songs that Josh White might sing. I would play harmonica for him, and then, once in a while, get to sing a song when he was taking a break or something. It was his show; he would be on for about half an hour.

  Then a conga group would get on, called Los Congeros, with twenty conga drummers and bongos and steel drums. And they would sing and play maybe half an hour. And
then this girl, I think she was called Judy Rainey, used to play sweet southern mountain Appalachian ballads, with electric guitar and a small amplifier. And then another guy named Hal Waters used to sing. He used to be a sort of crooner. Then there’d be a comedian, then an impersonator, and this whole unit would go around nonstop. And you’d get fed there, which was actually the best thing about the place.

  Mogull: How long a set would you do?

  Dylan: Oh, about half an hour. If they didn’t like you back then you couldn’t play. You’d get hooted off. If they liked you, you played more. If they didn’t like you, you didn’t play at all. You’d play one or two songs and people would just boo or hiss.

  Kleinman: This wasn’t your own stuff you were singing there?

  Dylan: No, I didn’t start playing my own stuff until much later.

  Kleinman: When did you start to perform your own stuff?

  Dylan: I just drifted into it. I just started writing. I’d always kinda written my own songs but I never played them. Nobody played their own songs then. The only person that did that was Woody Guthrie. And then one day I just wrote a song, and the first song I ever wrote that I performed in public was the song I wrote to Woody Guthrie. I just felt like playing it one night, and so I played it.

  Kleinman: Was writing something that you’d always wanted to do?

  Dylan: Not really. It wasn’t a thing I wanted to do ever. I wanted just a song to sing, and there came a certain point where I couldn’t sing anything. So I had to write what I wanted to sing ’cause nobody else was writing what I wanted to sing. I couldn’t find it anywhere. If I could, I probably would have never started writing.

  Kleinman: Was the writing something that came easy to you? Because it is a craft that you do very well and you talk about it so casually.

  Dylan: Yeah, it does come easy. But then, after so many records sometimes you just don’t know anymore: am I doing this because I want to do it or because you think it’s expected of you? Do you know what I mean? So you’d start saying, well, it’s time to write a song—I’ll write a song. And you’ll try to do something but sometimes it just won’t come out right. At those kind of times it’s best just to go sing somebody’s songs.