“The man who showed up at my door one afternoon
a few weeks back looked exactly like I had hoped and feared he would: with his
mazy brown hair and his taut smile and with smoky sunglasses masking his
inscrutable stare, he looked just like Bob Dylan. Almost too much so. Dressed
in a sleeveless torn T-shirt, weather-worn black jeans, and motorcycle boots
and, at 44, looking more fit than I had seen him in any recent photos or video
appearances, he seemed remarkably like the image of the younger Bob Dylan that
is burned into our collective memory; the keen, fierce man who often tore apart
known views of the world with his acerbic gestures and eloquent yowls.
What brought Dylan to my door was simply that
we had an interview to do, and since he had come to Hollywood anyway that day,
this was the easiest place for him to do it. While this certainly made the
meeting a lot more thrilling for me, it also made it a bit scarier. More than
20 years of image pre-ceded him. This was a man who could be tense, capricious
and baffling, and who was capable of wielding his image at a whim's notice in a
way that could stupefy and intimidate not only interviewers but sometimes
friends as well. What I found instead was a man who didn't seem too concerned
with brandishing his image-even for a moment. He offered his hand, flashed a
slightly bashful smile, then walked over to my stereo, kneeled down and started
to flip through a stack of some unfiled records on the floor—mostly LPs by
older jazz, pop and country singers. He commented on most of what he came
across: "The Delmore Brothers. God, I really love them. I think they've
influenced every harmony I've ever tried to sing... This Hank Williams thing
with just him and his guitar- -man, that's something, isn't it? I used to sing
these songs way back, a long time ago, even before I played rock & roll as
a teenager... Sinatra, Peggy Lee, yeah, I love all these people, but I tell you
who I've really been listening to a lot lately—in fact, I'm thinking about
recording one of his earlier songs—is Bing Crosby, I don't think you can find
better phrasing anywhere."
That's pretty much how Dylan was that
afternoon: good-humored and gracious, but also thoughtful and often elaborate
in his answers. And sometimes—when he talked about his Minnesota youth, or his
early days in the folk scene under the enthrallment of Woody Guthrie—his voice
grew softer and more deliberate, as if he were striving to pick just the right
words to convey the exact detail of his memory. During these moments he
sometimes lapsed into silence, but behind his sunglasses his eyes stayed active
with thought, flickering back and forth as if reading a distant memory.
For the most part, though, sipping a Corona
beer and smoking cigarettes, he seemed generous and relaxed, sometimes even
surprisingly candid, as he ranged through a wide stretch of topics. He talked
about his recent work in videos: "Making these things is like pulling
teeth. For one thing, because of that movie Renaldo and Clara [Dylan's 1978
film of the Rolling Thunder Revue, widely and misguidedly viewed as a disaster,
and preferable to me over Martin Scorsese’s later account], I haven't been in a
place where I could ask for my own control over these things-plus, because my
records aren't exactly selling like Cyndi Lauper's or Bruce's, I didn't feel I
had the credibility to demand that control.
"But the company wanted me to try one more
(to help boost Empire Burlesque's sales] and I said I would, as long as I got
to name Dave Stewart [of Eurythmics] as director. His stuff had a spontaneous
look to it, and somehow I just figured he would understand what I was doing.
And he did: He put together a great band for this lip-sync video and set us up
with the equipment on this little stage in a church somewhere in West L.A. So,
between all the time they took setting up camera shots and lights and all that
stuff, we could just play live for this little crowd that had gathered there.
"I can't even express how good that
felt-in fact, I was trying to remember the last time I'd felt that kind of
direct connection, and finally I realized it must have been back in the '50s,
when I was 14 or 15 years old playing with four-piece rock & roll bands
back in Minnesota. Back in those days there weren't any sound systems or
anything that you had to bother with. You'd set up your amplifiers and turn
them up to where you wanted to turn them. That just doesn't happen anymore. Now
there are just so many things that get in the way of that kind of feeling, that
simple directness. For some reason, making this video just made me realize how
far everything has come these last several years—and how far I'd come."
His reaction to pop's new social activism, and
such efforts as Live Aid, U.S.A. for Africa and Farm Aid, is somewhat mixed.
"While it's great that people are supporting U.S.A. for Africa and Farm
Aid, what are they really doing to alleviate poverty? It's almost like guilt money.
Some guy halfway round the world is starving so O.K., put 10 bucks in the
barrel, then you can feel you don't have to have a guilty conscience about it.
Obviously, on some level it does help, but as far as any sweeping movement to
destroy hunger and poverty, I don't see that happening.
"Still, Live Aid and Farm Aid are
fantastic things, but then musicians have always done things like that. When
people want a benefit, you don't see then calling dancers or architects or
lawyers or even politicians the power of music is that it has always drawn
people together.
"But at the same time, while they're
asking musicians to raise money, they're also trying to blacklist our records,
trying to take somebody like Prince and Madonna off the radio—the same people
that they ask to help raise funds. And it isn't just them: when they're talking
about blacklisting records and giving them ratings, they're talking about
everybody."
Dylan is pleased by Bruce Springsteen's growing
popularity, but he has a warning too. "Bruce knows where he comes from:
“He has taken what everybody else has done and made his own thing of it—and
that's great. But somebody'll come along after Bruce, say ten or twenty years
from now, and maybe they'll be looking to Bruce as their primary model and
somehow miss the fact [that his music comes from Elvis Presley and Woody
Guthrie]. In other words, all they're going to get is Bruce, they're not gonna
get what Bruce got.
"If you copy somebody—and there's nothing
wrong with that—the top rule should be to go back and copy the guy that was
there first. It's like all the people who copied me over the years, too many of
them just got me, they didn't get what I got."
Dylan was a bit less expansive when it came to
discussing his own historical presence in rock 'n' roll. He seemed more moved
or involved when discussing the inspiration he felt during his early immersion
in rock & roll and the folk, beat and poetry scenes than in deliberating
over any questions about his own triumphs—such as the seismic impact he had on
international pop culture once he fused folk tradition, rock revolt, political
insight and poetic ability into a personalized, myth-making style.
"There are certain things you can say
you've done along the way that count," he said, "but in the end it's
not really how many records you sell [Dylan had sold more than 35 million at
the time of this article] or how big a show you play or even how many people
end up imitating you. I know I've done a lot of things, but if I'm proud of
anything, it's maybe that I helped bring somebody like Woody Guthrie—who was
not a household name—to a little more attention, the same way that the Rolling
Stones helped to bring Howling Wolf more recognition. It's because of Woody
Guthrie and people like him that I originally set out to do what I've done.
Stumbling onto Woody Guthrie just blew my mind.
"Then again, I never really dwell on
myself too much in terms of what I've done. For one thing, so much of it went
by in such a flash, it's hard for me to focus on. I was once offered a great
deal of money for an autobiography, and I thought about it for a minute, then I
decided I wasn't ready. I have to be sat down and have this stuff drawn out of
me, because on my own I wouldn't think about these things. You just go ahead
and you live your life and you move onto the next thing, and when it's all said
and done, the historians figure it out. That's the way I look at it."
Despite his reluctance, Dylan did look back
recently at some length at the behest of Columbia Records, which has been trying
for three years to elicit his cooperation and enthusiasm over Biograph, a
five-LP retrospective of his career from 1962 to 1981. The package (which is
due for release in early November) features 53 tracks, including 18 previously
unreleased recordings and three scarce singles. Just as importantly, the set
also includes a 36-page booklet by journalist-author-screenwriter Cameron Crowe
(Rolling Stone, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) that features extensive
commentary and reflections by Dylan. His own critiques of his political
anthems, love songs, religious declarations, narrative epics, poetic fancies,
rock inventions and long-buried gems are fascinating,.
Except for Crowe's booklet, Dylan hasn't much
use for the Biograph project. "I’ve never really known what this thing is
supposed to be," he said, “There’s more stuff that hasn't been heard
before, but most of my stuff has already been bootlegged, so to anybody in the
know, there's nothing on it they haven't heard before. I probably would've put
different things on it that haven't been heard before, but I didn't pick the
material. I didn't put it together and I haven't been very excited about this
thing. All it is, really, is repackaging, and it’ll just cost a lot of money.
About the only thing that makes it special is Cameron's book."
Perhaps Dylan's objections to Biograph derive
from an aversion to being consigned to any kind of definitive history when so
much of his history remains to be written. Perhaps they also stem from an
understanding that a single collection could ever bind or explain a career as
wide-ranging and restive as his, nor could it ever satisfy the critics,
detractors, defenders and partisans who have scrutinized, acclaimed, assailed
and debated his work with more fervor and attention than any other American
post-war musician or author has received. Beginning with his ninth album, John
Wesley Harding (1968), virtually every subsequent release has been greeted as
either a comeback, a stinging disappointment or an out-and-out betrayal of his early
promise and beliefs.
While this later work hasn't affected pop
culture as much as his early songs did (but then, what could?), it's also true
that much of it amounts to a resourceful body of music often beautiful and
daring, sometimes perturbing or confused, but always informed by an aspiring
and uncompromising conscience.
Still, while Empire Burlesque sold respectably
(around the half-million mark), it didn't attain the commercial prominence that
was expected. Does that bother or disappoint Dylan?
"Yeah," he said without hesitation.
“In fact, it concerns me to a point where I was thinking about regrouping my
whole thought on making records. If the records I make are only going to sell a
certain amount, then why do I have to spend a lot of time putting them
together? You see, I haven't always been into recording all that much. It used
to be that I would go in and try to get some kind of track which was magical,
with a vocal on it, and just wait for those moments. I mean, talk about [Bruce
Springsteen's] Nebraska. People say to me, 'When you gonna make a Nebraska
album?’ Well, I love that record, but I think I've made five or six Nebraska
albums, you know."
Dylan stopped, shrugged and poured a little
more beer into his glass. "You know," he said, "I can't release
all the stuff I want to release. I've got a lot of just melodic instrumentals
laying around. I was thinking the other day that maybe I should put them out,
but I can't. I've also got a record of just me and Clydie King singing together
and it's great, but it doesn't fall into any category that the record company
knows how to deal with. It's like...well, something like the Delmore Brothers:
It's very simple and the harmonies are great. If it was up to me I'd put that
kind of stuff out, or I would've put some of it on Biograph but it's not up to
me. Anyway, who’s to know what people would make of it?"
I'd heard similar stories from various sources
over the last few years—about whole projects that had been discouraged, if not
altogether nixed by CBS. I'd even heard tapes of some of the unreleased works,
and many of them are stunning. Such still-unreleased tracks as "Blind
Willie McTell," "Death Is Not the End" and “Lord Protect My
Child" are among the most stirring work he has done, providing sharp commentaries
on physical and spiritual despair and hard-earned moral hope. Hearing these, as
well as the better material on Infidels and Empire Burlesque, one realizes that
Dylan still has a great deal to say, and that he is once again at a creative
crossroads. At the same time, one fears that he may withhold such
uncompromising work out of deference to the expectations of the marketplace.
That was a matter I didn't get to explore
because as quickly as Dylan can enter a room, he can also leave one. "It's
late. I should go," he said, standing up, offering his hand and heading
for the door. Looking out and realizing that night had fallen, he finally took
off his sunglasses. It was nice to look, even if just for a moment, into those
clear blue eyes.
In a way, I was glad that the question had gone
unasked. How was I going to put it: Are you going to redeem every promise we've
ever inferred from your work and legend? It was fitting to remember something
Sam Shepard once said of Dylan: "The repercussions of his art don't have
to be answered by him at all. They fall on us as questions and that's where
they belong.” That his art still inspires such questions tells me everything I
need to know about Bob Dylan’s remaining promise.”
- af Mikal
Gilmore. The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 13. oktober, 1985.
