Interview Date: August 7, 2008

An Interview with Poet, Critic, Publisher, the popular and the always waxing poetic, especially on all matters Dylan, Phil Gounis.

Phil Gounis was first drawn toward the songs of Bob Dylan in the early 1960's and never lost interest. Dylan’s work through its many changes has continued to intrigue him and influence his oeuvre as it has that of millions of inspired artists worldwide. Gounis is an American poet, novelist, archivist, filmmaker, publisher and critic. His work has been published in various media, and Gounis is well known for his Blues radio program that was popular during the 1970s, “Crackerbox” on KCLC. In the 1980s, Gounis co-founded a magazine of politics and popular culture – Steamshovel Press – with the impetus of publishing an interview with Ram Dass. His work has also appeared in River Styx Magazine. You can find out more about Phil Gounis on Wikipedia by typing in “Philip Gounis”.

S.R.P.

It was a late summer afternoon when Phil Gounis who would describe himself thus and I finally sat down, journalist-to-journalist, for what would turn out to be approximately a three hour long absolutely informal, and positively natural flowing tête-à-tête have a conversation about Bobby Dylan and the role he has played in both of our lives, and surely the very rhythm of our culture. Dylan is here at the hinge, always opening new doors through which we can pass, as one generation enters and becomes a whole new fan-base, as others move on and continue to grow with Dylan like a loop that just repeats.

Gounis is a journalist, Dylan archivist, long-time listener, but more than this, Gounis recounts for us here in this interview a youth and a present-tense that is infused with Dylan as he speaks of his coming of age, his then and now (and Dylan, likewise, perhaps to some extent unknowingly grew up with Gounis: there’s a synergy here between not just Gounis and Dylan, but so many of us as we walk the same road). Gounis is by turns informative, fascinating, funny, extremely knowledgeable, almost frighteningly astute at times, and always keenly aware of our culture. This interview is but a small part of what Gounis has to offer. This is the interview, in straight question and answer format, without edits, as our conversation went on that warm, late afternoon as I sat on the back porch while the machine taped our call – all three tapes, I should say.

Thanks for listening in,

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

S.R.P.: Let’s kick off and speak for the non-expert here. Consider this article for everyone – those who know a lot, those who know a little, and let’s take it from there, this way we’re all inclusive. Let me kick off with my first question then: What was the first song you ever heard that made an impression on you… there were covers, of Dylan songs, of course... What did you hear first?

P.G.: In the summer of 1963, I had an older brother, he and his friends were very much into that Peter Paul and Mary and they had an album called “In The Wind". Dylan wrote the liner-notes for it. I have another friend who once commented that Bob Dylan wouldn’t be remembered for his liner-notes. But anyway I’m this fifteen year old kid reading about Greenwich Village and that whole scene and it’s written in that kind of e.e. cummings style, and we thought," Boy, this is exciting stuff!" And we want to go to New York: "There’s beatniks there and all"! (laughs) So I had only heard Blowin’ In the Wind by Peter Paul and Mary and it was like a top twenty hit or something. And it was on A.M. radio. And again, we saw this name, Bob Die -lan (mispronounce) and wondered who is this guy? We had only three TV stations and Bob Dylan was never on television. And A.M. radio. The media wasn’t all over the place like it is now…. A.M. Radio had Leslie Gore. I had Columbia record samplers with Bobby Vinton and Bob Dylan both included. It was all lumped together, you couldn’t just go on line and find out who Bob Dylan was. So eventually you would ask people who were into folk music and who played guitar, just who this guy was. So the first album I listened to was “The Times They Are A Changing'” - some friends in Gaslight Square had that. Gaslight Square was a small entertainment area in St. Louis in the sixties. And Dylan actually played some of the clubs around there in the early 60's. So I was this underage kid hanging out with these college age beatniks. ( laughs) And I was fifteen, maybe seventeen. Dylan was born in '41 – so he was about 24 or something. It seems like a big age gap when you’re seventeen, so he seemed like this hip grown-up. Plus, we had no reason not to believe all that b.s. about him hitchhiking ‘round Gallop New Mexico which was on the liner-notes of some of his other albums. So this whole kind of image started to evolve and it was very intriguing and it fit right in with our curiosity and our interest in Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy. For us, it was the whole Beat thing – that’s what we connected with. Here was a guy who did all that Kerouac… did who did all that he did, as far as getting high, experimenting with life, etc. but he also played guitar. You know Chuck Berry came from St. Louis and you know Chuck Berry’s lyrics were always a cut above the usual pop records because in 2.5 minutes they told a little story, so we had listened to those narratives of Chuck Berry’s and Dylan’s thing – he took it even a step further.

The first time I heard “Subterranean Homesick Blues” we didn’t know who it was. We thought maybe it was the Rolling Stones because they didn’t say the name – again, it was a Top-Forty type of program, a type of make it or break it call =in radio contest. You could call in and let the radio station know what you thought of Subterranean Homesick Blues and I remember thinking it sounded like Jagger doing "Route 66". But as we grew and the media grew…

S. When you heard "Subterranean an Homesick Blues”… and that was Dylan’s first electric song, for my mind, "Don't Look Back" with that in the beginning was the first music video –

P. Keep in mind though that you can see Cab Calloway and other singers doing those things on film (Scopotone). . So those are kind of music videos.

S. I guess I’m taking about white contemporary music.

p. Again, on You Tube you could find Peggy Lee or you could find Glen Miller, but I know what you mean… with Dylan standing there with the lyrics on the card. It was a conceptual music video.

S. I can’t think of any other film that had opened up that way before "Don’t Look Back".

P. I can’t think of one off-hand so I would agree with that.

S. Did you go and see that?

P. I saw that in Gaslight Square at a little place called the Cinematheque. I saw that in '67 and they had folding chairs and an expandable screen just like you would see in school auditoriums. A small little back alley type of place where they charged a dollar. I think they also showed Warhol’s "Chelsea Girls" there as well…

S. But by then Dylan was pretty big.

p. He was big, but it’s an interesting thing about that movie… I'll get back to that. I’m going to digress a little. In the summer of '65, his name was all over the place. When I say that, we’re not talking about mainstream like he is now… Because the Byrds did his songs, a group called The Turtles did his song, Sony and Cher did his songs, all Top Forty a.m. radio hits…

S. Was that Grossman’s doing to popularize those songs?

P. Well how about that guy in the documentary "No Direction Home" – Artie Mogul? He says, “I tell you something, I’m the guy who made Bob Dylan". I always thought Albert Grossman… but someone somewhere with that Brill Building mentality thought they could make some money off this guy; because everybody everywhere was recording his music in '65, and then he stayed really big with those same groups of kids that listened to the Beatles and the Stones. But then after the motorcycle accident was in July '66 at the end of the tour, he was going to do a show called ABC Stage '67 – and that’s one version of "Eat The Document". But Dylan in a way kind of fell off the radar then but not really because kids, people, kept talking about him

S. After the accident you mean?

P. What spurred me to talk about that was that he was still popular then, but that it was kind of a word-of-mouth kind of thing… so back to the Cinematheque and Gaslight Square and you’d pay a dollar to sit down and see these underground movies.

S. So there you are, you’ve sort of got this subculture of Dylan going on. To your mind, when do you think he became – if he ever became – we can say now he’s mainstream (I mean, he’s doing commercials for Cadillac) – but when do you think he became popularized, if he became popularized in the early days. and if so, which song kicked it off

P. I don’t think it was just one song. I think what makes Dylan a really interesting cultural person to me… It’s almost as if the culture has exploded and got more of everything – and is more all over the place – and as it has expanded and mutated, Dylan’s career – and as a person who has listened to him since '62 or '63, I couldn’t imagine back then that he’d be doing Cadillac commercials and that it would be an accepted thing.

S. Would you agree with this statement, when you think of a song like “A Hard Rain”- I always listen to that song and I think and I think it was very prescient of him and this was right before Vietnam really… and he’s talking about a hard rain’s a gonna fall. But when I hear that song, I start thinking of Napalm and war... and in one show he starts talking of Goliaths and Greater Goliaths -

P. I think I know what you’re getting at

S. He seems always one step ahead…

P. More than one-step ahead. The culture caught up with him.

S. Exactly, that’s what I’m getting at. I think Dylan is ahead of everybody else.

P. I would totally agree with that. But what makes Dylan so incredibly interesting to me as an artist, is that not only is he a major influence on the culture, but he’s been influenced by so many things. Again to go back to me that 17 year old kid, I picked up "Bringing It All Back Home" and he’s talkin’ about Tolstoy and Gertrude Stein and Murph the Surf - and I thought this guy is interesting and I thought I have to go and find out about all of these people that he’s referencing on the liner notes.

S. Right. In some songs he’s even referencing Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg

P. But even to pick up the liner notes, as a young kid, you want to find out who these people are … A song like Desolation Row with T.S. Elliott and Ezra Pound, so you want to investigate who these people are. So the culture caught up with Bob Dylan and the reason that happened and the way that happened are again, interesting.

S. There’s always been a synchronicity, I think. I think for every generation, and Dylan has managed to span generations, but I think we pick somebody – they come along at the right time, etc – and they say everything that we want to say but we’re either afraid to say it, or can’t say and they become to us the way the Inuits have Shamans and they speak for the village, and that’s many of us.

P. I totally agree with that. Most people wouldn’t have that…

S. Baez tried, but she only spoke for a small group

P. Yeah, but Baez was more and is an interpreter of songs rather than a writer of songs. There used to be a process where singers didn’t write their songs. There used to be this place, the Brill Building, where people like Carole King and Jerry Goffin cranked out pop songs and then the singers would sing them. And that tradition went all the way back to Frank Sinatra. There were song-writing factories and that’s what they did.

S. Do you think that stopped around the time Dylan came onto the scene or was it phasing out?

P. Well, I can’t remember… Chuck Berry wrote his own songs, but Elvis didn’t, Little Richard wrote some of his own songs. Buddy Holly wrote some of his own songs, so there was a little bit of it, but there for a while, Dylan did nothing but write his own songs. I think "Blonde on Blonde" are all his and "Bringing It All Back Home" and "Highway 61 Revisited".

S. Do you remember John Jacob Niles… he wrote, “Go Away From My Window”? and Dylan would just take those lyrics and run with them. He said he was a “musical expeditionary” of himself [Dylan] in “No Direction Home”.

P. That was perfect when he said that. I was thinking about it, and in a lot of ways I was thinking of how Bob Dylan is like Charlie Chaplin. He created this persona, just like Chaplin created the “Little Tramp”, and what gets weird and screws most people up, is when they try to nail down this Robert Zimmerman who lives in Malibu and is a multi-millionaire and there is this contradiction. Like wait, I thought you were this scruffy guy that knocked around like in "Tangled Up In Blue” – that’s a persona he created, just like the Little Tramp is a persona in “City Lights” or other Chaplin films.

S. So then the question then becomes do you think, and this is really a philosophical question, do you think one is more or less authentic than the other, or are both authentic.

P. I thought about exactly that. Authentic and authenticity…and again, we're getting into splitting semantics. And nobody would dare call Chaplin a phony….

S. So why would we say that about Dylan then… right.

P. As far as that term authentic. The guy did play with Johnny Cash who was a sharecropper’s son.

S. I ask because it’s a question that comes back a lot in "Don’t Look Back" where people would ask Dylan “Are you ever really yourself?” and he would answer, “You gotta lot of nerve to ask me that…” and one guy says to him, “Are you ever not on-stage?” and then I believe the scene just cuts. I think, you know, Dylan is a song and dance man. But I think it’s a valid question: Who is Dylan. But we can’t know.

P. But then you get into the question what does authenticity mean?

S. Right, but it’s a fun little ball to bat around. I got into this last night after reading an article by someone who wrote you can’t interpret Dylan’s music, etc. If you ask me, what is art if it’s not there to be interpreted? That doesn’t mean our interpretation is correct, but art is created for an emotional response.

P. Exactly, and that’s the key phrase there, “Emotional response” and you might want to articulate that emotional response in a linear way, or you might want to pick up a saxophone and respond to it, or you might wanna start beating on some bongos, but that's the key phrase there: "emotional response" but that’s the thing people have debated forever. What is art? Is Motorhead art…?

S. Right. What makes art art? You remember the “Piss Christ” – was that art? Anything that provokes an emotional response. It’s art because we or someone says it’s art – this kind of thing. Think about Duchamp with his urinal on the wall. The best story to me was Duchamp’s snow shovel that was hanging on a museum wall when one day the caretaker came in and he saw a lot of snow and then he saw the shovel and not realizing it was part of a show, he shoveled the snow. The museum and curators had a fit whereas I think Duchamp would’ve loved it.

P. That’s a brilliant, funny story.

S. I think it’s the same with Dylan. I mean, you get people saying we can’t interpret Dylan’s songs. I think Dylan must have a field day when we interpret his songs. We may be wrong, but you know, it’s like he said to Baez and she quotes in "No Direction Home" about how people would be trying to interpret his songs and he (then) didn’t know “what the fuck they were about” and laughed…

P. But think of yourself as a poet. Someone comes up to you and says it means this, right? and you think No, but maybe to some extent it is about that.

S. That’s right. I think Dylan is probably the same in this way. I don’t know what he intends when he writes a song. We may stumble upon something in a song, and maybe he didn’t think that, but maybe he thinks, “Huh” and stops and re-considers. It’s like a dream right – we’re not always the best interpreters of our own dreams. Think Desolation Row or Bob Dylan’s 115th dream – those are very surreal songs. So it’s similar in that you wake up and you tell your best friend about a dream you had and you say, “this is crazy” but have no idea what it meant. To me, some of Dylan’s songs sound like dreams, like Desolation Row. I don’t know who we are to interpret it, but I don’t know who we are NOT to try interpret it either.

P. I don’t feel that I have to defend any approach to any kind of art. I’m just responding to it. I don’t feel I have to defend it to anyone. I might read pages and pages of Greil Marcus, for example, or someone else, but I still feel they don't connect with my vision.

S. Right, anyone can come up with the facts. But you’re looking at something more introspective, and that’s equally valid. Let’s get to you for a moment: What is your background?

P. I started to read and publish with a group of poets in University City in a magazine called River Styx – around Washington University. It was under the auspices of them. The great thing about River Styx in those days (it’s changed now), but there was this great blend of street poets and academic poets and that’s why the magazine really took off. We would do interviews with Gary Snyder or Margaret Atwood and right next to it would be a poem by someone you’d never heard of, and that was the great thing about River Styx. It was a very open-door policy. So there was River Styx Press and then I read on a radio station – in the last days of Gaslight Square – KDNA (this was the summer of '72) and I was reading poems – it was free form radio. It was an overlap of River Styx. Some of the people went on the air…

s. That’s quite progressive.

P. But now I work with KDHX and you can listen online and hear some great music etc. that is pretty unique to radio because it’s not commercial radio. The format at KDHX is more free form than NPR, which is more conservative. Later on I worked for a writing program here in St. Louis as a writing tutor. I did teach part- time and I tutored part- time. I was never really a structured academic.

S. Right, I was never really an academic. I teach real-world publishing, which is different from the academic.

P. Let’s talk about the term Dylanologist – how about we use the term “Dylan Appreciator”?

S. Right – you’re right, because what or who the hell is a Dylanologist anyway…

P. Someone who goes through garbage – A.J. Webermann. So we don’t go through garbage, so it’s more of an appreciator than a fan or garbage person.

S. When did “fan” become a dirty word?

P. Because it’s a whole kind of generic term and it implies some kind of obsessive…

S. Right, it implies idol worship and that’s not what we’re talking about here.

P. Yes, I think you noted that people who analyze his songs… about which Dylan said, “Me? Come on, get a life…” I think it’s ridiculous. I agree with him to some extent. I think it’s extremely important that you are a poet yourself…

To look at Bob Dylan and the impact of his art, to see him within the context of three social elements and that would be the Baby Boomer Generation, the Civil Rights movement, and the proliferation of psychotropic chemicals… and those substances were always around in subcultures.

S. Well, how are you saying Dylan played into drug culture, I’m not getting that. It’s a bit of a dodgy area. I don’t think he endorsed it.

P. The curious thing about Dylan is that those things were there before him, but after he absorbed them and assimilated them into his art, he became part of the culture. He was affected by the drug culture. So it was really his reaction to the drug culture in songs like "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Rainy Day Women" that was then assimilated back into the culture.

S. Do you think “Mr. Tambourine Man” is about drugs?

P. I think it’s in there somewhere…

S. I think it’s about him.

P. It’s his particular vision.

S. To me it’s about Dylan as a Pied Piper of sorts. He talks about himself being weary and tired …

P. But he’s not going to sleep (laughs)…

S. To me, that song wasn’t so much about drugs, but more, I’m really tired of the old stuff and I want to move on to something new now and that song was always a kind of a hinge, to me. That’s what I hear there. I could be dead wrong.

P. What I’m getting at – Dylan never had a particular “drug phase”. It’s all part of a big mix, a big stew. Part of that is being an outsider: a blue-eyed Jew growing up in Minnesota. One of the things that attracted me to Dylan was this outsider viewpoint. So one of the things is this great big mix…

S. Dylan as outsider is really interesting because Dylan wanted “in” to something, so he shrugged off everything that he was and became something else. Then what happened is everybody wanted in to that.

P. Now we’re talking again about this whole dynamic… he celebrated an outsider culture.

S. It’s like a continuous loop: a synchronicity in some ways.

P. He’s an outsider and in that group you’d put people like Ginsberg and Kerouac, and somehow our present day culture has assimilated that and the freakier the more interesting, and the more deviant the more interesting…

S. But like I said before, we’ve held them up as the shamans.

P. But there are a lot of things in that realm that are not healthy that are celebrated, and that’s what’s happening in Western culture. So you really have to separate the wheat from the chaff. As a result you have some of the worst elements of music rise to the top (not Dylan). Ken Kesey did a freeform lecture one time – he was to me one of the greats – and he said, and I’ll never forget, "Both shit and cream rise to the top" and he gave examples. It said a lot about the culture and what the culture celebrates. That’s where Western culture is at right now. You really have to sift through… Ken Kesey said that in the fall of 1993 at a college here in St. Louis, but it’s so true and he gave many examples, but you get the idea. Within the context of that cultural appreciation, Dylan is interesting because the outsider got in.

S. I think Dylan could release a record of pure hiss and people would buy it.

P. It’s funny, because if you read some of the comments on YouTube the guy can do no wrong. Everything he touches turns to gold. But the reality is, he is flawed like anyone else. But there is an intense loyalty where he can’t do anything wrong.

S. True, but then there is the view that all Dylan fans are sort of flower-children “nice’ people. I don’t think that’s true either – it’s an extreme. I’m not that nice. I don’t think there is any “one” Dylan fan. You cannot stereotype the group.

P. When that whole hippie thing was happening, I was working at a factory and was a member of the Teamsters. I had kids to raise.

S. So you were considered very “straight”?

P. No, because at night I was going out and really into the Beat scene et al. Dylan talks about the working class in 1969 for instance, in the Rolling Stone interview, and like Lennon, grew up more working class. When you’re raised a certain way there is a certain pragmatism that doesn’t mix with being high all the time… it doesn’t put food on the table. Did you see the interview I did with Ed Sanders – he recorded with Dylan and Ginsberg and he’s a poet in his own right and was with a group that were the political forerunners of what Frank Zappa did – very erudite articulate guys. They understood that to do it right you had to be practical and the hippie movement didn’t really understand that. The Nixon types saw that flaw in the movement.

S. Let me ask you an impossible question now, because people always ask me this question, but let’s try it out. Which album was the one that for you said, “Wow… This guy is amazing.” Which moment, which age were you, and why?

P. When you’re seventeen years old and you’re casting around for things to embrace and engage you and in high-school you’re reading Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost but they’re not really speaking to you so much… It’s got to be "Highway 61 Revisited". For me " Highway 61" still stands out… I still listen to that and say, "This is incredible stuff!"

S. I still like "Bringing It All Back Home".

P. Well, they’re kind of bookends. The one side of "Bringing It All Back Home" is acoustic.

S. I think with every album he’s changeable. He’s very different every time I see him on tour. With each record, he’s a different performer. Just think of the whole “John Wesley Harding” period – wholly different. He has changed from album to album in many ways, so is quite mercurial in his music and that keeps things interesting.

P. I agree with that, but I see it as an evolution of the artist and I think there is a certain basis to his work. Like now, he sort of croons and I love it. It’s like I said before, not to use that word Dylanologist, but as an appreciator, I think his future can be as a DJ as well: I think that radio show is incredible. You can get a musical education from that show. It’s witty, funny. It’s a great program. It makes you want to go back – at least it did me – and it is a musical education that you can enjoy.

S. I listen to “Spirit On the Water” and these are crooner songs – in some way they remind me of Frank Sinatra (“The Summer Wind” etc).

P. Who would’ve thought that after "From A Buick 6 "?

S. Or "Highway 61"

P. It says something about the era we’re in, it says something about Dylan growing older, and it says something about his appreciation for musical history which I think, again, he’s had from day one. So, in answer to your question to one album, you said "Bringing It All Back Home" – that and "Highway 61 Revisited" – but the two almost blend for me.

S. It’s an impossible question. The answer really depends on where I’m at emotionally. I can’t pick one favorite Dylan song. I don’t know how people do that – pick one favorite song. I just can’t do it. I like some songs that some people (to my mind, wrongly) say are “toss-offs” like “Spanish Harlem Incident” and I don’t think they are toss offs.

P. Let me interject this one thing. We’ve been talking about appreciation, crooning, and so on. In so far as the cultural take on Bob Dylan: you hear people say his voice is shot and so on, but he’s a song stylist…

S. Well, he never sang like anybody else.

P. I heard him sing "Positively Fourth Street" at one of those baseball park concerts and he somehow, with his phrasing and intonation, he made it into a lover’s lament instead of this snarling indictment. And I know that you as a poet… understand that this is an incredible thing.

S. He has done that with "Lay, Lady, Lay".

P. Right. It never really struck me until that particular concert, but right…

S. Yes, I heard him sing "Shelter From The Storm" at one show and it really changed things for me.

P. Right, that’s an incredible thing for an artist to do, to do that kind of magic. And they can say whatever they want about him losing his voice, and so on…

S. Yes, but when he first sang “Lay, Lady, Lay” it was a totally different Dylan and a totally different voice. So it could be, or seems to me to be, a conscious decision on his part.

P. I’ve thought about that. There was a thing on You Tube – did you see the one in Germany where he was trying to do “New Morning” and they called it “Name That Tune” (which has since been pulled). He may just be doing that to keep himself amused with the concert, you never know.

S. Agreed. He must get bored with the same set-list night after night, which is why I wrote the piece “Set-List This”. Just some suggestions to take or leave, but you like to think maybe it makes some difference, even if small. I will say that he did play “Lay, Lady, Lay” at the Brooklyn show after that piece, but who knows if he even saw the writing. One hopes.

P. You never know and you can never be sure of what comments make a difference to him and what he just dismisses. When he did "Slow Train" and some people went down to Muscle Shoals, they did a stapled together Xerox type magazine called “Zimmerman Blues”, and they were outside when he went outside to take a break, and they said he was very accommodating. Somewhere in that afternoon he cut that song, "You Gotta Serve Somebody" and says “you can call me Zimmy” and you never know if they made a difference. They may or may not have. It’s a curious thing. As an artist, as a human being, who wouldn’t be interested in articulate, intelligent feedback on their work?

S. I agree.

P. There’s so much online – but it’s your eye as a poet that is different and your site is different, done with polish.

S. Thanks. That makes me happy. I find like anything, you’re not always liked.

P. Well, the Internet – there can be a lot of misogynistic stuff – rock ‘n roll and so on – It doesn’t surprise me. I think you just go about your business as an artist and that stands out. It comes back around… speaking poet to poet… Your work is interpretive and poetic and it’s not all about Dylan, but the Dylan section stands out.

S. We write about what doesn’t bore us. It’s that simple. If there is something that moves us – it may be one song – then I’ll write about it. Maybe I’ll have people pick on that, but it’s really about having perspective on something and bringing that.

P. That’s one thing I can bring to it. It’s one thing to read about it, and another thing to have lived through that involvement and evolvement. It’s one thing to read it in a history book, and another thing to have a real emotional connection to an era.

S. To go back to Dylan, I think he has a real connection to many eras.

P. I think that’s right. I think he says in the Scorsese documentary that “For me, the past, the present, and the future are all in one room”. I can totally relate to that…

S. Yes, me too

p. I can relate very strongly to that. And that makes life really interesting.

S. It does, because you’re up with change.

P. For people living in the past, it’s kind of like holding on to a Model T.

S. Dylan embraces the new. He’s not afraid to do these commercials – which he gets or has gotten some grief for – for iPod, Victoria’s Secret, Cadillac, and so on. I actually think that’s all good.

P. I have no problem with any artist endorsing products, but the Cadillac commercial was leaving the woman behind in the dust, spitting up the dust in her face and I wonder, “What’s up with that?” (It’s not a Dylan song they use). Right around the time he did the Cadillac commercial, somebody wrote in to his radio show supposedly and asked him what he thinks about product endorsement and he mentioned Hank Williams and the King Biscuit Flour Hour with Sonny Williamson – I have no problem with people who do endorsements – we all need to pay the bills. But there is such a large gap between the super-wealthy and the impoverished, but the way that was done (the Cadillac commercial)… I don’t mean to take Dylan to task. He’s working. He works every night. But it was the symbolism of the woman – what looks like a peasant woman or something – left behind in the dust. You’d mentioned the idea of the romantic outlaw riding off into the dust, but no, you don’t have multimillionaire outlaws who’ll never be put in jail. Donald Trump doesn’t get traffic tickets. So the outlaw thing doesn’t wash.

S. He’s probably asked to endorse a lot of things and has had to say no, so it’s interesting what he’s chosen and chooses to endorse. So I have this idea of just going with him on tour and being there once each month as a touchstone to really talk to, it could be something he would go for. You just don’t know…

P. My sense of reading your work online and talking to you and so forth … to have someone like yourself with somewhat of a critical eye and to go into it with that kind of attitude would make an incredible book. He would really let his guard down, I think.

S. I’m certainly not out to crucify him and that is a difference, I think, between me and some of the other popular writers who are looking for “dirt”. I just want to be that “touchstone” like I said. Someone to sit and have dinner with and really just talk to about problems or happiness’s or whatever with no preformatted questions. You need to know what you don’t know and in some ways you have to be naïve and smart at the same time to know that. I just want to sit down and have dinner – to be his confessor, I suppose but without telling all. That’s my approach.

P. Right. I can’t see him letting his guard down that much with someone who could expose him and I don’t blame him because he was thrown into that meat grinding machine early in his life.

S. Exactly, so why should he trust me. I suppose you just keep writing what you are writing and hope that he sees that. I think I would even run the book by him first before publication (some people would disagree with that, but to me in this case it seems fair). But I want a real Dylan – I don’t really care about Dylan who once did drugs etc and I don’t want dirt. I could give a shit. That’s not important to me. I want to know how he’s feeling, just as a friend would – a new friend (laughs).

P. If you wrote a book like that, it would almost have to be an impressionistic book in the same way that "I’m Not There" was impressionistic.

S. I suppose I would want to be Pennebaker but in print. To know what it’s like to do this for a whole year and I’m sure it’s very taxing – to add that very human element.

P. If you can somehow put into this in some impressionistic way to be that blue-eyed Jewish kid who grew up and now finds himself in this position.

S. Well, you know it’s inside-out, outside-in. You know to me, I’ve always thought his story is “Great Expectations”, which a lot of people tell me likewise is my own story, interestingly.

P. It’s a unique story right there. I was thinking of Marcel Marceau and Pip earlier when I was talking about Charlie Chaplin and the “Tramp”. That’s exactly what Robert Zimmerman did, he created Bob Dylan. You can’t find a birth certificate with Bob Dylan on it – he created Bob Dylan.

S. A mythmaker, and I think that’s his genius in some ways.

P. Yes, and that’s what really works well with his radio program as well.

S. Right. And where that comes from I’m not here to psychoanalyze Dylan – I’m not interested in that. People do and have done that. You know, the whole “he must have hated where he came from and so on” and that doesn’t interest me. I couldn't give a shit about that. What interests me more is that he is so good at what he does and has done such a good job, but he is turned inside out now. He wanted in and now everybody else wants in. Everybody wants a piece of him … There’s been a total flip.

P. Yeah, and that’s a metaphor for the whole.

S. Yes, it’s like a regurgitation of something and a self-perpetuating machine.

P. The phrased you used, a “loop”, and it’s probably a phenomenon that can only be understood many, many years from now on how all of this played itself out; because now we’re swimming in the middle of it and it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on. Because it’s an extremely complex time with a lot of different components.

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Thanks for listening,

s.r.p.