Bob Dylan: The Rolling Stone Interview, Part 2

That’s what I was asking you.
How would I know?

Well, a lot of your songs are concerned with that . . . Someone once said that one’s real feelings come out when one’s separated from somebody one loves.
Who said that?

Nietzsche.
Well, I guess he’s right. Your real feelings come out when you’re free to be alone. Most people draw a line that they don’t want you to cross – that’s what happens in most petty relationships.

In a song such as “Like a Rolling Stone,” and now “Where Are You Tonight?” and “No Time to Think,” you seem to tear away and remove the layers of social identity – burn away the “rinds” of received reality – and bring us back to the zero state.
That’s right. “Stripped of all virtue as you crawl through the dirt/You can give but you cannot receive.” Well, I said it.

[At this point the pilot announces that we’ll be landing in five minutes.] Just a few quick questions before we land. Coming back to “Changing of the Guards”…
It means something different every time I sing it.

The lines, “She’s smelling sweet like the meadows where she was born, On midsummer’s eve, near the tower,” are so quiet and pure.
Oh, yeah?

Those lines seem to go back a thousand year into the past.
They do. “Changing of the Guards” is a thousand years old. Woody Guthrie said he just picked songs our of the air. That meant that they were already there and that he was tuned into them. “Changing of the Guards” might be a song that might have been there for thousands of years, sailing around in the mist, and one day I just tuned into it. Just like “Tupelo Honey” was floating around and Van Morrison came by.

It’s been said that the Stones’ song, “Some Girls,” hints at being about you a bit.
I’ve never lived at Zuma Beach.

Jagger imitates your phrasing, though.
He always does . . . He imitates Otis Redding, too, and Riley Puckett and Slim Harpo.

In “One More Cup of Coffee” you sing about a sister who see the future, and in “Changing of the Guards” you sing about “treacherous young witches.”
I meet witchy women. Somehow I attract them. I wish they’d leave me alone.

Well, there are some good witches, too, though that voodoo girl in “New Pony” was giving you some trouble.
That’s right. By the way, the Miss X in that song is Miss X, not ex-.

In “We Better Talk This Over,” is the line, “I’m exiled, you can’t convert me,” in some way about being Jewish?
Listen, I don’t know how Jewish I am, because I’ve got blue eyes. My grandparents were from Russia, and going back that far, which one of those women didn’t get raped by the Cossacks? So there’s plenty of Russian in me, I’m sure. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be the way I am.

Do you agree with Octavio Paz’ idea “that “all of us are alone, because all of us are two”?
I can’t disagree, but I’ve got to think there’s more than two. Didn’t Leonard Cohen sing something like, “I’m the one who goes from nothing to two”? I don’t remember.

We’re back to numbers.
Leonard Cohen was really interested in numbers: “I’m the one who goes from nothing to one.”

You’re a Gemini, and the Gemini twins been seen by one writer, Marius Schneider, as symbols of the “harmonious ambiguity of paradise and inferno, love and hate, peace and war, birth and death, praise and insult, clarity and obscurity, scorching rocks and swamps surrounding the fountains and waters of salvation.” That sounds like a good description of some of your new songs.
Right, but you can’t choose the month of the year you’re born in.

“Sacrifice is the code of the road” is what you sing in “Where Are You Tonight?” To die before dying, shedding your skin, making new songs out of old ones.
That’s my mission in life….”He not busy being born is busy dying.” Did you bring your parachute?

The interview was that bad, huh?
[Talking to a friend] Bring a parachute for Jonathan.

I’d prefer the pathway that leads up to the stars.

THE DRESSING ROOM

[I ran into Dylan backstage half an hour before a sound check at the Veterans’ Memorial Coliseum in New Haven, He invited me into his room, where we concluded out talk.]

When I was waiting to pick up my ticket for your Portland concert last night, I happened to ask the woman behind the desk where all these kids were coming from and she said: “For Babby Dylan, from heaven – far Black Sabbath, who Knows?”
Well, I believe it, don’t you? Where else could my particular audience come from?

I’ve already met two angelic types – one in your dressing room here in New Haven, the other the girl whom you knew fifteen years ago who brought you a breakfast in Portland.
They’re all angels . . . But I wanted to ask you about something Paul Wasserman [who’s in charge of Dylan’s publicity] said that you said to him, and that is: “A genius can’t be a genius on instinct alone.”

I said that? Maybe, but really late at night.
Well, I disagree. I believe that instinct is what makes a genius a genius.

What do you think of all the criticisms of Street Legal?
I read some of them. In fact, I didn’t understand them: I don’t think these people have had the experiences I’ve had to write those songs. The reviews didn’t strike me as being particularly interesting one way or another, or as compelling to my particular scene. I don’t know who these people are. They don’t travel in the same crowd, anyway. So it would be like me criticizing Pancho Villa.