DYLAN interview

I thought to include a Dylan blog – I could nearly do an entire site on him! It’s wonderful to be alive in the time of such a genius poet and artist.

He wrote about riding boxcars, and fishing boats outside of Delacroix – I’m sure loads made up – yet it was real in the sense that moving to New York was a huge huge deal for a young guy from the great cultural wildness of the northwest. In many senses this is the real Dylan the one forever on the road artistically and in reality too - and not wanting to be pinned down. He also rode them becasue Woodie Guthrie had.

Yet he was also saying in the interview the wonderful things about the northwest – Hibbing or Deluth. ‘You’ll never see another town like Deluth. It’s not a tourist attraction, but it probably should be. There are only two seasons: damp and cold. I like the way the hills tumble to the waterfront and the way the wind blows around the grain elevators. The train yards go on forever too, It’s old-age industrial, that’s what it is. You’ll see it from the top of the hill for miles and miles before you get there. You wont’ believe your eyes. I’ll give you a medal if you get out alive.'

Quote Dylan – ‘Later on I started reading over and over again Plutarch and his Roman Lives. And the writers Cicero, Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius; I like the morality thing… In Roman thought, morality is broken down into basically four things: wisdom, justice, moderation and courage.’

‘The air is so pure there,’ he says. ‘And the brooks and rivers are still running. The forests are thick, and the landscape is brutal. And the sky is still blue up there. It is pretty untarnished, It’s still of the beaten path. But I hardly ever go back.’

Apparently Dylan walked off the Ed Sullivan show – as they wanted him to do a Clancy Brothers cover. While he’d rehearsed ‘Talkin John Birch Paranoid Blues’.

‘Dylan belongs to no city or state. There is Dylan the family man who spends time in California with his children and grandchildren in Malibu. Sometimes Dylan lingers in the Bay Area for weeks at a time, sketching fishmongers and longshoremen. As a New York Yankees fan, he can be found sitting behind first base in the Bronx on random autumnal nights. But it’s Minnesota’s north country, which seems to always lie just over the frozen brow of a long-remembered field, where the road still reaches into the void on below-zero blue winter days, that remains Dylan’s touchstone place. That’s the American landscape that has influenced him most. ‘ © Douglas Brinkley Rolling Stone 2009.