by Jeff Burger
Zollo phoned Mintz, who said that the interview could take place the following week, “somewhere in the middle of Los Angeles. We will let you know the date, time, and location that morning. Come alone.”
“I loved the mystery of that,” Zollo told me. “And ‘come alone’ I found funny, as if I might show up with all my friends.”
When Zollo arrived for the May 16 interview at a bungalow in the back of the Beverly Hills Hotel, Mintz was there to greet him. Dylan emerged from a bedroom after about fifteen minutes.
“He was in a happy mood and we connected easily,” Zollo recalled. “I began by paraphrasing something Arlo Guthrie had said about songwriting being like fishing, and he thought that was hilarious. He laughed even more when I asked, ‘So, how’d you catch so many?’
“He said it was ‘the bait’—a typically funny but cryptic Dylan answer, which most interviewers might let go,” Zollo said. “But my whole mission was really to determine how this one man wrote so many amazing songs and changed the art form forever. So I asked him what kind of bait, and when I did his eyes lit up and he recognized I was going to follow him everywhere. And he liked that.
“He also liked that I was a musician and a songwriter myself, and he mentioned it,” Zollo said. “Musicians talk differently to fellow musicians. So when I asked him about the key of A minor, for example, he knew where I was at. When I told him that to me ‘One More Cup of Coffee’ was an ideal A minor song, he said I should try it in B minor. I asked why, and he said, ‘It could be a hit for you.’
Zollo told me that at Mintz’s request, he removed from the interview transcript a reference to the song “People,” which Barbra Streisand had recorded. During the Q&A, Dylan had said, “You know that song [and he sort of sang], ‘People, people who need people, are the luckiest people in the world.’” Then he asked, “Do you think that is true? Are people who need people really the luckiest people?”
Said Zollo: “That was golden, in that Dylan, like all serious songwriters, subscribes to the idea that any equation introduced into a song—like that one—should add up. And this does not. Because it is nothing more than a contrivance, an old-fashioned songwriting conceit that works OK in the song but is ultimately untrue. Phony. Not connected to real life. Whereas Dylan’s songs do the very opposite, as was his intention.
“When he kept returning to the image of the ‘yellow railroad’ from ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie,’ he did so to make this very point,” Zollo continued. “That these songs are not contrived. They are real. The equations in them—whether we like them or not—do add up.
“Dylan was also happy that I talked of some songs people rarely discuss,” Zollo told me, “such as ‘Joey’ from Desire. But to my enormous dismay, when Dylan had not yet completed his thoughts about that song, Elliot reached over and turned off both of my tape recorders and said we were done.
“To this day,” said Zollo, “I am not sure why that happened. Bob was on a roll and we were so connecting. I think I could have had another hour easy. But Elliot ensured it was over.” —Ed.
“I’ve made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot.”
—from “I and I” by Bob Dylan
“Songwriting? What do I know about songwriting?” Bob Dylan asked, and then broke into laughter. He was wearing blue jeans and a white tank-top T-shirt, and drinking coffee out of a glass. “It tastes better out of a glass,” he said grinning. His blonde acoustic guitar was leaning on a couch near where we sat. Bob Dylan’s guitar. His influence is so vast that everything that surrounds him takes on enlarged significance: Bob Dylan’s moccasins. Bob Dylan’s coat.
Pete Seeger said, “All songwriters are links in a chain,” yet there are few artists in this evolutionary arc whose influence is as profound as that of Bob Dylan. It’s hard to imagine the art of songwriting as we know it without him. Though he insists in this interview that “somebody else would have done it,” he was the instigator, the one who knew that songs could do more, that they could take on more. He knew that songs could contain a lyrical richness and meaning far beyond the scope of all previous pop songs, and they could possess as much beauty and power as the greatest poetry, and that by being written in rhythm and rhyme and merged with music, they could speak to our souls.
Starting with the models made by his predecessors, such as the talking blues, Dylan quickly discarded old forms and began to fashion new ones. He broke all the rules of songwriting without abandoning the craft and care that holds songs together. He brought the linguistic beauty of Shakespeare, Byron, and Dylan Thomas, and the expansiveness and beat experimentation of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti, to the folk poetry of Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams. And when the world was still in the midst of accepting this new form, he brought music to a new place again, fusing it with the electricity of rock and roll. “Basically, he showed that anything goes,” Robbie Robertson said. John Lennon said that it was hearing Dylan that allowed him to make the leap from writing empty pop songs to expressing the actuality of his life and the depths of his own soul. “Help” was a real call for help, he said, and prior to hearing Dylan it didn’t occur to him that songs could contain such direct meaning. When he asked Paul Simon how he made the leap in his writing from fifties rock & roll songs like “Hey Schoolgirl” to writing “Sound of Silence” he said, “I really can’t imagine it could have been anyone else besides Bob Dylan.”
“Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky
with one hand waving free,
silhouetted by the sea,
circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate
driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.”
—from “Mr. Tambourine Man”
There’s an unmistakable elegance in Dylan’s words, an almost biblical beauty that he has sustained in his songs throughout the years. He refers to it as a “gallantry” in the following, and pointed to it as the single thing that sets his songs apart from others. Though he’s maybe more famous for the freedom and expansiveness of his lyrics, all of his songs possess this exquisite care and love for the language. As Shakespeare and Byron did in their times, Dylan has taken English, perhaps the world’s plainest language, and instilled it with a timeless, mythic grace.
“Ring them bells, sweet Martha, for the poor man’s son
Ring them bells so the world will know that God is one
Oh, the shepherd is asleep
where the willows weep
and the mountains are filled with lost sheep”
—from “Ring Them Bells”
As much as he has stretched, expanded and redefined the rules of songwriting, Dylan is a tremendously meticulous craftsman. A brutal critic of his own work, he works and reworks the words of his songs in the studio and even continues to rewrite certain ones even after they’ve been recorded and released. “They’re not written in stone,” he said. With such a wondrous wealth of language at his fingertips, he discards imagery and lines other songwriters would sell their souls to discover. The Bootleg Series, a recently released collection of previously unissued recordings, offers a rare opportunity to see the revisions and regrouping his songs go through.
“Idiot Wind” is one of his angriest songs (“You don’t hear a song like that every day,” he said), which he recorded on Blood On The Tracks in a way that reflects this anger, emphasizing lines of condemnation like “one day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes, blood on your saddle.” On The Bootleg Series, we get an alternate approach to the song, a quiet, tender reading of the same lines that makes the inherent disquiet of the song even more disturbing, the tenderness of Dylan’s delivery adding a new level of genuine sadness to lines like “people see me all the time and they just can’t remember how to act.” The peak moment of the song is the penultimate chorus when Dylan addresses America: “Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull, from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.” On the
Bootleg version, this famous line is still in formation: “Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your jaw, from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Mardi Gras.” His song “Jokerman” also went through a similar evolution, as a still unreleased bootleg of the song reveals. Like “Idiot Wind,” the depth and intensity of the lyric is sustained over an extraordinary amount of verses, yet even more scenes were shot that wound up on the cutting room floor, evidence of an artist overflowing with the abundance of creation:
“It’s a shadowy world
skies are slippery gray
A woman just gave birth to a prince today
and dressed him in scarlet
He’ll put the priest in his pocket,
put the blade to the heat
Take the motherless children off the street
And place them at the feet of a harlot”
—from “Jokerman” on Infidels
“It’s a shadowy world
skies are slippery gray
A woman just gave birth to a prince today
and she’s dressed in scarlet
He’ll turn priests into pimps
and make all men bark
Take a woman who could have been Joan of Arc
and turn her into a harlot”
—from “Jokerman” on Outfidels, a bootleg
Often Dylan lays abstraction aside and writes songs as clear and telling as any of Woody Guthrie’s narrative ballads, finding heroes and antiheroes in our modern times as Woody found in his. Some of these subjects might be thought of as questionable choices for heroic treatment, such as underworld boss Joey Gallo, about whom he wrote the astounding song, “Joey.” It’s a song that is remarkable for its cinematic clarity; Dylan paints a picture of a life and death so explicit and exact that we can see every frame of it, and even experience Gallo’s death as if we were sitting there watching it. And he does it with a rhyme scheme and a meter that makes the immediacy of the imagery even more striking:
“One day they blew him down
in a clam bar in New York
He could see it coming through the door
as he lifted up his fork.
He pushed the table over to protect his family
Then he staggered out into the streets
of Little Italy.”
—from “Joey”
“Yes, well, what can you know about anybody?” Dylan asked, and it’s a good question. He’s been a mystery for years, “kind of impenetrable, really,” Paul Simon said, and that mystery is not penetrated by this interview or any interview. Dylan’s answers are often more enigmatic than the questions themselves, and like his songs, they give you a lot to think about while not necessarily revealing much about the man. In person, as others have noted, he is Chaplinesque. His body is smaller and his head bigger than one might expect, giving the effect of a kid wearing a Bob Dylan mask. He possesses one of the world’s most striking faces; while certain stars might seem surprisingly normal and unimpressive in the flesh, Dylan is perhaps even more startling to confront than one might expect. Seeing those eyes, and that nose, it’s clear it could be no one else than he, and to sit at a table with him and face those iconic features is no less impressive than suddenly finding yourself sitting face to face with William Shakespeare. It’s a face we associate with an enormous, amazing body of work, work that has changed the world. But it’s not really the kind of face one expects to encounter in everyday life.
Though Van Morrison and others have called him the world’s greatest poet, he doesn’t think of himself as a poet. “Poets drown in lakes,” he said to us. Yet he’s written some of the most beautiful poetry the world has known, poetry of love and outrage, of abstraction and clarity, of timelessness and relativity. Though he is faced with the evidence of a catalogue of songs that would contain the whole careers of a dozen fine songwriters, Dylan told us he doesn’t consider himself to be a professional songwriter. “For me it’s always been more con-fessional than pro-fessional,” he said in distinctive Dylan cadence. “My songs aren’t written on a schedule.” Well, how are they written, we asked? This is the question at the heart of this interview, the main one that comes to mind when looking over all the albums, or witnessing the amazing array of moods, masks, styles and forms all represented on the recently released Bootleg Series. How has he done it? It was the first question asked, and though he deflected it at first with his customary humor, it’s a question we returned to a few times. “Start me off somewhere,” he said smiling, as if he might be left alone to divulge the secrets of his songwriting, and our talk began.
SongTalk: Okay, Arlo Guthrie recently said, “Songwriting is like fishing in a stream; you put in your line and hope you catch something. And I don’t think anyone downstream from Bob Dylan ever caught anything.”
Dylan: [Much laughter]
ST: Any idea how you’ve been able to catch so many?
Dylan: [Laughs] It’s probably the bait. [More laughter]
ST: What kind of bait do you use?
Dylan: Uh . . . bait . . . You’ve got to use some bait. Otherwise you sit around and expect songs to come to you. Forcing it is using bait.
ST: Does that work for you?
Dylan: Well, no. Throwing yourself into a situation that would demand a response is like using bait. People who write about stuff that hasn’t really happened to them are inclined to do that.
ST: When you write songs, do you try to consciously guide the meaning or do you try to follow subconscious directions?
Dylan: Well, you know, motivation is something you never know behind any song, really. Anybody’s song, you never know what the motivation was. It’s nice to be able to put yourself in an environment where you can completely accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from your inner workings of your mind. And block yourself off to where you can control it all, take it down. Edgar Allan Poe must have done that. People who are dedicated writers, of which there are some, but mostly people get their information today over a television set or some kind of a way that’s hitting them on all their senses. It’s not just a great novel anymore. You have to be able to get the thoughts out of your mind.
ST: How do you do that?
Dylan: Well, first of all, there’s two kinds of thoughts in your mind: there’s good thoughts and evil thoughts. Both come through your mind. Some people are more loaded down with one than another. Nevertheless, they come through. And you have to be able to sort them out, if you want to be a songwriter, if you want to be a good song singer. You must get rid of all that baggage. You ought to be able to sort out those thoughts, because they don’t mean anything, they’re just pulling you around, too. It’s important to get rid of all them thoughts. Then you can do something from some kind of surveillance of the situation. You have some kind of place where you can see but it can’t affect you. Where you can bring something to the matter, besides just take, take, take, take, take. As so many situations in life are today. Take, take, take, that’s all that it is. What’s in it for me? That syndrome which started in the Me Decade, whenever that was. We’re still in that. It’s still happening.
ST: Is songwriting for you more a sense of taking something from someplace else?
Dylan: Well, someplace else is always a heartbeat away. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. There’s no rule. That’s what makes it so attractive. There isn’t any rule. You can still have your wits about you and do something that gets you off in a multitude of ways. As you very well know, or else you yourself wouldn’t be doing it.
ST: Your songs often bring us back to other times, and are filled with mythic, magical images. A song like “Changing of the Guard” seems to take place centuries ago, with lines like “They shaved her head / she was torn between Jupiter and Apollo / a messenger arrived with a black nightingale . . .” How do you connect with a song like that?
Dylan: [Pause] A song like that, there’s no way of knowing, after the fact, unless somebody’s there to take it down in chronological order, what the motivation was behind
it. [Pause] But on one level, of course, it’s no different from anything else of mine. It’s the same amount of metric verses like a poem. To me, like a poem. The melodies in my mind are very simple, they’re very simple, they’re just based on music we’ve all heard growing up. And that and music which went beyond that, which went back further, Elizabethan ballads and whatnot . . . To me, it’s old. [Laughs] It’s old. It’s not something, with my minimal amount of talent, if you could call it that, minimum amount . . . To me somebody coming along now would definitely read what’s out there if they’re seriously concerned with being an artist who’s going to still be an artist when they get to be Picasso’s age. You’re better off learning some music theory. You’re just better off, yeah, if you want to write songs. Rather than just take a hillbilly twang, you know, and try to base it all on that. Even country music is more orchestrated than it used to be. You’re better off having some feel for music that you don’t have to carry in your head, that you can write down. To me those are the people who . . . are serious about this craft. People who go about it that way. Not people who just want to pour out their insides and they got to get a big idea out and they want to tell the world about this, sure, you can do it through a song, you always could. You can use a song for anything, you know. The world don’t need any more songs.
ST: You don’t think so?
Dylan: No. They’ve got enough. They’ve got way too many. As a matter of fact, if nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain’t gonna suffer for it. Nobody cares. There’s enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probably, each of them, a hundred records, and never be repeated. There’s enough songs. Unless someone’s gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That’s a different story. But as far as songwriting, any idiot could do it. If you see me do it, any idiot could do it. [Laughs] It’s just not that difficult of a thing. Everybody writes a song just like everybody’s got that one great novel in them. There aren’t a lot of people like me. You just had your interview with Neil [Young], John Mellencamp . . . Of course, most of my ilk that came along write their own songs and play them. It wouldn’t matter if anybody ever made another record. They’ve got enough songs. To me, someone who writes really good songs is Randy Newman. There’s a lot of people who write good songs. As songs. Now Randy might not go out on stage and knock you out, or knock your socks off. And he’s not going to get people thrilled in the front row. He ain’t gonna do that. But he’s gonna write a better song than most people who can do it. You know, he’s got that down to an art. Now Randy knows music. He knows music. But it doesn’t get any better than “Louisiana” or “Cross Charleston Bay” [“Sail Away”]. It doesn’t get any better than that. It’s like a classically heroic anthem theme. He did it. There’s quite a few people who did it. Not that many people in Randy’s class. Brian Wilson. He can write melodies that will beat the band. Three people could combine on a song and make it a great song. If one person would have written the same song, maybe you would have never heard it. It might get buried on some . . . rap record. [Laughs]