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By PAUL ZOLLO
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 ongwriting? What do I know about songwriting?" Bob Dylan asked, and then broke into laughter. He was wearing blue jeans, a white tank-top T-shirt, and drinking coffee out of a glass. "It tastes better out of a glass," he said, grinning. His blonde acoustic guitar was leaning on a couch near where we sat. Bob Dylan's guitar. His influence is so vast that everything that surrounds him takes on enlarged significance: Bob Dylan's moccasins. Bob Dylan's coat.
Pete Seeger said, "All songwriters are links in a chain," yet there are few artists in this evolutionary arc whose influence is as profound as that of Bob Dylan. It's hard to imagine the art of songwriting as we know it without him. Though he insists in this interview that "somebody else would have done it," he was the instigator, the one who knew that songs could do more, that they could take on more. He knew that songs could contain a lyrical richness and meaning far beyond the scope of all previous pop songs, that they could possess as much beauty and power as the greatest poetry, and that by being written in rhythm and rhyme and merged with music, they could speak to our souls.
Starting with the models made by his predecessors, such as the talking blues he learned from the songs of Seeger and Woody Guthrie, Dylan quickly discarded old forms and began to fashion new ones. He broke all the rules of songwriting without abandoning the craft and care that holds songs together. He brought the linguistic beauty of Shakespeare, Byron, and Dylan Thomas, and the expansiveness and beat experimentation of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti, to the folk poetry of Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams. And when the world was still in the midst of accepting this new form, he brought music to a new place again, fusing it with the electricity of rock and roll.
"Basically, he showed that anything goes," Robbie Robertson said. John Lennon said that it was hearing Dylan that allowed him to make the leap from writing empty pop songs to expressing the actuality of his life and the depths of his own soul. "Help" was a real call for help, he said, and prior to hearing Dylan it didn't occur to him that songs could contain such direct meaning. When I asked Paul Simon how he made the leap in his writing from fifties rock & roll songs like "Hey Schoolgirl" to "Sound of Silence" he said, "I really can't imagine it could have been anyone else besides Bob Dylan."
There's an unmistakable elegance in Dylan's words, an almost biblical beauty that he has sustained in his songs throughout the years. He refers to it as a "gallantry" in the following, and pointed to it as the single thing that sets his songs apart from others. Though he's maybe more famous for the freedom and expansiveness of his lyrics, all of his songs possess this exquisite care and love for the language. As Shakespeare and Byron did in their times, Dylan has taken English, perhaps the world's plainest language, and instilled it with a timeless, mythic grace.
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As much as he has stretched, expanded and redefined the rules of songwriting, he's a tremendously meticulous craftsman. A brutal critic of his own work, he works and reworks the words of his songs in the studio, and even continues to rewrite certain ones even after they've been recorded and released. "They're not written in stone," he said. With such a wondrous wealth of language at his fingertips, he discards imagery and lines other songwriters would sell their souls to discover.
He was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. Inspired by the writing and music of Woody Guthrie, he moved to New York in 1961 ostensibly to meet Woody, who was suffering in a New Jersey hospital from the illness that eventually took his life, Huntington's Disease. Marjorie Guthrie, Woody's wife, told me that Dylan was a nice enough kid, and quite respectful of Woody, but she didn't like his singing, and suggested he try to better enunciate the words to his songs.
More impressed than Mrs. Guthrie was the producer John Hammond, who heard Dylan sing at Gerde's in Greenwich Village, and signed him to a record deal with Columbia. Though his debut album contained only two original songs, including his tribute to Guthrie, "Song To Woody," by the second album he'd already written classics such as "Blowing In The Wind" and "Masters Of War," manifesting the new potential inherent in popular songs.
He went on to change the world and bend our minds with successive masterpieces, including such classics as The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Blonde On Blonde, Nashville Skyline, The Basement Tapes [made with The Band], John Wesley Harding, Blood On The Tracks, Desire, Oh Mercy and much more.
"It's too much and not enough," he said, in reference to the extended nature of many of his songs. The same could be said of any attempt to express the full impact of his greatness in words. Such an attempt would take volumes and still be lacking, as the countless books on the subject attest. Suffice it to say that, like the writing of Shakespeare, the full significance of Dylan's work may not be understood for centuries, at which time scholars might very well look back in wonder that one man could have produced such an immense and amazing body of work.
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"Yes, well, what can you know about anybody?" Dylan asked, and it's a good question. He's been a mystery for years, "kind of inpenetrable, really," said Paul Simon, and that mystery is not penetrated by this interview or any interview. Dylan's answers were often more enigmatic than my questions, and like his songs, they offer a lot to think about while not necessarily revealing much about the man.
In person, as others have noted, he is Chaplinesque. His body is smaller and his head bigger than one might expect, giving the effect of a kid wearing a Bob Dylan mask. He possesses one of the world's most striking faces; while certain stars might seem surprisingly normal and unimpressive in the flesh, Dylan is perhaps even more startling to confront than one might expect. Seeing those eyes, and that nose, it's clear it could be no one else than he, and to sit at a table with him and face those iconic features is no less impressive than suddenly finding yourself sitting face to face with William Shakespeare. It's a face we associate with an enormous, timeless body of work, work that has changed the world. But it's not really the kind of face one expects to encounter in everyday life.
Though Van Morrison called him the world's greatest poet, he doesn't think of himself as a poet. "Poets drown in lakes," he said. Yet he's written some of the most beautiful poetry the world has known, poetry of love and outrage, of abstraction and clarity, of timelessness and relativity. Though he is faced with the evidence of a catalogue of songs that could contain the whole careers of a dozen fine songwriters, Dylan told me that he doesn't consider himself to be a professional songwriter. "For me it's always been more con-fessional than pro-fessional," he said in distinctive Dylan cadence. "My songs aren't written on a schedule."
Well, how are they written, I asked? This is the question at the heart of this interview, the main one that comes to mind when looking over all the albums, or witnessing the amazing array of moods, masks, styles and forms he's presented over the years. How has he done it? It was the first question asked, and though he deflected it at first with his customary humor, it's a question I tried to return to a few times.
"Start me off somewhere," he said smiling, as if he might be left alone to divulge the secrets of his songwriting, and our talk began.
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BLUERAILROAD: Arlo Guthrie recently said, "Songwriting is like fishing in a stream; you put in your line and hope you catch something. And I don't think anyone downstream from Bob Dylan ever caught anything."
DYLAN: [Much laughter]
Any idea how you've been able to catch so many?
[Laughs] It's probably the bait. [More laughter]
What kind of bait do you use?
[Pause] Bait. You've got to use some bait. Otherwise you sit around and expect songs to come to you. Forcing it is using bait.
Does that work for you?
Well, no. Throwing yourself into a situation that would demand a response is like using bait. People who write about stuff that hasn't really happened to them are inclined to do that.
When you write songs, do you try to consciously guide the meaning or do you try to follow subconscious directions?
Well, you know, motivation is something you never know behind any song, really. Anybody's song, you never know what the motivation was.
It's nice to be able to put yourself in an environment where you can completely accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from your inner workings of your mind. And block yourself off to where you can control it all, take it down...
Edgar Allen Poe must have done that. People who are dedicated writers, of which there are some, but mostly people get their information today over a television set or some kind of a way that's hitting them on all their senses. It's not just a great novel anymore.
You have to be able to get the thoughts out of your mind.
How do you do that?
Well, first of all, there's two kinds of thoughts in your mind: there's good thoughts and evil thoughts. Both come through your mind. Some people are more loaded down with one than another. Nevertheless, they come through. And you have to be able to sort them out, if you want to be a songwriter, if you want to be a song singer. You must get rid of all that baggage. You ought to be able to sort out those thoughts, because they don't mean anything, they're just pulling you around, too. It's important to get rid of all them thoughts.
Then you can do something from some kind of surveillance of the situation. You have some kind of place where you can see it but it can't affect you. Where you can bring something to the matter, besides just take, take, take, take, take. As so many situations in life are today. Take, take, take, that's all that it is. What's in it for me? That syndrome which started in the Me Decade, whenever that was. We're still in that. It's still happening.
Is songwriting for you more a sense of taking something from some place else?
Well, some place else is always a heartbeat away. There's no rhyme or reason to it. There's no rule. That's what makes it so attractive. There isn't any rule. You can still have your wits about you and do something that gets you off in a multitude of ways. As you very well know, or else you yourself wouldn't be doing it.
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Your songs often bring us back to other times, and are filled with mythic, magical images. A song like "Changing Of The Guard" seems to take place centuries ago, with lines like They shaved her head/she was torn between Jupiter and Apollo/ a messenger arrived with a black nightingale...". How do you connect with a song like that?
[Pause] A song like that, there's no way of knowing, after the fact, unless somebody's there to take it down in chronological order, what the motivation was behind it.
[Pause] But on one level, of course, it's no different from anything else of mine. It's the same amount of metric verses like a poem. To me, like a poem.
The melodies in my mind are very simple, they're very simple, they're just based on music we've all heard growing up. And that and music which went beyond that, which went back further, Elizabethan ballads and whatnot...
To me, it's old. [Laughs] It's old. It's not something, with my minimal amount of talent, if you could call it that, minimum amount... To me somebody coming along now would definitely read what's out there if they're seriously concerned with being an artist whose going to still be an artist when they get to be Picasso's age. You're better off learning some music theory. You're just better off, yeah, if you want to write songs. Rather than just take a hillbilly twang, you know, and try to base it all on that. Even country music is more orchestrated than it used to be. You're better off having some feel for music that you don't have to carry in your head, that you can write down.
To me those are the people who... are serious about this craft. People who go about it that way. Not people who just want to pour out their insides and they got to get a big idea out and they want to tell the world about this, sure, you can do it through a song, you always could. You can use a song for anything, you know.
The world don't need any more songs.
You don't think so?
No. They've got enough. They've got way too many. As a matter of fact, if nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain't gonna suffer for it. Nobody cares. There's enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probably, each of them, a hundred records, and never be repeated. There's enough songs.
Unless someone's gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That's a different story.
But as far as songwriting, any idiot could do it. If you see me do it, any idiot could do it. [Laughs] It's just not that difficult of a thing. Everybody writes a song just like everybody's got that one great novel in them.
There aren't a lot of people like me. You just had your interview with Neil [Young], John Mellencamp... Of course, most of my ilk that came along write their own songs and play them. It wouldn't matter if anybody ever made another record. They've got enough songs.
To me, someone who writes really good songs is Randy Newman. There's a lot of people who write good songs. As songs. Now Randy might not go out on stage and knock you out, or knock your socks off. And he's not going to get people thrilled in the front row. He ain't gonna do that. But he's gonna write a better song than most people who can do it.
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You know, he's got that down to an art. Now Randy knows music. He knows music. But it doesn't get any better than "Louisiana" or "Cross Charleston Bay" ["Sail Away"]. It doesn't get any better than that. That's like a classically heroic anthem theme. He did it. There's quite a few people who did it. Not that many people in Randy's class.
Brian Wilson. He can write melodies that will beat the band. Three people could combine on a song and make it a great song. If one person would have written the same song, maybe you would have never heard it. It might get buried on some...rap record. [Laughs]
Still, when you've come out with some of your new albums of songs, those songs fit that specific time better than any songs that had already been written. Your new songs have always shown us new possibilities.
It's not a good idea and it's bad luck to look for life's guidance to popular entertainers. It's bad luck to do that. No one should do that. Popular entertainers are fine, there's nothing the matter with that, but as long as you know where you're standing and what ground you're on, many of them, they don't know what they're doing either.
But your songs are more than pop entertainment --
Some people say so. Not to me.
No?
Pop entertainment means nothing to me. Nothing. You know, Madonna's good. Madonna's good, she's talented, she puts all kinds of stuff together, she's learned her thing... But it's the kind of thing which takes years and years out of your life to be able to do. You've got to sacrifice a whole lot to do that. Sacrifice. If you want to make it big, you've got to sacrifice a whole lot.
It's all the same, it's all the same. [Laughs]
Van Morrison said that you are our greatest living poet. Do you think of yourself in those terms?
[Pause] Sometimes. It's within me. It's within me to put myself up and be a poet. But it's a dedication. [Softly] It's a big dedication.
[Pause] Poet's don't drive cars. [Laughs] Poets don't go to the supermarket. Poets don't empty the garbage. Poets aren't on the PTA. Poets, you know, they don't go picket the Better Housing Bureau, or whatever. Poets don't... Poets don't even speak on the telephone. Poets don't even talk to anybody. Poets do a lot of listening and... and usually they know why they're poets! [Laughs]
Yeah, there are... what can you say? The world don't need any more poems, it's got Shakespeare. There's enough of everything. You name it, there's enough of it. There was too much of it with electricity, maybe, some people said that. Some people said the lightbulb was going too far.
Poets live on the land. They behave in a gentlemanly way. And live by their own gentlemanly code.
[Pause] And die broke. Or drown in lakes. Poets usually have very unhappy endings. Look at Keats' life. Look at Jim Morrison, if you want to call him a poet. Look at him. Although some people say that he really is in the Andes.
(continued ...)
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