by Jeff Burger
—from Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes Continued,
Showtime TV network (US), November 21, 2014
BOB DYLAN: THE UNCUT INTERVIEW
Robert Love | February/March 2015 | AARP The Magazine
Bob Dylan’s career has been loaded with unexpected ups, downs, twists, and turns. There was, for example, the shift to electric music in the mid ’60s that led to boos and triumphs; the nod to country and the debut of a new voice on 1969’s Nashville Skyline; the widely panned, covers-dominated Self Portrait; the resurgence that began with Blood on the Tracks; the detour into religious music on albums like Saved; and even a 2009 album called Christmas in the Heart that found Dylan working his way through “Here Comes Santa Claus” and “Winter Wonderland.”
It’s safe to say that by the time of that last release, most fans were ready for nearly anything. And sure enough, they got it, in the form of Shadows in the Night, a February 2015 CD that features Dylan’s affecting albeit idiosyncratic readings of ten songs associated with Frank Sinatra.
Given the nature of the record—and the fact that Dylan himself was now seventy-three—it is probably not surprising that he chose to promote it by talking with AARP’s magazine rather than with, say, Rolling Stone. “If it were up to me,” Dylan told AARP’s editor Robert Love during a long and fascinating, music-focused interview, “I’d give you the records for nothing, and you give them to every [reader of your] magazine. I think a lot of your readers will identify with these songs.”
This would not be Dylan’s last foray into the Great American Songbook. In May of 2016, he would follow Shadows in the Night with Fallen Angels, another collection of Sinatra-related standards; and in March 2017, he would issue his thirty-eighth studio album, Triplicate, a three-disc, thirty-track collection of standards such as “Stardust” and “Sentimental Journey.”
Here is the introduction to the print version of Robert Love’s interview with Dylan, followed by the intro and expanded Q&A that appeared online. —Ed.
For a man who has lived in the public eye for more than 50 years, Bob Dylan is fiercely private. When he’s not on stage—since 1988, he’s maintained a performance schedule so relentless it’s known as the Never Ending Tour—he slips back into anonymity. But early last summer, Dylan’s representatives reached out and told me he wanted to speak to AARP The Magazine about his new project. “I don’t work at Rolling Stone anymore,” I told them, thinking it was a case of crossed wires, since I put in 20 years there. No, they said, there’s no mistake; he wants to talk to your readers.
And now, after five months of negotiation, a cross-country flight and days of waiting, it is less than an hour until our interview, and I still don’t know exactly where I will meet the reclusive artist. Driving down into the late October sun from the hills of Berkeley, California, toward the San Francisco Bay, I wait for a phone call with directions to a certain floor of a hotel. Then I’ll be given the room number, told to knock, and wait.
We shake hands. Dylan is wearing a close-fitting black-and-white leather jacket that ends at his waist, black jeans and boots. The 73-year-old singer is not wearing his trademark sunglasses, and his blue eyes are startling. We are here to talk about Shadows in the Night, an album of 10 beloved songs from the 1920s to the 1960s. These are not his compositions—they are part of what is often called the Great American Songbook: familiar standards like “Autumn Leaves,” “That Lucky Old Sun” and “Some Enchanted Evening,” along with others, like 1957’s hymnlike “Stay With Me,” that are a bit obscure. In his 36th studio album, Dylan leads a five-piece band including two guitars, bass and pedal steel, and occasional horns, in austere and beautiful arrangements that were recorded live. It is a quiet, moody record with “no heavy drums and no piano,” he says more than once.
As the afternoon deepens, Dylan talks about youth and aging, songwriting, friends and enemies. He recalls with unvarnished affection the performers who shaped his musical DNA, from gospel singer Mavis Staples to rocker Jerry Lee Lewis. Sitting on the edge of a low-slung couch in a dimly lit hotel suite, coiled and fully present—but in good humor—he seems anxious to begin this, his one and only interview for the new album.
The Songs
“I’ve always been drawn to spiritual songs,” Bob Dylan tells me. “In ‘Amazing Grace,’ that line —‘that saved a wretch like me’—isn’t that something we could all say if we were honest enough?” At 73, Dylan is still in the game, still brutally honest and authentically himself, as you will see in this extended version of the exclusive interview that appeared in the February/March issue of AARP The Magazine.
In the 9,000 or so words that follow, Dylan goes where he has rarely gone before in public conversation: He explores his creative process and offers his insights on songwriting, performing, recording, and the creative destruction unleashed by rock and roll. For fun, perhaps, he tosses us a few pointed asides on contemporaries like Elton John, Rod Stewart and Eric Clapton, but reserves his undiluted praise for Chuck Berry’s poetry and Billy Graham’s soul-searing hellfire.
You may be struck, as I was time and again, at just how powerful a force music has played in Dylan’s life. At various times he was hypnotized, spellbound, lifted, knocked out by what he’d heard. Listening to the Staple Singers for the first time at 14, he said, he couldn’t sleep that night. “It just went through me like my body was invisible.” From the moment he stumbled upon blues, country and gospel at the nether end of the radio dial, he never stopped listening closely, absorbing the best. A student and professor of America’s truest music, he begins our conversation by explaining his decision to record ten beloved standards for Shadows in the Night.
Q: After several critically acclaimed records of original songs, why did you make this record now?
A: Now is the right time. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, ever since I heard Willie [Nelson]’s Stardust record in the late ’70s. I thought I could do that, too. So I went to see Walter Yetnikoff, he was the president of Columbia Records. I told him I wanted to make a record of standards, like Willie’s record. What he said was, “You can go ahead and make that record, but we won’t pay for it, and we won’t release it. But go ahead and make it if you want to.” So I went and made Street-Legal instead. In retrospect, Yetnikoff was probably right. It was most likely too soon for me to make a record of standards.
All through the years, I’ve heard these songs being recorded by other people and I’ve always wanted to do that. And I wondered if anybody else saw it the way I did. I was looking forward to hearing Rod [Stewart]’s records of standards. I thought if anybody could bring something different to these songs, Rod certainly could. But the records were disappointing. Rod’s a great singer. He’s got a great voice, but there’s no point to put a 30-piece orchestra behind him. I’m not going to knock anybody’s right to make a living but you can always tell if somebody’s heart and soul is into something, and I didn’t think Rod was into it in that way. It sounds like so many records where the vocals are overdubbed and these kind of songs don’t come off well if you use modern recording techniques.
To those of us who grew up with these kinds of songs and didn’t think much of it, these are the same songs that rock ’n’ roll came to destroy—music hall, tangos, pop songs from the ’40s, fox-trots, rumbas, Irving Berlin, Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Hammerstein. Composers of great renown. It’s hard for modern singers to connect with that kind of music and song. When we finally went to record, I had about 30 songs, and these 10 fall together to create a certain kind of drama. They all seem connected in one way or another. We were playing a lot of these songs at sound checks on stages around the world without a vocal mic, and you could hear everything pretty well. You usually hear these songs with a full-out orchestra. But I was playing them with a five-piece band and didn’t miss the orchestra. Of course, a producer would have come in and said, “Let’s put strings here and a horn section there.” But I wasn’t going to do that. I wasn’t even going to use keyboards or a
grand piano. The piano covers too much territory and can dominate songs like this in ways you don’t want them to. One of the keys to making this record was to get the piano right off the floor and not be influenced by it in any way.
Q: It’s going to be something of a surprise to your traditional fans, don’t you think?
A: Well, they shouldn’t be surprised. There’s a lot of types of songs I’ve sung over the years, and they definitely have heard me sing standards before.
Q: Did you know many of these songs from your childhood? Some of them are pretty old.
A: Yeah, I did. I don’t usually forget songs if I like them. It could be 30 years ago or something.
Q: What was your process like?
A: Once you think you know the song, then you have to go and see how other people have done it. One version led to another until we were starting to assimilate even Harry James’ arrangements. Or even Pérez Prado’s. My pedal steel player is a genius at that. He can play anything from hillbilly to bebop. There are only two guitars in there, and one is just playing the pulse. Stand-up bass is playing orchestrated moving lines. It’s almost like folk music in a way. I mean, there are no drums in a Bill Monroe band. Hank Williams didn’t use them either. Sometimes the beat takes the mystery out of the rhythm. Maybe all the time. I could only record these songs one way, and that was live on the floor with a very small number of mics. No headphones, no overdubs, no vocal booth, no separate tracking. I know it’s the old-fashioned way, but to me it’s the only way that would have worked for songs like this. Vocally, I think I sang about 6 inches away from the mic. It’s a board mix, for the most part, mixed as it was recorded. We played the song a few times for the engineer. He put a few microphones around. I told him we would play it as many times as he wanted. That’s the way each song was done.
Q: It sounds like the microphone was right in your face.
A: Yeah, yeah.
Q: It is a very intimate rendering of this material. I assume that’s what you wanted.
A: Exactly. We recorded it in the Capitol studios, which is good for a record like this. But we didn’t use any of the new equipment. The engineer had his own equipment left over from bygone days, and he brought all that in. Like I said before, I rehearsed the band all last fall in a tour we were doing over in Europe. We rehearsed a whole bunch of things on the stage, with no microphones so we could play at the right volume. By the time we went in to make this record, it was almost like we’d done it already.
Q: Beautiful horns. Really low-key. Atmospheric almost.
A: Yeah, but there are only a few. French horn, a trumpet, a trombone, all played in harmony. Together they make a beautiful sound.
Q: Did you do the arrangements?
A: No. The original arrangements were for up to 30 pieces. We couldn’t match that and didn’t even try. What we had to do was fundamentally get to the bottom of what makes these songs alive. We took only the necessary parts to make that happen. In a case like this, you have to trust your own instincts.
Q: Did you listen to multiple versions and then throw them away, cleanse your palate and come up with your own version?
A: Well, a lot of these songs, you know, have been pounded into the ground over the years. I wanted to use songs that everybody knows or thinks they know. I wanted to show them a different side of it and opened up that world in a more unique way. You have to believe what the words are saying and the words are as important as the melody. Unless you believe the song and have lived it, there’s little sense in performing it. “Some Enchanted Evening”—that would be one. Another one would be “Autumn Leaves.” That’s a song that’s been done to death. I mean, who hasn’t done that song? You sing “Autumn Leaves” and you have to know something about love and loss and feel it just as much, or there’s no point in doing it. It’s too deep a song. A schoolboy could never do it convincingly. People talk about Frank [Sinatra] all the time—and they should talk about Frank—but he had the greatest arrangers. And not only that, but he brought out the best in these guys. Billy May and Nelson Riddle or Gordon Jenkins. Whoever they were. They worked for him in a different kind of way than they worked for other people. They gave him arrangements that are just sublime on every level. And he, of course, could match that because he had this ability to get inside of the song in a sort of a conversational way. Frank sang to you, not at you, like so many pop singers today. Even singers of standards. I never wanted to be a singer that sings at somebody. I’ve always wanted to sing to somebody. I would have gotten that subliminally from Frank many years ago. Hank Williams did that, too. He sang to you.
Q: This is a wide-ranging curation of songs from what people call the American Songbook. But I noticed Frank recorded all 10 of them. Was he on your mind?
A: You know, when you start doing these songs, Frank’s got to be on your mind. Because he is the mountain. That’s the mountain you have to climb even if you only get part of the way there. And it’s hard to find a song he did not do. He’d be the guy you got to check with. I particularly like Nancy, too! I think Nancy is head and shoulders above most of these girl singers today. She’s so soulful also in a conversational way. And where’d she get that? Well, she’s Frank’s daughter, right? Just naturally. Frank Jr. can sing, too. Just the same way, if you want to do a Woody Guthrie song, you have to go past Bruce Springsteen and get to Jack Elliott. Eventually, you’ll get to Woody, but it might be a long process.
Q: You’ve written about how Frank’s version of the classic song “Ebb Tide” knocked you back on your heels in the ’60s. But you said, “I couldn’t listen to the stuff now. It wasn’t the right time.”
A: Totally. . . . Yeah. Really. There are a lot of things like that in my past that I’ve had to let be and keep moving in my own direction. It would overwhelm me at times, because that’s a world that is not your world. “Ebb Tide” was a song that I kind of grew up with. I don’t know exactly when it was. But it was a hit song, a pop song. Roy Hamilton did it and he was a fantastic singer, and he did it in a grandiose way. And I thought I knew it. Then I was at somebody’s house, and they had one of Frank’s records, and “Ebb Tide” was on it. I must have listened to that thing 100 times. I realized then that I didn’t know it. I still don’t know it to this day. I don’t know how he did it. The performance hypnotizes you. It’s a spellbinding performance. I never heard anything so supreme—on every single level.
Q: Maybe that music was just too square to admit to liking back then?
A: Square? I don’t think anybody would have been bold enough to call Frank Sinatra square. Kerouac listened to him, along with Bird [Charlie Parker] and Dizzy [Gillespie]. But I myself never bought any Frank Sinatra records back then, if that’s what you mean. I never listened to Frank as an influence. All I had to go on were records, and they were all over the place, orchestrated in one way or another. Swing music, Count Basie, romantic ballads, jazz bands—it was hard to get a fix on him. But like I say, you’d hear him anyway. You’d hear him in a car or a jukebox. You were conscious of Frank Sinatra no matter what age you were. Certainly nobody worshipped Frank Sinatra in the ’60s like they did in the ’40s. But he never went away. All those other things that we thought were here to stay, they did go away. But he never did.
Q: Do you think of this album as risky? These songs have fans who will say you can’t touch Sinatra’s version.
A: Risky? Like walking across a field laced with land mines? Or working in a poison gas factory? There’s nothing risky about making records. Comparing me with Frank Sinatra? You must be joking. To be mentioned in the same breath as him must be some sort of high compliment. As far as touching him goes, nobody touches him. Not me or anyone else.
Q: What do you think Frank would make of this album?
A: I think first of all he’d be amazed I did these songs with a five-piece band. I think he’d be proud in a certain way.
The History
Q: What other kinds of music did you listen to growing up?
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p; A: Early on, before rock ’n’ roll, I listened to big band music: Harry James, Russ Columbo, Glenn Miller. Singers like Jo Stafford, Kay Starr, Dick Haymes. Anything that came over the radio and music played by bands in hotels that our parents could dance to. We had a big radio that looked like a jukebox, with a record player on the top.
All the furniture had been left in the house by the previous owners, including a piano. The radio/record player played 78-rpm records. And when we moved to that house, there was a record on there. The record had a red label, and I think it was a Columbia record. It was Bill Monroe singing, or maybe it was the Stanley Brothers. And they were singing “Drifting Too Far From Shore.” I’d never heard anything like that before. Ever. And it moved me away from all the conventional music that I was hearing.
To understand that, you’d have to understand where I came from. I come from way north. We’d listen to radio shows all the time. I think I was the last generation, or pretty close to the last one, that grew up without TV. So we listened to the radio a lot. Most of these shows were theatrical radio dramas. For us, this was like our TV. Everything you heard, you could imagine what it looked like. Even singers that I would hear on the radio, I couldn’t see what they looked like, so I imagined what they looked like. What they were wearing. What their instruments were. Gene Vincent? When I first pictured him, he was a tall, lanky blond-haired guy.
Q: Did it make you a better listener?
A: It made me the listener that I am today. It made me listen for little things: the slamming of the door, the jingling of car keys. The wind blowing through trees, the songs of birds, footsteps, a hammer hitting a nail. Just random sounds. Cows mooing. I could string all that together and make that a song. It made me listen to life in a different way. I still listen to some of those old radio shows, and most of them still hold up. I mean, the jokes might be a little outdated, but the situations seem to be about the same. I don’t listen to The Fat Man or Superman or Inner Sanctum in any way you could call nostalgic. They don’t bring back any memories. I just like them.