Dylan on Dylan Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Jeff Burger

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-0-912777-44-3

  Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data

  Are available from the Library of Congress.

  A list of credits and copyright notices for the individual pieces in this collection can be found on pages 527–29.

  Cover and interior design: Jonathan Hahn

  Interior layout: Nord Compo

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  For Andre and Myriam,

  from a proud father

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication Page

  Preface | Jeff Burger

  Izzy Young’s Notebook | IZZY YOUNG

  October 20, 1961–March 14, 1962 | The Fiddler Now Upspoke (UK)

  Radio Interview | CYNTHIA GOODING

  Early 1962 | Folksinger’s Choice, WBAI-FM (New York)

  Conversation | IZZY YOUNG, PETE SEEGER, SIS CUNNINGHAM, AND GIL TURNER

  May 1962 (recording) | Unaired, WBAI-FM (New York)

  A Day with Bob Dylan | JOHN COCKS

  November 20, 1964 | Kenyon Collegian (Ohio)

  Bob Dylan as Bob Dylan | PAUL JAY ROBBINS

  March and September 1965 (interview) | September 10, 17,

  and 24, 1965 | Los Angeles Free Press

  Interview | NORA EPHRON AND SUSAN EDMISTON

  August 1965 (interview) | Publication Unknown

  Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan | NAT HENTOFF

  Fall 1965 (interview) | March 1966 | Playboy

  Press Conference

  December 3, 1965 | KQED-TV (San Francisco)

  Press Conference

  December 16, 1965 | Los Angeles

  Radio Conversation | BOB FASS

  January 26, 1966 | Radio Unnameable, WBAI-FM (New York)

  Radio Interview | KLAS BURLING

  May 1, 1966 | Radio 3 (Sweden)

  Conversations with Bob Dylan | JOHN COHEN AND HAPPY TRAUM

  October/November 1968 | Sing Out!

  Press Conference

  August 27, 1969 | Isle of Wight, England

  Radio Interview | MARY TRAVERS

  April 20, 1975 | Mary Travers and Friend, KNX-FM (Los Angeles)

  Bob Dylan: “. . . A Sailing Ship to the Moon” | NEIL HICKEY

  August 1976 (interview) | March 4, 2015 | Adventures in the

  Scribblers Trade

  An Interview with Dylan | RANDY ANDERSON

  February 17, 1978 | Minnesota Daily

  Radio Interview | PAUL VINCENT

  November 19, 1980 | KMEL-FM (San Francisco)

  Radio Interview | PAUL GAMBACCINI

  June 20, 1981 | Rock On, BBC Radio 1 (UK)

  “Jesus, Who’s Got Time to Keep Up with the Times?” | MICK BROWN

  July 1, 1984 | Sunday Times (UK)

  Radio Interview | BERT KLEINMAN AND ARTIE MOGULL

  November 13, 1984 | Westwood One (US)

  Radio Interview | BOB COBURN

  June 17, 1985 | Rockline, KLOS-FM (Los Angeles)

  Bob Dylan—After All These Years in the Spotlight, the Elusive Star Is at the Crossroads Again | MIKAL GILMORE

  October 13, 1985 | Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

  Ask Him Something, and a Sincere Dylan Will Tell You the Truth | DON McLEESE

  January 26, 1986 | Chicago Sun-Times

  The Invisible Man | DAVID HEPWORTH

  October 1986 | Q magazine (UK)

  Radio Interview | ELLIOT MINTZ

  May 1991 | Westwood One (US)

  Interview | PAUL ZOLLO

  November 1991 | SongTalk

  Dylan: Jokes, Laughter, and a Series of Dreams | PETER WILMOTH

  April 3, 1992 | The Age (Australia)

  A Midnight Chat with Dylan | JOHN DOLEN

  September 28, 1995 | SunSentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Florida)

  No Direction Home Outtakes

  2000 (interview)

  | Broadcast Date Unknown | WBAI-FM (New York)

  Press Conference

  July 23, 2001 | Rome

  TV Interview | ED BRADLEY

  December 5, 2004 | 60 Minutes, CBS (US)

  The Genius and Modern Times of Bob Dylan | JONATHAN LETHEM

  September 7, 2006 | Rolling Stone

  Bob Dylan’s Late-Era, Old-Style American Individualism | DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

  May 14, 2009 | Rolling Stone

  Bob Dylan: The Uncut Interview | ROBERT LOVE

  February/March 2015 | AARP The Magazine

  Nobel Prize Banquet Speech | BOB DYLAN (presented by Azita Raji)

  December 10, 2016 | Stockholm, Sweden

  About the Contributors

  About the Editor

  Credits

  Index

  PREFACE

  Google “Bob Dylan rarely gives interviews” and you’ll discover dozens of articles that use that or a similar phrase—often in the introduction to a Dylan Q&A. Sometimes, as in a 1969 conversation with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, it is Dylan himself who proclaims, “I don’t give interviews.”

  This has never been even close to the truth. Granted, there have been periods of several years when he has met with journalists rarely or not at all. He has also complained about talking to the media, loudly and frequently, saying, for example, that “if you give one magazine an interview, then the other magazine wants an interview . . . so pretty soon you’re in the interview business.” He has said that his words get twisted by journalists, and that “performers feel that . . . a lot of times that their points are not taken the right way or they feel imposed upon to answer questions that have really little to do with why they fill halls or sell records.”

  But his complaints haven’t stopped him from talking. Dylan has given numerous press conferences; spoken at length with countless large and small print publications and with broadcast media around the world; and even answered listeners’ questions on call-in radio shows. There is far more Q&A material than any one book could accommodate.

  Besides claiming that Dylan almost never grants interviews, journalists frequently say that when he does talk to them, he doesn’t reveal much. His responses “are often vague, mystical, or testy,” wrote Jon Bream in the Minneapolis StarTribune in 2013. He “has never spoken extensively about his early career,” proclaimed the BBC in 2003. In no interview, “from what I can tell, did he reveal anything of substance about his nonpublic life,” wrote Andrew Ferguson in London’s Weekly Standard magazine in 2016.

  After reading this book—which includes dozens of Dylan’s most interesting interviews plus highlights from more than eighty other Q&As, encounters, and speeches—you’ll understand why journalists make such comments. Like the Beatles, who offered silly answers to silly queries about their hairstyles and similarly trivial matters early in their careers, Dylan can be as evasive and abstruse as he is witty. Sometimes—especially in interviews that contain preposterous questions—he can be cranky and sarcastic. But when he’s in the right mood, likes the interviewer, and hears intelligent questions, he often offers candid, revealing commentary about his groundbreaking music and creative process, and occasionally even about marriage, parenting, and other personal subjects.

  You’ll find such interviews in the pages that follow, along with ones in which Dylan’s true feelings remain elusive, and I think you’ll agree that while the former kind shed the most light, the latter can be just as colorful and entertaining. Indeed, Dylan is one of a small number of popular music art
ists who are nearly always as fascinating in conversation as they are on record.

  His Q&As are particularly valuable because they offer one of the few non-musical glimpses we have into the mind of one of the most important performers and songwriters of the last hundred years. He rarely talks to audiences in concert, and he has never produced a full and proper autobiography. There is, of course, the terrific Chronicles, Volume One. But that memoir isn’t nearly as confessional or wide-ranging as, say, Bruce Springsteen’s; and while Chronicles was supposed to be a three-book project, we have yet to see a sequel to volume one, which appeared well over a decade ago. Dylan was reportedly working on volume two as far back as 2008, so it could appear at any moment, maybe even before this book hits the stores. But even if it does, I suspect we’ll find in these interviews many otherwise unavailable clues to the man behind the music.

  You have to read those clues carefully, though. Dylan said in 1986 that reporters sometimes “take quotations and turn things around and make you seem like a different kind of person . . . So you felt like you’d been suckered or something.” But sometimes the reader gets suckered, too. A writer named Eduardo Bueno filed a Dylan tour feature in 1991 and found later that an editor had tried to pass it off as an interview, using some quotes from earlier articles and some that the singer had never even uttered. Then there was the case of New Yorker writer Jonah Lehrer, who resigned from that magazine in 2012 after admitting that he’d invented the Dylan quotes that appear in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. (No, Jonah, that’s not how it works.)

  Dylan himself often speaks honestly to the press, but he, too, has at times tried to fool the public. “The press, I figured, you lied to it,” he wrote in Chronicles, and some of the lies were big ones. The transcript of an ostensible 1965 press conference that appeared in the Village Voice was actually written by Dylan and the Voice’s J. R. Goddard. Dylan also told many tall tales about his teen years in early interviews. And when he didn’t like what a Playboy editor did to the transcript of his 1965 conversation with Nat Hentoff, he rejected Hentoff’s suggestion that he simply tell the magazine to cancel its publication of the interview. “I got a better idea,” Dylan reportedly said. “I’m gonna make one up.” And with some help from Hentoff, he did.

  * * *

  The table of contents lists publication or broadcast dates, when available, but the full-length interviews here are arranged in the order that they were conducted. (I’ve indicated interview dates when no publication or broadcast date is available and in cases where a piece would appear to be out of sequence based on the publication or broadcast date.) Conversations that did not originally appear in print have been styled according to guidelines in The Chicago Manual of Style. I listened to audio recordings whenever possible, and in doing so, found many previous transcriptions to be incomplete and error-prone. I have done some minor editing to improve readability—for example, by deleting verbal ticks like “you know” as well as aborted, incoherent, and redundant phrases and sentences.

  As for material that originated in print media, I have in most cases obtained copies of the publications and am presenting these features exactly as they first appeared. Whether album and song titles are italicized, placed in quotes, or simply written with initial caps, for example, depends on how they are displayed in the original article; even when punctuation or styling is at odds with all the rules I know, I’ve followed The Chicago Manual of Style’s guidelines about not altering previously published material. I have, however, made rare exceptions to correct obvious and egregious typos and spelling and punctuation mistakes and have also used bracketed editor’s notes to flag misstatements and explain comments that seem unclear.

  There isn’t much repetition in these interviews. Dylan is highly changeable, so the content and tone of conversations often differs dramatically, even when only weeks or months separate them. Moreover, I have attempted to select interviews that mostly cover territory not explored elsewhere in the same way or at all.

  Still, as I noted in the preface to my last anthology, which featured John Lennon’s conversations, there are only two ways I could have avoided all repetition. I could have excluded pieces that introduce any redundancy, which would have meant cutting conversations that also contain fascinating and fresh material; or I could have deleted sections of interviews that cover subjects addressed elsewhere. Having concluded that most fans would prefer unedited conversations, that’s what I’ve opted to present (with just a couple of exceptions, which are explained in my introductions). Besides, I often find the occasional repetition enlightening, in that it indicates topics of particular interest to Dylan or interviewers and sometimes provides a new slant on familiar turf.

  * * *

  It takes a lot of help to put together a book like this. I particularly want to thank Yuval Taylor, my longtime editor at Chicago Review Press, who enthusiastically signed on to this project as soon as I suggested it; and managing editor Michelle Williams. Special thanks also to Gretchen Day Bryant at the SunSentinel; Ken Charles at KNX; Tom Cording at Columbia Legacy; Keith Cunningham at KLOS; Steven Finger at the Los Angeles Free Press; Melissa Garza at Westwood One; Philomene Grandin, daughter of Izzy Young; Tiffany Lintner at KMEL; Mark Moss at Sing Out!; Dylan Scott at the Minnesota Daily; Nathaniel Shahan at the Kenyon Collegian; Mark Torres and Shawn Dellis at the Pacifica Foundation; Amanda Urban at ICM Partners; and all those who granted permission for use of their material in this anthology.

  I also want to express my appreciation to journalist Jonathan Cott, who edited an excellent 2006 book of Dylan interviews that has recently been reissued. At one point, I discarded the possibility of preparing a Dylan anthology because Cott had already published one. As it turns out, though, it was he who wound up urging me to put together this book. “There are a lot of good interviews that I didn’t get,” he told me, and indeed there were. About two-thirds of the pieces that follow have not previously been anthologized anywhere and some of them have never before appeared in print. Some of the other Q&As—such as the early interviews with Paul Jay Robbins and Cynthia Gooding and the San Francisco press conference from 1965—have been excerpted elsewhere but not published in full.

  Continued thanks to Ken Terry, my friend of nearly half a century, and to my many terrific coworkers at AIN Publications. I particularly want to acknowledge Jennifer Leach English, whose kindness and friendship I value more with each passing year; and Lysbeth McAleer, a first-rate professional who, as a bonus, couldn’t be more fun to work with. I had planned to retire from my editorial job at AIN a couple of years ago; people like Jennifer and Lysbeth are among the biggest reasons why I have not done so.

  Greatest thanks, as always, to my wife, Madeleine Beresford, and our children—who are now too old to fit that word—Andre and Myriam. I’ve had a fair amount of luck over the years, but nothing beats the good fortune of being able to share my life with these three wonderful people.

  —JEFF BURGER

  Ridgewood, New Jersey, 2018

  “He [Frank Sinatra] was funny. We were standing out on his patio at night and he said to me, ‘You and me, pal, we got blue eyes, we’re from up there,’ and he pointed to the stars. ‘These other bums are from down here.’ I remember thinking that he might be right.”

  —Bob Dylan, in an interview with Bill

  Flanagan, posted at bobdylan.com,

  March 22, 2017

  IZZY YOUNG’S NOTEBOOK

  Izzy Young | October 20, 1961–March 14, 1962 | The Fiddler Now Upspoke (UK)

  Bob Dylan dropped out of the University of Minnesota in May 1960, around his nineteenth birthday. The following winter, he traveled to New York, where he began playing Greenwich Village clubs. Only about nine months later, famed producer John Hammond signed him to Columbia Records.

  By then, Greenwich Village’s Folklore Center had become a gathering place for Dylan and other leaders of the burgeoning folk-music movement. Izzy Young, who had founded the operation in 1957, apparently sensed
that he was a witness to a historical moment, particularly regarding Dylan, because he kept a notebook where he recorded much of what the fledgling artist had to say to him. To my knowledge, only brief excerpts from the following material have ever been printed in any widely circulated publication.

  The first notebook entry here dates from October 20, 1961—probably just weeks after the Hammond signing—when the artist was still five months away from release of his debut LP. The entry, which was used in the program for Dylan’s Izzy Young–produced Carnegie Hall concert on November 4, 1961, opens with two paragraphs by the diarist. All the rest of the notes—which are today preserved in the Library of Congress—consist of Young’s transcription of Dylan’s comments, which the singer reportedly checked for accuracy. (Some clarifying words from Young are in parentheses; a few from me are in brackets.)

  In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, Dylan wrote that Young would “ask me questions about myself like, where it was that I grew up and how did I get interested in folk music, where I discovered it, stuff like that. He’d then write about me in his diary. I couldn’t imagine why. His questions were annoying, but I liked him because he was gracious to me and I tried to be considerate and forthcoming. I was very careful when talking to outsiders, but Izzy was okay and I answered him in plain talk.”

  “Plain talk” notwithstanding, some of Dylan’s comments sound disjointed, some of his references are unclear, some of his lines seem more like notes than exact quotes, and some of the things he told Young are questionable or clearly false (such as the bit at the beginning about being raised in Gallup, New Mexico, and traveling with carnivals from age fourteen, a tale he spun for multiple early interviewers). Still, this is a rare window into Dylan’s thoughts and life in a time before practically anyone knew his name—a time when he could recall recently knocking on record company doors, saying, “Howdy, I’ve written some songs,” and being turned away. —Ed.

  October 20, 1961