Dylan on Dylan

by Jeff Burger

  Good evening, everyone. I extend my warmest greetings to the members of the Swedish Academy and to all of the other distinguished guests in attendance tonight.

  I’m sorry I can’t be with you in person, but please know that I am most definitely with you in spirit and honored to be receiving such a prestigious prize. Being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is something I never could have imagined or seen coming. From an early age, I’ve been familiar with and reading and absorbing the works of those who were deemed worthy of such a distinction: Kipling, Shaw, Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck, Albert Camus, Hemingway. These giants of literature whose works are taught in the schoolroom, housed in libraries around the world and spoken of in reverent tones have always made a deep impression. That I now join the names on such a list is truly beyond words.

  I don’t know if these men and women ever thought of the Nobel honor for themselves, but I suppose that anyone writing a book, or a poem, or a play anywhere in the world might harbor that secret dream deep down inside. It’s probably buried so deep that they don’t even know it’s there.

  If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I’d have about the same odds as standing on the moon. In fact, during the year I was born and for a few years after, there wasn’t anyone in the world who was considered good enough to win this Nobel Prize. So, I recognize that I am in very rare company, to say the least.

  I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn’t have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken, not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: “Who’re the right actors for these roles?” “How should this be staged?” “Do I really want to set this in Denmark?” His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. “Is the financing in place?” “Are there enough good seats for my patrons?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?” I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question “Is this literature?”

  When I started writing songs as a teenager, and even as I started to achieve some renown for my abilities, my aspirations for these songs only went so far. I thought they could be heard in coffee houses or bars, maybe later in places like Carnegie Hall, the London Palladium. If I was really dreaming big, maybe I could imagine getting to make a record and then hearing my songs on the radio. That was really the big prize in my mind. Making records and hearing your songs on the radio meant that you were reaching a big audience and that you might get to keep doing what you had set out to do.

  Well, I’ve been doing what I set out to do for a long time, now. I’ve made dozens of records and played thousands of concerts all around the world. But it’s my songs that are at the vital center of almost everything I do. They seemed to have found a place in the lives of many people throughout many different cultures and I’m grateful for that.

  But there’s one thing I must say. As a performer, I’ve played for 50,000 people and I’ve played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves. They can perceive things more clearly. Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried. The fact that the Nobel committee is so small is not lost on me.

  But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters. “Who are the best musicians for these songs?” “Am I recording in the right studio?” “Is this song in the right key?” Some things never change, even in 400 years.

  Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, “Are my songs literature?”

  So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.

  My best wishes to you all,

  Bob Dylan

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Randy Anderson wrote for the arts-and-leisure section of Minnesota Daily in the late 1970s and, later, for Minneapolis City Pages.

  After covering the end of the Vietnam War and the White House, Ed Bradley spent twenty-six years as a correspondent for CBS News’s 60 Minutes program. The winner of nineteen Emmy Awards, he died in November 2006, less than two years after conducting the Dylan interview that appears in this book.

  Douglas Brinkley has been a professor of history at Rice University in Houston since 2007. He is the author of The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the coeditor of Woody Guthrie’s novel House of Earth; and he has written, coauthored, or edited about two dozen other books. Brinkley is CNN’s presidential historian and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. In 2017, he won a Grammy for coproducing Presidential Suite with Jazz at Lincoln Center.

  Born in London in 1950, Mick Brown has contributed to such publications as the Sunday Times, the Guardian, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. He now writes on cultural subjects for the Daily Telegraph magazine. He is the author of six books, including American Heartbeat: Travels from Woodstock to San Jose by Song Title, The Spiritual Tourist, The Dance of 17 Lives, and Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector.

  When pirate radio stations shut down in 1961, the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation decided to set up a channel to provide a legal alternative, and Klas Burling was in the forefront of this process. Burling, who was born in 1941, subsequently interviewed the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Beach Boys, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and many other British and American pop stars.

  Bob Coburn was a disc jockey at Los Angeles-area radio station KLOS-FM from 1980 until his death in 2016. For most of that time, he hosted the nationally syndicated Rockline, a call-in program that Wikipedia has labeled the longest-running radio program in rock history.

  John “Jay” Cocks was a film critic for such magazines as Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and Time before becoming a screenwriter. His scripts for Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York both received Academy Award nominations.

  Musician, filmmaker, photographer, and musicologist John Cohen cofounded the New Lost City Ramblers, a traditional string band that played a key role in the folk revival during the 1960s. His other work includes High Lonesome Sound, a highly regarded film about old-time Appalachian music; and Young Bob: John Cohen’s Early Photographs of Bob Dylan. Cohen, who was born in 1932, served as a professor of visual arts at the State University of New York’s Purchase College from 1972 to 1997.

  Sis Cunningham (1909–2004) was a folksinger and the founding editor of Broadside magazine.

  John Dolen is a Florida-based journalist. A graduate of the University of Maryland, he spent twenty-seven years at the SunSentinel in Fort Lauderdale, including thirteen as the newspaper’s arts and features editor. He is working on a memoir about his days following his “graduation” from the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury and then Woodstock.

  Susan Edmiston, who has been an editor at Redbook and Glamour, has written for such publications as New York, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Women’s Day. She coauthored Literary New York: A History and Guide and The Cow in the Parking Lot: A Zen Approach to Overcoming Anger.

  Nora Ephron, who died in 2012, wrote the scripts for such popular films as Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally . . ., Sleepless in Seattle, and Julie & Julia. She was also a producer, director, essayist, novelist, playwright, and journalist. In 1966, while working as a reporter at the New York Post, she broke the news that Bob Dylan had married Sara Lownds.

  Bob Fass, who was born in
1933, has been a fixture on New York’s listener-sponsored WBAI-FM for more than half a century. His late-night Radio Unnameable program was the subject of a 2012 documentary of the same name. In addition to Bob Dylan, the program has featured such musical and countercultural figures as Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Phil Ochs, and Arlo Guthrie.

  Paul Gambaccini, who was born in New York in 1949, is a radio and television personality in the UK. He was a BBC Radio 1 presenter for sixteen years, including eleven years on a Billboard Top 30 countdown show, and he has hosted such other BBC programs as America’s Greatest Hits and Pick of the Pops. He coauthored The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles and has written more than a dozen other books, including Radio Boy and Track Record.

  Mikal Gilmore, one of America’s leading music journalists, has written for Rolling Stone since the 1970s. He is the author of Night Beat: A Shadow History of Rock and Roll and Stories Done: Writings on the 1960s and Its Discontents. His 1995 memoir, Shot in the Heart, recounts his destructive childhood and relationship with his older brother Gary, who in 1977 became the first person to be executed in the US after restoration of the death penalty. It won the Los Angeles Times book prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

  Cynthia Gooding, who died of cancer in 1988 at age sixty-three, was a folksinger and the host of the 1960s radio program Folksinger’s Choice, which aired on WBAI-FM in New York.

  Nat Hentoff was the jazz critic for New York’s Village Voice from 1958 to 2009, and for the Wall Street Journal from 2009 until his death in 2017 at age ninety-one. His distinguished career also embraced authorship of numerous nonfiction books and novels, stints as a staff writer at the New Yorker and an editor and columnist at Down Beat, the hosting of several radio programs, columns for the Washington Post, and articles for such publications as the New York Times and the Atlantic.

  As editorial director of EMAP Magazines in the 1980s and 1990s, British journalist David Hepworth was involved in editing, launching, or directing such leading magazines as Q and Mojo. He has been a presenter on BBC’s Whistle Test and, in 1985, was an anchor of Live Aid. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Times, the Independent, and Marie Claire. His books include 1971: Never a Dull Moment and Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars.

  Neil Hickey is an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a former editor at large of the Columbia Journalism Review. He was the longtime New York bureau chief of the original TV Guide. He has published hundreds of articles on subjects ranging from the Vietnam War and the first Persian Gulf War to glasnost and the 1968 Democratic convention; and he has interviewed presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Clinton. He has won the Country Music Association’s Journalist of the Year Award and the Everett C. Parker Award for Lifetime Achievement for his coverage of telecommunications. His latest book, Adventures in the Scribblers Trade, includes the Dylan piece featured here as well as interview-based features on Johnny Cash, Kurt Vonnegut, Bobby Fischer, Willie Nelson, Henry Kissinger, and other cultural and political figures.

  Bert Kleinman has been a radio consultant for decades. Since 2001, he has been an adviser to Radio Sawa, which broadcasts in Arabic in the Middle East, as well as to Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America.

  Jonathan Lethem, a Brooklyn native who was born in 1964, is a novelist and the author of numerous essays and short stories. He first achieved mainstream success with 1999’s Motherless Brooklyn, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and 2003’s bestselling The Fortress of Solitude. His latest novel, A Gambler’s Anatomy, appeared in 2016.

  Robert Love is editor in chief of AARP The Magazine, the world’s largest-circulation periodical. He previously spent twenty years in senior editorial positions at Rolling Stone and eleven years as an adjunct professor at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Love has also been an editor at such publications as Playboy, Reader’s Digest, and The Week.

  Don McLeese, a journalism professor at the University of Iowa, has been a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and Austin American Statesman and a senior editor at No Depression. He has written for Rolling Stone, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Entertainment Weekly, and dozens of other publications. His work has been anthologized in The Best of No Depression: Writing About American Music, Rolling Stone: The Decades of Rock & Roll, Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader, Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A., 33 1/3 Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, and Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters. He is the author of Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles from Nowhere, The New York Times Arts and Culture Reader, and Kick Out the Jams.

  Elliot Mintz began hosting a radio talk show on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles in 1966, when he was twenty-one, and subsequently worked at several other Southern California radio and TV stations. According to Wikipedia, he interviewed more than two thousand luminaries during his broadcasting career. Mintz entered the public relations field during the 1970s. Besides Bob Dylan, his clients have included Christie Brinkley; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; and Paris Hilton. He was a friend and spokesperson for John Lennon and Yoko Ono throughout the 1970s and continues to represent Lennon’s estate and Ono.

  Artie Mogull, who died in 2004 at age seventy-seven, was an A&R executive who discovered or signed such acts as Laura Nyro, Bill Cosby, Olivia Newton-John, Wilson Phillips, and Hootie and the Blowfish. He worked for such record labels as Warner Bros., Capitol, and MCA, and served as president and then co-owner of United Artists Records. In 1962, he signed Bob Dylan to his first music-publishing contract.

  Paul Jay Robbins appears to have maintained a low profile since the 1960s, when he published short fiction; worked as a film critic for Los Angeles’s KPFK-FM; sang in a choir on Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle; and contributed articles about Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, and others to the Los Angeles Free Press.

  Pete Seeger (1919–2014), one of the giants of American folk music and political activism, was a member of the popular vocal group the Weavers in the early ’50s. He authored or coauthored such now-standard songs as “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “If I Had a Hammer.” One of Bob Dylan’s earliest supporters, he urged John Hammond to produce Dylan’s first LP and invited him to perform at the Newport Folk Festival, for which Seeger was a board member.

  Folk musician Happy Traum, a former editor of Sing Out!, has recorded numerous solo albums and recordings with his brother Artie. He has also recorded with many luminous folk and rock artists. He first collaborated with Bob Dylan in 1962 on the now-classic Broadside Ballads, Vol. 1, and he also appeared on such Dylan recordings as Greatest Hits Vol. II and The Bootleg Series Vol. 10—Another Self Portrait (1969–1971). In early 1963, Traum’s New World Singers released what was reportedly the first recorded version of Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

  Mary Travers (1936–2009) was a member of the pioneering folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary, which performed and recorded from 1961 to 1970 and again from 1978 to 2009. The trio—which, like Dylan, were managed by Albert Grossman—recorded such hits as “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane,” “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Their 1963 recordings of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” both Top 10 hits, played a big role in popularizing his early work.

  A singer/songwriter and political activist, Gil Turner (1933–1974) was a key figure in the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early ’60s. He was the first person to publicly perform Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (on April 16, 1962, the night Dylan completed it), and, with the New World Singers, the first to record it.

  At the time of his Dylan interview, Paul Vincent was music director and an afternoon DJ at San Francisco’s KMEL-FM. In addition to Dylan, Vincent’s guests on the show included such artists as Peter Gabriel, Van Morrison, and the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir and Mickey Hart.

  Peter Wilmoth is a Melbourne, Australia–based jour
nalist who spent many years writing for the Age and the Sunday Age on everything from sports and politics to food and the arts. He covered the end of the Ceausescu regime in Romania and the civil war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. His interview subjects have included Woody Allen, Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), Christopher Hitchens, Rachel Ward, Leo Sayer, and Robert Altman. He has written for Rolling Stone (Australia) and the Sydney Morning Herald and has authored and coauthored several books, including Glad All Over: The Countdown Years 1974–1987. Since 2010, he has written an interview column for Melbourne’s Weekly Review magazine.

  Izzy Young, who was born in 1928, owned and operated Greenwich Village’s Folklore Center (the subject of Bob Dylan’s “Talking Folklore Center”) from 1957 until the early 1970s, when he moved to Sweden and opened a similar store in Stockholm. Besides selling folk-related books and records, the New York store became a hangout for musicians such as Dylan, who reportedly met folksinger Dave Van Ronk there. Young—who wrote a column for Sing Out! from 1959 to 1969—produced Dylan’s first concert at New York’s Carnegie Chapter Hall on November 4, 1961.

  Paul Zollo is a songwriter, music journalist, and author of several books, including Songwriters on Songwriting, More Songwriters on Songwriting, Conversations with Tom Petty, Hollywood Remembered, and Matisyahu: King without a Crown. A senior editor of American Songwriter magazine, he’s also a recording artist with two solo albums to his credit, Universal Cure and Orange Avenue. As a songwriter, he has collaborated with many artists, including the late Steve Allen, Art Garfunkel, Dan Bern, Darryl Purpose, Stephen Kalinich, and Neil Rosengarden. He lives with his son and cats in Hollywood, California.