THE 'SCENE' INTERVIEW JANUARY 1963


(What was it you wanted? #28)

Tomorrow's Top Twenty

It really would be a test of the assimilatory powers of Tin Pan Alley if folk music suddenly hit the charts in a big way. How for instance would the men in the sharp suits deal with Bob Dylan, the shambling boy genius of American Folk music?

Dylan does his very best to talk, act, dress and behave as much like a Tennessee mountain man as he can.

When I first met him he was talking vaguely about heading off for Rome, Paris or maybe New York. It worried him very little that he was halfway through the telerecording of the BBC play "Madhouse on Castle St." and that high-level conferences were being held all over London because of an overtime squabble at the BBC which threatened to take the production time of the play some weeks beyond the time stipulated in Dylan's contract.

"They're paying me two thousand dollars to do this play." said Dylan. "If I got to stay another three weeks to finish it they'll probably have to pay the same money all over again."

"But to me two thousand, four thousand, I can't imagine the difference. It's too much money. And what's the money for three whole weeks of time? Three weeks is too long to lose."

Dylan is one of the biggest stars on the American folk circuit ...

It was a lunchtime dawn for the tousled boy who opened the door, on which hung a "Do Not Disturb" notice. Thin-faced with a week's growth of boyish hair on his chin, he rubbed a floppy mass of hair out of his eyes and perched out on his bed, feet bare, legs crossed tailor fashion.

His guitar case stood in the centre of the floor, a pile of rolled up shirts erupted from an open suitcase and a large sheepskin jacket in dire need of cleaning lay beside the bed, where it had obviously been dropped the night before.

Dylan is the most exciting white folk and blues singer, the experts say, America has produced. He writes many of his own songs, sings them 'consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a southern farmhand musing in melody on his porch' and accompanies himself on guitar and harmonica (fixed round his neck).

Dylan talked like Brando imitating that southern farmhand. "I'm not in show-business," he said. "Money? I don't know how much I make. Sometimes I ask, sometimes I don't. I don't know what I spend it on, it just falls through holes in my pocket."

The curtains were still drawn in his room and they remained that way for three hours.

"I don't like singing to anybody but Americans. My songs say things. I sing them for people who know what I'm saying."

"Nowadays I just play at concerts," he said. "Clubs I don't play at. A few years ago when I needed the money they wouldn't pay me. Now they're writing all the time asking me to play. Sometimes I write back and tell them no, sometimes I just don't answer. But they keep right on asking, offering me percentages of the house and all."

Dylan dressed to go out to a local cafeteria for lunch with his manager, Mr. Albert Grossman.

Later that afternoon Mr. Grossman and Dylan decided they would finish the TV play, in which Dylan played a guitar-playing hobo.

A week or so after that I caught up with Mr. Grossman and Dylan in London again. Dylan was now wearing a black hat with a coloured band and a curvy brim.

In the plush stalls of the new Prince Charles Theatre Dylan slumped in a seat ....


This article was originally published in the English magazine 'Scene' on January 26, 1963. The reporter is uncredited but is thought to be Ronnie or Richard Gilbert. The article is reprinted in Clinton Heylin's "More Rain Unravelled Tales", 1984.