Bob Dylan will be performing 15 shows in Australia beginning August 13 in Perth, Australia. He’ll also be in Melbourne, and Sydney.
So today you can check out some past performances and interviews Dylan did in Australia.
Dylan said some interesting things during the following 1986 press conference.
Journalist: What does Bob Dylan think of Bob Dylan?
Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan doesn’t ever think about Bob Dylan
Journalist: Are you shy man?
Bob Dylan: Yeah, most of the time.
Journalist: Because of being shy, is it a burden being Bob Dylan?
Bob Dylan: Who’s Bob Dylan?
[laughter]
Bob Dylan: I’m only Bob Dylan when I have to be Bob Dylan. Most of the time I can just be myself.
And later in response to a question about the past, Dylan says this:
Dylan: We live here in the present time. You get up and have to deal with today. Yesterday’s gone, tomorrow’s not promised. So this is all we have, really.
Dylan press conference, 1986, Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney
This was shot at a Dylan press conference in 1986. There’s 18 minutes of the press conference.
“Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” Byron Bay Bluesfest April 26, 2011:
“Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” Byron Bay Bluesfest April 26, 2011:
“Cold Irons Bound,” Byron Bay Bluesfest April 26, 2011:
“Tangled Up In Blue,” Byron Bay Bluesfest April 26, 2011:
“Highway 61 Revisited” / “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Byron Bay Bluesfest April 26, 2011:
“Like A Rolling Stone,” Byron Bay Bluesfest April 26, 2011:
Bob Dylan radio interview, Adelaide, Australia 1966:
“Ballad Of A Thin Man,” Sydney, April 13, 1966:
“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” Sydney, April 13, 1966:
“Positively Fourth Street,” Sydney, April 13, 1966:
“Visions Of Johanna,” Melbourne, April 20, 1966:
“She Belongs To Me,” Melbourne, April 20, 1966:
“Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” Melbourne, April 20, 1966:
“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” Melbourne, April 20, 1966:
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll/ coming-of-age novel, “True Love Scars,” which features a narrator who is obsessed with Bob Dylan. To read the first chapter, head here.
Or watch an arty video with audio of me reading from the novel here.
Of just buy the damn thing:
–- A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
My book and me on the front page of the Marin Independent Journal.
Pretty crazy.
On Saturday morning I got an email from a friend telling me I was on the FRONT PAGE of the daily newspaper for Marin Country, the Marin Independent Journal.
I just about fell over.
The article, by Paul Liberatore, begins like this:
There’s a scene in Michael Goldberg’s new rock ‘n’ roll novel, “True Love Scars,” that takes place in Mill Valley’s Depot Bookstore and Cafe, where the author was sitting one recent sweltering afternoon, sipping a hot coffee, despite the heat, and talking about this first book in what he’s calling his “Freak Scene Dream Trilogy.”
An ex-Rolling Stone associate editor and senior writer cum online music pioneer, the 61-year-old author describes the narrator of his coming-of-age story, 19-year-old Michael Stein, aka “Writerman,” as “a caricature of his teenage self,” a rock-crazed kid with raging hormones who’s obsessed with Bob Dylan and the “Visions of Johanna chick,” Sweet Sarah, he meets and falls in love with at a meditation center in Woodacre.
In Goldberg’s tragic love story, set in Marin County in the late ’60s and early ’70s, young Writerman begins his betrayal of Sweet Sarah at the Depot and its downtown plaza.
“It’s the first time he looks at another woman,” Goldberg explained, noting the parallels between the arc of his fictional tale and the maturation of the music he’s spent his career writing about. Novelist Tom Spanbauer calls Goldberg “a total rock ‘n’ roll geek,” a characterization that’s borne out in the rock references on just about every page.
“There are so many songs about teen love in the early days of rock n’ roll, and that’s a big theme in the early portion of this trilogy,” he said. “Then things change and get more sophisticated and evolved as the books progress, just as rock music did. I was taking emotion from songs and from albums and manifesting that into my fiction.”
And this fantastic review was posted by Gigi Little at her wonderful blog, ut omnia bena…, yesterday.
Here’s an excerpt:
This is sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, folks, which normally you probably wouldn’t think would be my thing, but Goldberg’s book is full of a voice that is so breathless and particular and, what attracts me the most, innocent. There is such a sweetness in the narrator, such youthful naive charm under all the F-bombs. (There are lots of F-bombs. Sometimes when he read pages in the Dangerous Writing basement, we’d count the F-bombs.) Michael Stein knows everything there is to know about music and the music scene. He’s a walking encyclopedia of rock ‘n’ roll. But there’s so much that he doesn’t know. And it’s in what Michael Stein doesn’t know that the story finds its heartbreaking charm – and, of course, its danger.
In 1977, my wife Leslie and I interviewed Jesse Winchester. I was a young music critic at the time, and Leslie and I were freelancing for underground publications including the Berkeley Barb, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, as well as some local and national magazines.
I found the article we wrote when I was going through years of stories for a collection of my music journalism that I’m putting together. With Jesse’s passing this morning, I want to share it with those who, like I, have appreciated his music for many, many years, and for those who are hearing it for the first time today.
So here’s the article, along with a few of Jesse’s songs:
A Little Bit of Dixie in the Cool Blue North
By Leslie & Michael Goldberg
If there was ever a man who seemed predestined to be a singer/songwriter/musician it is draft-resister-turned-Canadian-citizen Jesse Winchester. His career has been riddled by strange lurches of fate. The strangest lurch of all, of course, was the Vietnam War.
Rather than be drafted, Winchester, at age 22, fled to Canada in January of 1967, arriving with only two hundred dollars in his pocket.
“I had never considered music as a profession until I was forced to,” reflected Winchester between sets in the dark, smokey Boarding House bar [in San Francisco] last week. “I tried to find a straight job when I moved to Canada in some kind of business or something. I wanted to show good faith to the Canadian government, that I was not going to be a ward of the state. So I looked around for a legitimate job and couldn’t find one.
“People heard my southern accent and wanted to know what I was doing there and when I told them they were kind of wary of hiring me. So music was the only thing I knew how to do that I knew I could make a living at. So I was pretty well forced into it.”
“The Brand New Tennessee Waltz” (produced by Robbie Robertson):
He hooked up with a Canadian rock and roll band, Les Astronauts. During the following two years Jesse was in and out of bands, writing songs and building a following in the clubs and bars of Montreal. Through fortunate circumstances Jesse happened to meet up with The Band’s Robbie Robertson.
“Robbie was a friend of a friend of the girl I was living with. He and I met in the basement of a church in Ottawa where I was working on a tape. So this friend I was speaking of brought Robbie down and he had just put out Music From Big Pink with his band So I was very impressed by him and very thrilled to meet him,” said Jesse, a softspoken, exceedingly polite man who neither drinks nor smokes.
“Robbie liked what we’d been doing. He decided we’d make a demo tape in a real studio and he would take it to Albert Grossman (Dylan’s former manager) which is what happened.”
ApparentIy Robertson, a Canadian himself with a fascination with the South, was much taken by Jesse’s heartfelt songs about his homeland.
“Black Dog” (produced by Robbie Robertson):
The Winchester family has a strong southern heritage which is evoked in many of Jesse’s songs. Jesse was born on May 17, 1944 in Shreveport, Louisiana. The Winchesters are connected to the Robert E. Lee family and Jesse’s fifth great – grandfather helped Andrew Jackson found Memphis. His grandfather gave the funeral oration at Memphis jazzman W. C. Handy’s funeral.
Jesse’s father was the first “radical” of the family. He hated World War II and initially rejected a legal career to work the land. “He was one of the original hippies in the late Forties,” said Winchester. “He took up farming to get closer to the land.”
Although Jesse insists on his Canadian loyalty, he is proud of the South and has turned to it for his songwriting inspira-tion. Perhaps his exile in Canada has fueled the fires of this great passion.
“I think I hear a noisy-old John Deer/ In a field specked with dirty cotton lint/ And below the field runs a little shady creek/And there you’ll find the cool green leaves of mint/ Mississippi you’re on my mind/ Mississippi you’re on my mind/ Oh, Mississippi you’re on, my mind.” — “Mississippi You’re On My Mind”
“Mississippi You’re On My Mind”:
Jesse Winchester is one of the best contemporary songwriters working today. Not only do songs like “Mississippi, You’re On My Mind” evoke crystal clear images and moods of the South, but his good natured songs about relationships transcend the merely personal to the universal.
“I’m no good company/ I guess that’s true/ I like my silence/ Like I love you/ But if you feel like talkin’/ Talk away/ I’m gonna hang on/ Every word you say.” — “Every Word You Say”
Although many of the songs on Jesse’s five albums are about the South, until recently he has had no way to tour the U.S. and thus expose his music. Despite highly favorable reviews of each album, starting with his first (and only) Robbie Robertson produced album, Jesse Winchester, right up to his latest, Nothing But a Breeze, Jesse was unable to sell many records. He lived off club work and the royalties that came in from versions of his songs, “Brand New Tennessee Waltz,” “Isn’t That So,” “‘Yankee Lady” and “Mississippi, You’re On My· Mind” recorded by better known artists including Joan Baez, Jimmy Buffett, the Everly Brothers and even Wilson Pickett. Carter’s amnesty was welcomed because it allowed Jesse to tour the U.S. for the first time and promote his records.
We caught two of Winchester’s many sold out shows at the Boarding House. Drawing from each of his albums, Winchester presented a powerful, cohesive performance that far surpassed his best recorded efforts. His was one of the best club appearances so far this year. The Midnight Bus, his terrific band, glided easily from Nashville-style country to funky blues and moody ballads.
“Biloxi”:
Winchester’s sense of humor, a side seldom revealed on record, balanced the serious tone of many of the songs. For a new tune, “Rhumba Man,” Jesse danced, bopped and gestured comically as he sang about the joys of doing the Rhumba.
Winchester’s tour through the U.S. has been wildly successful. Still, he feels uncomfortable with all the fanfare and his notoriety as the draft-dodging songwriter. “My feelings are ambivalent,” he admitted freely. “On one hand I know that a lot of publicity has come to me because of it and on the other hand I think it would be just in the worst possible taste to purposely capitalize on something like that. So I’m benefiting from an ugly thing. And it’s a fine, delicate line to tread and I just have to try extra hard to do the right thing, say the right thing all the time, be as forthright as I can on the subject.
“I’d like to be able to forget the whole thing. But on the other hand I can’t pretend it didn’t happen. I just have to play it by ear and do the best I can. My job at the moment is to play the best music I can and I think if I do that, eventually it will be the thing that will stand. I really have to concentrate on that and let the political stuff do what it will.”
Jesse, his French-Canadian wife Leslie, 26, and their two children, James, 5 and Alice, 2, make Montreal their home Jesse became a Canadian citizen in 1973.
“Yankee Lady”:
“I feel that can’t come back to the U.S. to live because I made a decision to move to Canada and not away from the United States. So I’m doing my best to be a good Canadian. I have nothing against the United States. I love the United State and always will. But my loyalties lie with Canada now. I’m very grateful to the country and I want to be a good citizen.”
When asked what he meant by the key lines of the title track of his new album “Me, I want to live with my feet in Dixie/ And my head in the cool blue North, Jesse explained, “It’s just talking about how people want to have their cake all eat it too. You kinda want both sides of things and it’s hard to make up your mind, that’s all.”
Elvis Costello, Jesse Winchester & Sheryl Crow play “Payday”:
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –
Cool interview with Thurston Moore over at Vulture magazine.
Jennifer Vineyard interviewed Moore. Here’s an excerpt:
I was born in 1958, and the Velvet Underground disbanded in the early ’70s, so I was aware of the Velvet Underground as a young kid. I remember finding the banana LP at Sears, because you’d buy records in places like department stores. It wasn’t until later I found a record store in New Haven, Connecticut, called Cutler’s, where we’d find records that were more obscure. You would see them written about every once in a while, either in Rolling Stone or CREEM or the magazines of the time, like Circus, Hit Parader, and Rock Scene. Rock Scene was the most important one because it was primarily events that were happening in New York City. They would have all the heavyweights in there, like Led Zeppelin and David Bowie, but they were also covering what was going on in the margins. That was really exciting, wondering what was going on in these little clubs in New York City, because the people just looked fabulous, and the music sounded more intriguing than what was going on at the time with youth culture, which was sort of a fallout from hippie and post-Vietnam kind of vibe. At that time, the hip thing was going back to the country, escaping the city and smoking pot with Joni Mitchell and David Crosby on the porch with the dogs. And there was all this music from Europe and England that had more pomp to it, like prog rock—Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. So to me, seeing images of Patti Smith standing on the subway platform—all of a sudden it was like this new idea that it was kind of cool to be urban. And that was like our new definition of identity. I wanted to investigate that. The reality of it was the city was destitute, and it became this kind of postapocalyptic landscape for artists, and there’s something very enchanting in that. I ran to it. I wanted to see Patti Smith.
Connecticut was a great place to be, because the bands would come to you. But I was very curious about going to New York City, to Max’s Kansas City. So as soon as I could figure it out, I drove to New York City and sought out Max’s Kansas City. I knew it was on Park Avenue—which is a very long avenue, by the way! So I drove along Park Avenue, and I yelled out the window, “Where’s Max’s?” [Laughs.] I eventually found it at the very bottom of the avenue, right near Union Square.
In Larry “Ratso” Sloman’s terrific book, “On the Road with Bob Dylan,” he interviews Michael Bloomfield on the phone in 1975. Bloomfield, of course, famously played on Highway 61 Revisited and was in the band when Dylan went electric at Newport in 1965.
Bloomfield recounts how in preparation for recording Blood on the Tracks, Dylan came to Bloomfield’s house in 1974 to play him the songs. Dylan was thinking about having Bloomfield play on the album.
Michael Bloomfield: The last time was atrocious, atrocious. He came over and there was a whole lot of secrecy involved, there couldn’t be anybody in the house. I wanted to tape the songs so I could learn them so I wouldn’t fuck ‘em up at the sessions…”
Larry Sloman: What songs?
“The ones that came out later on Blood on the Tracks. Anyway, he saw the tape recorder and he had this horrible look on his face like I was trying to put out a bootleg album or something and my little kid, who is like fantastically interested in anyone who plays music, never came into the room where Dylan was the entire several hours he was in the house. He started playing the goddamn songs from Blood on the Tracks and I couldn’t play, I couldn’t follow them, a friend of mine had come to the house and I had to chase him from the house. I’m telling you, the guy [Dylan] intimidated me, I don’t know what it was, it was like he had character armor or something, he was like a wall, he had a wall around him and I couldn’t reach through it. I used to know him a long time ago. He was sort of a normal guy or not a normal guy but knowable, but that last time I couldn’t get the knowable part of him out of him, and to try to get that part out of him would have been ass-kissing, it would have been being a sycophant, and it just isn’t worth kissing his ass, as a matter of fact, I don’t think he would have liked that anyway. It was one of the worst social and musical experiences of my life.
Sloman: What was he like?
Bloomfield: There was this frozen guy there. It was very disconcerting. It leads you to think, if I hadn’t spent some time in the last ten or eleven years with Bob that were extremely pleasant, where I got the hippie intuition that this was a very, very special and, in some ways, an extremely warm and perceptive human being, I would now say that this dude is a stone prick. Time has left him to be a shit, but I don’t see him that much, two isolated incidents over a period of ten years.
Sloman: What do you see as the cause of that?
Bloomfield: Character armor. It’s to keep his sanity, to keep away the people who are always wanting something from him. But if a lot of people relate to you as their concept of you, not your concept of you, you’re gonna have to do something to keep those people from driving you crazy, but if that is so strong that you can’t realize who is trying to fuck with you and who just wants to get along with the business, if you can’t tell the difference, it’s very difficult.
Sloman: How did you relate to him in the early days?
Bloomfield: When I first saw him he was playing in a night club, I had heard his first album, and Grossman got Dylan to play in a club in Chicago called The Bear and I went down there to cut Bob, to take my guitar and cut him, burn him, and he was a great guy, I mean we spent all day talking and jamming and hanging out and he was an incredibly appealing human being and any instincts I may have had in doing that was immediately stopped , and I was just charmed by the man.
That night, I saw him perform and if I had been charmed by just meeting him, me and my old lady were just bowled over watching him perform. I don’t’ know what, it was like this Little Richard song, ‘I don’t know what ou got but it moves me,’ man, this can sang this song called ‘Redwing’ about a boys’ prison and some funny talking blues about a picnic and he was fucking fantastic, not that it was the greatest playing or singing in the world, I don’t know what he had, man, but I’m telling you I just loved it, I mean I could have watched it nonstop forever and ever…
Michael Bloomfield (left) and Dylan at Newport, 1965.
Bloomfield goes on to talk about getting a call from Dylan and going up to Woodstock and Dylan teaching him all the songs for Highway 61 Revisited and then going to New York and recording them. And then Bloomfield talks about playing with Dylan at Newport.
Bloomfield: So after that we like drifted apart, what was there to drift apart, we weren’t that tight, but after that when I’d see him he was a changed guy, honest to God, Larry, he was. There was a time he was one of the most charming human beings I had ever met and I mean charming, not in like the sense of being very nice, but I mean someone who cold beguile you, man, with his personality. You just had to say, ‘Man, this little fucking guy’s got a bit of an angel in him,’ God touched him in a certain way. And he changed, like that guy was gone or it must not be gone, any man that has that many kids, he must be relating that way to his children, but I never related to him that way again.
Anytime that I would see him, I would see him consciously be that cruel, man, I didn’t’ understand that game they played, that constant insane sort of sadistic put-down game. Who’s king of the hill? Who’s on top? To me it seemed like much ado about nothing but to Dave Blue and Phil Ochs it was real serious. I don’t think Blue’s ever escaped that time, in some ways it seems like he’s still trying to prove himself to Bob. I know David’s one of Bob’s biggest champions. ..
I feel the cat’s Pavlovized, he’s Tofflerized, he’s future-shocked. It would take a huge amount of debriefing or something to get him back to normal again, to put that character armor down. But if he’s happy, who am I to say? I can’t judge if he’s happy, this might be his happiness.
“Like A Rolling Stone,” Michael Bloomfield on lead guitar:
Bob Dylan and Patti Smith at the Beacon Theater, 1995.
I’ve been going through old interviews recently, putting together a collection of my music journalism, and I came across an interview that Jaan Uhelszki and I did with Patti Smith.
In August of 1996, two months after the release of her first album in eight years, Patti Smith sat down for an interview with us for my online magazine, Addicted To Noise.
Patti had a history with both myself and Jaan. She’d known Jaan when Jaan worked at Creem, and I’d interviewed Patti in 1975, before the release of her debut album, Horses.
We had a long conversation with Patti. I’ve pulled out the part where she talks about Bob Dylan. She had gone out on the road with Dylan at the end of 1995. At one point during the interview she said that she felt Bob Dylan was a big reason for why she became an artist.
Patti Smith: I’ve always felt that if there wasn’t a Bob Dylan I don’t know if… I think you have to give back what you’re given. I’ve been inspired and influenced by a lot of great people and I think it’s important, if you have any gifts at all, you have–if you’re given a gift, you have to give of it. One can’t hoard it. I think that is one thing Fred [‘Sonic’ Smith] and I were really talking about after being pretty reclusive for so long, that we did have a certain responsibility and I often, I deeply encouraged Fred, who was one of the most gifted people I ever knew to share his gifts with others and it’s regrettable it didn’t happen.
Some people are very comfortable with their gifts, somebody like Robert Mapplethorpe was very comfortable with them and used them daily. Worked daily. Other people are plagued by their gifts and I feel myself I have a little more of a better balance of comfortable plagued-ness, I have a little bit of plagued, I often feel dogged yet most of the time I feel blessed.
Jaan Uhelszki: The Dylan tour. How did it come about and did you stay in touch with him after you first met him at the Bottom Line in the seventies?
Patti Smith: No I hadn’t talked to him in some time. Really as I gleaned from Bob himself, he really felt that it would be good for me to come back out. He thought that I should come back out, and he said really nice things from onstage. I think that he feels I was a strong influence on things, and he thinks I should be out here–out in the front. He was very encouraging to me. I wasn’t really ready to work then, I really didn’t have a band. We’d been recording but I wasn’t really prepared to do anything. But I was so happy that he asked, that we decided to do it and you know we were a little rusty and rag tag but the people seemed happy and he was happy. My main mission on that small tour–it was only ten dates–was to crack all the energy, to crack all the atmosphere and get the stage ready for him. So we had our time before him and that was my prime directive was to get the night as magic as possible, so when he hit the stage, ’cause he hits a lot of them, that maybe it would feel a little more special than normal. And I think we did a pretty good job and I know that he was happy.
— continued —
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On January 17, 1965, Bob Dylan appeared on “The Les Crane Show” at WABC studios in New York.
He was interviewed at length by Les Crane, and he performed two songs: “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleedin’)”
Here’s a bit of the interview. The entire interview is reprinted below the audio.
Dylan: Well, I’m gonna try to make a movie this summer. Which Allen Ginsberg is writing. I’m rewriting …
Crane: Allen Ginsberg, the poet?
Dylan: Yeah, yeah.
Crane: He was on this program you know.
Dylan: Yeah.
Crane: Extolling the virtues of marijuana one night.
Dylan: Really? Allen?? (audience laughter). Sounds like a lie to me (audience laughter).
Crane: That’s really … You think I’m lying?
Dylan: No, I didn’t mean that.
Crane: Allen Ginsberg was sitting in that chair where Caterina Valente is sitting right now and he said that he thought that we ought to legalize pot.
Dylan: He said that?
Crane: Right on the television.
Dylan: Pheeeww!
Crane: Can you imagine that?
Dylan: Nah. Allen is a little funny sometimes (audience roars with laughter).
Crane: Allen’s funny sometimes, huh? Yes … what is this movie going to be about?
Dylan: Oh it’s a, sort of a horror cowboy movie (audience laughter). Takes place on the New York Thruway.
Crane: A horror cowboy movie that takes place .. I don’t think that’s exactly what Tommy Sands had in mind.
Dylan: No, well, its, that’s the kind of movie it’s gonna be though. You know.
Crane: It’s gonna be one of those underground pictures, right?
Dylan: No. It’s gonna be all straight. On the up and up.
Crane: Yeah? Are you gonna star in it?
Dylan: Yeah, yeah, I’m a hero.
I’ve included the songs, audio of Les and Bob’s conversation, and a transcript of the interview.
“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”:
Les Crane interviews Bob Dylan, February 17, 1965:
“It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleedin'”:
Here’s the interview in full:
Crane: Mr Bob Dylan, Ladies and Gentlemen! (applause) (shouts) Hello Bobby!
Dylan: I’m alright!
Crane: Are you plugged in? All right.
Dylan: [sings It’s All Over Now Baby Blue]
Crane: Thank you Bob and I’ll be right back.
—-< break >—-
Crane: How’d it feel?
Dylan: Fine.
Crane: Did it feel good?
Dylan: Felt good.
Crane: Yeah, you were groovy. What’cha doin’ with that?
Dylan: Oh, I’m just trying to get it down so it doesn’t fall in the way of my voice you know.
Crane: We had … looking at that harmonica, have you ever met Jesse Fuller?
Dylan: Sure.
Crane: Jessie was on the show a couple of weeks ago. We didn’t get a chance to talk much but next time he comes back, I want to because he looks like an amazing gentleman. Talking about amazing gentlemen, how old are you?
Dylan: 23!
Crane: 23 years old!
Dylan: Yeah, I’ll be 24 in May!
Crane: Yeah. A lot’s happened to you in just 23 years hasn’t it?
Dylan: Yeah, yeah, fantastic!
Crane: Are you happy about it?
Dylan: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Crane: You oughta be. Because you’re successful at doing, I think, what you want to do more than anything else.
Dylan: Yeah, yeah, I don’t have much to think about.
Crane: You don’t have much to think about? I think you must be thinking about an awful lot of things to write the kind of things you do.
Dylan: Yeah, yeah.
Crane: Tell ’em!
Dylan: Yeah.
Crane: Tell ’em, just for those out there in the audience that might not know all of the songs that you’ve written. Just name a few of the big ones!
Dylan: Oh.
Crane: This is the composer of …
Dylan: SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES!
Crane: No! That ain’t one of the big ones! (audience laughter)
Dylan: No?
Crane: No.
Dylan: Let’s see, One Too Many Mornings.
Crane: How about Blowin’ In The Wind?
Dylan: Yeah? (applause)
Crane: Do you folks. maybe you remember the night that Judy Collins…, and I kept saying “You gotta sing this song, you gotta sing this song” and Judy Collins came out and and sang the full original version of Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall? Well, Bob wrote that!
Dylan: Yeah, I wrote that (applause).
Crane: Who are you waving at?
Dylan: Odetta!
Crane: Odetta! (To audience) Do you know who Odetta is? (lots of applause). Put a light on that lady!! How are you darling? … Talk about great artists! That’s one of them! (To Odetta) You are going to be on show in a while aren’t you?
Odetta: Next month.
Crane: Next month. Yeah, Odetta is all booked …
Crane: When did you first start pickin’ and singin’, Bob?
Dylan: Oh… When I was about ten, eleven.
— continued —
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In early 1962, very possibly February, Bob Dylan and his friend/radio host/singer Cynthia Gooding recorded a show that was broadcast on WBAI radio in New York.
The recording was made in February 1962. The date of March 11, 1962 is listed on the back cover, though this is most likely a re-broadcast date. The original radio show broadcast could have been as early as February. History is a bit fuzzy here.
Gooding’s interview with Bob is a good one. You can read the transcript at Expecting Rain.
Here’s some of the flavor of the conversation:
Cynthia Gooding: When I first heard Bob Dylan it was, I think, about three years ago in Minneapolis, and at that time you were thinking of being a rock and roll singer weren’t you?
Bob Dylan: Well at that time I was just sort of doin’ nothin’. I was there.
CG: Well, you were studying.
BD: I was working, I guess. l was making pretend I was going to school out there. I’d just come there from south Dakota. That was about three years ago?
CG: Yeah?
BD: Yeah, I’d come there from Sioux Falls. That was only about the place you didn’t have to go too far to find the Mississippi River. It runs right through the town you know. (laughs).
CG: You’ve been singing … you’ve sung now at Gerdes here in town and have you sung at any of the coffee houses?
BD: Yeah, I’ve sung at the Gaslight. That was a long time ago though. I used to play down in the Wha too. You ever know where that place is?
CG: Yeah, I didn’t know you sung there though.
BD: Yeah, I sung down there during the afternoons. I played my harmonica for this guy there who was singing. He used to give me a dollar to play every day with him, from 2 o’clock in the afternoon until 8.30 at night. He gave me a dollar plus a cheese burger.
CG: Wow, a thin one or a thick one?
BD: I couldn’t much tell in those days.
CG: Well, whatever got you off rock ‘n roll and on to folk music?
BD: Well, I never really got onto this, they were just sort of, I dunno, I wasn’t calling it anything then you know, I wasn’t really singing rock ‘n roll, I was singing Muddy Waters songs and I was writing songs, and I was singing Woody Guthrie songs and also I sung Hank Williams songs and Johnny Cash, I think.
The music is superb. Be sure to click on play all!
The songs:
1. Lonesome Whistle Blues (Hank Williams/Jimmy Davies)
2. Fixin’ To Die (Bukka White)
3. Smokestack Lightning (Howlin’ Wolf)
4. Hard Travelin’ (Woody Guthrie)
5. The Death Of Emmett Till
6. Standing On The Highway
7. Roll On, John (trad., arr. By Bob Dylan)
8. Stealin’, Stealin’ (trad. arr. Memphis Jug Band)
9. Long Time Man (trad., arr. by Alan Lomax)
10. Baby Please Don’t Go (Big Joe Williams)
11. Hard Times In New York Town
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Bob Dylan has always had a kind of love/hate relationship with journalists.
With some regularity he has spoken to reporters from the start of his career.
Robert Shelton helped Dylan get the attention of Columbia Records, and Nat Hentoff’s New Yorker profile in 1964 provided Dylan with the credibility one can only get by being profiled in that most esteemed publication.
It was the interview in “Don’t Look Back” that gave us the impression that Dylan disliked the press. But in fact, it’s to his advantage, when he can use the press to promote his latest project (album, film, book) he’ll talk to Rolling Stone or some other high profile outlet. And why not?
Perhaps the most outrageous and flat out amazing interview Dylan ever gave was when he spoke to Nat Hentoff in February 1966 for Playboy.
Here are some excerpts:
PLAYBOY: Do you feel that acquiring a combo and switching from folk to folkrock has improved you as a performer?
DYLAN: I’m not interested in myself as a performer. Performers are people who perform for other people. Unlike actors, I know what I’m saying. It’s very simple in my mind. It doesn’t matter what kind of audience reaction this whole thing gets. What happens on the stage is straight. It doesn’t expect any rewards or fines from any kind of outside agitators. It’s ultra-simple, and would exist whether anybody was looking or not.
As far as folk and folk-rock are concerned, it doesn’t matter what kind of nasty names people invent for the music. It could be called arsenic music, or perhaps Phaedra music. I don’t think that such a word as folk-rock has anything to do with it. And folk music is a word I can’t use. Folk music is a bunch of fat people. I have to think of all this as traditional music. Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. There’s nobody that’s going to kill traditional music. All these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels – they’re not going to die. It’s all those paranoid people who think that someone’s going to come and take away their toilet paper – they’re going to die. Songs like “Which Side Are You On?” and “I Love You, Porgy” – they’re not folk-music songs; they’re political songs. They’re already dead. Obviously, death is not very universally accepted. I mean, you’d think that the traditional-music people could gather from their songs that mystery – just plain simple mystery – is a fact, a traditional fact. I listen to the old ballads; but I wouldn’t go to a party and listen to the old ballads. I could give you descriptive detail of what they do to me, but some people would probably think my imagination had gone mad. It strikes me funny that people actually have the gall to think that I have some kind of fantastic imagination. It gets very lonesome. But anyway, traditional music is too unreal to die. It doesn’t need to be protected. Nobody’s going to hurt it. In that music is the only true, valid death you can feel today off a record player. But like anything else in great demand, people try to own it. It has to do with a purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy. Everybody knows that I’m not a folk singer.
PLAYBOY: Some of your old fans would agree with you – and not in a complimentary vein – since your debut with the rock-‘n’-roll combo at last year’s Newport Folk Festival, where many of them booed you loudly for “selling out” to commercial pop tastes. The early Bob Dylan, they felt, was the “pure” Bob Dylan. How do you feel about it?
DYLAN: I was kind of stunned. But I can’t put anybody down for coming and booing: after all, they paid to get in. They could have been maybe a little guieter and not so persistent, though. There were a lot of old people there, too; lots of whole families had driven down from Vermont, lots of nurses and their parents, and well, like they just came to hear some relaxing hoedowns, you know, maybe an Indian polka or two. And just when everything’s going all right, here I come on, and the whole place turns into a beer factory. There were a lot of people there who were very pleased that I got booed. I saw them afterward. I do resent somewhat, though, that everybody that booed said they did it because they were old fans.
PLAYBOY: What about their charge that you vulgarized your natural gifts?
DYLAN: What can I say? I’d like to see one of these so-called fans. I’d like to have him blindfolded and brought to me. It’s like going out to the desert and screaming and then having little kids throw their sandbox at you. I’m only 24. These people that said this – were they Americans?
PLAYBOY: Americans or not, there were a lot of people who didn’t like your new sound. In view of tbis widespread negative reaction, do you think you may have made a mistake in changing your style?
DYLAN: A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding. There could be no such thing, anyway, as this action. Either people understand or they pretend to understand – or else they really don’t understand. What you’re speaking of here is doing wrong things for selfish reasons. I don’t know the word for that, unless it’s suicide. In any case, it has nothing to do with my music.
PLAYBOY: Mistake or not, what made you decide to go the rock-‘n’-roll route?
DYLAN: Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I’m in a card game. Then I’m in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a “before” in a Charles Atlas “before and after” ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy – he ain’t so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I’m in Omaha. It’s so cold there, by this time I’m robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain’t much to look at, but who’s built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything’s going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?
PLAYBOY: And that’s how you became a rock-‘n’-roll singer?
DYLAN: No, that’s how I got tuberculosis.
***
PLAYBOY: In their admiration for you, many young people have begun to imitate the way you dress – which one adult commentator has called “selfconsciously oddball and defiantly sloppy.” What’s your reaction to that kind of put-down?
DYLAN: Bullshit. Oh, such bullshit. I know the fellow that said that. He used to come around here and get beat up all the time. He better watch it; some people are after him. They’re going to strip him naked and stick him in Times Square. They’re going to tie him up, and also put a thermometer in his mouth. Those kind of morbid ideas and remarks are so petty – I mean there’s a war going on. People got rickets; everybody wants to start a riot; 40-year-old women are eating spinach by the carload; the doctors haven’t got a cure for cancer – and here’s some hillbilly talking about how he doesn’t like somebody’s clothes. Worse than hat, it gets printed and innocent people have to read it. This is a terrible thing. And he’s a terrible man. Obviously, he’s just living off the fat of himself, and he’s expecting his kids to take care of him. His kids probably listen to my records. Just because my clothes are too long, does that mean I’m unqualified for what I do?
PLAYBOY: No, but there are those who think it does – and many of them seem to feel the same way about your long hair. But compared with the shoulder-length coiffures worn by some of the male singing groups these days, your tonsorial tastes are on the conservative side. How do you feel about these far-out hair styles?
DYLAN: The thing that most people don’t realize is that it’s warmer to have long hair. Everybody wants to be warm. People with short hair freeze easily. Then they try to hide their coldness, and they get jealous of everybody that’s warm. Then they become either barbers or Congressmen. A lot of prison wardens have short hair. Have you ever noticed that Abraham Lincoln’s hair was much longer than John Wilkes Booth’s?
PLAYBOY: Do you think Lincoln wore his hair long to keep his head warm?
DYLAN: Actually, I think it was for medical reasons, which are none of my business. But I guess if you figure it out, you realize that all of one’s hair surrounds and lays on the brain inside your head. Mathematically speaking, the more of it you can get out of your head, the better. People who want free minds sometimes overlook the fact that you have to have an uncluttered brain. Obviously, if you get your hair on the outside of your head, your brain will be a little more freer. But all this talk about long hair is just a trick. It’s been thought up by men and women who look like cigars – the anti-happiness committee. They’re all freeloaders and cops. You can tell who they are: They’re always carrying calendars, guns or scissors. They’re all trying to get into your quicksand. They think you’ve got something. I don’t know why Abe Lincoln had long hair.
***
PLAYBOY: As a college dropout in your freshman year, you seem to take a dim view of schooling in general, whatever the subject.
DYLAN: I really don’t think about it.
PLAYBOY: Well, have you ever had any regrets about not completing college?
DYLAN: That would be ridiculous. Colleges are like old-age homes; except for the fact that more people die in colleges than in old-age homes, there’s really no difference. People have one great blessing – obscurity – and not really too many people are thankful for it. Everybody is always taught to be thankful for their food and clothes and things like that, but not to be thankful for their obscurity. Schools don’t teach that; they teach people to be rebels and lawyers. I’m not going to put down the teaching system; that would be too silly. It’s just that it really doesn’t have too much to teach. Colleges are part of the American institution; everybody respects them. They’re very rich and influential, but they have nothing to do with survival. Everybody knows that.
PLAYBOY: Would you advise young people to skip college, then?
DYLAN: I wouldn’t advise anybody to do anything. I certainly wouldn’t advise somebody not to go to college; I just wouldn’t pay his way through college.
PLAYBOY: Don’t you think the things one learns in college can help enrich one’s life?
DYLAN: I don’t think anything like that is going to enrich my life, no – not my life, anyway. Things are going to happen whether I know why they happen or not. It just gets more complicated when you stick yourself into it. You don’t find out why things move. You let them move; you watch them move; you stop them from moving: you start them moving. But you don’t sit around and try to figure out why there’s movement – unless, of course, you’re just an innocent moron, or some wise old Japanese man. Out of all the people who just lay around and ask “Why?”, how many do you figure really want to know?
PLAYBOY: Can you suggest a better use for the four years that would otherwise be spent in college?
DYLAN: Well, you could hang around in Italy; you could go to Mexico; you could become a dishwasher; you could even go to Arkansas. I don’t know; there are thousands of things to do and places to go. Everybody thinks that you have to bang your head against the wall, but it’s silly when you really think about it. I mean, here you have fantastic scientists working on ways to prolong human living, and then you have other people who take it for granted that you have to beat your head against the wall in order to be happy. You can’t take everything you don’t like as a personal insult. I guess you should go where your wants are bare, where you’re invisible and not needed.
PLAYBOY: Would you classify sex among your wants, wherever you go?
DYLAN: Sex is a temporary thing; sex isn’t love. You can get sex anywhere. If you’re looking for someone to love you, now that’s different. I guess you have to stay in college for that.
PLAYBOY: Since you didn’t stay in college, does that mean you haven’t found someone to love you?
DYLAN: Let’s go on to the next question.
***
PLAYBOY: Do you have any unfulfilled ambitions?
DYLAN: Well, I guess I’ve always wanted to be Anthony Quinn in “La Strada”. Not always – only for about six years now; it’s not one of those childhood-dream things. Oh, and come to think of it, I guess I’ve always wanted to be Brigitte Bardot, too; but I don’t really want to think about that too much.
