Dylan on Dylan

by Jeff Burger

  Dylan: My stuff were songs, you know? They weren’t sermons. If you examine the songs, I don’t believe you’re gonna find anything in there that says that I’m a spokesman for anybody or anything, really.

  Bradley: But they saw it.

  Dylan: Yeah, but they must not have heard the songs.

  Bradley: It’s ironic that the way that people viewed you was just the polar opposite of the way you viewed yourself.

  Dylan: Isn’t that something?

  Bradley: [Voiceover.] Dylan did almost anything to shatter the lofty image many people had of him. He writes that he intentionally made bad records; once poured whiskey over his head in public; and as a stunt, he went to Israel and made a point of having his picture taken at the Wailing Wall wearing a skullcap.

  Bradley: When you went to Israel, you wrote that “the newspapers changed me overnight into a Zionist and this helped a little.” How did it help?

  Dylan: Look, if the common perception of me out there in the public was that I was either a drunk, or I was a sicko, or a Zionist, or a Buddhist, or a Catholic, or a Mormon—all of this was better than Archbishop of Anarchy.

  Bradley: . . . and Spokesman for the Generation . . .

  Dylan: Yeah.

  Bradley: . . . opposed everything.

  Dylan: Mm-hmm.

  Bradley: [Voiceover.] He was especially opposed to the media, which he says was always trying to pin him down. [Video clip from 1965 San Francisco press conference airs. A reporter asks, “Do you think of yourself primarily as a singer or as a poet?” and Dylan answers, “I think of myself more as a song-and-dance man.”]

  Bradley: Let me talk a little bit about your relationship with the media. You wrote, “The press, I figured, you lied to it.” Why?

  Dylan: I realized at the time that the press, the media, they’re not the judge—God’s the judge. The only person you have to think about lying twice to is either yourself or to God. The press isn’t either of them. And I just figured they’re irrelevant.

  Bradley: [Voiceover.] Bob Dylan tried to run away from all of that in the mid ’60s. He retreated with his wife and three young children to Woodstock, New York. But even there, he couldn’t escape the legions of fans who descended on his home, begging for an audience with the legend himself.

  Bradley: So people would actually come to the house?

  Dylan: Mm-hmm.

  Bradley: And do what?

  Dylan: They wanted to discuss things with me—politics and philosophy and organic farming and things.

  Bradley: What did you know about organic farming?

  Dylan: Nothing. Not a thing.

  Bradley: What did you mean when you wrote that “the funny thing about fame is that nobody believes it’s you”?

  Dylan: People, they’ll say, “Are you who I think you are?” And you’ll say, “I don’t know.” Then, they’ll say, “You’re him.” And you’ll say, “OK, yes.” And then, the next thing they’ll say, “Well, no.” Like “Are you really him? You’re not him.” And that can go on and on.

  Bradley: Do you go out to restaurants now?

  Dylan: I don’t like to eat in restaurants.

  Bradley: Because people come up and say, “Are you him?”

  Dylan: That’s always gonna happen, yeah.

  Bradley: Do you ever get used to it?

  Dylan: [Pause.] No.

  Bradley: [Voiceover.] At his peak, fame was taking its toll on Bob Dylan. He was heading towards a divorce from his wife, Sara. In concerts, he wore white makeup to mask himself. But his songs revealed the pain. [Video of Dylan performing “Tangled Up in Blue” airs.]

  Bradley: You said, “My wife, when she married me, had no idea of what she was getting into.”

  Dylan: Well, she was with me back then through thick and thin, you know? It just wasn’t the kind of life that she had ever envisioned for herself, any more than the kind of life that I was living, that I had envisioned for mine.

  Bradley: [Voiceover.] By the mid-1980s, he felt he was burned out and over the hill.

  Bradley: You also wrote that: “I’m a ’60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic. A wordsmith from bygone days. I’m in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion.” Those are pretty harsh words.

  Dylan: Well, I’d seen all these titles written about me.

  Bradley: And you started to believe it?

  Dylan: Well, I believed it, anyway. I wasn’t getting any thrill out of performing. I thought it might be time to close it up.

  Bradley: You really thought about quitting, folding up the tent?

  Dylan: I had thought I’d just put it away for a while. But then I started thinking, “That’s enough.”

  Bradley: [Voiceover.] But within a few years, Dylan told us, he recaptured his creative spark, and he went back on the road. [Video of Dylan performing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” plays.] Performing more than one hundred concerts a year. In 1998, he won three Grammy awards. [Clip from Grammies ceremony airs.] At age sixty-three, Bob Dylan remains a voice as unique and powerful as any there has ever been in American music. His fellow musicians paid tribute to him when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, joining him in a rousing rendition of his most famous song. [Clip from that performance of “Like a Rolling Stone” airs.]

  Bradley: As you probably know, Rolling Stone magazine just named your song, “Like a Rolling Stone,” the number-one song of all time. Twelve of your songs are in their list of the Top 500. That must be good to have as part of your legacy.

  Dylan: Oh, maybe this week. But you know, the lists, they change names, and quite frequently, really. I don’t really pay much attention to that.

  Bradley: But it’s a pat on the back, Bob.

  Dylan: This week it is. But who’s to say how long that’s gonna last?

  Bradley: Well, it’s lasted a long time for you. I mean, you’re still out here doing these songs, you know. You’re still on tour.

  Dylan: I do, but I don’t take it for granted.

  Bradley: Why do you still do it? Why are you still out here?

  Dylan: Well, it goes back to that destiny thing. I made a bargain with it, long time ago. And I’m holding up my end.

  Bradley: What was your bargain?

  Dylan: To get where I am now.

  Bradley: Should I ask who you made the bargain with?

  Dylan: [Laughs.] You know, with the chief commander.

  Bradley: On this earth?

  Dylan: [Laughs.] In this earth and then in the world we can’t see.

  Bradley: [Back in studio.] Bob Dylan has been nominated this year for the Nobel Prize in Literature for his songwriting. His new book has been a bestseller for the past seven weeks. It was published by Simon and Schuster, which is owned by Viacom, the parent company of CBS. Dylan is planning to write two more volumes of his memoirs.

  DYLAN ON

  Street-Legal, Slow Train Coming, and Infidels

  “I was just being swept along with the current when I was making those records. I don’t think my talent was under control. But there’s probably good stuff on all of them. Shelley said the point was to make unpremeditated art. I don’t think those records fall into that category.”

  —from interview with Austin Scaggs,

  Rolling Stone, December 9, 2004

  DYLAN ON

  What He Did After High School

  “. . . Left the very next day. I’d gone as far as I could in my particular environment. . . . I was a musical expeditionary. I had no past to speak of, nothing to go back to, nobody to lean on. I came down to Minneapolis. I didn’t go to classes. I was enrolled but I didn’t go to classes. I just didn’t feel like it. We were singing and playing all night. Sleeping most of the morning. I didn’t really have any time for studying.”

  —from interview with Jeff Rosen, No Direction Home, 2005

  THE GENIUS AND MODERN TIMES OF BOB DYLAN

  Jonathan Lethem | September 7, 2006 | Rolling Stone

  Dylan had a busy and productive year in 2006.
In May, he debuted his engrossing Theme Time Radio Hour, a weekly program for XM Satellite Radio (which became Sirius XM Radio after a merger) that demonstrated his encyclopedic musical knowledge. And on August 29, he released Modern Times, the third in a series of comeback albums, following 1997’s Time Out of Mind and 2001’s Love and Theft. Unlike those two predecessors, Modern Times made it all the way to the top of the charts in the United States.

  Shortly before the album’s release, Dylan met with novelist and essayist Jonathan Lethem, a longtime fan. Dylan talks about the record, as well as file-sharing, the ’60s, and his so-called Never Ending Tour. He also concedes that he has never been quite as inaccessible to the media as his reputation—and sometimes he himself—have suggested. —Ed.

  “I don’t really have a herd of astrologers telling me what’s going to happen. I just make one move after the other, this leads to that.” Is the voice familiar? I’m sitting in a Santa Monica seaside hotel suite, ignoring a tray of sliced pineapple and sugar-dusty cookies, while Bob Dylan sits across from my tape recorder, giving his best to my questions. The man before me is fitful in his chair, not impatient, but keenly alive to the moment, and ready on a dime to make me laugh and to laugh himself. The expressions on Dylan’s face, in person, seem to compress and encompass versions of his persona across time, a sixty-five-year-old with a nineteen-year-old cavorting somewhere inside. Above all, though, it is the tones of his speaking voice that seem to kaleidoscope through time: here the yelp of the folk pup or the sarcastic rimshot timing of the hounded hipster-idol, there the beguilement of the Seventies sex symbol, then again—and always—the gravel of the elder statesman, that antediluvian bluesman’s voice the young aspirant so legendarily invoked at the very outset of his work and then ever so gradually aged into.

  It’s that voice, the voice of a rogue ageless in decrepitude, that grounds the paradox of the achievement of Modern Times, his thirty-first studio album. Are these our “modern tunes,” or some ancient, silent-movie dream, a fugue in black-and-white? Modern Times, like Love and Theft and Time Out of Mind before it, seems to survey a broken world through the prism of a heart that’s worn and worldly, yet decidedly unbroken itself. “I been sitting down studying the art of love / I think it will fit me like a glove,” he states in “Thunder on the Mountain,” the opening song, a rollicking blues you’ve heard a million times before and yet which magically seems to announce yet another “new” Dylan. “I feel like my soul is beginning to expand,” the song declares. “Look into my heart and you will sort of understand.”

  What we do understand, if we’re listening, is that we’re three albums into a Dylan renaissance that’s sounding more and more like a period to put beside any in his work. If, beginning with Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan garbed his amphetamine visions in the gloriously grungy clothes of the electric blues and early rock & roll, the musical glories of these three records are grounded in a knowledge of the blues built from the inside out—a knowledge that includes the fact that the early blues and its players were stranger than any purist would have you know, hardly restricting themselves to twelve-bar laments but featuring narrative recitations, spirituals, X-rated ditties, popular ballads and more. Dylan offers us nourishment from the root cellar of American cultural life. For an amnesiac society, that’s arguably as mind-expanding an offering as anything in his Sixties work. And with each succeeding record, Dylan’s convergence with his muses grows more effortlessly natural.

  How does he summon such an eternal authority? “I’d make this record no matter what was going on in the world,” Dylan tells me. “I wrote these songs in not a meditative state at all, but more like in a trancelike, hypnotic state. This is how I feel? Why do I feel like that? And who’s the me that feels this way? I couldn’t tell you that, either. But I know that those songs are just in my genes and I couldn’t stop them comin’ out.” This isn’t to say Modern Times, or Dylan, seems oblivious to the present moment. The record is littered—or should I say baited?—with glinting references to world events like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, though anyone seeking a moral, to paraphrase Mark Twain, should be shot. And, as if to startle the contemporary listener out of any delusion that Dylan’s musical drift into pre-rock forms—blues, ragtime, rockabilly—is the mark of a nostalgist, “Thunder on the Mountain” also name-checks a certain contemporary singer: “I was thinking ’bout Alicia Keys, I couldn’t keep from crying / While she was born in Hell’s Kitchen, I was livin’ down the line.” When I ask Dylan what Keys did “to get into your pantheon,” he only chuckles at my precious question. “I remember seeing her on the Grammys. I think I was on the show with her, I didn’t meet her or anything. But I said to myself, ‘There’s nothing about that girl I don’t like.’”

  Rather than analyzing lyrics, Dylan prefers to linger over the songs as artifacts of music and describes the process of their making. As in other instances, stretching back to 1974’s Planet Waves, 1978’s Street-Legal and 2001’s Love and Theft, the singer and performer known for his love-hate affair with the recording studio—“I don’t like to make records,” he tells me simply. “I do it reluctantly”—has cut his new album with his touring band. And Dylan himself is the record’s producer, credited under the nom-de-studio Jack Frost. “I didn’t feel like I wanted to be overproduced anymore,” he tells me. “I felt like I’ve always produced my own records anyway, except I just had someone there in the way. I feel like nobody’s gonna know how I should sound except me anyway, nobody knows what they want out of players except me, nobody can tell a player what he’s doing wrong, nobody can find a player who can play but he’s not playing, like I can. I can do that in my sleep.”

  As ever, Dylan is circling, defining what he is first by what he isn’t, by what he doesn’t want, doesn’t like, doesn’t need, locating meaning by a process of elimination. This rhetorical strategy goes back at least as far as “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “All I Really Want to Do” (“I ain’t looking to compete with you,” etc.), and it still has plenty of real juice in it. When Dylan arrives at a positive assertion out of the wilderness of so much doubt, it takes on the force of a jubilant boast. “This is the best band I’ve ever been in, I’ve ever had, man for man. When you play with guys a hundred times a year, you know what you can and can’t do, what they’re good at, whether you want ’em there. It takes a long time to find a band of individual players. Most bands are gangs. Whether it’s a metal group or pop rock, whatever, you get that gang mentality. But for those of us who went back further, gangs were the mob. The gang was not what anybody aspired to. On this record I didn’t have anybody to teach. I got guys now in my band, they can whip up anything, they surprise even me.” Dylan’s cadences take on the quality of an impromptu recitation, replete with internal rhyme schemes, such that when I later transcribe this tape I’ll find myself tempted to set the words on the page in the form of a lyric. “I knew this time it wouldn’t be futile writing something I really love and thought dearly of, and then gettin’ in the studio and having it be beaten up and whacked around and come out with some kind of incoherent thing which didn’t have any resonance. With that, I was awake. I felt freed up to do just about anything I pleased.”

  But getting the band of his dreams into the studio was only half the battle. “The records I used to listen to and still love, you can’t make a record that sounds that way,” he explains. It is as if having taken his new material down to the crossroads of the recording studio Dylan isn’t wholly sure the deal struck with the devil there was worth it. “Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn’t make his records if you had a hundred tracks today. We all like records that are played on record players, but let’s face it, those days are gon-n-n-e. You do the best you can, you fight that technology in all kinds of ways, but I don’t know anybody who’s made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really. You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no
vocal, no nothing, just like—static. Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded ’em. CDs are small. There’s no stature to it. I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like, ‘Everybody’s gettin’ music for free.’ I was like, ‘Well, why not? It ain’t worth nothing anyway.’”

  Hearing the word “Napster” come from Bob Dylan’s mouth, I venture a question about bootleg recordings. In my own wishful thinking, The Bootleg Series, a sequence of superb archival retrospectives, sanctioned by Dylan and released by Columbia, represents a kind of unspoken consent to the tradition of pirate scholarship—an acknowledgment that Dylan’s outtakes, alternate takes, rejected album tracks and live performances are themselves a towering body of work that faithful listeners deserve to hear. As Michael Gray says in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, the first three-disc release of outtakes “could, of itself, establish Dylan’s place as the pre-eminent songwriter and performer of the age and as one of the great artists of the twentieth century.” On Love and Theft’s “Sugar Baby,” the line “Some of these bootleggers, they make pretty good stuff” was taken by some as a shout-out to this viewpoint. Today, at least, that line seems to have had only moonshine whiskey as its subject. “I still don’t like bootleg records. There was a period of time when people were just bootlegging anything on me, because there was nobody ever in charge of the recording sessions. All my stuff was being bootlegged high and low, far and wide. They were never intended to be released, but everybody was buying them. So my record company said, ‘Well, everybody else is buying these records, we might as well put them out.’” But Dylan can’t possibly be sorry that the world has had the benefit of hearing, for instance, “Blind Willie McTell”—an outtake from 1983’s Infidels that has subsequently risen as high in most people’s Dylan pantheon as a song can rise, and that he himself has played live since. Can he? “I started playing it live because I heard the Band doing it. Most likely it was a demo, probably showing the musicians how it should go. It was never developed fully, I never got around to completing it. There wouldn’t have been any other reason for leaving it off the record. It’s like taking a painting by Manet or Picasso—goin’ to his house and lookin’ at a half-finished painting and grabbing it and selling it to people who are ‘Picasso fans.’ The only fans I know I have are the people who I’m looking at when I play, night after night.”