The French Interviewer Antoine de Caunes brings out a side of Bob Dylan that is honest and willing to discuss in detail.
Dylan talks about songwriting and how he has changed over time. Although he does sa he is the same as in 1966! That’s gold – and there is a lot of gold in this interview. Bob didn’t think he would change in the mid 90s- ha. Said he was sick of changing.I need not say more – Watch it!
Part One
Dylan released the album ‘Real Live’ which was made up of live performances from the 1984 tour. This tour seemed to take it out of Bob I think. He looks pretty stuffed, but Rock and Roll is tough!
I’ve never seen this one before! It’s a great interview Bob done while he was in Australia in 1986. Bob says that he only writes songs that are easy to write. If they are too hard he drops them. Bob is in a good mood and enjoys the interview. Bob even let the program record part of his concert one night and we get to see part of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ He talks about feeling uncomfortable in crowded rooms, what love and romance is to him and what makes him laugh.
This is a must see!
Some releases you can buy from around the time of this interview are:
This is a press conference in san francisco in 1965 where Dylan is playful as ever taking the reporters for a ride as per usual.
The way Dylan goes on spinning conversational webs is pure genius.
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Part 6
Excerpt from newspaper
Bob Dylan’s Idea For a Symphony
by Lisa Hobbs
Bob Dylan, a mental free-floater in two-inch high boots, has made but one commitment to the future–he would like to write a symphony.
It’s the only firm commitment verbal, philosophic, or social that he offered yesterday to a world that he perceives as being otherwise without hope.
It will be like no other symphony, just like the 24 year old Dylan is like no other writer-singer.
As the high priest of the folk-rock cult described it to reporters at KQED, it will have “different melodies, words and ideas all being the same and rolled on top of each other”.
He made a delicate gesture with delicate hands as if he were kneading pastry dough.
Dylan denied that his songs have any subtle message, although he has written and sung over 150.
“Where did you hear they have a message?” he asked a pert teenage editor from a Bay Area high school newspaper.
“In a movie magazine” she giggled.
This sets dozens of beards in the audience shaking. Some beards even removed their sunglasses to wipe off the tears. (Poet Allen Ginsberg, one of the guests invited for what turn out to be a rather fruitless mental autopsy, would have won the prize for Best Beard easlly.)
Dylan, who looks like an under-nourished kewpie doll, also denied that he played folk-rock.
“I call it vision music, mathematical music,” he said in a barely audible mutter which made this reporter feel positively decrepit.
“The words are just as important as the music. There would be no music without the words. I do the words first. I know what music I want when I hear the words. But sometimes on a gentle instrument like a harpsichord or a harmonica, I hear the melody first and know the words that should fit to it. That never happens with the guitar. It’s too hard an instrument.”
Asked what poets did he dig, Dylan replied:
“W.C. Fields, the trapeze family in the circus, Ginsburg, Charlie Rich.”
He denied that he wanted to change anyone’s lives by being hard on them in his songs.
“I just want to needle ’em.”
He also digs flicks—-will make one himself next year and thinks Joan Baez interprets his earlier songs “all right.”
Smoking continually, flicking ash and rubbing his little suede boots together, the pale and aesthetic-faced Dylan said he’ll know when to quit because “I’ll just start to itch and something goes through a terrifying turn and it has nothing to do with anything.”
A newsman commented that Dylan’s voice was inaudible until he spoke about the booings he had received but then it became quite clear.
“Are you doing a pennance of silence?” Dylan was asked.
“No,” he replied. “It’s always silent where I am.”
“They shouldn’t have asked any reporters over 30,” one sighed.
This is an excerpt from the movie “Don’t Look Back”. Dylan is being interviewed by Time Magazine. Dylan totally shuts this dude down. Talking non stop and this interviewer has no hope at all. One could say Dylan was a smart arse back in the day. But that’s not saying he wasn’t speaking the truth. It is absolutely hilarious and well worth watching.
DylanTube 