Latest / Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann / Music Series 8: Steven Rings / Bob Dylan History / Dylan Genres / Dylan Covers / Dylan Voices

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Music Series 8: Steven Rings / Bob Dylan History / Dylan Genres / Dylan Covers / Dylan Voices · Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of Come Together,
• 0:15
  Professor, author Stephen Rings, How are you, Steve Rings,
• 0:19
  welcome to the show. How are you today?
• 0:21
  I'm just great. Thanks so much for having me.
• 0:23
  I'm excited to talk. I was excited when we spoke
• 0:27
  about a month ago, I think, and we had our introductory call and
• 0:32
  immediately we had a ton of fun going back and forth about Bob
• 0:35
  Dylan and about also the music and influence and the roots and
• 0:41
  the persona, a little bit of the, the human aspects of him.
• 0:45
  And you know, I and then you and then you and then you.
• 0:47
  And then when I, when I was reading your book and I, I have
• 0:49
  to, I, I admit I did not finish it.
• 0:51
  I was, and have time to finish it, but that's all right.
• 0:53
  I, I had a lot of fun with it and I'm really excited to talk
• 0:58
  to you. So, so tell me a little bit
• 1:01
  about your about what you research, what you study and
• 1:04
  what kind of brought you to write about this type of about
• 1:07
  what what makes your book about Bob Dylan unique?
• 1:10
  No. OK, well, first, thanks so much
• 1:13
  for having me and give me a chance to talk Bob Dylan with
• 1:17
  you and about my work. I'm a music theorist.
• 1:24
  I've taught at the University of Chicago for about 21 years and I
• 1:30
  work on a range of music. So music theorists tend to focus
• 1:34
  on nuts and bolts of music, details of harmony, rhythm,
• 1:39
  things like that. My early research is quite
• 1:46
  different from this. It's focused on sort of fancy
• 1:52
  mathematical ways of talking about Western classical music.
• 1:57
  But I started off as a guitarist when I was a kid.
• 2:00
  I grew up in Minnesota, like Bob Dylan, but in a very different
• 2:03
  part of Minnesota way in the South.
• 2:05
  He grew up in the Iron Range in the North.
• 2:09
  So I switching to this topic was in some ways like coming home
• 2:15
  for me to a musician from my part of the world and to music
• 2:21
  that I've known since I was little.
• 2:23
  You've. Been playing it forever too.
• 2:25
  Yeah, a bit. Although I didn't play a ton of
• 2:28
  Dylan when I was younger, my brother and I played in bands
• 2:31
  that were more far afield from Bob Dylan at the time.
• 2:36
  But I also went to a high school that was very much a Grateful
• 2:40
  Dead focused high school in the 80s in the sort of curdled late
• 2:45
  phase of Deadhead, you know, decadence.
• 2:52
  And so, you know, there was a lot of Bob Dylan around too
• 2:56
  then. But you know, what brought me to
• 2:58
  the project was that first time I wanted to spend time with his
• 3:04
  music again. Second, he is someone who is
• 3:10
  rarely discussed musically. Usually people talk about his
• 3:14
  words, they talk about his historical importance, his
• 3:18
  faith, his status as a countercultural figure, and so
• 3:24
  on. And there is generally a sense
• 3:27
  that his music won't sustain extended critical attention.
• 3:34
  And I thought this was wrong. Moreover, I was so struck,
• 3:40
  especially as I got to know more really, really serious fans.
• 3:45
  These people, by and large, are just absolutely avid fans of his
• 3:51
  music. Yeah, and they want to discuss
• 3:53
  every little detail. They want to compare bootlegs
• 3:58
  with studio recordings, slight changes in arrangement, in
• 4:02
  timing of a certain line vocally and so forth.
• 4:05
  They really are dedicated to the sounds that he makes and
• 4:11
  profoundly moved by them. That's one piece.
• 4:14
  The other piece that we all know is that Bob Dylan's sounds are
• 4:18
  unusual. They're idiosyncratic.
• 4:20
  They are. They do not conform two
• 4:25
  conventional notions of polished musicianship, Obviously, you
• 4:33
  know, with his starting with his voice, but with his instrumental
• 4:35
  playing and so forth. So that, yeah, that that
• 4:38
  particular pairing was fascinating to me.
• 4:43
  Here's someone who is absolutely beloved, one of the, you know,
• 4:49
  most famous figures of post war mass culture as a musician who
• 4:56
  is also such an unusual musician.
• 4:59
  And how can we make sense of that?
• 5:01
  Because in general, music scholars are not good at talking
• 5:04
  about musicians whose technique does not conform to traditional
• 5:11
  canons of virtuosity, virtuosity or Polish or what have you.
• 5:16
  So that interested me. And that was the starting point
• 5:18
  for the book. That's really cool.
• 5:20
  Really. One thing that immediately jumps
• 5:22
  to my mind just in response to your last sentence over there
• 5:25
  was I feel like the people, you know, like the Grateful Dead,
• 5:32
  for example, like you mentioned earlier, kind of I wouldn't say
• 5:35
  they invented the genre, but they rockified genre of of or
• 5:40
  psychedelicized, you know, the genre of jazz and improv culture
• 5:45
  and that that whole that whole world.
• 5:48
  You don't, you know, and then you know, and so you kind of
• 5:51
  scholars and movements that kind of grow out of that with Dylan
• 5:55
  and and his music in particular, you don't really have many
• 5:58
  people that that kind of try to embody.
• 6:00
  You know, you put, I guess you have a little bit more of an era
• 6:03
  based, you know, I get you, you people would would kind of mimic
• 6:08
  Dylan based on the era. So the most common would be, you
• 6:10
  know, that kind of folky. We got blown in the wind,
• 6:13
  whatever Ted Berra and then, but I mean, you he he is a lot more
• 6:16
  to him. He has that church music and he
• 6:18
  has the rock music. And I was just listening.
• 6:20
  I went, I went to to the gym this morning and I was just
• 6:24
  going through literally a couple of songs on different albums
• 6:27
  from different years. And the music is so cool and so
• 6:33
  different throughout the years from the late 80s to the studio
• 6:36
  albums that have more of these deep bluesy kind of vibes to
• 6:39
  them. I, I mean, what, what's so much
• 6:42
  fun is that there is, there is no Bob Dylan music style.
• 6:48
  There are errors of Bob Dylan music style and that that makes
• 6:51
  it so much more fun to dive into.
• 6:54
  Yeah, I mean that in in the aggregate that is his brand,
• 6:58
  right? He's zigs when you expect him to
• 7:01
  zag always has done so constantly.
• 7:06
  And you know, the most famous first Zig was Newport in 1965
• 7:13
  and going electric, but then pretty quickly he zags after
• 7:16
  that into away from Woodstock, what he called Woodstock nation
• 7:22
  into country with national skyline.
• 7:25
  And then as you mentioned, about 10 years later, he's a born
• 7:29
  again Christian, even though he was raised in, he comes from a
• 7:35
  Jewish background, Eastern European ancestors and, you
• 7:40
  know, Bar mitzvah and all that up in Hibbing.
• 7:43
  Yeah, he always. Kind of kept on floating back
• 7:45
  and forth with the Judaism of his life.
• 7:46
  He did and you know, and you know, by the a couple of years
• 7:49
  later in the 80s, he gravitates back a little bit, may sort of
• 7:55
  reconnects with his Jewish roots.
• 7:57
  But then, you know, in the 80s has kind of a rough time with
• 8:00
  some 80's pop trends. And then he sort of reconnects
• 8:04
  with early music in the, you know, folk and Blues in the 90s,
• 8:10
  has a kind of career renaissance, but then later, you
• 8:12
  know, switches to show tunes, does a whole several records, 3
• 8:16
  records of a Great American songbook stuff.
• 8:21
  So yeah, he is always shifting. The voices change constantly.
• 8:26
  And, you know, it's interesting. I hadn't thought about the
• 8:31
  Grateful Dead in this regard, but the Grateful Dead of course
• 8:37
  change some. And you know, the lineup changes
• 8:40
  slightly to keyboard, players keep changing and so on.
• 8:43
  Hey everyone real quick if you're enjoying the show, click
• 8:46
  subscribe and rate the show. 5 stars helps a time.
• 8:49
  Thanks so much. But in general, it's a really
• 8:52
  consistent style and you can mainly tell the differences by
• 8:56
  if it's the 80s. Jerry Garcia has a since guitar
• 9:00
  and like Ottawa pedals or whatever, or in the mid 70s
• 9:04
  Donna Godcho's singing or whatever.
• 9:06
  But in general, in general the style is pretty consistent.
• 9:11
  It's more of an organic development of their style.
• 9:16
  Whereas with Dylan, there are these sort of startling
• 9:21
  disjunctures in his style where suddenly it sounds totally
• 9:25
  different. Yeah, and I think and, and, and,
• 9:28
  you know, and we, and you and I talked about this.
• 9:30
  By the way, just to quickly relate a funny story, my friend
• 9:32
  from business had told me, a buddy, Keith, We we talk about
• 9:36
  music when we're not talking about business, we're talking
• 9:38
  about business. We're not talking about music
• 9:40
  really. And and he told me he goes, you
• 9:42
  know, he, he's like, I'm a Dylan nut.
• 9:44
  And one time I went to a Dylan concert.
• 9:46
  I drove, he's from Ohio, I believe.
• 9:48
  And I forgot where he drove to, maybe even Minnesota.
• 9:50
  And, and like, I'm sitting on the stadium and they're just tie
• 9:55
  dye T-shirts all around me. And he's like, I have what is
• 9:59
  going on? And he looks over it, you know,
• 10:00
  he starts talking to people next to it and he's like, so what's
• 10:02
  going on? And you know, why is that one of
• 10:04
  the, you know, the Dylan show wearing tie dye?
• 10:06
  He's like Dylan, dude, this is Dylan of the dead man.
• 10:09
  Like you're, you're, you're, you're in for a different type
• 10:12
  of show over here. And.
• 10:13
  More real. Yeah.
• 10:14
  And he was like, it was, it was. It was a strange night,
• 10:17
  especially for expecting that. But yeah.
• 10:20
  Well, and and for many Dylan fans, this is viewed as kind of
• 10:23
  a nadir of Dylan's performing career.
• 10:26
  The Dylan and the Dead shows see him just kind of flailing.
• 10:31
  There is a live record called Dylan and the Dead that is
• 10:33
  regularly ranked way at the bottom.
• 10:35
  And he he does credit them nevertheless with sort of
• 10:43
  pointing the way forward, Jerry Garcia, especially what would
• 10:46
  become the Never ending tour and the idea it was the Grateful
• 10:49
  Dead. Of course, I've always been on a
• 10:51
  never ending tour or were until Jerry Garcia's death.
• 10:53
  And they're still, you know, whoever's alive now.
• 10:57
  But that was the model that he found like just go out night
• 11:04
  after night and do it, experiment, make mistakes,
• 11:08
  stumble, but make it a practice. And that was started in the late
• 11:12
  80s and it's still going starts in 1988.
• 11:15
  And is it, Look, I mean, fans argue about whether the never
• 11:18
  ending tour is still going because of COVID because they
• 11:20
  had to stop briefly for COVID and whether the rough and rowdy
• 11:23
  ways tour is still it. But that's semantics.
• 11:27
  He did learn from him. I I've read accounts that Dylan
• 11:32
  had famously prepped like 50 songs of the Dead and then
• 11:37
  proceeded to not play a single one of them on the left Bob Weir
• 11:42
  float. You know, flailing around in the
• 11:43
  dark trying to figure out what to do.
• 11:45
  And that that is again, very on brand for him.
• 11:49
  He loves to call audibles from the stage and essentially say,
• 11:54
  no, let's do this song. We didn't rehearse it.
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  He likes to keep his fellow musicians off balance, keep them
• 12:00
  on their toes, have things be spontaneous and a little
• 12:03
  ramshackle. So that is definitely his MO.
• 12:08
  And we were talking well again earlier about a month ago and
• 12:12
  I'm and this is actually a really interesting dynamic that
• 12:14
  I first noticed with actually streaming shows where when
• 12:18
  Netflix started dumping whole seasons of TV at a time, it
• 12:23
  allows you to consume the content very differently than if
• 12:26
  you're waiting a week at a time for an episode to drop.
• 12:28
  You may not remember every detail in between the callbacks
• 12:30
  or maybe a little bit harder to remember.
• 12:34
  There's something that I feel very lucky about having access
• 12:38
  to Dylan's entire library or any artist that I'm really getting
• 12:40
  into. I did this with Springsteen.
• 12:42
  I did this with Van Morrison with the Dead, where you can
• 12:45
  really just drop in on any point of a career and you can kind of
• 12:51
  take pick what you like, drop what you don't, and then allow
• 12:54
  yourself to kind of grow into different types of the music,
• 12:57
  right? So for example, I just again,
• 13:00
  you know, the old Mercy album or this, the 1974 live sampler with
• 13:05
  the playing with the band, right?
• 13:07
  These are like sounds that I was not prepared for when I started
• 13:11
  getting exposed to Dylan. And I didn't have to wait to
• 13:13
  1974 or 1978 or or 2010 for this to come out.
• 13:18
  I could just kind of pop, pop in and out and and really get to
• 13:21
  experience a lot of them, you know, the the majesty of the of
• 13:25
  the development of Dylan's career.
• 13:28
  And in that regard, what I, what I said to you was I never felt
• 13:31
  let down by Dylan. I was always confused, you know,
• 13:34
  and I and I kind of like that the man never seemed to have any
• 13:39
  set idea as to what he was and admitting that he was always a
• 13:41
  work in progress. But I'm curious from your
• 13:44
  perspective or you know, someone that's been probably following
• 13:47
  him for the course of time and seeing the development of music
• 13:51
  as as his career went on, I'm sure he didn't feel the same way
• 13:54
  to lifelong fans, you know? But yeah, for sure.
• 13:57
  But I, you know, I wouldn't count myself in the category of
• 14:00
  people who've been pissed off by him taking this turn or that
• 14:05
  turn for some of those. I think you really had to be
• 14:09
  there. It's interesting that you say
• 14:11
  that. What is what you really like now
• 14:14
  is we've got all of this had our fingers with streaming and you
• 14:18
  know, with Dylan, it's not just the many, many studio albums,
• 14:22
  about 40 studio albums, but we've got literally thousands of
• 14:26
  bootlegs, about about 3500 bootlegs or something like that.
• 14:30
  So you can hear anything from the last 60 years.
• 14:36
  Yeah, really easily 65 years. But.
• 14:44
  And so one thing that that does is it allows one to kind of
• 14:47
  revel in the variety and the multiplicity of styles in a way
• 14:55
  that is free of the like high dudgeon of Oh my God, he did
• 15:01
  what like electric or now he's preaching, you know, Christian
• 15:06
  gospel from the stage. All of that always seems to me a
• 15:10
  little quaint in retrospect. Like, I can't get a offended by
• 15:14
  it. And I love, you know, for
• 15:17
  example, the Christian phase. I adore that music.
• 15:20
  I'm not a believer, but I adore that phase.
• 15:24
  And I wasn't if you were a boomer and this was the guy who
• 15:28
  said, you know, don't follow leaders watch the parking
• 15:33
  meters, you know, from Subterranean Homesick Blues.
• 15:36
  And then here he's saying, oh, you've got to serve somebody and
• 15:41
  it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you got to serve
• 15:44
  somebody. You know, understandable why a
• 15:46
  boomer would be offended by that.
• 15:48
  But I'm not what I what I like about that moment.
• 15:51
  He's such an ornery dude. And in some ways, the Christian
• 15:57
  phase strikes me as Dylan at his most ornery.
• 16:01
  It's not like warm fuzzy Christianity.
• 16:04
  It's kind of fire and brimstone, like finger wagging.
• 16:08
  And one thing that's interesting to me about that song Gotta
• 16:11
  Serve Somebody. I don't write about this in the
• 16:13
  book, but just the thought. So many previous Dylan songs,
• 16:17
  especially in the 60s, think of the really ambitious songs like
• 16:20
  Desolation Robe or, you know, later Tangled Up in Blue, you
• 16:24
  know, songs that are just sort of overstuffed with images.
• 16:29
  There's a kind of proliferation in those songs.
• 16:33
  More, more, more, more, more. Add this, add that.
• 16:39
  And even though they have this structure where they always come
• 16:41
  back to the refrain, like Desolation Row at the end of
• 16:44
  each verse, you say Desolation Row.
• 16:46
  Desolation Row is an idea gets bigger and bigger.
• 16:49
  It's filled with this kind of motley carnival of figures.
• 16:55
  In the Christian phase. It goes in the opposite
• 16:57
  direction, like Got to serve somebody as a list song too.
• 17:02
  OK, you may let you be being ambassador of England or France.
• 17:05
  You may like to gamble. You may like to dance.
• 17:06
  You may be the heavyweight champion of the world.
• 17:09
  You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls.
• 17:11
  That's like a great Dylan list. Love that.
• 17:13
  But you've got to serve somebody now.
• 17:16
  It narrows down. All these differences don't
• 17:18
  matter. You're in one or two camps.
• 17:21
  Either you are a Christian believer or you're serving the
• 17:24
  devil. And that to me, you know, again,
• 17:28
  I wasn't of the generation to be offended by it.
• 17:30
  I can observe it more as kind of a detached listener and be sort
• 17:35
  of struck by how it's kind of, I don't know, punk rock, born
• 17:39
  again Christianity, even though I have no investment.
• 17:44
  Like I say, I'm not a believer, but I can also understand for
• 17:48
  people who are believers in of different faiths, like you might
• 17:51
  be like, yeah, not for me. I mean, I'm curious for you how
• 17:53
  you feel about those records. So they I think I was not
• 18:03
  musically prepared to hear them at the time that I was listening
• 18:07
  to them is what I'll say. And the and in recent and since
• 18:13
  since you and I have been scheduled to speak, I have been
• 18:16
  listening back on them and the music speaks much more to me.
• 18:23
  There is Dylan, the way that Dylan, and we're going to talk
• 18:28
  about this for sure, but the way that he uses his voice as a as
• 18:34
  an instrument to set a tone and to set urgency and to set
• 18:38
  certain degrees of I don't want to call it, you know, like he's
• 18:42
  he's sounding the alarm. He's he, he, he, he's biting,
• 18:44
  almost think it's a very biting type of of voice.
• 18:48
  It sounds like he's chanting, he's trying to channel
• 18:50
  something, you know, And so I don't know if I, I love it as
• 18:57
  something to consume as much as I'm appreciating where he's
• 18:59
  coming from. And I and I appreciate the
• 19:01
  intentionality behind it. And I think that, you know, one
• 19:08
  mistake that I used to make was I would go throughout his albums
• 19:11
  and I'd be like, oh, there's Maggie's farm again.
• 19:13
  Oh, there's Lei Lady Lei again. And I'll just go to the song and
• 19:16
  and then and then, and then, you know, and then these songs would
• 19:19
  pop up again every now and then in these new albums and like,
• 19:22
  whoa, like this is not the same song.
• 19:25
  And, and, and, and The funny thing for me is that I shouldn't
• 19:29
  have made that mistake because the way I started listening to
• 19:32
  Dylan to begin with was I couldn't stand his voice like I
• 19:34
  mentioned. And then I listened to the
• 19:36
  Buddha can album from 78 and I was like, oh, this I could
• 19:40
  listen to. And then I found, and then the
• 19:42
  next more palatable version for me was, was blood on the tracks.
• 19:49
  I found his voice and, and then I was able to kind of ease my
• 19:51
  way into the rest of it, but I had to.
• 19:54
  But when I heard the Mr. Tambourine man in Budokan and I
• 19:56
  heard the Mr. Tambourine man, you know, in another, in another
• 19:59
  version, like, Oh my God, like, you know, how does anyone like
• 20:03
  this stuff? So it's, it's, it's really cute.
• 20:06
  It's really cool. You had kind of the opposite
• 20:09
  reaction of most fans to live at Budokan.
• 20:11
  That was a hated, hated record at the time.
• 20:15
  Yeah, it's got a it's got a big band.
• 20:18
  Yeah. I, I think I might have
• 20:19
  mentioned this to you when we talked on the phone.
• 20:23
  This was a tour that he initially embarked on because he
• 20:29
  was contacted by Japanese promoters who wanted him to come
• 20:33
  to Japan and wanted him to play a certain set of songs.
• 20:38
  And they actually dictated the setlist.
• 20:40
  There is an anecdote, I don't know if it's true, in one of the
• 20:43
  biographies that Dylan actually had to go, like, buy a copy of
• 20:48
  his lyrics book to remind himself about how these songs
• 20:53
  went. But what's so characteristic of
• 20:57
  him is he's like, OK, so you want me to do Don't Think Twice,
• 21:01
  It's all right, For example. Well, you didn't tell me how to
• 21:04
  do it. And so he does the reggae
• 21:06
  version of Don't Think Twice. It's all right.
• 21:08
  Which, by the way, I thought was awesome.
• 21:09
  I loved that one. He was kind of like, yeah, I
• 21:15
  mean, and. Man, sorry, real quickly just to
• 21:18
  throw in the love -0 no limit that was that was most of the
• 21:23
  song that could that. That was the first time I that I
• 21:25
  caught that song and I was like, that's a.
• 21:28
  Yeah. Well, and there are people who,
• 21:31
  so I have a soft spot that's right near the Christian era and
• 21:36
  that I have a soft spot for that tour also.
• 21:40
  But there are also some fans who saw him for the first time then
• 21:45
  and they had been, maybe they're, you know, 18 and 1978.
• 21:49
  They weren't old enough to see him in 1965.
• 21:53
  S 78 is the first time to see him, especially people in the UK
• 21:56
  talk about this. And they're people who say,
• 21:58
  yeah, those shows changed my life.
• 22:00
  They were amazing. Even if he had this kind of
• 22:02
  Vegas shtick going on, even if he was changing the arrangements
• 22:06
  like crazy. So there has been kind of a
• 22:08
  reassessment of that era. What I'll also say just to one
• 22:14
  last word on the Gospel phase that followed, many fans just
• 22:20
  adore the live performances from that era, which I do too.
• 22:25
  They are that there's a conviction and intensity to them
• 22:28
  that is so powerful. You were talking about him
• 22:31
  channeling. There was a kind of preacherly
• 22:34
  energy to it. And a lot of those performances,
• 22:39
  I think are just dynamite. Yeah, it feel like they
• 22:43
  literally feel, you know, they're different bands that can
• 22:45
  encompass different type of, you know, environments.
• 22:49
  And it felt, it feels like dark grey clouds rumbling over, you
• 22:53
  know, and like you hear I, I, I mean, like it's very foreboding.
• 22:56
  That's the word. I think that it.
• 22:58
  And I don't know what he was going through, what he was
• 22:59
  thinking at the time. But.
• 23:03
  I I do digress. It's, it's so funny what I think
• 23:06
  is fun about the Buddhican thing and what's funny about my and I
• 23:09
  have this experience all the time, right?
• 23:11
  I'll, I'll discover my, I'll wander blindly into a world, you
• 23:17
  know, a fan world, a music world, you know, whatever it is.
• 23:21
  And I'll have a good initial reaction to something whether I
• 23:23
  like it or I don't like. And then someone else would tell
• 23:25
  me, oh, that take the best performance of all.
• 23:27
  That was his best performance, the most famous performance.
• 23:30
  And I'll hype that song up in my head, you know, that version up
• 23:32
  in my head because I'm being told or I'm being instructed or
• 23:35
  primed to prepared to like it. And I think that one of the fun
• 23:40
  things about going into different phases of Dylan is
• 23:42
  that, you know, if you go in without expectations, if you
• 23:45
  don't know, if you're like, you know what, let's just see what
• 23:48
  this album is. And you don't expect, you know,
• 23:51
  subterranean, you know, homesick Blues and you don't you're not
• 23:54
  expecting can't blowing in the wind.
• 23:56
  Then you might be pleasantly surprised by what you find
• 24:00
  yourself exposed to. And then I might say, you know
• 24:02
  what, maybe this reggae stuff is pretty cool, man.
• 24:05
  You know, maybe I should check out why saxophone belongs on,
• 24:08
  you know, on more albums. Oh my gosh, it's all right, mom.
• 24:14
  I'm only I'm only crying. I'm.
• 24:16
  Bleeding. Yeah, that's some.
• 24:17
  That's like the arena rock version for sure.
• 24:20
  I totally agree with what you're saying.
• 24:23
  And you make a really good point, which is sometimes when
• 24:27
  someone's already gotten to something and liked it up a
• 24:30
  bunch, you know, like, oh, this is the most amazing thing you
• 24:33
  have to hear. You have to hear it, it's so
• 24:35
  great, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 24:36
  It kind of doesn't leave a lot of room for you to like discover
• 24:40
  it yourself. It's like you've already been
• 24:42
  told what your response is supposed to be.
• 24:45
  Yes, everyone has decided this is the best thing since sliced
• 24:48
  bread, and you better feel the same.
• 24:50
  It can be hard to find your relationship to it.
• 24:53
  And with someone like Dylan, about whom that praise, the on
• 24:59
  whom that praise has been lavished a lot.
• 25:02
  It's I've also enjoyed finding those nooks and crannies that
• 25:06
  are less loved and finding ways that I can love them.
• 25:10
  I think of sort of less ambitious albums.
• 25:14
  One of my favorite Dylan albums is an album called album called
• 25:17
  New Morning from 1970 that's very understated and has just
• 25:24
  some heartbreaking music on it That is not much.
• 25:30
  It's not in anyone's top 10 or not often it would be in my top
• 25:34
  ten, but that's a place where I get to kind of let my own
• 25:37
  enthusiasms fill the space from the one that follows with the
• 25:43
  band Planet Waves, same sort of thing.
• 25:45
  Not anyone's favorite, but I quite like it.
• 25:49
  There are those who gravitate toward the 80s albums.
• 25:53
  There are several 80s albums that are really hated and one is
• 25:58
  called Empire Burlesque that has the best reputation of any of
• 26:02
  the mid 80s albums. But still most people don't like
• 26:05
  it. It's got super 80s production
• 26:08
  and there's a guy named Ray, Ray Padgett personally.
• 26:11
  Sure, a lot of people could. There's a guy, a big guy in
• 26:15
  Dylan world now called Ray Patrick, who has a blog that a
• 26:18
  lot of people follow or Sub Stack, I should say.
• 26:21
  And he loves Empire Burlesque, did a whole series of episodes
• 26:24
  on Empire Burlesque. So.
• 26:27
  But you know, if you don't love 80s Dylan, you're in good
• 26:31
  company. Yeah, Bob Bob Dylan doesn't love
• 26:33
  80s Dylan either. And he, you know, talks about
• 26:37
  how he just felt like a has been and that he was lost.
• 26:40
  There are several low points in the 80s.
• 26:43
  Live Aid is 1. Also a very bad performance at
• 26:47
  Live Aid. Yeah.
• 26:47
  What? What was going on there?
• 26:49
  Oh, he's he's accompanied by Keith Richards and I think
• 26:52
  Ronnie Woods of The Rolling Stones, but playing acoustic
• 26:56
  guitars. If Emery serves, which you don't
• 26:58
  want to see Keith Richards and Ronnie Woods playing acoustic
• 27:01
  guitars. I mean, it's like not their
• 27:02
  thing. Dylan was in poor voice, seemed
• 27:09
  for someone who in so many contexts could seem larger than
• 27:13
  life, seemed small and frail and uncertain.
• 27:18
  It's a really shaky set. But having said all that, there
• 27:23
  are absolute gems in the 80s too.
• 27:27
  The song Blind Willie McTell, which I talk about in the book,
• 27:29
  many people feel is one of his best songs.
• 27:31
  I agree another song I talk about Brownsville girl
• 27:36
  extraordinary long stem Winder of a song from 1986, some
• 27:43
  unreleased songs, a song called Angelina that I love Caribbean
• 27:47
  wind that I love. But you know then a lot of share
• 27:52
  to middling. I should mention one thing that
• 27:54
  Dylan fans are super excited about at the moment.
• 27:56
  The real, like Trainspotting Dylan fans, is that he has
• 28:01
  revived A beloved song from O Mercy from the 80s on this
• 28:06
  current leg of the tour song called Men in Long Black Coat,
• 28:10
  which he hasn't performed for a long time.
• 28:12
  And I saw him do it a few weeks ago and it was I, I was ready to
• 28:17
  be disappointed. Like, well, it's such, I love
• 28:19
  that song. Everyone's excited about it.
• 28:21
  It's probably going to disappoint.
• 28:22
  Sometimes that happens. I saw him do, for example, The
• 28:26
  Man and Me years ago, which was the classic song.
• 28:29
  People Know It from The Big Lebowski I.
• 28:31
  Was going to say. Big Lebowski, and he doesn't
• 28:34
  play that much and I saw him do it.
• 28:36
  And so, yeah, on like my life list of Dylan songs, like a
• 28:41
  birder, you know, a lot of Dylan fans are like birders.
• 28:43
  They've got their life lists. I can check off the man in me.
• 28:46
  But it was horrible. It was so uncertain, forgetting
• 28:51
  words. I think Donny Herron even played
• 28:53
  trumpet on it. I'm not certain about that.
• 28:55
  Don't quote me, but I just remember it being a train wreck.
• 28:57
  But Man in the Long Black Coat a couple weeks ago absolutely
• 29:02
  exceeded my expectations. It was the highlight of the
• 29:05
  night for me. I think that I think that the
• 29:09
  way that Dylan plays and I think that the way that a lot of
• 29:12
  people would describe typically jam music is you just just a
• 29:16
  mixed bag. There's going to be times where
• 29:18
  you're there for magic and you're going to and and then
• 29:20
  there's going to be something incredible that emerges out of
• 29:24
  the, you know, the circumstances of the audience and the
• 29:26
  performers and and and Dylan himself and something that just
• 29:32
  strikes a particular type of chord in an emotional real way
• 29:35
  at a certain point that you just want to be there for.
• 29:38
  And then there are times where it doesn't work and, and you
• 29:40
  have to be OK with that. And part of what this like whole
• 29:42
  fandom is. And the reason why people do are
• 29:45
  willing to travel and, and, and, and keep up with them is because
• 29:50
  it's worth that experience for the one time that you get that
• 29:53
  magic. When you're there for that one
• 29:55
  jam, you're there for that one killer performance that keeps
• 29:58
  you going for five more shows. You just hope to get that one
• 30:00
  more like that, you know, so. Yeah, that's a.
• 30:02
  That's such a. Yeah.
• 30:04
  Such a good point. There are a lot of Dylan fans
• 30:11
  who feel this way. Now I will say among the like
• 30:13
  hardcore, the tendency is much more to say, boy, the whole show
• 30:18
  is amazing except for these couple songs.
• 30:22
  But there are many who will say, you know, what I'm really
• 30:24
  waiting for is that moment when it locks in, where it suddenly
• 30:28
  seems like voice instruments and words lock in and some new
• 30:36
  meeting, new meaning is activated in that line or
• 30:40
  something comes alive and resonates emotionally.
• 30:44
  And for some people to say, yeah, it really wasn't until the
• 30:47
  5th song. But then that happened.
• 30:49
  And we maintained that plateau for a while.
• 30:51
  And then maybe I think Dylan himself would also agree very
• 30:55
  much with this, that he is an absolutely restless and
• 31:01
  experimental performer more than I.
• 31:05
  I don't use the word improvisation too much, even
• 31:08
  though in the literal sense that is what he does.
• 31:12
  I don't use it primarily because it's really associated with
• 31:15
  jazz, and then it's associated with people like the Grateful
• 31:18
  Dead, where it means a particular thing about a certain
• 31:21
  kind of adventurous instrumental exploration.
• 31:25
  He just doesn't really do that. He changes shit all the time, so
• 31:29
  he's always messing with, with arrangements and whatnot.
• 31:33
  But you know, the, I guess what I'm getting toward is a word
• 31:38
  that I like maybe more than an improvisation is experiment.
• 31:41
  He's an experimental musician, and experiments fail as well as
• 31:47
  succeed, right? They sometimes flop and
• 31:50
  sometimes you try something and it doesn't work.
• 31:53
  And I think he's really basically at peace with that.
• 31:58
  A bargain. Like to get the magic, you've
• 32:02
  got to be willing to fail. And without opening up to that,
• 32:08
  you're going to have stiff, overly arranged routine
• 32:15
  performances. And routine is something that he
• 32:18
  seems just simply allergic to at some level.
• 32:22
  Although, you know, set lists in the last couple decades have
• 32:25
  gotten much more fixed, but still he's changing arrangements
• 32:29
  constantly, so. And that's what keeps, that's
• 32:32
  what breathes new life into it for sure.
• 32:34
  But I, I think for sure, I, I venture to say this as I mean,
• 32:39
  I, you know, I play open mics every now and then and I've done
• 32:41
  a lot of public speaking in College in particular.
• 32:44
  And I've got to say that even the failures and when it with
• 32:49
  open mic, for sure, it happens more often because I'm a lot
• 32:52
  less confident in my playing as I am in my public speaking.
• 32:55
  So I'm a little bit more tense to begin with and a little bit
• 32:58
  less confident. There's something fun about
• 33:01
  failing too. There's something fun about
• 33:03
  getting up there and trying to song and be like, oh shit, that
• 33:06
  did not work. And I'm like, you know, there,
• 33:09
  there's a time I play. I tried.
• 33:11
  I tried because I'm a I'm also a Springsteen.
• 33:13
  Not and during actually, I'm sure you're familiar with this
• 33:17
  era when Springsteen is playing late 80s chimes of freedom a
• 33:22
  lot. And he was also playing that
• 33:24
  acoustic Born to Run, which is basically just a bunch of
• 33:27
  downward strums. And that was it, you know, and,
• 33:29
  and it was just a beautiful empty acoustic sound that
• 33:32
  Springsteen does so well, like that ghost kind of haunted sound
• 33:35
  and like a creaking in the attic.
• 33:38
  And I love it. And he and I tried playing that
• 33:42
  and I got off and I'm like, I didn't hear that.
• 33:46
  I was like you. Cannot hear that.
• 33:50
  You know, but like and like, you know, you feel like you want to
• 33:52
  die on one hand, and on the other hand, you're like, well,
• 33:55
  if that's the worst that it gets and that's not too bad.
• 33:58
  And, you know, yeah, I'm OK with that.
• 34:00
  Well, and you know, one thing that occurred to me when you
• 34:04
  were talking two things I was thinking about comedians talking
• 34:09
  about bombing, Sure. And any hugely famous comedian,
• 34:15
  it seems like this is something that they almost compulsively
• 34:18
  share about thinking about their past.
• 34:21
  Oh, I did this one show and I bombed so hard.
• 34:24
  But you know, I think there is an acceptance in that profession
• 34:29
  that bombing is part of it. Bombing is how you learn.
• 34:32
  It's how you develop your craft. It's all going into your
• 34:37
  technique, learning about timing, learning about crowd
• 34:39
  work, whatever it is. The other thing that occurred to
• 34:43
  me that I'm sure like Sirius, Dylan fans who are listening, if
• 34:46
  there are, are thinking with this conversation.
• 34:48
  You mentioned love -0 as a song. There's the famous line.
• 34:52
  There's no success like failure, and failure is success at all.
• 34:58
  It's a Riddle. Like it doesn't make any sense
• 35:00
  really logically. But you know, the first part,
• 35:05
  there's no success. Like like failure seems to speak
• 35:08
  to the possible virtues of a kind of shambolic performing
• 35:13
  style, which is what he has. The best things are going to
• 35:16
  come out through sort of trip, stumble and fall happy
• 35:20
  accidents, right? But then the second line is
• 35:23
  failure is no success at all. Also says that sometimes a
• 35:27
  failure is just that, like you tried something, it didn't quite
• 35:31
  work. OK, well, back to the drawing
• 35:33
  board. Let's try again.
• 35:35
  Yeah, it interestingly is this. Yeah, right.
• 35:38
  For sure. This happened in I think it was
• 35:44
  Iowa City. There is just a few weeks ago, a
• 35:50
  couple weeks, a few days before the show that I saw in Rockford
• 35:54
  and it might not be Iowa. I'm not remembering now for
• 35:56
  certain. They started Goodbye Jimmy Reed.
• 36:05
  Maybe I'm not remembering the song now, but the band starts in
• 36:08
  and Dylan calls them off, says stop.
• 36:12
  Wow. And and he says like something
• 36:15
  nasty. I would be like, Oh my God, he
• 36:16
  said. Like, play it right.
• 36:19
  OK. And then they come in and they
• 36:21
  do a totally different arrangement, like a different
• 36:23
  groove and everything. And I don't know if it's that
• 36:25
  they started off trying some experimental groove and it just
• 36:28
  didn't gel. And then it's like, let's go
• 36:30
  back to the way we rehearsed it. That could be.
• 36:33
  Or if it was something else, it was such a strange moment.
• 36:37
  But he's willing in that moment on stage to say, oh, halt, yeah,
• 36:42
  let's try that again. Doesn't happen often.
• 36:44
  That was an unusual moment. And to be clear, these band
• 36:48
  members, it's not like they hang out with him much, right?
• 36:54
  There's a guy, Tony Garnier, who's been playing bass with him
• 36:57
  since, I think 1989. He's been with him longer than
• 36:59
  anybody ever. And there have been periods when
• 37:03
  I heard from someone where it's like a year that Dylan and Tony
• 37:06
  Garnier didn't even speak what they would see to see each other
• 37:10
  on stage. And then they go to their
• 37:12
  respective tour buses and that's that.
• 37:17
  So you know, it's he is not a super warm and cuddly person.
• 37:22
  Although I do need to share my favorite Bob Dylan story from
• 37:26
  this never ending tour era. This comes from this guy Ray
• 37:29
  Padgett from his book. It's like worth the price of the
• 37:32
  book alone. This anecdote.
• 37:35
  Dylan played with an African American drummer named Winston
• 37:38
  Watson in the 90s, and Winston would occasionally bring his
• 37:47
  daughter on tour who was young. I'm not remembering how old,
• 37:51
  maybe like a tweener or something like that. 11 or 12.
• 37:55
  It's, it's in race book, it would say there.
• 37:58
  And Winston was often worried, like, she's running around and
• 38:02
  Oh no, is she going to irritate Bob and am I going to get in
• 38:06
  trouble? One day Dylan went into a
• 38:15
  dressing room and the daughter was in there.
• 38:18
  And they end up talking, and then he comes out and runs into
• 38:24
  Winston. And he says, OK, I don't really
• 38:30
  have to. Dylan voice like, we got to do
• 38:31
  something about this girl. And Winston's like, oh, shit,
• 38:35
  here it comes. I'm in trouble.
• 38:38
  Like I, my, I'm in trouble because my daughter's here.
• 38:41
  And Winston starts to stammer her thing and Dylan's like, no,
• 38:44
  no, I mean this girl that's being a bully to her at school.
• 38:48
  Like his daughter had confided in Bob Dylan about her, you
• 38:53
  know, grade school troubles. And Dylan in sort of fatherly
• 38:58
  way was taking it on. So I love that as sort of one
• 39:02
  story that moves in the opposite direction of he's a loner, he
• 39:07
  doesn't talk to his band members, He's, you know, pretty
• 39:10
  inaccessible. I thought that was a wonderfully
• 39:12
  humanizing story from a dad. For sure, for sure.
• 39:15
  I think I, I, I have a very difficult time believing his
• 39:19
  reputation. And I think, I'm sure that his
• 39:21
  reputation is intentional and manufactured total large.
• 39:29
  And if, if you are this guy, I mean, if I were him, right?
• 39:33
  And I'm thinking about just my own life, my own perspective.
• 39:36
  And especially if you know, you have one life, you know, you
• 39:40
  have one career. You know that most musicians,
• 39:41
  especially throughout the course of his career, the most
• 39:44
  musicians careers don't last their entire career, their
• 39:47
  entire lives, right? And the amount of sharp turns
• 39:52
  that he's taken that you and I have talking about, you know,
• 39:54
  going electric folk, talking Blues, Blues, you know, church
• 39:59
  music, etcetera, is. You know, like, it takes a
• 40:03
  lifetime to get that music, to be able to even get through the
• 40:08
  music, forget about playing it, embodying it, finding a band to
• 40:11
  play with you, touring it. I think that he really wanted to
• 40:14
  be left alone. And I think that he was so good
• 40:16
  at what he does that he's like, the only way to do this is to
• 40:21
  just listen. I, you know, there's, there's,
• 40:24
  there's, there's the world of schmoozing and business in
• 40:26
  entertainment, and there's the world of art and entertainment.
• 40:29
  And I think a lot of people like to get sweat.
• 40:31
  But people like both aspects of it.
• 40:32
  But some great artists don't, don't, you know, just just want
• 40:36
  to do their art. I think this is a a really good
• 40:40
  point. You said something that
• 40:41
  resonated, which is he just wanted to be left alone.
• 40:45
  So what I don't my read on it and this is I think probably
• 40:50
  many people's read early on when he first arrived in New York,
• 40:56
  no, he wanted attention and he had tons of ambition.
• 41:01
  He would. He could practically have
• 41:02
  exploded from ambition and was seeking fame or was seeking, at
• 41:13
  least, you know, to achieve escape velocity from this life
• 41:16
  that he had in hitting Minnesota.
• 41:20
  But he got far more of it, far more quickly than he ever
• 41:25
  expected. And so there's a real change
• 41:29
  that happens in his attitude, say, towards interviewers,
• 41:34
  towards the press. It starts in 1963 when Newsweek
• 41:39
  publishes an expose showing that he's actually a Jewish kid from
• 41:43
  Hibbing, MN. He's not someone who grew up in
• 41:47
  the circus or as a hobo. He'd lied and.
• 41:51
  Lied and lied, making up his past.
• 41:52
  So yeah, by the way. And endearing.
• 41:56
  Sure, sure. But he, that Newsweek thing
• 41:59
  soured him a bit. Like someone did their homework
• 42:02
  and went up to northern Minnesota, and then he just got
• 42:06
  so sick of the questions. Oh, you're the spokesperson of a
• 42:12
  generation. You know, tell us what to
• 42:15
  believe about the Vietnam War. Tell us what to believe about
• 42:18
  this. He was always much more of a
• 42:20
  musician than he was any of those things.
• 42:24
  So he hated that. So then you get this brief
• 42:28
  period in 65 and 66 where he adopts this delightful kind of
• 42:35
  thrust and Perry with the press. Yeah, it was that that hasn't
• 42:38
  had that long interview, that black and white one.
• 42:41
  Yeah, so you. Know I'm talking about he's.
• 42:43
  Yeah, well, yeah, the one in San Francisco, which is so good.
• 42:48
  He's got those sort of San Francisco journalist hipsters in
• 42:53
  the palm of his hand. Oh, yeah, His timing.
• 42:55
  I'm one of my favorites is he's asked, you know.
• 42:58
  Oh, what poets do you read, isn't it?
• 43:02
  The timing is great. It's a long pause of smoking.
• 43:05
  Yeah. Rambo, WC Fields, that trapeze
• 43:13
  family like them, Smokey Robinson, Allen Ginsberg, like
• 43:19
  this classic list of like, you know, a couple poets in there,
• 43:23
  but also a bunch of like hilarious nonsense.
• 43:25
  And they do these cutaway shots to the press.
• 43:28
  And like I say, they're hanging on every word on the sort of
• 43:32
  Stoner comedy of it. But that's a lovely moment where
• 43:36
  we're kind of in transition. But after that, you know, he
• 43:39
  retreats in 1966 after the motorcycle accident.
• 43:42
  And from there on, he's such a truculent subject when it comes
• 43:47
  to interviews and really can't abide these sort of typical
• 43:54
  questions. There are a few people whom he
• 43:56
  gives really revealing interviews to over the decades,
• 43:59
  and some people multiple revealing interviews.
• 44:01
  Yeah, there's this famous Round Rosen Time interview from 1978
• 44:05
  that everyone talks about the guy Mikhail Gilmore, who tends
• 44:09
  to get good things out of him, but by and large, he's really
• 44:15
  standoffish because then he's like, look, this is in that
• 44:18
  same, I think it's the same San Francisco.
• 44:20
  He goes. You guys are never going to
• 44:21
  print anyway. There's that.
• 44:23
  Well, and he also says, well, I'm a song and dance man.
• 44:26
  That's what I do. And you know, everyone quotes
• 44:28
  this as like this is him being so Dylan esque because obviously
• 44:32
  he's more than a song and dance man.
• 44:34
  You know, he wrote Desolation Row.
• 44:36
  Sammy Davis Junior didn't write Desolation Row.
• 44:39
  But there is truth in it, which is I like to play music.
• 44:43
  I like to write fancy, ambitious words and play music that floats
• 44:48
  my boat. And don't ask me the meaning of
• 44:51
  life. I'm not going to tell you one of
• 44:53
  my favorites. And if people search it up on
• 44:55
  YouTube, many people have seen it already.
• 44:57
  There's an interviewer in the 80s when Dylan is touring with
• 45:01
  Santana and runs into them in the parking lot of Sun Arena.
• 45:06
  And Santana and Dylan are there. And they've got this interviewer
• 45:09
  who is just this green dude who like seems like he just got his
• 45:14
  job for local news, you know, last week and he's asking Bob
• 45:18
  Dylan. So like, so like these
• 45:20
  spokesperson supposed to learn the generation questions.
• 45:24
  So what do you think about all the the guns in, you know,
• 45:28
  society now? What's such a like lazy
• 45:32
  question? And what's he supposed to say?
• 45:34
  Like, yeah, they're bad. You know, I mean, there's
• 45:38
  nothing good to say about that. But Dylan sees this coming a
• 45:41
  mile off and starts giving a guy the side eye, just the the look
• 45:44
  of the side eye is so good. And he says, all right, guns.
• 45:49
  And the guy says something like, yeah, you know, like kids and
• 45:52
  guns. And Dylan says, you mean toy
• 45:56
  guns? And he's like, well, where do
• 46:00
  you think kids get them? And he says they get them in the
• 46:03
  toy store and the whole time giving him this absolutely
• 46:10
  withering side eye. Like, do not ask me these
• 46:14
  greenhorn questions like my pot takes on on gun violence.
• 46:20
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 46:21
  So there's a whole a whole subject in itself is Dylan and
• 46:26
  the press for sure. Yeah, yeah, he but, and, and,
• 46:30
  and it's, it's an unfortunate reality that you need in order
• 46:35
  to have creative independence, you need a certain amount of
• 46:37
  fame, even if you don't, if you, even if you're not interested in
• 46:40
  it and, you know, and, and the more you piss.
• 46:45
  And I actually don't know anything about his relationship
• 46:47
  with his agents throughout the years, especially as his music
• 46:50
  changes. But if I know anything about the
• 46:53
  business of the entertainment world, it's that executives,
• 46:57
  agents, studios, record labels want what work want what have
• 47:02
  historically worked, you know, And that's why, you know,
• 47:04
  there's also, there's a direct with, with film, there's almost
• 47:07
  always a direct correlation between sequels making more
• 47:11
  money but doing worse as far as ratings and commercial
• 47:15
  reception, you know, so everyone's excited to see the
• 47:18
  new content, but no one actually likes it more.
• 47:22
  And I'm, I'm, I, I, I don't know anything about his relationship
• 47:25
  with his agents or, or the record labels, but I'm sure that
• 47:27
  as he was handing in his music, he like, he didn't want to hear
• 47:31
  from them even. He's like, you know, like, and,
• 47:32
  and they were probably fighting him.
• 47:33
  You know, he's probably fighting his entire life every time he
• 47:37
  wanted to make a creative turn. And even though the fact that he
• 47:39
  was Bob Dylan, people, people only care as long as you're the
• 47:43
  Bob Dylan that is blown in the wind or that is, you know, like,
• 47:47
  like a Rolling Stone one. Yeah, exactly.
• 47:49
  Yeah. I I, I think this is true with
• 47:54
  us an asterisk. What I'll say first of all, for
• 47:59
  his relationship with managers and things that he had a a very
• 48:02
  famous big boorish manager in the 60s and Albert Grossman and
• 48:06
  and they eventually that relationship ends in acrimony in
• 48:10
  the courts, right? But also because Albert Grossman
• 48:13
  was a bruiser. He was sort of like the the
• 48:16
  Colonel Tom Parker to Dylan, a lot of people.
• 48:19
  Too not judge. Dylan yeah, right.
• 48:21
  Peter Palmieri and others. But the asterisk is, is from an
• 48:29
  early moment. I feel like there was a bit of a
• 48:33
  carve out for Bob Dylan with Columbia.
• 48:37
  And the carve out was this, first of all, when he was first
• 48:40
  brought on by a guy named John Hammond.
• 48:43
  And also Bruce Springsteen and who else?
• 48:46
  Oh, Aretha Franklin, Aretha Franklin.
• 48:48
  I mean, like this guy was like, you know, yeah, in front of the
• 48:53
  talent scare. And so they they thought, OK,
• 48:56
  well, John Hammond's ringing him in.
• 48:57
  Maybe it's something. But initially, as everyone says,
• 49:00
  this is part of Dylan lore. People in Columbia started
• 49:04
  calling Dylan Hammond's folly because the first record didn't
• 49:08
  do that well and no one could see the potential in this kid in
• 49:13
  the 1st. Way Bob Dylan, right with
• 49:15
  self-titled. That's right, self-titled, all
• 49:18
  covers except for two original song to Woody and Talk in New
• 49:21
  York. So initially Dylan was viewed as
• 49:25
  sort of like, well, you know, he's not, we don't expect much.
• 49:29
  And then Freewheel and Bob Dylan comes out in 1963, and that's a
• 49:36
  totally different story. Moreover, Peter, Paul and Mary
• 49:39
  have just had a huge hit with their version of blown in the
• 49:41
  wind. And then Dylan very quickly gets
• 49:47
  this reputation as a genius. And that's the carve out with
• 49:51
  Columbia, which is when he wants to go electric, it's, well, it's
• 49:55
  Bob Dylan. When John Hammond got him four
• 49:57
  years ago, we thought he was a right, right, right.
• 50:00
  And now look at him. So who are we to second guess
• 50:05
  like they were already getting? I think that part of this genius
• 50:08
  mythos was that. You never know.
• 50:11
  What he's going? To do miss though, they only say
• 50:13
  that and then there's a miss. We knew the whole time he was
• 50:16
  full of crap. And yeah, and, and Speaking of
• 50:19
  like Dylan lore, the miss, the really big miss record wise is
• 50:24
  this record from 1970 called Self-portrait that. 3 copies of
• 50:29
  that album. Grill Marcus famously began his
• 50:32
  review. What is this shit?
• 50:35
  And at that point, yeah, then suddenly everyone was like, oh,
• 50:40
  maybe he wasn't so great after all.
• 50:42
  But what it's set up then is something that has played out
• 50:45
  for decades, ever since, which is rapturous reception of albums
• 50:51
  that are viewed as comebacks. Yeah, So New morning.
• 50:54
  The one I mentioned comes right after self-portrait.
• 50:56
  Everyone said, oh, he's back, right, He's back.
• 50:58
  This one's great. And then Blood on the Tracks,
• 51:01
  oh, my gosh, this is like the best ever.
• 51:05
  He's back. And then there's a long series
• 51:08
  of best album since Blood on the Tracks, And I heard people say
• 51:12
  that that's been going on for 50 years.
• 51:15
  I heard people say that about Rough and Rowdy Ways best album
• 51:19
  since Blood on the Tracks. So, you know, that's the cycle.
• 51:23
  People are always waiting for the next time when he catches
• 51:26
  lightning in a bottle and whether it's going to be, you
• 51:29
  know, something new or something he's already done, whatever.
• 51:32
  People love that and they've gotten used to the, you know,
• 51:36
  you stick in it for the rocky patches, you know, for the less
• 51:40
  inspired records. And by the way, I'm all for
• 51:42
  that. I really am.
• 51:43
  I, I, I think there's something fun about being loyal in a
• 51:46
  creative way. And I think that there's
• 51:48
  something valuable even about giving back feedback and saying,
• 51:50
  hey, you know what? I love you.
• 51:52
  That song wasn't for me. You know, I appreciate.
• 51:54
  It sure I want to talk. I want to talk to you a little
• 51:58
  bit more about the music now about there's two things I, I
• 52:01
  really want to talk about #1 is and I want you to please maybe
• 52:05
  even tell me some of the background, how you started
• 52:07
  thinking about this, the voice at using your voice and using
• 52:12
  your words. And we touched on this earlier
• 52:15
  to convey different emotions, thoughts that, and the way that
• 52:21
  you put in the book was so great that obviously not verbatim, but
• 52:26
  that like your, your voice embodies the words that you use
• 52:30
  in the way that you say, use those words in the way that you
• 52:33
  enunciate them. And but it contains your soul.
• 52:36
  It contains your spirit. It contains your emotional state
• 52:39
  and where you are and, and your physical state and, and that
• 52:43
  and, and one of the beautiful benefits of having so much live,
• 52:48
  you know, live albums or even different studio albums
• 52:51
  throughout the years is that you really get to kind of tone in on
• 52:55
  different versions of even the same songs, but with different,
• 52:58
  with a completely different life to them.
• 53:00
  So how'd you get how'd you notice that?
• 53:01
  How are you getting started on that?
• 53:03
  It was awesome. I oh, thank you.
• 53:05
  I mean, one way I think about it is words on the page or one
• 53:08
  thing, words coming out of your mouth are a different thing.
• 53:13
  You know, I used to have an example of this just to give a
• 53:15
  really sort of try example. Early on in my field, it was
• 53:20
  unusual to write a book on Bob Dylan.
• 53:23
  If a music theorist was going to write about The Beatles, that's
• 53:28
  a different story. The Beatles have lots of fancy
• 53:30
  chords and all the stuff that music theorists like to talk
• 53:33
  about, but Bob Dylan. So I thought of this sentence,
• 53:35
  which is Steve brings us writing a book on Bob Dylan and think
• 53:39
  about all the different ways that you can inflect that
• 53:41
  depending on how you say it. Steve Rings is writing a book on
• 53:45
  Bob Dylan. Steve Rings is writing a book on
• 53:47
  Bob Dylan. Steve Rings is writing a book on
• 53:50
  Bob Dylan. Every one of those has a
• 53:53
  different meaning, right? And it's entire.
• 53:57
  It's not from the words by themselves.
• 53:58
  It's from delivery. You know, what are you
• 54:00
  emphasizing? What word are you leading,
• 54:02
  leaning into? Are you phrasing it as a
• 54:04
  question? Are you phrasing it as, you
• 54:07
  know, exasperated or incredulous or whatever, and you know, at a
• 54:13
  much, much higher level? That is how I think his vocal
• 54:17
  delivery works. One of the things he does is, as
• 54:20
  I, to use the word I used earlier, experiment constantly
• 54:24
  with delivery. And the phrase that I use in the
• 54:28
  book is to startle words back into meaning.
• 54:32
  These words are words for some songs, you know all along.
• 54:35
  The Watchtower now is back in the set list.
• 54:37
  This is his most performed song. I think last I checked, it's in
• 54:40
  the thousands, couple 1000 times he's performed.
• 54:43
  It's competes with like a Rolling Stone for most
• 54:47
  performances. But talk about words that he
• 54:49
  knows inside and out. And that's a song that doesn't
• 54:51
  have very many words either. So what to do and what to do is
• 54:57
  constantly keep shifting the delivery to see if you can
• 55:02
  startle those words back into meaning and maybe startle them
• 55:05
  into a meaning that's different than the one that they had on
• 55:08
  the record. The inflection is more menacing
• 55:10
  or it's more mystical or it's more sort of ancient and
• 55:16
  storytelling, whatever that by shifting the inflection, we can
• 55:22
  kind of spin the words this way now, that way and see what
• 55:26
  meanings come falling out. One way he does this a lot that
• 55:31
  I talk about quite a bit in the book is by shuttling his voice
• 55:35
  along the continuum between speaking and singing.
• 55:38
  And everyone knows this about him that he's like one of the
• 55:41
  great speak singers of the post war era.
• 55:44
  But in fact there is a really wide continuum and sometimes he
• 55:49
  is much closer to speech, but sometimes he's also a very like
• 55:54
  well behaved singer who's really trying to sing the melody.
• 55:58
  That was certainly true on all those Sinatra records.
• 56:01
  It's true in on bits of Refinerati ways where he really
• 56:05
  holds to the melody very carefully.
• 56:07
  Nashville, Scotland. I feel like too Nashville.
• 56:09
  Skyline for sure. Beautiful.
• 56:11
  And what's interesting is when you think about that continuum
• 56:14
  between speech and song, when people think of their Dylan
• 56:18
  caricature or when they want to imitate Dylan, they settle
• 56:22
  themselves at a very particular point on that continuum.
• 56:26
  It's this one that I call the syllable emphatic style, where
• 56:31
  this is like the blonde on blonde style.
• 56:36
  That's it. That's it for sure.
• 56:38
  Or like, what would be the The rag man draws circles up and
• 56:43
  down the block. Yeah.
• 56:45
  Asked him what the matter was. But I know that he don't talk.
• 56:50
  People do like, you know, do you know, silver bells, Silver
• 56:57
  bells, like thing like, you know, A Christmas Carol.
• 56:59
  If they're going to do their Bob Dylan voice, they do that voice.
• 57:02
  Yeah. I because it's so it's so him
• 57:06
  and so nobody else. But the point I make is that is
• 57:10
  not his only voice and it's actually a very particular one.
• 57:13
  It's really comes to the fore in 1966 and then Nashville Skyline
• 57:18
  is 3 years after that. John Wesley Harding is just the
• 57:20
  next year. He doesn't sing that way at all
• 57:23
  on John Wesley Harding. He doesn't he really doesn't
• 57:26
  sing that way on Nashville Skyline.
• 57:28
  I heard he. Quit smoking before Nashville
• 57:29
  skyline just to get his voice better, yeah.
• 57:32
  Yeah, well, and also one thing to keep in mind there, everyone,
• 57:35
  if, if you don't know this National Skyline voice, you most
• 57:39
  certainly know Lay Lady Lay. And so Lay Lady Lay is the song
• 57:43
  to listen to words, voice sounds completely different.
• 57:44
  The other thing to keep in mind there is when he recorded it, he
• 57:48
  hadn't been touring. So previously he was playing
• 57:52
  concerts incessantly and sort of blowing his voice out in rooms
• 57:57
  where the moisture changes a lot, like this room's really
• 58:00
  dry. And if you're pushing your voice
• 58:02
  really hard, it's going to wear your voice.
• 58:05
  Whereas he was like a family man in 1969 living up in Woodstock
• 58:10
  and was taking care of himself more.
• 58:13
  And so you've got this more sort of smooth, plummy round.
• 58:17
  Voice Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he, he uses his what's what
• 58:25
  the other thing that you talk about, which is fun, is he, he
• 58:30
  likes to pat, he likes to try to parrot other genres and doesn't
• 58:34
  try to bend the genres to himself.
• 58:36
  And you know, and obviously, again, you have the same
• 58:39
  example. I brought this up actually up
• 58:41
  yesterday. Another conversation was with
• 58:42
  the Grateful Dead 2 where they they were initially a cover band
• 58:46
  or The Rolling Stones or cover band, you know, but they were, I
• 58:49
  guess The Rolling Stones isn't the best example, but that's the
• 58:52
  Grateful Dead where they would take a song and they would make
• 58:55
  it their own as opposed to trying to sound as close to the
• 58:59
  original as you can get. And he gets, you know, I think a
• 59:04
  lot of people, if they listen to the electric albums, Hwy. 61
• 59:08
  Revisited and. Bringing it all back home.
• 59:12
  Yes, bring it all back home. Thank you.
• 59:14
  If you listen to the Blues albums at that time, he does an
• 59:17
  incredible job replicating it. And and So what, what, what what
• 59:23
  I think is funny. Maybe we could talk about the
• 59:24
  different types of genres that he has kind of gone through and
• 59:28
  actually embodied and encapsulated he and you know,
• 59:31
  and I, and I mentioned this in the past, the talking Blues, and
• 59:34
  you said, you know, that that that's a very particular genre.
• 59:37
  And then people say when he came to New York, he tried to sound
• 59:39
  like Woody Gun through. He tried to sound like Hank
• 59:41
  Williams. He tried to sound like, he tried
• 59:43
  to sound like anyone but himself, you know, in a really,
• 59:45
  really interesting way. Yeah.
• 59:49
  Tell me what you think about that.
• 59:50
  What do you what do you more of the genres that he crosses over
• 59:52
  to? Yeah, I mean, one thing I say
• 59:55
  about trying to sound like other people is that the more Bob
• 59:58
  Dylan tries to sound like someone else, the more he sounds
• 1:00:00
  like Bob Dylan. So one of the ways that his
• 1:00:03
  voice works, I think, is through this strenuous effort of
• 1:00:06
  imitation, which just all the more reveals the real particular
• 1:00:10
  character of his voice. When you put Woody Got 3 and Bob
• 1:00:15
  Dylan side by side singing the same song and there's an example
• 1:00:18
  on the way. Website for the book with this.
• 1:00:20
  They don't sound much alike, actually.
• 1:00:22
  Woody Guthrie has this kind of okie twang.
• 1:00:25
  Bob Dylan's voice is much more sandpapery at this point.
• 1:00:30
  Dylan's timing is always much freer than Woody Guthrie's.
• 1:00:36
  For instance, he's really loose with rhythm and syncopation and
• 1:00:41
  so forth. But in terms of genres, you've,
• 1:00:45
  you've got it. I mean, one thing to keep in
• 1:00:48
  mind is just sort of a covering idea is that he's a musical
• 1:00:53
  omnivore. He metabolizes and has
• 1:00:57
  metabolized music from so many genres.
• 1:01:00
  He is the opposite of a purist, which is why he had so much
• 1:01:06
  friction with the folk revivalist.
• 1:01:07
  Yeah. Who were purists to A1, at least
• 1:01:10
  to the real gatekeepers, right, Irwin Silber and his young, you
• 1:01:15
  know, the people who are like, you know, deciding George Wayne,
• 1:01:18
  who gets to be in Newport and who's going to be in broadside
• 1:01:22
  and sing out and so on. The tourism is a big part of it.
• 1:01:26
  And he was always much more of an omnivore.
• 1:01:29
  And so, you know, he actually kind of hid some of his
• 1:01:33
  rock'n'roll enthusiasm from in like 196123 yeah 4 but he was
• 1:01:40
  still his first. That that wasn't even as heavy
• 1:01:43
  rock as when he was playing with the band.
• 1:01:45
  Of course, yeah. But I mean, yeah, right.
• 1:01:49
  But all I was going to say is like, you know, his first
• 1:01:51
  musical love is Little Richard. And, you know, Little Richard is
• 1:01:55
  going to be just like miles away from Pete Seeger in the Folker
• 1:02:01
  in Greenwich Village in 1961. So he hid that, but still it
• 1:02:06
  came out. In this playing, there's kind of
• 1:02:08
  rhythmic propulsion. But yeah, then what?
• 1:02:11
  He switches to playing with Mike Bloomfield and members of the
• 1:02:15
  Paul Butterfield Blues Band in in Newport 1965.
• 1:02:18
  So when you're talking about Blues musicians and him sounding
• 1:02:21
  like them, he had some of them on stage with him in Newport.
• 1:02:25
  Or then he plays with the band who had cut their teeth playing
• 1:02:28
  with Ronnie Hawkins and rockabilly circuits in the 50s
• 1:02:31
  and 60s. He picks up other generic points
• 1:02:37
  of reference. One thing that's interesting,
• 1:02:40
  There's a moment in 196566 when radio format people are trying
• 1:02:46
  to figure out what genre Bob Dylan is.
• 1:02:49
  The electric Bob Dylan. The earlier 1 is like, we call
• 1:02:51
  that folk, OK, Even though that's a super complex and
• 1:02:55
  fraught term. Yeah, but they didn't know what
• 1:02:58
  to call like a Rolling Stone. And so they settle on the label
• 1:03:01
  Folk Rock, which Dylan hated and really is much more of an
• 1:03:06
  apartment term for the birds. Yeah, I was going to.
• 1:03:09
  Say that sound. Like that folk rock?
• 1:03:10
  It doesn't. Sound like it.
• 1:03:12
  That's right. It's I think of it as sort of a
• 1:03:14
  West Coast genre. It's a little more laid back or,
• 1:03:17
  or Laurel Canyon or the birds. It's kind of chiming and, you
• 1:03:22
  know, optimistic. Yeah, it's Bob Dylan was always
• 1:03:28
  much closer to Chicago Blues. Yeah, And it's much more of that
• 1:03:33
  raw energy. It's much more ramshackle than
• 1:03:38
  the birds are. The birds are tidy.
• 1:03:40
  Cross Basil's Nash super tidy. Like no vocal harmony misplaced
• 1:03:45
  everything in its place. Kind of prim and proper almost.
• 1:03:49
  Whereas Dylan's electric playing was always much looser and owed
• 1:03:53
  more to electric. Loose it's more San Francisco we
• 1:03:56
  really if you think about it it falls much more in line with Big
• 1:03:59
  Brother band and sure yeah silver message you know quick
• 1:04:02
  silver and that was like that whole that was that San
• 1:04:06
  Francisco crashing noisy but like like garage band having a
• 1:04:11
  lot of fun on acid and like. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:16
  I mean, I think that I think the real influence is I probably the
• 1:04:20
  influence goes the other direction.
• 1:04:22
  And that influence, Dylan, is influencing the San Francisco
• 1:04:25
  ban. You think so?
• 1:04:26
  Yeah, I mean, he's not. Oh yeah, so Phil, if.
• 1:04:28
  We're thinking about if, if we're thinking about the order
• 1:04:31
  in which like. Right, right, right.
• 1:04:33
  Big. Brother comes along.
• 1:04:35
  I mean, it's afterwards, but he certainly was a connoisseur of
• 1:04:40
  chess records recordings. He knew Howlin' Wolf recordings,
• 1:04:44
  he knew Muddy Waters and whatnot.
• 1:04:47
  If you listen to how, and I actually recommend doing this,
• 1:04:50
  listen to Howlin' Wolf, listen to some like authentic 60s Blues
• 1:04:54
  or 50s Blues even, and then listen to those albums and
• 1:04:58
  you'll be like, this is like, that's almost like what Elvis
• 1:05:02
  did to to to rock as far as like, you know, like being
• 1:05:06
  another race genre, everything to personify something, but so
• 1:05:12
  close to it. I think that's cool, right?
• 1:05:14
  And I think that. Yeah, that does bring up a
• 1:05:17
  really sensitive topic, which is a topic of appropriation.
• 1:05:19
  I talk about this a bit in the book and it's obviously a big,
• 1:05:23
  big topic with Elvis. You know, making music came from
• 1:05:27
  black music. That's right, But then the white
• 1:05:29
  people make all the money, right?
• 1:05:32
  And with Dylan, that's also the case, although with a couple
• 1:05:37
  asterisks. 1 is that Dylan is a true connoisseur of, let's say,
• 1:05:47
  delta Blues and electric Blues. And what I mean by that is that
• 1:05:51
  he's not just a white boy who wants to learn how to play
• 1:05:56
  electric guitar really well and impress people like Eric Clapton
• 1:05:59
  and like, steal things from Buddy Guy or whatever.
• 1:06:04
  He, like it was a connoisseur of Blues lyrics as well, like
• 1:06:08
  Robert Johnson. He thinks of his like right next
• 1:06:11
  door to TS Eliot or something. Like this is surreal.
• 1:06:14
  It's weird. It's minimal.
• 1:06:17
  So he really loves that. I think his fandom is less sort
• 1:06:21
  of rapacious or appropriative in that sense.
• 1:06:25
  He will also always say to people, you've got to listen to,
• 1:06:29
  you should listen to Robert Johnson, you know, don't listen
• 1:06:32
  to me. The other thing is, you know,
• 1:06:37
  Dylan's Jewish identity is also an asterisk.
• 1:06:41
  Like, it's not quite the same as just like Waspy white guys
• 1:06:46
  adopting Blues music. He comes from a group that
• 1:06:50
  hasn't always enjoyed the privileges of whiteness in this
• 1:06:54
  country. And so I think that that is a a
• 1:06:56
  crucial distinction as well. It's also interesting.
• 1:07:01
  I just would like to plug that first album, which we mentioned
• 1:07:05
  that was kind of a flop at the time.
• 1:07:08
  I think the performances on that album are extraordinarily good
• 1:07:11
  for a super young album. Yeah. self-titled.
• 1:07:15
  Yeah, self-titled. I have a chapter on his
• 1:07:18
  recording of House of the Rising Sun on there, which I think is
• 1:07:21
  an astonishing performance. You.
• 1:07:23
  Know I loved. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:26
  Well, yeah. And I mean, he does does it
• 1:07:28
  totally differently than the folk revivalists would do it.
• 1:07:32
  The he does see the my grave is cut clean Blind Lemon Lemon
• 1:07:37
  Jefferson. And what I would say about all
• 1:07:42
  of these is they both show simultaneously sincere homage
• 1:07:48
  and him swerving away that his performance doesn't sound
• 1:07:53
  anything like Blind Lemon Jefferson of that song.
• 1:07:56
  You can put them side by side. Again, they're very, very
• 1:07:59
  different. He was accused by Dave Van Ronk
• 1:08:03
  of stealing House of the Rising Sun, the arrangement from Dave
• 1:08:06
  Van Ronk, which he did. But again, put them side by side
• 1:08:09
  as I do, they sound very different.
• 1:08:12
  And there are crucial things that Dylan does that Van Ronk
• 1:08:15
  does not do. So that's all part of this
• 1:08:18
  dialectic of he sounds. He's imitates others, but he
• 1:08:23
  sounds stubbornly like himself. I love one of the my favorite
• 1:08:28
  Dylan Blues songs is It takes a lot to laugh.
• 1:08:30
  It takes a train to cry. Yeah.
• 1:08:32
  And I have to say, I don't know. We should talk about it a little
• 1:08:36
  bit. But the movie complete unknown.
• 1:08:39
  I thought they did a really good job actually expressing how
• 1:08:43
  attentive Dylan was 2 Blues and like how and and how much of A
• 1:08:48
  feel he had for that rhythm. And I thought that Timothy
• 1:08:50
  Shamalay did a really awesome job with a lot of the mannerisms
• 1:08:54
  of that. You know, I mean, say what you
• 1:08:56
  will about the place and the set and the and the sequence and
• 1:08:59
  whatever, you know, they have to they have to Hollywood.
• 1:09:01
  They have to make the movie Hollywood anyway.
• 1:09:03
  But as far as like certain aspects of Dylan, I think they
• 1:09:07
  really nailed a lot of good of good stuff there too.
• 1:09:09
  And he's coming up with that with that tune for that, for it
• 1:09:14
  takes a lot to laugh. It takes a train to cry.
• 1:09:16
  I heard it covered at a local cover band, you know, the local
• 1:09:21
  at the open mic. And I thought, and they played
• 1:09:23
  it was a four people he spent with.
• 1:09:26
  It was going to be similar. I mean, kind of bluegrassy and
• 1:09:30
  was awesome Blues bluegrassy. And then I heard the Taj Mahal
• 1:09:32
  version and I was like, Oh my goodness.
• 1:09:35
  Like talk about breathing, you know, breathing life into
• 1:09:37
  another type of. Song.
• 1:09:39
  You know, for. Sure.
• 1:09:40
  Yeah. I mean, so my take on the movie
• 1:09:44
  was initially I realized that what I was going to have to do
• 1:09:47
  is like put my inner fact checker on mute.
• 1:09:53
  Yep, that's right. Just like be like, don't be that
• 1:09:56
  person. And really I, I, if I don't do
• 1:10:00
  that, I'm not going to enjoy the movie because of course they
• 1:10:04
  have to take a lot of licenses. And they did.
• 1:10:07
  I mean, I was able to do that successfully and really enjoy
• 1:10:10
  the movie until the very last moment when they insert this
• 1:10:13
  Judas shout in Newport. Those are two different moments.
• 1:10:17
  In Bob Dylan, there's a fan that shouts Judas at him a year
• 1:10:20
  later, not quite a year later in in Manchester.
• 1:10:24
  It's a very famous moment, and Newport is famous all on its
• 1:10:29
  own. You don't need to put them
• 1:10:30
  together. It felt like gilding the Lily to
• 1:10:31
  me, and I thought they'd done such a good job with the Newport
• 1:10:35
  set up until then. The sound, the varied audience
• 1:10:39
  reactions, I thought it was great.
• 1:10:41
  But in general, I so enjoyed a lot of the movie, and the moment
• 1:10:46
  that you're reminding me of with It Takes A Lot to Laugh, is a
• 1:10:52
  fictitious episode of this show, which is a real show called
• 1:10:55
  Rainbow Quest that Pete Seeger did, where he would have folk
• 1:10:59
  musicians come on and he would talk with them.
• 1:11:03
  It's a controversial scene in the movie.
• 1:11:04
  It didn't happen. And they make up, no, they make
• 1:11:08
  up a Blues musician. And what I love about it is also
• 1:11:13
  one of the things that's controversial.
• 1:11:15
  I think Edward Norton's portrayal of Pete Seeger is
• 1:11:17
  amazing because he is both, he is both sort of avuncular.
• 1:11:23
  Pete Seeger, you know, just plain folks, we're up here doing
• 1:11:26
  some picking and you know, we're going to play some whatever.
• 1:11:30
  And Pete Seeger has the shadow side.
• 1:11:33
  He has a shadow side that gets angry.
• 1:11:36
  He has a shadow side that feels very territorial.
• 1:11:39
  He has buttons that can be pushed.
• 1:11:40
  Woody Guthrie was great at pushing Pete Seeger's buttons
• 1:11:44
  because Pete Seeger wanted to be just plain folks.
• 1:11:46
  But he went to Harvard and his dad was a famous composer and
• 1:11:50
  Esther musicologist and so forth.
• 1:11:52
  Like he was sort of he, he was not Woody Guthrie.
• 1:11:54
  He was not salt on the earth, but he wanted to be.
• 1:11:56
  Woody Guthrie knew how to push his butt.
• 1:11:58
  How? Does it feel right?
• 1:12:01
  But this Rainbow Quest scene, you got this Blues guy come in
• 1:12:05
  there and what is controversial and I think rightly so, is he's
• 1:12:10
  got a bottle with him. And so people say, oh, this is
• 1:12:13
  such a racist portrayal. Like the of course the black
• 1:12:15
  Blues musician is drinking. But what I love is that he
• 1:12:19
  offers a drink to Pete Seeger. And it's how Pete Seeger
• 1:12:21
  response, although, you know, just a family show or something
• 1:12:25
  like that, which I thought is so like in keeping with, look, I'm
• 1:12:28
  just one of the people, but actually, you know, I don't want
• 1:12:31
  to drink with them. You know, that that's, like, not
• 1:12:34
  genteel. So then what happens is Bob
• 1:12:37
  Dylan walks in again. None of this happened IRL.
• 1:12:42
  And I thought, OK, let's see if they get this right.
• 1:12:45
  Because we have seen by that point, a couple hours or hour
• 1:12:50
  and a half of Dylan being an asshole over and over again,
• 1:12:53
  being an asshole to women, to other musicians.
• 1:12:57
  Yeah. And I was like, OK, but he would
• 1:13:01
  not be that way with this musician.
• 1:13:03
  He would be respectful. He would have, like, eyes on him
• 1:13:08
  to see how he's playing those chords.
• 1:13:10
  How would he do it? And that's how they did it.
• 1:13:13
  And so I thought even though it was fictitious, I thought it
• 1:13:17
  really captured it. And what he does is then start
• 1:13:19
  to improvise the lyrics to It Takes a lot to laugh.
• 1:13:23
  There's an Italian phrase that I love, which is sino navero, a
• 1:13:28
  dentrovalto, which means if it's not true, it should have been,
• 1:13:32
  or if it's not true it it very well could be.
• 1:13:36
  And I think that's the case with that scene.
• 1:13:39
  I think it's really well done. We actually have documented how
• 1:13:43
  Dylan wrote that song. It's part of this huge bootleg
• 1:13:47
  series called The Cutting Edge, about 196566 recording sessions.
• 1:13:53
  And you can really hear that he and the band really struggled to
• 1:13:56
  find a groove for that and tried various different ones.
• 1:14:01
  And then I think they broke for lunch and he stayed at the
• 1:14:05
  upright piano and found that sort of slow, bluesy shuffle
• 1:14:10
  that ended up being on the record.
• 1:14:12
  Yeah, that's why I've been playing guitar for the last
• 1:14:15
  five, you know, five years and I'm getting better.
• 1:14:17
  And I and I've, I've always had a love for piano, probably more
• 1:14:21
  than guitar, but guitar is always a better instrument to
• 1:14:23
  learn because it was more accessible and I could take it
• 1:14:24
  with me and whatever. And, and one of the things I
• 1:14:28
  noticed is all my favorite singer songwriters write their
• 1:14:32
  best songs on piano and then transmuto over to guitar.
• 1:14:35
  And I'm like, I got to get myself a freaking, you know, I
• 1:14:38
  got, I got to take six months. Yeah.
• 1:14:40
  And I got to get a keyboard and I got to figure out how to do
• 1:14:43
  this. I I, I, I also wanted to circle
• 1:14:45
  back before we talk about covers a little bit and, you know, and
• 1:14:49
  which I think is really important too, especially in the
• 1:14:51
  Dylan fan world. Going back just briefly to
• 1:14:55
  because I meant to bring this up a bunch of times about Dylan
• 1:14:57
  rejecting the, you know, society and using his voice to do it and
• 1:15:01
  lyrics and everything. The song I shall be free earlier
• 1:15:07
  songs. That is just absolute lunacy.
• 1:15:09
  And he sings it like a lunatic and he plays it like a lunatic
• 1:15:13
  and he laughs in the middle of it and like he does all this
• 1:15:15
  crazy stuff. And this came, you know, at a
• 1:15:18
  point where he was at his, you know, it was his hero.
• 1:15:21
  He was this folk hero. He was this anti war hero.
• 1:15:24
  He was this anti nuclear hero. He was the one that spoke out
• 1:15:28
  against the leaders. And then he comes out with his
• 1:15:29
  goofy song and is like, Yep. Don't.
• 1:15:32
  Take anything I say seriously. She's got a gobblegook on her
• 1:15:35
  head. I was half drunk, you know, I
• 1:15:37
  was two quarters drunk. She looked half fine.
• 1:15:40
  Yeah, And that just happened to, in addition to his sort of
• 1:15:46
  shaking off the yoke that's been placed on him of being a
• 1:15:49
  generational spokesman, it also captures something about the
• 1:15:53
  early Dylan, which is he had great comic timing.
• 1:15:55
  He was very funny. People often compared him to
• 1:15:58
  Charlie Chaplin. And you can hear it really
• 1:16:00
  clearly on a song like that or in his talking Blues where he's
• 1:16:03
  got this droll timing that's very much like Woody Guthrie
• 1:16:07
  there. The other song I think about
• 1:16:10
  that is very much shaking off that burden is Maggie's Farm.
• 1:16:15
  It's something going to work on Maggie's farm no more.
• 1:16:18
  I try my best to be just like I am that everyone wants you to
• 1:16:21
  be. Everyone wants you to be just
• 1:16:22
  like them. Yeah, they say sing while you
• 1:16:24
  slave. And I just get bored.
• 1:16:26
  I ain't going to work on Maggie's farm no more.
• 1:16:28
  I mean, it's like you can't quite get it more explicit than
• 1:16:32
  that. And that, of course, is the very
• 1:16:34
  first electric song that he plays at Newport.
• 1:16:36
  Right. So both that song and I Shall Be
• 1:16:39
  Free are actually based on earlier songs from different an
• 1:16:42
  artist. He would do this a lot, sort of
• 1:16:43
  rework. And there's a song called
• 1:16:45
  Penny's Farm that Maggie's Farm is based on and so forth.
• 1:16:49
  But yeah, these were moments when he was really pushing back.
• 1:16:53
  Yeah, yeah. And now As for covers and again,
• 1:16:56
  to kind of build on everything that we've that we talked about
• 1:16:58
  when Dylan says, and Dylan said this about, I think Garcia,
• 1:17:01
  after you heard him play, it's all over now, baby blue, because
• 1:17:08
  you know, again, you have such a massive library and you're
• 1:17:11
  putting out all this music and you're going all these different
• 1:17:13
  creative directions and, and everyone's yelling at you and
• 1:17:16
  you're getting this feedback and people are trying to get your
• 1:17:18
  attention. Then you hear a song that you
• 1:17:19
  played, that you wrote, played in a different and you always
• 1:17:22
  again, like, like you say that Bob Dylan is always changing up
• 1:17:25
  the arrangements and then he hears Jerry Garcia play.
• 1:17:28
  It's all over now. Baby Blue is like he brought out
• 1:17:31
  something that song that I didn't even know existed.
• 1:17:34
  And one of the things that I, that people ask me what I love
• 1:17:38
  about Bob, when I, when I talk about Bob Dylan's lyrics like
• 1:17:41
  this doesn't make any sense to me.
• 1:17:42
  I'm like, it doesn't have to, you got to listen to what he
• 1:17:44
  said. You have to feel what he's
• 1:17:45
  saying because a lot of times the words themselves don't mean
• 1:17:50
  anything. It's the way that you're going
• 1:17:51
  to present it and interpret it and you're going to and and what
• 1:17:55
  exactly is his words are incredibly visual.
• 1:17:59
  So what what what's popping out at you is popping out for a
• 1:18:02
  reason. And if you're missing something,
• 1:18:03
  you're missing something for a reason.
• 1:18:05
  And when you get when you and, and I mean, I don't he might be
• 1:18:09
  one of the most covered solo artists ever, if not the most
• 1:18:14
  covered solo artist ever. What are some versions or songs
• 1:18:18
  that you think or artists that you think really kind of bring
• 1:18:20
  out a an extra dimension or you think a new side of Dylan that
• 1:18:25
  that speaks to you the most? Yeah, and so several things come
• 1:18:29
  up with what you say, and I'll just touch on a couple that come
• 1:18:32
  up and then answer your question.
• 1:18:35
  One that I think about Jerry Garcia doing.
• 1:18:39
  It's all over now. Baby Blue, that's one of Dylan's
• 1:18:46
  breakup songs. Don't Think Twice is 2.
• 1:18:49
  It Ain't Me. Babe is 2.
• 1:18:52
  The turtles covered that, I think, Right?
• 1:18:54
  It ain't me, babe. Yeah.
• 1:18:56
  I mean the same thing as I, Yeah.
• 1:19:00
  Right. Yeah, it's got that sound, but
• 1:19:04
  it's all over now. Baby Blue is an angry song.
• 1:19:08
  Among other things. You must leave now.
• 1:19:11
  Take what you need. You think will last.
• 1:19:12
  Whatever we should keep you better grab it fast.
• 1:19:15
  He understands you're orphaned with his gun, etcetera.
• 1:19:18
  What? I that have really come to
• 1:19:20
  appreciate about Jerry Garcia over the years is he's a really
• 1:19:23
  vulnerable actor. His voice has a vulnerability.
• 1:19:27
  I think as a person he's playing as a person.
• 1:19:30
  He is a tragic figure who became the leader of this organization.
• 1:19:38
  There's that employed I'm sure hundreds of people by the 80s
• 1:19:42
  and was addicted to heroin and like couldn't.
• 1:19:44
  Responsibility killed him, the responsibility, the
• 1:19:46
  responsibility killed him. And I hear a lot of that in his
• 1:19:51
  voice, in the tremulousness of his voice, in the vulnerability
• 1:19:54
  of his voice. And so he brings something new
• 1:19:57
  to it's all over baby blue. It's all over now baby blue that
• 1:20:01
  Dylan doesn't. Dylan's really good at anger.
• 1:20:03
  And, you know, sometimes he does vulnerability, but not like
• 1:20:06
  Jerry Garcia. So that's one thing I think of.
• 1:20:09
  The other thing I think of when you talk about him saying, oh,
• 1:20:12
  you brought out something in the song.
• 1:20:13
  I never knew it was there. There are instances where a
• 1:20:16
  Dylan song is covered. And the cover eclipses the
• 1:20:20
  original. I mean, there's one.
• 1:20:21
  Famous all. Along the Watchtower is the
• 1:20:23
  famous one with Jimi Hendrix's version.
• 1:20:27
  And what's interesting there is Dylan, essentially ever since
• 1:20:33
  then covers Jimi Hendrix's version of All Along the
• 1:20:36
  Watchtower live in concert. Yeah, I mean, actually right now
• 1:20:40
  he's playing it, and now it's actually a little held back.
• 1:20:42
  So it sounds a little bit less Jimi Hendrixi than it did in
• 1:20:47
  previous decades. But yeah, I mean, it's the
• 1:20:49
  definitive version of that song. I think even Bob Dylan would
• 1:20:52
  agree. If you go back, this is my last
• 1:20:56
  point, and then I'll get to other people.
• 1:20:57
  I like covering Dylan. Dylan first becomes known in
• 1:21:03
  1963, not through his own voice, but through Peter, Paul and
• 1:21:08
  Mary. Well, and yeah, eventually John
• 1:21:10
  Baez, right? But Peter, Paul and Mary
• 1:21:13
  especially, who sound nothing like him, you know, they're very
• 1:21:15
  pure voiced and so forth to the point that Columbia records, he
• 1:21:22
  even had to do some special pleading and the line was nobody
• 1:21:25
  sings Dylan like Dylan. This is before he's even that
• 1:21:28
  famous. It's they're talking about him
• 1:21:30
  like he's already famous, but they're saying, no, actually,
• 1:21:32
  you've heard these sort of Lily white Peter, Paul and Mary
• 1:21:36
  versions. You've got to hear him do it.
• 1:21:38
  So already from the very beginning, there was a tension
• 1:21:42
  between covered versions of his songs and his versions of his
• 1:21:46
  songs. In terms of artists that I
• 1:21:50
  really like covering, Bob Dylan, a few come to mind.
• 1:21:55
  Nina Simone is the biggest, I think.
• 1:21:57
  Nina Simone, Oh, she covers just like a woman.
• 1:22:00
  Amazingly. She covers the Ballad of Hollis
• 1:22:03
  Brown. She does her handful songs.
• 1:22:05
  Yeah, yeah, I think she does about 5, and I'm not going to
• 1:22:09
  come up with all of them right now.
• 1:22:10
  OK, no problem. But her Just like a Woman is
• 1:22:13
  super. And especially for a song that
• 1:22:16
  has such misogynistic overtones, to hear her sing it with such
• 1:22:22
  pathos is really remarkable. It flips the script.
• 1:22:28
  I love what I would call slant covers.
• 1:22:33
  Covers that are really unexpected and go in a weird
• 1:22:37
  direction. My favorite slant cover is
• 1:22:40
  probably Bryan Ferry's version of Hard Rain.
• 1:22:45
  So Bryan Ferry was the singer for rock scene music in the 70s
• 1:22:48
  and sort of like a crooner. Very camp and queer.
• 1:22:54
  I actually don't know if Bryan Ferry's actually queer, but the
• 1:22:56
  image was like very camp and he does this kind of art Euro pop
• 1:23:03
  version of Hard Rain that is not even remotely reverent.
• 1:23:08
  It's up tempo. It's like it's a show tune or
• 1:23:12
  something. I think that is great.
• 1:23:14
  I love it because it's so disrespectful.
• 1:23:18
  And Dylan around that time as being similarly blasphemous with
• 1:23:23
  that song. In 1975, he's performing it as a
• 1:23:26
  Roadhouse Blues on the Rolling Thunder review.
• 1:23:28
  And I think in part that is to like, like, get rid of its kind
• 1:23:35
  of sacred text reputation. Yes, I know this is a song we
• 1:23:39
  can do totally differently, but Bryan Ferry's version does that.
• 1:23:43
  I'm also really fond and I'm not, I'm not going to be able to
• 1:23:45
  come up with the name of the band.
• 1:23:47
  There is an Italian band that does like a Rolling Stone.
• 1:23:51
  It's over the first scene in Masked and Anonymous, and it's
• 1:23:56
  like a Rolling Stone in Italian and it's sort of hip, hoppy and
• 1:24:00
  it's absolutely dynamite, so. My I, I, I've heard like from
• 1:24:07
  like a Rolling Stone from John Mellencamp.
• 1:24:10
  I thought was OK, pretty good. I loved the the the Jimi Hendrix
• 1:24:17
  from Montdrie like a Rolling Stone.
• 1:24:19
  I think that was I like that one more than I like his.
• 1:24:23
  I like that more than I liked his along the watchtower, I
• 1:24:26
  think, but and Springsteen's I can't recommend this song
• 1:24:30
  enough. The Springsteen version of
• 1:24:32
  Chimes of Freedom, especially compared to the Dylan studio
• 1:24:35
  version or most of his versions even like I there, there's
• 1:24:38
  something that Springsteen embodies in that song so, so, so
• 1:24:42
  well that just, it turns it into a patriotic.
• 1:24:46
  It turns into a almost, yeah. It's American.
• 1:24:49
  It's Springsteen. He turns it into a Springsteen
• 1:24:52
  song. It's an American patriotic type
• 1:24:54
  of song. And I actually saw that he's
• 1:24:56
  just started replaying it on his, on his tours.
• 1:24:58
  He brought it back into the setlist.
• 1:25:00
  So I, I hope to hear, I hope to hear more of that.
• 1:25:16
  I know, I tried learning it. We start far between some how
• 1:25:25
  much finish and midnight. Broken.
• 1:25:29
  Yeah. Under crashing.
• 1:25:32
  Love it. Yeah, I love that note.
• 1:26:00
  Oh, wait. I'm sorry.
• 1:26:01
  Hang on one second. For some reason it says you OK?
• 1:26:04
  I'm sorry. Finish your train of thought.
• 1:26:05
  I apologize. That's OK.
• 1:26:08
  What I think about with that song's wordiness with regard to
• 1:26:11
  Springsteen is for Springsteen's first album, he was as the next
• 1:26:19
  Bob Dylan, and it is a very the the nods to Dylan on that album,
• 1:26:27
  especially in. Like drummers, bummers and
• 1:26:30
  Indians discover with the teenage diplomat, Yeah.
• 1:26:33
  So it's actually a little cringe for me that that particular
• 1:26:37
  song, Blinded by the Light is too on the nose for me, and it's
• 1:26:42
  Dylan. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:26:44
  For. Sure, the I've got this thing.
• 1:26:47
  Arkansas, yeah, that's a. That's a lovely song.
• 1:26:51
  I mean, there are other songs I like better, but I've got a
• 1:26:53
  thought about Diplomat, which is, that's like not a
• 1:26:58
  rock'n'roll word, right? And it was already in like a
• 1:27:02
  Rolling Stone. So you used to ride on a Chrome
• 1:27:05
  horse with your diplomat. And I sort of feel like we as a
• 1:27:08
  culture, we get diplomat in one rock song, and then that token,
• 1:27:12
  that token is spent. Like you can't really do it
• 1:27:15
  again because it's so characteristic and it sticks out
• 1:27:18
  like a sore thumb. And so as soon as he gets to
• 1:27:20
  diplomat, I'm like, oh boy. But what I was going to say is
• 1:27:25
  one of the ways the Dylan ISM on that first Springsteen record
• 1:27:29
  manifest is in wordiness, like overstuffed lines.
• 1:27:33
  Chimes of Freedom has that. And I think it's something that
• 1:27:37
  Springsteen can plug into. But what I'll say is that
• 1:27:40
  Springsteen of course, found, I would say especially, you know,
• 1:27:44
  2 albums later, or even really on the Wild, the Innocent V
• 1:27:49
  Street Shuffle, he starts to find his voice.
• 1:27:51
  Oh yeah, certainly by Born to Run, he's absolutely found his
• 1:27:54
  voice. But.
• 1:27:55
  He's still worried in those albums, by the way, If you I
• 1:27:57
  mean, like, yeah, the music is a lot, but if you look at back
• 1:28:00
  streets, it's wordy as hell. I'm sure.
• 1:28:02
  Wordy as hell, Yeah. I mean the yeah in the wild
• 1:28:05
  innocent. But but help me with the opening
• 1:28:10
  of Thunder Rd. screen slams Merry St.
• 1:28:13
  Sway, yeah. Like a vision, she dances across
• 1:28:17
  the porch. That's the radio place.
• 1:28:19
  That is not Bob Dylan. That is Bruce Springsteen.
• 1:28:22
  That is. That is like cinematic details,
• 1:28:27
  screen door slams. Maggie's dress sways or Mary's
• 1:28:30
  dressways. What's her name?
• 1:28:32
  It's Mary, I think. Mary, Yeah.
• 1:28:37
  Roy Orbison singing for the Loneliest Me Girl, I want you
• 1:28:40
  Only. I mean, this is Bruce
• 1:28:42
  Springsteen. And there he has really found
• 1:28:45
  how he tells the story. Or, you know, racing in the
• 1:28:49
  streets. Racing in the streets is not Bob
• 1:28:52
  Dylan. No, far from it.
• 1:28:54
  That's. Springsteen from it, That's him.
• 1:28:56
  And that's a song that uses economy of means.
• 1:29:00
  Lyrically and musically, it doesn't go over the top.
• 1:29:04
  You know, there's stuff about but engine in the car and you
• 1:29:08
  know, there's like little details, but it's not this sort
• 1:29:11
  of like Logaria that you have on the first album.
• 1:29:16
  Yeah. Does this bus stop on 82nd
• 1:29:19
  Street, I don't know if you know that song that's also really fun
• 1:29:22
  and that was also filled with apparently was inspired by Van
• 1:29:26
  Morrison's Domino and but but stuffed with the lyrics in a
• 1:29:32
  very similar way to Dylan. And there's a live version and
• 1:29:36
  the studio version. I highly recommend both because
• 1:29:40
  the live version got the big domino sound and then the studio
• 1:29:43
  versions got much more of that wordiness that you know, because
• 1:29:45
  I mean, John Hammond signed him on hopes that he was going to be
• 1:29:49
  in the another another Dylan. And so he, I, I don't think he
• 1:29:51
  had a problem with, with, with Springsteen and the first two
• 1:29:54
  albums being so? Dylan asked.
• 1:29:55
  Well, he didn't. And that was the promotional
• 1:29:58
  copy. Yeah.
• 1:29:59
  The next Dylan. And to the point that
• 1:30:01
  Springsteen hated it and was like tearing down signs like at
• 1:30:04
  concerts, like. Didn't want to be called that.
• 1:30:08
  I need to let you know Efron, I'm I.
• 1:30:10
  Was about to say we have to wrap up right now.
• 1:30:11
  I was about to say thank you so much Steve for the time.
• 1:30:14
  This is so much fun and you are a wonderful source of
• 1:30:18
  information and a wonderful voice to present all of this.
• 1:30:21
  This has been a ton of fun. Thank you.
• 1:30:23
  I so appreciate it. It was just a real joy talking.
• 1:30:27
  Yes, we'll be in touch again. For having.
• 1:30:29
  Live. Thank you very much.
• 1:30:30
  Take care, all right?