by Jeff Burger
“I had rung promoter Michael Gudinski and let him know how much I wanted an interview with the man,” Wilmoth told me. “I was about to sit down at the Palais Theatre for the show when I got a tap on the shoulder from Gudinski. ‘Bob Dylan will see you after the show.’
“I had no tape recorder (this was well before smartphones), no questions, no notice. I was bundled into a Terago [Australian Toyota model] and driven to my nearby apartment to get the recorder. I sat in the dark for two hours writing out my questions. Not easy. What hasn’t Bob Dylan been asked?”
Wilmoth wound up getting thirty minutes with the artist. “It went OK,” he recalled.
“And twenty-five years later, I still feel blessed that I had the chance to spend even a little time with the man who so profoundly shaped contemporary music and culture.” —Ed.
Bob Dylan is considering the symbolism of the ’60s voice of youth turning 50 last year. “Well, Rod’s around,” he says. “He must be close to me or even above me. [Rod Stewart is 47.] A couple of ’em are around. The Stones.” What does he think of the Stones 30 years later? Dylan breaks up laughing. “If you like that sort of thing.”
Bob Dylan: sit-down-comic? The man who has been called one of this country’s most influential—and possibly earnest—figures is not expansive, but he’s not walking out of the interview after seven minutes either, as he did to one journalist. This is a kinder, gentler Dylan, cooling off after his first Melbourne show on Wednesday night. Dylan is a small man, almost curled up in his chair. His shoulders are hunched against intrusion. He offers a limp hand and a grunt in greeting. This is Dylan in a good mood. Why Dylan has agreed to meet a journalist after refusing 300 requests for interviews when he turned 50 in May last year is unclear. But The Age is the beneficiary of half an hour of sometimes incomprehensible, sometimes lucid thoughts, punctuated by three or four belly laughs. America’s greatest living poet is actually being charming.
Since he became famous in the coffee shops of New York’s Greenwich Village in 1961, Dylan has embodied other people’s dreams and ideals of the ’60s. “People seem now to have forgotten about it,” he says. “People are now more or less interested in the ’90s. Sixties memories are fading a little.” There seems to be a ’60s revival every few months. Dylan smiles. “There were ’60s revivals in the ’60s.”
When journalists are finally allowed to touch the hem, they are usually forewarned not to get personal. “There’s nothing that is really very interesting about me,” Dylan protests, laughing. “Talking about me doesn’t make a conversation more interesting. It doesn’t interest me to talk about me. It’s my least favorite subject [laughs again].”
But Dylan seems happy enough when asked about his children Anna, 25, and Jacob, 21, who with Sara Dylan, were immortalized in the song Sara from his acclaimed 1975 album Desire. “They’re just around. I have an extended family, this, that and the other. We get on well, for the most part.”
After 30 years of singing Blowin’ in the Wind, does he perform the early songs under sufferance? “I do those songs because they feel right to sing,” he says. “Even if they weren’t my songs, they’re my style of song, and they are oriented to what I am doing today.”
He is tired of interpreting his early songs too literally. “Some of my records I’ve been overloaded with, some parts and arrangements,” he admits. “Whereas the song itself still has its strength for me. With some of the older songs, the vision is still quite focused.”
Strangely he admits to changing the list of songs he performs to keep certain fans happy. “There are a lot of people that come to our shows lots of times, so just for them, it’s a good idea to do different things. It’s not like they come and see me once.”
Dylan has recently been the subject of a biography, Clinton Heylin’s Behind the Shades, and there are several retrospectives, including a three-CD boxed set of “bootlegged” versions of his earliest songs. “Well, you know, people bootleg concerts, they might as well be out legally. Nobody would ever have thought that was that big a business. They sell quite a bit.”
Was there any music Dylan admires today? “No. Nothing.” He believes music lost the plot. “There was a cut-off point sometime.” The early 70’s? “Maybe. When the machines got into making music, you could turn it off more. It seemed to take a different turn at that point and the purpose got kind of lost.”
The audience at Dylan’s shows consists largely of people who were in nappies when he released “All Along the Watchtower” in 1968. “I’m lucky to have any audience,” Dylan says. “A lot of my contemporaries really don’t have any.”
His views on Australia are a little disjointed, but he claims to be fascinated by a country so different from his own. “To me Australia is ancient ground broken off from Africa, and that’s why there are different animals here. Someone told me kangaroos are prehistoric. The people who are indigenous are prehistoric, too. Just looking at the ground . . . it doesn’t look this way in America or Europe. This is ancient territory. For that reason alone, it’s worth spending time here.”
Dylan said recently that he’d written enough songs. “My songs aren’t written like they used to be, which was all the time. They come slower now [laughs].” Dylan ties a towel around his head and walks out of the dressing room and disappears into his tour bus. To rejuvenate himself, he sometimes decides to escape from the circus. “Oh, I get away to the boondocks somewhere.”
DYLAN ON
His Life in Woodstock
“It was like a wave of insanity breakin’ loose around the house day and night. You’d come in the house and find people there, people comin’ through the woods, at all hours of the day and night, knockin’ on your door. It was really dark and depressing. And there was no way to respond to all this, you know? It was as if they were suckin’ your very blood out. I said: ‘Now, wait, these people can’t be my fans. They just can’t be.’ And they kept comin’ We had to get out of there. This was just about the time of that Woodstock Festival, which was the sum total of all this bullshit. And it seemed to have something to do with me, this Woodstock Nation and everything it represented. So we couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get any space for myself and my family, and there was no help, nowhere. I got very resentful about the whole thing, and we got outta there.”
—from interview with Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone, October 15, 1992
DYLAN ON
Recording Technology
“Modern recording technology never endeared itself to me. My kind of sound is very simple, with a little bit of echo, and that’s about all that’s required to record it. . . . The way most records sound these days, everything is equalized. My kind of music is based on non-equalized parts, where one sound isn’t necessarily supposed to be as loud as another. When producers try to equal everything out, it’s to dismal effect on my records.”
—from interview with Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune, August 1993
DYLAN ON
Nostalgia
“I’d rather live in the moment than some kind of nostalgia trip, which I feel is a drug, a real drug that people are mainlining. It’s outrageous. People are mainlining nostalgia like it was morphine. I don’t want to be a drug dealer.”
—from interview with Malcolm Jones Jr., Newsweek, March 20, 1995
A MIDNIGHT CHAT WITH DYLAN
John Dolen | September 28, 1995 | SunSentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Florida)
Dylan experienced eventful times shortly after his April 1992 meeting with Peter Wilmoth—especially in October of that year. That’s when he issued Good As I Been to You, the first of two acclaimed albums of blues and folk covers. It’s also the month when he obtained a divorce from Carolyn Dennis. Finally, it’s the month when New York’s Madison Square Garden hosted an all-star concert that marked the thirtieth anniversary of Dylan’s debut album release. Performers at the show—which subsequently became available on CD and in video formats—included George Harrison, Neil Young, Stevie Wonder, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, and, in th
e finale, the man himself.
The next few years were less momentous, though Dylan released a second album of blues/folk covers, World Gone Wrong, in October 1993, and a live set from MTV Unplugged in April 1995. He toured extensively in North America and Europe during these years, however.
On September 25, 1995, he had just ended a two-month break after a summer spent performing in Germany, Spain, France, Switzerland, and England. And he had arrived in Florida, where he would begin a North American tour. That’s where he spoke with newspaper journalist John Dolen.
The interview, Dolen told me, took place only after three days of delays. It finally happened, he said, “late in the evening when I had almost given up, sitting nearly alone in the newsroom. Dylan had just returned to his hotel. I thought he would be tired. But it sounded as if he’d just had a pot of coffee.
“The quality of his voice surprised me, too,” Dolan added. “Not soft, not loud, and not the slightest bit hoarse or raspy.
“Another thing that struck me was a bit of a revelation,” Dolen continued. “Dylan does not come off as an intellectual, although he’s read very widely. He is wise, of course, but it is more folksy than cerebral. In other words, he talks like a musician, which shouldn’t be surprising because that’s what he is. On the bookish side myself, I realized that all these years I had put my own trappings on who he is—just as others have.”
The scope and tone of the conversation surprised Dolen as well. “He ranged far beyond [the focus of] your typical musician, speaking at times like a poet or even a prophet, with that elliptical logic reminiscent of the biblical teachers, cutting to the very core of things. He did all this without pretense, without affectation, and with professional respect for where I was coming from.
“It was an unforgettable experience,” Dolen concluded. —Ed.
When Bob Dylan calls, it’s nearly midnight. When he speaks it is with a clear, distinctive voice. Even though he’s at the end of his day, having just returned to a Fort Lauderdale hotel after a band rehearsal, he is contemplative, enigmatic, even poetic.
The Southern leg of his current tour cranks into high gear tonight with the first of two concerts at the Sunrise Musical Theatre. The tour, which has been in progress for more than a year, has earned rave reviews from critics in New York, San Francisco, Dublin. In a nearly hour-long interview with Arts & Features Editor John Dolen, the first in-depth interview he has given to a newspaper this year, Dylan talks about his songs, the creative process and the free gig at the Edge in Fort Lauderdale last Saturday.
Like many others over the years I’ve spent thousands of hours listening to your albums. Even now, not a month goes by without me reaching for Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61 Revisited, Slow Train Coming, Street-Legal, Oh Mercy. Do you ever just sit back and look at all these albums and say, hey, that’s pretty good?
You know, it’s ironic, I never listen to those records. I really don’t notice them anymore except to pick songs off of them here and there to play. Maybe I should listen to them.
As a body of work, there could always be more. But it depends. Robert Johnson only made one record—his body of work was just one record. Yet there’s no praise or esteem high enough for the body of work he represents. He’s influenced hundreds of artists. There are people who put out 40 or 50 records and don’t do what he did.
What was the record?
He made a record called King of the Delta Blues Singers. In ’60 or ’62. He was brilliant.
Your performance at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert in Cleveland earlier this month drew a lot of great notices. Is that important to you? What’s your feeling about that institution?
I never visited the actual building, I was just over at the concert, which was pretty long. So I have no comment on the interior or any of the exhibits inside.
But how do you feel about the idea of a rock hall of fame itself?
Nothing surprises me anymore. It’s a perfect time for anything to happen.
At the Edge show Saturday, you did a lot of covers, including some old stuff like Confidential. Was that a Johnnie Ray song?
It’s by Sonny Knight. You won’t hear that again.
Oh, was that the reason for your “trying to turn bull— into gold” comment at the show?
(Laugh) Something like that.
Were these covers just something for folks at the Edge? Does that mean you aren’t going to be doing more material like that on your tour, including the Sunrise shows?
It will be the usual show we’re used to doing on this tour now, songs most people will have heard already.
In the vein of non-Dylan music, what does Bob Dylan toss on the CD or cassette player these days?
Ever heard of John Trudell? He talks his songs instead of singing them and has a real good band. There’s a lot of tradition to what he is doing. I also like Kevin Lynch. And Steve Forbert.
Are there new bands you think are worth bringing to our attention?
I hear people here and there and I think they’re all great. In most cases I never hear of them again. I saw some groups in London this summer. Don’t know their names.
At this stage of your career, when you’ve earned every kind of honor and accolade that a person can get, what motivates you?
I’ve had it both ways. I have had good and bad accolades. If you pay any attention to them at all, it makes you pathological. It makes us pathological, to read about ourselves. You try not to pay attention or you try to discard it as soon as possible.
For some writers the motivation is that burden, that you have to get what’s inside of you out and down on paper. How is it with you?
Like that, exactly. But if I can’t make it happen, when it comes—you know, when other things intrude—I usually don’t make it happen. I don’t go to a certain place at a certain time every day to build it. In my case, a lot of these songs, they lay around imperfectly . . .
As a songwriter, what’s the creative process? How does a song like All Along the Watchtower come about?
There’s three kinds of ways. You write lyrics and try to find a melody. Or, if you come up with a melody, then you have to stuff the lyrics in there some kinda way.
And then the third kind of a way is when they both come at the same time. Where it all comes in a blur: The words are the melody and the melody is the words. And that’s the ideal way for somebody like myself to get going with something.
All Along the Watchtower was that way. It leaped out in a very short time. I don’t like songs that make you feel feeble or indifferent. That lets a whole lot of things out of the picture for me.
How did you feel when you first heard Jimi Hendrix’s version of All Along the Watchtower?
It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent—he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn’t think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day.
Angelina, off the Bootleg Series, is such a great song, but no matter how hard I try I can’t figure out the words; any clues for me?
I never try to figure out what they’re about. If you have to think about it, then it’s not there.
A song that always haunted me was Señor [(Tales of Yankee Power)], from Street Legal. Have you played that at all in the last few years?
We play that maybe once every third, fourth or fifth show.
In the ’70s after years abroad, I remember the incredible elation I felt coming back to the States and hearing your Christian songs—a validation of experiences I had been through in Spain. I remember the lines, “You talk about Buddha / You talk about Muhammad / But you never said a word about / The one who came to die for us instead . . .” Those were fearless words. How do you feel about those words and the songs you wrote during that period now?
Just writing a song like that probably emancipated me from other kinds of illusions. I’ve writte
n so many songs and so many records that I can’t address them all. I can’t say that I would disagree with that line. On its own level it was some kind of turning point for me, writing that.
With the great catalog you have and with the success this year with the MTV Unplugged disc, why does this concert tour have such a heavy guitar and drums thing going?
It’s not the kind of music that will put anybody to sleep.
The other night at the Edge you left the harmonicas on the stand without touching them—any reason for that?
They are such a dynamo unto themselves. I pick them up when I feel like it.
You’ve made several passes through here in the past 10 years. Your thoughts on South Florida?
I like it a lot, who wouldn’t? There’s a lot to like.
Now there is Bob Dylan on CD-ROM, Bob Dylan on the Internet and all that stuff. Are some people taking you too seriously?
It’s not for me to say. People take everything seriously. You can get too altruistic on your own self because of the brain energy of other people.
Across the Atlantic is a fellow named Elvis Costello, who, after you, takes a lot of shelf space by my stereo. Both of you are prolific, turn out distinctive albums each time, have great imagery, have a lot to say and so on. Is there any reason that in all the years I’ve never seen your names or faces together?
It’s funny you should mention that. He just played four or five shows with me in London and Paris. He was doing a lot of new songs, playing them by himself. He was doing his thing. You sorta had to be there.
Is America better or worse than, say, in the days of The Times They Are A-Changin’?
I see pictures of the ’50s, the ’60s and the ’70s and I see there was a difference. But I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking there’s some kind of change. But after you’ve been around awhile, they both seem unnatural.