Q&A: Bob Dylan

Did you start out wanting to be a star?
Not really, because I always needed a song to get by. There’s a lot of singers who don’t need songs to get by. A lot of ’em are tall, good-lookin’, you know? They don’t need to say anything to grab people. Me, I had to make it on something other than my looks or my voice. [

What was it that made you decide to become a rock & roll songwriter?
Well, now, Chuck Berry was a rock & roll songwriter. So I never tried to write rock & roll songs, ’cause I figured he had just done it. When I started writing songs, they had to be in a different mold. Because who wants to be a second-rate anybody? A new generation had come along, of which I was a part — the second generation of rock & roll people. To me, and to others like me, it was a way of life. It was an all-consuming way of life.

What was the rock scene like when you arrived in New York in the early Sixties?
What was happening was Joey Dee and the Starliters, which was, like, a twisting scene. There was a big twist craze. There were little pockets, I guess, all across the country where people were playin’ rock & roll music. But it was awfully difficult. I knew some guys that played in the Village, and to make some extra money they would play in midtown clubs like the Metropole, which used to be a burlesque house on Seventh Avenue. Those were pretty funky places. You could play for six hours and make ten dollars, and there’d be some girl stripping all that time. Pretty degrading gig. But economics being what they are, you got to make some kinda money to exist with electric instruments. That’s what got me out of it, actually. It was just too hard.

So you opted for folk music.
Folk music creates its own audience. Because you can take a guitar anywhere, anytime. Most of the places we played in the early days were all parties — house parties, rent parties. Any kind of reason to go play someplace and we’d be there.

Were you surprised by the public reaction to your early songs, or by your eventual mass acceptance?
Not really. ‘Cause I paid my dues. It didn’t happen overnight, you know. I came up one step at a time. And I knew when I’d come up with somethin’ good. For instance, “Song to Woody,” on my first record: I knew that no one had ever written anything like that before.

Still, given your unique style of writing and singing, you did seem an unlikely candidate for stardom on the pop scene in the mid-Sixties.
Well, I wasn’t tryin’ to get onto the radio. I wasn’t singin’ for Tin Pan Alley. I’d given up on all that stuff. I was downtown, you know? I wanted to make records, but I thought the furthest I could go was to make a folk-music record. It surprised the hell out of me when I was signed at Columbia Records. I was more surprised than anybody. But I never let that stop me [laughs].

Did you ever feel that you had tapped into the Zeitgeist in some special sort of way?
With the songs that I came up with?

Yeah.
As I look back on it now, I am surprised that I came up with so many of them. At the time it seemed like a natural thing to do. Now I can look back and see that I must have written those songs “in the spirit,” you know? Like “Desolation Row” — I was just thinkin’ about that the other night. There’s no logical way that you can arrive at lyrics like that. I don’t know how it was done.

It just came to you?
It just came out through me.

By the time of “Desolation Row”, in 1965, you had gone electric and had been more or less drummed out of the purist folk movement. Was that a painful experience?
No. I looked at that as an opportunity to get back into what I had been into a long time ago and to take it someplace further. Folk-music circles were very cold, anyway. Everybody was pretty strict and severe in their attitudes; it was kind of a stuffy scene. It didn’t bother me that people didn’t understand what I was doing, because I had been doing it long before they were around. And I knew, when I was doin’ that stuff, that that hadn’t been done before, either. Because I’d known all the stuff that had gone down before. I knew what the Beatles were doin’, and that seemed to be real pop stuff. The Stones were doing blues things — just hard city blues. The Beach Boys, of course, were doin’ stuff that I didn’t think had ever been done before, either. But I also knew that I was doing stuff that hadn’t ever been done before.

Did you have more of a drive to write back then? More of a drive to make it?
Well, yeah, you had all those feelings that had been bottled up for twenty-some years, and then you got ’em all out. And once they’re out, then you gotta start up again.

Do you still get inspired the same way these days?
I don’t know. It’s been a while since, uh …— What moves you to write is something that you care about deeply. You also have to have the time to write. You have to have the isolation to write. And the more demands that are put on you, the harder it is. I mean, it seems like everybody wants a piece of your time at a certain point. There was a time when nobody cared, and that was one of the most productive times, when nobody gave a shit who I was.