Rock: A Folk Hero Speaks

Bob Dylan has never been big on interviews. For one thing, he doesn’t like questions; for another, he doesn’t need publicity. Since 1966, when he broke his neck in a motorcycle accident, he has avoided reporters almost entirely—much to the despair of millions of young people who idolize him as a primogenitor of the rock generation. Now Dylan has had a change of heart and granted an interview to a San Francisco-based rock magazine.

Why the long silence? “If you give an interview to one magazine,” he explains in the current issue of Rolling Stone, “then another one’ll get mad. People don’t understand that the press, they just use you to sell papers. And, in a certain way, that’s not bad, but when they misquote you all the time, and when they just use you to fill in some story, it hurts because you think you were just played for a fool.”

Having cleared up one mystery for his fans, Dylan turned to another—the new and notable richness and resonance of his voice in his most recent LP, Nashville Skyline (TIME, April 11). His explanation: “When I stopped smoking, my voice changed so drastically, I couldn’t believe it myself. That’s true. I tell you, you stop smoking those cigarettes, and you’ll be able to sing like Caruso.”

Lighten Every Load. Dylan revealed that he has written “a whole bag of new songs” for a U.S. tour he is talking about launching in the next month or so. But the tour will be a lot different—slower, less frantic—from his tours before the motorcycle accident. In those days, says Dylan, “I was going at a tremendous speed . . . I was on the road for almost five years. It wore me down. I was on drugs, a lot of things. A lot of things just to keep going, you know? And I don’t want to live that way anymore.”

The adulation heaped upon Dylan over the years makes him uneasy, at best. When told by the interviewer that many writers and college students were “tremendously hung-up” over his words and asked if he felt any responsibility to them, Dylan begged off. “Boy, if I could ease someone’s mind, I’d be the first one to do it. I want to lighten every load. Straighten out every burden. I don’t want anybody to be hung-up—especially over me, or anything I do. That’s not the point at all.”

Among other revelations about the life and times of a folk hero: the familiar story of Dylan’s running away from his Hibbing, Minn., home at age 10, 12, 13, 15, 151, 17 and 18, and being brought back all but once, is strictly a publicist’s pipedream. “I didn’t put out any of those stories.” He “didn’t get a penny” from the documentary movie about him, Don’t Look Back. His best songs have been written in motel rooms and cars. “I try to write the song when it comes . . . And when they don’t come, I don’t try for it.”

Biggest Contract. In his inimitable language, Dylan also told how he almost wrote a philosophical memoir of sorts called Tarantula: “It begins with when I suddenly began to sell quite a few records . . . and I was doing interviews before and after concerts, and reporters would say things like ‘What else do you write?’ And I would say, ‘Well, I don’t write much of anything else.’ And they would say, ‘Oh, come on. You must write other things. Tell us something else. Do you write books?’ And I’d say, ‘Sure, I write books.’ After the publishers saw that I wrote books, they began to send me contracts . . . Doubleday, Macmillan . . . we took the biggest one and then owed them a book. You follow me?”

Twice Dylan turned in manuscripts and twice was so dissatisfied after reading proofs that he refused to allow the work to be printed. Finally, he took his research and a typewriter along on a European tour. “I was going to rewrite it all,” he explains. “But still, it wasn’t any book; it was just to satisfy the publishers who wanted to print something that we had a contract for. Follow me? So eventually I had my motorcycle accident and that just got me out of the whole thing, ’cause I didn’t care anymore. As it stands now, I could write a book. But I’m gonna write it first, and then give it to them. You know what I mean?” Dig.