Trivia
July 1966: He was in a serious motorcycle accident, and in seclusion until late 1969.
1991: Awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys.
5/27/97: Admitted to hospital for treatment of a "potentially life-threatening infection".
Father of the singer/songwriter Jakob Dylan of The Wallflowers.
February 1964: Dylan and three friends drove south from New York to see some of the US heartland. He insisted they stop unannounced to see poet Carl Sandburg in North Carolina.
To his lasting disappointment, Dylan left after some ten minutes when he sadly realized he couldn't get the venerable man of letters to take him seriously as a fellow poet.
2000: Awarded the Polar Music Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Music Award.
1/30/90: Received France's highest cultural award, the Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
6/9/70: Awarded honorary doctorate by Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.
1985: Daughter Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan born. Mother is gospel-rock vocalist Carol Dennis, a backup singer who formerly worked with him and who he secretly married.
At the famous "Johnny Cash at San Quentin" concert, Johnny Cash introduced a song co-written by Dylan, describing him as "...the greatest writer of our time".
Early in his career used the stage name Elston Gunn.
His albums "Time Out of Mind" (1997), "Love and Theft" (2001) and "Modern Times" (2006) were voted Album of the Year in the Village Voice's annual critics' poll.
Appears on sleeve of The Beatles' "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".
Borrowed lines from a Japanese book "Confessions of a Yakuza" for lyrics in the songs of his album "Love and Theft" - the author was apparently flattered by this.
Hitchhiked from Minnesota to New York after leaving college, paying his way by doing odd jobs and sleeping wherever he could find space.
Stopped at a courthouse along the way and legally changed his name from Zimmerman to Dylan (when asked later if his name was spelled like Dylan Thomas, he answered "No, like Bob Dylan").
1964: Introduced The Beatles to pot-smoking, during their first meeting in New York; each told the press later, "We just laughed all night.".
Dylan's father owned a furniture store when young "Bobby" was in high school, and sent him once on rounds, to collect from installment-plan customers late on their bills.
When Dylan returned and told his father "Dad, those people don't have any money," his father replied "Some of those people make as much money as I do; they just don't know how to manage it." The lesson stuck with Dylan.
According to the stage manager at Hibbing High School, and a local documentary, the piano that he played on stage is currently the same one that the school uses during their drama performances.
The town of Hibbing, Minnesota where he went to high school still acknowledges him. On Howard Street, there is a restaurant called Zimmy's taken after his real last name (Zimmerman).
June 2004: Awarded an honorary degree at the University of St. Andrews (Scotland).
Some of his biggest influences are Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, Ferdinand 'Jelly Roll' Morton, Leadbelly, Mance Lipscomb, Big Joe Williams and Woody Guthrie.
Said that when he performs "All Along the Watchtower," he thinks of it as a tribute to Jimi Hendrix. Although Dylan was the song's original writer, Hendrix's cover is the best known version of the song.
Almost all of his studio recordings has been original songs. One exception was his self-titled debut which was comprised mainly of standards. The others were from two periods when he allegedly suffered from a case of "writer's block", the early 1970s ("Self Portrait" and "Dylan") and two from the the early 1990s ("Good As I've Been to You" and "World Gone Wrong", respectively).
Although he is often thought of as just playing guitar, harmonica, and singing, Dylan is equally skilled on the piano, and he has played most instruments at one point or another in his 40+ years in music. On the album "John Wesley Harding," for example, he played all the instruments but drums and bass on most of the tracks.
He turned down an offer to headline the legendary Woodstock Festival in 1969 (Jimi Hendrix ultimately headlined), even though he had been living on a farm in Woodstock for many years at that point.
He was voted the second Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Artist of all time by Rolling Stone.
Early 1980s: He studied with Lubavitch Hasidim.
Always something of a Casanova, he had his first steady girlfriend
at 14 and was seeing as many as five girls at once by the time he was
in college.
By the time he was ten, Bob began to get piano lessons and he was
beginning to listen to the country, blues, and (a little later) the rock
'n' roll played on radio late at night in Hibbing.
In his teens, Bob's
father bought him an electric guitar and he started a series of rock 'n'
roll cover bands with friends from school and summer camp called The
Jokers, The Shadow Blasters, and, lastly, The Golden Chords. Once in
college, he became so excited by the folk music of Woody Guthrie that he traded his electric guitar for an acoustic one.
In his book, "Chronicles," Dylan indicates that the reason he began starting writing songs were the works of folk-legend Woody Guthrie (he was obsessed with Guthrie's "hopped-up union meeting sermons"), mysterious blues great Robert Johnson (saying he evoked the "dark night of the soul") and certain songs by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (due to their "tough language" and their "resilience and outrageous power").
Although he had several stalkers over the years, perhaps the most
dogged was the self-titled Dylanologist, A.J. Weberman. This obsessed
fan started the "Dylan Liberation Front," protesting that Dylan had sold
out and has abandoned his political causes (in reality, Dylan was never
very political). Weberman staged several "protests" in front of
Dylan's
home, rooted through Dylan's garbage repeatedly, and accused Dylan of
heroin use. After Weberman pushed aside Dylan's wife, Sara, and broke
into Dylan's home, Dylan lost his patience and defeated his considerably
beefier stalker in a fight.
Despite his reputation as a "protest singer", he was never very
active politically and very rarely rallied for causes. Although he did
some work in support of the civil right movements and often fought
individual injustices (most famously, that of Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter), many of his peers in the folk community found his apparent indifference to politics frustrating.
Other bands Dylan preformed in are The Satin Stones, Elston Gunn and the Rock Boppers, and The Rockets.
At the The 40th Annual Grammy Awards
(1998) he won a Grammy for best male rock singer (on "Cold Irons
Bound"), best contemporary folk singer and album of the year ("Time Out
of Mind").
May 1997: He was diagnosed with pericarditis, which can be lethal if it's not discovered in time.
His song "Like a Rolling Stone" was named # 1 on Rolling Stone's
500 Greatest Songs of All Time (2004).
Other songs listed include:
"Blowin' in the Wind" (# 14), "The Times Are A-Changin'" (# 59),
"Tangled Up In Blue" (# 68), "Mr. Tambourine Man" (# 106), "Desolation
Row" (# 185), "Knocking on Heaven's Door" (# 190), "Positively 4th
Street" (# 203), "Just Like a Woman" # (230), "Subterranean Homesick
Blues" (# 332), "Highway 61 Revisited" (# 364), and "Visions of Johanna"
(# 403).
Despite rumors that he hates rap music, Dylan cites several
rappers as having "brilliant minds" and, in his "Chronicles" states that
he is a big fan of several Old School rappers, particularly Public Enemy,
who were one of his favorite artists of that era.
Many see an early
connection to rap in Dylan's music, particularly the song "Subterranean
Homesick Blues". However, Dylan apparently dislikes the commercialism of
much modern hip-hop and warned popular rappers that "sometimes less is
more". When he hosted "Bob Dylan's Radio Theme Time Hour", during his
"Mother's Day" hour in 2008, Dylan played "Momma Said Knock You Out" by LL Cool J and was heard to rap along with the first verse. LL Cool J himself was thrilled when he heard this.
Some notable covers of his songs: "Quinn the Eskimo" - Manfred Mann; "Mr. Tambourine Man" - The Byrds; "All Along the Watchtower" - Jimi Hendrix; "It Ain't Me, Babe" - Johnny Cash, The Turtles; "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" - Eric Clapton; as well as Guns N' Roses, "Maggie's Farm" - Rage Against the Machine, "Desolation Row" - My Chemical Romance, and there are over 100 covers of "Blowin' in the Wind".
1959: Played piano for Bobby Vee in a make-up band booked for show left vacant by the airplane-crash death of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper (aka J.P. Richardson).
He has nine grandchildren - four from his step-daughter, Maria, one each from Jesse and Samuel, and three from Jakob Dylan.
He also has a "World's Greatest Grandpa" bumper sticker that he proudly displays on his car.
A father of six children. His children are: Maria Lowndes Dylan
(born 21 October 1961; married to Peter Himmelman and a mother of four),
Jesse Byron Dylan (born 6 January 1966; married to Susan Traylor and
father of William), Anna Leigh Dylan (born 11 July 1967; she is married,
but has no children), Samuel Abraham Dylan (born 30 July 1968; married
to Stacy Hochheiser and father of Jonah), Jakob Luke Dylan (born 9
December 1969; married to Paige and a father of three), Desiree
Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan (born 31 January 1985).
His eldest child, Maria,
became his step-daughter when he married Sara Lowndes, and he later
adopted her as his own. His youngest daughter, Desiree, was born to his
second wife, Carolyn Dennis. His other four children were all with his
first wife, Sara.
11/16/05: Inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame for his
outstanding contribution to British music and integral part of British
music culture.
Son of Abraham Zimmerman and Beatrice Stone (Beatty Zimmerman).
Has a brother named David Zimmerman.
1982: Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Fan of Elvis Presley.
"All Along the Watchtower" is the song he's performed the most,
with nearly 2,000 known performances. It is also, including Jimi Hendrix's performance of the song, the song that's been most frequently featured on film and TV soundtracks.
In 1999 Steve Howe released "Portraits of Bob Dylan", an album consisting entirely of 12 of Dylan's songs.
(April 7, 2008) Awarded a special Pulitzer Prize.
Awarded a 2008 Pulitzer Prize (Special Citation "for his profound
impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical
compositions of extraordinary poetic power"). He is the first rock or
folk musical artist to win this prestigious honor.
Supported Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.
Resides in Malibu, California.
Recorded "Empire Burlesque" as well as several tracks from his
platinum selling "Bootleg Series" at the well-known Cherokee Studios in
Hollywood.
Although he had previously disparaged the use of his likeness and
music for advertisements, he has appeared in commercials for Victoria's
Secret, Cadillac, Apple and Pepsi within the last 10 years (2009).
His Album "Love and Theft" (2001) was voted the 11th Best Album of the Decade by Rolling Stone Magazine.
He was awarded the American National Medal of the Arts on February
25, 2010, in Washington D.C. for his services and contributions to the
arts.
Between the ages of 10 and 18, Dylan ran away from home seven times.
He has sometimes erroneously been parodied as having lyrics that are hard to understand due to his singing voice.
According to Dylan writer Clinton Heylin,
Dylan's "true story" songs were usually riddled with inaccuracies, with
Dylan indifferently taking poetic license with the truth. In "The
Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll", he wrote of William Zantzinger
beating Hattie Carroll to death with a cane, when in fact she died of
heart failure some time after she had been verbally abused and tapped on
the rear end with a toy cane by an inebriated Zantzinger. In
"Hurricane" (arguably his most famous "true story" song), Dylan and
Jacques Levy got several facts about the case against former boxer Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter
wrong, including false accusations of police corruption in the case,
claiming without evidence that the witnesses to the crime were lying and
claiming that Carter was an almost saint-like figure that "coulda been
the champion of the world", when in fact Carter was long past his prime
as a boxer and had been known throughout the area as a bully with a
brutal, hair-trigger temper.
In "Joey" (about murderous mob boss Joe Gallo) and "John Wesley Harding" (about famous western gunfighter John Wesley Hardin),
Dylan spins the title characters into Robin Hood-like do-gooders, when
in fact both men were known to be sadistic killers--Hardin once emptied
his pistol through a hotel-room wall because the man on the other side
was snoring and keeping Hardin awake. The man died instantly--and
unrepentant thieves.
Although it has been reported that Dylan renounced his faith in
Christianity, he in fact has never publically renounced it and he only
seemed to drift away gradually from being outspoken in regards to his
religious beliefs.
Despite remaining more subtle in their Christian
elements, the songs recorded for the album "Infidels" (often described
as the first secular album after the born-again albums) almost all
contained some Bible-based material. Dylan was also observed to discuss
his preoccupation with Jesus and Armageddon and engage in Christian
prayers at least through the mid-1980s and still occasionally sings
songs from his "born again" phase today. He also recorded a full-length
album of Christmas standards, "Christmas in the Heart", including fairly
religious songs, in 2009.
Although celebrated as one of the most original songwriters of all
time, he has borrowed heavily at some points in his songwriting. In his
early acoustic days (before 1964), he often put his own original lyrics
to melodies and chords cribbed from traditional folk songs, which is a
fairly common tradition in blues and folk music. He returned to
regularly "borrowing" tunes and lyrics more recently since the late
1990s.
He no longer plays the guitar when performing live, instead either
playing on the keyboards or only on his harmonica. Although this has
erroneously claimed to be due to back problems, it is apparently due to
his opinion of the band's sound. He has accumulated several talented
guitarist in his long-time touring band who fill the void.
Parodied by 'Weird Al' Yankovic in the song "Bob", consisting of palindromes sung in a Dylan-like voice.
He has developed the habit in recent years of making impromptu
visits to the childhood homes of musical colleagues he admires. He told
Rolling Stone magazine that he has visited the childhood homes of Neil Young, John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen.
In Springsteen's case, some neighbors called police when they allegedly
saw Dylan peering into the window of Springsteen's childhood home in
Long Branch, New Jersey, He was questioned by a pair of police officers
who didn't recognize him. He was not arrested.
In 2012 Dylan claimed to Rolling Stone magazine that he was a
philosophical believer in transfiguration. He says he came to believe in
it after reading "Hell's Angel" by Sonny Barger,
former president of the notorious Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, which
included a passage about Bobby Zimmerman, a Hell's Angel "president" who
is erroneously reported to have died in a biking accident in 1965,
coincidentally the same year Dylan was at the zenith of his fame
(actually it was 1961 that the biker Zimmerman died, around the time
that Dylan started getting noticed in Greenwich Village).
Coincidentally, Dylan's birth name was also Robert Zimmerman, a last
name also shared by the book's co-authors, Kent Zimmerman and Keith
Zimmerman.
In 1963 he canceled a booking on Toast of the Town (1948) because the show's producers told him that he couldn't sing "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues".
His songwriting is both narrative and metaphorical.
He often wears a hoodie and/or a blonde wig when out in public,
reportedly because he is very shy and likes to avoid being recognized.
Personal Quotes
I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.
What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and
goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.
When you feel in your gut what you are and then dynamically pursue it
- don't back down and don't give up - then you're going to mystify a
The radio makes hideous sounds.
What good are fans? You can't eat applause for breakfast. You can't sleep with it.
People today are still living off the table scraps of the '60s.
They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.
People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.
Money doesn't talk, it swears.
Just because you like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything.
Maybe in the '90s or possibly in the next century people will look
upon the '80s as the age of masturbation, when it was taken to the
limit; that might be all that's going on right now in a big way.
It rubs me the wrong way, a camera . . . It's a frightening thing . . . Cameras make ghosts out of people.
I'm speaking for all of us. I'm the spokesman for a generation.
I've never written a political song. Songs can't save the world. I've gone through all that.
I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.
I say there're no depressed words, just depressed minds.
I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.
I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
Democracy don't rule the world, You'd better get that in your
head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that's better left
unsaid.
A poem is a naked person . . . Some people say that I am a poet.
All I can do is be me, whoever that is.
All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.
Chaos is a friend of mine.
Being on tour is like being in limbo. It's like going from nowhere to nowhere.
A lot of people can't stand touring, but to me it's like breathing. I do it because I'm driven to do it.
A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding.
Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.
Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.
I've only written four songs in my whole life, but I've written those four songs a million times.
I wasn't a good husband . . . I don't even know what a good husband is.
[on his song "Everything Is Broken"] Critics usually don't like a
song like this coming out of me because it didn't seem to be
autobiographical. Maybe not, but the stuff I write does come from an
autobiographical place.
[when asked what his songs are "about"] Oh, some are about four
minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about 11
or 12.
I know there are groups at the top of the charts that are hailed
as the saviors of rock 'n' roll and all that, but they are amateurs.
They don't know where the music comes from . . .
I wouldn't even think
about playing music if I was born in these times . . . I'd probably turn
to something like mathematics. That would interest me. Architecture
would interest me. Something like that.
They'd like to use my tunes for different beer companies and
perfumes and automobiles. I get approached on all that stuff. But, shit,
I didn't write them for that reason. That's never been my scene.
I can move, and fake. I know some of the tricks and it all applies artistically, not politically or philosophically.
[on the legendary Woodstock Festival] I didn't want to be part of
that thing. I liked the town. I felt they exploited the shit out of
that, going up there and getting 15 million people all in the same spot.
That don't excite me. The flower generation - is that what it was? I
wasn't into that at all. I just thought it was a lot of kids out and
around wearing flowers in their hair taking a lot of acid.
[on a visit to Israel in the early 1970s] There was no great
significance to that visit, but I'm interested in the fact that Jews are
Semites, like Babylonians, Hittites, Arabs, Syrians, Ethiopians. But a
Jew is different because a lot of people hate Jews. There's something
going on here that's hard to explain.
The bootleg records, those are outrageous. I mean, they have stuff
you do in a phone booth. Like, nobody's around. If you're just sitting
and strumming in a motel, you don't think anybody's there, you know . . .
it's like the phone is tapped and then it appears on a bootleg record.
With a cover that's got a picture of you taken from underneath your bed
and it's got a striptease-type title and it costs $30. Amazing. Then you
wonder why most artists feel so paranoid.
[about Woody Guthrie]
His influence on me was never in inflection or in voice. What drew me
to was that hearing his voice, I could tell he was very lonesome, very
alone and very lost in his time. That's why I dug him.
I think of myself as a song-and-dance man.
What the songwriter does is just connect the dots. The ends he sees and the ones given to him and he connects them.
My childhood is so far away . . . it's like I don't even remember
being a child. I think it was someone else who was a child.
People can learn everything about me through my songs, if they know where to look.
[on his hometown of Hibbing, MN] The town didn't have a rabbi, and
it was time for me to be bar mitzvahed. Suddenly a rabbi showed up
under strange circumstances for only a year. He and his wife got off the
bus in the middle of winter. He showed up just in time for me to learn
this stuff.
He was an old man from Brooklyn who had a white beard and
wore a black hat and black clothes. They put him upstairs above the
café, which was the local hangout. It was a rock and roll café where I
used to hang out, too. I use to go up there every day to learn the
stuff, either after school or after dinner. After studying with him an
hour or so, I'd come down and boogie.
When I first heard [Elvis Presley's]
voice I just knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody; and nobody
was going to be my boss. Hearing him for the first time was like busting
out of jail.
My friend's wife is a really bad cook. I broke a tooth on her coffee.
I always thought I might want to be a doctor. Where else could you
ask a woman to take off her clothes and send a bill to her husband?
I always liked songs with parentheses in the title.
The harmonica is the world's best-selling musical instrument. You're welcome.
I'm not ashamed to say that I lived my life to that code. Quite a man, that Gene Autry.
Lipstick traces on cigarettes can get you in trouble or remind you of the wonders of the night before.
A giraffe can go a long time without water. But he wants to see the menu right away.
[on Joni Mitchell]
Joni and I go back a long ways. Not all the way back, but pretty far.
I've been in a car with Joni. Joni was driving a Lincoln. Excellent
driver. I felt safe.
[on Johnny Cash, in 2005] Johnny Cash was more like a religious figure to me. Just the fact that he'd sing one of my songs was unthinkable.
I don't consider myself an educator or an explainer. You see what
it is that I do, and that I've always done. But it is time now for great
men to come forward. With small men, no great things can be
accomplished at the moment.
He does me better than anybody. (On Mark Knopfler)
Right now, America is in a state of upheaval. Poverty is
demoralizing. You can't expect people to have the virtue of purity when
they are poor.
But we've got this guy there now who is redefining what a
politician is, so we'll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful?
Yes, I'm hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have
to. - on Barack Obama
Charlton gets a bad rap for his strong conservative beliefs and
involvement with the NRA, but truth to tell, he was a strong advocate
for civil rights, many years before it became fashionable ... Never mind
the fact that he's in a couple of our favorite movies, including Sed de mal (1958), Horizontes de grandeza (1958), El planeta de los simios (1968) and of course, Soylent Green: Cuando el destino nos alcance (1973). - Following the death of Charlton Heston
I don't break the rules, because I don't see any rules to break. As far as I'm concerned, there aren't any rules.
Genius? There's a real fine line between genius and insanity. Anybody will tell you that.
I would really like to think of myself as a poet, but I just can't because of all the slobs who are called poets.
Art, if there is such a thing, is in the bathrooms; everybody knows that.
[on Paul McCartney]
I'm in awe of McCartney. He's about the only one that I am in awe of.
He can do it all. And he's never let up...he's just so damn effortless.
I don't need to be happy. Happiness is kind of a cheap word. Let's
face it, I'm not the kind of cat that's going to cut off an ear if I
can't do something.
What's so bad about being misunderstood?
[on the question of "message" songs] Well, first of all, anybody
that's got a message is going to learn from experience that they can't
put it into a song.
I mean it's just not going to come out the same
message. After one or two of these unsuccessful attempts, one realizes
that his resultant message, which is not even the same message he
thought up and began with, he's now got to stick by it; because, after
all, a song leaves your mouth just as soon as it leaves your hands. Are
you following me? Well, anyway, second of all, you've got to respect
other people's right to also have a message themselves. Myself, what I'm
going to do is rent Town Hall and put about 30 Western Union boys on
the bill. I mean, then there'll really be some messages.
People will be
able to come and hear more messages than they've ever heard before in
their life.
[on the question of "what made you decide to go the rock-'n'-roll
route?"] Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The
first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake
up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table,
takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns
down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working
in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl.
Then this big
Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go
down to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas "before and
after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili
and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns
the house down. The delivery boy - he ain't so mild: He gives her the
knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by
this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble
onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races
every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does
a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's
built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into
lettuce.
Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and
tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit
the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a
star. What could I say?
People have different emotional levels. Especially when you're
young. Back then I guess most of my influences could be thought of as
eccentric. Mass media had no overwhelming reach so I was drawn to the
traveling performers passing through. The side show performers -
bluegrass singers, the black cowboy with chaps and a lariat doing rope
tricks.
Miss Europe, Quasimodo, the Bearded Lady, the half-man
half-woman, the deformed and the bent, Atlas the Dwarf, the fire-eaters,
the teachers and preachers, the blues singers. I remember it like it
was yesterday. I got close to some of these people. I learned about
dignity from them. Freedom too. Civil rights, human rights. How to stay
within yourself. Most others were into the rides like the tilt-a-whirl
and the roller-coaster. To me that was the nightmare. All the giddiness.
The artificiality of it. The sledge hammer of life. It didn't make
sense or seem real.
The stuff off the main road was where force of
reality was. At least it struck me that way. When I left home those
feelings didn't change.
I'm coming out of the folk music tradition and that's the
vernacular and archetypal aesthetic that I've experienced. Those are the
dynamics of it. I couldn't have written songs for the Brill Building if
I tried. Whatever passes for pop music, I couldn't do it then and I
can't do it now.
Byronesque maybe. Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was [Frank Sinatra], Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sonrisas y lágrimas
(1965). There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no
fitting into it now.
Some of my songs have crossed over but they were
all done by other singers. -on what kind of artist he is
Those guys all had conspicuous hits. They started out
anti-establishment and now they are in charge of the world. Celebratory
songs. Music for the grand dinner party. Mainstream stuff that played
into the culture on a pervasive level. My stuff is different from those
guys. It's more desperate. [Roger Daltrey], [Pete Townshend], [Paul McCartney], the Beach Boys, [Elton John], Billy Joel.
They made perfect records, so they have to play them
perfectly...exactly the way people remember them. My records were never
perfect.
So there is no point in trying to duplicate them. Anyway, I'm
no mainstream artist. -on artist from the 60s who still play songs in
the same way they always have
Sometimes I might shift paradigms within the same song, but then
that structure also has its own rules. And I combine them both, see what
works and what doesn't. My range is limited. Some formulas are too
complex and I don't want anything to do with them.
The myth of the starving artist is a myth. The big bankers and
prominent young ladies who buy art started it.
They just want to keep
the artist under their thumb. Who says an artist can't have any money?
Look at Picasso. The starving artist is usually starving for those
around him to starve. You don't have to starve to be a good artist. You
just have to have love, insight and a strong point of view. And you have
to fight off depravity. Uncompromising, that's what makes a good
artist. It doesn't matter if he has money or not. Look at Matisse; he
was a banker. Anyway, there are other things that constitute wealth and
poverty besides money.
A saint is a person who gives of himself totally and freely,
without strings. He is neither deaf nor blind. And yet he's both. He's
the master of his own reality, the voice of simplicity. The trick is to
stay away from mirror images. The only true mirrors are puddles of
water.
Politics was always one because there were people who were trying
to change things.
They were involved in the political game because that
is how they had to change things. But I have always considered politics
just part of the illusion. I don't get involved much in politics. I
don't know what the system runs on. For instance, there are people who
have definite ideas or who studied all the systems of government. A lot
of those people with college-educational backgrounds tended to come in
and use up everybody for whatever purposes they had in mind.
And, of
course, they used music, because music was accessible and we would have
done that stuff and written those songs and sung them whether there was
any politics or not. I never did renounce a role in politics, because I
never played one in politics. It would be comical for me to think that I
played a role. Gurdjieff thinks it's best to work out your mobility
daily.
You can be a priest and be in rock 'n' roll. Being a rock-'n'-roll
singer is no different from being a house painter.
You climb up as high
as you want to.
[on folk rock] It's all music. No more, no less. I know in my own
mind what I'm doing. If anyone has imagination, he'll know what I'm
doing. If they can't understand my songs they're missing something. If
they can't understand green clocks, wet chairs, purple lamps or hostile
statues, they're missing something too.
[on the recordings that become known as 'The Basement Tapes'] I
didn't know how to record the way other people were recording, and I
didn't want to.
The Beatles had just released Sgt. Pepper which I didn't
like at all. I thought that was a very indulgent album, though the
songs on it were real good. I didn't think all that production was
necessary.
I don't care what people expect of me. Doesn't concern me. I'm doing God's work. That's all I know.
If you're not fulfilled in other ways, performing can never make
you happy.
Performing is something you have to learn how to do. You do
it, you get better at it and you keep going. And if you don't get better
at it, you have to give it up...Whatever you do, you have to be the
best at it-Highly skilled. It's about confidence- not arrogance. You
have to know you're the best whether someone tells you that or not. And
that you'll be around, in one way or another, longer than anybody else.
Folk musicians, blues musicians did write a lot of songs about the
"Titanic".
That's what I feel I'm best at, being a folk musician or a
blue musician, so in my mind it's there to be done. If you're a folk
singer, blues singer, rock & roll singer, whatever, in that realm,
you oughta write a song about the "Titanic", because that's the bar you
have to pass.
The Fifties were a simpler time, at least for me and the situation
I was in. I didn't really experience what a lot of other people my age
experienced, from the more mainstream towns and cities. Where I grew up
was about as far from the cultural center as you could get. It was way
out of the beaten path.
You had the whole town to roam around in,
though, and there didn't seem to be any sadness or fear or insecurity.
It was just woods and sky and rivers and streams, winter and summer,
spring, autumn. The changing of the seasons. The cultural was mainly
circuses and carnivals, preachers and barnstorming pilots, hillbilly
shows and comedians, big bands and whatnot.
Powerful radio shows and
powerful radio music. This was before supermarkets and malls and
multiplexes and Home Depots and all the rest.
[on Bing Crosby] A lot of people would like to sing like Bing
Crosby, but very few could match his phrasing or depth of tone. He's
influenced every real singer whether they know it or not. I used to hear
Bing Crosby as a kid and not really pay attention to him. But he got
inside me nevertheless.
[on Gordon Lightfoot] Every time I hear a song of his, it's like I wish it would last forever.
(Gifs and photos: source_Tumblr and google)
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