Sunday Telegraph interview
Interviewed by John Preston.
When it was announced two years ago that Bob Dylan was writing his autobiography, there was general astonishment among his legions of obsessive fans. Here, after all, was a man who has spent his life hiding behind carefully erected smokescreens of privacy and elusiveness. While other rock stars may have spilled details of their albums, their affairs and their addictions with delirious abandon, Dylan has always kept his public utterances to a gnomic few. All across the Internet questions flew back and forth. Would Dylan ever complete the book? How were his powers of recall? And perhaps most critically – particularly for anyone who has attempted to read Dylan's only other published work, his I97I novel, Tarantula – would it make any sense?
But Dylan hasn't spent more than 40 years wrong footing people for nothing. Not only did he deliver Chronicles Volume One on time, but it turns out to be a remarkable book, richly atmospheric and full of insights into his work, along with vivid impressions from his life.
Then came another surprise: Dylan was prepared to talk, to give his first interview to a British newspaper in 20 years. And there was one more shock in store. Normally interviews with Bob Dylan tend to be tortuous affairs, full of yawning silences and mumbling evasions. But when I spoke to him at his farm in Minnesota where Dylan has been taking a rare break from performing, he confounded expectations by being friendly, relaxed and only too happy to chew the fat and reminisce.
He was quick to point out that it wasn't actually his idea to write the book. Rather, his publisher suggested it and despite a few misgivings he decided to have a try. „In part, I guess I wanted to set the record straight,“ he says in his light, mid-western accent, “I knew there had been other books about me and I'd even read a couple of them – although – frankly you can't spend time reading books about yourself, no matter who you are.”
„Some of the books were more accurate than others, but no one knew the full story, apart from me. So I sat down and started tapping away on my old manual typewriter. Initially the book was going to be about the background to some of my albums, but then it took on a life of its own. The chapters about my early days in New York were supposed to be about how I recorded my second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. But somehow I never quite got there. Every few weeks I'd send off some pages to my publisher and ask if they thought they were usable. They seemed happy and so I just kept on going.
Dylan found writing Chronicles a very strange experience. „For a start I'm used to writing songs and I use a lot of symbol and metaphor. People can misinterpret that. But here I was determined to write a book that no one could misinterpret. It was difficult, though. Writing a song is a more straightforward process: you go verse, chorus, verse, chorus, and pretty soon you're done. With a book you can't use the same dynamics.“
But Dylan's main problem – at least to begin with – was that he wasn't sure how reliable his memory would prove to be. „However, as I wrote, my memory seemed to unlock. I surprised myself with how much came back. I found I could visualise what people looked like and what they were wearing and even how particular rooms were furnished.“
The book starts with Dylan freshly arrived in New York from Minnesota, and being signed up by Columbia records. At Columbia, he was taken under the wing of one of the label's most respected producers, John Hammond, who had only heard two of Dylan's original songs, „but he had a premonition there would be more“.
From the word go, Dylan hung up a large mask between himself and the world. He changed his name, partly in tribute to the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas – in the past Dylan has always denied naming himself after Thomas, but now he seems happy to acknowledge his influence. He also changed his background. When people asked him where he'd come from and how he'd arrived, he claimed to have ridden into New York City on a freight train.
In fact, as he admits with a chuckle, he had driven in from the Midwest in a four-door I957 sedan. But there could be no doubting his determination to succeed. Apart from anything else, he felt he had been singled out by destiny.
“I did have that feeling; I'd had it since I was a kid, you know. I grew up in a very isolated place and throughout my boyhood years I felt like I was like a dog hunting in dreams, always looking for something, although I wasn't sure what exactly. But from the start I had this absolute confidence. While I didn't know how I was going to get there, it didn't surprise me when I did. If I hadn't have had that confidence, I would have gone off and done something else.“
Dylan was born in I94I and brought up in the iron-ore mining town of Hibbing. When he was a boy his heroes, he recalls, were Robin Hood and St George, the Dragon Slayer. His Jewish seamstress grandmother, whom he plainly adored, had emigrated from Odessa in Russia, losing a leg along the way. Originally his father, Abe, who worked for the Standard Oil Company, wanted his son to become a mechanical engineer. Dylan, however, had, other ideas. At one stage, he insists he thought seriously about enrolling in the army and going to West Point. „Yeah, that was something I'd forgotten all about, but then it came back to me as I was writing.“
Instead of West Point, Dylan headed south for New York City. As he describes it, the New York of the early I960s sounds like a Greenwich Village version of La Boheme, full of blazingly intense intellectuals hanging about in book-lined lofts and smoky folk clubs.
It was a world apart from anything he'd been used to in Hibbing, and Dylan plunged into it with ravenous zeal. At a friend's apartment, he devoured books – Rousseau’s Social Contract, Machiavelli's The Prince, even the I9th~century Prussian General, Karl Clausewift's treatise on military strategy – cramming his head full of anything he could pick up. „A lot of these books were too big to read,“ he recalls, „like giant shoes fitted for large-footed people.“
Soon Dylan was performing in the folk clubs, modelling himself on his great idol, Woody Guthrie. At the time Guthrie was dying with Huntingdon's chorea in Greystone Hospital, a sanatorium in New Jersey. Eager to meet his hero, Dylan went to see him. „He had no idea who I was when I first turned up. But very few people were going to see him then. Hardly anyone even knew who he was, certainly not in the sanatorium. I never saw any other visitors there. I don't think he was lonely necessarily, but he seemed to like my company. I must have, gone to see him about a dozen times. I'd bring him cigarettes, play songs and we'd just talk about this and that. It was a terrible place; like an asylum really. I always found it very draining psychologically going there.“
Meanwhile, the Greenwich Village folk devotees weren't too sure what to make of Dylan. “Basically, folk performers fell into one of two categories. Either they were commercial and had highly stylised nightclub acts, or else they did southern mountain music. But I didn't do either of those things. I came from a rock 'n' roll background, although I did my best to hide that because I knew they'd be disapproving.“
Under Guthrie's influence, Dylan began writing his own songs. „I had a similar sense of destiny there. In one sense, writing songs was a gradual process and yet in another it seemed to happen very quickly. Over the course of a year I started writing a lot, but the experience I'd already had stood me in good stead. I'd learned a lot by the time I started writing my first songs.“
In September I96I, the critic Robert Shelton, writing in the New York Times reviewed a concert that Dylan had given at Gerde’s Folk City. “His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica, or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.“
A year later Dylan had written his great anti-war anthem, Blowin’ in the
Wind. It was the first in what was to be an extraordinarily long line of classic songs. But as soon as he’d mastered one form, Dylan was keen to move on, to experiment with new structures and instrumentation. Within four years he appeared to have left folk music behind. At the I965 Newport Folk Festival he played the electric guitar while outraged folk fans in the audience tried to boo him offstage.
“In retrospect,” he says, “I think it was very hard to domesticate and tame my talent. However, some people seemed to think that listening to songs should be like listening to dull sermons. I didn't want anything like that. But at the same time I felt very much a part of the folk music tradition. All the lyrics I wrote came out of that idiom.”
It was a tradition that Dylan insists he never wanted to break with, even when he went electric, and as he puts it wryly, “gathered some notoriety I always kept in touch with older musicians, people in their fifties and sixties, like Mississippi John Hurt. Hard-core rural folksingers. They understood the complexity of my language and what I was trying to do. They didn't have any problem with it.”
Throughout the I960s, Dylan’s fame and reputation continued to escalate, to the point where he was constantly being referred to as „the spokesman of his generation“. It was a label he detested; he'd never sought such a role and he found the pressure of people's expectations increasingly hard to bear.
„Not only did I not want it, but I didn’t need it. I couldn’t understand it either. None of us like to be defined by what other people think of us. I wasn't the toastmaster of any generation and that notion had to be pulled up by the roots.”
All he wanted, he says, was to be left alone with his wife and children enjoying „a nine-to-five existence with a white picket fence and pink roses in the backyard. That would have been nice“.
Following a motorcycle accident in July I966, he fled to Woodstock in upstate New York in an effort to put some distance between himself and his would-be disciples. But the fans, along with the mayhem, quickly followed. Soon, maps were being sold showing where Dylan's home was. Whenever he went out to a restaurant, the whole place would fall silent and everyone would start staring at him.
„It all turned into a nightmare,“ he remembers. In the end things got so bad that Dylan – ostensibly the great pacifist – was reduced to keeping guns in his house in case he and his family were attacked.
I wondered if he'd actually come close to having a nervous breakdown at the time. „I guess I did. None the less, you have to try to get on with your life and do the best you can. But it was terrible and also very disorientating. In the early years everything had been like a magic carpet ride for me – and then all at once it was over. Here was this thing that I'd wanted to do all my life, but suddenly I didn't feel I could do it anymore.
„Also, I was changing too. Now I had a wife and kids and different responsibilities. I realised I had to try to settle for another type of life; to take enjoyment out of little things. A lot about fame tastes good, or can do. Apart from anything else, you can use it to do a lot of good. But I wasn't seeing any of that back then.“
For several years Dylan took himself out of the limelight. His marriage to Sara Lowndes fell apart and he concentrated on trying to bring up his four children. “I remember thinking that art was sublime excrement, and I decided to turn my back on it for a while.“
Creatively, he foundered. He describes the experience as like being in a long dark tunnel. When I asked him how long it took him to emerge from the tunnel, he sighs and says, “Oh, a long time … But I got there in the end.”
It was in the I980s that Dylan hit his lowest ebb. His record sales plummeted and so did the quality of his live shows. Audiences stayed away, put off by Dylan’s ramblingly atonal delivery and his apparent indifference to his own material. “In reality,” he says, I was just above a club act.”
Unsure what direction to follow and unable to write any new songs, he found his old ones hanging heavy round his neck. “I was carrying a package of rotting meat … The glow was gone and the match had burned right to the end. I was going through the motions. The whisky had gone out of the bottle.“
For a he thought seriously about quitting, never recording or performing again. Then one evening in a bar he saw an old jazz singer whose style of performing came as a revelation to him. “Suddenly, it was like this guy had an open window to my soul.“ All at once he saw how he could sing with his voice „bypassing“ his brain, and „blasting up from the bottom of my lower self“.
From then on, things began to improve – slowly at first, and then with gathering momentum. His I989 album, Oh Mercy, was hailed as his best in years. His next, Time Out Of Mind won him a Grammy for album of the year in I997, and Things Have Changed, the song he wrote for the 2000 film Wonderboys won him as Oscar. Dylan was so delighted with his Oscar that lie took to carrying it on stage with him and displaying it to his audience.
It was in the late I980s that Dylan embarked on what soon became known as The Never Ending Tour – and he's been more or less on it ever since, criss-crossing the globe, playing about I50 concerts a year and seldom stopping for more than a month at a time.
I asked him if he thought he could ever have felt fulfilled if he had retired. „I'm not really sure. I think I would have missed the performing. I feel I need to perform more than I need to write. Having said that, though, I do get caught up in writing. Every time I come up with a new song it's like the first rose of May.“
A few years ago after he had been hospitalised for a heart condition Dylan said that „any day above ground was a good day“ as far as he was concerned. But life has looked up a good deal since then. His last album, Love and Theft, released in 200I, was hailed as one of the best things he has ever done. Now here he is, aged 63, a grandfather several times over, trawling through his back pages for what he says will eventually be a three-volume autobiography.
„I found writing the first volume quite an emotional experience in places. But then I'd put it aside and not look at it for a while. To be honest, I also found it quite a tedious process. I'm not a professional writer and I just didn’t get that sense of exhilaration that some writers feel. But I guess I'll keep on going. I've certainly got a lot more things to write about.“
There was one other question I wanted to ask. However much Dylan may hate being labelled as a spokesman of any kind, it's something he can never shake off completely. So did he think that the United States and Britain should have invaded Iraq?
Dylan barks with loud wheezy laughter. „Maybe I'll tackle that in the next book.“
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