INTERVIEW WITH AN ICON
Bob Dylan grants an audience
If I'd thought about it
I never would have done it
I guess I would 'a let it slide
If I'd 'a lived my life by what others were thinkin'
This heart inside me would 'a died
I was just too stubborn to ever be governed by enforced insanity
Someone had to reach for the risin' star
I guess it was up to me
(c)1974 Ram's Horn Music
Bob Dylan is a legend in his own time. Not a full-fledged commercial superstar, for he doesn't make platinum records nor sell out all of his live performances, Dylan is merely a legend, enigmatic and mysterious. Familiar, yet strange. It has been said that Dylan is not half the myth he believes himself to be and that he himself is the myth-monger, selling us his every new phase while, like his descendant in style, David Bowie, he casually discards each old mask with the ease of an actor changing roles. He has also at various times been accused of having sold out, of being too removed, aloof, of not revealing enough, of being cold and calculating, allowing us to see only what he wishes and no more. No matter, in the final analysis he _is_ what he has created. If the '60s were his formative years, the '70s have seen Dylan subject to many changes in his life. From the laid-back family man of 'Nashville Skyline' and 'New Morning', Dylan slowly turned and headed back into the more complex reaches of his mind, starting with 'Planet Waves', which signalled the return within, and following with 'Blood on the Tracks', which brought him even closer to his anima, his muse, who finally appeared to him as Isis on 'Desire'. (In a dream-scape not unlike Robert Graves' 'White Goddess', who could be found "among pack ice or where the track had faded," Dylan united with his goddess after he "came to the pyramids all imbedded in ice.")
With 'Desire' in the stores, Dylan took to the road with his own gypsy troupe. The Rolling Thunder Revue brought to mind the "Indiani Metropolitani," groups of young people who do street theatre in Italy. They toured the U.S. playing moderately sized halls, picking up and dropping different performers along the way. 'Renaldo and Clara', Dylan's mammoth and controversial movie, was filmed on the road with Rolling Thunder, during a tumultuous period in which his marriage reportedly took a turn for the worse and his life (along with his newly-built dream house) began to slide. Seemingly none the worse for wear and tear, Dylan embarked on the most extensive tour of his career early in 1978. Beginning in Japan, New Zealand and Australia, it finally wound up matters in the southeastern United States in December of last year. The first time I saw Dylan was in Binghamton, New York, in September 1978. I had always admired him. How could you not? No matter how one views Dylan and/or his music, it's difficult to deny the charismatic mystique that has afforded him widespread recognition and critical acclaim. Personally, I had always responded favorably to whatever courses Dylan had chosen to take, so approaching him live, I was already biased in favor of the man. I was shocked at his appearance. He seemed ragged and worn (which later proved to be deceptive. Make-up, heavy black around the eyes, cast strange shadows over his face under the lights). The music, though, was even more startling. My initial reaction was thoroughly negative, to put it mildly. In comparison to what was then currently happening in rock, the music seemed, bluntly, quite lame. The new arrangements seemed clumsy and awkward, overriding the simplicity that had originally made the songs work. But as I listened closer it rang with a clear resonance. The sound in the hall was exceptional, and the musicians excellent. This was certainly not, as many reviews and reviewers had suggested, "Las Vegas" nor was it disco. It was just Dylan, older, to be sure, scraggly and unkempt as always, even in his new black and white stage suit, his band playing behind him like a mini-orchestra in perfect synch. I met Dylan a week later, at a typical record company bash held for him and his band after one of the Madison Square Garden shows. A friend introduced me to him and, sitting at an adjacent table, I had ample opportunity to observe him at close quarters. I sensed no animosity from him, no aggression nor defense; indeed, he seemed rather shy. His expertise at deterring conversation from himself, at keeping the talk light and meaningless, was obvious. He chain smoked and drank red wine all night. He appeared drunk at times, slurring words and laughing a lot, but it could easily have been an act, a way of retaining his one-upmanship in any situation. Dylan, the enigmatic cynic, the infallible put-on artist remained in control. Three months later, I caught up with the Bob Dylan tour once again, this time, down south in Birmingham, Alabama. Looking disheveled as ever, the Jack of Hearts had once again trumped those in his audience wh had been led to believe press reports of his new "slick" image. The tour had almost reached its end and the band was much tighter than they had been earlier. The songs no longer felt stiff, they were flowing now, having settled into their new forms. Dylan spoke to the crowd a lot that night, introducing songs with brief stories or parables,
breathing new life into songs 10, even 15 years old. He ended the show with 'Forever Young,' which he dedicated to one of his children. "This is our last--look for us," he said, "We may be back. I'm not quite read to be put out to pasture just yet!" On the way out of town, I left a note for Dylan with the desk clerk of his hotel, saying that I wished to interview him, that I had no ulterior motive at all other than an interest and a desire to talk. I left a number for him to call and headed back home to Atlanta. A week later, backstage at the Omni in Atlanta, an hour before going onstage, Bob Dylan sat alone in his dressing room, strumming an old Martin guitar that had yellowed with age, the wood around the pick-guard chipped from years of use. Dressed in a green flannel shirt, black leather pants and boots, his eyes hidden behind dark aviator shades, he was relaxed and friendly, the antithesis of the guarded creature which the media so often portrays him as. His old black leather jacket lay crumpled up on one of the chairs, a small notebook peeked out of one of the pockets. What appeared to be chicken scratchings made their way across the open page. "I'm always writing something" he explained as he continued to pick a haunting blues melody on the guitar.
I mentioned to him that I had noticed a definite theme running through his more recent albums, culminating on 'Desire'. He didn't seem too happy with the idea, though, and emphasized his disagreement with a forceful strum. "That album didn't have a concept. It didn't have that type of concept. Of course I wrote it with somebody else too, but I always kept it kinda on the track of where I thought it should be going. I can look back on it just like anybody else...but when that particular album was happening, I didn't know what was happening at the time. We tried it with a lot of different people in the studio, a lot of different types of sound and I even had back-up singers on that album for two or three days, a lot of percussion, a lot going on. But as it got down, I got more irritated with all this sound going on and eventually just settled on bass, drums and violin. "That was new," he stressed. "I didn't take that out as far as I
wanted to, I didn't have a chance to do that. I wanted to do more harmonica and violin together but we never got a chance to do that. But, yeah, all that time, those songs like 'Isis' and and all that--gee, I haven't done that for a long time--I used to do that song all the time..." 'Desire', Dylan's collaboration with writer Jacques Levy, was a deeply mystical statement, the violin capturing the free, gypsy spirit so inherent in the songs and later in the whole Rolling Thunder idea. "Yeah, it was that. It definitely was that. Oh you know, we did it all night long, into the morning. I never slept when I made that album, I couldn't sleep. I would have to listen to it again to really answer these questions in a coherent way." "You've left it behind in a way," I said. "No, I haven't left the songs behind. I never leave the songs behind. I might leave the arrangements and the mood behind, but the songs, I never leave them behind." At Newport in 1965, he unleashed his new-found electricity on an unsuspecting audience. Or as he put it in Atlanta, when introducing 'Maggie's Farm': "I was invited to Newport in 1965. I had been invited there before and never caused too much fuss, but I was invited in '65 and I went and I played this particular song. Anyway, people booted me out of town, actually, for playing this particular tune and it was hard to believe that this song caused such a disturbance, but it did! It's called "I Ain't Gonna Work on Maggie's Farm No More.'" Years later, after a seemingly endless flow of changes in direction, he is still meeting with the same type of criticism. Dylan steps in and out of musical forms these days with an unusual ease, echoes of carnival music blend harmoniously with primitive jungle rhythms and Chicago blues, while Dylan the Folksinger and Dylan the Newport Electric Poet still exist. As at Newport, Dylan has not met with much favorable response to his new sound. People are disturbed by the strange changes. The unfamiliarity. He refuses to stagnate, to be pinned down, categorized: "Art is the perpetual motion of illusion," he once observed. And he truly lives his belief. I mentioned a line from 'Idiot Wind': "Your chestnut mare shoots through my head and is making me see stars!" (Dylanologist A.J. Weberman claims that equine references in Dylan songs refer to heroin.) Interestingly, 'Idiot Wind' was written before Dylan's teaming with Jacques Levy, co-writer (with Roger McGuinn) of 'Chestnut Mare' years earlier. "That's right! Yeah!" He laughed delightfully. "I'm sure it's all connected up y'know, way down the line."
"But yeah, I had a couple of years there, where I went out to be by myself quite a bit of the time, and that's where I experienced those kind of songs, on the 'Blood on the Tracks' album...I'll do anything to write a song..." he laughed. "I used to anyway." 'Street Legal' seems to backtrack through all the aforementioned albums. It is an acknowledgment of changes, both internal and external. "You're right. Let's say with a song like 'True Love Tends to Forget'..." He lit a cigarette. "The mood I was in on that song is--I mean, that means a lot, if you think about it, y'know. True love tends to forget--it isn't like a possession trip, when you've been wronged, that type of thing--I was trying to ge the most out of that. I thought that was my best album." I agreed. "I hear it sometimes on the radio or a record player and I see that it's badly mixed and it doesn't sound very good, but what can you do? I've got, on Columbia Records alone, 21 or 22 albums out. So every time you make an album, you want it to be new, good and different, but personally, when you look back on them--for me--all my albums are, are just measuring points for wherever I was at at a certain period of time. I went into the studio, recorded the songs as good as I could, and left. Basically, realistically, I'm a live performer and want to play onstage for the people and not make records that may sound really good." I mentioned how the current show had changed each time that I had seen him, and how much tighter the band had become as the tour progressed. "Yeah, well it's never gonna be the same two nights in a row." Dylan has made many comments in the press recently about the 1980s. In his 'Rolling Stone' interview with Jonathan Cott he said, "Anyone who's going to be doing anything will have his or her cards showing. You won't be able to get back in the '80s." What did he mean by that? "I don't know what I meant by that," he chuckled. "Me and Jonathan, every time he does an interview, we just get drunk. I don't think you should show all of your cards all of the time, I didn't mean that." He continued: "It's like, when I started out playing--it's hard to put into words--I don't know what the eighties are going to be like. I imagine a lot of the glue is gonna hold a lot of things together which are sort of scattered now. Appearances of people you know, some wearing blue uniforms with badges, they are probably going to be standing side by side with housewives with their hair up in curlers, wanting the same things. All these different elements are going to--I think--be molded together. I think people are going to be more honest in the '80s." Like the '60s, I wondered? "No, never. I don't think so." He answered adamantly. Dylan remembers the '60s very well. They were years that shaped him, that produced the inspiration for him to create some of the most potent art of the decade. His strange song-poems mirrored the turbulence and chaos of the times. He spoke for an entire generation, it seemed, and then suddenly he wanted no involvement with the movement he had given voice to. Some say it was the motorcycle accident. That it almost killed him, sent him crashing headlong into a nightmare of his own making. Others just say that he fell in love, settled into a more even existence in which politics and protest had not part. Radical critics like Weberman flatly accuse him of "drifting into indifference during a period when resistance was called for."
"I was always more tied up with the Beat Movement," he admits. "I don't know what the hippie movement was all about, that was a media thing, I think, 'Rent a Hippie'--I don't know what that was about. A lot of people, people that I knew, were in the early '60s up 'til '65 or '66. There was a different comradeship. There was drugs, but drugs were something that was just a playful thing or something which wasn't that romanticized. Drugs were always in the folk clubs and in the jazz clubs, but outside of those places I never really saw too many drugs." "The drugs at the end of the '60s were artificial. They were those--ah--L.S...acid, all that stuff made in a laboratory. Well I guess it's all make in a laboratory one way or another. I don't know. I was never involved in the acid scene either." By 1968 the Beatles had released 'Sgt. Pepper'. Rock and roll had moved primarily into studios and electronics began to become more and more a part of the music. Acid rock flourished on the West Coast and the new art form was just becoming self-consciously aware of itself with a little help from its friends (often in the form of a little Kool-Aid). Dylan chose this time to put out the album he had been working on since the cataclysmic accident. 'John Wesley Harding' totally contradicted everything happening musically at the time. The deceptively simple folk melodies only served to draw one's attention even closer to the intensity of the lyrical message. Eventually, the '60s came to a close, the Beatles broke up, the war ended in a stale-mate and we stumbled into the '70s in a catatonic daze. The music reflected the times. Rock had a few casualties of its own. Madison Avenue and Wall Street moved in as the voice of the people turned into a multibillion dollar industry. A few couldn't handle it, and destroyed themselves by becoming victims of their own myths. Others, like Jagger and Dylan, survived. "People are always talking about the '60s and now we are almost into the '80s and everybody wants to know what happened back then. Well," he answered himself, "in the '60s, everything that happened you did because you wanted to. You didn't do it because you thought you should do it or because it was the thing to do. Something inside of you told you you wanted to do it. There was a network all across the country--really. Very small, but very close, I still see those people travelling around y'know, they're still hanging in there. But as far as what happened, it will always be felt just the same as the Civil War was always felt into 1870 and 1880. It was just something which was felt by everyone whether they knew it or not and a lot of people in the '60s started all this which is happening now. They just don't realize it, you know." He put down the guitar, lit another cigarette. "But the '50s gave birth to the '60s too, don't forget, and in the '50s it was even rarer...like in the '60s it was people caught up on all the be-bop and the beat movement, or the subterranean culture that was going on, but it was home-like and it gave you identity." It is interesting that Dylan's material has always dealt with the opposing forces of black and white, whether on a material level--as during the '60s when songs like 'The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll' clarified the issues of the civil rights movement--or on the spiritual level of his most recent work. Dylan has taken to wearing black and white on stage of late, costuming his entire band in the same. The effect is one of total balance. Yin and yang, darkness and light. "Well, I think I'm more of an extremist. But no, I'm more active than someone who is balancing," he said. "If you play the game all by yourself and you're the only one playing the game, then you want to balance the game, but if you're playing the game with someone else, you've got to ride up when it's time for someone else to ride down." Like a see saw? "Yeah right, and then you get the same kind of balance, but if you're playing by yourself then you've got to move to the middle." Which you don't do. "No, I'm uncomfortable in the middle, too easily blown down." When questioned about his unusual relationship with his record company--of being able to release any product he wants--he became edgy, his answer accompanied once again by the guitar. [As I am writing this, Bob Dylan is in the process of forming his own record company, Accomplice, to be distributed by CBS.] "CBS doesn't pay me, except for a royalty rate. They don't support these tours for me so they don't have any say. It they supported them, maybe they'd have some say in it." With 'Renaldo and Clara', Dylan took a new approack by filming the characters of his dreams. The film was an unconstructed, symbolic comment, a bold and original epic (its original four-hour length was the major complaint from most of its critics), visually combining the same elements Dylan uses in the written word. The actors and actresses, real people from his life, cast in fantasy roles. American film critics on the whole were not impressed with Dylan's work. They accused him of over-indulgence and blamed his "careless treatment" of people close to him for the break-up of his marriage, which followed shortly on the heels of the film's release. The 'Village Voice' sent an entire battalion of reviewers to see it and they all came back with negative impressions. However, the film was hailed at last year's Cannes Film Festival as one of the most innovative presentations there, an honor bestowed on Dylan by Europe's most discriminating cinema elite, which must have more than made up for the confused and confusing reviews it received in the US. Filmed by Sam Shepard, Dylan claims 'Renaldo' was 10 years in the works but has decided that, "For me, film wouldn't be the right thing to do right now. It's not live enough. You're acting for a camera, a director, you can't really see the results." 'Renaldo and Clara' seemed to be spontaneous. "That was great! Yeah, but I can't do that no more. It costs too much money for one, to make your own movie, and then if you make a movie for another man who's putting up the money, then he'll want what he wants." As the '50s gave way to the '60s, the age of the media superstar was born. James Dean gave way to Elvis Presley who gave way to Bob Dylan, each gigantic myths in their own time. While Elvis found his way into Middle America's heart, the chasm James Dean left wasn't filled until Bob Dylan formed a new link in the ever-growing chain of super-anti-heroes. When compared to the people he once strived to be like, he denies all similarity of public persona. "It's not as heavy as it probably was to deal with being Elvis Presley. Elvis didn't write any of his songs don't forget, I write all this stuff so I know what I'm saying. I'm behind it so I don't feel like I'm a mystery or anything." Does he consider himself an artist as opposed to a musician or a songwriter? "Well yeah, it's like all the artists have had their periods right, and that they've changed--most people in history that have done anything at all have always been put down--so it don't bother me a bit. I don't care what people say. Whether I'm an artist, or a musician, or a poet, or a songwriter or just anything..."