Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews
Bob on Bob, Louis Menand’s review of Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, in the September 4, 2006 issue of the New Yorker. A great review of a book that sounds less than great, due to Dylan’s mumbling indifference to most interviewers, at least during the early days of his career. Menand zeroes in on Dylan’s interest in the sound of music, more than lyrics, and how artists, either out of creative exploration or commercial necessity, often explore a greater range of interests than their fans, who want to put their prey into boxes:
…[Dave] Van Ronk was a big spirit, and in his posthumously published memoir, written with Elijah Wald, “The Mayor of MacDougal Street”—a wise and very funny book; in some ways a great book—he had this to say:
I thought that going electric was a logical direction for Bobby to take. I did not care for all of his new stuff, by any means, but some of it was excellent, and it was a reasonable extension of what he had done up to that point. I knew perfectly well that none of us was a true “folk” artist. We were professional performers, and while we liked a lot of folk music, we all liked a lot of other things as well. Working musicians are very rarely purists. The purists are out in the audience kibitzing, not onstage trying to make a living. And Bobby was absolutely right to ignore them.
…You can’t find the road that gets you from “Hell Hound on My Trail” and “This Land Is Your Land” through “Pirate Jenny” to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Musicians don’t follow roads. Most of them have much more eclectic musical interests than their fans do. Elijah Wald (Van Ronk’s co-author), in his indispensable revisionist history of the blues, “Escaping the Delta,” points out that Muddy Waters had more songs in his repertoire by Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy, than by any blues musician; that Louis Armstrong’s favorite band was Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians; and that Robert Johnson played Bing Crosby songs. “If I had only one artist to listen to through eternity,” Chuck Berry said, “it would be Nat Cole.”
…Van Ronk thought that Dylan was sloppy, that he wrote his songs too fast. Even in Dylan’s best songs (I know that my life will not be worth much after these words appear in print), there are lines that are truly lame. “And the words that are used/For to get the ship confused/Will not be understood as they’re spoken” is not even lyrical, forget about the sense. “Ballad of a Thin Man” does not profit from the verse about the one-eyed midget shouting the word “NOW.” (“And you say, ‘For what reason?’/And he says, ‘How?’/And you say, ‘What does this mean?’/And he screams back, ‘You’re a cow/Give me some milk/Or else go home.’ ” Maybe it makes some kind of sense as a proto-hip-hop rant.) Dylan’s words—he has said as much—are often placeholders, devices to fit the melody and fill out the line, which is why dutiful efforts to extract a message or a meaning are largely beside the point. If you want a message, buy a newspaper. “Songs are songs,” Dylan says in one of his early interviews. “I don’t believe in expecting too much out of any one thing.”
