two jews blues

two jews blues

PAUL KRASSNER INTERVIEWS BOB DYLAN. Reprinted from EVO

(I had originally intended to use this interview for the tenth annual edition of The Realist, but after eleven years of The Realist, I don’t think there is going to be a tenth annual edition. When I started, there was a gap in journalism big enough for a dozen magazines, but now with everything from Playboy to Life advocating liberalized abortion laws and the Surgeon General saying he’d rather have his daughter on pot than bourbon, I don’t think even one is necessary. Who put the Real in the Realist-a-list-a-list? Besides, I’m tired. So I’ve decided to give up the editing business and work on my novel (you should have guessed) and possibly take up the banjo. Sic Transit Euphoria, Grundy. Besides, I’m not sure I’d want this particular interview in my magazine -better to leave the regular subscriber’s image of me intact. Since this interview originally took place in Walter Bowart’s apartment, using his tape recorder, and since he went to all the trouble of arranging it (it’s easier for Ian Paisley to get an audience with the Pope than for ANYBODY to get hold of Dylan) I’ve decided to let him print it. Which is why I’m in the OTHER.)

K: I’m not sure what to say...I feel as if I was about to suck off an elephant or something. What’s a good interviewer question?

D: Well, they usually start off with my health and then ask questions about that until they’re tired, and then they go home. They seem to get tired faster lately, I don’t know -maybe they’re worried about THEIR health...because there’s a lot of it going around lately...A lot of health. Most of it bad...

K: Their MENTAL health?

D: Well, you know, they’re connected. Your health and mine are too, during this interview at least. I don’t know about afterward, but during this interview your mind effects...my body.

K: Why not the other way around. Your m nd and my body?

D: I don’t know man, I just didn’t think it was important...now if we were in love or something...

K: (laughter) Yeah, I can imagine the children...

D: There wouldn’t have to be any children, unless you’re a Catholic or something...unless you believe in something and you don’t do you? Believe in. something?

K: Oh, I suppose everybody has to believe in something. I’m not a Catholic though -just the opposite. I burn crucifixes in Italian neighborhoods every Easter.

D: Just the opposite - what does the opposite of a Catholic believe in? You said everybody had to believe in something, what makes you the opposite of a Catholic?

K: Burning crucifixes. And Lenny Bruce. You know this is strange - people don’t put me on very often. It’s usually the other way around.

D: Well, if you’d just let whichever end’s in front come in first...you keep trying to change the ends around. I’m not putting you on really.

K. Well, then what are you doing really?

D: I’m not doing Anything -I’m just making a joke. You don’t mind if I make a joke, do you?

K: No, but if the person you’re talking to isn’t part of the joke, it’s a put-on.

D: Y’know, Paul, I just MAKE the jokes, if you don’t want to be a part of it, that’s up to you. I want you to be part of it, I want to include everybody in everything I’m doing. Besides, maybe the tape recorder understands it. Maybe the people who read this will think it’s funny. You don’t know.

K: Do you expect people to understand your songs or are you putting the people who buy your records on? D: Do you understand them? I mean, let’s turn it around...

K: Ah ha!

D: You shouldn’t interrupt . . .

K: But you were turning what I said around.

D: Still, you shouldn’t interrrupt.

K: 1 think I understand your songs as well as you understand my writings — I mean there are always private jokes.

U: 1 don’t care about your writings, man, I

don’t ,ead writings! Writings interrupt people — they interrupt people’s natural thoughts and make them stupid. I sing and study karate and don’t have time to K: The man who wrote Blowing In The Wind studies karate — wow! Why?

D: Why what? Study karate? Because I don’t like to have people interrupt my thoughts. If you don’t read, you got to remember a long time before your thoughts turn into a song. I have to live with my thoughts. You can’t interrupt a writer — he’s always used up whatever he was thinking about anyway, but if you interrupt a song, you kill it. Some people go to concerts just to cough. Some people hang around T.B. wards, when they got a deadline or something... K: I heard a tape of an interview you did with Pete Seeger where you said you’d written a bunch of songs the night before, but you’d lost the paper you’d written them on and couldn’t remember how they went. So you MUST have been a writer at one time. Why did you stop writing?

D: I never heard that tape, man. I once had an interviewer who asked me all about Peter, Paul & Mary. He said he’d read a Peter, Paul & Mary record jacket I’d written. I never read any of their liner notes, man, or any Roy Acuff liner notes either. That tape isn’t important to me.

K: And I never drink milk.

D: What? (laughter) You’re an INCREDIBLE motherfucker, you know? Incredible! I don’t believe you.

K: You don’t really? I feel like the Thin Man ...

D: Well, you got to do your own feeling. Keep that in mind when you go to bed at night, and you won’t fall off the top bunk getting a drink of water. Everybody has to feel for theirselves.

K: In Don’t Look Back you have your manager with you, and there is a scene where he and some other businessmen are working out a deal, very tense, a financial chess game. How do you get along with businessmen?

D: Oh, I get along fine with business men - they don’t go around trying to get put down. Hippies are always trying to slip their beards in a revolving door just before you push it, but businessmen got a certain thing they want from you. That’s all they want, and it’s very clean and honest. Yeah, I get along fine with businessmen.

Coni. Next Page

K: How are they to work with compared to radicals -you used to spend time around the Movement scene, SNCC and Broadside...

D: Well, they want something too, but they want a bigger piece. There were a lot of people just like Albert (Grossman, Dylan’s manager) but they weren’t as modest. Albert is really very modest -I imagine H.L.Hunt is very modest too, when he’s talking about oil wells. Money limits greed, otherwise it extends to everything.

K: That’s a curious ideamoney saves us from greed. I’d always...

D: Thought it was the other way around. You don’t drive a motorcycle do you?

K: No, I don’t even drive.

D: You try changing which end of a motorcycle is front and which is back at sixty miles an hour, and you g°t to type with your toes for a year.

K: You’re stretching a littlesometimes it must be a little hard to be Bob Dylan...

D: Not really, Bob Dylan stretches a little. He’s made out of crepe paper and neon and there are all these Jews trying to grab a piece.

K: That sounds anti-semetic to me.

D: I’m a Jew. You’re a Jew. So’s Albert. And LIrwin Silber. So are the Beatles, but nobody knows it. Everybody’s stretching. The thing about Jews isn’t that they grabeverybody does - it’s what they grab. Most of the really modest people in the world are Jews, except for Jewish musicians who aren’t really modest or really Jews either.

K: Would you say they were Calvinists?

D: What’s that? (laughter)

K: Oh, Presbyterians, (laughter)

D: No, I don’t know too many Presbyterian musicians. Maybe Charlie Pride is Presbyterian but I don’t think so ... (no laughter)

K: Your songs seem to have become less personal somehow — on something like Corinna Corinna or One Too Many Mornings I was always conscious of the personality of the singer, but on Lay Lady Lay I just hear the song. You don’t change inflection much in any given song.

D: Well, yeah.

K: You don’t like being interviewed, do you?

D: Well, I don’t mind, actually, it’s recreational. But it’s not like playing musicdo you play or sing or anything?

K: I just make love. And write sometimes, but sometimes when I’m in bed with a woman it’s very musical. Do you think of sex as musical?

D: Not reallysex is more like words, but you have to be a musician to appreciate that. You scheme and plot a thousand times as much with a woman you really love than with a songeven if you hate the song. I bet you first said that thing about music to a woman, right?

K: I guess so, because it was true...

D: But it’s only true because you’re not a musician. If you were, it would be different. It’s like a eunuch comparing intrigue to loveit’s true, but what he s thinking still isn’t the way it is.

K: I feel like I used to feel before I’d taken acid, there’s this big secret that I don’t know and everybody says I can’t understand how important it is.

D: Yeah, but acid isn’t like anything else, so it’s uselessit’s inapplicable. Music goes everywhere.

K: Even into a cunt?

D: If that’s where you want to put it, that’s where it will go. There are songs about death and whiskey and whores and even politics, though some of those aren’t real songs. Some of them are, Payday on Cold Creek and Satisfaction are songs about politics.

K: Is Wicked Messenger about you when you were involved in politics?

D: No, it’s about stupid fucking Jews I have known. The really stupid ones, stupid in a way that you could not see in a million years... really dumb! Hey, you’re starting to affect my body you know that?

K: You’re right they’re connected.

D: It’s all right though, I can afford a doctor, and you can afford a doctor...

K: Or even an abortionist...

D: Or an abortionist.

K: Speaking of afford, what do you do with the money you make from records and concerts?

D: I really don’t know. Some of it goes in the bank and some of it just goes. I don’t ever really count it. K: Did you ever think of doing something strange with itlike putting up a billboard saying “Radium gives your baby strong bones” or even “Whaaaat?”

D: What for?

K: Maybe it would change something.

D: NaaaawI do all that stuff in my songs, and what does that change?

K: The shape of American societythe lives of millions of kids.

D: As long as you can connect what millions of people are doing to a song , the song hasn’t really gotten across.

K: Which song?

D: ANY song. You can’t live a song or a billboard. It doesn’t give anything but itselfit’s a fingerpointing not a place to live in.

K: Don’t you feel your music implies a responsibility?

D: But my songs don’t TAKE any responsibilitythey don’t care what people do with them. How can I? You write a song to do one thing and it does another, and so you write a song about what happened and you don’t know what that’s going to do.

K: So you don’t advise people to trust your music?

D: I don’t advise people. To trust. Music or books. Or anything.