thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
it?DYLAN: It definitely was. Sing Out was the only magazine you could read about those people. They were special people and you kept your distance from them.PLAYBOY: What do you mean?DYLAN: Well, they were the type of people you just observed and learned from, but you would never approach them. I never would, anyway. I remember being too shy. But it took me a long time to realize the New York crowd wasn't that different from the singers I'd seen in my own home town. They were right there, on the backroad circuit, people like the Stanley Brothers, playing for a few nights. If I had known then what I do now, I probably would have taken off when I was 12 and followed Bill Monroe. 'Cause I could have gotten to the same place.PLAYBOY: Would you have gotten there sooner?DYLAN: Probably would have saved me a lot of time and hassles.PLAYBOY: This comes under the category of setting the record straight: By the time you arrived in New York, you'd changed your name from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan. Was it because of Dylan Thomas?DYLAN: No. I haven't read that much of Dylan Thomas. It's a common thing to change your name. It isn't that incredible. Many people do it. People change their town, change their country. New appearance, new mannerisms. Some people have many names. I wouldn't pick a name unless I thought I was that person. Sometimes you are held back by your name. Sometimes there are advantages to having a certain name. Names are labels so we can refer to one another. But deep inside us we don't have a name. We have no name. I just chose that name and it stuck.PLAYBOY: Do you know what Zimmerman means in German?DYLAN: My forebears were Russian. I don't know how they got a German name coming from Russia. Maybe they got their name coming off the boat or something. To make a big deal over somebody's name, you're liable to make a big deal about any little thing. But getting back to Dylan Thomas, it wasn't that I was inspired by reading some of his poetry and going "Aha!" and changing my name to Dylan. If I thought he was that great, I would have sung his poems, and could just as easily have changed my name to Thomas.PLAYBOY: Bob Thomas? It would have been a mistake.DYLAN: Well, that name changed me. I didn't sit around and think about it too much. That is who I felt I was.PLAYBOY: Do you deny being the enfant terrible in those days-do you deny the craziness of it all that has been portrayed?DYLAN: No, it's true. That's the way it was. But . . . can't stay in one place forever.PLAYBOY: Did the motorcycle accident you had in 1966 have anything to do with cooling you off, getting you to relax?DYLAN: Well, now you're jumping way ahead to another period of time.... What was I doing? I don't know. It came time. Was it when I had the motorcycle accident? Well, I
was straining pretty hard and couldn't have gone on living that way much longer. The fact that I made it through what I did is pretty miraculous. But, you know, sometimes you get too close to something and you got to get away from it to be able to see it. And something like that happened to me at the time.PLAYBOY: In a book you published during that period, Tarantula, you wrote an epitaph for yourself that begins: "Here lies Bob Dylan / murdered / from behind / by trembling flesh...."DYLAN: Those were in my wild, unnatural moments. I'm glad those feelings passed.PLAYBOY: What were those days like?DYLAN: [Pause] I don't remember. [Long pause]PLAYBOY: There was a report in the press recently that you turned the Beatles on to grass for, the first time. According to the story, you gave Ringo Starr a toke at J.F.K. Airport and it was the first time for any of them. True?DYLAN: I'm surprised if Ringo said that. It don't sound like Ringo. I don't recall meeting him at J.F.K. Airport.PLAYBOY: OK. Who turned you on?DYLAN: Grass was everywhere in the clubs. It was always there in the jazz clubs and in the folk-music clubs. There was just grass and it was available to musicians in those days. And in coffeehouses way back in Minneapolis. That's where I first came into contact with it, I'm sure. I forget when or where, really.PLAYBOY: Why did the musicians like grass so much?DYLAN: Being a musician means-depending on how far you go-getting to the depths of where you are at. And most any musician would try anything to get to those depths, because playing music is an immediate thing-as opposed to putting paint on a canvas, which is a calculated thing. Your spirit flies when you are playing music. So, with music, you tend to look deeper and deeper inside yourself to find the music. That's why, I guess, grass was around those clubs. I know the whole scene has changed now; I mean, pot is almost a legal thing. But in the old days, it was just for a few people.PLAYBOY: Did psychedelics have a similar effect on you?DYLAN: No. Psychedelics never influenced me. I don't know, I think Timothy Leary had a lot to do with driving the last nails into the coffin of that New York scene we were talking about. When psychedelics happened, everything became irrelevant. Because that had nothing to do with making music or writing poems or trying to really find yourself in that day and age.PLAYBOY: But people thought they were doing just that-finding themselves.DYLAN: People were deluded into thinking they were something that they weren't: birds, airplanes, fire hydrants, whatever. People were walking around thinking they were stars.PLAYBOY: As far as your music was concerned, was there a moment when you made a conscious decision to work with an electric band?DYLAN: Well, it had to get there. It had to go that way for me. Because that's where I started and eventually it just got back to that. I couldn't go
on being the lone folkie out there, you know, strumming Blowin' in the Wind for three hours every night. I hear my songs as part of the music, the musical background.PLAYBOY: When you hear your songs in your mind, it's not just you strumming alone, you mean?DYLAN: Well, no, it is to begin with. But then I always hear other instruments, how they should sound. The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That's my particular sound. I haven't been able to succeed in getting it all the time. Mostly, I've been driving at a combination of guitar, harmonica and organ, but now I find myself going into territory that has more percussion in it and [pause] rhythms of the soul.PLAYBOY: Was that wild mercury sound in I Want You?DYLAN: Yeah, it was in I Want You. It was in a lot of that stuff. It was in the album before that, too.PLAYBOY: Highway 61 Revisited?DYLAN: Yeah. Also in Bringing It All Back Home. That's the sound I've always heard. Later on, the songs got more defined, but it didn't necessarily bring more power to them. The sound was whatever happened to be available at the time. I have to get back to the sound, to the sound that will bring it all through me.PLAYBOY: Can't you just reassemble the same musicians?DYLAN: Not really. People change, you know, they scatter in all directions. People's lives get complicated. They tend to have more distractions, so they can't focus on that fine, singular purpose.PLAYBOY: You're searching for people?DYLAN: No, not searching, the people are there. But I just haven't paid as much attention to it as I should have. I haven't felt comfortable in a studio since I worked with Tom Wilson. The next move for me is to have a permanent band. You know, usually I just record whatever's available at the time. That's my thing, you know, and it's-it's legitimate. I mean, I do it because I have to do it that way. I don't want to keep doing it, because I would like to get my life more in order. But until now, my recording sessions have tended to be last-minute affairs. I don't really use all the technical studio stuff. My songs are done live in the studio; they always have been and they always will be done that way. That's why they're alive. No matter what else you say about them, they are alive. You know, what Paul Simon does or Rod Stewart does or Crosby, Stills and Nash do-a record is not that monumental for me to make. It's just a record of songs.PLAYBOY: Getting back to your transition from folk to rock, the period when came out with Highway 61 must have been exciting.DYLAN: Those were exciting times. We were doing it before anybody knew we would-or could. We didn't know what it was going
to turn out to be. Nobody thought of it as folk-rock at the time. There were some people involved in it like The Byrds, and I remember Sonny and Cher and the Turtles and the early Rascals. It began coming out on the radio. I mean, I had a couple of hits in a row. That was the most I ever had in a row- two. The top ten was filled with that kind of sound-the Beatles, too-and it was exciting, those days were exciting. It was the sound of the streets. It still is. I symbolically hear that sound wherever I am.PLAYBOY: You hear the sound of the street?DYLAN: That ethereal twilight light, you know. It's the sound of the street with the sunrays, the sun shining down at a particular time, on a particular type of building. A particular type of people walking on a particular type of street. It's an outdoor sound that drifts even into open windows that you can hear. The sound of bells and distant railroad trains and arguments in apartments and the clinking of silverware and knives and forks and beating with leather straps. It's all-it's all there. Just lack of a jackhammer, you know.PLAYBOY: You mean if a jackhammer were-DYLAN: Yeah, no jackhammer sounds, no airplane sounds. All pretty natural sounds. It's water, you know water trickling down a brook. It's light flowing through thePLAYBOY: Late-afternoon light?DYLAN: No, usually it's the crack of dawn. Music filters out to me in the crack of dawn.PLAYBOY: The "jingle jangle morning"?DYLAN: Right.PLAYBOY: After being up all night?DYLAN: Sometimes. You get a little spacy when you've been up all night, so you don't really have the power to form it. But that's the sound I'm trying to get across. I'm not just up there re-creating old blues tunes or trying to invent some surrealistic rhapsody.PLAYBOY: It's the sound that you want.DYLAN: Yeah, it's the sound and the words. Words don't interfere with it. They- they-punctuate it. You know, they give it purpose. [Pause] And all the ideas for my songs, all the influences, all come out of that. All the influences, all the feelings, all the ideas come from that. I'm not doing it to see how good I can sound, or how perfect the melody can be, or how intricate the details can be woven or how perfectly written something can be. I don't care about those things.PLAYBOY: The sound is that compelling to you?DYLAN: Mmm-hnhPLAYBOY: When did you first hear it, or feel it?DYLAN: I guess it started way back when I was growing up.PLAYBOY: Not in New York?DYLAN: Well, I took it to New York. I wasn't born in New York. I was given some direction there, but I took it, too. I don't think I could ever have done it in New York. I would have been too beaten down.PLAYBOY: It was formed by the sounds back in the ore country of Minnesota?DYLAN: Or the lack of sound. In the city, there is nowhere you can go where you don't hear sound. You are
never alone. I don't think I could have done it there. Just the struggle of growing up would he immense and would really distort things if you wanted to be an artist. Well . . . maybe not. A lot of really creative people come out of New York. But I don't know anyone like myself. I meet a lot of people from New York that I get along with fine, and share the same ideas, but I got something different in my soul. Like a spirit. It's like being from the Smoky Mountains or the backwoods of Mississippi. It is going to make you a certain type of person if you stay 20 years in a place.PLAYBOY: With your love of the country, what made you leave Woodstock in 1969 and go back to the Village?DYLAN: It became stale and disillusioning. It got too crowded, with the wrong people throwing orders. And the old people were afraid to come out on the street. The rainbow faded.PLAYBOY: But the Village, New York City, wasn't the answer, either.DYLAN: The stimulation had vanished Everybody was in a pretty down mood. It was over.PLAYBOY: Do you think that old scene you've talked about might be creeping back into New York?DYLAN: Well, I was there last summer. I didn't sense any of it. There are a lot of rock-'n'-roll clubs and jazz clubs and Puerto Rican poetry clubs, but as far as learning something new, learning to teach.... New York is full of teachers, that is obvious, but it is pretty depressing now. To make it on the street, you just about have to beg.PLAYBOY: So now you're in California Is there any kind of scene that you can be part of?DYLAN: I'm only working out here most, or all, of the time, so I don't know what this town is really like. I like San Francisco. I find it full of tragedy and comedy. But if I want to go to a city in this country, I will still go to New York. There are cities all over the world to go to. I don't know, maybe I am just an old dog, so maybe I feel like I've been around so long I am looking for something new to do and it ain't there. I was looking for some space to create what I want to do. I am only interested in that these days. I don't care so much about hanging out.PLAYBOY: Do you feel older than when you sang, "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now"?DYLAN: No, I don't feel old. I don't feel old at all. But I feel like there are certain things that don't attract me anymore that I used to succumb to very easily.PLAYBOY: Such as?DYLAN: Just the everyday vices.PLAYBOY: Do you think that you have managed to resist having to grow up or have you found a way of doing it that is different from conventional growing up?DYLAN: I don't really think in terms of growing up or not growing up. I think
in terms of being able to fulfill yourself. Don't forget, you see, I've been doing what I've been doing since I was very small, so I have never known anything else. I have never had to quit my job to do this. This is all that I have ever done in my life. So I don't think in terms of economics or status or what people think of me one way or the other.PLAYBOY: Would you say you still have a rebellious, or punk, quality toward the rest of the world?DYLAN: Punk quality?PLAYBOY: Well, you're still wearing dark sunglasses, right?DYLAN: Yeah.PLAYBOY: Is that so people won't see your eyes?DYLAN: Actually, it's just habit-forming after a while, I still do wear dark sunglasses. There is no profound reason for it, I guess. Some kind of insecurity, I don't know: I like dark sunglasses. Have I had these on through every interview session?PLAYBOY: Yes. We haven't seen your eyes yet.DYLAN: Well, Monday for sure. [The day that PLAYBOY photos were to be taken for the opening page]PLAYBOY: Aside from the dark glasses, is it something in the punk quality of Elvis or James Dean that makes you dress a certain way or act a certain way?DYLAN: No. It's from the early Sixties. Elvis was there. He was there when there wasn't anybody there. He was Elvis and everybody knows about what Elvis did. He did it to me just like he did it to everybody else. Elvis was in that certain age group and I followed him right from Blue Moon in Kentucky. And there were others; I admired Buddy Holly a lot. But Elvis was never really a punk. And neither was James Dean a punk.PLAYBOY: What quality did Dean represent?DYLAN: He let his heart do the talking. That was his one badge. He was effective for people of that age, but as you grow older, you have different experiences and you tend to identify with artists who had different meanings for you.PLAYBOY: Let's talk some more about your influences. What musicians do you listen to today.DYLAN: I still listen to the same old black and-blue blues. Tommy McClennan, Lightnin' Hopkins, the Carter Family, the early Carlyles. I listen to Big Maceo, Robert Johnson. Once in a while, I listen to Woody Guthrie again. Among the more recent people, Fred McDowell, Gary Stewart. I like Memphis Minnie a whole lot. Blind Willie McTell. I like bluegrass music. I listen to foreign music, too. I like Middle Eastern music a whole lot.PLAYBOY: Such as?DYLAN: Om Kalthoum.PLAYBOY: Who is that?DYLAN: She was a great Egyptian singer. I first heard of her when I was in Jerusalem.PLAYBOY: She was an Egyptian singer who was popular in Jerusalem?DYLAN: I think she's popular all over the Middle East. In Israel, too. She does mostly love and prayer-type songs, with violin and-drum accompaniment. Her father chanted those prayers and I guess she was so good when she tried singing behind his back that he allowed her to sing professionally, and she's dead now but not forgotten. She's great. She
really is. Really great.PLAYBOY: Any popular stuff?DYLAN: Well, Nana Maskouri.PLAYBOY: How about the Beatles?DYLAN: I've always liked the way George Harrison plays guitar-restrained and good. As for Lennon, well, I was encouraged by his book [In His Own Write]. Or the publishers were encouraged, because they asked me to write a book and that's how Tarantula came about. John has taken poetics pretty far in popular music. A lot of his work is overlooked, but if you examine it, you'll find key expressions that have never been said before to push across his point of view. Things that are symbolic of some inner reality and probably will never be said again.PLAYBOY: Do you listen to your own stuff?DYLAN: Not so much.PLAYBOY: What about your literary influences? You've mentioned Kerouac and Ginsberg. Whom do you read now?DYLAN: Rilke. Chekhov. Chekhov is my favorite writer. I like Henry Miller. I think he's the greatest American writer.PLAYBOY: Did you meet Miller?DYLAN: Yeah, I met him. Years ago. Played ping-pony with him.PLAYBOY: Did you read Catcher in the Rye as a kid?DYLAN: I must have, you know. Yeah, I think so.PLAYBOY: Did you identify with Holden Caulfield?DYLAN: Uh,. what was his story?PLAYBOY: He was a lonely kid in prep school who ran away and decided that everyone else was phony and that he was sensitive.DYLAN: I must have identified with him.PLAYBOY: We've been talking about the arts, and as we've been speaking, you've been in the midst of editing your first film, Renaldo & Clara. What do you feel you can do in films that you can't do in songs?DYLAN: I can take songs up to a higher power. The movie to me is more a painting than music. It is a painting. It's a painting coming alive off a wall. That's why we're making it. Painters can contain their artistic turmoil; in another age, moviemakers would most likely he paintersPLAYBOY: Although Renaldo & Clara is the first movie you've produced, directed and acted in, there was a documentary made in 1966 that marked your first appearance in a film-Don't Look Back. What did you think of it.DYLAN: Don't Look Back was . . . somebody else's movie It was a deal worked out with a film company, but I didn't really play any part in it. When I saw it in a moviehouse, I was shocked at what had been done. I didn't find out until later that the camera had been on me all the time. That movie was done by a mar. who took it all out of context It was documented from his personal point of view. The movie was dishonest, it was a propaganda movie. I don't think it was accurate at all in terms of showing my formative years. It showed only one side. He made it seem like I wasn't doing anything but living in hotel rooms, playing the typewriter and holding press conferences for journalists. All that is true, you know. Throwing some bottles, there's something about it in the movie. Joan Baez is in it. But it's
one-sided. Let's not lean on it too hard. It just wasn't representative of what was happening in the Sixties.PLAYBOY: Don't you feel it captured the frenzy of your tour, even though it focused on you in terms of stardom?DYLAN: I wasn't really a star in those days, any more than I'm a star these days. I was very obviously confused then as to what my purpose was. It was pretty early, you know. The Times They Are A-Changin' was on the English charts then, so it had to be pretty early.PLAYBOY: And you didn't really know what you were doing then?DYLAN: Well, look what I did after that. Look what I did after that. I didn't really start to develop until after that. I mean, I did, but I didn't. Don't Look Back was a little too premature. I should have been left alone at that stage.PLAYBOY: You were involved in another movie around that period-1966-that was never released, called Eat the Document. How did that happen?DYLAN: That started as a television special. I wasn't the maker of that film, either. I was the-I was the victim. They had already shot film, but at that time, of course, I did-I had a-if I hadn't gotten into that motorcycle accident, they would have broadcast it, and that would have been that. But I was sort of-I was taken out of it, you know, and-I think it was the fall of that year. I had a little more time to, you know, concentrate on what was happening to me and what had happened. Anyway, what had happened was that they had made another Don't Look Back, only this time it was for television. I had nothing better to do than to see the film. All of it, including unused footage. And it was obvious from looking at the film that it was garbage. It was miles and miles of garbage. That was my introduction to film My film concept was all formed in those early days when I was looking at that footage.PLAYBOY: From looking at those miles of garbage, you got your concept of film?DYLAN: Yeah, it was mostly rejected footage, which I found beauty in. Which probably tells you more-that I see beauty where other people don't.PLAYBOY: That reminds us of a poem you wrote for the jacket of an early Joan Baez album, in which you claimed that you always thought something had to be ugly before you found it beautiful. And at some point in the poem, you described listening to Joan sing and suddenly deciding that beauty didn't have to start out by being uglyDYLAN: I was very hung up on Joan at the time [Pause] I think I was just trying to tell myself I wasn't hung up on her.PLAYBOY: OK. Would you talk some more about the film concept you got from the rejected footage?DYLAN: Well, up until that time, they had been concerned with the linear story line. It was on one plane and in one dimension only. And the more I looked at the film,