Bob Dylan

The Essential Interviews

Jonathan Cott, Jonathan Cott

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501173202
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

"A historical compilation to savor" ( Los Angeles Times ) that is "invaluable…irresistible" ( The New York Times )—the ultimate collection of interviews and encounters with Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, spanning his entire career from 1962 to today. Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews features over two dozen of the most significant and revealing conversations with the singer, gathered in one definitive collection that spans his career from street poet to Nobel Laureate. First published in 2006, this acclaimed collection brought together the best interviews and encounters with Bob Dylan to create a multi-faceted, cultural, and journalistic portrait of the artist and his legacy. This edition includes three additional pieces from Rolling Stone that update the volume to the present day. Among the highlights are the seminal Rolling Stone interviews—anthologized here for the first time—by Jann Wenner, Jonathan Cott, Kurt Loder, Mikal Gilmore, Douglas Brinkley, and Jonathan Lethem—as well as Nat Hentoff's legendary 1966 Playboy interview. Surprises include Studs Terkel's radio interview in 1963 on WFMT in Chicago, the interview Dylan gave to screenwriter Jay Cocks when he was a student at Kenyon College in 1964, a 1965 interview with director Nora Ephron, and an interview Sam Shepard turned into a one-act play for Esquire in 1987. Introduced by Rolling Stone editor Jonathan Cott, these intimate conversations from America's most celebrated street poet is a "priceless collection with honest, open, and thoughtful musings…a fascinating window into his one-of-a-kind mind" ( Publishers Weekly ).

1.

I was with the carnival off and on. . . . I was clean-up boy. I was mainliner on the Ferris wheel. Do the shoreline thing. Used to do all kinds of stuff like that.”

---

Radio Interview with Cynthia Gooding, WBAI (New York)

1962

Bob Dylan, you must be twenty years old now.

Yeah, I must be twenty . . .

In Minneapolis you were thinking of being a rock & roll singer?

At that time I was sort of doing nothing, I was working, I guess, I was making pretend I was going to school out there—I’d just come in from South Dakota, that was about three years ago . . . yeah, I’d come in from Sioux Falls, that was the only place you didn’t have to go too far to find the Mississippi River—it runs right through the town.

Have you sung at any of the coffee houses [in Greenwich Village]?

Yeah, I sang at the Gaslight. That was a long time ago . . . I used to play down at the Wha?, too. I sang down there during the afternoons, played my harmonica for this guy there . . . he used to give me a dollar . . . play with him every day from two o’clock in the afternoon. Play till 8:30 at night . . . . He gave me a dollar, plus a cheeseburger.

What got you off rock & roll and onto folk music?

Well I never got onto that—they were just sorta, I don’t know. I wasn’t calling it anything, I wasn’t singing rock & roll. I was singing Muddy Waters songs, I was writing songs, and I was singing Woody Guthrie songs and also Hank Williams songs . . . Johnny Cash . . .

I heard you doing Johnny Cash.

These are French ones [cigarettes]?

No, they’re healthy ones.

My record for Columbia is coming out in March.

What’s it going to be called?

Bob Dylan, I think.

This is one of the fastest rises in folksingers.

Yeah, but I really don’t think of myself as a folksinger thing . . . [I don’t] play in places across the country, you know, I’m not on the circuit or anything. I’m not a folksinger so . . . I play a little, once in a while. But I like more than just folk music too. I sing more than just folk music . . . as such people label folk music “folk music” . . . yeah, I like folk music . . . like Hobart Smith’s stuff. I don’t sing much of that, and when I do it’s a modified version or something . . . it’s more of a old-time jazz thing. Jelly Roll Morton ’n’ stuff like that.

I’d like you to sing songs from your short history.

Short history?

[To listeners] He’s got a list of songs pasted to his guitar.

Well, I don’t know all of these songs, it’s just a list of what other people gave me. I gathered them on, I copied the best songs I could find. So I don’t know a lot of these. Gives me something to do on the stage.

Like something to look at.

[Sings a blues]

That’s a great song, how much of it is yours?

I don’t know, I can’t remember. My hands are cold, it’s a pretty cold studio.

You’re a very good friend of John Lee Hooker’s? . . . Howlin’ Wolf. You’re a friend of Woody Guthrie . . .

Yeah.

Which ones of his do you like the best, which ones are the best?

Depends . . . . Which one do you want to hear? [Sings “Hard Travelin’”]

Tell me about the songs you’ve written, that you sing.

Those are . . . I don’t claim they’re folk songs or anything. I just call them contemporary songs I guess. A lot of people paint if they got something they want to say, other people write plays, write songs . . . same place. Wanna hear one?

Why, yes!

I got a new one, it’s called “Emmett Till.” I stole the melody from Len Chandler. He’s a folksinger, uses a lot of funny chords. He got me to using some of these funny chords, trying to teach me new chords. He played me these, said, “Don’t they sound nice?” So I said, “They sure do.” So I stole it, the whole thing. [Sings “Emmett Till”]

“It’s one of the best contemporary ballads I ever heard. It’s tremendous.

You like it?

Oh, yes.

I just wrote it last week, I think.

I don’t get a chance much to play. Let me play you a plain ordinary one. Broke my fingernail . . . [Plays “Standing on the Highway Trying to Bum a Ride”]

You know, the eight of diamonds is delay, and the ace of spades is death.

Yeah.

So that sort of goes in with the two roads, doesn’t it?

I learned that in the carnival. I used to travel with the carnival.

Oh, you can read cards too?

Um . . . I can’t read cards, I really believe in palm reading. But for a bunch of personal things, personal experiences, I don’t believe too much in the cards. I like to think I don’t believe too much in the cards.

So you won’t go too far out of your way to have them read . . . . How long were you with the carnival?

I was with the carnival off and on for six years.

What were you doing?

Just about everything. I was clean-up boy. I was mainliner on the Ferris wheel. Do the shoreline thing. Used to do all kinds of stuff like that.

Didn’t that interfere with your schooling?

Well, I skipped a lot of things and I didn’t go to school for a bunch of years, skipped this, skipped that . . . ha ha! It all came out even, though [laughs].

2.

I used to play the guitar when I was ten, you know. So I figured maybe my thing is playing the guitar, maybe that’s my little gift.”

---

Radio Interview with Studs Terkel, WFMT (Chicago)

May 1963

Bob Dylan was a young folk poet at the time I spoke with him, one of the most exciting singers of songs around—rumpled trousers, curly hair, wearing a skipper’s cap, twenty-two years old. He can’t be pigeonholed. Bob Shelton of The New York Times writes: “His lyrics mix a sermon out of Woody Guthrie’s conversational folksay with a dash of Rimbaud’s demonic imagery and even a bit of Yevtushenko’s social criticism. Whether his verse is free or rhymed, whether the mood is somber, crusading, satiric, subject to the fanciful. Mr. Dylan’s words and melodies sparkle with the light of an inspired poet.” He is an American original.

Where did you come from, Cotton-Eyed Joe?

The beginning was there in Minnesota. But that was the beginning before the beginning. I don’t know how I come to songs, you know. It’s not up to me to explain—I don’t really go into myself that deep, I just go ahead and do it. I’m just sort of trying to find a place to pound my nails.

Woody Guthrie, is he a factor in your life?

Oh yeah. Woody’s a big factor. I feel lucky just to know Woody. I’d heard of Woody, I knew of Woody. I saw Woody once, a long, long time ago in Burbank, California, when I was just a little boy. I don’t even remember seeing him, but I heard him play. I must have been about ten. My uncle took me.

What was it that stuck in your mind?

It stuck in my mind that he was Woody, and everybody else I could see around me was just everybody else.

If I may venture an opinion, that could apply to you, too, Bob. Unique. It’s hard to separate you from the songs you sing. You write most of the songs you sing, don’t you?

Yeah, I write all my songs now.

There’s one song, the only way I can describe it is as a great tapestry—“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

I’ll tell you how I come to write that. Every line in that really is another song. Could be used as a whole song, every single line. I wrote that when I didn’t know how many other songs I could write. That was during October of last year and I remember sitting up all night with a bunch of people someplace. I wanted to get the most down that I knew about into one song, so I wrote that. It was during the Cuba trouble, that blockade, I guess is the word. I was a little worried, maybe that’s the word.

You’re right. Each one of the lines, each one of the images could be a song in itself. You know why I asked you to sing that live? I have this letter from a kid who’s about your age, he’s twenty-one. He was wondering what this new generation is really thinking of. We hear so much. At the very end he says, “America’s heard the story of the bright, straight-A student, the fraternity-leading good guy Charlie. But there’s a quiet group that remains. One that has no overwhelming crusade that is outwardly on the make, but one that is uneasily discontented. Thoughtfully or restless, young people of this sort may eventually determine future directions . . . . Outwardly we seem to be cool, but there’s a rage inside us.”

I’ve got a friend who wrote a book called One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding. I don’t know if it’s around Chicago. It’s about this straight-A college kid, you know, fraternity guy, and a fourteen-year-old Negro prostitute. And it’s got two dialogues in the same book. A dialogue is one chapter and the other chapter follows with just exactly what he’s thinking and what he does. The next chapter is her view of him. The whole books goes like that. This guy Robert Gover wrote it. That would explain a lot too. That’s one of the hippest things nowadays, I guess. I mean, it actually comes out and states something that’s actually true, that everybody thinks about. I don’t know if this fellow who wrote ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• 1. Radio interview with Cynthia Gooding
• 2. Radio interview with Studs Terkel
• 3. “The Crackin’, Shakin’, Breakin’, Sounds” by Nat Hentoff
• 4. Interview with Jay Cocks
• 5. Interview with Paul J. Robbins
• 6. Interview with Nora Ephron And Susan Edmiston
• 7. Interview with Joseph Haas
• 8. Television Press Conference
• 9. Interview with Robert Shelton
• 10. Interview with Nat Hentoff
• 11. Interview with John Cohen And Happy Traum
• 12. Interview with Jann S. Wenner
• 13. Interview with A. J. Weberman
• 14. Interview with Jonathan Cott
• 15. Interview with Ron Rosenbaum
• 16. Interview with Karen Hughes
• 17. Interview with Jonathan Cott
• 18. Radio interview with Bruce Heiman
• 19. Interview with Karen Hughes
• 20. Interview with Robert Hilburn
• 21. Interview with Kurt Loder
• 22. Radio interview with Bert Kleinman And Artie Mogull
• 23. Interview with Toby Creswell
• 24. Interview with Mikal Gilmore
• 25. A Short Life of Trouble by Sam Shepard
• 26. Interview with Paul Zollo
• 27. Interview with Jon Pareles
• 28. Interview with Robert Hilburn
• 29. Interview with Murray Engleheart
• 30. Interview with Mikal Gilmore
• 31. Interview with Robert Hilburn
• 32. “The Genius of Bob Dylan” by Jonathan Lethem
• 33. Interview with Jann S. Wenner
• 34. Interview with Douglas Brinkley
• Contributors
• Permissions
• Lyric Credits
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright