interviews page 3:
back aaaapages: 1 2 3 4 5aaaanext
Bob Dylan Not Like a Rolling Stone Interview. Spin, Volume One Number Eight December 1985. download this file here
Rolling Stone Issue 394 , January 16, 1986 Australian edition p57 Music News download this file here
Hugh Downs Interview - download this file here
Fort-Lauderdale, Sun Sentinel today 29/9/95 download this file here
USA today 28 September 1997 download this file here
Subject: Dylan - Guitar World Interview - March 1999 Date: 31 Jan 1999 18:36:44 -0800 download this file here
This is a brief interview with Carol Dennis published on "Follow That Dream international" December 1992 download this file here
Helena Springs was a backup singer in Dylan's band from 1978 to 1980. download this file here
Some Words from Pastor Larry Myers download this file here
KAREN HUGHES INTERVIEW, DAYTON, OHIO, MAY 21, 1980 download this file here
Desire, Columbia, Recorded 1975 download this file here
The Bootleg Series, Volumes 1-3 Columbia, Recorded 1961-1991; Released 1991 download this file here
Bob Dylan biography download this file here
Bob Dylan Not Like a Rolling Stone Interview. Spin, Volume One Number Eight December 1985.
Found on Giulio Molfese's "Breadcrumb Sins" site
Don't Ask Me Nothin' About Nothin', I Just Might Tell You The Truth Bob Dylan, in perhaps his most revealing interview in years, proves there's nothing more mysterious than a normal musical genius. By Scott Cohen. 26
Who's Who, What's What, and Why...
In this issue we publish what is possibly Bob Dylan's most candid interview ever. Scott Cohen spent several days with Dylan in California and then stayed in constant touch with him for the following two weeks as they added to the story. Starting on page 36, it is the largest interview we've ever run.
Bob Dylan, poet laureate, prophet in a motorcycle jacket. Mystery tramp. Napoleon in rags. A Jew. A Christian. A million contradictions. A complete unknown, like a rolling stone. He's been analyzed, classified, categorized, crucified, defined, dissected, detected, inspected, and rejected, but never figured out. He blew into mythology in 1961 with a guitar, harmonica, and corduroy cap, a cross between Woody Guthrie and Little Richard. He was like the first punk folksinger. He introduced the protest song to rock. He made words more important than melody, more important than the beat. His smokey, nasal voice and sexy phrasings are unique. He can write surreal songs with a logic all their own--like a James Rosenquist painting or a Rimbaud prose poem--and simple, straight-from-the-heart ballads with equal ease. He can take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black. He probably could have been the bigget sex symbol since Elvis, had he chosen to. Then Mick Jagger came along. The Stones, the Beatles, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, all paid him their due. The radical Weathermen took their name from him. He caused a riot at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when he went on stage and played electric rock. The folk faction thought he sold out. Later, during the height of "flower power," when everyone was getting into Eastern religion, Dylan went to Jerusalem, to the Wailing Wall, wearing a yarmulke. A decade later he was a born-again Christian, or so it seemed, putting out gospel records. People discovered that he really wasn't where it's at. It's not like Dylan suddenly got less political or more spiritual. Biblical references have always been in his songs. People have been calling him a visionary for years. Who knows? Suppose a spiritual revolution is going on and rock 'n' roll's just a prelude to something else. Who would make a better prophet than Dylan? Sometimes, what looks large from a distance, close up ain't never that big. Dylan's like one of his lines. He lives pretty simply, in a nice house on secluded property on the California coast, with a bunch of chickens, horses, and dogs. The fact that he's more visible now and doing ordinary things, like the Grammies, videos, even this interview, doesn't make him any less mysterious. It adds to it.
You Want to Talk to Me, Go Ahead and Talk
A lot of people from the press want to talk to me, but they never do, and for some reason there's this great mystery, if that's what it is. They put it on me. It sells newspapers, I guess. News is a business. It really has nothing to do with me personally, so I really don't keep up with it. When I think of mystery, I don't think about myself. I think of the universe, like why does the moon rise when the sun falls? Caterpillars turn into butterflies? I really haven't remained a recluse. I just haven't talked to the press over the years because I've had to deal with personal things and usually they take priority over talking about myself. I stay out of sight if I can. Dealing with my own life takes priority over other people dealing with my life. I mean, for instance, if I got to get the landlord to fix the plumbing, or get some guy to put up money for a movie, or if I just feel I'm being treated unfairly, then I need to deal with this by myself and not blab it all over to the newspapers. Other people knowing about things confuses the situation, and I'm not prepared for that. I don't like to talk about myself. The things I have to say about such things as ghetto bosses, salvation and sin, lust, murderers going free, and children without hope--messianic kingdom-type stuff, that sort of thing--people don't like to print. Usually I don't have any answers to the questions they would print, anyway.
Who would you want to interview?
A lot of people who aren't alive: Hank Williams, Apollinaire, Joseph from the Bible, Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, Mohammed, Paul the Apostle, maybe John Wilkes Booth, maybe Gogol. I'd like to interview people who died leaving a great unsolved mess behind, who left people for ages to do nothing but speculate. As far as anybody living goes, who's there to interview? Castro? Gorbachev? Reagan? The Hillside Strangler? What are they going to tell you? The destiny of the world's wealthiest man, that don't interest me. I know what his reward is. Anybody who's done work that I admire, I'd rather just leave it at that. I'm not that pushy about finding out how people come up with what they come up with, so what does that leave you with? Just the daily life of somebody. You know, like, "How come you don't eat fish?" That really wouldn't give me answers to what I'm wondering about.
Dark Sunglasses
I started out with Batman and Robin-type sunglasses. I always thought the best kind of sunglasses are the motorcycle helmets with the black plastic masks on them. That way, nobody can recognize the back of your head either. With sunglasses, you buy them off the rack, if they fit, and put them on. Shoes are tougher. You go into a store, try this pair on, that pair on. I feel I have to buy something if I put it on. What I'm looking for is a pair of glasses that can see through walls, whether they're sunglasses or not.
Isn't it hard to wear dark glasses after all these years?
Late at night it is, when I'm driving. I don't wear them all the time. I've gone through periods when I wear them, but I don't know why. I'm nearsighted, so I wear them for that reason.
Highway 61 Revisited
People ask me about the '60s all the time. That's the first thing they want to know. I say, if you want to know about the '60s, read Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer, or read Marshall McLuhan or Abraham Maslow. A lot of people have written about the '60s in an exciting way and have told the truth. The singers were just a part of it. I can't tell them that much. Certain things I can remember very clearly. Others are a kinda blur, but where I was and what was happening I can focus in on if I'm forced to. Of course, there are people who can remember in vivid detail. Ginsberg has that talent and Kerouac had that talent to a great degree. Kerouac never forgot anything, so he could write anything because he could just remember.
My Back Pages
Miles Davis is my definition of cool. I loved to see him in the small clubs playing his solo, turn his back on the crowd, put down his horn and walk off the stage, let the band keep playing, and then come back and play a few notes at the end. I did that at a couple of shows. The audience thought I was sick or something. Lily St. Cyr (the stripper), Dorothy Dandridge, Mary Magdalen, that's my definition of hot. My first pop hero was Johnny Ray. I saw him late '78. I think he was playing club lounges. He hasn't had a hit for a while. Maybe he needs a new record company. I hope the guy's still alive. People forget how good he was. The only person I can think of who didn't return a phone call of mine was Walter Yetnikoff (president of CBS) the summer before last. I placed it personally, direct dial, long distance, at 3 o'clock in the morning. The last record I bought was Lucille Bogan. She was a blues singer who I had heard of, but not her records. I don't buy too many contemporary records. I didn't go down to the record store and buy the record personally. I know someone who works in a record store in town and I called and asked him to set it aside. No, I didn't actually pick it up, somebody else did. The first expensive thing I bought with my first big paycheck was a '65 baby-blue Mustang convertible. But a guy who worked for me rolled it down a hill in Woodstock and it smashed into a truck. I got 25 bucks for it. The name on my driver's license is Bob Dylan. It was legally changed when I went to work for Folk City a few thousand years ago. They had to get my name straight for the union. I never watch sports on TV, although I did see John McEnroe beat Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon when I was over in England last year. There was a TV set backstage and I had gotten there early and I paid attention to the whole thing. Usually I don't stay with something that long. I used to play hockey when I was growing up. Everyone sort of learns how to skate and play hockey at an early age (in Minnesota). I usually played forward, sometimes center. My cousin was a goalie at the University of Colorado. I didn't play too much baseball, because my eyes were kind of bad and the ball would hit me when I wasn't looking. I never played much basketball, unless I played with my kids. Football I never played at all, not even touch football. I really don't like to hurt myself. I have a good understanding with all the women who have been in my life, whether I see them occasionally or not. We're still always best of friends.
Tangled Up in Blue
I once read a book of Nathaniel Hawthorne's letters to some girl, and they were extremely private and personal, and I didn't feel there was any of myself in those letters, but I could identify with what he was saying. A lot of myself crosses over into my songs. I'll write something and say to myself, I can change this, I can make this not so personal, and at other times I'll say, I think I'll leave this on a personal level, and if somebody wants to peek at it and make up their own minds about what kind of character I am, that's up to them. Other times I might say, well, it's too personal, I think I'll turn the corner on it, because why do I want somebody thinking about what I'm thinking about, especially if it's not to their benefit.
Tales of Yankee Power
The best songs are the songs you write that you don't know anything about. They're an escape. I don't do too much of that because maybe it's more important to deal with what's happening rather than to put yourself in a place where all you can do is imagine something. If you can imagine something and you haven't experienced it, it's usually true that someone else has actually gone through it and will identify with it. I actually think about Poe's stories, "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Pit and the Pendulum." Certainly, if you look at his life, he really didn't experience any of that stuff. But some fantastic stories came out of his imagination. Like, "Here I am stuck in this job I can't get out of. I'm working as a civil servant, what am I going to do next? I hate this existence." So what does he do? He sits in his attic and writes a story and all the people take it to mean he's a very weird character. Now, I dont' think that's an illegitimate way to go about things, but then you got someone like Herman Melville who writes out of experience--Moby Dick or Confidence Man. I think there's a certain amount of fantasy in what he wrote. Can you see him riding on the back of a whale? I don't know. I've never been to college and taken a literary course. I can only try to answer these questions, because I'm suppsoed to be somebody who knows something about writing, but the actual fact is, I don't really know that much about it. I don't know what there is to know about it, anyway. I began writing because I was singing. I think that's an important thing. I started writing because things were changing all the time and a certain song needed to be written. I started writing them because I wanted to sing them. If they had been written, I wouldn't have started to write them. Anyway, one thing led to another and I just kept on writing my own songs, but I stumbled into it, really, It was nothing I had prepared myself for, but I did sing a lot of songs before I wrote any of my own. I think that's important too.
Did you ever send your poems to any poetry magazines?
No, I didn't start writing poetry until I was out of high school. I was 18 or so when I discovered Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Phillip Whalen, Frank O'Hara, and those guys. Then I went back and started reading the French guys, Rimbaud and Francois Villon; I started putting tunes to their poems. There used to be a folk music scene and jazz clubs just about every place. The two scenes were very much connected, where the poets would read to a small combo, so I was close up to that for a while. My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.
The Real You at Last
Sometimes the "you" in my songs is me talking to me. Other times I can be talking to somebody else. If I'm talking to me in a song, I'm not going to drop evrything and say, alright, now I'm talking to you. It's up to you to figure out who's who. A lot of times it's "you" talking to "you." The "I," like in "I and I," also changes. It could be I, or it could be the "I" who created me. And also, it could be another person who's saying "I." When I say "I" right now, I dont' know who I'm talking about.
All I Really Want to Do
As long as I continue to make records and play, which I'm not through doing yet, I have to go along with what the scene is at the time. I'm not a Pete Seeger. I've actually done that every once in a while, where I have led two thousand, three thousand people through songs, but I haven't done it like Pete Seeger. He's a master at that, leading a mass of people in four-part harmony to a song not even in their language. I think he could appeal to people as much as Sting could, because he could make them feel like they matter and make sense to themselves and feel like they're contributing to something. Seeing Tears for Fears is like being a spectator at a football game. Pete is almost like a tribal medicine man, in the true sense of the word. Rock 'n roll performers aren't. They're just kind of working out other people's fantasies.
Bob Dylan's 115th Dream
I signed a record contract with John Hammond, Sr., of Columbia Records in 1961. It was a big moment. I had been rejected by a lot of folk companies--Folkways, Tradition, Prestige, Vanguard. It was meant to be, actually. If those other companies had signed me, I would have recorded folk songs, and I don't think they would have stayed with me. Most of those companies went out of business, anyway. Dream #116: The Freewheelin' album. The girl on the cover with me is Suze Rotolo, my roommatre at the time.
Newport, 1965
The first time I played electric before a large group of people was at the Newport Folk Festival, but I had a hit record out (Bringing It All Back Home), so I don't know how people expected me to do anything different. I was aware that people were fighting in the audience, but I couldn't understand it. I was a little embarrassed by the fuss, because it was for the wrong reasons. I mean, you can do some really disgusting things in life and people will let you get away with it. Then you do something that you don't think is anything more than natural and people react in that type of riotous way, but I don't pay too much attention to it.
Motorpsycho Nitemare
In 1966 I had a motorcycle accident and ended up with several broken vertebrae and a concussion. That put me down for a while. I couldn't go on doing what I had been. I was pretty wound up before that accident happened. It set me down so I could see things in a better perspective. I wasn't seeing anything in any kind of perspective. I probably would have died if I had kept on going the way I had been.
Gospel Plow
In 1979 I went out on tour and played no song that I had ever played before live. It was a whole different show, and I thought that was a pretty amazing thing to do. I don't know any other artist who has done that, has not played whatever they'r known for. The Slow Train record was out and I had the songs to the next record and then I had some songs that never were recorded. I had about 20 songs that never had been sung live before, and nobody seemed to pick up on that. They were seeing me as if they were dropping into some club I was playing in and were to witness something that really wasn't for publicity purposes. Yet it got all kinds of negative publicity. The only thing that bothered me about it was that the negative publicity was so hateful that it turned a lot of people off from making up their own minds, and financially that can hurt if you got a show on the road. The first time we went out on that tour, we had something like eight weeks booked. Two of the weeks were in San Francisco. In the review in the paper, the man did not understand any of the concepts behind any part of the show, and he wrote an anti-Bob Dylan thing. He probably never liked me anyway, but just said that he did. A lot of them guys say stuff like, "Well, he changed our lives before, how come he can't do it now?" Just an excuse really. Their expectations are so high, nobody can fulfill them. The can't fulfill their own expectations, so they expect other people to do it for them. I don't mind being put down, but intense personal hatred is another thing. It was like an opening-night critic burying a show on Broadway. This particular review got picked up and printed in all the newspapers of the cities we were going to play to even before tickets went on sale, and people would read this review and decide the didn't want to see the show. So it hurt us at the box office, and it took a while to work back from there. I thoguht the show was pretty relevant for what was going on at the time.
Positively 4th Street
Outside of a song like "Positively 4th Street," which is extremely one-dimensional, which I like, I don't usually purge myself by writing anything about any type of quote, so-called, relationships. I don't have the kinds of relationships that are built on any kind of false pretense, not to say that I haven't. I've had just as many as anybody else, but I haven't had them in a long time. Usually everything with me and anybody is up front. My-life-is-an-open-book sort of thing. And I choose to be involved with the people I'm involved with. They don't choose me.
Heart of Gold
The only time it bothered me that someone sounded like me was when I was living in Phoenix, Arizona, in about '72 and the big song at the time was "Heart of Gold." I used to hate it when it came on the radio. I always liked Neil Young, but it bothered me every time I listened to "Heart of Gold." I think it was up at number one for a long time, and I'd say, "Shit, that's me. If it sounds like me, it should as well be me." There I was, stuck on the desert someplace, having to cool out for a while. New York was a heavy place. Woodstock was worse, people living in trees outside my house, fans trying to batter down my door, cars following me up dark mountain roads. I needed to lay back for a while, forget about things, myself included, and I'd get so far away and turn on the radio and there I am, but it's not me. It seemed to me somebody else had taken my thing and had run away with it, you know, and I never got over it. Maybe tomorrow.
Has Anybody Seen My Love?
"Tight Connection to My Heart" is a very visual song. I want to make a movie out of it. I don't think it's going to get done. I think it's going to go past on the way, but of all the songs I've ever written, that might be one of the most visual. Of all the songs I've written, that's the one that's got characters that can be identified with. Whatever the fuck that means. I don't know, I may be trying to make it more important than it is, but I can see the people in it. Have you ever heard that song "I'm a Rambler, I'm a Gambler," ... "I once had a sweetheart, age was 16, she was the Flower of Belton and the Rose of Saline"? Same girl, maybe older. I don't know, maybe it should stay a song. In most of my songs, I know who it is that I'm singing about and to. Lately, since '78, that's been true and hasn't changed. The stuff before '78, those people have kinda disappeared, '76, '75, '74. If you see me live, you won't hear me sing too many of those songs. There's a certain area of songs, a certain period that I don't feel that close to. Like the songs on the Desire album, that's kind of a fog to me. But since '78 the characters have all been extremely real and are still there. The ones I choose to talk about and relate to are the ones I find some kind of greatness in.
Million Dollar Bash
I know going on the Grammies is not my type of thing, but with Stevie (Wonder) it seemed like an interesting idea. I wasn't doing anything that night. I didn't feel I was making any great statement. For me, it was just going down to the place and changing my clothes.
Idiot Wind
Videos are out of character for me, too. The latest ones I've done with Dave Stewart are all right. The other ones, I don't know, I was just ordered around. I didn't pay much attention to those videos. You have to make them if you make records. You just have to. But you have to play live. You can't hide behind videos. I think once this video thing peaks out, people will get back to see who performs live and who don't.
X-Rated
I don't think censorship applies to me. It applies more to Top 40 artists. People who have hit rcords might have to be concerned with that, but I don't have those kinds of records that I'd have to be concerned about what I say. I'm just going to write any old song I feel like writing. The way I feel about it, I don't buy any of those records, anyway. I don't even like most of that music. I couldn't care at all if the records you hear on the radio are X-rated or R-rated. I don't think it's right, however, I'm opposed to it. I think every single song that you hear can be seen in another point of view from what it is. People have been reading stuff into my songs for years. I'd probably be the first one with a letter on their record.
Which letter?
F and B, Fire and Brimstone. But I don't know about the B, that could stand for Boring. Certainly a lot of stuff today would fall into that category.
Rainy Day Women
I've always been drawn to a certain kind of woman. It's the voice more than anything else. I listen to the voice first. It's that sound I heard when I was growing up. It was calling out to me. When everything was blank and void, I would listen for hours to the Staple Singers. It's that sort of gospel singing sound. Or that voice on the Crystal's record, "The He Kissed Me," Clydie King, Memphis Minnie, that type of thing. There's something in that voice, that whenever I hear it, I drop everything, whatever it is.
What happens when the body doesn't match the voice?
A body is a body. A woman could be deaf, dumb, crippled, and blind and still have soul and compassion. That's all that matters to me. You can hear it in the voice.
I forgot More Than You'll Ever Know
I never had that much to do with Edie Sedgwick. I've seen where I have had, and read that I have had, but I don't remember Edie that well. I remember she was around, but I know other people who, as far as I know, might have been involved with Edie. Uh, she was a great girl. An exciting girl, very enthusiastic. She was around the Andy Warhol scene, and I drifted in and out of that scene, but then I moved out of the Chelsea Hotel. We, me and my wife, lived in the Chelsea Hotel on the third floor in 1965 or '66, when our first baby was born. We moved out of that hotel maybe a year before Chelsea Girls, and when Chelsea Girls came out, it was all over for the Chelsea Hotel. You might as well have burned it down. The notoriety it had gotten from that movie pretty much destroyed it. I think Edie was in Chelsea Girls. I had lost total touch with her by that time, anyway. It may just have been a time when there was just a lot of stuff happening. Ondine, Steve Paul's Scene, Cheetah. That's when I would have known Edie if I would have known her, and I did know her, but I don't recall any type of relationship. If I did have one, I think I'd remember.
I Threw It All Away
I once traded an Andy Warhol "Elvis Presley" painting for a sofa, which was a stupid thing to do. I always wanted to tell Andy what a stupid thing I done, and if he had another painting he would give me, I'd never do it again.
Another Side of Bob Dylan
I never read Freud. I've never been attracted to anything he has said, and I think he's started a lot of nonsense with psychiatry and that business. I don't think psychiatry can help or has helped anybody. I think it's a big fraud (pun not intended) on the public. Billions of dollars have changed hands that could be used for far better purposes. A lot of people have trouble with their parents up until they're 50, 60, 70 years old. They can't get off their parents. I never had that kind of problem with my parents. Like John Lennon, "Mother": "Mother, I had you but you never had me." I can't imagine that. I know a lot of people have. There are a lot of orphans in the world, for sure. But that's not been my experience. I have a strong identification with orphans, but I've been raised by people who feel that fathers, whether they're married or not, should be responsible for their children, that all sons should be taught a trade, and that parents should be punished for their children's crimes. Actually, I was raised more by my grandmother. She was a fantastic lady. I love her so much, and I miss her a lot. But, getting back to the other thing, it all needs to be shaken up, and it will be. I never had any barriers to get across that were that clear to me, that I had to bust down to anything I truly loved. If I had any advantage over anybody at all, it's the advantage that I was all alone and could think and do what I wanted to. Looking back on it, it probably has a lot to do with growing up in northern Minnesota. I don't know what I would have been if I was growing up in the Bronx or Ethiopia or South America or even California. I think everybody's environment affects him in that way. Where I grew up...it's been a long time since. I forgot about it once I went east. I couldn't remember very much about it even then. I remember even less about it now. I don't have any long great story to tell about when I was a kid that would let anybody know how it is that I am what I am.
Patti Smith says you were Rimbaud in a previous incarnation
I don't know if she's right or wrong, but Patti Smith, then, of course, knows a lot of deep details that I might not be aware of. She might be clued in to something that's a little beyond me. I know at least a dozen women who tell me they were the Queen of Sheba. And I know a few Napoleons andf two Joan of Arcs and one Einstein.
All Along the Watchtower
There weren't too many Jews in Hibbing, Minnesota. Most of them I was related to. The town didn't have a rabbi, and it was time for me to be bar mitzvahed. Suddenly a rabbi showed up under strange circumstances for only a year. He and his wife got off the bus in the middle of winter. He showed up just in time for me to learn this stuff. He was an old man from Brooklyn who had a white beard and wore a black hat and black clothes. They put him upstairs of the cafe, which was the local hangout. It was a rock 'n' roll cafe where I used to hang out, too. I used to go up there every day to learn this stuff, either after school or after dinner. After studying with him an hour or so, I'd come down and boogie. The rabbi taught me what I had to learn, and after he conducted this bar mitzvah, he just disappeared. The people didn't want him. He didn't look like anybody's idea of a rabbi. He was an embarrassment. All the Jews up there shaved their heads and, I think, worked on Saturday. And I never saw him again. It's like he came and went like a ghost. Later I found out he was Orthodox. Jews separate themselves like that. Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, as if God calls them that. Christians, too. Baptists, Assembly of God, Methodists, Calvinists. God has no respect for a person's title. He don't care what you call yourself.
A Puff of Smoke
I've never been able to understand the seriousness of it all, the seriousness of pride. People talk, act, live as if they're never going to die. And what do they leave behind? Nothing. Nothing but a mask.
Knockin' on Heaven's Door
Whenever anybody does something in a big way, it's always rejected at home and accepted someplace else. For instance, that could apply to Buddha. Who was Buddha? An Indian. Who are Buddhists? Chinese, Japanese, Asian people. They make up the big numbers in Buddhism. It's the same way with Jesus being a Jew. Who did he appeal to? He appeals to people who want to get into heaven in a big way. But some day the true story will reveal itself, and by that time, people will be ready for it, because it's just going in that direction. You can come out and say it all now, but what does it matter? It's going to happen anyway. Vanities of vanities, that's all it is.
They're Not Showing Any Lights Tonight
I went to Bible school at an extension of this church out in the Valley in Reseda, California. It was affiliated with the church, but I'm not a believer in that born-again type thing. Jesus told Nicodemus, "A man must be born again." And Nicodemus said, "How can I go through my mother's womb?" and Jesus said, "You must be born of the spirit." And that's where that comes from, that born-again thing. People have put a heavy trip on it. People can call you what they want. The media make up a lot of these words for the definition of people. I mean, who's a person anymore? Everything's done for the media. If the media don't know about it, it's not happening. They'll take the littlest thing and make it spectacular. They're in the business of doing that. Everything's a business. Love, truth, beauty. Conversation is a business. Spirituality is not a business, so it's going to go against the grain of people who are trying to exploit other people. God doesn't look at people and say, "That's a banker, that's a dentist, that's an oil-well driller."
What's the messianic complex?
All that exists is spirit, before, now and forever more. The messianic thing has to do with this world, the flesh world, and you got to pass through this to get to that. The messianic thing has to do with the world of mankind, like it is. This world is scheduled to go for 7,000 years. Six thousand years of this, where man has his way, and 1,000 years when God has His way. Just like a week. Six days work, one day rest. The last thousand years is called the Messianic Age. Messiah will rule. He is, was, and will be about God, doing God's business. Drought, famine, war, murder, theft, earthquake, and all other evil things will be no more. No more disease. That's all of this world. What's gonna happen is this: you know when things change, people usually know, like in a revolution, people know before it happens who's coming in and who's going out. All the Somozas and Batistas will be on their way out, grabbing their stuff and whatever, but you can forget about them. They won't be going anywhere. It's the people who live under tyranny and opression, the plain, simple people, that count, like the multitude of sheep. They'll see that God is coming. Somebody representing Him will be on the scene. Not some crackpot lawyer or politician with the mark of the beast, but somebody who makes them feel holy. People don't know how to feel holy. They don't know what it's about or what's right. They don't know what God wants of them. They'll want to know what to do and how to act. Just like you want to know how to please any ruler. They don't teach that stuff like they do math, medicine, and carpentry, but now there will be a tremendous calling for it. There will be a run on godliness, just like now there's a run on refrigerators, headphones, and fishing gear. It's going to be a matter of survival. People are going to be running to find out about God, and who are they going to run to? They're gonna run to the Jews, 'cause the Jews wrote the book, and you know what? The Jews ain't gonna know. They're too busy in the fur busines and in the pawnshops and in sending their kids to some atheist school. They're too busy doing all that stuff to know. People who believe in the coming of the Messiah live their lives right now as if he was here. That's my idea of it, anyway. I know people are going to say to themselves, "What the fuck is this guy talking about?" But it's all there in black and white, the written and unwritten word. I don't have to defend this. The scriptures back me up. I didn't ask to know this stuff. It just came to me at different times from experiences throughout my life. Other than that, I'm just a rock 'n' roller, folk poet, gospel-blues-protestest guitar player. Did I say that right?
Blowin' in the Wind
Politics have changed. The subject matter has changed. In the '60s there was a lot of people coming out of schools who were taught politics by professors who were political thinkers, and those people spilled over into the streets. What politics I ever learned, I learned in the streets, because it was part of the environment. I don't know where somebody would hear that now. Now everybody wants their own thing. There's no unity. There's the Puerto Rican Day parade, Polish Day, German Week, the Mexican parades. You have all these different types of people all waving their own flags, and there's no unity between all these people. In the '60s, there wasn't any separation. That's the difference between then and now that I can see. Everybody now is out for their own people and their own selves, and they should be 'cause they look around and see everything's unbalanced.
The Times They Are a-Changing
The times still are a-changing, every day. I'm trying to slow down every day, because the times may be a-changing, but they're going by awfully fast. "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things."
download this file here or back to list
Rolling Stone Issue 394 , January 16, 1986 Australian edition p57 Music News
Gates of Eden Revisited A Conversation with Bob Dylan (Toby Creswell)
It doesn't really matter now whether Bob Dylan is a fundamentalist Christian, anymore than it mattered whether he was going to the Synagogue when he recorded 'Blood on the Tracks' ten years ago. Amongst all the crucial lines that Dylan has sung, one sticks out - "He not busy being born is busy dying." Dylan, of all the great creators of his generation, has been busy being born over a series of almost thirty albums, each of which has added to all that had come before.
However, there have been some constants. There has always been a sense of engagement with the external world. When Dylan gave up writing specific protest songs in 1964, he began writing songs about hypocrisy, prejudice, injustice, malice, exploitation and cruelty. Those concerns are still the subject of his songs. At the same time he was writing love songs like "Love Minus Zero/No Limit", which is a tender and complete statement of affection that is also a religious statement. Dylan has sung of both sacred and profane love throughout his career, sometimes concentrating on one, sometimes on the other. Then there was the electric bite of pure rock & roll as portrayed on "Subterranean Homesick Blues," a song that Dylan notes, on the five-album 'Biograph' retrospective, was recorded in one take.
All these are still elements of Dylan's current work. His choice of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as a backing band suggests that he still after that fire in his rock & roll. Moreover, the news that he is working with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics suggests that he still sees himself as contemporary.
Given all of that and the quality of the last album, 'Empire Burlesque,' the presence of the Heartbreakers on Dylan's Australian tour promises us an extraordinary series of concerts.
CBS has just issued the 'Biograph' box set: ten sides of Dylan from 'Bob Dylan' to 'Shot of Love.' It is an awesome body of work, unequalled in rock & roll, even the outtakes and the unfinished songs like "Jet Pilot" which later became "Tombstone Blues."
As somebody who has listened to Bob Dylan for twenty years, I jumped at the chance of an interview. But what do you say over the telephone to someone whom you have grown up with? My friend Danny said you usually talk about how the family is doing. What do you ask Bob Dylan, though?
TC: This tour you'll be playing with the Heartbreakers, the first time you've played with a band since the Band tour a decade ago. It must be good to get back to that format.
BD: We don't really know what the format is going to be yet. It's a lot easier, though, because as band members they sort of think as one person. When you put people together who've never played together before, there's so many different people ; it takes years for people to play together like the Tom Petty Band. We were all raised on the same sort of music.
TC: You played with the Heartbreakers for Farm Aid. You seem to have been doing rather a lot of those shows lately.
BD: These things pop up every once in a while. I don't think it'll become a regular thing. This year these seem to have been a couple of those kind of shows.
TC: It seems that these shows have become such huge events that they tend to overshadow the issues.
BD: I know what you mean. That can happen. The atmosphere is like a carnival. But by raising that kind of money, they must be getting these problems into the minds of a lot of people who wouldn't have had it on their minds before, and that's a good thing.
TC: You have said in the past that the function of art is to lead you to God. There were the three gospel albums: 'Slow Train Coming,' 'Saved' and 'Shot of Love,' but your last two records have taken a different slant.
BD: Well, it all depends where you come at it from. I come at things from different sides to get a different perspective on what it is I'm trying to focus in on. Maybe all my songs are focusing on the same thing. I don't know; maybe I'm just coming in from all sides.
TC: The difference between the gospel records and the recent stuff seems to be that earlier you were laying down the law.
BD: Every so often you have to have the law laid down so that you know what the law is. Then you can do whatever you please with it. I haven't heard those albums in quite awhile ; you're probably right.
TC: You have said recently that you didn't think rock & roll still existed in its pure form, that it was no longer viable. Would you put yourself in with that?
BD: I don't think I put myself in that category. I'm not coming up anymore, you know what I mean? I probably was speaking about the industry itself. I listen to it but mostly I don't pay much attention to modern music. It's everywhere, in places that maybe it shouldn't be. There comes a time to shut off the radio, there's a time to turn off the tube, but the way it's projected into society there's not much of a chance that you can get to do that. There are very few people I know who play the real old-style music. When it first appeared, as I remember it, it was an escape from everything that was going on, which was mainly lies, so when music came it was a direction to pull you in that was out of this myth. But now nobody wants to get pulled out of the myth because they don't recognise it as being a myth. That's what it's like here anyway. They like where they're at, they like what's going on, and music is just an extension of that, so they like it, too. It's nothing different, it doesn't pull you anywhere.
TC: So what's the solution?
BD: Turn it off. It's a decision people have to make. That's what the Sixties and the Fifties were all about. There are other ways to operate, to survive. There's got to be some type of light, some type of brightness outside of everything that you're given on a mass consumer level. What I can see is the mass monster. I don't know what it's like in Australia, but in America it's everywhere. It's invaded your home, your bed, it's in your closet. It's come real close to kicking over life itself. Unless you're able to go into the woods, the back country, and even there it reaches you. It seems to want to make everybody the same. People who are different are looked at as being a little bit crazy or a little bit odd. It's hard to stand outside of all that and remain sane. Even outrageousness gets to be in fashion. Anything you can think of to do, someone is going to come along and market it. I think it's going to change. I don't think it can stay like this forever, that's for sure. I think it's going to change but for the moment it's hard to find anything that's really hot.
TC: 'Empire Burlesque' seems a very straightforward record by comparison with some of your earlier work. Is simplicity something you are striving for?
BD: I strive for somehing that feels right to me. It could be a lot of different kinds of moods and phrasings, or lines that might not seem to be too connected at the time with the music. They're all connected. A lot of times people will take the music out of my lyrics and just read them as lyrics. That's not really fair because the music and the lyrics I've always felt are pretty closely wrapped up. You can't separate one from the other that simply. A lot of time the meaning is more in the way a line is sung, and not just in the line.
TC: These last few years have been very prolific for you.
BD: Yeah, I've been trying to find different things that are offshoots of the things I would normally do. I feel like something might open up in the next couple of months in different areas. There's a bunch of songs I want to write that I haven't been able to get close to. I almost know what they are but the information that I need is not really available to me so I have to go out and get it and I haven't done that. I expected to have a little more of that on Empire Burlesque but I just didn't do it. They are the true story type things, real things that have happened that I would like to comment on. I need to talk to the people involved but I haven't followed through yet. I hope to have some of that stuff on the next album I do.
TC: Were you pleased with the way 'Empire Burlesque' turned out?
BD: Yes, for what it was I thought it was really good. I think the next record is going to sound even better. I'm not too experienced at having records sound good. I don't know how to go about doing that, though I thought I got pretty close last time with Arthur Baker. I think next time, working with Dave Stewart here, the stuff we're doing has been happening a lot easier, quicker, so I think it's going to sound a lot more together than the last record.
TC: You recorded that album yourself and gave it to Arthur Baker to mix?
BD: Pretty much so. I just went out and recorded a bunch of stuff all over the place and then when it was time to put this record together I brought it all to him and he made it sound like a record. Usually I stay out of that side of the finished record.
TC: Why?
BD: I'm not good at it. There are guys that don't mind sitting in the control booth for days and days. I'm just not like that ; I'm a one-mix man. I can't tell the difference after that.
TC: Your music often seems to get ignored as compared with the emphasis that's placed on the lyrics, but they're have been some really nice instrumental passages like "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," for example.
BD: Yes, I just did a bunch of tracks with Dave Stewart that have no lyrics, and you don't even miss the lyrics, really. They're just different chord patterns that make up a melody. My records usually don't have a lot of guitar solos or anything like that on them. The vocals mean a lot and the rhythm means a lot, that's about it.
TC: Your voice seems to have changed a lot over the years.
BD: Maybe it has, I don't know.
TC: It sounded different to me, particularly after 'Street Legal' when you started using girl singers.
BD: I'm not aware of any significant difference, really. I've always heard that sound (female backing) with my music. I just hear it in there, it's just like another way of putting horns in. That sound has always been one of my favourites, just that vocal part, because I don't do anything with solo-type work - it's all part of the overall effect, it's more just playing the song and getting the structure of it right. The vocal parts are like another instrument but not a solo instrument. Apart from that, I just like the gospel sound.
TC: Seeing the latest videos and the 'We are the World' video, you seem to have less of the legend around your neck, you seem freed of the burden of being Bob Dylan.
BD: I don't think I ever carried that around except for 1974, when I did that tour with the Band. That was pretty much of a heavy tour because of the notoriety and the legendary quality of the people involved. I had to step into Bob Dylan's shoes for that tour. Since that time, I never thought about it. I wouldn't do half the things I do if I was thinking about having to live up to a Bob Dylan myth.
TC: Do you feel that you've been guided to where you are?
BD: You're always guided to where you are., but you have the choice to mess it up. Sooner or later evrything that goes around comes around. So, yeah, I feel like I've been guided to wherever it is I'm at right now, but I don't know whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing. I might have something else to do. I can't figure out what it would be, though, because I like doing what I do. Who's to say? There's a lot of luck involved, a lot of circumstance. You can't do anything alone, though. You've always got to have somebody supporting you or nobody would get anywhere.
TC: Do you think that with time comes wisdom?
BD: With experience. Things don't really change, just attitudes.
TC: You've been doing videos with Dave Stewart. What do you think of the video age?
BD: I don't think much about it at all. It's not going to go away. Everyplace you look, you're drowning in it. You can't turn on your TV without seeing music videos. It's like the unions. Unions in the early thirties were all communist organisations and now they're big business.
TC: It's got to the point where everybody seems to be using rock & roll for their own ends. In America, you have politicians associating themselves with rock & roll songs.
BD: Absurd isn't it. The rock & roll songs they're quoting from don't deserve to be quoted from like that. You couldn't do that with the early stuff, Little Richard and Chuck Berry - what politician is going to quote Chuck Berry? Who's going to quote Carl Perkins or Gene Vincent or any of those guys? It was outside then.
TC: Today it's image rather than content. People hold up an image of a star and hope to attach themselves to that image.
BD: That's absolutely correct. It's destroying the fabric of our minds and all we can do is complain about it, so we just have to shut it out. You just have to cut it off and not let it get into your framework because that's the only way you're going to escape it. You can't meet it head on. You've probably got a little more space to breathe over there, but here it's heavy. There's not many places you can go where you're not reminded of the current cultural ambitions of people who are on their way to be stars.
TC: When you started out you must have wanted to be a star in some way?
BD: I wanted to be a star in my own mind, I wanted to be my own star. I didn't want to be a star for people I didn't really identify with. For me what I did was a way of life, it wasn't an occupation.
TC: Has it been all it was cracked up to be?
BD: Yes and no. I'm still doing it , you know. It seems to be what I've done more years than I haven't done it, but I'm just going to keep on doing it till it runs out. Yes, it was all it was cracked up to be, because I never strayed from it. Maybe I would've gone down if I'd gone into being a movie star or if I'd started believing what other people said of me or if I'd started to think I was this person that everybody was talking about. I know there are a lot of people that did go down. They started believing what the newspapers said about them. I never believed it one way or another, so for me, I don't really feel much of a change. I feel very little change between now and ten years ago, twenty years ago. I don't feel like I've travelled that far or done that much.
TC: You mentioned the Unions earlier and I was thinking of the song "Union Sundown," on 'Infidels' which is a very specific commentary. Do you still feel a need to make that type of comment?
BD: Oh, yes, that comes with the territory.
TC: There seems to be two types of songs you've written, those which are here and now, and a lot that seem to focus on the eternals.
BD: Well, that's the important thing, if you lose that, you start getting into stuff that is mindless and meaningless. Usually there's a voice that goes on, there's some kind of warning point if that ever happens, but mostly what this kind of music is about is your ability to feel things. There's a lot of stuff going on that you hear that you know nobody felt nothing about ; you can hear it in the spirit. So much stuff gets thrown at you with no feeling behind it because nobody feels anything anymore. But there are a lot of good things going on that I don't understand. A lot of music that's coming out is way beyond me. There are some people who are really gifted musicians, I mean in a classical sense, and they're coming out with a lot of different stuff that is being thought out and preplanned.
TC: There does seem to be an attempt by people, like Miami Steve on the "Sun City" record, to say things about apartheid and about what is happening in America today.
BD: Yes, he's highly committed to that.
TC: It seems like a very difficult struggle.
BD: Well, it is a very difficult struggle, because most people don't want to hear that.
TC: There's a lot of red-baiting going on again.
BD: That's been going on since the Fifties.
TC: The cold war seems to be coming back.
BD: I don't think it ever went away, you know. It just lays low for a while. People need something to hate, you've got to hate something. As soon as your old enough, people try to make you hate something or somebody. Blacks are a little easier, Communists you can't really see. The early Christians were like Communists. The Roman Empire treated the Early Christians the same way as the Western world treats the Communists.
TC: So it doesn't really change?
BD: No, things don't, it's just got a different name on it. There's always someone you're told you've got to step on so you can rise up a little higher.
TC: Your kids are grown up now. What's the perspective like as a father?
BD: It gives you a perspective on what kids are doing. I don't think kids are any different from what they ever were, really. It's like my daddy once said, when he was twelve years old he asked his dad something and he didn't think his dad knew too much about what he was talking about. When he got to twenty-five, he asked him the same question and he got the same answer and he was amazed how his father got to be so smart.
download this file here or back to list
October 10, 1986
NO TRANSCRIPT
Is this recollection based on:
19 Sept 1985, Malibu, California, Interviewer : Bob Brown
ABC TV 20/20 programme 10 Oct 1985, video available; transcribed in "Talking Bob Dylan 84-85" by Bicker
Bill Youngblood has posted the following recollections on rec.music.dylan:
I have been asked about Dylan's references to his Christian beliefs in his interview with Hugh Downs on 20/20 several years ago. I've tracked thesegment down. It was played on ABC on October 10, 1986.
The particular segment I referred to was actually in the narration, over sound bytes of "Shot of Love":
"In 1979 Dylan took the most dramatic and controversial turn of hiscareer, to born again Christianity, reflected in songs like 'Shot of Love'and performances with an evangelical fervor. He believes in theResurrection, he says, but he also delves intensely into his own religious heritage, Orthodox Judaism."
My remembrance of Dylan saying he also believes in the coming of themessianic Kingdom must have come from some other source (alas, I don'tremember where).
The 20/20 interview, by the way, was quite interesting. It runs about 20 minutes, and includes a short biography as well as several song samples.Dylan reflects on his music, philosophy, and spirituality. Asked about hisparticipation in "We Are the World," he said he did it because it was fora good cause, but that he really didn't believe in the song: "I don'tbelieve we can save ourselves."
At the end of the segment, the film crew had been watching Dylan practicing with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Dylan was asked to do oneof his older songs, any he chose to do. Dylan thought for a moment anddecided to do "Forever Young," joined spontaneously and unrehearsed byPetty and band. Another unique cut of that classic. -- Bill Youngblood
According to Olof: September 19 1985, Dylan is interviewed by Bob Brown from ABC-TV in Malibu. The interview is later broadcast on October 20 in the program "20-20".
download this file here or back to list
Fort-Lauderdale, Sun Sentinel today 29/9/95
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IDNIGHT CHAT WITH BOB DYLAN I
nterview by John Dolen
When Bob Dylan calls, it's nearly midnight. When he speaks it is with a clear, distinctive voice. Even though he's at the end of his day, having just returned to a Fort Lauderdale hotel after a band rehearsal, he is contemplative, enigmatic, even poetic.
The Southern leg of his current tour cranks into high gear tonight with the first of two concerts at the Sunrise Musical Theatre. The tour, which as been in progress for more than a year, has earned rave reviews from critics in New York, San Francisco, Dublin. In a nearly hour-long interview with Arts & Features Editor John Dolen, the first in-depth interview he has given to a newspaper this year, Dylan talks about his songs, the creative process and the free gig at The Edge in Fort Lauderdale last Saturday.
Q: Like many others, over the years I've spent thousands of hours listening to your albums. Even now, not a month goes by witbout me reaching for Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61 Revisited, Slow Train Coming, Street Legal, Oh Mercy. Do you sit back and look at all these albums and say, hey, that's pretty good?
A: You know it's ironic, I never listen to those records. I really don't notice them anymore except to pick songs off of them here and there to play. Maybe I should listen to them. As a body of work, there could always be more. But it depends. Robert Johnson only made one record‹ His body of work was just one record. Yet there's no praise or esteem high enough for the body of work he represents. He's influenced hundreds of artists. There are people who put out 40 or 50 records and don't do what he did.
Q: What was the record?
A: He made a record called King of the Delta Blues Singers. In '61 or '62. He was brilliant.
Q: Your performance at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert in Cleveland earlier this month drew a lot of great notices. Is that important to you? What's your feeling about tbat institution?
A: I never visited the actual building, I was just over at the concert, which was pretty long. So I have no comment on the interior or any of the exhibits inside.
Q: But how do you feel about the idea of a rock hall of fame itself?
A: Nothing surprises me anymore. It's a perfect time for anything to happen.
Q: At the Edge show Saturday, you did a lot of covers, including some old stuff, like Confidential . Was that a Johnny Ray song?
A: It's by Sonny Knight. You won't hear that again.
Q: Oh, was that the reason for your "trying to turn bullshit into gold" comment at the show? Were these covers just something for folks at the Edge? Does that mean you aren't going to be doing more material like that on your tour, including the Sunrise shows?
A: It will be the usual show we're used to doing on this tour now, songs most people will have heard already.
Q: In the vein of non-Dylan music, what does Bob Dylan toss on the CD or cassette player these days?
A: Ever heard of John Trudell? He talks his songs instead of singing them and has a real good band. There¹s a lot of tradition to what he is doing. I also like Kevin Lynch. And Steve Forbert.
Q: Are there new bands you think are worth bringing to attention?
A: I hear people here and there and I think they're all great. In most cases I never hear of them again. I saw some groups in London summer. I don¹t know their names.
Q: At this stage of your career, when you've earned every kind of honor and accolade that a person can get, what motivates you?
A: I've had it both ways. I have had good and bad accolades. If you pay any attention to them at all, it makes you pathological. It makes us pathological, to read about ourselves. You try not to pay attention or you try to discard it as soon as possible.
Q: For some writers the motivation is that burden, that you have to get what's inside of you out and down on paper. How is it with you?
A: Like that, exactly. But if I can't make it happen when it comes, you know, when other things intrude, I usually don't make it happen. I don't go to a certain place at a certain time every day to build it. In my case, a lot of these songs, they lay around imperfectly...
Q: As a songwriter, what's the creative process? How does a song like "All Along tbe Watchtower" come about?
A: There's three kinds of ways. You write Iyrics and try to find a melody. Or, if you come up with a melody, then you have to stuff the Iyrics in there some kinda way. And then the third kind of a way is when they both come at the same time. Where it all comes in a blur: The words are the melody and the melody is the words. And that's the ideal way for somebody, like myself to get going with something. "All Along the Watchtower" was that way. It leaped out in a very short time. I don't like songs that make you feel feeble or indifferent. That lets a whole lot of things out of the picture for me.
Q: How did you feel when you first heard Jimi Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower"?
A: It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn't think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day.
Q: "Angelina", off the Bootleg Series, is such a great song, but no matter how hard I try I can't figure out the words; any clues for me?
A: I never try to figure out what they're about. If you have to think about it, then it's not there.
Q: A song that always haunted me was "Senor", from Street Legal Have you played that at all in last few years?
A: We play that maybe once every third, fourth or fifth show.
Q: In the '70s after years abroad, I remember the incredible elation I felt coming back to the States and hearing your Christian songs, a validation of experiences I had been through in Spain. I remember the lines,
You talk about Buddha
You talk about Muhammad
But you never said a word about the one who came to die for us instead ..."
Those were fearless words. How do you feel about those words and the songs your wrote during that period now?
A: Just writing a song like that probably emancipated me from other kind of illusions. I've written so many songs and so many records that I can't address them all. I can't say that I would disagree with that line. On its own level it was some kind of turning point for me, writing that.
Q: With the great catalog you have and with the success this year with the MTV Unplugged disc, why does this concert tour have such a heavy guitar and drums thing going?
A: It's not the kind of music that will put anybody to sleep.
Q: The other night at the Edge you left the harmonicas on the stand without touching them, any reason for that?
A: They are such a dynamo unto themselves. I pick them up when I feel like it.
Q: You've made several passes through here in the past 10 years. Your thoughts on South Florida?
A: I like it a lot, who wouldn¹t. There's a lot to like.
Q: Now there is Bob Dylan on CD-ROM, Bob Dylan on the Internet and all that stuff. Are some people taking you too seriously?
A: It's not for me to say. People take everything seriously. You can get too altruistic on your yourself because of the brain ener of other people.
Q: Across the Atlantic is a fellow named Elvis Costello, who, after you, takes a lot of shelf space I my stereo. Both of you are prolific, turn out distinctive albums each time, have great imagery have a lot to say and so on. Is there any reason that in all the years I've never seen your names or faces together?
A: It's funny you should mention that. He just played four or five shows with me in London and Paris. He was doing a lot of new songs, playing them by himself He was doing his thing. You so had So be there.
Q: Is America better or worse than, say, in the days of "The Times They are A-Changin'"?
A: I see pictures of the '50s, the '60s and the '70s and I see there was a difference. But I don't think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change. But after you've been around awhile, they both seem unnatural. It seems like we're going in a straight line, but then you start seeing sings that you've seen before. Haven't you experienced that? It seems we're going around in circles.
Q: When you look ahead now, do you still see a Slow Train Coming?
A: When I look ahead now, it¹s picked up quite a bit of speed. In fact, it's going like a freight train now
download this file here or back to list
At the heart of Dylan USA today 28 September 1997
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SANTA MONICA, Calif. - Heartache. The word literally and figuratively defines Bob Dylan in 1997. After surviving a life-threatening cardiac infection, he is resuming his storied career with a powerful album about lost love and dwindling hope.
Time Out of Mind, in stores Tuesday, examines mortality and heartbreak in 11 raw and potent tracks. Though finished long before Dylan was hospitalized, the lyrics carry added resonance in light of his illness.
Disciples will ruminate over lines like "When you think you've lost everything, you find you can lose a little more," "It's not dark yet but it's getting there" and "I was on anything but a roll."
At 56, nearly four decades after his first public appearances, Dylan is on a roll. A chorus of praise greets Time Out of Mind: A+ in Entertainment Weekly, **** in Rolling Stone, "his best sustained work since the mid-1970s," raves The New York Times. He's Newsweek's cover boy. On Saturday, he played for the pope. In December, he'll become the first rock star anointed a Kennedy Center honoree.
Dylan, slim and natty in a black shirt, slacks and patent leather loafers, seems anything but morose during a rare interview. His clear blue eyes, ready smile and animated demeanor suggest good health and high spirits. He is quick to discourage analysts who'd dismantle his songs for clues about death and despair.
"I don't think they should or could be interpreted that way, if at all," he says, his back to a hotel window that frames the Pacific sunset. "You can't interpret a Hank Williams song. He's done the interpretation and the performance, and that's it. Now it's for the listener to decide if it moves him or not. That's something you don't even decide. That happens to you unconsciously.
"I let the songs fly, and people respond. Whether they make a valid interpretation or look at it with a false eye, I'm not concerned with that."
Nor is the ferociously private Dylan willing to expound on Time's tales of shattered romance, except to acknowledge that the songs are drawn from personal experience.
"I can identify with other people and situations, but I tend not to," he says. "I would rather recall things from my own life, and I don't have to force myself. . . . Just being in certain environments triggers a response in my brain, a certain feeling I want to articulate. For some reason, I am attracted to self-destruction. I know that personal sacrifice has a great deal to do with how we live or don't live our lives.
"These songs are not allegorical," Dylan stresses. "I have given that up. . . . Philosophical dogma doesn't interest me."
Pop's most scrutinized yet inscrutable artist doesn't deny his mercurial nature or his disdain for the labels of rebel, poet and prophet. Though he radically transformed folk, rock and the singer/songwriter genre in the '60s, he refuses to clone seminal works and adopts a humble stance.
"I don't consider myself a songwriter in the sense of Townes Van Zandt or Randy Newman," he says. "I'm not Paul Simon. I can't do that. My songs come out of folk music and early rock 'n' roll, and that's it. I'm not a classical lyricist, I'm not a meticulous lyricist. I don't write melodies that are clever or catchy. It's all very traditionally documented."
The most influential songwriter of modern times recognizes that his mass appeal has waned.
"I'm under the impression that people aren't really paying attention to my records," he says. "I'm aware that I don't sell records like I did in the '80s or the '70s, and that's OK as long as I can play, and the right crowd is going to come and see it properly. I don't follow what records are at the top of the charts. I ceased doing that a long, long time ago."
He does, however, take notice of rising son Jakob, whose band the Wallflowers, No. 31 after 64 weeks on Billboard's chart, commercially outranks his dad's '90s output.
"I'm proud of his accomplishments," Dylan says. "He's still young, and he's come a long way in a short time. I worried about him when he started out. I just didn't want to see him get roughed up. This business can throw you into deep water."
The murkiest depths? Celebrity. "It mortifies me to even think that I am a celebrity," Dylan says. "I'm not one, and I never want to be one. I lead a very insular existence. It's different on stage, because those people look at me as a performer.
"By being a celebrity, you lose your anonymity. It short-circuits your creative powers when people come up and interrupt your train of thought. They consider you completely approachable. And you can't be rude to people, so basically you shut yourself down. I know I do. I shut myself down when people come up and want to shake my hand or want to talk. That's just dead time."
Dylan avoids the press, loathes photo sessions and steadily releases records with scant promotion.
Time contains his first batch of originals since 1990's Under the Red Sky. Since then, he has released a boxed set of rarities, his third greatest hits album, an MTV Unplugged, and two collections of vintage folk and blues, 1992's Good as I Been to You and 1993's World Gone Wrong.
Making Time was a liberating experience for Dylan, who can feel burdened by the weight of his legend. The classics he performs on stage "are proven to be true and strong, otherwise I couldn't sing them night after night," he says. "It's not like I can eclipse that.
"I'm not looking to do that, but to record new songs, they have to be in that arena, and that's why it took a long time. I was constantly thinking, will these songs stand up to what I'm playing night after night?"
Dylan considers his early records roughly sketched prototypes that later matured onstage. Produced by Daniel Lanois last January in a Miami studio, the new songs were captured live with sidemen schooled in low-tech production.
"This record is not a blueprint," Dylan says. "This is it. This is the way these songs should go, every single last one. This record went through evolutions. What you hear comes through that whole maze, that labyrinth of fire that it takes to perfect the arrangement and structure.
"There is nothing contemporary about it. There is no trickery. We went back to the way a primitive record was made, before the advent of technology. It's almost a revolutionary concept these days."
The man who shocked the folk rank and file by plugging in now worries that high-watt noise is eradicating traditional American music.
"You see all this electricity speaking, all this wizardry," he says. "Pull out the plugs and probably very few of these people could move you, because they can't play. They are dominated by the electricity. Guys like Elmore James played acoustically and used electricity so they could be heard in a crowded room. They weren't depending on electricity to hide talent they didn't have. I don't want a bunch of flaky sounds. It's a dead end."
Dylan was still sequencing Time tracks when he was stricken with chest pains in May. He was declared fit after an initial medical exam.
"I accepted that, but the pain didn't go away," he says. "It was intolerable pain, where it affects your breathing every waking moment."
He entered a hospital May 25 and was diagnosed with pericarditis, a swelling of the sac around the heart, brought on by a fungal infection called histoplasmosis. Dylan spent six weeks off his feet. His brush with death brought delirium and ennui but no spiritual revelations.
"I didn't have any philosophical, profound thoughts," he says. "The pain stopped me in my tracks and fried my mind. I was so sick my mind just blanked out. I'm getting better; that's all I can say right now."
The alignment of events this year - his health scare, broad acclaim for Time Out of Mind, the papal encounter - has magnified Dylan's star power and fed an ongoing deification that he finds perplexing. In 1990, he received France's highest cultural honor. The next year, he got Grammy's lifetime achievement award. And in 1992, an all-star concert, pay-per-view and compilation album toasted his 30th anniversary as a recording artist.
Such honors "are unexpected and unsolicited, and I'm not nonchalant about it, because in some sense it really does matter," he says. "I'm very appreciative."
But he's leery of the hype. Dozens of books are devoted to the enigmatic troubadour. He doesn't read them.
"I'm not going to read a book about myself," he says with a chuckle. "I mean, why? I'm with myself enough. I wake up every day and I'm still me. It would be torture to read about myself. I would rather read about anybody else but me.
download this file here or back to list
Subject: Dylan - Guitar World Interview - March 1999 Date: 31 Jan 1999 18:36:44 -0800
Guitar World Magazine -- March, 1999
Profile: Bob Dylan
MAXIMUM BOB
In little over a year, he's won a Grammy, survived a dangerous illness, hobnobbed with eligious royalty and toured endlessly. He's Bob Dylan,forever young prince of rock and roll.
by Murray Engleheart
Bob Dylan, who for much of his fabled career has been the hippest,has now spent more than a year being the hottest as well. He's the man on everyon'es A-list, from Eddie Vedder, an avowed fan, to PopeJohn Paul II, for whom Dylan performed three songs in Bologna, Italy.Dylan even impressed online retailer amazon.com, which recently voted
*Bob Dylan Live 1966: The "Royal Albert Hall Concert* the best albumof 1998. As remarkable as it seems, one of the most vital post-grungeartists in rock is 58 year old Bob Dylan. After a rather lean decade,the Sixties folk-rock icon has, against all odds, revitalized his career by polishing off the Nineties with two albums that rank among his very best.
Along with the highly acclaimed "*Albert Hall*" reissue,Dylan's 1995 Grammy-winning release, *Time Out of Mind*, produced by Daniel Lanois, has put the singer back in rock'svanguard.
Perhaps even more remarkable than Dylan's albums have been his brilliant live shows, showcasing his feisty lead guitarplaying and a crack band. After bouncing back from a life-threatening heart infection in mid-'97, Dylan has played well over 200 shows, perrforming fierce, jam-oriented reinterpretations of his best songs, at times recalling the tightly wound three guitar army of Lynrd Skynrd's "Free Bird." It's all been a far cry from the disappointingly ramshackle shows that became his stock-in-trade in the Eighties and early Nineties.
When Bob Dylan talks -- which is rarely -- people listen. Especially these days. We recently had the opportunity for a brief chat with the enigmatic legend, who finally took a break from his "Never Ending Tour." Dylan seemed relaxed, and was kind enough to reflect on the turbulent events of his recent career, and to speculate on his future.
Guitar World: Bruce Springsteen once said that without you there'd be no Beatles' *Sgt. Pepper's* no Beach Boys *Pet Sounds*, no Sex-Pistols' "God Save the Queen."
Bob Dylan: Well...you know, you can influence all kinds of people, but sometimes it gets in the way -- especially if somebody is accusing you of influencing somebody that you had no interest in influencing in the first place. I've never given it any mindat all,
really. I don't really care to influence anybody at this time, and if I have influenced anybody, what can I say?
GW: Certain Albums of yours -- *Blood on the Tracks*, *Infidels*, *Highway 61 Revisited* -- have inspired great critical plaudits in their day, and have stood the test of time. In your view, do those records live up to their reputation?
BD: Well, those records were made a long time ago, and you know, truthfully, records that were made in that day and age all were good. They all had some magic to them because the technology didn't go beyond what the artist was doing. It was a lot easier to get excellence back in those days on a record than it is now. I made records back then just like a lot of other people who were my age, and we all made good records. Those records seem to cast a long shadow. But how much of it is the technology and how much of it is the talent and influence, I really don't know.
I know you can't make records that sound that way any more. The high priority is technology now. It's not the artist or the art. It's the technology that is coming through. That's what makes *Time Out of Mind* ... it doesn't take itself seriously, but then again, the sound is very significant to that record. If that record was made more haphazardly, it wouldn't have sounded that way. It wouldn't have had the impact that it did. The guys that helped me make it went out of their way to make a record that sounds like a record
played on a record player. There wasn't any wasted effort on *Time Out of Mind*, and I don't think there will be on any more of my records.
GW: A writer once noted that Delta bluesman Skip James' records always sound best at night. The same could be said about *Time Out of Mind*.
BD: You think it sounds like Skip James?
GW: In a sense. *Time Out of Mind* sounds best late at night.
BD: That would be a tremendous compliment to me, to hear that it was even in any kind of ... that it would be in the same realm as Skip James.
GW: In terms of mood and ambience, it's almost like there's ghosts running through it. Are those ghosts of, or for, anybody in particular?
BD: Er, no. I'm not versed in the psychological part of it. I don't know. The ghosts you're probably talking about are just probably where the instruments are all placed in the mix. Some are more in the background as opposed to being in the foreground. Or maybe you're just hearing different echoes that emanate from the complete sound of the record.
GW: Jim Dickinson, who played keyboards on *Time Out of Mind*, said something years ago that I thought was fascinating. He said that a lot of people don't realize that the recording process is about freeze-framing the soul.
BD: Yeah. The recording process is very difficult for me. I lose my inspiration in the studio real easy, and it's very difficult for me to think that I'm going to eclipse anything I've ever done before. I get bored easily, and my mission, which starts out wide,
becomes very dim after a few failed takes and this and that.
GW: There are elements of country blues and Sun Records production quality on the album.
BD: Well, it's always been there. But in the past, when my records were made, the producer, or whoever was in charge of my sessions, felt it was just enough to have me sing an original song. There was never enough work put into developing the orchestration, and that always made me feel very disillusioned about recording. *Time Out of Mind* is more illuminated, rather than just a song and the singing of that song. The arrangements or structures are really an integral part of the whole.
GW: *Time Out of Mind* was recorded just before you fell ill.
BD: That's right.
GW: Would you have regarded it as a satisfactory final chapter for you?
BD: No, I don't think so. I think we are just starting to get my sound on disc, and I think there's plenty more to do. We just opened up that door at that particular time, and in the passage of time we'll go back in and extend that. But I didn't feel like it was an ending to anything. I thought it was more the beginning.
GW: You've mentioned Buddy Holly in connection with the album. What did his spirit bring to the record?
BD: Buddy Holly. You know, I don't really recall exactly what I said about Buddy Holly, but while we were recording, every place I turned there was Buddy Holly. You know what I mean? It was one of those things. Every place you turned. You walked down a hallway and you heard Buddy Holly records like "That'll Be the Day." Then you'd get in the car to go over to the studio and "Rave On" would be playing. Then you'd walk into this studio and someone's playing a cassette of "It's So Easy." And this would happen day after day after day. Phrases of Buddy Holly songs would just come out of nowhere. It was spooky. [laughs] But after we recorded and left, you know, it stayed i n our minds. Well, Buddy Holly's spirit must have been someplace, hastening this record.
GW: There seems to be a renewed interest in your music, particularly among young people. Have you noticed a shift in your audience?
BD: Ah, no, I haven't found any shift, but I've found a different audience. I'm not good at reading how old people are, but my audience seems to be livelier than they were 10 years ago. They react immediately to what I do, and they don't come with a lot of preconceived ideas about who they would like me to be, or who they think I am. Wereas a few years ago they couldn't react quickly. They had to get through too much ...er...
GW: Baggage?
BD: Mental, yeah, mental, psychic stuff, so [sighs] I was still kind of bogged down with a certain crowd of people. It has taken a long time to bust through that crowd. Even the last time I toured with Tom Petty, we were kind of facing that same old crowd.
But that's changed. We seem to be attracting a new audience. Not just those who know me as some kind of figurehead from another age or a symbol for a generational thing. I don't really have to deal with that any more, if I ever did.
GW: Do you find that choosing songs for your live performances gets harder or easier as the years go on?
BD: I have so many songs that finding them is the least of my problems. I've got songs that I've never even sung live. I've got 500, 600, 700 songs. I don't have a problem with the backlog of songs. Some fade away and diminish in time, but others take their place.
GW: While there seems there is plenty of room to improvise, your current live sound appears to be more tightly arranged than in previous years.
BD: If you're going to ask me what's the difference between now and when I used to play in the Seventies, Eighties and even back in the Sixties, the songs weren't arranged. The arrangement is the architecture of the song. And that's why our performances are so effective these days, because measure for measure we don't stray from the actual structure of the song. And once the architecture is in place, a song can be done in an endless amount ofways. That's what keeps my current live shows unadulterated. Because they're not diluted, or they're not jumbled up. They're not scrambled, they're not just a bunch of screaming... a conglomerated sound mix.
It's like Skip James, who you mentioned earlier, once said: "I don't want to entertain. What I want to do is impress with skill and deaden the minds of my listeners." If you listen to his records -- his old records -- you know he can do that. But if you listen to the records he made in the Sixties, when they rediscovered him, you find that there's something missing. And what's missing is that interconnecting thread of the structure of the songs.
GW: What was the nature of your heart infection?
BD: It was something called histoplasmosis that came from just accidentally inhaling a bunch of stuff that was out on one of the rivers by where I live. Maybe one month, or two to three days out of the year, the banks around the river get all mucky, and then the wind blows and a bunch of swirling mess is in the air. I happened to inhale a bunch of that. That's what made me sick. It went into my heart area, but it wasn't anything really attacking my heart.
GW: You were pretty seriously ill though?
BD: Oh, I was real seriously ill, yeah.
GW: Did that make you pause and rethink things?
BD: I really didn't, you know, because it wasn't something that I brought on myself. It's not like I even needed the time to slow down and re-examine my life. If was just one of those things. I was down for about six weeks, but I don't remember particularly having any kind of great illuminations at that time.
GW: The performance for the Pope at the World Eucharistic Congress in Bologna must have been tremendously moving for you.
BD: Well, it's all surreal, you know? But yeah, it was moving. I mean, he's the Pope. [laughs] You know what I mean? There's only one Pope, right?
GW: Did the irony of playing "Knocking on Heaven's Door" in that situation strike you at the time?
BD: No, because that's the song they wanted to hear. It seemed to be a good correspondence to the situation
download this file here or back to list
This is a brief interview with Carol Dennis published on "Follow That Dream international" December 1992, a Bruce Springsteen's fanzine. I've cut the other parts leaving only the Bob related piece.
Q. After getting involved with theatre and working with Stevie Wonder and Burt Bacharach you started your long collaboration with Bob Dylan...
A. Yeah, I went on the road for a couple of weeks with Burt Bacharach doing a tour in South America, and I came back to a surprising phone call from a girl who was dating Mr. Dylan at the time, for him. I have say - as embarrassing as it might be - I didn't know who he was, because my young life had been so reclusive and so sheltered. So I called and I asked "Who is Bob Dylan? I got a call, they want me to come and audition for this guy named Bob Dylan. Who is he?". And the Union went "What? Oh My God! In the sixties there was nobody but Bob Dylan and the Beatles!". It was May 1978 when I first met him and started working for him, did the United States, started recording with him.
Q. After your first tour with him, you had a kind of special role in helping with the vocal parts...
A. Well, I mean, I would call background singers and then, you know, he'd hear them of course, the final decision was his, you know. But he knew that I'd basically bring in what he was after, people that could go after a feeling, that it wasn't so much standing there with the music and trying to prove how perfectly you could sing, but people who had a story in their voices, when they'd sing there was a feeling there. That feeling comes from life experiences, and that's what he was after. He wanted his show to have that kind of spontaneous spiritual type of feeling to it, a lot similar to what Bruce is requesting..."
Subject: Look What I found - Re Ms. Carol Dennis...
From: Nishama7
Date: 28 Dec 1997 16:38:43 GMT
Subject: Bob Dylan's ex on Broadway
From: Nishama7@aol.com -(snipped from PUSSSYKATT)
Date: Sun, Dec 28, 1997 09:46 EST
NY POST....PAGE SIX...
A BIG Broadway secret: one of Bob Dylan's exes - and the mother of two of his children - is starring on stage right now. Cinemania Online's Roger Friedman reports that Carol Dennis, who's been knocking out audiences at "Street Corner Symphony," is a former longtime Dylan lady-friend and backup singer. The couple met in 1978 after Dylan split with wife Sara Lowndes, mother of Wallflowers singer Jakob Dylan. Dennis has since sung backup on every Dylan album, including the latest, "Time Out of Mind." She also sings back-up for Bruce Springsteen. She told Friedman, "I have three children, but I'm not going to say which ones are Bob Dylan's." Dennis, according to her spokesman, had made a pact with her kids not to publicize their paternity. "Bob Dylan has eight or nine children," Dennis says. "We're not trading on that."
Subject: Look What I found - Re Ms. Carol Dennis... From: (RSbklyn@AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 19:49:22 -0500
... Howdy Folks,
I've heard of Miss Information, but this is ridiculous!
First of all, the name of the woman who was Dylan's backup singer is Carolyn Dennis, not Carol Dennis. (Details, details.)
Dennis has since (1978) sung backup on every Dylan album, including the latest, "Time Out of Mind."
Red Flag!! If "Carol Dennis" is the source of that information, she is at best a liar and at worst delusional. Why should anyone believe the rest of the article after reading that baldfaced lie? BTW, the editorial policy of the NY Post (owned by Rupert Murdoch) consists of: "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story".
"Bob Dylan has eight or nine children," Dennis says. "We're not trading on that."
Oh no, "Ms Dennis", that would be WRONG, wouldn't it?? How disingenuous can she be? "Trading on" her claim to have had Dylan's children is EXACTLY what she is doing. And she is doing so right when Dylan is getting so much media attention and she's in a Broadway musical in need of publicity. What a coincidence. Gee, this all reminds me of a song... it starts out
"Someone's got it in for me, They're planting stories in the press..."
G'night and Happy New Year ev'rybody.... Rich Shaffer .
download this file here or back to list
Helena Springs was a backup singer in Dylan's band from 1978 to 1980.
She also co-wrote several songs with Bob Dylan, two of which were later
recorded by Eric Clapton for his LP, Backless.
Q: You did Saturday Night Live, the first time he played any totally religious songs. Can you remember much about when he became a born-again Christian?
HS: Yes, I do. I don't know if I should say or ... hmmm ... it was a chain reaction of things.
I can't really go into too much depth, because that would upset me. I think it had to do with personal things.He was having some problems once and he called me and he asked me questions that no-one could possibly help with. And I just said, "Don't you every pray?" And he said, "Pray?" Like that, you know. And I said, "Don't you ever do that?" I said, "When I am in trouble, I pray." He asked me more questions about it, he started enquiring, he's a very inquisitive person which is one good thing about him -- he's always searching for truth, truth in anything he can find. It was like he was exploring Christianity. He didn't give up being a Jewish person, but he learned how to pray, and when he'd learned all he could learn, he went on to something else.
Q: Those San Francisco concerts in 1979 were extraordinary.
HS: Yeah, they were, those 14 days at the Fox-Warfield. I remember a lot of people were ... hmmm ... people from the Vineyard in Los Angeles -- it's kinda like a cult. Jesus-type people. I remember a lot of them pressuring him about a lot of things.
There were not allowing him to live. I remember one time he said to me: "God, it's awfully tight. It's so tight, you now?" He found a lot of hypocracy in those Jesus people that he had gotten involved with. He mentioned that to me..."
From an interview with Helena Springs, printed in John Bauldie's Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan (p. 125ff) [A Lilly Among Thorns Note: PROBABLY a reprint of: Helena Springs. A conversation with Chris Cooper - The Telegraph # 34
download this file here or back to list
Some Words from Pastor Larry Myers
Found on the Bill Parr's "Slow Train Coming" site
I was one of two pastors (Paul Emond, not Esmond, the other) who went to see Dylan in Brentwood, not Malibu, in the very early 1979, at the request of Bob Dylan who extended the request through Mary Alice Artes. There we met a man who was very interested in learning what the Bible says about Jesus Christ. To the best of my ability I started at the beginning in Genesis and walked through the Old Testament and the New Testament and ended in Revelation. I tried to clearly express what is the historical, orthodox understanding of who Jesus is. It was a quiet, intelligent conversation with a man who was seriously intent on understanding the Bible. There was no attempt to convince, manipulate or pressure this man into anything. But in my view God spoke through His Word, the Bible, to a man who had been seeking for many years. Sometime in the next few days, privately and on his own, Bob accepted Christ and believed that Jesus Christ is indeed the Messiah. After yet more time and further serious deliberation, Bob was baptized, but not at Bill Dwyer's home or Pat Boone's (which was widely reported at the time) or anyone else's.
Dylan then studied in the "School of Discipleship" under Kenn Gulliksen and at least four other competent pastor-teachers, including myself. We met in a comfortable conference room that was part of a suite of offices, which served as the church offices. The church worship services were held on Sunday afternoons in the sanctuary of St. Paul's United Methodist Church in Reseda, so it was necessary for us to occupy offices elsewhere. There was a real estate firm occupying the first floor suite of offices. Bob attended the intense course of study along with other students for three and one-half months...
This is a brief excerpt from On The Tracks, Issue #4, Fall 1994, page 31 - 32. Available through Rolling Tomes.
download this file here or back to list
KAREN HUGHES INTERVIEW, DAYTON, OHIO, MAY 21, 1980
Bob Dylan stretched out his hand and reached for a cigarette from a half-empty pack on the table. "It would have been easier", he sighed "If I had become, or a Buddhist, or a Scientologist or if I had gone to Sing Sing"
I asked him if many of his friends had forsaken him.
"No REAL friends?" Dylan responded tellingly, blowing cigarette smoke away from my face, in the tiny hotel room in Dayton, Ohio, where we talked as his tour was cutting across America's Bible belt and winding it's way back to Los Angeles, Dylan's home of nine years.
"At every point in my life I've had to make decisions for what I believed in. Sometimes I've ended up hurting people that I've loved. Other times I've ended up loving people that I never thought I would."
"You ask me about myself" Dylan said at the end of an intensive session of questioning, "but I'm becoming less and less defined as Christ becomes more and more defined".
"Christianity", he explained, "is not Christ and Christ is not Christianity. Christianity is making Christ the Lord of your life. You're talking about your life now, you're not talking about just part of it, you're not talking about a certain hour every day. You're talking about making Christ the Lord and the Master of your life, the KIng of your life. And you're also talking about Christ, the resurrected Christ, you're not talking about some dead man who had a bunch of good ideas and was nailed to a tree. Who died with those ideas. You're talking about a resurrected Christ who is Lord of your life. We're talking about that type of Christianity".
"It's HIM through YOU. 'He's alive', Paul said, 'I've been crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live. Yet not I but Christ who liveth in me'. See Christ is not some kind of figure down the road. We serve the living God, not dead monuments, dead ideas, dead philosophies. If he had been a dead God, you'd be carrying around a corpse inside you".
Dylan speaks of having constant dialogue with Christ, of surrendering his life to God's will much in the same way as Joan of Arc or St Francis of Assisi would have done. It is, he says, the only thing that matters. When you ask about his band, he replies "I think Jim Keltner and Tim Drummond are the best rhythm section that God ever invented".
His view on American politics is, "God will stay with America as long as America stays with God. A lot of people maybe even the President, maybe a lot of senators, you hear them speak and they'll speak of the attributes of God. But none of them are speaking about being a disciple of Christ".
"There's a different between knowing who Christ is and being a disciple of Christ and recognizing Christ as a personality and being of God. I'm more aware of that than anything and it dictates my very being. So I wouldn't have much to offer anybody who wants to know about politics or history or or art or any of that. I've always been pretty extreme in all them areas anyway".
Whether on or off the road Dylan worships whenever he can at the Assembly of God, a fundamentalist, pentecostal, evangelical l denomination that believe in the literal Bible and speaking in tongues. He came to Christ through a revelation, a personal experience with Jesus.
"Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up".
"Being born again is a hard thing. You ever seen a mother give birth to a child? Well it's painful. We don't like to lose those old attitudes and hang-ups".
"Conversion takes time because you have to learn to crawl before you can walk. You have to learn to drink milk before you can eat meat. You're re-born, but like a baby. A baby doesn't know anything about this world ant that's what it's like when you're re-born. You're a stranger. You have to learn all over again. God will show you what you need to know".
"I guess He's always been calling me", Dylan said gently. "Of course, how would I have ever known that? That it was Jesus calling me. I always thought it was some voice that would be more identifiable. But Christ is calling everybody; we just turn him off. We just don't want to hear. We think he's gonna make our lives miserable, you know what I mean. We think he's gonna make us do things we don't want to do. Or keep us from doing things we want to do".
"But God's got his own purpose and time for everything. He knew when I would respond to His call".
This was the first proper interview with Bob Dylan after his conversion and it was printed in the New Zealand newspaper The Dominion, August 2,1980.
Reprinted in Occasionally #5.
download this file here or back to list
Desire, Columbia, Recorded 1975
Dylan shows a greater sense of the world around him on this follow-up to the more introspective Blood on the Tracks. Working with lyricist Jacques Levy, Dylan offers a work with rougher edges and greater urgency that is distinguished by the prominence of Scarlet Rivera's melancholy violin.
The album features two of Dylan's famous wrongly-accused-and-misunderstood-criminal sagas. The passionate and angry "Hurricane" tells the tale of Ruben Carter, a former champion African-American boxer who's falsely tried and takes the fall for a white man. This powerful statement puts the American justice system on trial, and although Dylan may have assumed many of the facts involved, there's no doubt that similar situations have occurred multiple times throughout history. "Joey" is a poignant excuse for a benign mob boss.
Exotic imagery meshes with simple melody and chords on "Isis," one of Dylan's most appealing rambles. The droning piano and plodding drums create the proper mood while his account of a mystical journey contains some of his most clever (and most ridiculous) lyrics about paranoia, trust, betrayal, and, of course, desire. ("What drives me to you is what drives me insane.") "Mozambique," a romantic tale of love in a "magical land," features Emmylou Harris' potent harmony vocals while Dylan shows no signs of being jaded by love's fickleness. Mandolin, trumpet, and accordion guide the terrific "Romance in Durango," complete with Spanish chorus. The sad violin plays against Dylan's harmonica on the moody "Oh Sister," while the delicate and heartbreaking "Sara," a gift to his ex-wife, eloquently recounts the wonders of a relationship, perhaps in an attempt to revive.
download this file here or back to list
The Bootleg Series, Volumes 1-3 Columbia, Recorded 1961-1991; Released 1991
After showing a bunch of Simpsons outtakes, animated host Troy McClure notes sarcastically, "If that's what they leave out, then what they leave in must be pure gold."
In the case of Bob Dylan, it had always been rumored (and proven through bootleg tapes) that much of what he "left out"--the unreleased outtakes and rarities--actually rivalled or even surpassed his greatest official work. Finally, Columbia substantiated this by releasing three CDs of these undiscovered gems. The fact that over three hours' worth of quality music--often superb music--had never seen the (official) light of day is remarkable. Clearly, Bob Dylan is more talented in performing and creating music than he is at evaluating it.
This collection opens with Dylan in his original new-Woody form. "Hard Times in New York Town" is a defiant and determined statement that foreshadows his domination of the Greenwich Village folk scene. "He Was a Friend of Mine" and "Man on the Street" are poignant hobo laments straight out of the Guthrie school. "No More Auction Block" is a traditional slave's song of freedom, made famous by Paul Robeson among others.
Next we have 10 outtakes from the Freewheelin' sessions. The original record is one of Dylan's greatest, but amazingly, many of the outtakes are just as memorable. "Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Blues" displays Dylan's sardonic humor while "Quit Your Lowdown Ways" touches on the Delta blues idiom. "Let Me Die in My Footsteps" is one of his most potent folk songs and "Rambling Gambling Willie" shows his penchant for vivid storytelling.
The hysterical "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" and the sober "Who Killed Davey Moore?" come from a 1963 Carnegie Hall date. "Only a Hobo" and "Moonshiner" are brooding outtakes from The Times They Are A-Changin' while "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie" is a poem recited at Town Hall. From the Bringin' It All Back Home sessions, Dylan delivers the simple love song "Mama You Been On My Mind" and the mystical "Farewell Angelina," plus a rare acoustic reading of "Subterranean Homesick Blues." 1965 brought a few of his sarcastic blues romps and a rehearsal version of "Like a Rolling Stone" with Dylan on waltzing piano. Richard Manuel's haunting harmony graces "I Shall Be Released" while George Harrison adds fluid guitar to "If Not for You."
Dylan's second "classic" period, 1974-1975, is also well represented. Four alternate versions from Blood on the Tracks are culled from the original New York sessions. Dylan would re-record these in Minnesota for the official release, but his New York versions are much more sensitive and subdued than his angrier and more emphatic official renditions. "Golden Loom" and "Catfish," about Yankee free-agent pitcher Jim Hunter, are outstanding numbers that were somehow left off Desire while the raucous "Seven Days" (boasting five guitarists) comes from a 1976 live date in Tampa.
Of the 58 songs included, only 11 emanate from Dylan's 1980s work. The buoyant "Need a Woman" and plaintive "Angelina" come from the Shot of Love period. "Blind Willie McTell," recorded at the 1983 Infidels sessions, represents a high point of this collection, and indeed, of Dylan's entire recorded output. Dark and deep, it is his homage to a blues legend and simultaneously, an expression of his insecurity about picking up the blues mantle. Dylan, of course, sells himself short because his reading here is powerful and piercing.
The Bootleg Series succeeds on many levels: As a whole, it brilliantly shows Dylan's numerous stages and reinventions of himself--from neo-folkie to psychedelic blues rocker to country crooner to singer-songwriter and so on. For the uninitiated, it serves as a useful career overview, if not a lesser-known greatest-hits collection. In addition, it fills in the gaps for the diehards who longed for these rarities. Without question, the oddities, novelties, and masterpieces found here only add to Dylan's incredible legacy.
download this file here or back to list
LOOKING at the history of rock and roll, it is impossible to overstate the importance of Bob Dylan. As Bruce Springsteen put it, inducting Dylan into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, "Bob freed the mind the way Elvis freed the body. He showed us that just because the music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellectual. He had the vision and the talent to make a pop song that contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve, and changed the face of rock and roll forever."
The grandchild of Jewish-Russian immigrants, Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman, on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, where his father, Abe, worked for the Standard Oil Company. In 1947, the Zimmerman family moved to the small town of Hibbing, where an unexceptional childhood did little to hint at the brilliance to come. Robert started writing poems around the age of ten, and taught himself rudimentary piano and guitar in his early teens. Falling under the spell of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and other early rock stars, he started forming his own bands, including the Golden Chords and Elston Gunn and His Rock Boppers. According to the 1959 Hibbing high school yearbook, his goal was "to join Little Richard."
The young Zimmerman left Hibbing for Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota in the fall of 1959. The sights and sounds of the big city opened new vistas for him, and he began to trace contemporary rock and roll back to its roots, listening to the work of country, rock, and folk pioneers like Hank Williams, Robert Johnson, and Woody Guthrie. Indeed, his interest in music had become so intense that he rarely found the time to go to class. He began to perform solo at local nightspots like the Ten O'Clock Scholar cafe and St. Paul's Purple Onion Pizza Parlor, honing his guitar and harmonica work and developing the expressive nasal voice that would become the nucleus of his trademark sound. It was around this time, too, that he adopted the stage name Bob Dylan, presumably in honor of the late Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, though this is an origin he has continued to deny throughout his career.
The following year, he dropped out of college and went to New York with two things on his mind: to become a part of Greenwich Village's burgeoning folk-music scene, and to meet Guthrie, who was hospitalized in New Jersey with a rare, hereditary disease of the nervous system. He succeeded on both counts, becoming a fixture in the Village's folk clubs and coffee houses and at Guthrie's hospital bedside, where he would perform the folk legend's own songs for an audience of one. Spending all of his spare time in the company of other musicians, Dylan amazed them with his ability to learn songs perfectly after hearing them only once. He also began writing songs at a remarkable pace, including a tribute to his hero entitled "Song to Woody."
In the fall of 1961, Dylan's legend began to spread beyond folk circles and into the world at large after critic Robert Shelton saw him perform at Gerde's Folk City and raved in the New York Times that he was "bursting at the seams with talent." A month later, Columbia Records executive John Hammond signed Dylan to a recording contract, and the young singer-songwriter began selecting material for his eponymous debut album. Not yet fully confident in his own songwriting abilities, he cut only two original numbers, rounding out the collection with traditional folk tunes and songs by blues singers like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Bukka White. The result (released early in 1962) was an often haunting, death-obsessed record that, culminating in Dylan's gravel-voiced reading of "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," sounded as much like the work of an aging black blues man as a twenty-one-year-old Jewish folksinger from Minnesota.
Promising as that first album was, it didn't prepare anyone for the masterpiece that came next. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, released in 1963, contained two of the sixties' most durable folk anthems, "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," the breathtaking ballads "Girl From the North Country" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," and nine other originals that marked the emergence of the most distinctive and poetic voice in the history of American popular music. Cementing his reputation was Peter, Paul, and Mary's folksy cover of "Blowin' in the Wind," which went to No. 2 on the pop singles chart.
Dylan's next album, The Times They Are A-Changin', provided more of the same: the title cut and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" were the standout protest songs, while "Boots of Spanish Leather" was his saddest and most graceful love song so far. At the same time, Dylan seemed to be tiring of his position at the forefront of the protest movement: in "Restless Farewell," the record's last song, he concluded that he'd "bid farewell and not give a damn." Sure enough, his next album, pointedly titled Another Side of Bob Dylan, was his most introspective and least topical to date, and its finale, "It Ain't Me Babe," was an even more explicit goodbye to the folk movement he had helped reinvigorate.
The most revealing song on Another Side was "Ballad in Plain D," which painted a harsh, one-sided, blow-by-blow picture of Dylan's breakup with his longtime girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who can be seen on his arm in happier days on the Freewheelin' album cover. (More than twenty years later, Dylan said this was the one song in his catalogue that he wished he hadn't released.) Shortly after his split with Rotolo, he became involved with the world's most famous folk diva, Joan Baez. The relationship proved beneficial for them both, as Baez raided Dylan's unreleased material for her albums and introduced him to thousands of fans at her concerts.
At the same time, Dylan was itching to move beyond the acoustic musical constraints the folk movement imposed. Early in 1965, he went into the studio with a nine piece band and recorded Bringing It All Back Home, a half-electric, half-acoustic album of complex, incisive, biting songs like "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (featuring the trademark line, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"), "Mr. Tambourine Man," and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." A week after Dylan cut Bringing It All Back Home, the Byrds electrified his acoustic "Tambourine Man," and by the time it reached the top of the charts the term "folk-rock" had become part of the contemporary lexicon.
Dylan's own transition from folk troubadour to rock bard was not quite so smooth: debuting his new material with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he was famously booed off the stage. Such resistance notwithstanding, Dylan's fame had long since eclipsed Baez's, and their relationship was starting to crumble. (D.A. Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back was filmed during this period, and it clearly shows the tension between Dylan and Baez.) He had begun to see Sara Lowndes, a friend of his manager Albert Grossman's wife, and by the end of the year would marry her. In the meantime, he recorded and released the album Highway 61 Revisited, which contained the monumental single "Like a Rolling Stone." Clocking in at more than six minutes, it was the longest, angriest song ever released on a 45, and it reached No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart.
Next up was Blonde on Blonde, a two-record set recorded in Nashville in early 1966, which took the stream-of-consciousness lyrics and edgy rock sounds of Highway 61 Revisited to the next level of artistry. From the raucous party rock of "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" to the rambling, hallucinogenic folk 'n' blues of "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again" to the poignant, apocalyptic balladry of "Visions of Johanna" and "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," Blonde on Blonde took rock and roll to places no one else had even dreamed of. A tour of England with the Hawks (who would later change their name to the Band) produced music that was even wilder and more astonishing, though many of Dylan's old fans continued to be baffled. The tour reached its peak at the Manchester Free Trade Hall on May 17, 1966, when the combo recorded a live set that was bootlegged--and mis-titled--as Live at the Royal Albert Hall. (If you're lucky enough to find the two-CD bootleg Guitars Kissing & the Contemporary Fix--which features a pristine recording of the entire show--buy it; it's the greatest album never released.)
By this time, Dylan was routinely being hailed as the most important voice of his generation, but he was reaching a breaking point; he was, after all, only twenty-five years old. "The pressures were unbelievable," he would later tell biographer Anthony Scaduto. "They were just something you can't imagine unless you go through them yourself. Man, they hurt so much." A near-fatal motorcycle accident on July 29, 1966, proved a blessing in disguise, allowing Dylan to retreat to the solitude of his home in Woodstock, New York, with Sara and their newborn son Jesse to reevaluate his career and priorities. (The Dylans would ultimately have four children, with Bob adopting Sara's daughter from a previous marriage; Jakob, the youngest, is now the leader of the popular band the Wallflowers.)
A few months later, the Hawks joined him at Woodstock, and they began recording the loose, country-flavored tracks that would be bootlegged (and released eight years later) as The Basement Tapes. Dylan's next official release, though, was the even more low-ky John Wesley Harding. Recorded in Nashville with a three-piece backing band, John Wesley Harding was widely considered to be Dylan's pointed reaction to the Beatles' musically and technically complex landmark LP Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band--an interpretation he naturally denied.
While John Wesley Harding earned glowing reviews and reached the No. 2 spot on Billboard's album chart (making it his most commercially successful album to date), it also painted Dylan into an artistic corner. Gone was what he called his "thin wild mercury sound," and gone were his outlandish, visionary lyrical flourishes; the simple, often elegant songs that he was now writing could not support the hype that painted Dylan as one of the twentieth century's great poets. Nashville Skyline, his next album, seemed to revel in disappointing fans' expectations: it was a straight country record, and despite some lovely songs (especially "I Threw It All Away") and a hit single ("Lay Lady Lay") it was seen as Dylan's first real artistic misstep.
As it turned out, Nashville Skyline was just the beginning of Dylan's slide in the eyes of the critical establishment. Self Portrait, the two-record set which followed in 1970, was viewed as a genuine disaster: "What is this shit?" Greil Marcus asked in his Rolling Stone review. New Morning, released four months later, was a comeback of sorts--it was at least listenable--but it was a far cry from Dylan's best work. The release of his long-awaited book Tarantula in 1971 didn't do anything to rehabilitate his reputation in hip circles. Even his inspiring set at the George Harrison-organized Concert for Bangladesh--Dylan's first American concert appearance since his motorcycle accident five years earlier--seemed to hint at artistic confusion: he didn't perform a single song written after 1966.
Seemingly floundering, Dylan accepted an invitation from legendary Western filmmaker Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) to appear in and compose the score for his new film, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which was filming in Mexico and would star Dylan's friend Kris Kristofferson. The shoot was not a pleasant experience: the Mexican location proved difficult, Peckinpah was preoccupied with studio politics (the film was eventually taken out of his hands and recut), and Dylan floundered in the role of Billy's sidekick, Alias. But the soundtrack album was a success, and the single "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" broke the Top 20 (and went on to become one of Dylan's most covered songs).
At this point, it had been seven years since Dylan's motorcycle accident, and he had not mounted a full-scale tour since. In the summer and fall of 1973, he and the Band started rehearsing the Dylan songbook for a comeback tour, and in early November they took a few days off to record the album Planet Waves. It was a hasty, underwritten effort, but that didn't stop it from shooting to the top of the charts after Dylan and the Band hit the road for a nationwide tour in January of 1974. (Planet Waves was, in fact, Dylan's first No. 1 album ever.) The concerts were the stuff of legend, and promoter Bill Graham said that there were mail-order requests for more than twelve million tickets, though only 658,000 seats were available for the forty shows. An acclaimed two-record live set, Before the Flood, came out within a few months of the tour, and made it to No. 3 on the charts.
While the tour seemed to reinvigorate Dylan's creative spirit, his personal life was in a shambles. He and Sara had separated, and Dylan's confusion, pain, and anger over their split infused the songs he was writing with a rare passion. The result was Blood on the Tracks, perhaps the most mature, moving, and profound examination of love and loss ever committed to record. Stunning songs like "Tangled Up in Blue," "Idiot Wind," and "Shelter From the Storm" were not strictly autobiographical, but their emotional turbulence clearly reflected Dylan's anguished state of mind. His second straight No. 1 album, Blood on the Tracks didn't merely match the brilliance of Dylan's sixties output--in terms of eloquence and emotional authority, he had reached new heights.
Later that year, a truncated version of The Basement Tapes was finally released, and was hailed as a found masterpiece. Another tour soon followed--the ragtag Rolling Thunder Revue, which featured old friends like Joan Baez and Roger McGuinn, and new ones such as T-Bone Burnett and playwright Sam Shepard, who was recruited to write a screenplay to be shot on the road. (The resulting film, the mostly unscripted Renaldo and Clara, was a confused four-hour debacle that received very limited distribution in 1978.) Mid-tour, Dylan released Desire, which was his third consecutive No. 1 album; it featured the single "Hurricane," dedicated to the wrongly imprisoned boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. While nowhere near as impressive as Blood on the Tracks, Desire was a well-crafted, evocative effort that contained at least two great songs: the playfully cinematic "Black Diamond Bay," and the plaintive, heartfelt ode to his estranged wife, "Sara." The song did not win her back: Dylan and Sara divorced the following year.
Dylan's first post-divorce album, Street Legal, did not bode well for the future. Overproduced and lyrically senseless, it was even worse than Self Portrait, and the world tour that followed was a pale shadow of the Before the Flood and Rolling Thunder shows. At thirty-seven, Dylan seemed, both personally and professionally, at loose ends. Even so, his next move took the world by surprise: embracing fundamental Christianity, he released the overtly born-again album Slow Train Coming. Much to the surprise of his critics, the record was a commercial success, reaching No. 3 on the charts, spawning the hit single "Gotta Serve Somebody," and earning Dylan his first Grammy award, for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance.
The tour that followed was a fire and brimstone affair that managed to alienate many of Dylan's longtime fans, and his next album, Saved, failed to crack the Top 20. For the faithful, though, his next record, Shot of Love offered signs of hope: "Every Grain of Sand" was a gorgeous, philosophical ballad that took a far more forgiving tone than his past two albums, while "The Groom's Still Waiting at the Alter" (the non-LP B-side to the single "Heart of Mine") was a barn-burning rocker that would have fit nicely on Highway 61 Revisited.
Infidels (1983) continued the positive trend: co-produced by Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler, whose graceful guitar work made it Dylan's best-sounding record ever, it was also his finest sustained collection of songs since Blood on the Tracks. Veering away from the overtly religious material of his last three albums, Dylan recaptured the complexity and emotional subtlety of his best work on songs like "Jokerman" and "Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight." Empire Burlesque, his self-produced follow-up to Infidels, was almost as good, ranging from the blistering soul of "Tight Connection to My Heart" to the gentle acoustic ballad "Dark Eyes," with only a few missteps.
While Dylan had toured regularly since returning to the stage with the Band in 1974, beginning in the mid-eighties he hit the road full-time, first with all-star cronies Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and the Grateful Dead, then, starting in 1988, with a small rock combo led by guitarist and Saturday Night Live musical director G.E. Smith. Shows on the so-called Never Ending Tour were generally sloppy, and Dylan tended to mumble his songs and glower at his audiences, but he stuck with it--nine years later, he's hardly spent a month off the road.
The original work he's released over the last decade has continued to contain flashes of genius, but only the Daniel Lanois-produced Oh Mercy worked to any sustained effect. Check out the wild, twelve-minute Dylan-Sam Shepard road song "Brownsville Girl" (from 1987's Knocked Out Loaded) or the hallucinatory Oh Mercy outtake "Series of Dreams" (from the revelatory, career-spanning three-CD set The Bootleg Series) to hear the best of the latter-day Dylan. Then there are the two fast and funny Traveling Wilburys albums, which catch Dylan--along with superstar pals George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and (on the first record) Roy Orbison--in an uncommonly lighthearted mood. He followed up 1990's Under the Red Sky with two albums' worth of old folk and blues covers: 1992's Good As I Been to You and 1993's World Gone Wrong. While both are largely satisfying efforts, they didn't win him many new fans.
Early in 1997, though, those who lived in hope of an artistically born-again Dylan had cause for optimism: musician Jim Dickinson told a Memphis newspaper that he had played on some recent, Daniel Lanois-produced Dylan sessions featuring new material Dylan had composed while stuck at home in Minnesota during a blizzard. According to Dickinson, one cut was seventeen minutes long, and overall the material was "so good, I can't imagine he won't use it."
The seventeen-minute song turned out to be "Highlands," the closing cut on the critically acclaimed Time Out of Mind, which was released in September and became Dylan's first gold record of the decade. The success of the album was noteworthy, but 1997 will go down as the year that Dylan knocked on heaven's door, literally: in May, on the eve of a European tour, he was hospitalized with histoplasmosis, a potentially fatal infection that creates swelling in the sac surrounding the heart. Happily, the songwriter made a rapid recovery, and was back on the road by August and continued to tour through the remainder of the year, including a September date in Bologna, Italy, at the behest of Pope John Paul II. In early December, Dylan was one of five recipients of his country's highest award for artistic excellence, the Kennedy Center Honors.
download this file here or back to list
