Original subtitles

I had ambitions to set out and find...

like an odyssey of going home somewhere.

I set out to find this home that I'd left a while back...

and I couldn't remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there.

And encountering what I encountered on the way, was how I envisioned it all.

I didn't really have any ambition at all.

I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be...

and so I'm on my way home, you know.

Once upon a time you dressed so fine

You threw the bums a dime in your prime

Didn't you?

People call and say, "Beware, doll, you're bound to fall"

You thought they were all kidding you

You used to laugh about

Everybody that was hanging out

Now you don't talk too loud

Now you don't seem so proud

About having to be scrounging around

For your next meal

How does it feel

How does it feel

To be on your own

With no direction home

Like a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone?

Time... You can do a lot of things that seem to make time stand still...

but of course, you know, no one can do that.

Maybe when I was about 10, I started playing the guitar.

I found a guitar in the house that my father bought, actually.

I found something else in there. This kind of mystical overtones.

There was a great big mahogany radio.

It had a 78 turntable when you opened up the top.

And I opened it up one day...

and there was a record on, a country record...

this song called Drifting Too Far From Shore.

The sound of the record made me feel like I was somebody else...

and that...

you know, I was maybe not even born to the right parents, or something.

It looked like any other town out of the '40s or '50s.

Just some rural town. It was on the way to nowhere.

And you probably couldn't find it on a map.

Maybe three blocks one way, and maybe three blocks the other way...

and that was like a main street where all the department stores were...

the drugstores, the... That's about it, you know.

What happens to a town after the livelihood is gone?

All right, it just sort of decays and blows away, doesn't it?

That's the way it goes.

Most of the land was either farmland...

or just completely scavenged by the mining companies.

Very hot in the summertime...

in the winter, it was just rightly cold, you know.

All winter, it was just, I mean...

We didn't have the clothes they have now...

so I mean, you just wore two or three shirts at a time.

Slept in your clothes.

The pit was on the outer limits of the town. That's where everybody worked.

You couldn't be a rebel. It was so cold that you couldn't be bad.

The weather equalizes everything very quickly.

And nobody was gonna really pull a stickup.

There really wasn't any philosophy, any idiom...

any ideology to really go against.

My father and his brothers, they had an electrical store.

'Bout the first job I ever had was sweeping up the store...

and I was supposed to learn...

the discipline of hard work or something, you know...

and the merits of employment.

Circuses came through.

There were tent shows at the carny midways.

And they had barkers.

Got a horse with two heads!

Got a chicken in there with a man's face!

Come see the girl-boy!

It was just more rural back then.

That's what people did. You could see guys in blackface.;

George Washington in blackface...

or Napoleon wearing blackface.

Like, weird Shakespearean things.

Stuff that didn't really make any sense at the time.

And people had other jobs in the carny team.

I saw somebody putting makeup on...

getting back from running the Ferris wheel once.

And I thought that was pretty interesting.

Guy's got, you know... He does two things, you know, or something like that.

I've got a song here that I'd like to do that's been awful kind to me and the boys.

It's a tune called.;

Cold Cold Heart.

We'd have to listen late at night for other stations to come in...

from other parts of the country, places that were far away.

Fifty-thousand watt stations coming out through the atmosphere.

Johnnie Ray.;

He had some kind of strange incantation in his voice...

like he'd been voodooed...

and he cried, kind of, when he sang.

It's Grand Ole Opry time.

Another big folk music show, starring Webb Pierce.

It was the sound that got to me.

It wasn't who it was, or...

It was the sound of it.

This is our town, Hibbing, Minnesota, USA.

I began listening to the radio, I began to get bored being there.

I thought about going to military school...

but the military school that I envisioned myself going to...

I couldn't get in...

which was West Point.

You know, I could always envision myself dying in some heroic battle somewhere.

So I mean, maybe that era...

has gone.

First time I heard rock 'n' roll on the radio...

I felt it was pretty similar to the country music which I'd been listening to.

I formed a couple of groups, growing up, and we rehearsed and played...

where we could play. There wasn't much opportunity...

to really break out of that area.

Robert was in my class, and that was the era that they had the talent show.

Robert, of course, he was up on stage.

His concert began, and it was quite surprising.

I saw Robert stand there at the piano...

and my guess is that he was trying to destroy it.

He was pumping on the thing. It was a most unusual thing to observe.

The principal pulled the curtain on him.

He said to me, "I didn't think that music was suitable for the audience...

"so I pulled the curtain. "

Nobody liked country music, or rock 'n' roll, or rhythm and blues.

That kind of music wasn't what was happening up there.

The music that was popular was How Much is that Doggie in the Window?

That wasn't our reality. Our reality was bleak to begin with.

Our reality was fear that at any moment...

this black cloud would explode, where everybody would be dead.

They would show you in school, how to dive for cover under your desk.

We grew up with all that, so it created a sense of paranoia...

that, I don't know, was probably unforeseen.

In May, 1959, I recorded a tape for Bob Zimmerman.

Bob was real excited to learn I had a tape recorder...

and he wanted to know what he sounded like.

I really can't say if the girls took a liking to me or not...

from playing around town.

The first girl that ever took a liking to me, her name was Gloria Story.

Gloria Story, I mean, that was her real name.

Second girlfriend was named Echo. Now, that's pretty strange.

I've never met anybody named Echo.

I serenaded her underneath the ladder that went up to her window.

And both these girls, by the way, brought out the poet in me.

Long after we have gone...

while the flesh of our beginning has not yet traveled the light years into distance...

it will disappear into the blackness of the space from which we came...

destroyed as we began, in a burst of gas and fire.

James Dean, Brando, The Wild One.

It didn't kill all the entire past.

It's not like they just appeared and there's a new scene happening now.

Time, you know, time kind of obliterated the past...

that was around when I was growing up.

Just time and progress, really.

How does it feel

Oh, how does it feel

To be on your own

With no direction home

Like a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone?

He's just changed altogether.

He's changed from what he was. He's not the same as what he was at first.

- You don't even recognize him. - No.

About a year ago, I saw him here in Sheffield at the City Hall...

and I thought he was magnificent.

You know, I thought he just couldn't improve if he tried.

Then the next thing that happened was...

he went really commercial, with this backing group.

And I didn't like that very much.

I don't know what he's trying to do.

I think he's conceding, you know, to some sort of popular taste.

I think it's a bad thing. I think he's prostituting himself.

I don't think the spirit of the Dylan songs has been portrayed with this...

with this incredibly corny group behind him.

I like his earlier records as on his Freewheelin' LPs, etcetera...

but this, I just can't stick.

I found it rather boring.

I found there was too much improvising on his wretched harmonica.

And he tended to lose the rhythm on his guitar altogether at times.

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

In the jingle jangle morning I'll come following you

Though I know that evening's empire

Has returned into sand

Vanished from my hand

Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping

My weariness amazes me I'm branded on my feet

I have no one to meet

And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

In the jingle jangle morning I'll come following you

Got out of high school and left the very next day.

I'd gone as far as I could in my particular environment.

I was gonna try to join some other band.

There was only one guy that ever came out of there, and he was out of Fargo.

And I'd actually gone there to play with him. He had a regional hit called Suzie Baby.

At that point, I was just playing triplets on the piano.

I didn't have my own piano, so they weren't gonna buy a piano.

But I did play some shows with them.

Nothing much came of it.

He would let people know that he was maybe Bobby Vee.

Bob told everyone including his, like, cousins and relatives...

that, you know, he was Bobby Vee.

And I guess he liked that recognition of being famous.

'Cause people looked at him, and say:

"Hey, that's a pretty good song you got out, Bobby Vee."

I was a musical expeditionary.

I had no past, really, to speak of, nothing to go back to, nobody to lean on.

I came down to Minneapolis. I didn't go to classes.

I was enrolled...

but I didn't go to classes.

I just didn't feel like it.

We were singing and playing all night. Sleeping most of, you know, the morning.

I didn't really have any time for studying.

"Praised be man

"He is existing in milk, and living in lilies

"And his violin music takes place in milk and creamy emptiness

"Praised be the unfolded inside petal flesh of tend'rest thought

"Praised be delusion; The ripple

"Praised be the Holy Ocean of Eternity

"Praised be I, writing, dead already, and dead again"

I fell into that atmosphere of everything Kerouac was saying...

about the world being completely mad.

And the only people for him that were interesting...

were the mad people, the mad ones, the ones who were, you know, mad to live...

and mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time...

the ones who never yawn, all those mad ones.

And I felt like I fit right into that bunch.

I had heard folk music before leaving the Iron Range.

I'd heard John Jacob Niles somewhere, strangely enough.

I don't know, folk music was delivering me something, you know...

which was the way I always felt about life, you know, and people...

and, you know, institutions, and ideology...

and it was just, you know, uncovering it all.

She played that upstroke-downstroke kind of rhythm...

where you don't need the drum. It's kind of like a Tex-Mex rhythm.

I heard that rhythm...

and I thought, well, I could use that rhythm for all kinds of things.

I don't even remember, you know, buying any records.

If went into the booth... I had a very agile mind.

I could learn a song by maybe hearing it once or twice.

I traded my electric equipment for an acoustic guitar.

Started playing almost immediately.

There he is, down at the end of the bar. Dylan! How are you?

Dylan Thomas, and he's looking shocked.

Out in Minnesota...

there was a young man who was inspired...

to change his name to Dylan...

because of the poet Dylan Thomas.

"Piety sings

"Innocence sweetens my last black breath

"Modesty hides my thighs in her wings

"And all the deadly virtues

"plague my death!"

Why it became that particular name, I really can't say.

There was some intimation that maybe he was changing his name...

'cause of a racial thing.

'Cause, I later found out...

that Minneapolis had a fairly big history of being anti-Semitic...

which I wasn't aware of at all.

The name just popped into my head one day.

But it didn't really happen any of the ways that I've read about it.

I mean, I just don't feel like I had had a past...

and, you know, I couldn't relate to anything...

other than what I was doing at the present time...

and I don't, you know...

Didn't matter to me what I said, you know. It still doesn't, really.

He sounded, like, average, I would say. He wasn't the worst, he wasn't the best...

but the repertoire was similar to everybody else's repertoire...

Josh White, Odetta, Belafonte.

Right then and there I had no goal except learning all the songs I could.

He was hungry. You know, hungry in a lot of ways...

not just for money, not just for fame...

but he was hungry for experience, for getting out, for doing it...

for seeing what was out there, seeing who he could be.

He was like a sponge in a way, like...

pick up people's mannerisms, accents.

I'd forgotten all about the Iron Range, where I grew up.

I'd forgotten about it all.

It didn't even enter my mind.

Woody Guthrie, he had a particular sound.

And besides that, he said something to go along with his sound.

That was highly unusual, to my ears.

He was a radical, his songs had a radical slant.

I thought, "ooh," you know, like... "That's what I want to sing.

"I want to sing that."

I couldn't believe that I'd never heard of this man.

You could listen to his songs, and actually learn how to live.

One guy said, "You're singing a Woody Guthrie song. "

He gave me a book that he wrote, called Bound for Glory, and I read it.

I identified with that Bound for Glory book...

more than I even did with On the Road.

These songs sounded archaic to most people.

I don't know why they didn't sound archaic to me.

They sounded like these songs were happening at the moment, to me.

Well, I see you got your

brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Yes, I see you got your

brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Well, you must tell me, baby

how your head feels under somethin' like that

Under your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Well, you wear it so pretty

Honey, can I jump on it sometime?

Yes, I just wanna see

if it's really the expensive kind

You know it balances on your head

just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine

Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

I asked the doctor if I could see you

Fantastic, very good.

- Rank. - Excellent.

- It was lousy, it was pathetic. - He was great!

It said on the ticket you came to see Dylan not a group.

Not a pop group.

Special paper, now, with all the pictures.

I was just learning songs and playing them...

and trying to find out who Woody Guthrie was.

Woody's records were almost impossible to find.

They didn't have any of his records in the record stores.

Paul was a folk music scholar. He didn't play at all.

He had a whole lot of records...

which probably couldn't be found anywhere else in the Midwest...

except at Paul's house, and he lived there with somebody else.

You know, I was listening to records at his house once.

I knew they'd be away for the weekend...

so I went over there and helped myself to a bunch of old records.

About 25 records disappeared, mostly the stuff that Dylan was listening to.

And we sort of figured out that he'd taken them.

Those records were extremely hard to find. They were like hen's teeth.

If you came across them, somebody like myself...

who was a musical expeditionary...

you know, you just would have to immerse yourself in them.

So we started trying to track Dylan down.

We tried the fraternity house where he had once been.

No luck there. We got another address, and then yet another.

And everybody said, "Boy, this kid must be popular," you know.

"You're about the tenth guy looking for him" you know, at every place we went.

And I don't know how we finally found him, but we got a current apartment.

This was a John Wayne production number, that John did.

He got a bowling pin, and he got a big cigar...

and John was 6'4" or something like this.

And he wasn't ever intending to hit Dylan with the bowling pin or anything...

but he was really gonna do the bit.

John just started waving the bowling pin over his head, and just saying.;

"I'm gonna beat the hell out of you. Where are my records?"

And Dylan was very scared for the first time around this routine went.

But he maintained his cool somehow...

and it somehow settled into sort of an absurdist drama...

where they would sort of talk.

Dylan would say something interesting, and John would get interesting...

and they'd start to talk, and they'd start to sort of like each other a little bit.

Then John would remember why he was there...

and he'd start brandishing the pin again.

And they'd play the whole scene out again.

I wanted to get to the East Coast to visit Woody Guthrie.

When I first heard him, I didn't know if he was dead or alive, really.

But then I discovered that he was definitely alive...

and he was in a hospital...

with some kind of ailment.

So I thought it'd be a nice gesture to go visit him.

Hitchhiking back then was very acceptable. I had a suitcase and a guitar.

And I don't know, maybe I had $ 10 in my pocket.

Joan Baez, she was staggering.

Kind of like hit my world from a different angle.

She was completely about folk music.

She was an excellent, really excellent guitar player.

When I saw her on television, I thought, you know, like.;

"That girl looks like she might need a singing partner. "

I'd say she was someplace in the back of my mind, you know.

Let the word go forth from this time and place...

to friend and foe alike...

that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.

Ask not what your country can do for you.

Ask what you can do for your country.

Got out of the car on George Washington Bridge...

took the subway down to the Village.

Went to the Café Wha? I looked out at the crowd.

I most likely asked from the stage.;

"Does anybody know where a couple of people could stay tonight?"

It was in old Greenwich Village, which was the '20s bohemia...

and had a very venerable history.

I first came down in 1948...

with a red bandana around my neck...

on the subway to go...

to see if I could find poets...

in Greenwich Village.

But there had been poets.

I probably came into the Village around 1952 or '53. I was a kid.

I was living in Queens, not liking it very much.

And for me, it was very sophisticated. I liked that.

I was into jazz at the time.

I didn't like the folk music thing much at all, I was very snobbish.

Over across the street, there was Nick's.

I actually met Tony Spargo...

who was the drummer on the very first jazz records...

with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, in 1917.

When I was young, it was a very laid-back place...

intermingled with various ethnic groups were lots of what we called bohemians...

doing their art, walking their dogs.

There was a wonderful creative climate there although I didn't...

I wasn't fully aware of it, but it was the center of the art world...

happenings, the first art movements were going on.

It was all there.

You were suddenly able to take your clothes off.

You were suddenly free of all the shackles of family...

the baggage...

of tradition, of bad tradition.

I was looking for freedom, but freedom didn't exist all over America.

Freedom only existed, really, here in the Village, in Greenwich Village.

"America, I've given you all, and now I'm nothing

"America, two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956

"I can't stand my own mind

"America, when will we end the human war?

"Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

"I don't feel good; Don't bother me

"I won't write my poem until I'm in my right mind"

The big breakthrough...

was in an ex-gay bar on MacDougal Street...

formerly the MacDougal Street Bar, I think this was '58 or '59...

then called The Gaslight.

And it was the first poetry reading in one of these sort of coffee shop/bars...

sort of a folk club/coffee shop/bar.

And it was so astonishing that there was a story on Page 3...

a whole page in the Daily News.; "Poets Reading in the Coffee Shop. "

"America, when will you be angelic?

"When will you take off your clothes?

"When will you look at yourself through the grave?

"When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

"America, why are your libraries full of tears?

"America, when will you send your eggs to India?

"I'm sick of your insane demands.

"When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?"

Down the block here was the San Remo.

And every Saturday night you'd have the riots...

between the Stalinists and the Trotskyites.

Glasses flying, that sort of thing.

There's an old bitch upstairs who keeps pounding the floor...

and she's threatening to call the police all the time.

We used to be out at the bar here with James Baldwin, the writer.

And he used to puff smoke:

"This goddamn Irish music!"

And the whole place would erupt:

In Washington Square, early days, it was just a place...

for people to hang out on Sundays and talk and play music...

and kind of jockey around and express themselves.

It was a place where you could put it together so someone could hear a little bit.

There weren't many concerts in those days.

People were starting to play little gigs in these coffeehouses in the Village.

We called them basket houses.

We didn't get paid a dime but we would pass a little bread basket around...

after the set and people would throw change in...

and then we'd pack up our guitars and go round to the next club.

They'd put the singers on in between beat poets to turn the house, essentially.

So you'd get...

three songs, you could sing three songs.

And what it came down to is...

if at the end of your three songs there was still anybody seated...

in the house, you were fired. You weren't doing your job.

Needless to say, we didn't get fired. That we could do.

When we played in the city, who was the audience?

Who were those people walking up and down MacDougal Street?

There was a lot of them.

Some were people from the suburbs coming in to look at the weird scene.

Some were from the city looking at the weird scene.

Some were the weird scene.

It was never clear that this was the audience and this was the singer.

Because maybe half the audience if they had their druthers...

they'd be up on the stage singing as well. It was very interesting.

I was ready for New York.

I started playing immediately and I realized right away...

that I'd come to the right place, because there were many places to play.

I played with Freddy Neil. He was a big star down there.

I did that until about 8.;00, he would give me what he could.

The place was usually packed from 12.;00 to 8.;00...

with tourists and lunch-hour secretaries.

And then at 8:00 all the rest of the houses would open...

where you'd pass the basket and play.

Check it out.

There'd be a carny on the street bringing people down.

"You know, you gotta come down here and see this.

"There's so much weirdness you've never seen in your life. "

Just always, there'd be people coming and going.

I have studied at Oxford University...

I've done my research at the British Museum...

and have matriculated at Brooklyn College.

Sawdust on the floor, tourist traps...

like, a poet, somebody singing a song with a parrot on a shoulder...

Tiny Tim-type characters.

No one who had any recordings out ever played them.

You only played those if you had to.

You would have to make an impression on somebody.

There were many, many singers who were good...

but they couldn't focus their attention on anybody.

They couldn't really get inside somebody's head.

You gotta be able to pin somebody down.

I remember him because he was different. He was doing Woody Guthrie songs.

He had on a little hat, he had a brace.

There's a quality of determination...

and of will that some people have...

where when they're doing something, they're really doing it...

and you know that you have to pay attention to them.

I first met Bob in the winter of 1961.

We were awkward. Neither of us really knew quite what to say.

So as a prop he pulled out this card.

And he was moving his leg like that and he just hands me the card.

And after he handed it to me he kind of glances and then...

continues to sort of talk about Woody Guthrie.

And on the card it said, "I ain't dead yet," signed, Woody Guthrie.

And it was actually Woody's handwriting, I guess, because Bob claimed it was.

Like, Woody was very important to both of us.

Bob, I think, wanted to be more like Woody than I did.

He was able to adopt a kind of theater about himself.

Actually, the very first time that I met him, he was really acting, in a way.

And that was good because you can go anywhere when you're somebody else.

Cinderella, she seems so easy

"It takes one to know one," she smiles

And puts her hands into her back pockets

Bette Davis style

And in comes Romeo, he's moaning

"You Belong to Me, I Believe"

And someone turns and says to him

"My friend, you'd better leave"

And the only sound that's left

after the ambulances go

is Cinderella sweeping up

on Desolation Row

Now the moon is almost hidden

The stars, they're just pretending to hide

The fortune-telling lady

has even taken all her things inside

All except for Cain and Abel

And the Hunchback of Notre Dame

Everyone is either making love

or else expecting rain

And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing

He's getting ready for the show

He's going to the carnival tonight

on Desolation Row

- I want to see this person immediately. - What?

Whoever's gonna shoot me.

How do you find that out, Albert?

Phoned the box office and they say they're gonna shoot me.

Do they do this often?

I don't mind being shot, man, but I don't dig being told about it.

Man, I can't believe that.

- Don't worry, Mickey. I'll protect you. - I hope so.

God.

Don't tell me not to push too hard, man. I'm worried about getting shot.

I'm not gonna push too hard.

Obviously, he was channeling Woody Guthrie.

He was literally channeling him and everything about him.

And I think it was part of his way of finding who he was in the end...

by imitating and assimilating Woody Guthrie.

So I found out where Woody Guthrie was, and I took a bus out to Morristown.

Basically, I think it was an insane asylum.

I thought about it later, it was a sad thing, they put him in a mental home...

because he just had the jitters.

He asked for certain songs and I'd play them.

I was young and impressionable and I think I must have been shocked...

in some kind of way to find him where I found him.

Brother John Sellers, he was the master of ceremonies at Gerde's Folk City.

And there was one night called Hootenanny Night where anybody could play.

We'd go down there every Monday night.

Peter LaFarge, who was sort of a cowboy/Indian...

and Cisco Houston.

A lot of the old Woody Guthrie crowd was still hanging out there.

We just watched and we picked out the performers that were doing it for real...

and tried to pick up what the essence of what they were doing was.

All of us were interested in seeing what the other guy was doing onstage...

because there was a lot more to be learned...

than just songs or picking styles.

Dave Van Ronk, he had that big gruff thing...

but he had this very sweet, sensitive thing going on at the same time.

He was a dichotomy of a performer.

He could take the essence of the song...

and only go after that, not go after the frills.

On Monday nights, Bob Dylan used to come over there...

and he would always, like...

He was always just hanging around.

Sometimes you wanted to say, "Go away."

Liam was profound.

Besides all of his rebel songs...

and his acting career, he would have these incredible sayings.

Like once he said to me after about 30 pints of Guinness...

he was saying, "Remember, Bob, no fear...

"no envy, no meanness."

I said, "Right."

What I heard in the Clancy Brothers was rousing, rebel songs...

Napoleonic in scope.

And they were just these Musketeer-type characters.

And then on the other level you had the romantic ballads that would just...

slay you right in your tracks, the sweetness of Tommy Makem and Liam.

It was just like, take a sword, cut off your head, and then weep.

That's sort of what they were about.

All the great performers that I'd seen...

who I wanted to be like were those kind of performers...

they all had one thing in common.;

It was in their eyes.

Now, there was something in their eyes that would say:

"I know something you don't know," and I wanted to be that kind of performer.

I am a man of constant sorrow

I've seen trouble all my days

I'll say goodbye to Colorado

Where I was born and partly raised

Through this open world I'm a-bound to ramble

Through ice and snow, sleet and rain

I'm a-bound to ride that morning railroad

Perhaps I'll die upon that train

He was playing at some party or something and it was like a whole different guy.

You hear those stories about the blues men...

who go out to the crossroads and sell their soul to the devil...

and come back, all of a sudden able to do stuff...

Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson, that whole mythology.

It was one of those kind of deals, almost.

When he left Minneapolis he was just average.

There was five, six other guys doing the same thing.

When he came back he was doing Woody...

and he was doing Van Ronk and he was fingerpicking.

He was playing cross harp, and this is a matter of a couple of months.

I mean, this is not like he was gone a year or anything.

He was gone a couple of months and apparently whatever he got into...

he got into so intensely that he was like a real interesting performer.

That's when I went to the crossroads and made a big deal.

You know, like...

One night and then went back to Minneapolis...

and it was like, "Hey, where's this guy been?

"You've been to the crossroads."

I wasn't seeing Woody Guthrie anymore.

I was still singing a lot of his songs...

but I'd replaced them with a lot of the other songs, all of a sudden.

I kind of went through Woody Guthrie in a kind of way.

But I didn't really want to go through Woody Guthrie.

I didn't want to feel that it was something just negligible.

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song

About a funny ol' world that's a-coming along

Seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn

It looks like it's a-dyin'

and it's hardly been born

But I really cared, I really wanted to portray my gratitude in some kind of way.

But I knew that I was not gonna be going back to Greystone anymore.

I felt like I had to write that song. I did not consider myself a songwriter at all.

But I needed to write that and I needed to sing it.

So that's why I needed to write it.

'Cause it hadn't been written and that's what I needed to say, I needed to say that.

Here's to Cisco and Sonny and Lead Belly, too

And to all the good people that traveled with you

Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men

that come with the dust

and are gone with the wind

So this guy comes in.

He didn't look too prepossessing. He didn't look too interesting to me.

He didn't look wild or...

He looked like an ordinary kid.

He didn't have the commanding presence.

And he said, "Listen, I got some songs I wanted you to hear."

So I was, "Oh, God. Can you come tomorrow?"

I says, "Get out of here." He says, "No, I want to sing you a song."

So I let him sing the song, then I kick him out...

then he comes back, then he came back.

And then I started pointing to people, I said, "Listen, see that guy in the back room?

"His name is Bob Dylan. You should listen to him.

"The guy's writing good songs. He's terrific."

He told me he never knew the word folk music...

before he came to New York City. What bullshit, God!

And he'd never seen somebody playing a banjo before he came to New York City.

He'd never seen all these things before he came to New York City.

It opened his eyes up wide to what folk music is...

after having lived on the Mississippi River and everything.

"I was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941. Moved to Gallup, New Mexico.

"Then, until now...

"lived in Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, North Dakota, for a little bit.

"Started playing in carnivals when I was 14 with guitar and piano."

"Arvella Gray taught him blues songs...

"a blind street singer from Chicago, about four or five years ago.

"Used to know a guy named Mance Lipscomb, from Navasota, Texas.

"Listened to him a lot. Met him through his grandson, a rock 'n' roller."

Now, listened to Arvella Gray in Chicago...

Mance Lipscomb in Texas...

I should have figured out right away, he's bullshitting me.

And I only found out later...

that he had borrowed 400 records from Tony Glover...

or something like that, which he still hasn't returned.

And things like that.

So I was a setup, a very easy setup, and I'm proud of it.

Because the guy wrote good songs. I didn't care what he was telling me.

I saw it advertised one day

A Bear Mountain picnic was comin' my way

Come along with us and take a trip

We'll transport you up there on a ship

Bring the wife and kids

Fun for all

Yippee

The owner of the place finally gave me a two-week run.

He had me open for John Lee Hooker.

Well, it don't seem to me quite so funny

What some of these people are gonna do for money

There's a brand new gimmick every day

Just to take somebody's money away

I didn't really feel like I was making a step forward anywhere.

Things were taking its natural course.

Now, November 4, Bob Dylan will be singing.

And that should be a very eventful occasion.

Bob was born in Duluth, Minnesota...

but, Bob, you weren't raised in Duluth, were you?

I was raised in Gallup, New Mexico.

And did you get many songs there?

Got a lot of cowboy songs there. Indian songs.

Well, I'm gonna get you, Sally gal

I'm gonna get you, Sally gal

I'm gonna get you, Sally gal

I'm gonna get you, Sally gal

I didn't start to have any ambition until I started working more and more.

I wondered how people recorded. I wondered how you get to do that.

There were always talent scouts in the clubs.

No one had ever spoken to me directly about making any records...

so I just assumed they'd passed on me.

The most important new vocal personality of recent years.;

Johnny Mathis, who vaulted over a Columbia microphone to stardom.

I always looked for songs that had a kind of excellence, lasting quality...

and artists who produced a beautiful sound with their voice.

From 1953, I was a head of A&R at Columbia.

That was the sound of the day.

People would want to hear a beautiful voice sing a melodic song.

- John, are you gonna do one, or was I? - You will.

Okay. I'll do Man of Constant Sorrow then with the autoharp.

We recorded for Folkways.

We lived in the clear, pure light of non-commercial...

long-playing, short-selling records for Folkways.

I learned it from a record that was made down in the Southern mountains...

in the late 1920s.

We also seemed to represent some idea about, excuse the expression...

integrity, or standing for something authentic or real in music.

We were always pointing to other people's music...

pointing to old singers, Appalachian singers, blues singers.

I think we were set up as a...

pillar of virtue.

The folksinging scene was either commercial folksinging...

for like a college kind of crowd: Harry Belafonte, Brothers Four...

that commercial... They had records that were on the pop charts.

And then there was the other side, which was intellectual.

People would just sit there, you know, I think...

And playing in the environment that I was playing in...

was neither of those.

I took him up to Folkways Records and that's written about in my notebook here...

where they treated him like shit. They wouldn't talk to him.

And he writes, "God, I thought I came into the wrong place."

Sing Out on the door, "Folkways" on the door...

Moe Asch, Irwin Silber, rejects him, throw him out on the street.

And he really felt bad about it and I felt bad about it...

'cause I don't push people every day. I've only pushed two people in my life.

I take him up to Maynard Solomon, at Vanguard Records.

And they say no.

And many years later I said, "Why did you say no to him?"

And he said, "Well, Izzy, we don't record freaks at Vanguard Records."

I said, "I see. Joan Baez, not a freak.

"The other people not... Nobody's a freak, just Bob Dylan."

I was standing in the audience with Maynard Solomon.

Maynard says, "What do you think of him?" I said, "That's good!"

I said, "What do you think of him?" He says, "It's too visceral."

John discovered Billie Holiday, Blind Boy Fuller, Lena Horne...

Count Basie.

Yeah, he was kind of like a Damon Runyon character. Is that the word?

One of these old Broadway guys, buzz-cut haircut.

He was very special in a lot of ways. He was very enthusiastic.

He had great love of music, and it just radiated out of him.

When I met him, a review had just come out of The New York Times...

of the set I'd played at Gerde's the previous night.

Hammond had seen the article and asked me right then and there...

whether I wanted to record for Columbia Records.

I thought it was almost unreal. I mean, no one would think that...

this kind of folk music would be recorded on Columbia Records.

John called me in my office at Columbia.

He says, "Come on down, I want you to hear something."

He didn't tell me who it was or anything. I come down.

There's this kid, all dressed up, with the boots and the suede jacket...

and he had the harmonica on.

And he was singing in this, you know, rough-edged voice.

I will admit I didn't see the greatness of it.

They recorded the popular hits of the day...

of people usually with beautiful tones of voices...

and great arrangements.

I don't know what they thought of my stuff up there.

He has no voice, I mean he doesn't produce a beautiful sound.

I was used to finding guys like Bennett and Damone and Mathis.

But when somebody like John Hammond is so confident of somebody's talent...

you have to respect that, for no other reason than his track record.

I didn't tell anybody for a bit...

because I almost wasn't sure it was happening myself.

I don't think I really told anybody until I actually...

went through with the sessions.

I first heard this from Rick Von Schmidt.

He lives in Cambridge.

I met him one day in...

the green pastures of Harvard University.

I have a habit I picked up someplace along the way.

Whatever works for me, not to give that away...

so easily, you know.

Baby, let me follow you down

Baby, let me follow you down

Well, I'll do anything in this God almighty world

If you just let me follow you down

When I did make that first record...

I used songs which I just knew but I hadn't really performed them a lot.

I wanted just to record stuff that was off the top of my head...

and see what would happen.

There is a house

down in New Orleans

They call The Rising Sun

And it's been the ruin

of many a poor girl

And me, oh, God, I'm one

The House of the Rising Sun is on that record.

I'd never done that song before...

but I heard it every night 'cause Van Ronk would do it.

So I thought he was really on to something with the song, so I just recorded it.

Bobby picked up the chord changes...

for the song from me.

It really altered the song considerably, although the lyric was...

pretty much the straight House of the Rising Sun lyric...

and so was the melody.

And when he was doing, I guess it was his first album...

he asked me if I would mind...

if he recorded my version of House of the Rising Sun.

And I had some plans to record it.

So I said, "Well, gee, Bob, I'd rather you didn't...

"because I'm gonna record it myself soon."

And Bobby said, "Oh-oh."

The mystery of being in a recording studio did something to me...

and those are the songs that came out.

Now the only thing

a gambler needs

is a suitcase and a trunk

After he recorded it, I had to stop singing the song...

because people were constantly...

accusing me of having got the song from Bobby's record.

Now that was very, very annoying.

But I couldn't blame that on him and I didn't.

The whole thing was a tempest in a teapot.

Later on, when Eric Burdon and the Animals picked the song up from Bobby...

and recorded it, Bobby told me that he had had to drop the song...

because everybody was accusing him of ripping it off of Eric Burdon!

Feelin' funny in my mind, Lord

I believe I'm fixin' to die

When I got the disk, I played it and I was highly disturbed.

I just wanted to cross this record out and make another record immediately.

I thought I'd recorded the wrong songs...

and I'd already written a few of my own, that I thought maybe...

I should have stuck on there. I was way past that record.

Or part of me was just saying...

that I didn't want to record that record anyway, that I just did it...

I didn't want to give away anything that was really...

dear to me or something.

When Bobby signed with Columbia, it was big news on the street.

Everybody wanted that.

People couldn't bring themselves to admit...

that they were that hungry.

They turned it into a moral issue. They had to.

Because otherwise they were going to have to take...

long looks at themselves and might not like what they saw.

Play.

Baby, let me follow you down

Baby, let me follow you down

Well, I'd do anything in this God almighty world

If you just let me follow you down

I'll buy you a diamond ring

Yes, I'll buy you a wedding gown

I'll do anything in this God almighty world

If you just let me follow you down

Yes, I'd do anything in this God almighty world

If you just let me follow you down

To think that entertainers always have to be happy and funny...

is kind of a shallow thing.

In fact, I've often remembered one of Bob's quotes is:

"Happy? Anybody can be happy. What's the purpose of that?"

The original Mexican name was La Feria de las Flores...

The Festival of Flowers.

The moment I became acquainted with old songs...

I realized people were always changing them.

Think of it as an age-old process. It's been going on for thousands of years.

People take old songs, change them a little...

add to them, adapt them for new people. It happens in every other field.

Lawyers change old laws to fit new citizens.

So I'm one in this long chain and so are millions of other musicians.

And Woody stepped right in that. He was always making up verses...

songs about real life, real people, real events.

The idea is that you make up a song about something real...

don't expect that it'll ever make any money.

It may never be heard by more than a few dozen people, but who knows? Who knows?

And I look upon us all as Woody's children.

Bob Dylan is... Well, you must be 20 years old now, I assume.

Yeah, I must be 20.

- Are you? - Yeah, I'm 20.

Tell me about the songs that you've written yourself that you sing.

I don't claim to call them folk songs or anything.

I just call them contemporary songs.

Come you ladies and you gentlemen, a-listen to my song

Sing it to you right, but you might think it's wrong

Just a little glimpse of a story I'll tell

'Bout an East Coast city that you all know well

It's hard times from the country

Livin' down in New York town

Come you ladies and you gentlemen, listen to my song

The traditional songs gave us ideas...

and attitudes about life that you could borrow from...

that you could build your songs on.

I will not go down under the ground

'Cause somebody tells me that death's comin' round

I wrote them anywhere I was.

You could write them on the subway or in a café or wherever.

You could write them talking to somebody else...

and be scribbling down a song.

Let me die in my footsteps

Before I go down under the ground

The first time I think I ever saw him perform a topical song, he was singing...

"Let me die with my boots on, before I go under the ground."

And that was a real feeling in New York at that time.

People were building bomb shelters everywhere...

and that we'll live out our lives in preparation for that kind of crap.

And here we were in the middle of Greenwich Village...

like a little pus pimple in the middle of this huge society...

saying, "This has gotta go.

"We don't... I don't agree with that. I'm not gonna live my life that way."

No more auction block for me

I was working at CORE and that was an incredible time.

A call would come in, and people would say, "Oh, my God...

"so-and-so was beaten to a pulp and so-and-so's in the hospital. "

These were traumatic times to live through.

And just the way I felt was the insane... It was insane.

Why should this be happening?

And I'm sure Bob had that same thing. You just can't live through this.

You live in your own little world and your own interests...

but the outer world is definitely part of it.

How many roads must a man walk down

before you call him a man?

Yes, and how many seas must a white dove sail

before she sleeps in the sand?

Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly

before they're forever banned?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind

The answer is blowin' in the wind

I didn't really know if that song was good or bad or... It felt right.

But I didn't really know...

that it had any kind of anthemic quality or anything.

How many years must a mountain exist

before it is washed to the sea?

I wrote the songs to perform the songs.

And I needed to sing, like, in that language.

Which is a language that I hadn't heard before.

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind

The answer is blowin' in the wind

How could he write.;

"How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?"

This is what my father went through.

He was the one who wasn't called a man, you know.

So, where is he coming from?

White people don't have hard times.

This was my thinking back then, because I was a kid, too.

What he was writing was inspirational...

you know, they were inspirational songs.

And they would inspire. It's the same as gospel.

He was writing truth.

By writing good songs...

and writing about contemporary ideas in traditional forms, which I understood.

And made it like was written today...

but it sounded like it could have been written 200 years ago, also.

It sounded current and old at the same time.

So it wasn't just like singing songs the way Pete Seeger would sing it...

you know, 'cause it's important that you sing these songs.

He sang songs that affected us.

Well, it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe

If'n you don't know by now

And it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe

It'll never do, somehow

When your rooster crows at the break of dawn

Look out your window and I'll be gone

You're the reason I'm travelin' on

But don't think twice, it's all right

Neither one of us had a fixed place to live, we were both a bit nomadic.

So we kind of had this private little existence, in a way.

I am leading a quiet life on Lower East Broadway

I was an American I am an American boy

I read The American Boy magazine and became a Boy Scout in the suburbs

I thought I was Tom Sawyer, catching crayfish in the Bronx River

and imagining the Mississippi

I had a baseball mitt and an American Flyer bike

Everything was meshed up at that time.

Everything was like just all in like a blender.

Everyone was interested in whatever was going on.

I stayed at a lot of people's houses which had poetry books...

and poetry volumes...

and I'd read what I found...

I found Verlaine poems or Rimbaud...

you know, "Drunken Boat," Illuminations.

Whether it was these wild and crazy poets that were getting up on stage...

or whether it was a musician playing some riff in a jazz club...

or some bluegrass guy, some old roots music...

it filters through you, you speak them when they come out verbally and you play them.

We were doing things totally instinctively. It was an instinctive awakening.

Lightning strikes every once in a while, in a different place.

Nobody knows why.

The night of the Cuban Missile Crisis...

the general feeling was, the world was gonna end or something like that.

I mean, it's quite heavy.

I walked into The Gaslight and Bob was there.

Just a few people listening to him sing.

He said, "Why don't you come up, we'll sing some songs together.

"Let's do that old Carter Family song.; You're Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone. "

I was playing the nice Carter Family thing, and we're singing.

And I'm thinking, "Who's gonna miss us when we're gone?

"We're all gonna be gone, you know.

"What the hell is this?"

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?

And where have you been, my darling young one?

I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains.

I've walked and I crawled on six crooked highways

I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests

I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans

I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard

And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard

it's a hard

It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

When I got back from India, and got to the West Coast...

there was a poet, Charlie Plymell...

at a party in Bolinas...

played me a record of this new young folk singer.

And I heard...

Hard Rain, I think...

and wept.

'Cause it seemed that...

the torch had been passed...

to another generation.

From earlier bohemian or beat...

illumination and self-empowerment.

And what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?

And what'll you do now, my darling young one?

I'm a-going back out before the rain starts a-fallin'

And I'll head for the depths of the deepest dark forest

Where the people are many and their hands are all empty

Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters

And I'll tell it, and think it, and speak it, and breathe it

And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it

Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin'

But I'll know my song well before I start singin'

And it's a hard, and it's a hard

And it's a hard, and it's a hard

And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

A very famous saying among the Tibetan Buddhists:

"If the student is not better than the teacher, then the teacher is a failure."

And I was really knocked out by the eloquence.

Particularly, "I'll know my song well before I start singing."

And, "Where all souls shall reflect it."

Or you know, "Stand on the mountain where everybody can hear."

It's sort of this biblical prophecy.

Poetry is words that are empowered that make your hair stand on end...

that you recognize instantly as being some form of subjective truth...

that has an objective reality to it, because somebody's realized it.

Then you call it poetry later.

Take this one you sang, this Hard Rain's Gonna Fall.

Even though it may have come out of your feelings about atomic rain.

No, it wasn't atomic rain, no. Somebody else thought that, too.

- It's not atomic rain. - Go ahead.

- It's just a hard rain. It's not atomic rain. - Hard rain.

All your songs are about more than the actual event...

that may have caused it.

- You know what I mean? - I'm not a topical songwriter.

- So you're not a topical songwriter. - No, I don't really even like that word.

I mean, it's not a song about a certain event.

- Yeah, it's not, no. - It's beyond that.

The folk idiom is so widespread...

that you could take any part of it and rework a song.

I never thought I was breaking through anything.

I was just working with an existing form that was there.

I was definitely not inventing anything that hadn't been tried before...

some part of the picture, you know.

You must learn to control yourselves. Is this on?

Check. Richard?

Is this mike on? Richard.

You walk into the room

With your pencil in your hand

You see somebody naked

You say, "Who is that, man?"

You try so hard

But you don't understand

Just what you'll say when you get home

Yes, because you know something is happening here

But you don't know what it is

Do you

Mr. Jones?

You have many contacts

Out there among the lumberjacks

To get you facts

When someone attacks your imagination

But nobody has any respect

Anyway, they just expect

You to take your check

And give them to tax-deductible

Charity organization

Don't boo me anymore. Don't boo me. God, that booing, I can't stand it.

Oh, my God. It's hard to get in tune when they're booing.

Yeah, I can't get in tune at all when they're booing.

I can't hear anything. I don't even want to get in tune.

When they yell in this weird nasal tone from here.

Jesus, you know, I don't understand how can they buy the tickets up so fast.

- I mean, you know. Let's get that light off. - Turn the light off.

Bobby Dylan, CBS label, brand new one...

in the Caroline Countdown of Sound, lying at number 18.

Let's Go and Get Stoned. Not this time of the day, surely.

Well, they'll stone ya when you're trying to be so good

They'll stone ya just a-like they said they would

They'll stone ya when you're tryin' to go home

They'll stone ya when you're there all alone

But I would not feel so all alone

Everybody must get stoned

Dylan's first albums did not sell.

I don't think we sold an album per store in America. I think, 2,500.

Salespeople, you know, would say, "This is Hammond's folly. "

Since he cost so little to record, let John have his folly.

On my second album, all of a sudden people started to take notice...

that never noticed before.

Grossman came into the picture around there.

He was kind of like a Col. Tom Parker figure...

all immaculately dressed, every time you see him.

You could smell him coming.

Al Grossman was the first successful folk manager...

who knew how to make money out of his singers.

He would own the recording studio...

he would own the music publishing company, he would own Bob Dylan.

He would own Peter, Paul and Mary.

He would sell a Bob Dylan song to Peter, Paul and Mary...

who would sing on a recording in his studio, which he was getting the rights.

So he would get a salami... He had a salami technique going.

He would get a piece of the action from six or seven different directions.

He created Peter, Paul and Mary...

because he saw people really wanted a fresh, young group like this...

that they could relate to.

He changed Paul's name to Paul, from Noel.

So it would have that biblical inference. He was a genius.

I knew Mary Travers, you know, of Peter, Paul and Mary.

I had known her when she was younger. She used to sing in Washington Square Park.

And she was a nice person and very lively teenager.

One time, in the middle of winter...

and it was cold on MacDougal Street, you know, like February...

I saw her, and I says, "Where have you been, Mary?"

She says, "Well, I've been in Florida for the last couple of..."

I don't know if it was weeks or months.

"A man named Albert Grossman has put me together...

"with some other guys from the coffeehouses...

"and we're trying out a new group there.

"We're singing."

And I said, "You mean you were in Florida all this time?

"Where's your tan? Didn't you ever go out in the sun?"

She says, "No, Albert told me I shouldn't go out in the sun.

"That I was supposed to be the pale, blonde, indoor type."

And it really made my flesh creep, to put it truthfully...

because I was shivering cold in New York...

and she had the chance to get out in the sun...

but that she was being manipulated, that the whole thing had an image...

it had a look.

I just felt that this was a bad sign.

I didn't feel that Albert manipulated Bob...

because I think Bob was weirder than Albert...

so that he couldn't manipulate him.

And by weird, I don't mean in a bad way but I mean that he had enough games.

Now, Bob was also a terrific opportunist...

so if someone gave him an opportunity to do something, he could use it.

I don't know if Bob was a hustler.

I think he just knew what he wanted and he could focus.

He was very astute.

He could pick out somebody who was important. I mean, any musician would...

but he was really good at it.

Albert tells me one day he's gonna send a guy over to see me named Bob Dylan.

He's got a guitar, with some kind of a contraption around his neck...

so that the harmonica is up to his mouth.

Now, believe me when I tell you...

nobody had ever seen this on Broadway before.

And he starts singing for me.

And one of the things that I pride myself on is that I think I'm one of the few...

At that time, I may have been the only one in the music business...

who listened to the words.

And when I heard...

"How many years must one man have before he can hear people cry," I flipped.

I can't even remember what the songs were that he played me that day...

but I said, "Okay, that's it. I want you."

How many roads must a man walk down

Before they call him a man

The music business per se was dominated by music publishers.

In those days, the song was important. You would pick a song and work on it.

Historically, whenever you see Dylan mentioned in print...

it's always John Hammond who discovered Bob Dylan.

I think the guy who made Dylan popular was me...

if I say so myself.

I'm the one who started to get his songs all over the place.

We never had resistance within the company to him.

My boss, the old man, Herman Starr, got on it right away.

Why? Because they smelled dollars, that's why.

I gotta sing you something to tell you something.

It's called Masters of War.

Come you masters of war

You that build the big guns

You that build the death planes

You that build all the bombs

You that hide behind walls

You that hide behind desks

I just want you to know I can see through your masks

And I hope that you die

And your death will come soon

I'll follow your casket

All the pale afternoon

And I'll watch while you're lowered

Down to your deathbed

And I'll stand over your grave till I'm sure that you're dead

I did a concert of his in Town Hall. It might have been '63.

And when the concert was over...

Bob called me over and he said:

"Is anybody in the stage door waiting for me?"

The fact is that I do not blame any artist for seeking fame...

which is in a sense, recognition.

You want to know that you've pleased an audience...

you want to know that the audience is interested in you.

He was, in his way, a dynamic performer.

But I think mostly the material that he was doing was so great...

that everybody responded to it.

Oxford Town, Oxford Town Everybody's got their heads bowed down

The sun don't shine above the ground

Ain't a-goin' down to Oxford Town

The topical song movement was a product of the Left.

And the Left, at that time, would have been Pete Seeger...

and the Weavers, and Woody Guthrie.

These people created material based on topical situations.

Pete Seeger, very tall, like a towering figure.

I didn't realize he was a communist.

I really wasn't sure even what a communist was.

If he was, it wouldn't have mattered to me anyway.

I really didn't think about people in those terms.

Bobby was not really a political person.

He was thought of...

as being...

a political person and a man of the Left.

And in a general sort of way, yes, he was. But he was not interested...

in the true nature of the Soviet Union or any of that crap.

We thought he was hopelessly politically naive.

But in retrospect, I think he may have been more sophisticated than we were.

The folk music revival was postponed by almost 10 years by the witch hunt.

I mean, when US Army publishes pamphlets on how to spot a communist...

that have lines in them like, "He will sometimes play the guitar"...

that kind of thing had a very...

repressive and suppressive effect.

The song Goodnight Irene was all over the country.

You couldn't escape that song...

in the United States of America, in the summer of 1950.

Right then, the very moment that Irene was at the top of the Top 40...

a bunch of blacklisters probably said to themselves:

"How did we let these commie so-and-so's slip through our fingers?"

They started out to see that we were blacklisted, and about two years later...

instead of singing in the Waldorf-Astoria, or Ciro's in Hollywood...

we were singing in Daffy's Bar and Grill on the outskirts of Cleveland...

and decided to take a sabbatical.

Lee says, it turned into a Mond-ical and a Tuesd-ical.

By the time McCarthy, I think, started to wane...

the folk music thing started to come up.

I say it's in the interest of every human being in the United States of America...

to get some good senators out of Mississippi for a change.

And you can do it, and you will do it soon, I know.

I got him to go with Pete and Theodore Bikel...

as they were both going down to the South.

The day Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught

And I encouraged him to go with them and he did, as part of an education.

The Civil Rights Movement was in full swing...

and there was a big field outside Greenwood...

with several hundred people.

I heard some speechifying there that I'll never forget in all my life.

And I remember Bob singing a song which really caused people to think.

He's Only a Pawn in The Game.

He was singing about the man who killed Medgar Evers.

In other words, don't just think of this one man...

who did this murder, but think of the whole situation.

To be on the side of people who are struggling for something...

doesn't necessarily mean you are being political.

Oh, my name it ain't nothin'

My age it means less

The country I come from

Is called the Midwest

I was taught and brought up there

The laws to abide

And that the land that I live in

Has God on its side

I would say that Bob was gifted, and it was flowering.

He had a great desire to change the world.

We even talked about it.

We thought that segregation wasn't gonna last...

and that we were gonna have something to do with ending it.

We really believed we were gonna have a part...

as songwriters in changing the world.

I had first laid eyes on Bob in Gerde's Folk City.

I had been told about him.

"This guy's a genius and he writes these incredible songs...

"and he admires Woody Guthrie," and all this stuff.

I was very dubious, you know...

when people raved about somebody other than myself.

But I went, and sure enough...

he was everything that they had said he was.

We both had our baby fat. That's what I think of when I look at the early pictures.

Smooth skin, baby fat. We were really young.

Bob looked like a ragamuffin.

Probably one of the things I found so appealing about him.

He would bring out the mother instinct...

in a woman who thought her mother instinct was dead.

He came out and stayed with me in a beautiful house, in Carmel Valley.

Bob liked to write there.

And he would just stand, tapping away at that typewriter.

He would always say, "What do you think of this?"

And I wouldn't understand the thing at all, but I loved it.

So I went, "Okay, I'm gonna figure this one out." So I read through it.

And I gave back my interpretation of what I thought it was about.

He said, "That's pretty fucking good."

He would say, "See now, a bunch of years from now...

"all these people, all these assholes...

"are gonna be writing about all the shit I write.

"I don't know where the fuck it comes from. I don't know what the fuck it's about.

"And they're gonna write what it's about."

Oh, the time will come up

When the winds will stop

And the breeze will cease to be breathin'

Like the stillness in the wind

Before the hurricane begins

The hour that the ship comes in

And the sea will split

And the ships will hit

And the sands on the shoreline will be shaking

Bob would write. Just write and write and write.

And one time, we pulled into someplace...

and I was okay by then. Bare feet or not, I was famous.

But this scruffy-looking guy I had with me...

and the people behind the desk were having none of it...

and they said they didn't have a room.

And now, of course, I was livid...

and pulled all my punches, and got him a room.

And he wrote a song that just was devastating:

The Hour The Ship Comes In.

And I could see him hanging them all.

He'd never sort of fess up to that sort of thing, but that's what it seemed like to me.

Working out whatever feelings...

he might have had about not being given a room...

in a brilliant song, in one night.

And they'll raise their hands

Sayin' we'll meet all your demands

There'll be a shout from the bow, "Your days are numbered"

And like Pharaoh's tribe

They'll be drownded in the tide

And like Goliath, they'll be conquered

You had country folks and city folks there.

We purposely tried to mix it up at Newport.

There was Johnny Cash.

And then you had O.J. Abbott singing some of the ballads he knew...

as a young man working in the lumber camps.

Right side by side.

There were 15,000 people, and that seemed to me just immense.

Everyone was there who played folk music. Old and new.

Sort of younger people, too.

We kind of bonded in a way, music-wise, you know...

what we were singing and what he was writing.

A bullet from the back of a bush

Took Medgar Evers's blood

A finger fired the trigger to his name

A handle hid out in the dark

The hand set the spark

Two eyes took the aim

Behind a man's brain

But he can't be blamed

He's only a pawn in their game

I was the only singer there probably singing the songs that he'd written.

And most likely, two years earlier to that...

I wouldn't have been able to get into Newport.

You got more than the blacks, don't complain

You're better than them

You been born with white skin, they explain

It was quite a sensation.

He was singing a lot of, what they called then, protest songs.

I've always hated that designation.

And it was very much...

in the spirit of the time.

Pete and the crowd around Broadside magazine...

had fallen head over heels in love with him.

Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught

They lowered him down as a king

But when the shadowy sun sets on the one

That fired the gun

He'll see by his grave

On the stone that remains

Carved next to his name

His epitaph plain

Only a pawn in their game

There was Woody Guthrie, transition to Pete Seeger...

who carried on Woody's tradition.

Now who was to carry on from Pete Seeger?

And in that spot really, came Bob Dylan.

So we began to recognize that Bobby...

would be the continuation in that tradition.

I wrote this song. It tells a story...

if you like stories.

- Maybe it doesn't do anything. - Maybe it doesn't tell a story.

It was a very, very exciting... I felt...

it was like, Bob was my pal.

We were involved in the same thing. And I knew he was gonna be a massive star...

and I liked that.

Let me say something?

We just have to sing one, that's all. That's the introduction.

Oh my name it is nothin'

My age it means less

The country I come from

Is called the Midwest

I was taught and brought up there

The laws to abide

And that the land that I live in

Has God on its side

Oh the history books tell it

They tell it so well

The cavalries charged

And the Indians fell

The cavalries charged

And the Indians died

Oh the country was young

With God on its side

I wrote a lot of songs in a quick amount of time.

I could do that then...

because the process was new to me.

I felt like...

I'd discovered something no one else had ever discovered...

and I was in a sort of an arena artistically that no one else had ever been in before...

ever, although I might have been wrong about that.

One time ago a crazy dream came to me

I dreamt I was walkin' in World War Three

I went to the doctor the very next day

To see what kind of words he had to say

He said it was a bad dream

I was on top of this 12-foot station and I had a long lens.

I was looking at Bob Dylan coming out on stage.

Well, down the corner by the hot-dog stand

I seen another man

I said, "Howdy, friend

"I guess there's just us two"

He screamed, and down the road he flew

Thought I was a communist

He was Charlie Chaplin. He was Dylan Thomas.

He talked like Woody Guthrie. He was constantly moving.

More time passed and now it seems

Everybody's having them dreams

Everybody sees theyself walkin' around with nobody else

And all the people can be half right some of the time

Some of the people can be all right part of the time

But all the people can't be all right all of the time

Abraham Lincoln said that

I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours

I said that

In old Irish mythology, they talk about the shape-changers.

He changed voices. He changed images.

It wasn't necessary for him to be...

a definitive person.

He was a receiver.

He was possessed.

And he articulated...

what the rest of us wanted to say but couldn't say.

How many roads must a man walk down

before you call him a man?

How many seas must a white dove sail

before she sleeps in the sand?

It's almost enough to make you...

believe in Jung's notion of collective unconscious.

That if there is an American collective unconscious...

if you could believe in something like that...

that Bobby had somehow tapped into it.

And there were always...

these sometimes very faint resonances.

In taking all the elements that I've ever known...

to make wide-sweeping statements which conveyed a feeling...

that was in the general essence of the spirit of the times.

I think I managed to do that.

I thought that I needed to press on...

and get as far into it as I could.

Is blowin' in the wind

I would like to say that he has his finger on the pulse of our generation.

Bob Dylan.

There will be singing through the night, in the town of Newport.

I'm looking for a place that will "collect, clip, bath," and return my dog...

"KN1-7727, cigarettes and tobacco."

"Animals and birds bought or sold on commission."

I want a dog that's gonna collect and clean my bath, return my cigarette...

and give tobacco to my animals and then give my birds a commission.

I'm looking for somebody to sell my dog...

collect my clip, buy my animal, and straighten out my bird.

I'm looking for a place to bathe my bird...

buy my dog, collect my clip...

sell me cigarettes and commission my bath.

I'm looking for a place that's going to collect my commission...

sell my dog, burn my bird, and sell me to the cigarette.

Going to bird my buy, collect my will, and bathe my commission.

I'm looking for a place that's going to animal my soul...

knit my return, bathe my foot, and collect my dog.

Commission me to sell my animals, to the bird to clip and buy my bath...

and return me back to the cigarettes.

These are all protest songs. Now, come on.

This is not British music, it's American music. Now, come on.

When you're lost in the rain in Juarez

And it's Eastertime too

When your gravity's down

And negativity don't get you through

Just don't put on any airs

When you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue

They got some hungry women there

And they really make a mess out of you

Sweet Melinda

The peasants call her the goddess of gloom

She speaks good English

My left fingertips?

- Yeah, let me feel them. - Good God, man.

What?

And picking up Angel

Who just arrived here from the coast

Who looked so fine at first

But left looking just like a ghost

Bob!

Every single one of them. That's...

That's all I do, is protest.

The March on Washington was not only a moment of extreme hopefulness...

it was a moment of the confirmation of the possibility...

of that hope becoming a reality.

That was the moment of recognition...

of what people could do to change history.

I have a dream...

that one day...

this nation will rise up...

and live out the true meaning of its creed.;

"We hold these truths to be self-evident...

"that all men are created equal."

I was up close when King was giving that speech.

To this day it still affects me in a profound way.

I would like now to introduce a young singer...

from New York, Bob Dylan.

I looked out the podium, I looked out at the crowd...

and I remember thinking to myself.;

"Man, I've never seen such a large crowd."

Oh the time will come up When the winds will stop

And the breeze will cease to be breathing

Like the stillness in the wind Before the hurricane begins

The hour that the ship comes in

Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty.

We are free at last.

And the ship's wise men Will remind you once again

That the whole wide world is watching

He would take individuals and infuse them with life that you could understand.

So even if he never considered himself a protest singer, he was a protest singer.

And he saw what was happening all around him...

and everybody else saw what was happening all around them...

but he voiced that for the first time.

"Hard rain's gonna fall" means something's going to happen.

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?

And where have you been, my darling young one?

I've stumbled on the side of 12 misty mountains

I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways

I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests

And I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans

I've been 10,000 miles in the mouth of a graveyard

And it's a hard and it's a hard

And it's a hard and it's a hard

And it's a

He's been shot! Oswald has been shot.

Rain's a-gonna fall

We were going to make this world a decent, better place...

but that loss, I think it traumatized the nation terribly.

The Emergency Civil Liberties Union...

was people who were really, deeply involved...

in progressive politics, were idealists...

and had a dream about fairness and justice.

Well, here's Bobby, he's 21 years old or whatever, he gets up there...

and they're giving him an award and his discomfort was extraordinary.

And he pointed his finger at them and he said...

"I haven't got any guitar. I can talk, though.

"I want to thank you for the Tom Paine Award...

"on behalf of everybody that went down to Cuba.

"First of all, because they're all young and it took me a long time to get young...

"and now I consider myself young, and I'm proud of it.

"I'm proud that I'm young.

"And I only wish that all you people who are sitting out here tonight...

"weren't here, and I could see all kinds of faces with hair on their head...

"and everything like that, everything leading to youngness."

You know, they were trying to build me up as a topical songwriter.

I was never a topical songwriter to begin with...

for whatever reason they were doing it...

was reasons not, really... That didn't really apply to me.

"Old people, when their hair grows out, they should go out.

"I look down to see the people that are governing me...

"and making my rules, and they haven't got any hair on their head.

"I get very uptight about it.

"There's no black and white, left and right to me any more.

"There's only up and down, and down is very close to the ground.

"And I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial, such as politics."

The evening that Dylan was given the Freedom Award...

from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee...

apparently he got up, stood on his hind legs and said he was not a political poet...

and nobody's left wing servant...

but an independent minstrel or something.

And astonished and pissed everybody off...

by not being a nice trained seal.

People were expecting him to give the same thing over and over again...

in a precise manner, and a precise theory, in a precise way, and it got creepy...

because why should you have to push yourself into a tunnel that isn't yours?

I mean, you're driving along and all these roads are apparent.

Why do you have to take that tunnel, and go in and it's literally a tunnel...

because it's political in its theory?

Whereas you're out there, driving around...

with all this other scenery going on, and that's what you're bringing out.

I was like an outsider, anyway.

I'd come to town as an outsider, and still, in a lot of ways...

I was still more outside than I ever was, really.

They were trying to make me an insider to some kind of trip they were on.

I don't think so.

Through the mad mystic hammering

of the wild ripping hail

The sky cracked its poems

in naked wonder

That the clinging of the church bells

blew far into the night

Leaving only bells of lightning

and its thunder

Striking for the gentle

striking for the kind

Striking for the guardians

and protectors of the mind

And the poet and the painter

who lights up his rightful time

And we gazed upon

The chimes of freedom flashing

Bob had a concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium...

where he told everybody how he and Neuwirth and them had traveled...

across the country and he sang Chimes of Freedom Flashing...

and it was incredible.

After the concert, all of a sudden we found ourselves trapped.

There was a press of people outside.

We made it into the station wagon, and then all the people came rushing over...

to the station wagon, and we slowly started to move the station wagon out.

And I turned around and saw... There was an amp and his guitars...

and their suitcases in the back with a little tarp over it, and I saw the tarp moving.

Two young girls stowed away under the tarp.

So we had to stop and gently eject them.

And of course, then all the people were pressing around.

Bobby!

All of a sudden, he had become an idol.

That was the beginning of people wanting more from him.

You know, as if just the songs weren't enough.

Everybody wanted to sleep with Bobby...

to get high with Bobby.

The reverence was for Bobby, but it was also for what he had created...

and everybody wanted to get close to it.

The desire to be next to him produced a huge magnet which drew everybody.

Young and old.

Genius makes its own rules, and Dylan is a genius.

A singing conscience and moral referee, as well as a preacher.

He's also a very embarrassed young man now, because...

It's always embarrassing to sit there with your feet in cement...

while somebody compliments you either casually or lavishly.

But, I've been reading a number of stories about Bob this afternoon...

and they are all of that order.

A comment in Billboard, the trade publication, says:

"Dylan's poetry is born of a painful awareness...

"of the tragedy that underlies the contemporary human condition."

Bob, do you sing partly your own songs...

and partly other people's, or where do you get your material?

- Well, they're all mine, now. - You sing all your own material?

And how long have you been writing your own music?

For about two years.

He came to be as he is because things needed saying...

and the young people were the ones who wanted to say them.

He somehow had an ear on his generation.

I don't have to tell you. You know him, he's yours, Bob Dylan.

I ain't looking to compete with you

Beat or cheat or mistreat you

Simplify you, classify you

Deny, defy or crucify you

All I really want to do

Is, baby, be friends with you

I want to say thank you.

I want to say thank you. I want to say thank you, I love you.

Well, it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, baby

If you don't know by now

Johnny Cash was more like a religious figure to me.

And there he was at Newport, you know, standing side by side.

Meeting him was the high thrill of a lifetime.

And, just the fact that he had sung one of my songs...

was just unthinkable.

Johnny Cash and June Carter came by after Bob had put a couple...

three tunes on tape for him, this little portable machine.

Johnny called him out in the hall...

and Bob came back in a few minutes later, he was holding this guitar and he says:

"He gave me his guitar."

Neuwirth was saying, "Wow, that's an old country tradition.

"If somebody gives you a guitar, that's a big honor, you know?"

This is called Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man.

"Please play a song for me."

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

In the jingle jangle morning

I'll come following you

Though I know that evening's empire

has returned into sand

Vanished from my hand left me blindly here to stand

but still not sleeping

My weariness amazes me

I'm branded on my feet

I have no one to meet

And the ancient empty streets too dead for dreaming

When Bob began to ignore topical material, it bothered me...

'cause he wrote such marvelous material, you know?

And suddenly to have stopped that meant that he was going away...

from a political consciousness that we felt we all had.

One can attribute that as going commercial...

as getting away from this, and that bothered us.

Then take me disappearing

through the smoke rings of my mind

Down the foggy ruins of time

far past the frozen leaves

The haunted, frightened trees

out to the windy beach

Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky

with one hand waving free

Silhouetted by the sea

circled by the circus sands

With all memory and fate

driven deep beneath the waves

Let me forget about today

until tomorrow

An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place...

where he thinks he's "at" somewhere.

You always have to realize that you're constantly...

in the state of becoming, you know?

And, as long as you can stay in that realm, you'll sort of be all right.

I can't self-analyze my own work, and I wasn't going to cater to the crowd...

because I knew certain people would like it, and certain people didn't like it.

I had gotten in the door when no one was looking.

I was in there now, and there was nothing anybody...

from then on, could ever do about it.

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious...

makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part.

You can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies...

upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus...

and you've got to make it stop, and you've got to indicate to the people...

who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free...

the machine will be prevented from working at all.

The police have got Mario, they are pulling him away.

The police have pulled Mario away...

All of us felt that those folks before didn't get it.

We were surrounded...

by people who were insensitive to the need for change.

And that's why Peter, Paul and Mary, and Bob Dylan, Joan Baez...

all of whom were about the same age, were put in positions of leadership...

because there was an identification amongst the college students.

I felt it all over America.

You know, wherever in America you went, you felt that things were happening...

in an Olympian type of way...

in which children were beyond their parents' command.

He tried to exercise free speech...

Sometime around that period of time I was painting in Berkeley...

and the phone rang, and I think this was 1964.

The phone rang, it was Bob and he said:

"I have to do these shows, you want to come?"

I said, "Well, I'm painting pictures."

He said, "I'll buy you a leather jacket," and he said, "all the paint you need."

The next thing I knew, you know, I got on a plane...

and I flew to New York.

In those days, artistic success...

was not dollar-driven.

It was, you know... Those were simpler times.

If you had something to say, which was the...

Basically, the way people were rated...

you know, they'd say: "Have you seen Ornette Coleman?

"Does he have anything to say?"

And it was the same with, like... With Bob or anybody else.

Do they have anything to say or not?

Darkness at the break of noon Shadows even the silver spoon

The handmade blade, the child's balloon

Eclipses both the sun and moon To understand you know too soon

There is no sense in trying

As pointed threats, they bluff with scorn

Suicide remarks are torn From the fool's gold mouthpiece

The hollow horn plays wasted words Proves to warn

That he not busy being born Is busy dying

Nobody had heard anything like this before.

No one had heard anything like this before.

There was a word of mouth.

And by the way, a crowd of 1,200 people isn't that big a crowd...

if you stop and think about it.

That's about how many people are waiting for the D train...

at Sheridan Square right now.

While preachers preach of evil fates

Teachers teach that knowledge waits Can lead to hundred-dollar plates

Goodness hides behind its gates But even the President of the United States

Sometimes must have to stand naked

Around that time he asked me if I wanted to go with him to...

You know, he had a date in Chicago.

Did I want to come along?

What struck me was that he was at one...

or he became identical with his breath.

And Dylan had become a column of air, so to speak, at certain moments...

where his total physical and mental focus was...

this single breath coming out of his body.

He had a found a way in public to be almost like a shaman...

with all of his intelligence and consciousness...

focused on his breath.

So don't fear if you hear

A foreign sound to your ear

It's alright, Ma

I'm only sighing

He was doing more and more prose writing, I think, at the time, too.

I think he was spending more time...

actually sitting down and writing stuff...

that he wasn't necessarily going to sing.

And then finding out that some of that could be sung as well.

Of war and peace the truth just twists

Its curfew gull just glides

Upon four-legged forest clouds

The cowboy angel rides

The ideal performances of the songs...

would then come on stages throughout the world.

Very few could be found on any of my records.

Every second, every... You know...

Reaching the audience is what it's all about.

All except when 'neath the trees of Eden

There are no veils, curtains, doors, walls...

anything between what pours out of Bob's hand...

onto the page...

and what is somehow available to the core of people...

who are believers in him.

There's some people who'd say... You know, not interested.

But if you're interested, he goes way, way deep.

Go away from my window

Leave at your own chosen speed

A typical evening.

I guess there would be soundcheck.

And there would be me dealing with what kind of mood...

Bob was going to be in.

I was already doing that, you know.

And when he was cheerful and up, it was just spectacular.

And if he was dark, there wasn't any way to reach him.

But always strong

Bob seemed to ignore whatever was coming towards him.

He could literally, and I'd seen him do it...

turn his back and play a whole song, play two songs.

Fiddling around with the equipment on the stage.

And never even look at the public...

and it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference in the magnetic draw.

It's as though the public wasn't even there...

he's just going to do what he's going to do, and he has to change.

And he has to keep moving, and he has to add this and he has to crank the sound.

If you ever work with him, if he did this song the night before as a waltz...

tonight he's gonna do it in 2/4 time, just to fuck you up, you know?

And so, with somebody who moves like that...

I now see it, that it's very unique...

and it's admirable, and it's a pain in the ass if you're trying to work with him.

Or it's a pain in the ass if you were expecting something else from him.

If everybody really listened to his own conscience...

and really acted upon what he thought was right and wrong...

rather than being so hopelessly passive...

which I think just about everybody is.

I think it's probably the main disease...

is the passivity, where we will listen to whatever anybody else says.

It's Daddy, and Mommy, and schoolteacher, and Sunday school teacher, and President.

This is what the war in Vietnam is all about.

The old and the very young.

The Marines have burned this old couple's cottage...

because fire was coming from here.

The day's operation burned down 150 houses...

wounded three women, killed one baby...

wounded one Marine, and netted these four prisoners.

Four old men who could not answer questions put to them in English.

I was feeling this political pull very strongly.

And I was thinking what the two of us could do together, you know...

as far as any kind of movement, and that...

And so, we... Our tour had come to an end...

and Bob said something like: "Hey, we ought to do Carnegie Hall...

"or some big place like that."

And I said, "What are we going to do with it?"

And... It was a pretty cold thing to say.

But then we did talk about...

you know, that he wanted to do his music and I wanted to do all this other stuff...

and he said he didn't want to do all that other stuff...

you know, so that was pretty clear.

And yeah, I was disappointed.

Oh my name it is nothing

My age it means less

I mean, he'd given us, by that point, the greatest songs...

in our anti-war, civil rights arsenals.

Thirty-some years, whenever I go to a march or a sit-in, or a lie-in...

or a be-in, or a jail-in, people'd say, "Is Bob coming?"

I'd say, "He never comes, you moron!"

You know, "When are you going to get it? Never did, probably never will."

And so I think he...

I think he couldn't have written songs like the ones he wrote...

if he didn't feel generally, I think, sort of, for the underdog.

But I think that he didn't want to have to be the guy people were going to go to.

I mean, the times then were cut and dry.

You were either for the war or you were against it.

You either hated niggers or, you know, you supported King.

And you were forced to take a side.

Johnny's in a basement Mixing up the medicine

I'm on the pavement Thinking about the government

The man in the trench coat badge out, laid off

Says he's got a bad cough Wants to get it paid off

Look out kid It's something you did

God knows when But you're doing it again

You better duck down the alleyway

Looking for a new friend

The man in the coon-skin cap In a pig pen

Wants eleven dollar bills You only got ten

Maggie comes fleet foot Face full of black soot

Talking that the heat put plants in the bed but

The phone's tapped anyway Maggie says that many say

They must bust in early May Orders from the D.A.

Look out kid Don't matter what you did

Walk on your tiptoes Don't tie no dose

Better stay away from those That carry around a fire hose

Keep a clean nose Watch the plain clothes

You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows

Words have their own meaning, or they have different meanings...

and words change their meaning.

Words that meant something 10 years ago don't mean that now.

They mean something else.

Don't steal, don't lift Twenty years of schooling

And they put you on the day shift

Look out kid They keep it all hid

Better jump down a manhole Light yourself a candle

Don't wear sandals Try to avoid the scandals

Don't want to be a bum You better chew gum

The pump don't work 'Cause the vandals took the handles

Subterranean Homesick Blues. I mean...

I don't think I would have wanted to do it all by myself.

I thought I'd get more power out of it, you know, with a small group in back of me.

It was electric, but doesn't necessarily mean...

that it's modernized just because it's electric, you know?

It was, you know, like a...

Country music was electric, too.

I ain't gonna work

on Maggie's farm no more

The Bringing It All Back Home session was really fun because...

it was this sort of spontaneous, telepathic thing, you know?

Like he might have, you know, played through a song very briefly...

and that was all the rehearsal or preparation that anyone had for the songs.

Everyone was really good, everyone was really funky, you know...

everyone had great time.

And everyone really got behind Bobby's songs.

It was almost like just getting together and jamming...

without any mandate or any charts or anything.

I was riding on the Mayflower when I thought I spied some land

He was playing all by himself, at first.

And then he stopped and everybody laughed...

and then two seconds later, he started it again...

and everybody came in just "bang," like gangbusters.

I was riding on the Mayflower when I thought I spied some land

I yelled for Captain Arab I have you understand

Who came running to the deck Said, "Boys forget the whale

"Look on over yonder Cut the engines change the sail

Haul on the bowline" We sang that melody

Like all tough sailors do When they're far away at sea

I mean, the whole culture has moved and changed.

This is really what we're announcing.

The entire culture, both in America and England has changed.

There's a whole new generation that's grown up, everybody.

Do people at the Museum of Modern Art...

and the Metropolitan know about this, do you think?

Do they know that culture has changed, that there's a new generation?

Well, they have been in the foreground...

of showing all this new pop art themselves, you know.

Warhol will be there in Albert Hall, and Warhol's on the walls...

of the Museum of Modern Art for the last five years.

There were signs of new life, of another generation picking up...

a revolution in consciousness. A bloodless revolution.

You know, like the first revolution that never shed any blood.

That was the important thing.

I had just been kicked out of Cuba...

for just talking privately...

about Castro's persecution of gay people.

Then went to Czechoslovakia, was elected King of May on May Day.

A week later was kicked out by the Minister of Education and deported to London...

and then I landed around the time of Dylan's concerts at Albert Hall.

There was a very exciting scene, back at the hotel...

and Dylan was down the hall with the Beatles.

Then a message came that I was supposed to come in there.

So I came into the room and everybody was sitting there...

totally stone-cold silent, frozen, paranoid.

Not quite knowing my place, knowing Bob...

I sat down on the side of his armchair.

John Lennon said snidely, "Why don't you sit a little closer?"

I suddenly realized they were just so naive, they were young.

So I actually, I fell over laughing on to John's lap...

looking up at him and asked him, "Do you ever read William Blake?"

He said, "Never heard of him." And his wife said, "Oh, John, stop lying."

Then everybody began laughing, and then the scene sort of broke up.

You know, the ice was broken.

It stuck me as funny that these guys at the summit of power...

spiritual power, musical power, world fame...

'65, May... June...

were so unsure...

of their minds and speech.

It interested me just to watch Dylan.

I could sort of see that things that he did and said...

were interesting to me.

And I didn't know why, and so that got me hooked on making a movie.

- Do you really like that song? - Yeah, it's fantastic.

- What do you like about it? - I just...

I don't like any of the Subterranean Homesick Blues.

Oh, you're that kind of... Okay, see, I understand right now.

When we'd go into a town, there would be no sign...

and there would be people, kind of, just hanging out at the steps...

waiting for him to...

And not waiting to crowd around or see him or get his autograph.

Just waiting for him.

And it gave you a feeling that there was some substance that you had to really...

see through, that you weren't going to find out about this quickly.

But you had to kind of see it the way they did.

In the dime stores and bus stations

People talk over situations

Read books and repeat quotations

Draw conclusions on the wall

Some speak of the future

My love she speaks softly

She knows there's no success like failure

And that failure's no success at all

Do you care about what you sing?

How could I answer that if you got the nerve to ask me?

Well, then you have...

I mean, you've got a lot of nerve asking me a question like that.

Do you ask the Beatles that?

I have to ask you that, because you have the nerve to question whether I can...

I'm not questioning you, because I don't expect any answer from you.

But do you think somebody wouldn't go see somebody if they didn't want entertainment?

In the dime stores and bus stations

We showed him the first rough cut.

What he saw must have made him look like he was bare bones...

and I think that was a big shock to him.

But then he saw, I think the second night, he saw that it was total theater.

It didn't matter.

He was like an actor, and he suddenly had reinvented himself...

as the actor within this movie, and then it was okay.

That's what he's good at, is getting used to the way things are.

I mean, he understands that time changes everything.

They didn't light places, they didn't have to stop filming.

If you ran, they ran.

If you went in a room, they went into the room.

And you know, at a certain point, you just became oblivious to that.

I was young, and I had expectations.

And wanted to be where the action was...

and I should not have been there at that time.

Everybody was having a wonderful time and they were all smashing things up...

in the hotel room, and I was this weird square over in my room...

who didn't do all that stuff.

I was very critical of everybody who did, and wanted my time with Bob...

because I thought he was a special friend, and he had moved on.

And it was awful. I mean, it just hurt like hell.

I thought, I assumed, that since I'd invited him on the stage in the States...

he would invite me on the stage there. He had no intention of doing that.

- Bob? - Bob?

He was ready to have that whole stage all to himself, that's what I'd say.

He didn't want anybody competing with it.

That's as close as I can get.

You know, it was probably a stupid thing to do...

not letting her play, but you can't be wise and in love at the same time, so...

I hope she'd see the light sooner or later on that.

Bob is one of the most complex human beings I've ever met...

I think at first I really tried to figure this guy out. No.

I gave it up, and so I don't know.

I don't know what he thought about, all I know is what he gave us.

The crash on the highway threw the car into a field

Turn, turn, turn again

Four people killed with him at the wheel

Turn, turn to the rain And the wind

The poetry, it tumbles out. And I watched him write...

at the typewriter or writing... It's done.

Do you remember that goddamn song?

That love is just a four-letter word

I never finished that song. Did I? No, I never finished it.

Oh, God!

- You finished it about eight different ways. - Did I?

I stole Four Letter Word, I took that and disappeared with it, and sang it...

and I think the next Bob knew about it, he heard it on the radio.

I was with him when he heard it on the radio and he was listening, he said:

"That's a great song."

That's a great song. He didn't remember he had written it.

I said, "You wrote it, you dope."

Strange it is to be beside you

Many years of tables turned

You'd probably not believe me if I told you all I've learned

And it is very very weird indeed

To hear words like forever and free

So ships run through my mind I cannot cheat

It's like looking in the teacher's face complete

I can say nothing to you but repeat

What I heard

That love is just a four-letter

Love is just a four-letter

Love is just a four-letter word

Hey Mr. Tambourine Man

Play a song for me

I'm not sleepy

And there ain't no place I'm going to

A lot of my songs, they were becoming hits for other people.

There was, the Byrds had a big hit.

Some group called the Turtles had some hit.

Sonny and Cher had a hit with a song of mine.

People were sort of writing a jingly-jangly kind of song...

which seemed to have something to do with me, I, you know, like, "okay..."

You know, I Got Me, Babe, is some kind of take-off of me, something I wrote.

Well, I don't know what it was a take-off on that I wrote, you know?

I didn't really like that sound...

or folk-rock, whatever that was, I didn't feel that had anything to do with me.

It got me thinking about the Billboard charts and the songs...

which become popular, which I hadn't thought of that before.

Once upon a time you dressed so fine

You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?

I found myself writing this song, this story...

this long piece of vomit, 20 pages long, and out of it...

I took Like A Rolling Stone, and made it as a single...

and I'd never written anything like that before.

And it suddenly came to me that was what I should do.

After writing that, I wasn't interested in writing a novel or a play or anything.

Like I knew I just had too much, I wanted to write songs.

About having to scrounge

Your next meal

Mike Bloomfield said he had heard my first record...

and said he wanted to show me how the blues were played...

and I didn't feel much competitive...

I didn't feel much competitive with him, he could outplay anybody, even at that...

at that point, you know.

But when it was time to bring in a guitar player on my record...

I couldn't think of anybody but him.

I mean, he just was the best guitar player I ever heard.

Okay, Bob. We've got everybody here, let's do one. And then...

A producer named Tom Wilson invited me to a recording session.

And me being 21 years old and incredibly ambitious...

and a big Bob Dylan fan, I decided I was going to play on that session.

There was another guitar player who sat down, and was warming up...

and just was playing far beyond my abilities.

And he turned out to be Mike Bloomfield.

I packed up my guitar, and I went into the control room where I belonged.

After the first couple of hours of the session, they moved...

the organ player over to piano.

And I said, "Well, here's another chance for me."

So I said to Tom Wilson:

"Why don't you let me play the organ?

"I got a great part for this," which was total bullshit.

And Tom Wilson said, "Oh, man, you don't play the organ.

"You're a guitar player."

I said, "I got a really good part for this, I can play it."

He said, "Al."

And just then someone came and got him...

to take a phone call that came in for him.

So he didn't say no.

Like a Rolling Stone, remake, Take One.

What are you doing there?

At that point, he really could have just busted me...

and got me back in the control room.

But he was a very gracious man. And so he let it go.

And so I began to play.

In the verses, in the beginning, you hear me come in...

always an eighth note behind the band.

To make sure that I played the right chord...

the band would go... And I'd go like that.

Like that.

They started playing it back.

After about a verse or two, Bob said to Tom Wilson.;

"Hey, turn the organ up."

And Tom Wilson said to Bob, "Oh, man, that guy's not an organ player.

"He's just..."

And then Bob said, "I don't care, turn the organ up."

Once upon a time you dressed so fine threw the bums a dime in your prime

didn't you?

People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall"

You thought they were all kidding you

You used to laugh about

Everybody that was hanging out

Now you don't talk so loud

Now you don't seem so proud

About having to be scrounging

your next meal

How does it feel

How does it feel

To be without a home

Like a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone

Like a Rolling Stone definitely broke through somewhere.

I didn't feel like radio had ever played a song like that before.

I know I'd never heard a song like that before.

So...

And everything I'd done up to that point had led up to...

writing a song like that, just effortlessly.

Like a Rolling Stone originally had about 50-some verses, as I recall.

And people who think it's long now, you know...

should have had a look at it when it was raw.

I think he always made exactly the works that he wanted to make...

At the time he wanted to make it. The audience came to Bob.

And that's one of the things that makes him so unique...

in the history of American music, is the audience came to Bob Dylan.

I've never been that kind of performer...

that wants to be one of them, you know, like one of the crowd.

I don't try to endear myself that way.

Now, do performers look for applause? Yeah, yes and no.

It really depends what kind of performer you are.

Like the story of Billie Holiday, you know...

when she sang Strange Fruit for the first time, nobody applauded.

You know, you could leave somebody kind of in a spellbound way and...

I don't know. There's a lot of things going on...

when there's a performer on stage and there's an audience out there.

That weekend, my daughter had been born.

Pete Seeger had made a recording of her. And he played it.

He opened the night on Sunday night at Newport...

and he played this little recording of a new baby, he says.;

"Here's the first folk song, the first voice...

"and we're dedicating this festival and this music and our purposes..."

"to this new child, and the new world that she's going to grow up in."

And that was kind of, you know... That's the way the evening began.

I was walking around in the afternoon and Albert Grossman took me aside...

and said, "Bob is looking for you."

And he took me to Bob and Bob said, "I want to play Sunday night...

"and try and reproduce what we did on the album."

And I said:

"Okay. Sounds great."

Ladies and gentlemen...

the person that's going to come up now...

has a limited amount of time.

His name is Bob Dylan.

I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more

No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more

Well, I try my best to be just like I am

But everybody wants you to be just like them

They say sing while you slave I just get bored

I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more

He sang that song, "I ain't going to work on Maggie's farm no more."

I said, "Hey look, he's taking that old Penny's Farm...

"and putting it somewhere else. That's terrific."

I thought that was interesting.

But the volume of the blues band was kind of wild...

and you couldn't get the words too clearly.

I ain't gonna work for Maggie's ma no more

No, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's ma no more

Well, she talks to all the servants about man and God and law

Everybody says she's the brains behind pa

She's 72 but she says she's 24

I ain't gonna work for Maggie's ma no more

It was not possible to share the kind of intimacy...

that we were sharing with folk music...

when you've got those electric instruments going.

The moment you've got drums there, everything has got to come up in level.

The sound was a bit harsh.

But we thought it was way cool.

And what we noticed was...

about a third of the audience was booing, which was unheard of...

not in all our days of seeing...

whatever kind of show had we ever seen that.

I remember understanding that drugs were bad and alcohol was bad...

and rock 'n' roll was wicked and sex was bad.

And so I thought, "Oh, my goodness, how depraved this is all getting."

All right!

I was thinking that somebody was shouting, "Are you with us? Are you with us?"

And, you know, I don't know what that, you know, like...

What was that supposed to mean?

I had no idea why they were booing.

I don't think anybody was there having a negative response to those...

songs, though.

I mean, whatever it was about, it wasn't about...

anything that they were hearing.

Well, he hands you a nickel Hands you a dime

Asks you with a grin if you're having a good time

And he fines you every time you slam the door

I ain't gonna work for Maggie's brother no more

You could not understand the words.

And I was frantic. I said, "Get that distortion out."

It was so raspy, you could not understand a word.

And I ran over to the sound system, "Get that distortion out of Bob's voice."

"No, this is the way they want to have it."

I said, "God damn it, it's terrible. You can't understand it.

"If I had an axe, I'd chop the mike cable right now."

Oh, you've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely

but you know you only used to get juiced in it

Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street

And now you're gonna have to get used to it

We ran backstage and there was mayhem going on.

Pete Seeger and Theodore Bikel and all the old guard...

the old leftist, protest-singing factions...

were horrified and thought: "This is pop music, this isn't folk music."

And there was just a big battle raging backstage and...

Pete, I understand Pete Seeger had an axe...

and was going to go cut the electric cables and had to be...

you know, subdued...

and Theodore Bikel was saying, "This is what the young people want!

"We have to go with the change, this is what's happening now."

So they were all arguing among themselves.

Seeger...

from all reports, was very upset by this.

And I had heard that he tried to cut the wires and that he'd gone into a car...

and wouldn't come out after this whole thing.

That's not my interpretation. You see...

Pete's father was there, Charlie Seeger...

and he had a hearing aid, and Charlie was very distressed...

when he couldn't hear things clearly.

And with all this sound coming from the speakers...

Charlie Seeger was quite upset. And I think that affected Pete.

You used to ride the chrome horse with your diplomat

Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat

Ain't it hard when you discover that

He really wasn't where it's at

After he's taken from you

everything he could steal

How does it feel?

Rock 'n' roll was considered a real sellout music for a lot of folk fans...

and Like a Rolling Stone seemed like the direct slap in the face...

to everything that topical songs represented.

"How does it feel to be on your own." And they took it as this most...

extremely negative...

you know...

selfish statement, basically, and it was, you know, it was not...

Better World A-Coming, you know, it was not that.

Let's go, man. That's all.

I thought he would go out and play some other stuff by himself and then...

we'd come out and play these three songs.

But we just came out and played these three songs and then...

he said, "Goodnight."

And we'd been out there for a total of 15 minutes...

and everybody else had played for an hour.

So that was pretty weird. And he was the headliner.

Bobby, can you do another song, please?

He's going to get his axe.

He's coming.

Bobby was terribly shaken and I ran backstage...

and he said to me, "What have you done to me?"

Peter Yarrow came out and said, "Okay, everybody calm down...

"Bob's gone to get his acoustic guitar."

And everybody...

The highway is for gamblers

better use your sense

Take what you have gathered

from coincidence

The empty-handed painter from your streets

Is drawing crazy patterns

on your sheets

The sky, too, is folding over you

And it's all over now

Baby Blue

I'd heard a rumor that Pete was going to cut the cable.

And I heard it later, you know. And it was like, it didn't make sense to me.

Like, Pete Seeger, like someone whose music I cherish, you know.

Like someone who I highly respect is going to cut the cable.

It was like, "Oh, God." It was like...

It was like a dagger, you know, it was...

Just the thought of it was, you know...

made me go out and get drunk.

Strike another match

Go start anew

And it's all over now

Baby Blue

I remember seeing Bob later on that evening...

looking kind of blue, as though he hadn't...

Hadn't made the point that he wanted to make properly.

He didn't want to feel that he was limited here or limited there.

He wanted to do something with the Butterfield Blues Band.

And it was great.

Every night, after the concerts, the festival people would have a party.

And Bob was sitting in the corner, I guess, thinking about what had happened.

I said, "Hey, Bob. Do you want to dance?" And he looked up at me and said:

"I'd dance with you, Maria, but my hands are on fire."

And it's sort of like... That was a cryptic remark, but I kind of knew...

exactly what he meant, you know. So I said, "Okay, man," and I just left him alone.

We want Dylan!

A couple of months later, he played Forest Hills.

There, the first half was acoustic, the second half was rock 'n' roll.

The electric half.; Silence, booing.

At least 15, 20 kids ran on the stage through the whole electric set.

There would be somebody, two, three times during a number...

actually jumping on the stage and running around amongst the musicians.

And an incredible animosity in the audience.

I think it was the only concert I have ever been at where...

that animosity was that strong and you actually felt a little threatened...

if you applauded during this, which I did.

When we played Forest Hills, Like a Rolling Stone was number one.

And so when we played Like a Rolling Stone...

they stopped booing and sang along.

And then when we finished they started booing again.

I thought that was great.

I enjoyed that. But at the party after the show...

Bob came running up to us and gave us big hugs, he said.;

"That was fabulous. It was great. It was like a carnival."

It was fantastic. He really enjoyed the show.

The booing didn't really, you know... I had a perspective on the booing.

Because you got to realize you can kill somebody with kindness, too.

God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"

Abe said, "Man, you must be putting me on"

God say, "No" Abe say, "What?"

God say, "You can do what you want, Abe, but

"Next time you see me coming you better run"

Well, Abe says, "Where do you want this killing done?"

God says, "Out on Highway 61"

I walked in the studio and he was out there in a corner...

and I walked up and I said, "Bob, I'm Bob Johnston."

He said, "How you doing?" And he smiled at me.

All I remember is Dylan doing that and starting in...

and from that moment, I really have no memory.

Nobody ever counted off for Dylan...

he always did what the fuck he wanted to.

And I always just got the sound pretty well. And he seemed to love the sound.

You walk into the room With your pencil in your hand

You see somebody naked And you say, "Who is that man?"

I was just caught in this whirlwind of...

You know, of being tacked on to this music that was going to be forever...

and being involved in it. And knowing that it was going to be forever.

Because something is happening here

But you don't know what it is

The music actually changed by, I think, the word is freedom.

Everything was changing. It wasn't like four songs a session.

There wasn't any clock. I took all the clocks down.

Nobody had a fucking clock in there.

It's just like, "Play some music." "What about this thing? What about this?"

We're recording 86845. Number one.

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood

With his memories in his trunk

Passed this way an hour ago

With his friend, a jealous monk

I believe in giving credit where credit's due.

I don't think Dylan had a lot to do with it.

I think God, instead of touching him on the shoulder...

he kicked him in the ass. Really!

And that's where all that came from. He can't help what he's doing.

I mean, he's got the Holy Spirit about him.

You can look at him and tell that.

Well, I ride a mailtrain, baby

Can't buy no thrill

It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.

In fact, there was two versions of that cut. The first version...

which turned up on bootlegs, it was like a fast...

It was a much faster and much more jivey version...

that sounded kind of a lot like the other things that had been done.

What the fuck are we doing with this song, man?

It's not such a terrible song to do.

Then he said, "Let's take a break."

And he sent everybody off. And he said it was a lunch break or whatever.

People went out for an hour.

He was sitting alone at the piano working over...

just play a few chords and he'd scribble something down.

And they came back and they did that other take...

after the lunch break and it was, like the much slower, bluesier version...

you hear on the album, and it's really changed the whole character...

and the feel of the song. It was really, really nice.

Well, I ride on a mailtrain, baby

Can't buy a thrill

I'd like to know about the cover of your album.

I'd like to know about...

the meaning of the photograph of you and the wearing of the Triumph t-shirt.

What did you want to know about it?

Well, I'd like to know if that's an equivalent photograph...

it means something. It's got a philosophy in it.

And I'd like to know, visually, what it represents to you.

Because you're a part of that.

I haven't really looked at it that much. I don't really...

I've thought about it a great deal.

It was just taken one day, when I was sitting on the steps, you know.

I don't really remember.

I don't worry too much about it.

But what about the motorcycle as an image in your songwriting?

You seem to like that.

- Oh, we all like motorcycles to some degree. - I do.

Do you prefer songs with a subtle or obvious message?

- With a what? - A subtle or obvious message.

With a message, you mean like... What song with a message?

Well like Eve of Destruction and things like that.

Do I prefer that to what?

I don't know, but your songs are supposed to have a subtle message.

- A subtle message? - Well, they're supposed to.

Where'd you hear that?

- In a movie magazine. - Oh, my God!

Do you think of yourself primarily as a singer or as a poet?

I think of myself more as a song-and-dance man, you know.

Mr. Dylan, I know you dislike labels and probably rightly so...

but for those of us who are well over 30...

could you label yourself and perhaps tell us what your role is?

Well, I sort of label myself as well under 30.

And my role is to, you know, to just stay here as long as I can.

You're considered by many people to be...

symbolic of the protest movement in the country...

for the young people.

For the young people.

Are you going to participate in...

the Vietnam Day Committee demonstration in front of the Paramount Hotel tonight?

I'll be busy tonight.

Things had gotten out of hand.

You know, it fell into the...

You know, you ask me why I write surreal songs...

or whatever, I mean that type of activity is surreal.

I had no answers to any of those questions...

any more than any other performer did, really.

But, you know, that didn't stop...

the press or people or whoever they were...

from asking these questions. They, for some reason the press thought...

that performers had the answers to all these...

problems in the society and...

you know, like what can...

What can you say to something like that? I mean, it's just kind of absurd.

Phil Ochs wrote something in a recent Broadside Magazine...

to the effect that...

you have twisted so many people's wigs that he feels that it becomes...

increasingly dangerous for you to perform in public before an audience.

Well, that's the way it goes, you know.

I can't apologize, certainly.

Do you feel that part of the popularity is because of an identification...

of your audience with you or with...

what you're saying or what you've been writing about?

I have no idea.

Mr. Dylan, you seem very reluctant to talk about the fact...

that you're a popular entertainer, and you're a most popular entertainer.

- What do you want me to say? - Well, I don't understand why you...

Well, what do you want me to say about it?

Well, you seem almost embarrassed to admit that you're... To talk about...

Well, I'm not embarrassed, I mean, you know.

What do you want exactly for me to say?

Do you want me to jump up and say, "Hallelujah" and crash the cameras...

and do something weird? Tell me.

I'll go along with you.

If I can't go along with you, I'll find somebody to go along with you.

No, but I find that... You really have no idea...

as to why, or no thoughts on why you're popular?

- That's what interests me. - I just have...

I haven't really struggled for that. I don't...

It happened, you know.

It happened like anything else happens.

How many people who labor...

in the same musical vineyard in which you toil...

how many are protest singers?

That is, people who use their music and use the songs...

to protest the social state in which we live today.

The matter of war, the matter of crime, or whatever it might be.

- How many? - Yes.

- Are there many who... - Yeah.

I think there's about 136.

- You say, "about 136"? - Yeah.

Or do you mean exactly 136?

It's either 136 or 142.

At a certain point, people seemed to have a distorted, warped view of me...

for some reason, and those people were usually...

outside of the musical community.

"The spokesman of the generation."

"The conscience of a..." This, and that and the other.

That I could not relate to. I just couldn't relate to it.

As long as I could continue doing what it is that I loved to do...

I didn't care what kinds of labels were put on me...

or how I was perceived in the press because I was playing to people every night.

I played at the Hollywood Bowl.

Then I left the organization.

I actually was frightened when I got the tour itinerary...

to see that we were going to play Dallas where...

they had just killed the President.

And I thought, you know: "If they didn't like that guy...

"what are they going to think of this guy?"

And I didn't want to, you know, I didn't want to be...

the analogy to John Connally.

I didn't want to be the guy next to him.

I started out on Burgundy But soon hit the harder stuff

Everybody said they'd stand behind me

When the game got rough

The guys that were with me on that tour, which later became The Band...

you know, we were all in it together.

We were putting our heads in the lion's mouth and...

I had to admire them for sticking it out with me.

Just for doing it, in my book, they were, you know, gallant knights for even...

you know, standing behind me.

By the time we got to England, it was out of control.

And I don't know if word of mouth...

preceded our concert tour...

but it really was pretty revolutionary, in the fact that...

here was someone who everyone loved...

and they didn't like what he was doing.

And they were showing it.

These stages were created for people who stood on stage...

and recited Shakespearean plays.

They weren't made for this kind of music we were playing.

The sound was pretty archaic, really.

The sound really hadn't been perfected. The sound quality hadn't been perfected...

many years after that.

The first half of the concert was Bob Dylan alone...

acoustic and harmonica.

When we kicked off the second half, I mean, we did kick ass and take names.

And we got everyone in there's attention.

They knew that we had arrived.

Because they were such fans of his acoustic set...

that when we came in and did the electric set...

people have said the word to me that...

he was a traitor to folk music. The pure music.

And I'd just about had it, though. I'd had it with the...

with the whole scene.

And I was... Whether I knew it or didn't know it, I was looking...

to just quit for a while.

What about the scene? What had you had it with?

What about the scene were you sick of?

Well, you know, people like you. People like, you know...

like, just, you know, like just being pressed...

and hammered and, you know, expected to answer questions. You know...

What can I... You know, like... It was enough to make anybody sick, really.

Ol' black Bascom, don't break no mirrors

Cold black water dog, make no tears

You say you love me with what may be love

Don't you remember making baby love?

Got your steam drill now you're

lookin' for some kid to get it to work for you

like your nine-pound hammer did

But I know that you know that

I know that you show something is

tearing up your mind

Tell me, momma

Tell me, momma

Tell me, momma, what is it?

What's wrong with you this time?

He's cheap!

And having a half concert. Half one and half the other.

Fake, hypocrite!

That's what he is.

Everybody's wondering when your

friendship's gonna end but

Come on, baby, I'm your friend

And I know that you know that I know

that you show something

Is tearing up your mind

- Crap. - Crap. Rubbish.

- Complete rubbish. - Pathetic.

Moronic.

We paid to see a flipping folk singer, not a big group.

- Didn't you boo me last night? - I didn't.

- Oh? - We didn't boo you, Bob.

- Please, just a minute. - Well.

I want the names of all the people that booed me.

We didn't boo you! Come back soon.

Okay. I'll... I'll be back in a month or two.

- We'll wait ya! - So long, cheerio!

All you sweet, lovely people.

- Hello, Bob! - So long, sweet...

For the first half, when they're all so quiet, I'll just...

I'll play four or five songs and they just don't make a sound.

All of a sudden, "Boo."

And then Albert will come out and they go, "Boo."

And I loved the description in the paper last night.

What they said, that was classic.

There wasn't one truth in the entire article.

It was all the most fantastic lies...

- they could concoct. - From what town, man?

From the last town, Edinburgh. "Another night of catcalls for Dylan."

- Oh, I didn't see that. - "Many of the audience walked out."

I saw one, man. Did you see one paper that said...

- everybody walked out? - I haven't seen that one.

Everybody walked out. Saw a paper it said, "Everybody walked out."

- In Liverpool, I saw it. - They're really losing their minds.

- Totally insane. - I'm going to walk out.

"We want the real Dylan."

"Will the real Dylan stand up?"

I've decided just to tell them, man, that Dylan got sick.

What do you think? Just...

I won't tell anybody what you say. What do you think?

- Not your personal comment. - Yeah. What do you think?

I have no opinion about that.

Well, why?

Because I haven't heard you sing, actually.

You've never heard me sing?

And here you are sitting here and you're asking me all these questions.

- Well, this is my job. - Yeah, well.

- Suck them? - Put them in your mouth for one second.

Put the corner of your glasses in your mouth. That's it.

Just suck your glasses.

No, I don't want to suck them.

- Does anybody want to suck my glasses? - Yeah.

Who said that?

- This one here. This fellow here. - You? Ask him if he's American.

- Are you American? - I'm French.

Well, that's why you probably think the first records are better.

This is called...

This is a folk song. I want to sing a folk song now.

I knew that would make you happy.

This is called Yes, I See You've Got Your Brand-New Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.

- Sign it! - You're so miserable.

- It won't take... - It won't take half an hour just to sign it.

They don't ask me, those other two people don't ask me. Why do you?

- Why shouldn't you give it? - You're so miserable?

Why do we come out to see you for?

- Because they like me they said... - We don't like you anymore.

She called me a bum.

- I'll tell you why! - May I have your autograph, please?

He'll call you a bum you don't sign the autograph.

- Come on, Bob. - Oh, come on!

You don't need my autograph. If you needed it, I'd give it to you.

- Just give up your autograph, will you? - What's wrong with him today, eh?

Ain't it just like the night

to play tricks when you're trying to be so quiet?

We sit here stranded

though we all do our best to deny it

And Louise holds a handful of rain

tempting you to defy it

Lights flicker from the opposite loft

In this room the heat pipes just cough

The country music station plays soft

But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off

Just Louise

and her lover so entwined

And these visions of Johanna

that conquer my mind

Hey, we've been on the road a long time, right?

I don't know. I don't remember.

- I guess maybe we have. - We've been on the road a very long time.

Man, I can't make it tonight. I don't know how to cover up for it.

It's something I never figured out.

There's nothing I can do about it. I just shouldn't be singing.

I think I'm gonna get me a new Bob Dylan next week.

Get me a new Bob Dylan and use him.

Use the new Bob Dylan, see how long he lasts!

He brags of his misery

he likes to live dangerously

And when bringing her name up

he speaks of her farewell kiss to me

He's sure got a lot of gall

to be so useless and all

Muttering small talk at the wall

while I'm in the hall

Oh, how can I explain?

It's so hard to get on

And these visions of Johanna

they kept me up past the dawn

I want to go home. You know what home is?

I don't want to go to Italy no more. I don't want to go nowhere no more.

You end up crashing in a private airplane...

in the mountains of Tennessee.

Or Sicily.

When you stay in the States, I mean, when you come back?

I don't know. I just want to go home.

- Are you in the controls at all? - Yeah.

What does it sound like?

Like you're in a recording studio downstairs...

the son of a bitch picks up great here.

The acoustics are fantastic. I don't know what they'll be like...

Fellas, can we have you, please? In about two minutes.

Okay, two minutes.

No. I mean by the time you get down there it'll be two minutes...

not, "In two minutes, we start to go down there."

- Yeah, two minutes. - Hey, two minutes, man.

Last on the bill. Not least, ladies and gentlemen...

here he is, back from the grave.

Right, straight from the grave.

I don't believe you.

You're a liar!

Once upon a time you dressed so fine

Threw the bums a dime in your prime

didn't you?

People'd call, say, "Beware, doll You're bound to fall"

You thought that they were all

Kidding you

You used to

laugh about

Everybody that was hangin' out

Now you don't talk so loud

Now you don't seem so proud

About having to be scrounging around

for your next meal

How does it feel

How does it feel

To be on your own

No direction home

Like a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone?

You've gone to the finest school

All right, Miss Lonely But you only used to get

juiced in it

Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street

But now

you're gonna have to get used to it

You said you'd never compromise

With the mystery tramp, but now you realize

He's not selling any alibis

As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes

And say

do you want to make a deal?

How does it feel

How does it feel

To be on your own

With no direction home

Like a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone?

Thank you.

Lay down your weary tune

Lay down

Lay down the song you strum

And rest yourself

'neath the strength of strings

No voice can hope

to hum

Struck by the sounds before the sun

I knew the night had gone

The morning breeze

like a bugle blew

Against the drums of dawn

Lay down your weary tune

Lay down

Lay down the song you strum

And rest yourself

'neath the strength of strings

No voice can hope

to hum

The ocean wild

like an organ played

The seaweed's wove its strands

The crashin' waves

like cymbals clashed

Against the rocks

and sands

Lay down your weary tune

Lay down

Lay down the song you strum

And rest yourself

'neath the strength of strings

No voice can hope

to hum

I stood unwound beneath the skies

And clouds unbound by laws

The cryin' rain

like a trumpet sang

And asked for no applause

Lay down your weary tune

Lay down

Lay down the song you strum

And rest yourself

'neath the strength of strings

No voice can hope

to hum

The last of leave fell from the trees

And clung to a new love's breast

The branches bare like a banjo moaned

To the winds that listened best

Lay down your weary tune Lay down

Lay down the song you strum

And rest yourself

'neath the strength of strings

No voice can hope to hum