No Regrets Journal Essay Bob Dylan Always Told Us Who He Was: In His Own Words
This is a compilation of quotes from Bob Dylan from The Essential Interviews edited by Jonathan Cott, published by Wenner Books in 2006 and Bob Dylan Chronicles Volume One published by Simon and Schuster in 2004. If needed I will provide some context, but the words speak for themselves. In his Nobel speech he said, “If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important. I don’t have to know what a song means….I return once again to Homer, who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.’” He was a great fan of Woody Guthrie and regularly visited him and sang Woody’s own songs to him in the 1960s when Woody was hospitalized in New Jersey with Huntington’s disease: “…I can see why he wrote what he wrote, in a very calm kind of way. I am not putting him down. I am not copping out of my attraction to him and his influence on me. His influence on me was never in inflection or in voice. What drew me to him was that hearing his voice I could tell he was very lonesome, very alone, and very lost out in his time. That’s why I dig him.” “You see, it’s all grown so serious, the writing-song business. It’s not that serious. The songs don’t painfully come out. They come out in a trick or two, or from something you might overhear. I’m just like any other song writer, you pick up the things that are given to you.” “The most you can do is satisfy yourself. If you satisfy yourself, then you don’t have to worry about remembering anything. If you don’t satisfy yourself, and you don’t know why you’re doing what you do, you begin to lose contact.” “…I am a songwriter. I can’t help what other people do with my songs, what they make of them.” “I see myself as it all. Married man, poet, singer, songwriter, custodian, gatekeeper…all of it. I’ll be it all. I feel ‘confined’ when I have to choose one of the other. Don’t you?” He talks about the sound coming with him when he went to New York City “Nobody thought of it as folk-rock at the time….It was the sound of the streets. It still is. I symbolically hear that sound wherever I am. That ethereal twilight light,
you know. It’s the sound of the street with the sun rays, the sound shining down at a particular time, on a particular type of building. A particular type of people walking on particular type of street. It’s an outdoor sound that drifts 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 knife and forks….Yeah, no jackhammer sounds, no airplane sounds. All pretty natural sounds. It’s water, you know trickling down a brook. It’s light flowing…the crack of dawn. Music filters out to me in the crack of dawn.” “I don’t think in terms of growing 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.” “I want to be moved, because that’s what art is supposed to do, according to all the great theologians. Art is supposed to take you out of your chair. It’s supposed to move you from one space to another.” “When you are playing music and it’s going well, you do lose your identity, you become totally subservient to the music you’re doing in your very being. It’s dangerous, because its effect is that you believe that you can transcend and cope with anything. That it is the real life, that you’ve struck at the heart of life itself and you are on top of your dream. And there’s no down. But later on, backstage, you have a different point of view.” “I am interested in all aspects of life. Revelations and realizations. Lucid thought that can be translated into songs, analogies, new information.” “I can imagine every situation in life as if I’ve done it, no matter what it might be: whether it be self-punishment or marrying my half sister, I mean, I can imagine, I can feel all those things for some reason. I don’t know why.” “Is it so surprising I’m on the road? What else would I be doing in this life— meditating on the mountain? Whatever someone finds fulfilling, whatever his or her purpose is—that’s all it is.” “…my roots go back to the Thirties not the Fifties.”
“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….in New York City 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…Big Bill Bronzy… the Clancy Brothers….And I listened to Jean Ritchie, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly…the Country Gentleman, Uncle Dave Macon, the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe.” “Its like what you were saying about people putting my record down. I couldn’t care less if they’re doing that…You find me some musician or 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 at all.” “It’s hard to speculate what tomorrow may bring. I kinda live where I find myself.” Song writing “wasn’t a thing I wanted to do ever. I wanted just a song to sing, and there came a certain point where I couldn’t sing anything. So I had to write what I wanted to sing ‘cause nobody else was writing what I wanted to sing. I couldn’t find it anywhere. If I could, I probably would have never started writing.” “I was never gonna be anything else, never. I was playing when I was twelve years old, and that was all I wanted to do—play my guitar. I was always going to these parties…and it was a way of getting attention and whatever…It starts out that way but I never really knew where it was going to lead. Now that it’s led me here—I still don’t know where it is.” “I hope somebody else comes along who could pick up on what I’m doing and learn exactly what it is…that makes it quite different. I keep looking for that somebody…not necessarily to cover me, but to take it a step further. I’ve already taken it as far as I can take it…But somebody will come along and take it that step further.” “…well I’m just thankful I can play on stage and people will come and see me. Because I couldn’t make it otherwise, I mean if I went out to play and nobody showed up, that would be the end of me.”
“I wanted to be a star in my own mind, I wanted to be my own star. I didn’t want to be a star for people I didn’t really identify with. For me, what I did was a way of life, it wasn’t an occupation.” “To me, I don’t have a ‘career.’…A career is something you can look back on, and I’m not ready to look back. Time doesn’t really exist for me in those kinds of terms. I don’t really remember in any monumental way ‘what I have done.’ this isn’t my career, this is my life, and it’s still vital to me.” “This is all gonna pass….All these people who say whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing—that’s all gonna pass, because, obviously, I’m not gonna be around forever. The day’s gonna come when there aren’t gonna be any more records, and then people won’t be able to say, ‘Well this one’s not as good as the last one.’ They’re gonna have to look at it all. And I don’t know what the picture will be, what people’s judgment will be at that time. I can’t help you there.” The Nobel Committee knew exactly what to think and what to do. “I wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ in 10 minutes, just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records. That’s the folk tradition. You use what’s been handed down. ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ is probably from an old Scottish folk song.” “I’ve always been about being an individual, with an individual point of view. If I’ve done anything, it’s probably that, and to let some people know that it’s possible to do the impossible….And that’s really all. If I’ve ever had anything to tell anybody, it’s that: You can do the impossible. Anything is possible. And that’s it. No more.”
Clayton Medeiros claymedeiros@aol.com Epublishing http://issuu.com/claymedeiros/docs https://www.facebook.com/NoRegretsJournal