Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews - Hardcover

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Jonathan Cott is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and has written for the The New York Times and The New Yorker. He is the author of twenty books, including Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein, Days That I’ll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Dylan (a biography), Conversations with Glenn Gould, Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer, Back to a Shadow in the Night: Music Writings and Interviews—1968–2001, and Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews. He lives in New York City.

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Bob Dylan

Introduction

“No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.”

—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY, FLIGHT TO ARRAS

It may have been a slow time coming, but one day in 1960, when he was nineteen years old, Robert Allen Zimmerman of Duluth and Hibbing, Minnesota—the elder of two sons of Abraham and Beatrice Zimmerman—decided to make a name for himself, as well as a nascent identity, a self, and a fantasticated life story nearer to his heart’s desire. (This may have been a slow but not totally calculated decision: As he told People magazine in 1975, “I didn’t consciously pursue the Bob Dylan myth. It was given to me by God. Inspiration is what we’re looking for. You just have to be receptive to it.”)

“Bob Dylan,” he volunteered to his early interviewers, was raised in Gallup, New Mexico—he often said, “I don’t have a family, I’m all alone”—and was a child of the open road, having run away from home seven times—at ten, twelve, thirteen, fifteen, fifteen-and-a-half, seventeen, and eighteen. His peregrinations took him to North and South Dakota, Kansas, Texas, California (where at age ten, he claimed to have seen Woody Guthrie perform in Burbank), and even Mexico, thumbing rides and riding freight trains. “I danced my way from the Indian festivals in Gallup, New Mexico/To the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Louisiana,” he wrote in his early autobiographical sketch “My Life in a Stolen Moment.” He traveled with a carnival “off and on for six years,” he confided to the folksinger Cynthia Gooding in 1962. “I was clean-up boy. I was mainliner on the Ferris wheel. Do the shoreline thing. Use to do all kinds of stuff like that.” As he told the New York Herald Tribune in 1965, “My past is so complicated you wouldn’t believe it, man.”

His life story changed as he proceeded onward in his journey, as, remarkably, did his physiognomy and everyday appearance. Like the Greek sea deity Proteus, who in order to elude his pursuers continually shape-shifted from dragon to lion to fire to flood—uttering prophecies along the way—Bob Dylan, in his early days, had, according to the folksinger Eric von Schmidt, “the most incredible way of changing shape, changing size, changing looks. The whole time . . . he wore the same thing, his blue jeans and cap. And sometimes he would look big and muscular, and the next day he’d look like a little gnome, and one day he’d be kind of handsome and virile, and the following day he’d look like a thirteen-year-old child. It was really strange.” (One thinks of the advice once given by the ancient Greek elegiac poet Theognis: “Present a different aspect of yourself to each of your friends . . . . Follow the example of the octopus with its many coils which assumes the appearance of the stone to which it is going to cling. Attach yourself to one on one day and, another day, change color. Cleverness is more valuable than inflexibility.”)

You would also never know what his voice was going to sound like. One of the other fascinating, if obvious, things about Bob Dylan’s chameleonic personality was the way the timbre of his voice would change from one record or period of his life to another—as if his voice, too, couldn’t stand having just one unvarying sound. When he first arrived in New York City, he was singing like a hillbilly, “like a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire,” as someone remarked at the time. And as years went by, Dylan’s voice would veer from, in his words, “that thin . . . wild mercury sound . . . metallic and bright gold” of Blonde on Blonde (1966) to the insouciant country sound, which Dylan attributes to his having stopped smoking cigarettes, of Nashville Skyline (1969) to the openheartedness, gentleness, vulnerability, and anger of Blood on the Tracks (1975) to the haunting timbral admixture of sandpaper and sherry of Time Out of Mind (1997).

The French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s “I is another” became Dylan’s self-defining (selves-defining) modus vivendi. Reading a newspaper account of himself, he once remarked, “God, I’m glad I’m not me.” When asked by a reporter the reason for his wearing a wig and a fake beard at a 2003 Newport Folk Festival concert, Dylan replied, “Is that me who you saw up there?” In a 1977 interview I conducted with him about his film Renaldo and Clara, Dylan explained to me, “There’s Renaldo, there’s a guy in whiteface singing on the stage, and then there’s Ronnie Hawkins playing Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan is listed in the credits as playing Renaldo, yet Ronnie Hawkins is listed as playing Bob Dylan.” “So Bob Dylan,” I surmised, “may or may not be in the film.” “Exactly.” “But Bob Dylan made the film.” “Bob Dylan didn’t make it,” he told me. “I made it.”

He even explored and confessed to the more particulated (some might say self-splitting) nature of his being. “Have you ever felt like a couple?” the playwright and actor Sam Shepard once asked him. “A couple?” Dylan responded. “You mean two? Yeah. All the time. Sometimes I feel like ten couples.” And as he informed Newsweek’s David Gates: “I don’t think I’m tangible to myself. I mean, I think one thing today and I think another thing tomorrow. I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me.” (One thinks of the Buddhist notion that the ego isn’t an entity but rather a process in time, as well as of Virginia Woolf’s comment in Orlando that “a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand.”)

Throughout his career he has played off his role of “Bob Dylan”—“I have my Bob Dylan mask on, I’m masquerading,” he told a Halloween concert audience in 1964—against the silent center of his inner life. At a 1986 press conference he said, “I’m only Bob Dylan when I have to be.” When asked who he was the rest of the time, he replied, “Myself.” In an interview with Clinton Heylin, Cesar Diaz, who spent five years working with Dylan as a guitar tech in almost daily proximity to him, said: “I’d been searching the same guy for years and years. I’d get a glimpse of the guy once in a while . . . . He actually put his cards down a couple of times . . . . You would have to be with him, and be there at that right moment when he just opens up and says, ‘Okay, I’m just Bob and Bob has no last name.’ ” And when the mask comes off, as it does in his astonishing song “Abandoned Love,” his life and his world become transparent both to himself and to us:

Everybody’s wearing a disguise

To hide what they’ve got left behind their eyes

But me, I can’t cover what I am

Wherever the children go I’ll follow them.

The legendary American pianist William Kapell, who died at the...