thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
them?Do they exist?Sure they do, but sometimes you never meet them. A soul mate . . .what do they mean by soul mate? There's a male and a female in everyone, don't they say that? So I guess the soul mate would be the physical mate of the soul. But that would mean we're supposed to be with just one other person. Is a soul mate a romantic notion or is there real truth in that, senor?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 years into the past.They do. "Changing of the Guards" is a thousand years old. Woody Guthrie said he just picked songs out 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 sees 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 Octavo 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.Were 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 have 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?[Taking 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 our 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 Bobby Dylan, from heaven -- for 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.The reviews in this country of Renaldo and Clara weren't good, either. The writers went out of their way to call
you presumptuous, pretentious and egocentric.These people probably don't like to eat what I like to eat, they probably don't like the same things I like, or the same people. Look, just one time I'd like to see any one of those assholes try and do what I do. Just once let one of them write a song to show how they feel and sing it in front of ten, let alone 10,000 or 100,000 people. I'd like to see them just try that one time.Some of these critics have suggested that you need more sophisticated record production.I probably do. The truth of it is that I can hear the same sounds that other people like to hear, too. But I don't like to spend the time trying to get those sounds in the studio.So you really not a producer-type?I'm not. Some musicians like to spend a lot of time in the studio. But a lot of people try to make something out of nothing. If you don't have a good song, you can go into the studio and make it appear to be good, but that stuff don't last.You've had producers - Tom Wilson, Bob Johnson, Don DeVito.But that wasn't all that sophisticated. I mean, John Hammond produced my first record, and it was a matter of singing into a microphone. He'd say, "It sounded good to me," and you'd go on to the next song. That's still the way I do it.Nowadays, you start out with anything but the song -- the drum track, for instance -- and you take a week getting the instruments all sounding the way they should. They put down the rhythm track or whatever sound they want to hear in the ghost tracks. If you have a good song, it doesn't matter how well or badly it's produced. Okay, my records aren't produced that well, I admit it.Personally, I love the "primitive" sound of Buddy Holly demo tapes or the original Chuck Berry discs.But in those days they recorded on different equipment and the records were thicker. If you buy one of my early records -- and you can't today -- they weren't like Saran Wrap, as they are now. There was quality to them... and the machinery was different and the boards were different. The Beach Boys did stuff on two-track in the garage.But you do need a producer now?I think so. You see, in the recent past my method, when I had the songs, was to go in, record them and put them out. Now I'm writing songs on the run again -they're dear to me, the songs I'm doing now -- and I can't perfect them. So if I can just block time out, here and there, I can work on an album the way the Eagles do. I've got so many records out that it doesn't matter when I put out a new one. I could release one a year from now -- start working on it in January and have it produced right.What's the longest it's taken you to record a
song?About six or seven hours. It took us a week to make Street-Legal -- we mixed it the following week and put it out the week after. If we hadn't done it that fast we wouldn't have made an album at all, because we were ready to go back on the road.You've got a bigger sound now -- on record and onstage -- than you've ever had before.I do - and I might hire two more girls and an elephant -- but it doesn't matter how big the sound gets as long as it's behind me emphasizing the song. It's still pretty simple. There's nothing like it in Vegas -- no matter what you've heard -- and it's anything but disco. It's not rock & roll -- my roots go back to the Thirties, not the Fifties.On this tour, you've again been changing some of the radically new versions of songs that I heard you perform in Europe this past summer.Yeah, we've changed them around some -- it's a different tour and a different show. The band has to relearn the songs, but they're fast and the best at that.Do you write songs now with them in mind?I've had this sound ever since I was a kid -- what grabs my heart. I had to play alone for a long time, and that was good because by playing alone I had to write songs. That's what I didn't do when I first started out, just playing available songs with a three-piece honky-tonk band in my hometown. But when I was first living in New York City -- do you remember the old Madison Square Garden? Well, they used to have gospel shows there every Sunday, and you could see everyone from the Five Blind Boys, the Soul Stirrers and the Swan Silvertones to Clara Ward and the Mighty Clouds of Joy. I went up there every Sunday I'd listen to that and Big Bill Broonzy. Then I heard the Clancy Brothers and hung out with them - all of their drinking songs, their revolutionary and damsel-in-distress songs. And I listened to Jean Ritchie, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly.What about the doo-wop groups?They played at shows, and those artists didn't have to be onstage for more than twenty minutes. They just got on and got off, and that was never what I wanted to do. I used to go to the Brooklyn Fox a lot, but the band I liked the best at that time was Bobby Blue Bland's, and I heard them at the Apollo. But the people whose floors I was sleeping on were all into the Country Gentlemen, Uncle Dave Macon, the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe. So I heard all that, too.You seem to like music that's real and uncorrupted, no matter what its tradition. But some of your folk-music followers didn't care much for your own musical changes.But don't forget that when I played "Maggie's Farm" electric at Newport, that was something I would have done years before. They thought I didn't know what I was doing and that I'd slipped
over the edge, but the truth is Kooper and Michael Bloomfield remember that scene very well. And what the newspapers say happened didn't actually happen that way. There wasn't a whole lot of resistance in the crowd. Don't forget they weren't equipped for what we were doing with the sound. But I had a legitimate right to do that.The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were already popular in this country at that time, though.I remember hanging out with Brian Jones in 1964. Brian could play the blues. He was an excellent guitar player -- he seemed afraid to sing for some reason -- but he could play note for note what Robert Johnson or Son House played.In songs like "Buckets of Rain" or "New Pony," you seem just to go in and out of musical traditions pick up what you want and need, and transform them as you please.That's basically what I do, but so do the Stones Mick and Keith know all that music. America's filled with all kinds of different music.When you sang "Baby Stop Crying" the other night in Portland, I remember thinking that your voice sounded as if it combined the following qualities tenderness, sarcasm, outraged innocence, indignation, insouciant malice and wariness.The man in that song has his hand out and is not afraid of getting it bit.He sounds stronger than the woman he's singing to and about.Not necessarily. The roles could be reversed at any time -- don't you remember "To Ramona"? "And someday maybe, who knows baby, I'll come and be cryin' to you."In the song "Baby Stop Crying," it sounds as if the singer is getting rejected -- that the woman's in love with someone else.She probably is.There's also a "bad man" in the song. It's almost as if three or four different movies were taking place in one song, all held together by the chorus. And the same thing seems to be happening in "Changing of the Guards" and some of your other new songs. What's that all about?Lord knows.How come you write in that way?I wouldn't be doing it unless some power higher than myself were guiding me on. I wouldn't be here this long. Let me put it another way. What was the question?There are all these different levels in many of your recent songs.That's right, and that's because my mind and my heart work on all those levels. Shit, I don't want to be chained down to the same old level all the time.I've seen you tell people who don't know you that some other person standing nearby is you.Well sure, if some old fluff ball comes wandering in looking for the real Bob Dylan, I'll direct him down the line, but I can't be held accountable for that.A poet and critic named Elizabeth Sewell once wrote, "Discovery, in science and poetry, is a mythological situation in which the mind unites with a figure of its own devising as a means toward understanding the world." And it seems as if you have created a figure named Bob Dylan...I didn't create Bob
Dylan. Bob Dylan has always been here...always was. When I was a child there was Bob Dylan. And before I was born, there was Bob Dylan.Why did you have to play that role?I'm not sure. Maybe I was best equipped to do it.The composer Arnold Schonberg once said the same thing: someone had to be Arnold Schonberg.Sometimes your parents don't even know who you are. No one knows but you. Lord, if your own parents don't know who you are, who else in the world is there who would know except you?Then why do children keep on wanting things from their parents they can't give them?Misunderstanding.In contradistinction to the idea of being true to oneself, there's an idea of personality-suggested by Yeats -- which states that "man is nothing till he is united to an image." You seem to have your foot in both camps.I don't know about that. Sometimes I think I'm a ghost. Don't you have to have some poetic sense to be involved in what we're talking about? It's like what you were saying about people putting my record down. I couldn't care less if they're doing that but, I mean, who are these people, what qualifications do they have? Are they poets, are they musicians? You find me some musician to poet, and then maybe we'll talk. Maybe that person will know something I don't know and I'll see it that way. That could happen. I'm not almighty. But my feelings come from the gut, and I'm not too concerned with someone whose feelings come from his head. That don't bother me none.This criticism has been going on for a long time. It's like a lover: you like somebody and then you don't want to like them anymore because you're afraid to admit to yourself that you like them so much . . .I don't know, you've just got to try, try to do some good for somebody. The world is full of nonsupporters and backbiters -- people who chew on wet rags. But it's also filled with people who love you.There are lines in your new songs about the one you love being so hard to recognize, or about feeling displaced and in exile. It seems as if the tyranny of love makes people unhappy.That's the tyranny of man-woman love. That ain't too much love.What's your idea of love?[Pause] Love like a driving wheel. That's my idea of love.What about Cupid with his bow and arrow aimed toward your heart?Naw, Cupid comes in a beard and a mustache, you know. Cupid has dark hair.
This interview took place in late summer of 1965 in the office of Dylan's manager Albert Grossman. Dylan had just been booed in the historic Forest Hills concert where he abandoned folk purity to the use of electric accompaniment. he was wearing a red-and-navy op-art shirt, a navy blazer and pointy high-heeled boots. His fact, so sharp and harsh when translated through media, was then infinitely soft and delicate. His hair was not bushy or electric or Afro; it was fine-spun soft froth like the foam of a wave. He looked like an underfed angel with a nose from the land of the Chosen People.Q: Some American folk singers--Carolyn Hester, for example--say that what you're now doing, the new sound, "folk rock," is liberating them.A:Did Carolyn say that? You tell her she can come around and see me any time now that she's liberated.Q: Does labeling, using the term, "folk rock," tend to obscure what's happening?A:Yes.Q: It's like "pop gospel." What does the term mean to you?A:Yeah, classical gospel could be the next trend. There's country rock, rockabilly. What does it mean to me? Folk rock. I've never even said that word. It has a hard gutter sound. Circussy atmosphere. It's nose-thumbing. Sound like you're looking down on what is... fantastic, great music.Q: The definition most often given of folk rock is the combination of the electronic sound of rock and roll with the meaningful lyrics of folk music? Does that sum up what you're doing?A:Yes. It's very complicated to play with electricity. You play with other people. You're dealing with other people. Most people don't like to work with other people, it's more difficult. It takes a lot. Most people who don't like rock and roll can't relate to other people.Q: You mention the Apollo Theatre in Harlem on one of your album covers. Do you go there often?A:Oh, I couldn't go up there. I used to go up there a lot about four years ago. I even wanted to play in one of the amateur nights, but I got scared. Bad things can happen to you. I saw what the audience did to a couple of guys they didn't like. And I would have had a couple of things against me right away when I stepped out on the stage.Q: Who is Mr. Jones in "Ballad of a Thin Man?"A:He's a real person. You know him, but not by that name.Q: Like Mr. Charlie?A:No. He's more than Mr. Charlie. He's actually a person. Like I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, "That's Mr. Jones." Then I asked this cat, "Doesn't he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?" And he told me, "He puts his nose on the ground." It's all there, it's a true story.Q: Where did you get that shirt?A:California. Do you like it? You should see my others. You can't get clothes like that here. There are a
lot of things out there we haven't got here.Q: Isn't California on the way here?A:It's uptight here compared to there. Hollywood I mean. It's not really breathable here. it's like there's air out there. The Sunset Strip can't be compared to anything here, like 42nd Street. The people there look different, they look more like... you want to kiss them out there.Q: Do you spend a lot of time out there?A:I don't have much time to spend anywhere: The same thing in England. In England everybody looks very hip East Side. They wear things... they don't wear things that bore you. They've got other hangups in other directions.Q: Do you consider yourself primarily a poet?A:No. We have our ideas about poets. The word doesn't mean any more than the word "house." There are people who write _po_ems and people who write po_ems_. Other people write _poems_. Everybody who writes poems do you call them a poet? There's a certain kind of rhythm in some kind of way that's visible. You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.Q: What I meant was, do you think your words stand without the music?A:They would stand but I don't read them. I'd rather sing them. I write things that aren't songs--I have a book coming out.Q: What is it?A:It's a book of words.Q: Is it like the back of your albums? It seemed to me that the album copy you write is a lot like the writing of William Burroughs. Some of the accidental sentences--A:Cut-ups.Q: Yes, and some of the imagery and anecdotes. I wondered if you had read anything by him.A:I haven't read _Naked Lunch_ but I read some of his shorter things in little magazines, foreign magazines. I read one in Rome. I know him. I don't really know him--I just met him once. I think he's a great man.Q: Burroughs keeps an album, a collection of photographs that illustrate his writing. Do you have anything similar to that?A:I do that too. I have photographs of "Gates of Eden" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blues." I saw them after I wrote the songs. People send me a lot of things and a lot of the things are pictures, so other people must have that idea too. I gotta admit, maybe I wouldn't have chosen them, but I can see what it is about the pictures.Q: I heard you used to play the piano for Buddy Holly.A:No. I used to play the rock and roll piano, but I don't want to say who it was for because the cat will try to get hold of me. I don't want to see the cat. He'll try to reclaim the friendship. I did it a long time ago, when I was seventeen years old. I used to play a country piano too.Q: This was before you became interested in folk music?A:Yes. I became interested in folk music because I