A Conversation with Bob Dylan (continued)

In a five-part conversation with Bill Flanagan, Bob Dylan talks about composing music for Olivier Dahan (La Vie en Rose), "milking" styles, drawing and painting, Sam Houston, guitar solos, accordions, the difference between dreams and hopes, politics, President Barack Obama, The Rolling Stones, acting versus singing, favorite songwriters, Hitler, and why he's not a mainstream artist.

Parts 1-3 are HERE.
Part 4 is HERE.
Part 5 is HERE.

Here are some excerpts:

BF: Say you wake up in a hotel room in Wichita and look out the window. A little girl is walking along the train tracks dragging a big statue of Buddha in a wooden wagon with a three-legged dog following behind. Do you reach for your guitar or your drawing pad?

BD: Oh wow. It would depend on a lot of things. The environment mostly; like what kind of day is it. Is it a cloudless blue-gray sky or does it look like rain? A little girl dragging a wagon with a statue in it? I'd probably put that in last. The three-legged dog - what type? A spaniel, a bulldog, a retriever? That would make a difference. I'd have to think about that. Depends what angle I'm seeing it all from. Second floor, third floor, eighth floor. I don't know. Maybe I'd want to go down there. The train tracks too. I'd have to find a way to connect it all up. I guess I would be thinking about if this was an omen or a harbinger of something.

BF: If a young man considering a career in the arts wanted to meet a lot of women, would he be better off learning to paint or to play guitar?

BD: Probably neither. If he had women on his mind, he might think about becoming a lawyer or a doctor.

BF: Seriously?

BD: Yeah, seriously. Maybe a private detective, but that would be the wrong motivation for any career.

BF: What do you think of the Stones?

BD: What do I think of them? They're pretty much finished, aren't they?

BF: They had a gigantic tour last year. You call that finished?

BD: Oh yeah, you mean Steel Wheels. I'm not saying they don't keep going, but they need Bill. Without him they're a funk band. They'll be the real Rolling Stones when they get Bill back.

BF: Bob, you're stuck in the 80's.

BD: I know. I'm trying to break free.

BF: Do you really think the Stones are finished?

BD: Of course not, They're far from finished. The Rolling Stones are truly the greatest rock and roll band in the world and always will be. The last too. Everything that came after them, metal, rap, punk, new wave, pop-rock, you name it .... you can trace it all back to the Rolling Stones. They were the first and the last and no one's ever done it better.

BF: Then what kind of artist are you?

BD: I'm not sure, Byronesque maybe. Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now. Some of my songs have crossed over but they were all done by other singers.

BF: Have you ever tried to fit in?

BD: Well, no, not really. I'm coming out of the folk music tradition and that's the vernacular and archetypal aesthetic that I've experienced. Those are the dynamics of it. I couldn't have written songs for the Brill Building if I tried. Whatever passes for pop music, I couldn't do it then and I can't do it now.

BF: Does that mean you create outsider art? Do you think of yourself as a cult figure?

BD: A cult figure, that's got religious connotations. It sounds cliquish and clannish. People have different emotional levels. Especially when you're young. Back then I guess most of my influences could be thought of as eccentric. Mass media had no overwhelming reach so I was drawn to the traveling performers passing through. The side show performers - bluegrass singers, the black cowboy with chaps and a lariat doing rope tricks. Miss Europe, Quasimodo, the Bearded Lady, the half-man half-woman, the deformed and the bent, Atlas the Dwarf, the fire-eaters, the teachers and preachers, the blues singers. I remember it like it was yesterday. I got close to some of these people. I learned about dignity from them. Freedom too. Civil rights, human rights. How to stay within yourself. Most others were into the rides like the tilt-a-whirl and the rollercoaster. To me that was the nightmare. All the giddiness. The artificiality of it. The sledge hammer of life. It didn't make sense or seem real. The stuff off the main road was where force of reality was. At least it struck me that way. When I left home those feelings didn't change.

BF: But you've sold over a hundred million records.

BD: Yeah I know. It's a mystery to me too.

New York Magazine's Conversation with Woody Allen

photo by Dan Winters
New York’s hometown auteur on whether a lifetime of psychoanalysis has paid off, and why kids from Yale no longer like good movies.

By Adam Moss Published Sep 28, 2008

An excerpt:

NY: Do you think audiences are less sophisticated?

WA: People are always talking about the dumbing down of the country. Now, it’s hard to believe that they could be dumber now than they were in my time. Theoretically that can’t be. But when you look around at Broadway theater and films, it’s hard to argue with the fact that we’re going through a period of coarsened public taste. And yet you don’t want to be caught saying that because then it seems like you’re one of those people saying, In my day, it was great. You know, it wasn’t that great in my day either. I’m sure if you went back to the 1800s and the 1500s and the Greeks, they would say garbage sells, too.

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NY: Do you have a theory about why the culture keeps getting coarser?

WA: The country has, over the years, moved to the right. And it’s possible that accompanying that move to the right, you also get a lessening of taste. But I don’t know if what I’m saying is true, because I have shown some very good films—Bergman, Fellini—to kids from good schools like Yale. Bright kids. And they were not impressed. You know, it wasn’t as though I picked out some kid from the Midwest who’s a churchgoing barbarian. Those same kids that you see in the movie house doubled over with laughter over fraternity toilet jokes are very often kids from Columbia and Yale. We might also still be feeling the fallout from the sexual revolution, when everybody just ran amok talking dirty and doing things that were forbidden and it became the mark of drama and comedy to be simply outrageous. Not necessarily dramatically interesting or particularly comic, but just outrageous. Read more...

This is the last time

...that I'll be posting anything Nick Cave-related for a while, but I thought I'd share with you this very funny interview with the man himself by the good people at the San Francisco Weekly blog site (which has way better music coverage than its printed counterpart in my opinion). Here is an excerpt from the Q & A:


HS: So you're just starting out on your U.S. tour.

NC: Yeah, we've been doing a lot of Grinderman shows, which are basically festival shows, and Grinderman thing very much infects the Bad Seeds thing. [Grinderman shows are] extremely aggressive, and that can't help but leak into what you're doing. You're like some kind of schizophrenic: Who am I today? Am I the introverted poet, or am I the fucking woman-hating sex machine? (Laughs, probably at the look on my face.) Woman-loving.

HS: (Weak laughter.)

NC: This is probably the easiest interview I've ever done in my life.

Read more...