The Beat Patrol

Dec. 12, 1965 article from the New York Herald Tribune by Al Aronowitz…

 

Bob Dylan picked himself up from the revolving turntable; staggered into an armchair, waved his hands above his head and sat down to watch the tube. On it, Soupy Sales was grinning from behind a mask cream pie.

Behind him a double exposure of Elvis Presley fired two six guns into the room from a well-silvered Andy Warhol canvas covered with Cellophane.

‘I hate it …’ Dylan said. ‘I’m going to cut a hole in its abdomen and put a water hose through it.’ He got up, walked with cowboy bow-legs into the kitchen and asked someone to make him some tea. The reflection of Soupy Sales still grinned from his grey-coloured shades.

It wasn’t Dylan’s pad; he had borrowed it from somebody or other. On the floor, a mink rug played tablecloth for several cups and saucers, ashes and the ashtrays that the ashes had been intended for. Several other people wandered about the room, some of them while still sitting in their chairs.

The doorbell rang. It was Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones with a limousine waiting outside. Dylan wiped Soupy Sales’s face off the TV tube, Robbie Robertson wiped the autoharp off his lap and everybody split. Dylan was the last to leave. He took the Temptations record off the turntable, hid it under his double-breasted corduroy jacket and winked at a light bulb. His tea, unsipped, was left to cool in its cup.

In the limousine, Dylan asked to be left off at the next block.

‘You must be joking,’ said Brian Jones.

Inside the limousine, Charlie, the chauffeur, asked if the group was going downtown. ‘I’m getting off at the next block,’ said Dylan. ‘These other people’re going downtown…’ ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Charlie. ‘No, we’re not going to any downtown,’ said Milly, a friend of Brian’s. ‘Shut up!’ said Dylan, ’shut up and quit making that racket or else you’ll be thrown to the fire inspectors…. and they are very hungry.’ ‘What?’ yelled Milly. The car stopped at the corner and Milly, one way or another, was thrown out… ‘Watch the fire inspectors!’ yelled Brian. ‘Nonsense,’ said Dylan, ‘I’m just fooling. We really don’t have them over in America.’

The limousine eventually stopped at a bar in the Eight Avenue district. After everyone in the party had entered, a very muscular woman ran up and very surprisingly hugged Dylan. ‘You’re not supposed to do that without an eyepatch!’ he jolted. ‘Hug my friend there, Brian, he looks more like me!’ … ‘You can write on the walls here,’ said Dylan later at the table. ‘This is the only bar I know of where you can write on the walls and nobody calls you a poet.’ … Sailors began wandering over towards the table and eventually everyone decided to leave. ‘Where’s Harold the Driver?’ asked Bob Neuwirth, a third cousin of Bob Dylan’s. ‘That’s not Harold,’ said Dylan. ‘That’s Mr Egg, and there but for fortune go you or I.’ ‘Ahhhhhh,’ said Bob Neuwirth. ‘You must give me two pints!’ said Dylan. ‘And anyway, how do you know his name ain’t Egg?’ ‘Where are we going?’ said everyone called Hare-up. ‘We’re going to the zoo.’

‘You Americans must all be soft,’ said Brian Jones. ‘Do you have any coyotes?’ A sailor leaped on the table, grinning at Brian, who snarled back. ‘I like your hair,’ the sailor said. ‘What about hair?’ Dylan said. ‘I thought we were going to the zoo,’ said Bob Neuwirth. ‘That’s what we need,’ said Brian Jones, ‘Some coyotes.’ ‘Are you sure you mean coyotes?’ said Dylan. ‘Are you sure we’re going to the zoo?’ said Brian Jones. ‘Be yourself,’ said Dylan. Everybody walked towards the door with the sailor leaping off the table and following them.

‘We’re not going anyplace,’ said Bob Neuwirth. Dylan leaped on Brian Jones and asked, ‘Tell, me, Brian, why is it that your lead singer does not have a little, pencil thin moustache?’

Back in the limousine, someone directed the driver to an underground movie house on Lafayette Street. Later on, when questioned about it, Dylan said they were all blindfolded and taken there at gunpoint. On the stage inside, there was no movie, but instead a group of green painted musicians were presenting a spontaneous ritual which had taken them three months to prepare. Timothy Cain, a friend of Dylan’s whom they had run into under the marquee, grabbed the seat next to Dylan. ‘Can you smoke here?’ he asked Dylan. ‘Of course you can smoke here,’ replied Dylan. ‘Put that cigarette out!’ said a long-haired flowery girl who turned out to be an usherette. Timothy ignored her. The usherette left in a huff, returning moments later with a chubby man who wore a handlebar moustache and slippers. ‘Put that cigarette out,’ the chubby man said. ‘Oh, my God,’ said Dylan, ‘it’s Porky Oil.’ Immediately, Timothy rose, grabbed the usherette’s flashlight, unscrewed it, took the batteries out and threw the batteries at the Exit signs and proceeded to punch the chubby man in his ample stomach. At the same time, everyone in the party got up to leave as Dylan mumbled. ‘What good are exits anyway?’ ‘I’m not an art fanatic,’ said Timothy, ‘I’m a cigarette-smoker.’ ‘I like you,’ said Dylan. ‘I wish we were both alive during Napoleon’s time.’

After several more stops, which included a pinball arcade on 42nd Street, the back room of a fortune-teller in the Chelsea district, the Phonebooth, a discotheque, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, the limousine wound up in front of a bar in Greenwich Village. Four people remained in the group, the others having been left behind by accident. ‘Plenty more people inside,’ said the chauffeur. ‘Watch your tongue,’ said Dylan.

The group got out to go inside the bar, but it was already closed. ‘Back to the pad,’ said Dylan. There was a small number of people gathered around the mink rug when they returned. Dylan took the Temptations record out from beneath his doublebreasted corduroy jacket and put it on the record-player. Then he went to another room and closed the door.

There was a W. C. Fields movie on the TV set. Dylan walked into the kitchen to get a bandage. ‘I think Marlon Brando should play the life of W.C. Fields,’ he mumbled. He fiddled around in the kitchen. ‘I also think that Warren Beatty should play the life of Johnny Weismuller,’ wrapping the bandage around his finger. Dylan returned to his room, stopping to say, ‘As for me, I plan to do the life story of Victor Mature.’ ‘Is he serious?’ said the mild-mannered, petite coloured girl, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor. She was immediately thrown out.

Al Aronowitz

Rolling Stone article from Feb. 14, 1974. Dylan had only recently returned to recording and touring again full time, with the help of The Band. Ben Fong-Torres finds him at this moment…

 

There’s still a message. There’s always a need for protest songs. You just gotta tap it. 

We are in Toronto the third stop of the Bob Dylan tour. Locked in by snow and still locked out, so far, from the inner circles of Dylan and the Band. I’m reduced to television in my hotel room. I choose Channel 6 and get Channel 79, where a newsy-talk program called The CITY Show named after the station’s call letters is on. For some reason, the moderator a sporty-looking fellow, 50 or so, looks familiar but the camera cuts to the program’s “youth reporter” whose report this evening is an earnest attack on Dylan, the tour and tour producer Bill Graham. He is asking where all the money is going; he is characterizing Dylan as a “manipulator” of his fans and the press, secreting himself from the public after that convenient little bike spill and, now, exploiting his absence from the scene. He also has heard that Dylan’s show is comprised mostly of older songs and this, too, is a pisser for him.

The moderator, the man with those penetrating, close-set eyes I’ve seen before, comes to Dylan’s defense.

“I believe there’s a freedom to just sit down if you want to,” he tells the kid. “The public doesn’t own Dylan; that’s why he appealed to you in the first place.”

As for Dylan’s manipulation of the media, he continues, “You know I don’t like to talk about my son too much on the air, but Neil has found that he’s not dependent on all this damned media coverage. [Now I recognize the gentleman: Scott Young, Neil's father and a newspaper columnist in Toronto.] Just a line in the papers is enough.

“Dylan is trying,” he says, “to reestablish that there still is a Dylan around.”

The next night, I met Dylan, bumping into him in the hallway up on his floor, and he agreed to talk – later, in Montreal. Three days later, in Montreal, 33 floors up at the Chateau Champlain, Bob Dylan sat across the table, at ease, in white western shirt and jeans, still sleepy at 3 PM, but willing to talk.

He’s always interested in what his audience is thinking, so I told him about the impression his new love songs seemed to be making. Critics — from Chicago through Philadelphia and Canada — were saying he’d mellowed out, “blunted his image,” “drained the venom from his voice.” He’d moved from urgent, surging metaphorical poetry to clinch-clichés, stereotyped images, and an emphatically-stated need for his loved one, a complete turn away from his previous posture of independence, individualism and defiance.

Of course, he’s played with such talk before. In “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” he rhymed “moon” and “spoon.” In Montreal, just last night, between “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Gates Of Eden,” he told the audience, “That was a love song, and this one’s another love song.”

With a wife and five children, Dylan is being called a family man, or, as Jonathan Takiff, pop critic for the Philadelphia Daily News put it, “a Dutch uncle.”

“Yeah,” said Dylan. “But those things don’t make a person settle down. A family brings the world together. You can see it’s all one. It paints a better picture than being with a chick and traveling all over the world. Or hanging out all night.

“But,” he maintained, “I still get that spark. I’m still out there. In no way am I not. I don’t live on a pedestal.

“Fame threw me for a loop at first,” Dylan continued. “I learned how to swim with it and turn it around — so you can just throw it in the closet and pick it up when you need it.”

The turning point, he said, was in Woodstock, “a little after the accident. There I was, sitting one night under a full moon, I looked out into the bleak woods and said, ‘Something’s gotta change.’ There was some business that had to be taken care of, that we don t have to go into.” I nodded, not mentioning the breakup with manager Albert Grossman, but reminding him of the problems he’d had fulfilling contracts for a book and a TV special.

“It was too much,” he said. “It finally broke the camel’s back. Now it’s the same old me again.”

Whatever that may be. 

One of the reasons for following Dylan around, even if ultimately you learn that he’s just the same old him, is that so many people are looking for so much from the drifter’s return — for some kind of statement, either from the mere act of his reemergence or from something that the new Dylan may have to say. But too many of those that are filling up the papers and the a airwaves with their Dylanologies never heard, really heard, the man in the first place, or refused to accept what they heard: “It’s not to stand naked under unknowing eyes/It’s for myself my friends my stories are sung,” he sang, in “Restless Farewell,” even before “My Back Pages.”

 Dylan says he’s touring only because he wants to play his music for the people. But the people, the papers say, want more than music. They want The Word. “I don’t understand that attitude,” says Robbie Robertson of the Band. “I don’t ever remember him ever delivering what they believed he delivered, or what they think he’s going to deliver now. I mean, I heard a lot of terrific lines and songs. He certainly had a way of saying something that everybody felt, a way of phrasing it and condensing it down. But people have a fictitious past in mind about him.”

I agreed. But even if I, for one, never saw Dylan as a messiah, idol, prophet, leader, or even a particularly great singer, I must admit, as have other journalists (whose style it is to not confess such things) that Dylan has touched me. And the nerve that was hit ties somehow back to the Sixties. During the second show in the Chicago Stadium, near the end of “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” it hit. It wasn’t the song, a simple enough affair over an even simpler acoustic guitar run that did it. For me, Dylan made a statement through a tone he was painting with his bitter-truth voice, a feeling of knowing resignation, the uplift deriving from the knowledge that here was a guy who’d seen it all, saw through it all, and… well, had a way of phrasing it, of condensing it down.

I watched this still-small, still-vulnerable figure behind his guitar, looking up and bawling, “I got nothing, Ma, to live up to,” and I shivered and thought of my brother Barry, a probation officer and community worker murdered in the summer of 1972, in the midst of the gang wars of Chinatown. He left a mother and father who cannot stop mourning, and when “It’s Alright Ma” pulsed through the verse.

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer’s pride, security
It blows the mind most bitterly
For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes
Must get lonely

I found myself wiping away tears with an index finger and thinking something toward Barry, something excusably maudlin like “Can you see? Bob Dylan, someone you heard and liked a lot, is here.”

Later, talking with reporters from The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, I learned that they, too, had had the chills. And in the next city, Jon Takiff — “Philadelphia’s Mr. Cynical,” the publicist for the Spectrum rock auditorium called him — would walk away from the press box and tell me that “Like a Rolling Stone” had made him cry. And all the lofty articles I’d read about Dylan, all the burdensome books, suddenly meant very little. I’d have to meet the guy for myself.

By Philadelphia, Dylan and the Band had their show pretty well set. The cluttered-attic look of the Chicago shows had been modified; Dylan and the Band came out strong, with six straight Dylan songs, concluding with Dylan cool-jerking the piano for “Ballad of a Thin Man,” followed by six Band tunes. Dylan returned for three more, finished up with “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” An intermission of exactly 15 minutes was broken by Dylan’s return as a solo acoustic artist for about five numbers, ending with “It’s Alright, Ma.” The Band came back for three or four more, finishing up with “The Weight” from Big Pink, and Dylan returning with a couple of newer songs, from Planet Waves, and the finale, “Like a Rolling Stone.” And the encore was “Most Likely You Go Your Way (I’ll Go Mine).”

In Toronto, Dylan began to open and close the shows with “You Go Your Way.”

Dylan explained, simply: “It completes a circle in some way.” By Philadelphia, the sound and light crews were in control of each show. Eighteen men were on the road for this one, under employment by Bill Graham’s FM Productions. Now Graham is holding a post-concert session with lighting director Bruce Ball.

Graham has by now heard “It’s Alright, Ma” five times, and each time, “Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked” gets the biggest reaction of any line in the concert.

“Tell you what I’d like to try,” says Graham. “When Bob hits that line, how about switching to reds from overhead” — Graham sweeps a huge left arm out and down –”blues from the sides, and white spotlights directly onto him.” Bruce agrees to give it a try. And as corny as the idea may sound, it works, the colors spread out far enough apart to be subtle. It is, to be sure, a United States flag lit up by a thousand light bulbs.

But Toronto, the next stop, greets the effect, and the line, even with more detached amusement than determined agreement. Michael McClure has joined the tour now; together we will go after his old friend Bob Dylan. McClure is uncomfortable; in the snow-sludge-slop-shuffle outside, he has lost his scarf, without which his neck is incomplete; he is seated just below the bank of speakers perched atop a tower on one corner of the stage, and he’s got his ears finger-plugged to balance out the insistent highs. But he can still smell — “They’re smoking rubber marijuana here,” he says — and see. “You see how much cleaner these kids are?” No, I don’t. The poet/playwright picks out a row of three boys in Pendleton shirts. They are indeed clean shirts. “See? Canada hasn’t been fucked over by the War Machine.”

The Toronto audience is as respectful of Dylan as the States crowds, but even more attentive. There’s less of the screaming of requests during pauses between numbers; less of the demands for Dylan while the Band is doing one of their own sets. But of course, this is Band territory. CHUM, the FM rock station, even embraces Dylan, referring to him as being “from Hibbing, Minnesota, very close to the Canadian border.” Dylan himself, later, will admit a special feeling for Canada that gets him smiling a crack more onstage, gets him staying, twice one show, “Great to he back Montreal!” and singing a particularly strong and croony version of “Girl From the North Country.” Dylan, later, will explain, looking out the wall-wide arched window in his hotel room, out beyond the office buildings, into the bleak woods: “Canada seems to bridge a gap between the United States and Europe. It’s a certain flair. And this is where I come from, this kind of setting — lakes, and boats and bridges.”

In Toronto, before the first of the two shows there, I call on CHUM and find a Dylan freak named John Donebie, who remembers that Dylan’s been in town three times before, twice as a solo artist around ‘62 and ‘63, and, in 1966, with the Hawks, who got huffily dismissed by one local critic as “a third rate Toronto rock & roll band.” In fact, the Hawks — and it’s well known — came up as the backup band for Ronnie Hawkins, the Arkansas rockabilly singer who’d moved to Canada in 1960. (His hits were in ‘59 – “40 Days” and “Mary Lou.”) The Hawks, all from Canada, except drummer/Arkansas native Levon Helm, got tired of the roads they traveled, mostly in Southern states and along a short stretch of drink joints on Yonge Street in Toronto.

“You know,” says Donebie, “Hawkins is still playing at the Nickelodeon down on Yonge Street. He’s always there — or whenever he wants to play there, anyway. Just about owns the place. You ought to check him out.”

The Nickelodeon is an eat-drink-and-dance place, with pizza tablecloths, red flowery paper lamps, and a required coat check, just like in all the fancy restaurants in town. It feels like a hustler’s hall, a singles spot where, if you don’t score, there’s always Jingles upstairs, where you can take pictures of guaranteed naked ladies.

At the club, in a cluttered storage room full of discarded chairs, Hawkins was as hearty and jovial as ever.

“I was over at the hotel last night and we brought back memories for seven hours,” he said. And he saw the show tonight — “first time I’ve seen ‘em play since they left in 1965″ — and paid due compliments.

“They were always two years ahead of their time. Robbie was the first guy to get into white funk, in Canada or anywhere.” Hawkins urged me to stay, see if Levon shows up.

Minutes later, at 12:30, an hour and a half since the end of the Dylan concert, the Nickelodeon broke into applause and cheers. Levon, and Robbie Robertson, and Rick Danko, and Bob Dylan, and friends, had passed the checkroom, all their coats fur caps and mufflers intact. It was a nice little 39th-birthday present for Hawkins, and he leapt through the crowd to exchange warm greetings with Dylan, who wore shades and stayed mostly quiet through the night.

Hawkins jumped onto the stage with his latest congregation — a six-piece outfit that had Bill Graham nodding favorably — and told the buzzing crowd: “They came all the way from L.A. to hear me sing ‘40 Days!’”

Hawkins introduced a special number. “I remember Robbie called it one of Bob’s best songs at one time,” he said, and moved into a mellow country version of “One Too Many Mornings,” one of Dylan’s earlier true-love songs, from 1964. A couple of birthday dedications later, Hawkins was rolling through “Bo Diddley” and worked in a couple of verses of ” The Ballad of Hollis Brown;” Dylan nodded and smiled.

After Hawkins’ set, the crowd was quiet, a nickelodeon full of Dylan-watchers, picture-snappers. I got a good close-up look at him for the first time, and he looked tired, in no shape to be club-nobbing, but not unapproachable. Later, at two o clock, while the club tried to kick everybody out, Graham looked to be trying to set up a private jam session, talking soothingly to the people in charge. But they didn’t go for it, and Graham resigned himself to the usual a spread of food and wine on the artists’ floor at the hotel.

Bob Dylan has had reason to avoid Rolling Stone. We had been among the most critical about his recent albums; the most cynical about his motives for the tour, launched in combination with a new label deal and a new album. He didn’t need the media, didn’t want to do interviews, all reporters were told. And that word seemed to have spread effectively around the tour. In Toronto, one writer spent 18 column inches describing how he chased the Band’s equipment van from the Malton Airport halfway across town at a sometimes furious, Bullitt-pace before giving up. And at the Inn on the Park, before the first concert, another reporter spotted Dylan, in shades, at the hotel newsstand, leafing through a pube magazine called Success. Dylan denied that he was Dylan, but let a photographer take pictures. The reporter hit him up again, and Dylan, exasperated, told him, “Look, man, I’m not him.” Finally, a friend came and helped him escape.

Still, his most intimate protectors insisted, Dylan would be happy to have a chat… if you happened to run into him. Now, Graham invited us to join the post-concert nibbling and listening-to-the-new-album gathering, and at 2:30 AM, I entered the most boring hotel suite I’d seen since my own Holiday Inn room back in Philadelphia. McClure and Byall were having a chat on one couch; Barry Imhoff was eating a plateful of snacks, and a lone teenaged girl wandered around wondering what she was doing.

But soon enough, there was a burst of noise from the hallway and a gang of Band members and buddies were scurrying past, followed by Bob Dylan, still in shades. He made a turn toward the party room, stopped in front of me, and continued to yell, half-puzzled, half-joking, after the little mob.

My moment had come. I introduced myself, and he kept his smile on, as we shook hands. His was cold, offered downward, with not much of a grip. Then he excused himself, but promised, without my asking, “I’ll be right back and we’ll talk.” Ten minutes later, at 3 AM, we sat side-by-side in couches and talked; he’d read some of my stories; I’d heard some of his songs.

We chatted, in idle, for maybe ten minutes…”How’d you like the show?”…”Well, you see, I wasn’t feeling that great, I just had a flu shot today.”…”No, 18,000 people yelling isn’t that much of a thing. It’s nothing new. See, I used to sit in the dark and dream about it, you know. It’s all happened before”…and then I suddenly felt nervous, without a notebook and not quite sure what to say. I suggested an interview — say, maybe in Montreal, when he felt better. He agreed and I made my escape.

The next night, still in Toronto, Dylan looked better onstage, sporting a hat for the first time along with his by-now regulation black suit, twisting his left heel in time with “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” working with organist Garth Hudson through “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and leaving the stage with a spread-armed curtsy. The Band seemed inspired, especially with a near-perfect reading of “I Shall Be Released” by Richard Manuel. As before, Dylan fluffed the second and third lines of “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” but the audience waited and roared for the main lines. On “Like a Rolling Stone,” the audience, in perfect unison, fast-clapped along with the song. This is the one song no one listens to, the Dylan anthem, the cause for celebration. The concert is marked down as the best since the second show in Philly.

And Toronto, for many of the Band, is home — or, at least, home enough so that the party after the show reminds one of Big Pink. In one room is a gathering of the next of kin, folks, stepfolks and friends. Full of etiquette — it is after midnight, after all — they are chatting and listening to Planet Waves on a cheap “compact” hifi borrowed from the hotel; “Tough Mama” is playing, and on the television (TV sets in touring rock stars’ hotel rooms are always on, no matter what’s happening in the room) is a movie starring Jimmy Stewart and some tough mama, a red fright-wigged woman wielding a shotgun, and as Dylan begins the final chorus, the woman blows up a houseboat, and Levon Helm and Rick Danko enter the room, listening to the music again, still loving it. Once again, Ronnie Hawkins and wife are part of the party; Gordon Lightfoot will drop in, too, and, out in the hallway, I run into Dylan again. I tell him I was thrilled, chilled again by his show; he mentions, again, how he’d had a flu shot and that’s why the previous night wasn’t so hot, and we affirm our plans to meet in Montreal.

The gathering is dissipating, and in another room, a drunken would-be groupie demands Dylan’s presence. She staggers around, going nowhere slow, until Dylan shows up, asking for a blanket. She shouts at him, and Dylan goes into his I-don’t-understand routine, slips into the bathroom and out again, before she notices. Later, Renee, a tall, blonde beauty, is talking with Robbie Robertson. Robbie, who looks years younger than he did in the Big Pink days, when his chin-thin beard, glasses and dark clothing gave him the look of a devout Russian Orthodox Jew, is listening attentively, like a priest. He seems to be humoring her, but no one can tell.

“I’m writing songs and I play guitar,” she tells him.

Robbie, in a light fauntleroy hat, reddish-plaid shirt and bell-bottomed overalls, lets his sleepy eyes widen and his mouth open, as if the news may yet bowl him over.

“Really?” he says. “Gee, you and I do the same things. What a coincidence.”

The woman has to leave. She has to go to work tomorrow morning. “But I don’t want to be a secretary all my life,” she tells Robbie. Robbie nods. He probably felt the same way 15 years ago, when he left school in Toronto to take up the guitar with the Robots.

I had met Robbie at the Nickelodeon; the next day, we met in his room and talked about the tour — how it started, exactly, how the Band felt being largely considered a backup, despite their co-billing and no matter how strong the applause at the end of each Band number and segment.

“We expected it,” he said, “because we know who Bob is, right? And because we also knew that it had been eight years since he had ever done a tour, and we knew it was going to be an incredible level of anticipation for his music. We just can’t… we have a job to do. You can’t say to yourself, ‘Oh, my god. Call Bob. Tell Bob he’s got to get back out here.’ The first time we played with him, when we walked out there, people would actually start booing and throwing things, so this is actually like a big, big departure. This is nothing, to have a couple of people yell, ‘Dylan!’”

The Band and Dylan, said Robertson, have always thought about touring since the last tour, in 1966. “We were going to do another one, and Bob had the motorcycle wreck. And for a long time it didn’t seem like a good idea to us at all. All of a sudden it started to become clear. There was a space, an opening, a necessity, almost, that just pulled you into it. It was no clever maneuver on anybody’s behalf to put the thing together, to expand our audience or get a few extra albums. Everybody just felt the same way at the same time.”

The impetus was a rock concert — the all-time biggest festival gathering, the 600,000-populated Watkins Glen festival.

“There was something different about it,” he said. “At Watkins Glen we were playing, and we would do little things, intricate, subtle things that the audience would react to that I’d never seen them react to before. There was an alertness to the audience that I could not believe.”

The whole thing is especially ironic because the Band is almost as reclusive as Dylan, having not played any dates for a year and a half before Watkins Glen, choosing to spend their time with families, working on albums, and playing with Dylan.

“We didn’t want to play Watkins Glen at all. We were in a mood; we thought tours, those things . . . it’s only the money, that’s the only reason that you do it. But we were talked into it. You know the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, really terrific people, and it was just one of those [Robbie puts on a painful, friendly, urging voice], ‘Oh, come on… it’s just up the road. You don’t have to really go out of your way.’ You know. ‘Don’t be a spoil sport.’ That’s what happened.”

After the festival, an enthusiastic Robertson told Dylan about the new sensations he’d received. “And he went for it alt the way. He asked me more questions. And then for a year or two I was planning on going to Malibu; I was ready to leave Woodstock. When I went out there we picked up on our talks and at this point I was more advanced, and we were coming out with a more positive attitude.”

Now, on tour, did the Band and Dylan find confirmation for his feelings after Watkins Glen? “I don’t think it’s a similar situation,” said Robbie. “I don’t think it’s necessarily the same audience. I also think that the audiences on this tour are not quite able to relax either. I think they’re a little confused, a little nervous. I think they’re waiting so much for something in there that it really distracts from that other thing that was Watkins Glen.”

But the Band and Dylan are nervous, too, said Robertson, and that partly explains the lack of communication from the artists to the audience, beyond the music and a wave, a peace sign or a clenched fist here, a nod from Robbie’s guitar there. First, Robertson maintains, there’s no need to talk. You say hello by showing up onstage; you play familiar music and don’t need to introduce numbers. A new number from Dylan is obviously new. “So you’re kind of… it’s meaningless talk.”

“Just remember, when Bob first started to play, he used to do more talking than music. He used to just talk and talk and tell stories, jokes and carrying on, you know. It’s a different thing. And also, I think in his case, everybody takes it to such a degree that it’s embarrassing, almost, to say anything. I mean, they start, you know…”

To analyze what he meant by “We’ll be back in 15 minutes”?

“Right, they start counting to 15 backwards… they just take it and they get silly.”

One critic in Chicago, a man with a background in theater, accused Dylan of holding back and concluded: “Maybe Dylan just isn’t a performer.”

Dylan, in Montreal, responded: “They just don’t understand.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s got nothing to do with that kind of atmosphere. What the critics expect is what they expect. It concerns me more with getting it to the people.

“It’s basically music, not a music-hall routine.”

Another factor for the silence between numbers, said Robertson, is the group’s required concentration on the music at hand. A song changes from one night to another, said Robertson, and Dylan loves to pull surprises.

“He pulled one out of the hat last night, that we had never played, or ran over, or even considered: ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh.’”

The Band and Dylan coarsely ran over some 80 numbers in one four-hour session, said Robertson, so that the show can change every night. But rehearsals, he said, were impossible. “For our situation and our mentality, it seemed so absurd to get into a room and run over ‘Positively Fourth Street.’ We’d go, ‘What is this? Remember the kickoff? Who cares what the kickoff was?’ You know. We just can’t approach it like that.”

Rehearsals began three months before the tour. “We sat down and played for four hours and ran over an incredible number of tunes. Just instantly. We would request tunes. Bob would ask us to play certain tunes of ours, and then we would do the same, then we’d think of some that we would particularly like to do. And when it was over, we said, ‘That’s it.’”

So, onstage, oftentimes a song will end quite abruptly; another may wheeze and fizzle to a tardy conclusion; Dylan will stop a number to change the beat.

Even while planning the tour, Dylan and the Band were nervous, said Robertson. “Not a real emotional nervousness, but also a physical endurance nervousness. Like Bob was saying, ‘Shit, I haven’t done nothing in eight years, all of a sudden I’m going to go out there and hit it for 40 concerts?’ We’re not really outgoing people,” Robbie said again, “we’re just not the kind of people that can — ‘Sure, turn us loose!’”

Enter Bill Graham, whom the Band had worked with for concerts, and David Geffen, chairman of Elektra Asylum Records, now Dylan’s label. When asked about how he got to know Robbie, Geffen replied: “He’s just my friend.” Robbie’s version had less of the hangout aura to it: “He called me up once, about nine or ten months ago. Just out of the blue, he said he wanted to see me. I talked to him and found him interesting, I thought he was in tune with today, now. He wasn’t relying on what it was, or he didn’t have ridiculous theories on what it should be.” What triggered the call? Was it just to get to know you?

“No, it was a business move.”

Robertson told Dylan about Graham and Geffen, Dylan approved, and the two went to work, convincing the group that if they were to avoid box-office riots, they had to play more than ten dates, and in larger-than-theater halls. It was also Graham who proposed the ticket prices (criticized in some cities as too high, averaging $8 and reaching a top of $9.50), and the Band and Dylan — who left all money matters to Graham and their various attorneys — agreed.

“The decision,” said Robbie, “was made by Bill and David, and they put their logic together and explained it to us. We left it up to them because they could be a little bit more objective than us. They would say, ‘Listen, Joe Blow gets $7.50. Just Joe Blow, so I would think you guys should charge that, and if there’s two of you, then you should charge’… and they had all kinds of reasons. If you don’t, then people are going to think that something’s wrong. Me? I just said, ‘You know better than we do.’ You have to give people room to move around in and do things. If you do it all yourself you go crazy.”

And when the Band and Dylan were informed that the tour would gross $5 million and net at least half that, no one felt that it was a bit much? Or asked if it was really needed or deserved?

“No way do we feel we deserve it,” Robertson replied calmly. “I think the whole thing is so out of proportion it doesn’t make any sense at all. But I don’t think a gallon of gas is worth a dollar, either. I think that the whole thing is so out of proportion, you couldn’t just step in and say, ‘Wait a minute, everybody.’ That’s not our job.”

Dylan echoed Robbie: “I put it in Bill Graham’s hands,” he said. “I just let people know I was ready.” He added: “Originally, I wanted to play small halls, but I was just talked out of that.”

Graham himself said that he could have suggested a high of $20, and still sell out the tour, just to prove the point “that the market will bear it. But that’s not what I was trying to prove. I tried to make it a decent price that I didn’t think there’d be complaints on.”

Each show in the first four cities was sold out; but in Chicago and Philadelphia, concerts were not sold out until nearly the last minute. In Chicago, last-minute shuffling of sound and lighting equipment made 1000 seats available for two shows, and they were sold on the days of the shows. In Philadelphia, at the time of the first show, at 2 PM, there were still tickets for the third show, the next night, available at the box office.

Graham maintained that it was immediate sellout, dating back to the December 2nd placement of ads in every city on the tour. Thousands of ticket requests had been returned then, he said. But 99% of requests had been for the night shows, leaving day-show tickets unsold. Also, he said, just two weeks before (that would be around Christmas), it was discovered that some side seats, with “obstructed views,” could be sold and ads were placed announcing “obstructed” tickets for $8. But, according to a Spectrum employee, the 19,000-seat auditorium sold some 16,000 seats for each show in the first rush, and placed ads on WMMR-FM by December 8th.

Later we learned that Madison Square Garden, on January 17th, announced more tickets available for the New York shows. Graham and David Geffen had previously reported an estimated 1.2 million ticket requests in the New York area; now, for some last-minute reason, the Garden, which can hold 58,500 people for three shows, had seats to spare.

Every show ends up sold out, of course, and overall, the six-week, 20-city, 39-show tour will gross over $5 million and net at least $2.5 million, according to what Graham calls a “conservative estimate.”

And in Philadelphia, the only city outside New York to have Dylan and the Band for more than two shows, writer Jon Takiff remarked: “It’s pretty phenomenal to sell out three shows at the Spectrum.”

Still, the facts seemed to make so much hype-confetti of Graham and Geffen’s pre-tour claims of a nationwide, overnight, mail-order sellout.

Bill Graham, the man who has an answer for just about anything, was even equipped with the proper languages for this tour. In Montreal, at the end of the first concert at the Forum, after the encore, he told the crowd, in fluid French, that Dylan had gone and would not be back.

It was a bilingual crowd, you could tell by the chatter around you. But, the student said, “I read there are 6000 Americans here tonight.” Because of the language situation, said Graham, Montreal was the only city to sell tickets through box offices, and thousands of people had crossed the border to get tickets and, a month later, to attend the show. “You should have seen the lines,” the young man said.

One woman, who came to Montreal from Plattsburgh, New York, seemed disappointed with Dylan after “Lay Lady Lay.” It was the new way he had of singing it, no longer country-comfy and inviting, but snarl-joking, stretching last words and snapping them off with a grit of his teeth.

“I liked the old Dylan,” said the woman, an employee at the state college in Plattsburgh. “Here, on this song, I felt he was ripping me off, just singing a song to get through it. He’s not sharing a part of himself with us.” She broke into applause, minutes later, when Dylan went into “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” and joined the ovation while Dylan offered two bows and a clenched left fist. She nodded her approval again as the solo Dylan worked his way through “Gates Of Eden.” And when “Rolling Stone” came around, she was on top of her chair, standing atop her cotton coat and clapping along. (Dylan: “‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is just as real today as it was then. The audience is reacting the same as back then. It was always the one that got the best reaction.”) And here, when Dylan returned for the encore, the ovation continued on and did not suddenly die, the way it had in the other cities.

“Always love to come back to Montreal.”

While friends of Dylan said he had stayed off the road mostly because his family came first, he left his wife and children behind. With him on the first few slops of the tour was Louie Kemp, a friend of Bob’s since the days in Hibbing when they went to camp together. Louie stuck close to Dylan, from hotel to hotel, and accompanied him wherever he went. In Chicago, they checked out a show at the Earl of Old Town. In Philadelphia, Dylan spent off-hours ice-skating. In Toronto; he planned to see The Exorcist at a local university movie house, then canceled out.

In Montreal, Dylan also took it easy, staying on a diet of vegetables, fruits, herb tea and distilled water. His one known foray into the streets — aside from shopping trips — was to pick up a loose NO PARKING sign to take back home.

On the scheduled day of the interview, I waited through the morning and early afternoon. When Dylan’s supposed to call, you don’t go running down to the newsstand to leaf through skin magazines. I decided to busy myself by going over my notes from the seven shows I’d seen, and compiling a list that would tell me, in case I ever got interested, just which songs Dylan was doing most often, and how many different numbers he had done in his concerts so far, at an average of 18 songs per night, with the Band adding another nine or ten.

It turned out that Dylan indeed had and played — favorites. Of 32 songs he had tried, thus far, 12 numbers had appeared in, at least, six of seven concerts. In every show, he had performed “Lay Lady Lay,” “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “All Along the Watchtower,” “It’s Alright, Ma,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and two from Planet Waves, “Forever Young” and “Something There Is About You.”

“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” “It Ain’t Me Babe,” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and a new number, “Except You,” had been done in every show but one, and “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)” had been sung seven times in five concerts.

“I Don’t Believe You” had been done five times, scattered out evenly, and “Ballad of Hollis Brown” was also a five-timer. “Times They Are A-Changin’” had been done twice, in Chicago, and once each in Toronto and Montreal. (Having stumbled through lines each time he tried the song, Dylan got a present from Bill Graham at intermission of the second show in Montreal: a set of cue cards, the lyrics to this, one of his best-known — if not by him — compositions written out in two-inch-high letters. Dylan laughed, then marched out and substituted “Blowin’ in the Wind” in the he “Times” slot.

The rest of the list included one-time acoustic shots of “To Ramona,” “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind,” “Song to Woody,” “Maggie’s Farm,” “As I Went Out One Morning,” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh (It Takes a Train to Cry).” Twice each, he had done “Rainy Day Women (Nos. 12 & 35),” “Just Like a Woman,” “Hero Blues,” “Love Minus Zero (No Limit),” “Gates Of Eden,” “Girl From the North Country,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and the new “Wedding Song.” Three times each, he had performed “Tough Mama,” another new, gritty love song. “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat,” and one of his own stated favorites from the protest days, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.”

“It’s more interesting for me to be able to move things around,” said Dylan. “These are the songs that were important for us, for me, for people we knew. They’re mostly songs that’ve been recorded through the years.”

I hadn’t heard any songs from New Morning or Self Portrait yet, I said.

“Well, we’ll do some from New Morning. We’ve got three or four numbers. But Self-Portrait, I didn’t live with those songs for too long. Those were just scraped together.” To, say, pay some sort of tribute to the songwriters you liked? Dylan smiled and nodded.

Dylan and I exchanged admissions of nervousness, soon enough, we were comfortable. He’s been well known to be antagonistic during interviews, challenging the wording of questions, offering totally evasive or fabricated responses. He does, in fact, give mostly half-answers, and one is not encouraged to pursue his replies. His face says to take a second to let it soak in, see the self-evidence for yourself. If he was putting me on with any of his responses — say, in his promotion man’s dream of an answer about doing his old songs — then he was a good actor. And, as he said during our hour session, he’s not a movie star.

The first time we’d talked, Dylan had mentioned a special enthusiasm for doing the Texas dates, in Fort Worth and in Houston January 25th and 26th, just before the five New York shows.

“Maybe it’s just the Mexican influence,” he said. “They’re more receptive to my kind of music, my kind of style,” said Dylan. “In the old days…” he paused. “I hate to call them the ‘old days,’” he thought out loud and laughed. “Anyway, I did New York, San Francisco and Austin. The rest were hard in coming…”

The tour, he said, wasn’t planned to take advantage of a lull in the music business, or to make a statement in a time of national crisis. “I saw daylight,” he said, “I just took off.”

Did he miss being onstage?

“Sure,” he replied. “There’s always those butterflies at a certain point, but then there’s the realization that the songs I’m singing mean as much to the people as to me; so it’s just up to me to perform the best I can.”

What kind of feeling did he get, singing the “protest” and “message” songs again, especially considering what people might read in his decision to revive those songs?

“For me, it’s just reinforcing those images in my head that were there, that don’t die, that will be there tomorrow. An in doing so for myself, hopefully also for those people who also had those images.”

In an earlier chat, Dylan had implied that it was a “new time,” in which people were united in their political thinking. I mentioned a comment by a member of the Committee, that much of the country still needed turning around, as evidenced by the overwhelming reelection of Richard Nixon, after four years of fairly obvious nonsense, and by the underwhelming call, at this point, for his removal.

“Sure,” Dylan agreed, “there’s still a message. But the same electric spark that went off back then could still go off again – the spark that led to nothing. Our kids will probably protest, too. Protest is an old thing. Sometimes protest is deeper, or different — the Haymarket Riot, the Russian Revolution, the Civil War — that’s protest.

“There’s always a need for protest songs. You just gotta tap it.”

What, I asked Dylan, had he been doing to keep his vocal chords in shape? Had he been singing regularly, at home, through the years off the stage? He said he hadn’t. “We’ve been through the big tours before,” he said. “Actually, I’d like to have a little club where I could sing when I felt like it.”

What about the changes his voice and vocal style have gone through over the past few albums? Dylan looked past me, then out the window again. “That’s a good question. I don’t know. I could only guess — if it has changed. I’ve never gone for having a great voice, for cultivating one. I’m still not doing it now.”

As for the rearrangements of songs, the harder, snappier way he’s singing some of the older songs: “You’ll always stretch things out or cut it up, just to keep interested. If you can’t stay interested that way, you’ll have to lose track. But I’m me now, that’s the way it comes out.”

What? You’re meaner now?

“What? Oh. no I’m me now,” Dylan laughed. He could just see the headline.

Is Dylan planning to stay in Malibu?

“No,” he said, “we’re just there temporarily. It was cold in New York and we didn’t want to go back there after Mexico [and the shooting of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid]. I can’t stay away from New York!”

How did he get the role of Alias in the Sam Peckinpah film?

“Just one thing into another. [Pause] They took me on because I was a big name. I’ve seen myself on screen; movies don’t impress me. That part didn’t scare me off at all. I just hoped I didn’t get shot during the movie.

“I don’t know who I played. I tried to play whoever it was in the story, but I guess it’s known fact in history that there was nobody who was the character I played in the story.

“No, I don’t want to be a movie star,” he continued, “but I’ve got a vision to put up on the screen. Someday we’ll get around to doing it. The Peckinpah experience was valuable, in terms of getting near the big action.”

Would Dylan do more films before tackling his “vision”?

“The Peckinpah movie brought me as close as I’ll get,” he said. “I’ve been on sets of movies and TV shows, but they were small-time compared. They spent $4, 5 million on Billy The Kid, had all the top people. So that was really heavy, gave me that vibration. When I finally do mine, it’ll have that vibration.”

What about his latest business moves?

“I don’t think about it,” said Dylan. “Just had to get out of some legal hassles from back in the old days.”

Dylan, in earlier announcements, had planned to have his own label, ironically named Ashes & Sand, the name of the holding company he’d set up back in the old, Albert Grossman days. Dylan smiled, laughing at himself:

“That only lasted a quick few minutes,” he agreed.

What were the advantages to having his own label? Was Dylan advised by an outside party to form his own company? “I advised myself it was a good thing, and then I advised myself that it wasn’t. I just didn’t need it.”

Dylan does, however, maintain an interest in spotting — and helping — new talent. If Ashes & Sand were a reality, Dylan said, he’d want Leon Redbone.

“Leon interests me,” he said. “I’ve heard he’s anywhere from 25 to 60. I’ve been this close” – Dylan held his hands out, a foot and a half apart – “and I can’t tell. But you gotta see him. He does old Jimmie Rodgers, then turns around and does a Robert Johnson. Redbone had surfaced at various folk festivals in the past few years and is every bit the mystery that Dylan indicates.

And the other Leon, Leon Russell, who produced only a couple of cuts with Dylan?

“Leon and I, we didn’t do that much.” Dylan couldn’t remember exactly what they’d done, beyond “Watching the River Flow” and “When I Paint My Masterpiece.”

“It went fine, it was as good as it could’ve been expected to be. But the producers that have meant the most to me are Tom Wilson, John Hammond and Bob Johnston. They were there. They were there when . . . well, it’s like a small group of friends.”

What about the Dylan album, the collection of Self Portrait outtakes Columbia had released on the eve of the Dylan tour, after Dylan split from the label to go with Ashes & Sand, and then Asylum? Dave Geffen had charged Columbia with holding the album over Dylan’s head, threatening to release it unless he re-signed his contract. “That’s when they sealed their doom,” he said. Geffen, speaking on Dylan’s behalf earlier in the tour, had characterized Dylan’s response to the album as utter repulsion. “He disclaims it,” Geffen said. “He doesn’t know that Dylan.”

(Columbia’s vice president of A&R, Charles Koppelman, denied Geffen’s allegations. The album was delayed, at Dylan’s request, during contract talks, he said, but Dylan had never expressed disapproval with the album itself. “He called Goddard [Lieberson, president of Columbia] and said he didn’t mind us at all putting out the album,” Koppelman said. The executive couldn’t offer much explanation for the sloppiness of the album: the lack of information on dates of recording, backup musicians and even composers’ credits. “We had a lack of information ourselves,” he said. Columbia, Koppelman said, will continue to release Dylan material. “We have a fairly good amount of tape,” including live concerts and “a group of tapes where he performed with other well-known performers. We have a good few albums,” said Koppelman.)

Dylan described the material on Dylan as outtakes, sung “just to warm up,” he said. “They were just not to be used. I thought it was well understood.” But, he said, he couldn’t understand all the critical downgrading of the album.

“I didn’t think it was that bad, really!” he said.

Dylan said he thought Clive Davis, the president of Columbia Records, fired last May for alleged “financial malfeasance,” was “a scapegoat.” But even if Davis was still at Columbia, he said, he would’ve left the label. “It was long overdue,” he said. “Just a gut feeling it was time to go on. I suspected they were doing more talk than action. Just released ‘em and that’s all. I got a feeling they didn’t care whether I stayed there or not.”

As for David Geffen: “He’s there.” What does “there” mean?

“Whatever it takes to be there.”

Has he signed a contract with Asylum, as Geffen said?

“I’m not so sure we signed one. I don’t sign anything these days.”

It’s been a tour of luck and coincidences, running into Neil Young’s father, Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan himself. But there was also the leaflet I picked up outside the Nickelodeon, blood-red headlined: 40 DAYS! AND NINEVEH SHALL BE DESTROYED. It was dated November 12th and distributed by the Children of God, a local religion franchise. “40 Days,” of course, was Ronnie Hawkins’ first major hit, dated June, 1959.

Here, sitting with Dylan, I also thought about the headlines that had surfaced upon his arrival in Philadelphia and Toronto. In Philly, the Evening Bulletin carried a story: “Fewer Jews Reported in Philadelphia Area” (population decreased 7% in the last year). In Toronto, Dylan was greeted with this headline in the Globe and Mail: “Apathy, Alienation Reported Rampant Among Young Jews.”

“It is not the slightest bit surprising (but nonetheless shocking and depressing) that no less than 88% [of converts to Christianity] consider the Jewish religion ‘valueless,’” said the report issued by P’eylim of Canada, a Toronto Jewish organization.

Religious images have long been part of Bob Dylan’s music. In 1971, he visited the Wailing Wall in Israel. Now, on tour, he was rumored to be planning on handing over his cut of the profits to the Israeli cause; that he was an “ultra-Zionist.”

“I’m not sure what a Zionist really is,” he said, putting down the rumors as “just gossip.” As for the religious images that surface regularly in his music, he commented, after a good pause: “Religion to me is a fleeting thing. Can’t nail it down. It’s in me and out of me. It does give me, on the surface, some images, but I don’t know to what degree.”

“Like da Vinci going in to paint the Last Supper. Until he finishes it, no one knows what the Last Supper is. He goes out and finds 12 guys, puts them around this table, and there’s your Last Supper. Or Moses. He found a guy and painted him, and, forever, that guy will be Moses. But why Moses, or the Last Supper? Why not a flower? Or a tree?”

Dylan had earlier mentioned an astrological influence on his return to active performance, the removal of an obstacle, Saturn, in his planetary system. I asked him to elaborate.

“I can’t read anybody’s chart,” he said, “but the thing about Saturn is, I didn’t know what it was at the time, or I would’ve gone somewhere away. It’s a big, heavy obstacle that comes into your chain of events that fucks you up in a big way. It came into my chart a few years ago and just flew off again a couple of months ago.”

Who’d clued him in on Saturn?

“Someone very dear to me.”

Interesting article from the Sept. 7, 2006 issue of Rolling Stone (#1008), around the time of the release of Modern Times.
The ever mercurial, ever fascinating Bob Dylan…

 

The legend comes to grips with his iconic status; an intimate conversation prior to the release of the new Modern Times.

 

“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 times,” 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 any more,” 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.”

 

Dylan and his favorite-band-ever are just a few days from undertaking another tour, one that will be well under way by the time Modern Times is released in late August. I’ve always wanted to ask: When a song suddenly appears on a given evening’s set list, retrieved from among the hundreds in his back catalog, is it because Dylan’s been listening to his old records? “I don’t listen to any of my records. When you’re inside of it, all you’re listening to is a replica. I don’t know why somebody would look at the movies they make – you don’t read your books, do you?” Point taken. He expands on the explanation he offered for “Blind Willie McTell”: “Strangely enough, sometimes we’ll hear a cover of a song and figure we can do it just as well. If somebody else thought so highly of it, why don’t I? Some of these arrangements I just take. The Dead did a lot of my songs, and we’d just take the whole arrangement, because they did it better than me. Jerry Garcia could hear the song in all my bad recordings, the song that was buried there. So if I want to sing something different, I just bring out one of them Dead records and see which one I wanna do. I never do that with my records.” Speaking of which: “I’ve heard it said, you’ve probably heard it said, that all the arrangements change night after night. Well, that’s a bunch of bullshit, they don’t know what they’re talkin’ about. The arrangements don’t change night after night. The rhythmic structures are different, that’s all. You can’t change the arrangement night after night – it’s impossible.”

Dylan points out that whether a song comes across for a given listener on a given night depends on where exactly they’re sitting. “I can’t stand to play arenas, but I do play ‘em. But I know that’s not where music’s supposed to be. It’s not meant to be heard in football stadiums, it’s not ‘Hey, how are you doin’ tonight, Cleveland?’ Nobody gives a shit how you’re doin’ tonight in Cleveland.” He grins and rolls his eyes, to let me know he knows he’s teasing at Spinal Tap heresy. Then he plunges deeper. “They say, ‘Dylan never talks.’ What the hell is there to say? That’s not the reason an artist is in front of people.” The words seem brash, but his tone is nearly pleading. “An artist has come for a different purpose. Maybe a self-help group – maybe a Dr. Phil – would say, ‘How you doin’?’ I don’t want to get harsh and say I don’t care. You do care, you care in a big way, otherwise you wouldn’t be there. But it’s a different kind of connection. It’s not a light thing.” He considers further. “It’s alive every night, or it feels alive every night.” Pause. “It becomes risky. I mean, you risk your life to play music, if you’re doing it in the right way.” I ask about the minor-league baseball stadiums he’s playing in the new tour’s first swing: Do they provide the sound he’s looking for? “Not really, not in the open air. The best sound you can get is an intimate club room, where you’ve got four walls and the sound just bounces. That’s the way this music is meant to be heard.” Then Dylan turns comedian again, the guy newly familiar to listeners of his XM satellite radio show, whose casual verbal riffs culminate in vaudeville one-liners. “I wouldn’t want to play a really small room, like ten people. Unless it was, you know, $50,000 a ticket or something.”

 

Let me take a moment and reintroduce myself, your interviewer and guide here. I’m a forty-two-year-old moonlighting novelist, and a lifelong Dylan fan, but one who, it must be emphasized, doesn’t remember the Sixties. I’m no longer a young man, but I am young for the job I’m doing here. My parents were Dylan fans, and my first taste of his music came through their LPs – I settled on Nashville Skyline, because it looked friendly. The first Dylan record I was able to respond to as new – to witness its arrival in stores and reception in magazines, and therefore to make my own – was 1979’s Slow Train Coming. As a fan in my early twenties, I digested Dylan’s catalog to that point and concluded that its panoply of styles and stances was itself the truest measure of his genius – call us the Biograph generation, if you like. In other words, the struggle to capture Dylan and his art like smoke in one particular bottle or another seemed laughable to me, a mistaken skirmish fought before it had become clear that mercurial responsiveness – anchored only by the existential commitment to the act of connection in the present moment – was the gift of freedom his songs had promised all along. To deny it to the man himself would be absurd.

By the time I required anything of Bob Dylan, it was the mid-Eighties, and I merely required him to be good. Which, in the mid-Eighties, Dylan kind of wasn’t. I recall taking home Empire Burlesque and struggling to discern songwriting greatness under the glittery murk of Arthur Baker’s production, a struggle I lost. The first time I saw Dylan in concert, it was, yes, in a football stadium in Oakland, with the Grateful Dead. By the time of 1988’s Down in the Groove, the album’s worst song might have seemed to describe my plight as fan: I was in love with the ugliest girl in the world.

Nevertheless, Eighties Dylan was my Dylan, and I bore down hard on what was there. Contrary to what you may have heard (in “Chronicles: Volume One,” among other detractors), there was water in that desert. From scattered tracks like “Rank Strangers to Me,” “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” and “Brownsville Girl,” to cassette-tape miracles like “Lord Protect My Child” and “Foot of Pride” (both later to surface on The Bootleg Series), to a version of “San Francisco Bay Blues” I was lucky enough to catch live in Berkeley, to a blistering take on Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Don’t Start Me to Talkin’ ” on Late Night with David Letterman, the irony is not only that “bad” Dylan was often astonishingly good. It is that his then-seemingly-rudderless exploration of roots-music sources can now be seen to point unerringly to the triumphs to come – I mean the triumphs of now. Not that Dylan himself would care to retrace those steps. When I gushed about the Sonny Boy Williamson moment on Letterman, he gaped, plainly amazed, and said, “I played that?”

 

So, the drama of my projected relationship to my hero, thin as it may seem to those steeped in the Sixties or Seventies listeners’ sense of multiple betrayals – he’s gone Electric! Country-Domestic-Unavailable! Christian! – was the one Dylan described to David Gates of Newsweek in 1997, and in the Oh Mercy chapter of his memoir, “Chronicles” – the relocation and repossession of his voice and of his will to compose and perform, as enacted gradually through the Nineties. Early in that decade it might have seemed he’d quit, or at least taken refuge or solace in the solo acoustic folk records he’d begun making in his garage: Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong. Live shows in what had become “The Never Ending Tour” were stronger and stronger in those years, but new songs were scarce. Then came Time Out of Mind, an album as cohesive – and ample – as any he’d ever recorded. When that was followed by Love and Theft, and then “Chronicles,” a reasonable Dylan fan might conclude he was living in the best of all possible worlds. In fact, with the satellite radio show beaming into our homes – Dylan’s promised to do fifty of the things! – Dylan can be said to have delivered more of his voice and his heart to his audience in the past decade than ever before, and more than anyone might have reasonably dared to hope. “Well, isn’t that funny,” Dylan snorts when I mention “the myth of inaccessibility.” “I’ve just seen that Wenner Books published a book of interviews with me that’s that big.” He stretches out his hands to show me. “What happened to this inaccessibility? Isn’t there a dichotomy there?

Yet it’s awfully easy, taking the role of Dylan’s interviewer, to feel oneself playing surrogate for an audience that has never quit holding its hero to an impossible standard: The more he offers, the more we want. The greatest artist of my lifetime has given me anything I could ever have thought to ask, and yet here I sit, somehow brokering between him and the expectations neither of us can pretend don’t exist. “If I’ve got any kind of attitude about me – or about what I do, what I perform, what I sing, on any level, my attitude is, compare it to somebody else! Don’t compare it to me. Are you going to compare Neil Young to Neil Young? Compare it to somebody else, compare it to Beck – which I like – or whoever else is on his level. This record should be compared to the artists who are working on the same ground. I’ll take it any way it comes, but compare it to that. That’s what everybody’s record should be, if they’re really serious about what they’re doing. Let’s face it, you’re either serious about what you’re doing or you’re not serious about what you’re doing. And you can’t mix the two. And life is short.”

I can’t help but wonder if he’s lately been reconditioned by the success of the Martin Scorsese No Direction Home documentary, to feel again the vivid discomfort of his unwanted savior’s role. “You know, everybody makes a big deal about the Sixties. The Sixties, it’s like the Civil War days. But, I mean, you’re talking to a person who owns the Sixties. Did I ever want to acquire the Sixties? No. But I own the Sixties – who’s going to argue with me?” He charms me with another joke: “I’ll give ‘em to you if you want ‘em. You can have ‘em.” For Dylan, as ever, what matters is the work, not in some archival sense, but in its present life. “My old songs, they’ve got something – I agree, they’ve got something! I think my songs have been covered – maybe not as much as ‘White Christmas’ or ‘Stardust,’ but there’s a list of over 5,000 recordings. That’s a lot of people covering your songs, they must have something. If I was me, I’d cover my songs too. A lot of these songs I wrote in 1961 and ‘62 and ‘64, and 1973, and 1985, I can still play a lot of those songs – well, how many other artists made songs during that time? How many do you hear today? I love Marvin Gaye, I love all that stuff. But how often are you gonna hear ‘What’s Going On’? I mean, who sings it? Who sings ‘Tracks of My Tears’? Where is that being sung tonight?”  

 

He’s still working to plumb the fullest truth in the matter of his adventures in the recording studio. “I’ve had a rough time recording. I’ve managed to come up with songs, but I’ve had a rough time recording. But maybe it should be that way. Because other stuff which sounds incredible, that can move you to tears – for all those who were knocked off our feet by listening to music from yesteryear, how many of those songs are really good? Or was it just the record that was great? Well, the record was great. The record was an art form. And you know, when all’s said and done, maybe I was never part of that art form, because my records really weren’t artistic at all. They were just documentation. Maybe bad players playing bad changes, but still something coming through. And the something that’s coming through, for me today, was to make it just as real. To show you how it’s real.” Dylan muses on the fate of art in posterity. “How many people can look at the Mona Lisa? You ever been there? I mean, maybe, like, three people can see it at once. And yet, how long has that painting been around? More people have seen that painting than have ever listened to, let’s name somebody – I don’t want to say Alicia Keys – say, Michael Jackson. More people have ever seen the Mona Lisa than ever listened to Michael Jackson. And only three people can see it at once. Talk about impact.”

Conversation about painting leads to conversation about other forms. “That’s what I like about books, there’s no noise in it. Whatever you put on the page, it’s like making a painting. Nobody can change it. Writing a book is the same way, it’s written in stone – it might as well be! It’s never gonna change. One’s not gonna be different in tone than another, you’re not gonna have to turn this one up louder to read it.” Dylan savored the reception of “Chronicles.” “Most people who write about music, they have no idea what it feels like to play it. But with the book I wrote, I thought, ‘The people who are writing reviews of this book, man, they know what the hell they’re talking about.’ It spoils you. They know how to write a book, they know more about it than me. The reviews of this book, some of ‘em almost made me cry – in a good way. I’d never felt that from a music critic, ever.”

While my private guess would have been that Dylan had satisfied the scribbling impulse (or as he says on Modern Times, “I’ve already confessed/No need to confess again”), in fact he seems to be deep into planning for a “Chronicles: Volume Two.” “I think I can go back to the Blonde on Blonde album – that’s probably about as far back as I can go on the next book. Then I’ll probably go forward. I thought of an interesting time. I made this record, Under the Red Sky, with Don Was, but at the same time I was also doing the Wilburys record. I don’t know how it happened that I got into both albums at the same time. I worked with George [Harrison] and Jeff [Lynne] during the day – everything had to be done in one day, the track and the song had to be written in one day, and then I’d go down and see Don Was, and I felt like I was walking into a wall. He’d have a different band for me to play with every day, a lot of all-stars, for no particular purpose. Back then I wasn’t bringing anything at all into the studio, I was completely disillusioned. I’d let someone else take control of it all and just come up with lyrics to the melody of the song. He’d say, ‘What do you want to cut?’ – well, I wouldn’t have anything to cut, but I’d be so beat down from being up with the Wilburys that I’d just come up with some track, and everybody would fall in behind that track, oh, my God.” He laughs. “It was sort of contrary to the Wilburys scene, which was being done in a mansion up in the hills. Then I’d go down to these other sessions, and they were in this cavelike studio down in Hollywood, where I’d spend the rest of the night, and then try to get some sleep. Both projects suffered some. Too many people in the room, too many musicians, too many egos, ego-driven musicians that just wanted to play their thing, and it definitely wasn’t my cup of tea, but that’s the record I’m going to feature.”

Now, this may be the place for me to mention that I find Side Two of Under the Red Sky one of the hidden treasures of Dylan’s catalog. The album’s closer, a garrulous but mysterious jump-blues called “Cat’s in the Well,” in particular, wouldn’t be at all out of place on Love and Theft or Modern Times. But as he’s told me, Dylan doesn’t listen to the records. And unlike me, he claims no familiarity with “The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia.” (“Those are not the circles I really move around in,” he chuckles when I ask. “That’s not something that would overlap with my life.”) But just as when he praises his current band as his absolute best – an evaluation supporters of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, not to mention Garth Hudson and Rick Danko, et al., might take issue with – I’ve come to feel that Dylan’s sweeping simplifications of his own journey’s story are outstandingly healthy ones. Puncturing myths, boycotting analysis and ignoring chronology are likely part of a long and lately quite successful campaign not to be incarcerated within his own legend. Dylan’s greatest accomplishment since his Sixties apotheosis may simply be that he has claimed his story as his own. (Think of him howling the first line of “Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine” upon his return to the stage during the 1974 tour: “You say you love me and you’re thinkin’ of me/But you know you could be wroooonngg!“). I take our conversation today the way I took “Chronicles,” and the long journal-song “Highlands”: as vivid and generous reports on the state of Bob Dylan and his feelings in the present moment.

In other words, never mind that I think Under the Red Sky is pretty good. After that early-Nineties disillusionment, how did he decide to record Time Out of Mind? “They gave me another contract, which I didn’t really want. I didn’t want to record anymore, I didn’t see any point to it, but lo and behold they made me an offer and it was hard to refuse. I’d worked with [Daniel] Lanois before, and I thought he might be able to bring that magic to this record. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll give it a try.’ There must have been twelve, fifteen musicians in that room – four drummers notwithstanding. I really don’t know how we got anything out of that.” He pauses to consider the record’s reception. Released just after a much-publicized health scare, the album’s doomy lyrics were widely taken as a musical wrestling match with the angel of death. “I mean, it was perceived as me being some chronic invalid, or crawling on bleeding knees. But that was never the case.” I mention that some are already describing the new album as the third in a trilogy, beginning with Time Out of Mind. Dylan demurs: “Time Out of Mind was me getting back in and fighting my way out of the corner. But by the time I made Love and Theft, I was out of the corner. On this record, I ain’t nowhere, you can’t find me anywhere, because I’m way gone from the corner.” He still toys with the notion I’ve put before him. “I would think more of Love and Theft as the beginning of a trilogy, if there’s going to be a trilogy.” Then swiftly gives himself an out: “If I decide I want to go back into the studio.”

 

In a day of circular talk we’ve circled back to the new record, and I venture to ask him again about certain motifs. Modern Times shades Love and Theft’s jocular, affectionate vibe into more ominous territory, the language of murder ballads and Edgar Allan Poe: foes and slaughter, haunted gardens and ghosts. Old blues and ballads are quoted liberally, like second nature. “I didn’t feel limited this time, or I felt limited in the way that you want to narrow your scope down, you don’t want to muddle things up, you want every line to be clear and every line to be purposeful. This is the way I feel someplace in me, in my genealogy – a lot of us don’t have the murderous instinct, but we wouldn’t mind having the license to kill. I just let the lyrics go, and when I was singing them, they seemed to have an ancient presence.” Dylan seems to feel he dwells in a body haunted like a house by his bardlike musical precursors. “Those songs are just in my genes, and I couldn’t stop them comin’ out. In a reincarnative kind of way, maybe. The songs have got some kind of a pedigree to them. But that pedigree stuff, that only works so far. You can go back to the ten-hundreds, and people only had one name. Nobody’s gonna tell you they’re going to go back further than when people had one name.” This reply puts an effective end to my connect-the-dots queries about his musical influences. I tell him that despite the talk of enemies, I found in the new record a generosity of spirit, even a sense of acceptance. He consents, barely. “Yeah. You got to accept it yourself before you can expect anybody else to accept it. And in the long run, it’s merely a record. Lyrics go by quick.”

When all is said and done, Bob Dylan is keen that I understand where he’s coming from, and for me to understand that, I have to grasp what he saw in the artists who went before him. “If you think about all the artists that recorded in the Forties and the Thirties, and in the Fifties, you had big bands, sure, but they were the vision of one man – I mean, the Duke Ellington band was the vision of one man, the Louis Armstrong band, it was the individual voice of Louis Armstrong. And going into all the rhythm & blues stuff, and the rockabilly stuff, the stuff that trained me to do what I do, that was all individually based. That was what you heard – the individual crying in the wilderness. So that’s kind of lost too. I mean, who’s the last individual performer that you can think of – Elton John, maybe? I’m talking about artists with the willpower not to conform to anybody’s reality but their own. Patsy Cline and Billy Lee Riley. Plato and Socrates, Whitman and Emerson. Slim Harpo and Donald Trump. It’s a lost art form. I don’t know who else does it beside myself, to tell you the truth.” Is he satisfied? “I always wanted to stop when I was on top. I didn’t want to fade away. I didn’t want to be a has-been, I wanted to be somebody who’d never be forgotten. I feel that, one way or another, it’s OK now, I’ve done what I wanted for myself.”

These remarks, it should be noted, are yet another occasion for laughter. “I see that I could stop touring at any time, but then, I don’t really feel like it right now.” Short of promising the third part of the trilogy-in-progress, this is good enough news for me. May the Never Ending Tour never end. “I think I’m in my middle years now,” Bob Dylan tells me. “I’ve got no retirement plans.”

 

FOOTNOTE: So what’s Bob Dylan’s favorite baseball team, anyway? “The problem with baseball teams is all the players get traded, and what your favorite team used to be – a couple of guys you really liked on the team, they’re not on the team now – and you can’t possibly make that team your favorite team. It’s like your favorite uniform. I mean…yeah  ..I like Detroit. Though I like Ozzie [Guillen] as a manager. And I don’t know how anybody can’t like Derek [Jeter]. I’d rather have him on my team than anybody.”  

Jonathan Lethem

This comes from Rolling Stone, March 4, 1971 (issue #77), about the premiere of his concert film Eat the Document, which had been made years earlier and focused on Dylan’s 1966 world tour. This film has remained obscure ever since…

 

Dylan Film, Opening Night: Fast on the Eye

 

It was an early evening rain, night comin’ in a-fallin’, and merely on the basis of short advance announcements in Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and on Howard Smith’s FM radio show, a couple of thousand persons showed up at the Academy of Music on February 8th to catch Dylan’s one-hour color film Eat the Document, shown twice at 7:00 and 9:00 with proceeds going to a Pike County citizen’s group which has been set up to stop strip mining in the South.

Jerry Rubin and Gordon Lightfoot where there. A. J. Weberman (“name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him”), so-called Minister of Defense of the so-called Dylan Liberation Front was standing under the marquee wearing his FREE BOB DYLAN button and passing out a leaflet which concluded “The movie you are about to see is about the old Dylan – a beautiful right-on dude who sang the truth and gave a lot of his bread to SNCC, but the new Dylan, the post-accident Dylan, is a stoned Pig.”

The Academy of Music, with its cavernous dome and its karmic memories of the Chords and the Valentines, early Fifties rock and roll shows rubbed and ingrained into the seats, was the perfect setting for this revisitation of old Dylan lovers hoping to retrieve their fantasies of their hero who used to “meet on edges.” And there everyone was with that “restless hungry feeling,” waiting for some miracle, so called Dylan Liberation Front members in the front rows, confusion boats, kneeling blood hounds, mutiny from stem to bow – all of Dylan’s images coming home to roost.

The Band’s manager, John Taplin, who organized the screening, had announced we were going to see a work print. The first images of the film came on the screen, out of focus, no sound, and it was positively 14th Street. “Fix it, you bastards!” some shouted. Other friendly voices screamed: “Get the shit together”; “I see why ABC didn’t buy this piece of shit”; “Let’s see him shoot up!” Someone behind me was talking about buying the $2 pirate edition of Dylan’s “liberated” novel “Tarantula.” A revolution in the Academy of Music.

The projector focused and started again, and on came a very special film conveying the sense of a private diary, both the subject and its filmic embodiment being that of a true night journey through mad, disjointed landscapes, a magic swirling ship of jump-cuts, “ready for to fade.” Dylan said: “We cut it fast on the eye.”

The quasi-methedrine logic of Eat the Document suggests a self-consciously disintegrating structure, an anti-documentary that uses the star image in order to de-mystify and decompose it. Thus Dylan’s presence is undermined for any easy identification by means of juxtaposing images from Australia with say a scene in an English train. Needless to say the film’s structure corresponds to what Dylan must have experienced on this mixed up confusion tour.

Using footage taken mainly by Donn Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back) during Dylan’s 1966 world tour with the Band both Dylan and editor friend Howard Alk retired to Woodstock and shortly after Dylan’s motorcycle accident, using editing ideas as their map they constructed a film that suggests the works of Man Ray, Ron Rice and William Burroughs with its insistence on perceiving a multitude of concrete details and elliptical progressions. What one remembers are silhouetted figures, a beautiful, almost androgynous Dylan with cigarette and shades, police dogs brutalizing a man in a bagpipe parade, a man wearing a sandwich board reading “It is appointed unto men once to die.” Dylan reading a paper in bed, a man in a war helmet, a cemetery, dogs on leashes, girls’ faces, fans commenting on Dylan’s music outside Royal Albert Hall (“It was rubbish”; “He was great, better than Presley”) and above all the repeating images of travel – a train steaming and whistling across country, scores of cars with their one too many windows which one is always looking through. And in on scene, which epitomizes the sense the film gives of one’s watching postcards of the hanging, the camera pans over people’s hands as they drunkenly pass plates across a Last Supper length table, and suddenly at the table’s corner is Dylan in shades, shrouded in a private world, looking abstractedly and wanly to the, side.

The soundtrack presents dream-like fragments of speech: “Have you ever heard of me?…I heard you booing…I can ‘t believe that everyone makes it so difficult…I’m sorry for everything I’ve done.” “Are you ever yourself at any time?” someone questions him, and Dylan shrugs “Why are you here?” another reporter asks to which Dylan says: “I take orders from someone on the telephone, but I never see him. He calls up and just tells me where to go.” And we’re back on the Nova Express.

The film’s fantastic music is cut off sometimes returning in similar elliptical fashion. The audience at the Academy of Music booed when those amazing Liverpool versions featuring Dylan and the Band playing “Like a Rolling Stone,” “One Too Many Mornings” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” were broken off abruptly. Other performances are briefly shown as well: “Tell Me Mama” and “Mr Jones” with the Band at Albert Hall, three beautiful acoustic numbers by Dylan accompanied by Robbie Robertson, Johnny Cash and Dylan singing “I Still Miss Someone.” But most of the people at the Academy of Music wanted to see a 1966 Dylan concert and not, what is equally powerful, Dylan’s particular filmic perceptions.

Most of these numbers, as well as the short fragments showing John Lennon and Dylan zonked out in the back of a car are small scenes taken from longer rushes that Donn Pennebaker has been working on in “documentary” style, in a wonderful, still unfinished and unreleased film. Both Dylan’s and Pennebaker’s films go well together.

“I shot most of the film,” Pennebaker says, “but it was pretty much Dylan directing what went on. And editing is all Dylan’s. Dylan wanted Eat the Document to show what TV never does, to snap people’s head a bit. It’s Dylan’s logic. And it’s a little like a mystery tour, really an extraordinary event. To worry about whether it’s good or bad is ridiculous. I find the film arresting, and I’m knocked out that he did it. Unlike my film which I’m making in order to see a kind of record preserved, Dylan’s film is complete. If someone had bought “Tarantula” and made a film of it that would be one thing. But in Eat the Document, Dylan is making you see things with his own funky kind of sense.”

At the beginning of the showing at the Academy of Music, Taplin announced that the film was “a little too freaky for ABC at that time, and they rejected it.”

“That’s a lie,” said Hubbell Robinson, who was executive producer for ABC’s Stage 67, the 90-minute program to which Eat the Document was originally contracted. “We didn’t know what we had,” Robinson recalled, “because when we saw the film in the fall of ‘66 it wasn’t yet edited. By that time we had to make other programming commitments to producers for the spring of ‘67 and Dylan didn’t know what the film would be and when it would be finished. But we were definitely interested in the film.”

There’s a possibility that Eat the Document will be distributed in the future. When it is released all the Mr. Joneses, whether they’re 14 or 64, will be wondering why Dylan didn’t just make a normal TV “music” film which anyone else could have made, when in fact Eat the Document is a near visual equivalent of some of the songs Dylan was singing on Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. 

 

Jonathan Cott

Taken from the Crawdaddy! website, Oct. 3, 2007, this article talks about Dylan’s excellent satellite radio program, Theme Time Radio Hour… 

 

It is enough just to hear his laugh again—adenoidal, wracked rasp of Solomon sense and parched good times drifting over the static airwaves from California to New England and every burg in between. No idiot winds blowing here, just an old man cracking wise over the abyss that is America today. He can afford to, this man with nothing left to prove again. Jaded as Job must’ve been with seen-it-all wisdom, his own myth is a long-defiant invention of folkloric dimension as he spins the tallest of tales, and songs, over the radio today—just like he did in his apocalyptic ‘60s, his Rolling-Thunder ‘70s, his burned-out ‘80s, his rekindled ‘90s, and on into the distant hope of this new century…

I can only be writing about one man, Mr. Bob Dylan, and his rabble-rousing storyteller’s return to vintage form with his program on the Theme Time Radio Hour weekly satellite radio show. When rumors of his show, with its tagline of “Dreams, schemes, themes,” leaked out over the news a few years ago, I remember thinking it seemed too good to be true. Dylan as DJ? As chatty host? C’mon. Besides being exalted for his epic canon of classics and a career spanning longer than those young pup Stones (not to mention in relevance), he is a man notorious for his misanthropic silence on stage, for his curmudgeonly ways and rapier wit, and for his willful refusal to do anything, ever, that he doesn’t want to do.

Integrity and genius, that’s Dylan squared. But it doesn’t make him an easy man to follow or understand. His restlessness burns on, leaving many of us stranded in his footprints. And some of us revel in that, too.

Bob is one of the lone holdouts against the ravenous Pop Culture Combine. Consider his solo achievements—here’s a guy who has been legendarily famous since his early 20s, he has been poked, prodded, criticized, and worshipped, many times over. Yet his own tongue-in-cheek self-description of being a “song and dance man” keeps on keepin’ us guessing. If you’ve ever witnessed one of his cockeyed, inspired kamikaze speeches at an awards show like the Grammy’s, when the audience holds its collective breath wondering what he might dare say next, then you know the obvious delight Bob still takes in disturbing the peace any way he can, while at the same time managing to continually make most artists seem tame.

Would he succumb to the pop culture virus now? Aficionados wondered. In the last few years, he somehow surprised us all, time and time again. There was his artistic resurgence with Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times. Or consider his Never Ending Tour that started way back in ’88 and continues on now as he travels America’s back roads and ballparks. And his biggest surprise, his seemingly perverse decision to lease his music for a Victoria’s Secret commercial. (Though with his uncanny, prophetic sense, Dylan once joked in one of his patented, Dadaist, stoned, high-wire press conferences in 1965 that if he ever did sell his music it would only be for ladies’ undergarments. Why not? Maybe he was more serious than we knew. We couldn’t tell. Just like back then, we couldn’t tell when he said he’s as good a singer as Caruso because he could hold his breath longer. Drum roll and chuckles. Either way, it’s as if he’s been biding his time for the last 40 years, just waiting to be courted by the right lingerie company. Chutzpah? Yeah, he built his career on that.)

And yet, to hear his crusty, ruined voice shine out over a satellite frequency is even more startling than seeing his weary frame juxtaposed against the young, sexy limbs of lingerie models on television. Introduced as if in a noir setting with drizzling rain falling on city streets, and narrated by Ellen Barkin and her sultry voice, Theme Time Radio Hour ricochets off the airwaves in a shotgun blast of vaudevillian one-liners, tender recollections, historical anecdotes, and absurdist humor.

Not to mention the music he chooses each episode, which jump-cuts from ‘40s swing band strolls to ‘50s Sun Records rockabilly to ’06 singer/songwriters roots fare. Imagine some pirate, twilight zone radio station that beams down Billie Holliday, Sinatra, Buck Owens, the Clash, and Bruce, among myriad other galaxies, into our XM frequencies. His encyclopedic musical knowledge and rough, off-kilter charm was always obvious in song, but he makes it moonshine-clear here every week.

Each episode has its specific theme, whether “Baseball,” “Divorce,” “Dogs,” “Sleep,” or “Luck,” and plays out like a compressed, panoramic journey of Americana with your favorite, slightly crazed uncle as the guide. He not only spins the songs, but he whispers the secrets behind them. And like the poet he is, he recites lyrics before and after songs, somehow transforming mundane phrases into a bard’s verse. He also answers fan email on the show and gives advice as he cues up an Abbot and Costello bit, or a Nietzsche quote, or sings “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in all his cracked, nasal, raging glory. (Cooperstown Baseball’s Shrine even recently inducted the “Baseball” episode into its Hall of Fame archives.)

While answering an email on the “Friends and Neighbors” show, he defines the parameters of his playlist. The listener’s question asks, “Love the show, but why do you play so many obscure artists?” Bob spells it out, “That’s a fair question, Vernon. First of all, why should we play things you can hear anywhere else? On the other hand, the artists I play are interesting and deserve their moment in the sun—besides; I’ll bet they’re not obscure to their friends and neighbors.”

I still have yet to try the mint julep recipe he reeled off during the “Drinking” episode, but I damn sure have the ink-scrawled note I copied the ingredients on. Kentucky is 10 minutes dead south, so maybe I’ll wait for my first Derby. But here it is straight from the bartender’s mouth: “First you take four mint sprigs, two and a half ounces of bourbon—I prefer three—a tablespoon of powdered sugar, and a tablespoon of water; you put the mint leaves, sugar, and water in a Collins glass; you fill the glass with shaved or crushed ice and then add bourbon, top that off with more ice—and I like to garnish mine with a mint sprig, serve it with a straw. Two or three of those and anything sounds good.” Two to go, Bob. Thanks.

Check out just a few more of his cornball, throwaway treasures interspersed through the shows: “I just came back from a pleasure trip—took my mother-in-law to the airport.” And introducing a favorite rapper, he chants, “Here’s LL Cool J. Don’t call it a comeback. He’s been here for years, rockin’ his peers, puttin’ them in fear, makin’ tears rain down like a monsoon, explosions overpowerin’ the competition. LL Cool J is towerin’.”

To call his show “eclectic” doesn’t do justice to his genre-skipping between the crackling 45s, the analog LPs, and the digital discs. But he’s been doing this from the beginning in some form or another, adapting traditional songs, eclipsing them like some musical palimpsest, wiping away and always adding, and finally mutating them into his own original vision.

Whether it’s Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, or Woody Guthrie, Dylan mines their nuggets of truth and filters them with a master’s mad alchemy. It’s true he favors the music he heard in his youth on many of the shows, meaning the 1950s generation of hard blues, raw country, and hiccupping rockabilly. In his memoir, Chronicles, he writes, “I was always fishing for something on the radio. Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my life.” But this fits too. After all, Bob still marks his teenage years by when he saw Buddy Holly perform in Duluth, Minnesota, 1959, three days before his early death. You just know that Bob hears the echoes of both the Texan and fate’s scythe slice through the iron-ore range of his beloved North Country.

The one thing you can’t do with Dylan, though it’s been tried in almost infinite critical analyses, is pin him down, label, or classify him. He won’t be reduced or defined by refusing to hold still long enough. But then he told us that in song as far back as the early ‘60s when he left the folk world behind. Since then, with irony piled high, that’s all we’ve been trying to do, to little avail. That’s why his radio show is such an exotic treat for fans; for one of the few times, we can actually hear Bob melting his iron stance a bit. His rusty cackle alone is worth the price of admission.

Coincidentally or not, Dylan has toured with Willie Nelson the last few years, barnstorming minor-league baseball parks across the land. Consider the two greats next to each other: both on the short list of American maverick icons, true troubadours, songwriting savants, road-hogs, ragged scarecrow-like archetypes, and yet we know Willie so much better than we know Bob—which only adds to the Minnesotan’s legend. Willie goes out of his way to please his audience, while Bob still challenges his every night, for better and worse. But somehow Bob’s impenetrability trumps Willie’s affability, mystery over nostalgia—and yet Bob may have learned some things from Willie just as he did from the Grateful Dead while mired in his 1980s’ slump. At the very least, his buddies’ examples helped get him plugged back into his ol’ freewheelin’ style again.

In a 1997 interview, Dylan said, “I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me… I find the religiosity and the philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else… I believe the songs.” And there’s no reason to doubt his words. He’s always been playing for the highest of stakes. As Dylan reminds us on a recent radio show while speaking of another artist, “He once heard Little Walter play the harmonica and it changed his life forever—music used to do that.” What else can be said, really?

With his late-period classic trilogy just completed now with the brilliant Modern Times, the publication of his kaleidoscopic memoir, Chronicles, and last but certainly not least, his raucous and retro radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, Dylan has peaked again in a new decade, this time in his 60s. Few artists have imagined such careers or leave such a legacy—in any genre. Once again, this Jewish, sometimes-Born Again, wire-haired Huck Finn character must “reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest….” Godspeed, Bobby.

Greg Gaston

This April 2009 review of Dylan’s brand new album was written by Danny Eccleston for Mojo magazine…

 

Like life – that other great imponderable – Bob Dylan is full of surprises. He surprised us in the mid-’60s by resigning his portfolio as ordained prophet of the nascent counterculture. He surprised us (an understatement, perhaps) with his mid-’70s conversion to born again Christianity and the hellfire records that followed. And he’s surprising us now, with this purple patch of renewed vigour, consistency and a new record seemingly out of the blue.

 

More so than Modern Times – a good record, but (can it now be said?) one which lacked a 24-carat humdinger, a “Mississippi” or a “Love Sick” – Together Through Life is an album that gets its hooks in early and refuses to let go. It’s dark yet comforting, with a big tough sound, booming slightly like a band grooving at a soundcheck in an empty theatre. And at its heart there is a haunting refrain. Because above everything, this is a record about love, its absence and its remembrance.

 

It’s there, amid the heavy rumble of opener “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” as the humid bass of Tony Garnier and the stinging lead guitar of The Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell goad a Dylan cursed to navigate “boulevards of broken cars,” haunted too by David Hidalgo’s ever-present accordion, an uncanny echo of Al Kooper’s organ underpinning of yore.

 

Dylan pursues his ancient love through this landscape, full of apocalyptic landmarks only half-glimpsed, until he smacks straight into “Life Is Hard,” the lachrymose country-jazz ballad which, once commissioned for Olivier Dahan’s soon-come movie, My Own Love Song, set his writerly juices flowing a year ago. “Since we’ve been out of touch/I haven’t felt that much,” he growls, a gloomy bullfrog with emphysema. “From day to barren day/My heart stays locked away.”

 

“Life Is Hard” is paradigmatic of all that’s great about Together Through Life. On a record with a high melody count it has one of the best, requiring a high register leap in the chorus that Dylan really has to haul himself into. More typically still, it’s excruciatingly crepuscular and sad, not the only farewell wave on a record full of narrators who are hanging on the best they can, their grip failing by the day: “The sun is sinking low/I guess it’s time to go/I feel a chilly breeze/In place of memories.” Memory was Modern Times‘ preoccupation too, but there’s something crueller about the tricks it plays in Together Through Life. In “Forgetful Heart” the past harboured love; now our narrator lies awake and listens to “the sound of pain”. But it’s unclear if it’s her faithlessness being castigated, or his. Life is meaningless, Dylan seems to say; only love makes it bearable, and even that hightails it in the end. It’s almost Beckettian.

 

Is this Dylan? Is this how he feels? Hard to say. These songs have shifting perspectives – tragic, comic, satirical. Some of them sound like a scrapbook of pensées, grouped by theme – not stories as such. Surely that’s Dylan, “listening to Billy Joe Shaver and reading James Joyce” in “I Feel a Change Comin’ On” – how could it be anyone else? Maybe that’s some other fellow, lost in the barrooms of Austin, Fort Worth and San Anton’ in the hard-swinging, gun-toting “If You Ever Go to Houston,” although Dylan has spent so long imagining himself into the North American Southwest it’s as if he’s left a splinter of himself there.

 

“This Dream of You” is the record’s most Tex-Mex moment, driven on by a lyrical meld of violin and accordion, while Dylan’s narrator is tormented by thoughts of a long-gone señorita that stalk the night and haunt the day. “There’s a moment when all things become new again,” he muses. “But that moment might have come and gone.” The missed opportunity hangs there, agonisingly, and yet it’s still “this dream of you that keeps me living on.”

 

This is transfixing stuff, but it’s not even the record’s best track. That’s the already-previewed “I Feel a Change Comin’ On,” which pivots on another of this record’s twilight reflections – “The last part of the day is already gone” – but it’s a gorgeous little melodic sting in a song that’s full of warmth. “Life is for love/And they say that love is blind,” sings Dylan, gaily. “If you wanna live easy/Baby, pack your clothes with mine.” One of his best easygoing romances, file it with “If Not for You” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.”

 

So Together Through Life is not without levity, and there’s a twinkle in Dylan’s bloodshot eye. “Shake Shake Mama” is a rockin’ picaresque in a classic Dylan vein, full of salty-tongued women and ludicrous judges, soundtracked by great niggles of just-distorting valve amp guitar. And in the Chess blues lope of “My Wife’s Home Town” there’s even a variant on the mother-in-law joke. Dylan enjoys it so much he imparts two hearty, malicious cackles in the outro, but we’re not meant to take it seriously. “There are reasons for that/There are reasons for this,” its narrator shrugs. “I can’t think of any right now/But I know they exist.”

 

Chuckles aside, Together Through Life ends as it begins, with a glimpse of the end of days. The sarcasm-rich “It’s All Good” is gleefully, relentlessly rendered – imagine “Subterranean Homesick Blues” delivered by the incensed moralist of Slow Train Coming’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” (the latter is back in favour, by the way, having opened at least two recent Dylan shows, in Copenhagen on March 29 and Saarbrücken on April 5). Mendacious politicos, starving farmers, widows and orphans swirl in a fever-dream of the world financial crisis, although according errant wives equal billing in this menu of Gomorrah’s ills lends an edge of farce. Where does Dylan stand, exactly, on the topic du jour? If he knows, he’s not saying – at least not quite.

 

If we’re used to anything, we’re used to Dylan’s riddle-me-rees, but the 67-year-old model appears more than ever to delight in the impression of knowing more than he’s letting on. It’s the prerogative of the elderly, perhaps. It’s not that they like to see younger folk make their own mistakes (although sometimes you wonder); it’s that they know we’re going to make those mistakes whatever they say. Truly, wisdom is wasted on the young.

 

Today’s Dylan sounds like a man who’s already delivered his valediction, as if long past the point where he’s taken full stock. There is no statement to make, just tunes to write and life to live. And each new record finds him slightly amazed, slightly amused that he’s still here, granted another curtain call.

 

These days, it seems, the old surpriser is even surprising himself.

 

Danny Eccleston

The final part of Bill Flanagan’s recent interview with Bob Dylan, about his new album, songwriting, politics, history, etc. Dylan’s new album Together Through Life comes out this month…

 

LIFE IS HARD comes from a tradition that got pretty much wiped out by the popularity of swing and blues and rock n roll. I remember Leon Redbone said once that the big break in 20th century music was not in the 50’s when rock camein; it was when swing and jazz knocked off parlor piano ballads in the late 20’s and early 30’s. Do you ever wish that old style had stuck around a little longer?

Today, the mad rush of the world would trample over delicate music like that. Even if it had survived swing and jazz it would never make it past Dr. Dre. Things changed economically and socially. Two world wars, the stock market crash, the depression, the sexual revolution, huge sound systems, techno-pop. How could anything survive that? You can’t imagine parlor ballads drifting out of hi rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life. I love those old piano ballads. In my hometown walking down dark streets on quiet summer nights you would sometimes hear parlor tunes coming out of doorways and open windows. Somebody’s mother or sister playing A BIRD IN A GILDED CAGE off of sheet music. I actually tried to conjure up that feeling once in a song I did called IN THE SUMMERTIME.

 

No one was expecting a new album from you right now. I heard even the
record company was surprised. How do you know it’s time to go in and make a new one?

You never do know. You just think sometimes if not now I’ll never do it. This particular album was supposed to come out next Fall sometime; September, October; when the movie’s released. We made it last year and it was supposed to be put away for a year. But then the guys from the record company heard it, and decided that they would like to put it out in early spring and not wait for the movie.

 

You don’t use elevated language on these songs – it’s mostly every-day speech and imagery. Did you decide to keep a lid on the poetry this time out – was it what the musical style demanded?

I’m not sure I agree. It’s not easy to define poetry. Hank Williams used simple language too.

 

IT’S ALL GOOD is a terrific song. You use that common catch phrase as a hook and describe a world that gets darker and more miserable with every verse – it’s kind of funny and kind of scary. How did that song get started?

Probably from hearing the phrase one too many times.

 

Every girl named Roxanne feels a connection to Sting. Every Alison
thinks Elvis Costello was singing about her. You expecting to meet a lot of Jolenes?

Oh gosh, I hope not.

 

Any chance your Jolene is the same woman who got Dolly Parton so worked up?

You mean that woman with the flaming locks of auburn hair?

 

Yeah! Whose smile is like a breath of Spring.

Oh yeah, I remember her.

 

Is it the same one?

It’s a different lady.

 

At the end of JOLENE I noticed that those riffs start happening. I’ve seen you do that live, but I’ve never heard that on any of your records. I assume that’s Donnie playing with you.

Yeah, it is. The organ sound and steel guitar combined make those riffs.

 

Tony, your bass player has been with you now for. . . what?

Gee, I don’t know, probably for a while. Fifteen, twenty years.

 

How about your drummer, George?

Not as long as Tony but longer than my last drummer.

 

Where does George come from to play like that?

George is from Louisiana. He’s from New Orleans.

 

There’s no characters on this record like the ones in DESOLATION ROW, except maybe Judge Simpson in SHAKE, SHAKE MAMA. Would he be one of these archetypal figures like Cinderella or Shakespeare in the alley?

Oh, most definitely. He’s a possum huntin’ judge.

 

Certain singers show up in IT’S ALL GOOD. Neil Young and Alicia Keys
have popped up on your recent albums. Do you think all your musician
friends are going to be looking for shout-outs now? Once you start down
that road how do you get out of it?

Well these people are archetypes, too. They might not think of themselves like that, but they are. They represent an idea.

 

Could you write a song about anybody?

Well I bet you could, yeah.

 

How would you get Stevie Wonder into a song?

When Stevie Wonder recorded BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND/ I was playin’ cards/ I was drinkin’ gin.

 

Could you write a song LIKE Stevie wonder?

I could write one like SUPERSTITION but I couldn’t write one like SIR DUKE.

 

Could you write a song about George Bush?

Well sure. George’s name would be easy to rhyme.

 

In the song I FEEL A CHANGE COMING ON the character says. . .

Wait a minute Bill. I’m not a playwright. The people in my songs are all me.
I thought we talked about that?

 

What exactly makes it you?

It’s in the way you say things. It’s not necessarily the things you say that make you who you are.

 

Okay, I think the line is, “I see my baby coming, she’s walking with the village priest/I feel a change coming on.”

Yeah, but you’re leaving a lot out.

 

Okay, but that’s the part I remember. I assume the guy, or YOU, are talking about being hooked up with somebody and feeling pretty good about it. Given what a hard time women have given the men, or YOU, in the other songs on the album, we can read this as a happy ending or a sign of trouble ahead. What are the chances that the guy in FEEL A CHANGE is likely to live happily ever after?

You might be reading too much into it. It’s not a fairy tale type song. There are degrees of happiness. You go from one to the other and then back again. It’s hard to be completely happy when those around us are suffering and groaning from hunger. But I know what you mean. You are talking about riding off into the sunset hoping that whatever you’ve done will outlive you.

 

Isn’t that the Hindu point of view?

Maybe it is.

 

A lot of performers give God credit for their music. How do you suppose
God feels about that?

I’m not the one to ask. It sounds like people just giving credit where credit is due.

 

How do you think this new record will be received?

I know my fans will like it. Other than that, I have no idea.