by Bell, Ian
12. 13 January 1984.
13. Many accounts continue to insist, for as much as it matters, that the son in question was Jacob (later Jakob) Dylan. Since Jewish law says that a boy becomes a bar mitzvah on reaching the age of 13, this doesn’t seem likely. Jacob didn’t reach that age until 9 December 1982, whereas Samuel was 13 until his birthday on 30 July. New York magazine’s informant had also made it clear that the ceremony was to take place in LA and not in Israel, as has sometimes been reported. Dylan was leaving New York in March 1982 because ‘He has to be in California by the 20th for his son’s bar mitzvah’.
14. Christopher Connelly, 24 November 1983.
15. At some point, Dylan grasped that his verse was liable to leave half the species unimpressed. Should you check his website these days, you will find that ‘Taking care of somebody nice’ has been replaced by the less egregious, if clumsy, ‘Watching out for someone who loves you true’.
16. ‘The life and crimes of the music biz’, The Observer, 20 January 2008.
17. To be fair to Asher, he had by this time earned a reputation for fighting corruption within the industry. In 1983, his stance would cost him his job. Described as ‘a company man’, ‘blunt and a bit awkward’, the former Marine was no diplomat. Asher had been promoted to deputy president to cut costs, a fact that might have a bearing on any clash with Dylan. Asher’s claim to fame as a hit-maker was the success of Julio Iglesias. See Frederic Dannen’s Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business (1991), pp. 1–13, ‘The Education of Dick Asher’.
18. Interview conducted on 5 July 1983 and published in Britain by the New Musical Express on 6 August 1983.
19. Interview with Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, 30 October 1983.
20. Bootleggers tend towards the opposite extreme. At their most extravagant, they turned this single Dylan album into The Complete Infidels Sessions, a seven-CD box set with a concert DVD from 1984. If six versions of ‘Neighborhood Bully’ and seven of ‘Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight’ are what you seek, the capacious set answers most prayers.
21. In December 2001, the Associated Press (AP) news agency published a three-part investigation into the theft of land from black Americans that began even before the Civil War and had continued almost to the present. ‘Torn From the Land’ established that property worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, had been stolen.
Amid a mass of documentation, AP noted: ‘In 1910, black Americans owned at least 15 million acres of farmland, nearly all of it in the South, according to the U.S. Agricultural Census. Today, blacks own only 1.1 million acres of farmland and are part owners of another 1.07 million acres … [Black] ownership has declined two and a half times faster than white ownership according to a 1982 federal report.’
22. Merline Pitre, In Struggle Against Jim Crow: Lulu B. White and the NAACP, 1900–1957 (1999), pp. 5–6.
23. Texas State Historical Association (http://www.tshaonline.org).
24. Song & Dance Man III (2000), pp. 527–45.
25. Bob Dylan in America (2010), Part 3, Chapter 6: ‘Many Martyrs Fell’.
26. See, generally, the marvellous Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell (2007), to which I am indebted for biographical information and much else besides.
27. Rolling Stone, 7 September 2006.
28. Edition of 21 June 1984.
29. Interview with Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone, 21 June 1984.
30. Interview with Martin Keller, New Musical Express, 6 August 1983. Asked the same question by the Australian writer Karen Hughes in 1978, Dylan had replied that he believed in reincarnation ‘In a casual but not astonishing way’. (Rock Express, April 1978).
31. Song & Dance Man III (2000), p. 464.
CHAPTER NINE – WORLD GONE WRONG
1. ‘September 1, 1939’, The English Auden: Poems, Essay and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939, (ed. Edward Mendelson) (1977, pb. 1986), pp. 245–7.
2. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987), p. 73.
3. Scott Stossel, The Atlantic, 2 September 1998.
4. And a Voice to Sing With (1987, repub. 2009), Part 5, Chapter 1.
5. Sunday Times, 1 July 1984.
6. Edition of 25 November 1985.
7. Michael Gray deals with this issue in fascinating and exhaustive detail in his The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2006), pp. 225–31. Gray also points out that the album’s title derives in part from the fact that there once were movie houses called Empire Burlesques. One such pops up in Philip Roth’s 1983 novel The Anatomy Lesson.
8. Behind the Shades Revisited (2000), p. 575.
9. 4 July 1985.
10. Interview with Denise Worrell, Time, 25 November 1985.
11. Howard Sounes, the biographer who brought the Dylan of secret marriages and love children to public attention, has more in Chapter 9 of his Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan.
12. The film, part of the BBC’s Omnibus strand, would not be broadcast until September 1987.
13. The Farley interview was published on 17 September 2001; the Inskeep interview
14. Allan Jones, ‘Editor’s Diary’, Uncut. www.uncut.co.uk/blog/uncut-editors-diary/the-greatest-shows-on-earth
15. 18 October 1987.
CHAPTER TEN – BORN IN TIME
1. Edition of 22 December 2001.
2. Rolling Stone, 7 September 2006.
3. Ben Rayner, Toronto Star, 15 November 2012.
4. Interview with Douglas Brinkley, published 14 May 2009.
5. Encyclopedia, pp. 173–4.
6. The Independent, 21 October 1988.
7. Edition of 29 July 1988.
8. Interview with Jon Pareles, 28 September 1997.
9. Chronicles, p. 165.
10. Both quotations come from interviews given to Uncut magazine, November 2008.
11. 21 September 1989.
12. Interview with Ellen Futterman, St Louis Post-Dispatch, 7 April 1994.
13. See Ian Bell, Once Upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan (2012), p. 101.
14. 4 February 1991.
15. Andrew Muir, Razor’s Edge: Bob Dylan & the Neverending Tour (2001), p. 71.
16. Published in July 1991.
17. The interview was conducted in Los Angeles on 14 April but not published until the winter 1991 edition of the magazine SongTalk.
18. Interview with Ryan Cormnier, Delaware Online, 9 October 2008. Retrieved from www.delawareonline.com/blogs.
19. The Ryan quotations are from an interview published online by Uncut magazine in October 2008.
20. Requiem for a Nun (1950).
21. See Bell, Once Upon a Time, p. 138.
22. See, generally, three books by the late Paul Williams: Bob Dylan: Performing Artist 1960–1973 (1990); Bob Dylan: Performing Artist: The Middle Years 1974–1986 (1992); Bob Dylan: Performing Artist 1986–1990 and Beyond (2005). Each is admirable, learned and somehow beside the point. See also Stephen Scobie’s fine Alias Bob Dylan Revisited (2003).
23. Song & Dance Man III, p. 389.
24. Interview with David Gates, Newsweek, 5 October 1997.
25. Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star, p. 21.
26. Ibid., p. 209.
27. Song & Dance Man III, p. 389.
28. Down the Highway, p. 475.
29. Ibid., pp. 488–9.
30. Biograph booklet.
CHAPTER ELEVEN – THINGS HAVE CHANGED
1. The melodrama began to get out of hand when Barry Dickens, Dylan’s British agent, described the infection as ‘potentially fatal’ (The Independent, 29 May 1997). The New York Daily News (29 May 1997) preferred ‘potentially deadly’. By 8 June, Newsweek had reported claims from the previous week that Dylan ‘might be dying’. By 16 October, Der Spiegel was stating that he had ‘almost died of a heart disease’.
2. The Oxford Companion to Medicine, Volume I, p. 546.
3. Edition of
26 August.
4. Interview with David Gates, Newsweek, 5 October 1997.
5. Ibid.
6. Interview with Jon Pareles, 28 September 1997.
7. USA Today, 29 September 1997.
8. Rolling Stone, 7 September 2006.
9. Interview with Edna Gundersen, USA Today, 29 September 1997.
10. Ibid.
11. Serge Kaganski, Mojo magazine, February 1998 edition.
12. Alan Jackson, press-conference report, Times magazine, 8 September 2001.
13. Interview with Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, 22 November 2001.
14. San Francisco Chronicle, 2 November 1997.
15. While it is true that only 49 per cent of eligible voters bothered to turn out for the election in November 1996, giving 49.2 per cent of the popular vote to Clinton and 40.7 per cent to his opponent, Bob Dole, polling organisations weight their findings to take account of participation, party affiliation, if any, and other factors besides. Clinton was popular.
16. The population statistics come from a Bureau of the Census document entitled Population Profile of the United States 1997. The firearms figures are from a National Institute of Justice survey published in May 1997.
17. Sidney Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars: An Insider’s Account of the White House Years (2003).
18. Mojo, February 1998. The piece was provided by Serge Kaganski of the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles. He had been part of a group of European journalists who had interviewd Dylan in London on 4 October 1997.
19. A Norwegian committee and John Bauldie, editor of the Dylan magazine The Telegraph, were equally important to the campaign. Bauldie died in a helicopter crash just after the nomination was submitted. Contrary to some reports, the submission, though lodged in 1996, was made too late for consideration that year.
20. From Bill Pagel’s Bob Links, a website ‘dedicated to providing Bob Dylan concert information’. (http://www.boblinks.com/dates11.html.)
21. Berkshire Eagle, 22 July 1999.
22. Reported by Dave Fanning, Irish Times magazine, 29 September 2001.
CHAPTER TWELVE – SKETCHES FROM MEMORY
1. Rolling Stone, issue of 7 September 2006.
2. Interview with Mikal Gilmore, 27 September 2012.
3. Charles Seeger put some of his thoughts on process and plagiarism in print in the journal Western Folklore in April 1962. See Bell, Once Upon a Time, pp. 374–5.
4. Interview with Seth Rogovoy, Berkshire Eagle, 8 June 2001.
5. Pete Seeger and Peter Blood (eds), Where Have All the Flowers Gone?: A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies, (1993) p. 33.
6. Interview with Paul Zollo, SongTalk magazine, 1991 winter issue (Vol. 2, Issue 16). Republished in Singers on Songwriting (1993, rev. and expanded 2003).
7. Rolling Stone, 14 September 2012.
8. Mikal Gilmore interview, 27 September 2012.
9. 5 October 2004.
10. The Marqusee review appeared on 16 October 2004, the Appleyard piece on the following day. Carlo Wolff’s notice was published on 5 October.
11. 8 July 2003.
12. Lott, p. 5.
13. Edition of 4 November 1963. Dylan had in fact taken his inspiration from the spiritual ‘No More Auction Block/Many Thousands Gone’, but its resemblance to ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ was not self-evident.
14. Junichi Saga, Confessions of a Yakuza (trans. John Bester, 1991), p. 6.
15. 14 September 2006.
16. ‘Bob Dylan: Henry Timrod Revisited’: www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178703.
17. Issue of 27 September 2012.
18. No Direction Home, Chapter 2.
19. To be found at swarmuth.blogspot.com.
20. As a specialist in Aramaic and Hebrew, Cook was probably more alert than most to the biblical connotations of Dylan’s title. Cook’s translations of the Scrolls, with Michael O. Wise and Martin G. Abegg, were published in 1996 with a revised edition in 2005.
21. See Bell, Once Upon a Time, pp. 348–9.
22. Los Angeles Times, 22 April 2010.
23. The blog can be found at ralphriver.blogspot.com. The relevant entry is for 30 July 2011.
24. ‘Highlands’, Time Out of Mind (1997).
CHAPTER THIRTEEN – HAND ME DOWN MY WALKIN’ CANE
1. 1 August 2003.
2. 4 August and 5 September 2003, respectively.
3. 29 July 2003.
4. 2 September 2001.
5. Interview with Austin Scaggs, Rolling Stone, 26 October 2004.
6. Interview with Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, 16 September 2001.
7. Seth Stevenson, www.slate.com, 12 April 2004. Brian Steinberg, Wall Street Journal, 2 April 2004.
8. Interview with Austin Scaggs, Rolling Stone, 26 October 2004.
9. Corcoran, who first saw Dylan in Newcastle in 1965, was the editor of the useful collection Do You Mr Jones?: Bob Dylan With the Poets and Professors (2002). With contributions from Paul Muldoon, Simon Armitage, Sean Wilentz and an impressive legion of others, the book contains more sense about its subject than is usually available.
10. From the Guardian’s notably vicious review of a ‘bizarre’ performance at London’s Wembley Arena (17 November 2003). It seems the paper was having another of its little turns where Dylan was concerned.
11. Sunday Telegraph, 26 September 2004; USA Today, 4 October; Newsweek, 4 October.
12. Edition of 26 October 2004.
13. See, for example, ‘The Sweet Troubles of Proust’, a New York Review of Books blog by Colm Tóibín, 22 February 2013 (www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/feb/22/sweet-troubles-proust/)
14. Interview with Douglas Brinkley, Rolling Stone, 14 May 2009.
15. The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2006), p. 497.
16. Rolling Stone, 7 September 2006.
17. Jon Pareles, 20 August 2006.
18. Interview with Douglas Brinkley, Rolling Stone, 14 May 2009.
19. 7 October 2006.
20. See Richard F. Thomas, ‘The Streets of Rome: The Classical Dylan’ in the journal Oral Tradition, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 30–56 (March 2007).
21. 2 August 2012.
22. The first headline comes from the New York Times (12 July 2003), the second from the online Daily Beast (30 April 2010). What’s interesting is that in both cases the writers, Jon Pareles and Sean Wilentz respectively, found the charges groundless. As mentioned previously, Joni Mitchell staged her attack in an interview with the Los Angeles Times published on 22 April 2010.
23. Nelson Mail, 7 October 2006.
24. Rolling Stone, 7 September 2006.
25. In an interview with Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore (22 December 2001), Dylan once again said that he had lost the desire to make albums, that ‘It was clear to me I had more than enough songs to play. Forever.’
26. Interview with Jonathan Lethem, Rolling Stone, 7 September 2006.
27. Interview with Mikal Gilmore, 27 September 2012.
28. Robert Sullivan, ‘This Is Not a Bob Dylan Movie’, 7 October 2007.
29. 15 May 2006.
30. Dreams From My Father (1995); The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006).
31. 17 January 2007.
32. www.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx.
33. Interview with Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, 27 September 2012.
34. 5 June 2008.
35. The promotional interview was conducted by Bill Flanagan and published on bobdylan.com. The excerpt was published by Newsweek on 6 April 2009.
36. Interview with Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, 27 September 2012.
37. ‘The Cost of Racial Animus on a Black Presidential Candidate’, 24 March 2013. www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~sstephen/papers.html.
38. ‘The Return of Old Fashioned Racism to White Americans’ Partisan Preferences in the Age of Obama’, Journal of Politics, Vol. 75 (1), pp. 110–23 (January 2013).
39. Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein,
Sylvia Allegretto, The State of Working America 2006/2007 (2007), p. 2.
40. ‘America’s Image in the World: Findings from the Pew Global Attitudes Project’, released 14 March 2007.
41. New York Times, 23 May 2013.
42. Chris Woods, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, August 10, 2011 (http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/10/most-complete-picture-yet-of-cia-drone-strikes/)
43. See The National Priorities Project (Mattea Kramer, Chris Hetman et al.), A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget (2012), pp. 134–6.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN – PAY IN BLOOD
1. 13 April 2008.
2. Richard Williams, The Guardian, 16 August 2008.
3. Rolling Stone, 14 May 2009.
4. Alexis Petridis, The Guardian, 24 April 2009.
5. Uncut magazine, January 2010.
6. Douglas Brinkley, Rolling Stone, 14 May 2009.
7. Mojo magazine, January 2010.
8. Interview with Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, 27 September 2012.
9. Kasper Monrad, ‘The Painter Bob Dylan: An Introduction’; John Elderfield, ‘Across the Borderline’. In the catalogue/book The Brazil Series (2010).
10. Agence France-Presse, 7 September 2010.
11. Interview with Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, 27 September 2012.
12. In the United States, ticket prices increased by more than four times the rate of inflation between 1996 and 2008. (Associated Press report, Billboard, 27 December 2010.)
13. 4 April 2010.
14. Both stories published 7 April 2011.
15. 9 April 2011.
16. 10 April 2011.
17. Sunday Herald, 10 April 2011.
18. The Herald, 21 May 2011.
19. This book, like its predecessor, like almost every book written about Dylan over the last two decades, owes eternal gratitude to the Swede for his extraordinary researches, tracking both public performances and recording activities from 1958 until (at the time of writing) 2013. See, in all circumstances, www.bjorner.com.