Bob Dylan

Published on May 22nd, 2016

bob-dylan-2009

Here at TOM we spent the weekend listening to the new Bob Dylan album, Fallen Angels. Featuring twelve classic American tunes written by some of music’s most acclaimed and influential songwriters, the album showcases Dylan’s unique and much-lauded talents as a vocalist, arranger and bandleader. On Fallen Angels, Dylan has chosen songs from a diverse array of writers such as Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen, Sammy Cahn and Carolyn Leigh to record with his touring band. The album was recorded at Capitol Studios in Hollywood in 2015. Dylan interviews in 2016 are a rare beast. Digging through our archives we found this terrific 1992 interview by the great Australian journalist Stuart Coupe and thought it was worth another read as it illustrates much about Dylan’s process.

Bob Dylan was in the foothills of what was called The Never-Ending Tour when he spoke to Coupe. A Dylan expert, Coupe was given the tip to play it straight when speaking to Bob. Dylan prefers chatting to newsmen rather than fans. Mentioning a bootleg tape of Dylan covering Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Pancho And Lefty’ almost blew his cover, but Coupe made it through to capture Dylan’s thoughts on touring and recording. A cover story for Time Off when this piece appeared in 1992, it literally disappeared off the streets faster than any other issue in memory.

At the age of fifty, he is arguably he most significant rock musician of the last thirty years. With twenty-one certified gold albums, the writer of some of the best-known songs of the last century is, by any assessment, phenomenally wealthy. He has no need to be on the road.

So why has Bob Dylan spent the last four years subjecting himself to the most punishing touring schedule of his entire career? Why, in most cases, does he insist on playing multiple nights at small venues instead of playing to the same number of people in one night at a large theatre? For the latter we should be thankful, while the former raises interesting questions about Dylan’s motivations.

Since June 1988, Dylan has played an average one hundred and twenty-five concerts per year on what even he now refers to as the Never-Ending Tour. Along with constant touring throughout North America, he’s traversed the planet, playing in many countries for the first time in his career. There have been concerts in locations as diverse as Iceland, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Greece, Turkey, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.

And finally the Never-Ending Tour has found its way to Australia. It’s Dylan’s fourth visit to this country. In 1966, he toured at the peak of his encounter with electric rock and roll, in 1978 he returned with a Las Vegas-style cabaret routine notable for little besides its blandness and Dylan’s fixation with facial make-up, and in 1986, he joined forces with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers for an equally dismal series of concerts.

This time, he arrives with a stripped down outfit, dividing the concert between electric band performances and acoustic renditions. If overseas set lists are any indication, expect a greatest hits style show featuring as many of his famous songs as any fan could reasonably expect to hear in two hours, plus a smattering of material from recent albums like the critically acclaimed Oh Mercy and the far less enthusiastically received Under the Red Sky. Yes, he’ll probably play ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, and ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and, if the tapes I’ve heard circulating among Dylanopiles are any indication, he’s still a hit and miss proposition, but when he’s on, the performances are as fiery and passionate as anything he’s done onstage in many a year.

“My old songs are always interesting to me,” replies a slightly defensive Dylan on the telephone from Los Angeles just prior to his departure for Australia. I’d just suggested to him that playing so many of his older songs might get just a little boring for him.

This is my second encounter with Dylan. In 1986, I ‘interviewed’ him after a concert in Auckland. The conversation lasted a good seven and a half minutes and it was obvious that Dylan had absolutely no interest in talking to the media. He sidestepped any specific questions in much the same way as he toyed with journalists in the mid sixties. His only straight answer was to a question about the legendary American country singer Hank Williams, who Dylan had said in a previous interview he would have liked to meet (Williams died in the early 1950s).

“What would you ask him if he was sitting here now,” I asked. Dylan leaned across the table and said, “I’d wanna know where he got his drugs from!”

Dylan’s aversion to being interviewed is part of rock legend. Before this encounter, I’m told not to ask any questions about the old days, not to bring up Joan Baez or to ask him what the 14th line of Desolation Row really means. It’s better, comes the instruction, to keep my questions to the last year and don’t come across like a Dylan expert or fan. Dylan likes ‘straight media’.

This time, the man’s in fine form. He laughs every so often and at least attempts to deal with each question. But still, Dylan is not a great conversationalist: every answer is punctuated by mutterings, sniffling, and pauses that seem to go on forever. An interview with Dylan is rarely anything but a series of frustrating attempts to get coherent answers. Dylan is at least relatively expansive on the subject of the Never-Ending Tour, which he says wasn’t started with the intention that it would continue for so many years.

“No, this is just my pattern over the last three or four years: to play at least a hundred times a year, maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less. It just works out better for me because it’s not necessary to be looking for a band all the time. That’s the advantage of just going out to play. It you’re only going out once in a while then, you know, you have a problem trying to find a band and trying to find people who aren’t playing with somebody else at that time, and it’s…in the long run, it’s better to just go out and do the shows and either it’s happening or it’s not.”

It’s a reasonable leap of faith to take that on face value, to accept that someone of Dylan’s stature has played around five hundred shows in the last four years merely because he’s worried his band members might go off and play with someone else. Maybe he’s taking the travelling troubadour caper to extremes. Maybe he genuinely needs the adoration. Certainly there are other things he could be doing.

Of all the new countries Dylan has visited during the Never-Ending Tour, it’s Argentina and Brazil that he’s the most expansive about.

“Yeah, Argentina, ah…ah…ah…you know, it’s really dusty down there, but Brazil was the same two times in a row,” he says. “It’s okay. It’s a different scene. You never know really…it’s kind of like makeshift sound almost. You’re never really sure about the facilities you’re playing in and what can be heard because everything looks so funky but, ah…ah…ah…the people were very responsive and it was relaxing being there.”

One of the most significant experiences for Dylan over the tour was visiting the site of the concentration camp at Dachau.

“No one had ever taken me there before, and so, yeah, last time we were in Germany, someone took me to one of them concentration camps. It’s a pretty spooky place.”

A moving experience?

“Well you can’t help but be moved by seeing all the regalia they have in there. It looked pretty much like whatever they were supposed to look like. Monuments you know, monuments of death. That’s what they were.”

The last year has seen the usual accolades heaped on Dylan. Life magazine listed him as one of the hundred most important Americans of the twentieth century. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences awarded him the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys, and, most significantly for Dylan, the French Government recognised his contributions with their highest cultural honour, Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, which has only been awarded to thirty-five individuals since the Revolution (including Chevalier, Chaplin, and very few Americans). The Minister of Culture and Communications decorated Dylan during the course of a five-night engagement at Le Grand Rex in Paris. This was obviously one award that Dylan took extremely seriously.

“Oh yeah,” he says, “that was a heavy thing, being given an award by the French Government, especially in the area of creativity, you know, because of the French influence in my own stuff.”

Questioned why he plays smaller venues in preference to larger auditoriums, he’s typically offhanded.

“The sound is easier to control and it’s not so much of a circus,” he says.

So does Dylan still enjoy the grind of touring? Doesn’t there come a point when he’d prefer to get back home for an extended period?

“There comes a point for everything, but…ah, you know…playing music’s a full time job, you know,” he mutters. “It’s hard to shut if off and turn it off and on like a faucet.”

Possibly that’s the (unlikely) key to it all: the music remains in his blood and he feels as though he doesn’t have a choice. It doesn’t, however, explain Dylan’s extended period away from touring: breaks, punctuated by occasional performances, that have lasted as long as seven years. In his excellent biography of Dylan, Behind The Shades, Clinton Heylin suggests this is one of only three periods in his career when Dylan has combined frequent studio activity with prodigious performance. All tours have coincided with periods of turmoil in Dylan’s personal life, almost as if the road becomes an easy escape from the issues he must face head-on in real life, away from the road. If that’s the case with the Never-Ending Tour, Dylan certainly isn’t saying anything. Questions about his personal life are strictly off limits. A strong air of paranoia surrounds most of his activities. In a 1990 interview, he explained his dislike of being photographed: “It rubs me the wrong way, a camera. It doesn’t matter who it is, someone in my own family could be pointing a camera around. It’s a frightening feeling. Cameras make ghosts out of people.”

At recent concerts, Dylan has refused to allow photographers in the theatres, and made things even more difficult by shrouding himself in darkness for most of the concert. It has been reported that these days Dylan is rarely seen by members of his band or crew. He travels in his own bus, away from the musicians, and often stays at different hotels. An appearance at sound check is rare and he rarely turns up for rehearsals. Agreeing to sign an autograph for a fan is extremely unusual. Dylan also doesn’t like his concerts being recorded and the tapes circulated. During the Never-Ending Tour, he’s been known to throw in covers of songs as diverse as Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Dancing In The Dark’, and Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Ponchy And Lefty’.

“Where did you hear that, if you don’t mind me asking?” says a suddenly serious Dylan. Told that I haven’t actually heard the tapes, but have read they’re occasional inclusions, he audibly relaxes.

While the Dylan industry rolls on around him with a regular stream of biographies and critical studies appearing on the market, Dylan at least feigns disinterest.

“Not really,” he replies when asked if he bothers to look at any of the books to find out what people are saying about him and his work. “No. It seems like they come out pretty regular now. It’s…it’s…ah…it’s…ah…they really don’t…it doesn’t knock me out to read a book about myself, you know?”

There’s other books to read?

“Yeah, yeah, exactly.”

So what has Dylan been reading of late?

“My, ah, my latest book…it’s been out for a long time, but my latest thing I’m just reading is…back into reading the William Blake poems again,” Dylan says. “It seems like when you’re young and you read ’em, they don’t have the effect on you that they do when you get older. It was years ago when it was time just to read all those guys, but lately it’s been necessary for me to find some time to go back and re-read someone like Blake, Shelley, Byron, some of those people.”

Aside from his reading, Dylan spends much of his time on the road painting and drawing. He explains that Random House has a book of his drawings coming out later this year, the majority of it being his output from the last three years. And, in keeping with his current workaholic state, Dylan is also preparing to record another album. He says that half the songs are written, they’re more acoustically based than recent albums, and he expects to record in Chicago soon after the Australian tour.

Does Dylan find that the songs come easier as he gets older or is it more difficult to find new things that he wants to say? Certainly songs like ‘Wiggle Wiggle’ (‘Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle ’til the moon is blue/Wiggle ’til the moon sees you’, and so on) from his last album weren’t exactly highpoints of his songwriting career.

“Well they’re coming natural, if they come at all,” he says, laughing loudly.  “So…um…when it’s not coming…ah…ah…there’s really no inclination on my part to make it happen.”

Dylan’s apparent jovial mood suggests that maybe it’s time to throw in the inevitable question about Gypsy Fire, the woman who’s been consistently in the media over recent years because of her (successful) action against The Truth newspaper over allegations that she was Dylan’s sex slave during the 1986 tour.

“Oh yeah, is she still around?” Dylan chuckles.

After being told that Fire is planning to write a book about their time together and the court case, Dylan sighs.

“Oooooh, poor girl, you know.”

Then, out of the blue, Dylan says, “Hey listen, can you say hi to that guy Brett Whiteley? Is he still around there painting? He gave me some drawings the last time I was there and they still look good to me.”

A couple of hours later, I call Whiteley to pass on the message.

“He’s a weird cat, Bob is,” Whiteley says.

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Bob Dylan Plays The Brisbane Entertainment Centre on August 24, 2018.

Stuart Coupe can be regularly heard on FBi Radio in Sydney. He runs Laughing Outlaw and his recent biography of Michael Gudinski is available here http://www.laughingoutlaw.com.au/product/gudinski-the-godfather-of-australian-music/