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In this department, Bob Dylan answers one question about his music and/or his life each month. If you have questions for Mr. Dylan, Click Here to send them to the editor. There's no guarantee that Mr. Dylan will answer your question, but you never know.
May 2007
 his month, Mr. Dylan answers a question about his transition from folk music to folk-rock posed to him by the writer Nat Hentoff in 1966.
NAT HENTOFF: Do you feel that switching from folk to folk-rock has improved you as a performer?
BOB DYLAN: I'm not interested in myself as a performer. Performers are people who perform for other people. Unlike actors, I know what I'm saying. It's very simple in my mind. It doesn't matter what kind of audience reaction this whole thing gets. What happens on the stage is straight. It doesn't expect any rewards or fines from any kind of outside agitators. It's ultra-simple, and would exist whether anybody was looking or not.
As far as folk and folk-rock are concerned, it doesn't matter what kind of nasty names people invent for the music. It could be called arsenic music, or perhaps Phaedra music. I don't think that such a word as folk-rock has anything to do with it. And folk music is a word I can't use. Folk music is a bunch of fat people. I have to think of all of this as traditional music. Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. There's nobody that going to kill traditional music. All these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans and turn into angels - they're not going to die. It's all those paranoid people who think that someone's going to come and take away their toilet paper - they're going to die. Songs like "Which Side Are You On?" and "And I Love You, Porgy" - they're not folk music songs; they're political songs. They're already dead. Obviously, death is not very universally accepted. I mean, you'd think that the traditional music people could gather from their songs that mystery - just plain simple mystery - is a fact, a traditional fact.
I listen to the old ballads; but I wouldn't go to a party and listen to the old ballads. I could give you descriptive detail of what they do to me, but some people would probably think my imagination had gone mad. It strikes me funny that people actually have the gall to think that I have some kind of fantastic imagination. It gets very lonesome. But anyway, traditional music is too unreal to die. It doesn't need to be protected. Nobody's going to get hurt. In that music is the only true, valid death you can feel today off a record player. But like anything else in great demand, people try to own it. It has to do with a purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy. Everybody knows that I'm not a folk singer.
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