Original subtitles

Dylan did what the best poets all through the ages have done.

He took that which he found when he looked around him ,

and he made it better before he moved on .

I think that it was probably when Tommy and I were working

in a place called The Fifth Peg , Gerde's Folk City.

And we were doing a regular gig there,

and on Monday nights, there was a hootenanny night,

and I remember looking down at the bar

and saying , "Is that a fella or a girl?"

And there was this young , fresh-faced lad ,

and he came up to us afterwards.

He had a presence.

He had something special .

He got up and sang and he started playing the piano.

"By God , this fella has talent.

"There's more to this fella than meets the eye."

As time went by, I remember,

we were together at the bar one night,

and Paddy had gotten him a job playing the harmonica on Columbia Records,

backing up Carolyn Hester,

this folk singer from Texas.

And during the coffee breaks,

he started singing his songs to John Hammond .

Who was the A&R man at Columbia Records.

He got a contract out of that,

and the record started selling .

He came to me at the bar one night,

and he said , "Hey, Liam .

"My records are selling nearly as much as yours."

Welcome to Madison Square Garden .

This is Bob Dylan's night.

On March 1 9 in 1 962,

Columbia Records released the first album by a new artist, Bob Dylan .

Now 30 years, 38 albums, and over 500 songs later,

Bob Dylan's universally recognized

as one of the most powerful creative artists of our time.

Backstage, we have one of the greatest collections

of performing artists ever assembled , and they're all here for one reason ,

to pay tribute to Bob Dylan through his own songs.

How you gonna top this?

I think the main thing about all of this is that here is a guy who is really deserving of this.

This is not some made-up thing from some promotional stunt.

I mean , Bob Dylan really deserves...

Whatever we're gonna be doing tonight is paying tribute to his music.

I mean , it's awesome what this man has done.

I was at rehearsal the other day,

and there I was playing guitar,

and I look to my left, and there's Steve Cropper,

to my right is "Duck" Dunn ,

Booker T. is on the keyboard ,

I got G . E. Smith .

We had so much fun . . . It was one of those things

where it was so much fun , how could it be legal?

J ust seeing Eric Clapton play

and watching Neil Young rehearse before that was just so awe-inspiring ,

I wanted to cry.

It was very cool .

I think I was more nervous than anything .

See, I'm fine. I keep my cool around all these cats, you know?

-I try to. -Try to be cool .

-I'm trying to. -It's hopeless.

Well , I couldn't not be here. I have to be here.

Anything with Bob, I'd probably be hurt if I was left out, you know?

I mean , being here with all these people from Neil to...

Oh , God . How do you start naming them all?

It was really great, the rehearsals,

seeing everybody all in the same room

and everybody there for the same reason , really.

And what was really great, too, was to see Bob say...

Ask somebody, "Is there a bridge in this song?"

Well , it's very daunting to think about it,

you know, to go through , like, 720 songs

and you've got to work out which one you want to do,

which is your favorite.

Then I saw a list of songs that hadn't been done

that were more of the classics.

I mean , in a show like this, I think it's good to do the classics because it's a tribute.

It would be hard to categorize what Bob's done songwriting-wise

because he's written so many coverable classics,

and then he's done so many songs

which it doesn't matter who sings them , they're always gonna sound like him ,

and his storytelling is quite incredible.

We watched Eric Clapton run through something ,

and he went, "Well , if that doesn't bring the house down , nothing will ."

I was in a band called The Yardbirds,

and the bass player was mad about Bob Dylan ,

and that was enough reason for me to hate him , really,

because this particular guy was a very big folk music fan ,

and I had no interest in folk music,

and my attitude in those days was very purist.

I didn't like anything ...

Didn't like any musician who was alive, for one thing ,

and who was other than black.

And a young white folk singer was not interesting to me

until I saw the cover of The Times They Are A-Changin',

and this guy looked so ravaged and old for a young man .

It was as good as being black in a way

in that he was old , you know, in this young body,

and it sort of triggered something .

I still can't figure out what,

but I bought the record and was immediately converted .

I used to work in the Brill building ,

and my job was to listen to the radio

and write songs like Frank Sinatra or Bobby V.

Right around that time,

Dylan was writing his own songs and singing them ,

and switched over from folk to rock,

and I think the impact on the whole music business

was tremendous because Tin Pan Alley went out of business after that.

When I first heard Tambourine Man ,

I wasn't sure that it was gonna be a hit single.

It didn't sound like the kind of thing that was on the radio at the time,

which was I Want To Hold Your Hand

or She Loves You .

Radio was very particular about how long a song could be.

Two, three minutes was the most time you could get on a hit single.

This song was, like, five or six minutes long ,

but what we did was we changed it to one verse

and changed the time signature from 2/4 to 4/4,

and I put a little Bach-like intro to it,

and gave it a little kick.

I was thinking about it last night,

and I was thinking about how music has always been like religion to me.

It's the only way I can even relate to the meaning of religion

is that music was that for me,

and it felt like yesterday we were in the room with maybe 1 0 of the 1 2 apostles

or something like that.

It was like the Mount Rushmore of rock and roll

except with more than four faces.

It was incredible.

I've been so concerned about trying not to make mistakes tonight

that I haven't had a chance to...

Assess the value of what we're doing here.

There's so much respect for Dylan .

I mean , really, he's driven , I think, a lot of careers.

Obviously.

There was a moment on Blonde on Blonde,

where it was about 3: 00 in the morning ,

and we were recording something , and I was playing ,

and I started playing this mind game with myself,

which was the experience that I had playing on H ighway 61 .

I realized after that that some of this music that we were doing was gonna live forever.

And so I got into this mind game of,

"Well , wherever you put your finger next is gonna be there in , like, 1 00 years."

And then I just slapped myself in the face mentally

and said , "Please don't do this.

"J ust play the song ."

I mean , he has never made a bad album ,

and I always buy whatever the new album is

because there's always something there

that will really knock me out.

I think Dylan introduced the idea of having a more complicated lyric

as opposed to pop music.

I mean , we all have our own favorite pop songs.

But it's talking about the type of lyric involved with it

and the complexity of the lyric involved with it.

He was truly the liberator of words in rock and roll .

Whereas rock and roll used to be music of the body,

he made it equally music of the mind ,

and for that, we owe him a great debt.

We're talking about poetry to music.

The first time I heard J ust Like A Woman , it moved me,

and how it moved me is the same way I try to sing it.

I mean , with the same feeling ,

what I felt, what I felt about what he was saying ,

is inside of the song when I'm singing it.

I heard him play in the Café Wha?

There was absolutely magic, there was.

What he was doing was something very new.

It was an expressive voice through music.

There was a great deal of spontaneousness.

In spontaneity, I think, there is a large bonding glue,

you know, because if you're there,

something is happening that isn't maybe even gonna happen again ,

and usually never does.

I think this girl , a Canadian friend of ours

that was working for Bob's manager,

brought an album up to Toronto

when we were playing one of them Yonge Street bars.

-Mary Martin . -Mary Martin .

I do believe

that it was before H ighway 61 Revisited .

It was Don't Think Twice, It's All Right,

Oxford Town .

And it was pretty remarkable.

It was different at that time.

Listening to the lyrics, you know,

Bob was definitely talking , making you think.

When Bob went electric,

you know, and started adding all ourselves to the equation .

-People like us. -Yeah .

Started adding people like us to the equation ,

with drums and with electric bass and with electric guitars.

It gave a good platform to reach from , from there.

He sure got reactions like nobody else got.

I mean , people would hiss, boo, cheer, yell , but they never threw anything .

You know, and amazingly enough ,

people would listen , they'd pay attention , and they would react.

It was scary.

It was. . . Of course, it was thrilling .

It was just one of those things, you know,

that you don't experience them kind of feelings too often in life, you know?

I'm glad we got through it.

You know, time has a way of making everything look bigger than what it really is,

and thank God for time.

Because of his ability to bring into his music all these other influences,

he tied a lot of loose ends up for people.

I mean , having heard him as a folk musician or as a poet, whatever you want to call it,

and then having heard him later with different rock and roll bands,

especially with , for instance, The Band ,

to me, it's one of those artists that I really always want to hear the new album

because I've got no idea where he's gonna take it next,

and that's, I think, the most important aspect of him ,

is that he moves so fast

that you really almost can't keep up with him ,

and when you're just starting to like what he did on this album ,

he's gone, you know?

I started out busking and stuff with the guitar,

and I always did Bob Dylan songs, and he kept me alive.

He literally kept me alive.

Like, if it wasn't for him ,

I would not have survived my life growing up.

Like, he was the one thing that was there that told me I wasn't crazy

and that I was going to survive and stay alive.

He made me see that pop music could be about real feelings,

that you could really write about...

That it was like poetry or something

and that you could do that and you didn't have to write about...

There was nothing . . . There were no rules, basically.

One thing that Bob Dylan will always be a symbol of

is the power behind the solo acoustic performance.

And that no matter what kinds of innovations come about,

technologically in the music world ,

that that will still , I think, be the most direct way

that you can connect to an audience and that you can present a song .

He made it all right for people to be political in their art and music

and the songs that they write.

And the problems are still there,

and we're still singing about them ,

and it still costs people to sing about them , you know?

It's like I manage to get myself in trouble half the time.

Willie and I got ourselves banned off of...

The FBI got us banned off a couple radio stations

for doing a concert for Leonard Peltier

down in California.

Or songs for the. . . I've sung for the Sandinistas.

That's not popular in Reagan America or Bush America, you know?

The really remarkable contribution of Bob Dylan

is that he took black rural blues and white folk music, rock and roll

and the kind of Allen Ginsberg Beat poetry literary sensibility

and combined them all .

He was really the first to do that.

For me, I learned about Allen Ginsberg through Bob Dylan ,

I learned about Howlin' Wolf through Bob Dylan .

He was a musicology course at university for me really,

and I think his synthesis is the basis

of all the rock and roll that came subsequent.

There was a time when the music industry, I didn't think,

took that much time to recognize the writer of a song .

When I first started in the music business,

there was a lot of guys that recorded songs,

and the guy who sang the songs became very popular,

but the person who wrote the songs, you very rarely heard his name,

and then in the '60s, I think,

they started listening more to lyrics,

and they started giving the writers more credit.

I know that helped me a lot because a lot of my songs

were recorded by other people,

and if it hadn't been for disc jockeys

and writers and the press saying , "Well , here's a song

"sung by Faron Young , written by Willie Nelson ."

That type of recognition is really good for the writer,

and I think that came along pretty much about the same time

that Bob Dylan's popularity started growing .

You don't have this body of standards anymore,

where Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett,

where they might have recorded the same songs

and you had a series of classics written by other people.

I think it probably makes for more personal music

to have the songwriter singing something that he wrote

that comes from his own heart.

I think the great thing about Bob is that

he's one of the handful who've really managed to unite both .

He's so eloquent for himself.

I like his style.

I like the way he writes,

I like the independence,

I like the attitude that he comes from .

Well , Bob Dylan and I , by the way, have written a song together,

and yesterday, I recorded another one of his songs,

so I'll be seeing him in New York,

and we'll be hopefully singing some together,

and I'm looking forward to that,

and I'm a big Bob Dylan fan .

Forget it.

Oh , man . Like I was saying ,

if there's a party, take the clock down , put the calendar up

because I need it.

He kind of came in the era

when I was buying records by anybody that had long hair

or anybody that came from England , you know?

It was kind of that kind of a thing ,

and I had heard the name Bob Dylan , I saw him .

In those days you knew...

If you saw somebody on an album cover that didn't look like the Four Seasons

or didn't look like The Supremes, you thought, "This is hip."

And I said , "Well , I'm gonna buy this because this guy is. . . Look at him .

"He's cool ! He's got a motorcycle t-shirt, Triumph ,

"and the cool boots and the hair and everything ."

So I started listening , and I said , "Wow! "

I said , "That's a sound ."

I was just very young when I first heard the music.

I was just a teenager, so it was a little heavy stuff

for a kid that had been used to listening to Herman's Hermits or something ,

and you could tell it was an incredible departure

from that style of music, and it was unique.

And I listened to it, I said , "This guy is saying something .

"I don't know what it is, but it's something unique,

"and it's something different,

"and it's something different than going to gym class."

That sounds so good , you know?

I don't want to put guitar and drums with that.

I remember when my dad did Nashville Skyline with Dylan .

I said , "Okay. My dad's cool ."

Girl from the North Country?

Yeah , Girl from the North Country.

I thought, "Well , my father's now acceptable to me."

In a deep way.

He is absolutely the standard for a singer-songwriter.

I mean , I've studied his lyrics.

You know, he's it.

It's like if you're writing a good song and you want to compare it to something

to see how it stands up,

I think Dylan is the ultimate litmus test.

It's almost impossible to articulate his sense of imagery,

the way he unravels an emotional thread ,

his use of literature.

-I don't know. I mean , he's Bob Dylan . -I know.

What am I gonna say?

I know. That's what everybody says.

I just got back from a tour through Europe and Japan ,

and one of the albums I took with me to listen to on the road

was the Dylan box set CDs Biograph .

And there was one song I kept listening to continuously

because I loved it so much , and it's Foot of Pride.

So when this show went down , they said , "What song you want to do?"

I knew no one else was going for that one.

It's a lot of lyrics to it,

and he sings really. . . Really swings on the lyric,

so I said immediately Foot of Pride,

because I had been listening to it practically every day for 8 months.

I mean , I like the song a lot.

That was fun .

I was in a car with my uncle,

and he had this little Panasonic tape recorder.

It was a beat-up Volkswagen ,

and I remember the windshield was smashed

because he was mad at his girlfriend , and he hit it,

and he was listening to, I think, Tangled U p In Blue.

That was the first thing I remember,

and he listened to it over and over and over and over,

and I think it got him through that period ,

and it stuck in my head and never left really.

I think it's an amazing song .

Hopefully we'll get through it. I know we will , but it's...

It's a heavy song .

It's a very heavy song ,

quite anti-establishment, war-mongering ,

and in this climate and period in time,

I think it's a good time to sing that song .

It's relevant today as it was 30 years ago or 20 years ago.

Classic works of art always seem to be timeless,

and this is another example.

Yesterday at rehearsal ,

he came in for about half an hour,

and he was there, and we were rehearsing stuff

that we were trying to make rigid and static for the show.

He came in and just started something else,

which was his way of imprinting himself on the situation ,

and we had to kind of. . . It was like a jam , really.

We took it somewhere, no one knew what it was

or if it was meant to be part of anything ,

and then he was very happy,

you know, because he kind of declared himself being there.

And about 1 0 minutes later,

he sort of edged his way to the door

and sat there while I did some more stuff,

and next thing I knew, he was gone.

And that's the way I've always...

My relationship with Bob has. . . Even when I met him in '66,

we were in the studio playing , the next minute, he wasn't in the room ,

and I said to one of his friends, "Where's Bob gone?"

They said , "Oh , he's gone to Madrid ."

You know? "He's gone to Madrid ."

"Okay."

How are we gonna know when the last one is?

Today, we had a rehearsal with Eric Clapton

and George Harrison , Bob Dylan , Tom Petty, Neil Young ,

and J im Keltner playing the drums,

and it was an amazing band sound .

I mean . . . N ine guitars, but they were controlled .

It wasn't like a total out of. . . Everybody was playing in sync.

I think that what Bob Dylan did really was make consciousness popular as music.

The ability to get that across on the radio and have them repeat that story is a big feat

in the music business.

You know what? You forget sometimes some of the hits that he did write.

You hear them a lot, and they've been redone and redone,

and they've sort of become somebody else's song .

You're not always looking at the label copy, and you forget that it was a Bob Dylan song .

You know, it's amazing .

If I was any more excited , I'd probably faint.

Like, man , I'm just not shaking because I'm Lou Reed , and I'm pretty cool .

You know, I've loved him folk, I've loved him rock,

I've loved him country, I've loved him gospel .

At the end of the day, as far as I'm concerned ,

he's a folk singer,

and he's still doing what he's been doing .

For years and years, he's never bought into any of the nonsense.

That's why I'm here for this.

He really helped my career,

and we became good friends,

and we still remain good friends over all that large period of time,

and , I mean , to me, he's Bob,

and he's a great guy.

Thirty years is a long span of years,

and I started thinking , "Where was I 30 years ago?"

And it's an amazing feat to remain as popular as he has

for 30 years, and I congratulate him .

Yeah .

I'd pay to hear that.

That works.

-Hey, Tom . -How are you?

Good . How are you?

Okay.

As long as I can read it, I guess it will be cool .

J ust put it up there like that. Like a hymn .