Peter took his first trip to the U.K. in May 1999. Along the way he stayed with some longtime Dylanologists, staying first with his friend CP Lee, then Alan Fraser, Matthew Zuckerman, Craig Jamieson and Espen Aas.

Like The Night with CP Lee

It is shortly before 11, Friday Morning and I am in CP’s office at the University of Salford.  The flight over took 7 hours.  Very strange seeing a sunset and sunrise in that time.  777 very claustrophobic, but the dinner was good and they had a lot of cool movies to watch.  The best thing was one of the channels showed where the plane was.  It flew up the East Coast to Nova Scotia and turned right and straight on over Ireland (which I couldn’t see at all) into London. But then when the plane landed, the doors to the thing that takes you from the plane to the airport wouldn’t open and we sat on the damn plane for 15 or 20 minutes before they got it to work.  Finally we got off the damn thing, and I had 45 minutes or less to make my next plane.

First I had to walk for what seemed like miles following these connection signs to end up at the bottom a stairway in line behind a locked door waiting for a bus to the next terminal.  No one says or explains anything.  Finally the bus comes and it’s off the the next terminal.  Keep in mind it’s about 7 in the morning here, but for me 2am in real life.  At the next terminal you ended up walking again forever only to get in line again to go through the metal detector BS, and they check you out with the dectector too.  Meanwhile time is getting short for the connecting plane.  So I make it through there only to end up in another line where they check your immigration card that you fill out on the plane.  And this one is taking FOREVER!!!!  So I kind of force my way to the front of the line as I now have less than 15 minutes to make the connecting flight, give them the appropriate answers, only to walk for more miles in these weird connecting tube things.  At this point I’ve been awake for about 22 hours and there’s hardly any signs or any indication how much further to the damn plane.

Finally I reach the terminal and I’m really nuts, WHERE’S THE PLANE TO MANCHESTER?  and this lady says oh I’ll tell them to hold it for you only to walk like another mile down another weird tube and somehow I broke a fingernail shifting my heavy shoulder bag and my finger’s bleeding and there’s still no plane in sight.  Finally I get on the plane and I’m a complete mess, sweating, bleeding, disheveled, exhausted, and sit down, at least the seats weren’t as claustrophobic as the jumbo jet where they really jam you in and of course some baby behind me starts wailing.  Now even though the flight was less than an hour, they actually give you breakfast on the flight (where American airlines would throw you a peanut).  Well there was barely time to eat it (not that I cared) because about five minutes after it was served they announce we’re landing (flight too less than 30 mins.)  So we land and it’s on to more strange hallways and finally the luggage carousel and my luggage does not appear.  So of course at this time I wanna turn around and go home.  So I go up to the desk and they give me a form, and by this time I’m totally ballistic and trying to keep cool ’cause I haven’t gone through customs yet, and demanding I WANNA KNOW WHERE MY LUGGAGE IS NOW!  I have a guitar on there that’s worth $2,000 and if I don’t know WHERE IT IS RIGHT NOW I’M GONNA SUE THE SHIT OUT OF YOU!  So they give me a form to take to the customs guy who’s directly opposite the no luggage counter.  Now the plus side to this was since my luggage wasn’t there it made going through customs a breeze.  Now during all this I thought I heard my name in an announcement, but it didn’t happen again, and they only announced it once.  So finally they said we have your luggage and it will be on the next plane and we will deliver it to you.  So finally I’m free and I walk down another hall (not 10 miles this time) and there is CP Lee waiting for me.  And I say I NEED a cigarette.  And then we get in a British Cab which looks like something out of the 30s or 40s – the rear door opens the other way like a Lincoln Continental – and go to his house and I can’t believe I’m in England.

There’s double-decker busses and all the cars are small, and the architecture is much different.  CP’s about a year older than me, and finally we get to his house where he has a ton of Dylan videos ’cause he’s now writing a book about Dylan in film and a ton of CDs and mini-discs and it’s kind of like Dylan heaven so I start to finally relax even though at this point I am totally wired and spaced.

The weather here is warm and quite beautiful though it was cloudy in the morning.  We hung out in his house waiting for the luggage which arrived after a couple of hours and then went for a walk. CP doesn’t drive though his wife Pam does, and he walks FAST!  We went to a supermarket and I was kind of amazed to see all American brands.  It was quite nice actually, nicer than the ones in Philly and of course the ones in NYC.  Then of course we went to a pub. 

The pubs are much different than bars.  For one thing, they are well-lit, with rugs on the floors, paintings on the walls and little (usually very old) wooden table and chairs. There are no stools and you only go to the bar to get your beer.  And then it was back, fell out sitting up in a chair.  So he suggested I crash for awhile and I fell out instantly.  Woke up an hour or 2 later to a really nice Mexican lamb stew.  By this time CP’s wife Pam was home, and after dinner they drove me around Manchester.  Some great gothic architecture.  But it is also a combination of old and new.  Kids skateboarding in the square in front of Manchester Town hall.

The way they drive here is kind of insane and that’s aside from driving on the left side of the road.  A lot of stuff here is reversed including the handles on toilets.  We stopped in another Pub and then had to get back because Pam had to see ER.  Of course by this time, I really don’t know what time it is.  But I have my own room and I fell out instantly into HEAVY sleep.

So now I’m a little more coherent and ready to check out England.

It is Tuesday morning, and I am back in CP’s office in Salford. Yesterday was a holiday for May day–they do the same Monday holiday thing here that we do.

We went to a street festival near the ruins of an ancient Roman fort. CP is just an amazing and extremely generous person.  His knowledge is incredible and all the little tours of Manchester are punctuated with amazing amounts of history from ancient times to more recent IRA bombings. 

He’s turned out to be more of a character than I could possibly imagine.  I had a feeling he was someone special when he visited me last year, but he’s actually quite a maniac.  He’s a professor of media and film at the University of Salford, and he has long (well, bald on top) grey, wiry, curly hair and a sort of goatee, it’s not really a goatee, just under his lip, but not beneath his chin, he loves to wear suits and act the part of a British gentleman.  But on the other hand, he is the essence of a raconteur.  He can speak in a million accents, all the British, Irish, Scottish Gaelic ones, and turn around and talk like Dr. John or a NYC Mafioso perfectly. You never know which voice he’s gonna use next.

His knowledge of music is immense, as his is knowledge of history, literature, theater and politics. It’s astounding.  He took me all over Manchester, an excellent tour guide, filling me in on all the historical details.  His house is filled with Bob posters, lots of CDs, and a wealth of other music as well, everything from traditional folk to Capt. Beefheart.

He was in a sort of punk band in the mid to late ’70s, Alberto Y Los Trios de paranoias, that put on a regular show at a theater in London and even had their own TV show (Nick Lowe was once a member).  But they were much more than that, they parodied rock, but had all kinds of skits and props to go with it.  He was hired to sing with Frank Zappa (by Zappa) and turned it down.  He’s known an astounding array of people from Hendrix to Chicago blues singers, and every day reveals a little more.  He thinks nothing of standing up in a bar and breaking into some ancient English ballad. So that’s just some of the reasons why this past week has been an amazing experience.

He’s funny, hip in the best sense and brilliant.  He arranged the whole thing, getting me whatever gigs I had.  Most of the gigs, were in pubs and audiences usually appreciative.  Manchester apparently is considered low on the totem pole of English cities, but I dug it a lot.  Amazing architecture everywhere, some extremely ancient.  But if I hadn’t had CP explaining the history of various sites in depth, I might not have enjoyed it so much.

The lifetstyle here is generally much more relaxed–beer is a matter of course.  Everyone smokes, usually rolling their own cigarettes. The last 2 nights we ate in this amazing Indian restaurant on what is known as the “curry mile.” This will make Mike V. wanna come over here immediately.

My eyes are wide open all the time as there is always another amazing building in a variety of styles including Florentine churches. The people here are all very friendly and I’ve met many characters.  There seem to be many accents, and sometimes they’re so thick you can’t understand them at all even though they’re talking in English. Everyone here apparently goes to pubs several times a day :-). Meanwhile nail bombers are in London and all kinds of crazy stuff happening.

My first week was filled with trips to pubs several times a day.  In the morning I’d go with him to work (he’s a professor –media & film — at Univ. of Salford. I’d go with him because I could surf the net there for free and take care of e-mail and stuff.  Basically CP would work for maybe 15 minutes, then spend an hour or so checking out RMD.  Then we’d hit a pub.  Then we’d go somewhere else and get lunch (more beer of course), then hit another pub. 

CP’s also a great cook and made me several incredible meals, Mexican, Thai and New Orleans so far. I’ve played 2 gigs so far.  The first was in this 16th Century Pub, the Pack Horse Tavern which is supposed to be haunted. There was this outside barbecue with the stage on a semi.  These motorcycle guys were running the barbecue and instead of using coal, they’d throw on these huge logs. However it got insanely cold. Everyone was huddled by the bbq to keep warm while at the other end of this fairly large yard behind the pub CP’s group, The Satans of Swing were on stage.  So they rigged up a sound system and moved my set inside and after I was done, CP started playing and we had this great jam, his fiddler and mandolinist joining in doing all kinds of stuff from the Carter Family to Bob and blues to Wild Mt. Thyme.  We played well past closing which for most pubs (not clubs) 11 pm.  He has kind of a folk band.  He plays a dobro, but plays it like guitar, and he has another guitarist, a fiddler, a mandolinist and sometimes an electric bassist, and a drummer who either plays a snare or a washboard.  It’s kind of skiffle except CP is quite capable of pulling out everything from John Wesley Harding and I Ain’t Marching Anymore to American ballads, blues, British and American rock songs, and unaccompanied Irish ballads.

He is as he says (quoting his mother) a voice dancer, and will shift accents constantly from various English accents to Irish, Scottish, and all kinds of American accents as well.  A total character. At night if we’re not out playing, he rents videos –he has American VCR, though sometimes Pam likes to watch her TV shows which range from ER to British soaps.  These sessions are accompanied by Brandy or wine and smokable inspiration.

The first Saturday there, before the outside gig, we took a train to Liverpool to attend the First Robert Shelton Memorial Dylan Conference at the University of Liverpool.  Ben Taylor was there, and a whole lot of academics.  It was pretty dumb, but they do take their pop music seriously over there.  They had flown in Shelton’s sisters from San Francisco who didn’t seem to have a clue who he was. 

Michael Gray (the Dylan author) talked forever about Michael Gray.  Some of the afternoon seminars (one on Richard Farina, another on the Byrds) were a little better, and CP’s talk on Free Trade Hall, where he showed the video they recently did with the Judas guy was pretty cool.  CP hates academics even though he’s a professor, so he kept it short and sweet.  Unfortunately the event was running behind, so they didn’t have a Q&A period, so I was a little disappointed, since most likely I was the only one there who had actually read Robert Shelton when he wrote for the New York Times.  And by the time they had a Q&A on Richard Farina, we had to split to do a gig that night, and once again I was probably the only person there who saw Farina play.

Later in the week, I went back to Liverpool by myself.  The Institute of Popular Music puts out this thing called “The Beat Map” that has all the Beatles and other rock and roll sites.  But it wasn’t a big deal and may have been better if I had someone who knew the city taking me around. 

CP has the video of the Dylan Chabad telethon appearances. Hysterical!  Dylan, Harry Dean Stanton and Himmelman doing Havah Negilah.  A total riot.  Himmelman really gets into it.  Bob of course is Bob.  It’s a real telethon and Bob gives plugs just like any telethon, except it’s all these crazy Jews.  On another one Dylan and Kinky Friedman do Kinky’s song, “Sold American” with Kinky on acoustic and Bob trying to play lead on electric, except he doesn’t appear to be playing the same song or even be in the same key.  They’re both wearing hats, Kinky a cowboy hat, and Bob sort of a regular hat, then he takes it off and he’s wearing a yarmulke underneath. 

I’m finding out all kinds of stuff, like why the British drive on the wrong side of the road.  It dates back to the days of carriages when the driver would always sit on the right side of the carriage and it’s so he could draw his sword.

And earlier this week when the tornadoes hit Oklahoma, I’m waking up and CP has BBC news on, and they’re interviewing some American, and they’re like, “So you’ve had a bit of a storm have you?  Quite terrible, is it?  A bit devastating, perhaps?”   I’m standing there listening to this and cracking up totally.  And their own weather reports are even funnier, “The weather will be a bit unsettled today.”

Also the English hate the Welsh.  In Chester which is even further north of here it is still legal to shoot a Welshman after dark. Apparently the further North you get the more difficult it becomes to understand accents.  Manchester isn’t all that far North, but sometimes when these guys get talking to each other, especially the people in some of the more working-class pubs CP took me to, you can’t understand a thing they say.  It just sounds like “eh”, “uh”,  “ah mate”, and words (especially slang) often have different meanings, like “pissed” here doesn’t mean angry, it means drunk (droonk).  Like in the ‘who threw water glass out the window’ scene in Don’t Look Back where the drunk says to Dylan, “I’m pissed man,” and Dylan says “I’m pissed too,” he doesn’t understand the guy is saying he’s drunk.  Then they have their own words like bolloxed (which I think is different than bollocks). 

When I played the 16th Century pub on Saturday, I go into the bathroom and there’s the guy (kind of a Brit Hells Angel) who was tending this huge barbecue all day and he says, “I’m really bolloxed, hope I don’t have to sleep in the land rover.”

The night after Liverpool, I went to Alan Fraser’s house.

Searching For A Gem with Alan Fraser

I am sitting all alone in the Dylan control studios of one Alan Fraser in the county of Cheshire (I haven’t seen the cat yet) where I intend to spend most of this sunny morning exploring his CD collection which is as astounding as you probably suspect.  At least 100 boots.  I just finally heard Bob sing Lady Came From Baltimore which is actually quite good.

Alan lives in Macclesfield which is maybe 30 or 40 miles from Manchester and he lives in the suburban part of that.  I felt like I could’ve been in New Jersey, like Cherry Hill or something. 

You would never think by looking at Alan that he’s this Dylan freak. His wife doesn’t understand the Dylan thing at all.  Alan has a habit of saying “yeah” at the end of all his sentences, like Dylan was better acoustic, yeah” and you never know whether or not you’re supposed to answer him.  I was a little nervous at first because it was quite different from Chris’ more bohemian existence and I knew that there wasn’t going to be the, um, nightly smoking session. 

Shortly after arriving he showed me “the room” saying read whatever you want, play whatever you want.  At first it didn’t seem like he had that many CDs until you started looking closer.  Then there was the not heard yet pile which was probably a foot high.  But then he showed me his son’s room where I stayed, where there were at least 2 more shelves of boots.  Then he takes me downstairs were there are more CDs, (the legitimate releases) and other artists, and then he opens up this cabinet and there’s the LPs.  The next day he opens up this cabinet above his computer and there were the tapes.  

He went to work Friday morning and I woke up alone in the house.  I went to the computer room and he left a note telling me his password and how to get to RMD.

It finally started raining today.  Alan took me for a ride first to see something close to a castle but it was closed, a bunch of bikers camping out there, so then he set out to take me up into the mountains, tiny windy roads, rain past a bunch of sheep farms, sometimes the sheep get out and wander into the road.  The rain doesn’t phase them one bit. He was taking me to the highest bar in England, the Cat & The Fiddle which is on top of a mountain complete with a look-out, but it was closed, and by the time we got there, there wasn’t much of a view, but he said on a clear day you can see all of Manchester.  But still it was beautiful.  Very strange terrain, no trees, just grass and sheep grazing, not a house in sight.  But it was a cool ride nonetheless. Macclesfield used to be an industrial textile town.  

Then we came back and he showed me this video of the TV special Dylan didn’t release back in ’77 or whatever which he replaced with the Hard Rain special, from same tour.  But this in many respects was a million times better, with Dylan actually human and it would’ve gone over much better if he had let it happen.  Further proof that he’s completely out of his mind.

That night he and his neighbour took me to a traditional English Folk Club, (actually foolk clooob), the Double Partridge in Bollington.  They said to bring my guitar.  I was a little apprehensive at first, but then the guy running it — who was around 55 and got into folk listening to Pete Seeger — says, “I saw my hero in Manchester last weekend, Bruce Springsteen,” so I started feeling better about things. But then he starts the night singing all these beautiful tunes in fucking Gaelic and everyone’s singing along, so I started getting a little nervous again. 

The main act was a musician/comic — totally British humor — but he actually was pretty funny and also was a good guitarist.  So I did a guest set between his sets and they really listened and they loved it.  They even got “Rockabilly Guy,” and I’ve had audiences here, particularly in folk clubs who didn’t.  

On Monday I head far south to Bath by train where I stayed with Matthew Zuckerman.

In Bath with Matthew Zuckerman

I’m in Bath using this Japanese keyboard, it’s in Japanese and it’s making me nuts. Bath is astoundingly beautiful.

Matthew is a few years younger than me, has 2 kids, and a Japanese wife.  He’s an American citizen because of his father (who is from Brooklyn and lives in the US) but Matthew has never been here, and he lived in Japan for 25 years.  Matthew seemed a bit nervous, maybe because my train was a half hour late, but soon we remembered we had a couple of things in common namely Bob and writing, so the ice was soon broken.  His collection of records, cds, and tapes might be one of the largest I’ve ever seen.

He had the “Name That Tune” Boot which is Dylan at his ’91 worst.  Totally unrecognizeable stuff.  Hysterical liner notes too. 

Matthew was born and raised in Bath which is an ancient city built by the Romans. All the buildings are made out of the same material (Bathstone).  It’s a historically protected city, and nothing can be built that isn’t made out of Bathstone.  Tiny streets, great old architecture.

The next day we went to Stone Henge.  It’s not as big as it seems in photos, but still amazing.  I kept telling Matthew, it was the aliens that did it.  Then he took me to this village, Avebury, where there’s similar stones, in a circle around the village, but none on top of each other like Stone Henge.  Around Stone Henge and in Avebury there are these mounds in the fields called barrows, which are usually graves. But in Avebury there’s one that’s so big, it’s a man-made hill.  It’s 5,000 years old and they’ve sent probes down and there’s no graves. Nobody knows why it’s there!  Across a road and a few 100 yards away, there’s something called the long barrow, which instead of being round is long and narrow and runs the equivalent of a couple of city blocks. You can go down into the beginning of it.  They knew there’s graves in the first hundred yards or so, but there are none in the rest.  Again no one knows why its there.

From Bath (unfortunately, I did not get to see the Baths). The next morning it was time to move on to Cambridge and Craig Jaimeson.

EDLIS and Cambridge

The trip involved 2 trains and a London subway which was quite a hassle since I had a HUGE suitcase (on wheels thankfully) a guitar, a shoulder bag and a camera.  Cambridge is also ancient, the one English town the Nazis didn’t touch, and a college town as well. The students aren’t allowed to own cars, so there are literally thousands of bikes. While waiting for Craig to pick me up at the station, I noticed more bicycles parked in front than I’d ever seen in my life.  It turns out the students are not allowed to own cars, so there are literally thousands of bikes.

Craig greeted me at the station. He took me to a Turkish restaurant where I ate and he had coffee, and then he dropped me off in town to wander around while he went back to work.  He thought it was funny that I took my Martin with me to the restaurant instead of leaving it in his car. Cambridge was again architecturally amazing with more tiny streets.  The university buildings were huge gothic structures. 

Picking me up a couple of hours later we went to his house in a tiny village maybe 20 or 30 miles from Cambridge.  Craig lives in a beautiful house that once was a pub.  The village where he lives was incredible.  Big old spooky gothic church on a hill maybe 50 yards from his house.  Houses with thatched roofs.  Quiet.  I couldn’t believe it.  If I wanted to go somewhere to write a novel, that would be it.  Craig has two young and very funny daughters and a lovely wife.  

On arrival, Craig started filling me up with wine and we had a great vegetarian dinner. Before dinner he started playing me a very old Bob tape (from Minnesota) that I could hear but could not tape.  Craig thought it was from around ’59, but I think it was later than that because his guitar playing particularly seemed more advanced than say the Bonnie Beecher tape. It was all folk songs.

Anyway the tape had some beautiful old ballad on it, “Red Rosy Bush”, where Bob sang in kind of a predecessor to his “Lone Pilgrim” voice — in other words, quite sensitively sung, as well as some song he tried to sing in an Irish accent that got more preposterous with each verse.

The next morning Craig’s wife Shirley drove me into Cambridge.  I checked my luggage at the train station and walked around some more this time with a camera.  Pretty much covered the same ground as I did the day before and around noon headed back to the train station.  The train system there is pretty crazy (not sure if I told you this) but they have various fares for different times of day and for long distance trips you have to book in advance to get a good rate.  Still, they’re pretty expensive.  The other thing is Thatcher privatized the train system, so now they are all different companies.  Anyway a one-way ticket to London cost 13 pounds which is like 25 dollars or something close to that.  This weirded me out a little because round-trip from Manchester to Liverpool was only five pounds and Liverpool is probably farther from Manchester than Cambridge is from London.  The really crazy thing is they NEVER collected the damn ticket.  Anyway on the train I got my first real look at the city.  Heathrow is nowhere near the city and on the train from Bath I barely saw anything.

Espen Aas and London

Once in London, I took a cab (which cost more than the train) to Espen Aas’ flat in Catford which is across the Thames in South-east London.  Now Espen was the one guy I hadn’t really had any kind of regular correspondence with, as he is more of an RMD lurker than a poster.  I think Alan contacted him for me and he was more than glad to help out (“always glad to help an RMD-er in London.”)  Well, he turned out to be the greatest guy!  He’s 26, is actually Norwegian and has been living in London for the past couple of years.  In fact he hosted me his last few days there, as he returned home to Oslo a couple of days after I left.  I had no idea what kind of fan he was or what he did for a living, but once again Bob and writing broke the ice.  

Anyway as I got there fairly late in the afternoon, I ended up hanging out at his flat and getting to know him, which included a (bus) trip to the store where I copped some real English Marmalade and also English mustard which Alan turned me onto (kicks ass :-), kind of like Chinese mustard.)  After another good vegetarian dinner (I’m not, but I don’t mind) and much talk of and listening to Bob, we made the obligatory pub stop.

Being a student, Espen doesn’t have much bread (and England is fairly expensive to live in) his collection was not as vast as the previous ones with more tapes than CDs.  But he does have a lot of stuff and once again had a lot of stuff I hadn’t heard or seen including a 3 CD set (can’t remember the name) that had at least one version of every song from Tour ’74.  After the pub, we ended up talking late into the night about all kinds of stuff from writing to comparing the US and England to corporations taking over people’s lives.

The next morning it was finally time for me to experience London.  They have these things called travel-passes that you can buy by the day, week, or weekend that allow you to ride all London, trains, busses and subways (actually underground, a subway there is a tunnel) as much as you want.  So armed with a map CP’s wife Pam gave me (which turned out to be pretty cool ’cause it was one of those street maps that’s sort of illustrated, so you can find where you are really quick) and a London A-Z street guide that Espen gave me I set out, riding a bus, (on the upper deck of course) a train and a subway to Oxford Circus. 

I had two items of business to try and take care of.  One was to drop some articles off at Mojo Magazine (the best music mag) and the other was to see if I could find a shipping box for my guitar for the trip home. 

As part of the conspiracy to make life more difficult, the airlines have decided [in the past year] that guitars are a no no to take with you on the plane.  I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that airline luggage handlers are not the most gentle guys in the world.  On the way over, thanks to a friend who owns a guitar shop, I put my Martin in one of those big rectangular boxes they ship guitars in [it was in its case of course] and packed it tight with newspaper and a lot of the heavy plastic you put on windows in winter.  It worked.  The guitar arrived safe and sound.

Anyway, the editor wasn’t there at Mojo and that turned out to be a waste of time, though I did leave the articles.

One of the first things I learned in London was that what we would consider an alley, they consider a street.  Street signs are always on buildings, they never have separate ones (in the cities anyway) like we do.  Another thing in England, streets that would be absolutely one-way in the U.S. are two-ways, narrower and with cars parked on both sides.  They also drive much smaller cars there, usually hatchbacks.  Only in London did I see big cars and even then not as big as U.S. except for one stretch Limo.  The big cars there are Jaguar sedans and the occasional Rolls which is still smaller than a typical American boat.  And while I’m on the subject of cars :-), the taxis are something else.  They are black and look like something from the ’40s with a huge area between the front seat and the back seat for luggage, and the rear doors are hinged on the back and open from the the other direction like a Lincoln Continental.  In addition to this, they are pretty crazy drivers along with the fact that they drive on the wrong side of the road.  I found out the reason for this at Alan’s.  It comes from the days of horse-drawn coaches.  The coachman would always sit on the right side of the coach so if another coach came along or a highwayman, he could draw his sword which is always sheathed on the left.  So once cars (autos there) came along they kept up the tradition, but somewhere along the line lost the swords.  I learned all this from Alan’s neighbor who thinks only Americans drive on the right, but Espen (who’s been to a lot of countries) told me only England and a couple of other countries drive on the left side.

Anyway, back to London… Once I left Mojo, my next destination was Denmark St. in Soho.  This is the music street of London and where the famous Albert Grossman negotiating scene in Don’t Look Back took place. 

Central London is fairly walkable and one of my favorite things to do is just wander around and find things by bumping into them.  On getting out of the subway, I noticed a sign (there are various destination sign markers throughout the city) pointing towards Carnaby Street, so I figured might as well go.  It was nothing much, no good clothes (I’m always in the market for Beatle boots or even better suede ones like I had back in ‘65 [same kind Bob wore of course] but no such luck.  Carnaby Street was kind of like Greenwich Village is now.  Depressing stores with no cool clothes and bad music playing.  So needless to say I split there pretty fast and going by instinct started wandering these little streets towards Soho.  The trouble was there are lots of these tiny streets and they all look kind of cool, and I wanted to walk down all of ’em.  This brought me to my first sad reality: London needed 3 weeks, not 3 days. 

I finally came across Denmark Street which had a lot of guitar and instrument stores and Helter Skelter books.  Helter Skelter is the company that published CP Lee’s book and they have a store entirely devoted to books on pop music!  Well, this resulted in about 90 minutes of browsing.  They had a huge Bob section of course and back issues of Isis, but alas no back issues of the Telegraph which is what I was hoping to find.  They also had the new Kroksgaard, which was impressive as well as expensive.  So considering the exchange rate, I figured I could get it cheaper in the states.  So after getting out of there, I checked out all the guitar stores to see what they had in search of the elusive guitar box.  My friend here told me to check out London Guitar Center which wasn’t on Denmark Street, but the only thing to close to that name was London Guitar Studio which was all the way back past Oxford Circus where I’d come from. They have a lot of strange guitars in England, and only a couple of stores carried what we would consider good guitars in the States.  You’ll see a lot of the newer Epiphones, but hardly any Martins or Gibsons (of course Epiphone is made by Gibson) and surprisingly few Fenders, and none of the newer brands like Taylor.  You do see a surprising amount of dobros, steel-bodied Nationals, mandolins, and a lot of imported instruments, African drums and other ethnic stuff.

So after checking out a few more bookstores (there are hundreds of great bookstores in and around Soho and just like the tiny streets, you wanna go in all of ’em, I set out for London Guitar Studio, which turned out to be another waste of time as it was primarily a classical guitar store and they had no boxes.  By this time it was dangerously close to rush hour, and one thing about London, there are tons of people on the streets, especially the big streets with department stores.  More than anyplace I’d been, London is like NYC in that regard, and to me it seemed, there were even more people on the streets.  You have to fight your way through the crowd and at rush hour it’s completely insane.  So, it was back to the small streets, stopping here and there to check out stores.  Returning to Soho, I went back to Helter Skelter to make sure I hand’t missed anything and resumed wandering.  Soon I found myself in a theater district (huge palaces both for movies and legitimate theater), and just going down whatever streets looked interesting I found a great jazz and blues CD store that reminded me of a place I used to work in.  No Bob, but extensive great blues section and excellent folk and world music section as well.  Returning to Charing Cross, a big street the runs through Soho, I followed it and soon found myself in Trafalgar Square where there were Quakers protesting the Kosovo war.

The anti-war sentiment in England seemed a bit more vehement than here.  In Manchester, there were blocks near the universities filled with anti-war posters.  I decided to hang out in central London and gave Espen a call telling him not to make dinner and found an Indian restaurant.  The general consensus seems to be that English food is terrible and to be avoided, but there are tons of Indian restaurants everywhere (in Manchester, there is actually something called “The Curry Mile” which is close to a mile of Indian and Pakistani restaurants and stores.  This was in the theater district where they have closed off a lot of streets and turned them into malls.  They are crammed with people.  Also while wandering around Soho, I noticed that the pubs would often overflow onto the streets (!) with a big crowd of people hanging out front drinking.  So I headed into the crush, and found quite a few street performers (singers, jugglers, all kinds) all with huge crowds around them.  A destination sign pointed towards Picadilly Circus which wasn’t much.  It’s kind of like Times Square with lots of neon signs.  There was a crusty old bagpiper there who was quite a character, but there was also a Tower Records on one corner and a MacDonalds on the other (there are actually several corners, it’s a multi-intersection).  I went into the Tower trying to find a fanzine for a friend that had a review of a CD of her band. 

Leaving Tower, I headed towards the Thames and found myself in front of a museum, and facing a fairly extensive mall (the park kind, not the shopping kind).  I looked to my right and there it was a few blocks away, Buckingham Palace.  It wasn’t on my list of top 10 places to see or anything, but I figured, I’m here, so I walked over.  By this time it was twilight.  It was worth it for the guards.  They don’t move!  At all!  At first I wasn’t sure if they were real.  They were behind the gates of course, two of them standing in front of their little guard huts.  The palace is huge, and there wasn’t a light to be seen in the place.  I stood there taking pictures waiting for the guards to move, but they never did.  I wondered what happens if they sneeze, and how they take care of other functions.  Later on, Espen told me that at other areas throughout the city, there are places where you can go right up to them, and that people will put their hands right in their faces to see if they blink.

I was starting to get pretty tired at this point having been walking for at least 9 hours and started heading back towards the train, but taking a different route.  I tried asking a couple of people if I was going in the right direction, but they all turned out to be foreigners.  But my sense of direction is pretty good, so I walked down these deserted streets, and after a few blocks bumped right into Westminster Abbey.  By this time it was almost completely dark and starting to rain to boot (I actually lucked out most of the time weather-wise, though in London it can rain at any time and the weather can go through a lot of changes in one day).  However the night and the rain made the Abbey which is magnificent  as well as huge seem even spookier than it already is.  I stared at it for quite a while and then moved on and there it was Big Ben, also seeming quite eerie in the midst, and of course Parliament which is enormous.  This also required a good few minutes of staring, this time under an umbrella.  I asked a bobby where the Charing Cross train station was and it turned out to be right up the road as Charing Cross goes right into Parliament. 

Walking up the street, after about a block I came across about 100 protesters in the rain.  Stopping to talk to them, I asked why there were at this location.  Pointing to the building behind them, they said, “That is the defense building,” and pointing across the street, they said, “And *that* is 10 Downing Street.”  I looked and (behind a gate that Thatcher put up–you used to be able to walk right up to it) down a tiny street in back of huge government buildings you could see what looked like a little brick house.  Espen later told me it’s not so little and actually goes way back.  It turned out this particular group of protesters were Serbs!

By this time I’d been on my feet for almost 12 hours, so I made it for the train, and then the bus to Espen’s.  There were actually 3 busses I could take.  I asked the driver to let me know when Davenport Rd in Catford, was coming up and he (a Jamaican) said, “Where’s that mon?” Now I’d made a note of landmarks that morning, and after a while the bus driver stops in what turned out to be the center of Catford, and says to me, “Catford’s back there mon.”   So I get off, and I don’t know where the hell I am.  It kind of blew my mind that a bus driver wouldn’t know streets he passes several times a day.  Not knowing where I was I took the next bus going in the same direction, but soon realized that was wrong, so I got off in the middle of some neighborhood and crossed the street to take the bus back.  I figured I’d go all the way back to the Lewisham station and take the same number bus I’d taken in the morning. 

It took forever for another bus to come, and I was starting to get nervous as parts of London are not exactly safe.  No cabs passed either, or I would have taken one.  Finally a bus came and again the driver didn’t know where the street was, but an old gent heard me ask him and came over and gave me a bunch of landmarks to look out for, though I barely understood what he was saying.  But it was enough, and very quickly I recognized what I was pretty sure was the right neighborhood and got off.  Later Espen told me the stop to ask for was the name of the pub.  Figures.

I finally made it back to Espen’s and he showed up a while later.  Again we had another long talk into the night, this time accompanied by some German liqueur that was quite tasty.  The funny thing is I am not a big drinker.  The guys in my band used to get nuts on how I long I would take to drink a beer. 

Anyway, Espen and I got into a big Bob discussion, and Espen is one of those guys who knows the exact date of versions he likes.  I can’t get that specific except for certain shows I saw that stick out in my mind or certain recordings that drive me nuts, and even then (except for Halloween ’64) I can’t remember the exact date.  So we’re talking “Every Grain of Sand” and he’s saying the version he did in Oslo or something is wonderful, and I say, well you have to hear the version he did in Philly at the Electric Factory on the Patti Smith tour ’cause they stuck this Curtis Mayfield type soul lick into it and that that was the best time I ever saw him do the song.  And of course along the way, I told him about how I heard the song long before its release ’cause a friend of mine knows Joel Bernstein who’s originally from just outside of Philly, and how I go this cat’s house sometime in the late winter/early spring of 1981, and this guy (Joel) tells me I can hear the song, but not tape it, and it’s “Every Grain of Sand” (dog barking version) and I think it’s the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard and make him play it about 10 times, and he tells me all about the Hard Rain tour, and how Bob names his guitars after poets and doesn’t change the strings on his guitars and saves his old strings in the envelopes in his case, and how Bob came to do the insane arrangements of ’78 by sending Joel out for the lyrics and drawings book and the 66-76 book  and sitting there at the piano and one version would be country, and another would a samba and another would be a blues or something stranger, and how at the end of the day, Bob would listen to all the versions and pick one and that it would be it and sometimes his choices were good and sometimes, well they weren’t so good.

So Espen of course is taking all this in, but there’s no way I can explain this version of “Every Grain of Sand” since obviously I don’t have my tape collection with me.  So, I have no choice but to get out the Triple-0 18 and play my approximation of this for him.  Well, he just loved that!  And that left me no choice but to play him some of my other favorite Bob tunes like “Abandoned Love” and “Except You” and of course some of my own as well.  I’d already laid a CD on him as a way of thanking him for his hospitality. 

So one I played him was my newest one (written last October — I don’t force songs, I just them come out) called “Wyoming” about the Matthew Shepherd incident.  Now I usually don’t write “topical” songs, but this one just flowed right out, in fact right out of the newspaper as someone once said, and came so quickly and so naturally that I knew it was something special.  I kind of look upon it as my “Hurricane” in that it just kind of lays out the facts.  Well, this song blew Espen’s mind.  He was like that is an *excellent* song, and that’s talking about how he has contacts in Oslo and is going to be working in radio and stuff.  So that ended up being a great night going well into the wee hours of the morning.  I was hoping he’d get his guitar (a nylon string) and play something, but he didn’t.  But it kind of totally substantiated my feeling that there’s nothing like a good kitchen to play music in.

The next morning Espen went with me back to central London so I could take some pics of Parliament and the Abbey.  Parliament was even more amazing in daylight.  It is humongous, dwarfing the capitol, and there’s gold trim around Big Ben and stuff.  I didn’t even realize that it is actually connected to Westminster Abbey which was equally stupendous.  Then on our way to the train we came upon the Queen’s Royal Horse Guards just in time to see them change!  These guys had these hats with white feathers and gold chin bands, and some higher guard comes out and starts barking orders at them in a thick accent.  One guy had trouble adjusting his hat right, and the chin band kept slipping up to his mouth.  It was a complete insane ceremony where first they lead the horses out and the horses get inspected, and then they get inspected and then they ride to the guard station and the other guards just ride in and then they just sit there totally still on horses.  They looked exactly alike, and Espen said they were probably brothers.  Once they were done changing, the guard’s eyes would dart back and forth and his hat comes right to his eyes, but no other part of him moved.  

Then it was onto the oldest subway line in London (and the subways go deep down underground with these long steep escalators leading to them with signs telling you to stay to the right) for a trip to Camden, a rather run-down section of town.  But before we get there, another crazy thing about the English.  Instead of having exit signs in the subways and train stations, they have signs saying “way out.”  This cracked me right up as the first one I saw was at the Liverpool train station and it was HUGE, running the width of several train platforms.  

Now Camden is where the World’s End Cafe is where Bob shot the World Gone Wrong cover and the Blood In My Eyes video.  The hoped for gathering didn’t happen, (and if it did, we didn’t show up) but it didn’t matter as Camden is a fascinating place.  We did go in the cafe (a rather large pub) and tried to figure out where Bob sat, but as we didn’t have the cover with us, and he probably rearranged things adding his own props, we never did figure it out and we were crazy enough to look everywhere.  

Anyway, Camden has this open air-market that goes on floor blocks in and out of buildings and stuff.  There are hundreds of stalls selling all kinds of stuff.  Clothes, books, antiques, toys, junk and  CDs and albums.  Well I don’t have to tell you what that means.  Bootlegs!  We were soon joined by another Dylan fan friend of Espen’s.  At some of the stalls, if they see you looking at the Dylan section, they ask if you want to see more.  Well, I don’t have to tell you what the answer was.  Actually, I didn’t actually buy much Bob.  I’d already bought one boot in Liverpool called Tour Diary ’97 ’cause it had the version of “Sooner or Later” I saw in Hershey, PA, and I wanted to get some momentos for some friends back home.  So I bought a rare stones boot, and a rare Beatles boot and this Bob LP “Last Thought On Henry Mancini” that has “Moon River” which I had on tape and Van’s “And It Stoned Me” which I didn’t.  Mostly I bought it for the cover, a ridiculous picture of Bob in his famous hood.  Anyway we spent at least six hours there looking at junk, and looking at the people who were as interesting as the junk, and of course an hour
at a cafe drinking coffee and talking about Dylan.  Then Espen’s friend split and he and I went back to wander around Soho some more where I treated him to a Polynesian dinner.

Then we went back home for more Bob and more talk.

The next morning I went back to Central London by myself to check out the Tower of London.  I’d ridden past it on the way to Espen’s house (the taxi driver pointed it out) as well as the Tower Bridge which is right next to it which a lot of people mistake for London Bridge.  Espen said the Tower is one of his favorite places.  Actually there are several towers and several buildings.  The place is sort of a combination fort/castle right on the Thames and Kings and Queens at one time lived there.  Of course this is a major tourist attraction, and they have guides dressed in Beefeater uniforms who are hysterical (and they know it too).  “Let’s go see where people were ’anged.”  “They took Guy Fawlkes and sliiiiiiced ’im down thee middle.”  Unfortunately the room housing the instruments of torture was closed.  You can just wander around, you don’t have to be part of a tour, though it’s fun to hear the guide’s talk.  There’s all kinds of stuff in there from the Royal Crown Jewels to Knight’s costumes and various weapons as well as the rooms they locked the prisoners in.  You wander up these winding spiral staircases and down ancient hallways.  The most interesting thing was the prisoners probably having nothing else to do carved writings into the walls that are still there.  Some are just a date and the date they were imprisoned — there were no cells, apparently they’d just throw them in a room, usually an empty room and lock the door — but other writings are manifestos.  They also have Ravens there wandering the grounds, and when I saw one, I realized I’d never seen a Raven which basically look like very big crows and are quite vicious.

After the Tower I walked through the streets of London one last time, down Fleet Street where all the newspapers used to be and Reuters still is, past St. Paul’s Cathedral–magnificent and by accident happened upon another place Espen told me about, Covant Garden, which is kind of an upscale shopping place that once was a theater where there are several street performers.  There was a guy playing blues on a steel-bodied National accompanied by a harp player, around the corner from him a folksinger, in a kind of sunken courtyard, an amazing string quartet and jugglers and musicians.  One kid trying to attract attention to the jugglers was a riot.  He was about 15, wearing a blue velvet suit and red tie with Nikes, and he was banging a big hard shell suitcase on the ground loudly while blowing a whistle.  “C’mon ladies, sit down and watch the show,” he’d yell whipping a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiping off a bench.  Then he’d grab a kid’s baseball hat off  the kid’s head and balance it on his nose, return it and bang the suitcase and blow the whistle again.  

Then I took one last walk through the streets of Soho and reluctantly took the train back to Espen’s.

That morning Espen got all dressed up to go to Norwegian Independence Day celebration for which he made Norwegian Jam.  He invited me to go along, but I just had to much stuff to take with me, and the suitcase was extremely heavy.  My flight wasn’t until 4, but the airlines want you there 2 hours in advance on international flights and Heathrow was more than an hour away.  And so about an hour after he left a gypsy cab (cheaper than the ’40s style official black ones) came to take me to Heathrow.  It was a long ride, mostly through the streets of London until finally hitting a highway.  The driver was Jamaican, and on the way we heard this hysterical BBC newscast.  The BBC guys are very proper and this guy said something like, “The government has spent 4 million dollars on a report that says COUGH COUGH COUGH, excuse me, that madcow disease was not at all harmful to humans.”  The cab driver laughed hysterically.  Back at CP’s he’d have BBC news on every morning and it cracked me up: “The weather will be a bit unsettled today.”  One morning I heard about the tornado in Oklahoma, and they had a live feed: “Had a bit of a storm have we?  A lot of devastation, eh?  Many people killed?”  I couldn’t believe it.  

Anyway I arrived at Heathrow way early which was a good thing ’cause no one was in line.  As I walked to the British Airways counter, the person there said, “Going to Philadelphia” which freaked me out.  Turned out it was their only flight that afternoon.  So getting into my friendliest, most polite mode, I said, “This guitar is extremely valuable and I would really appreciate it if I could possibly take it with me on the plane.”  And instead of saying “No” like they would in Philly, she said, “Let me call up to the gate and see what I can do.”  And then much to my relief and amazement she said, “Take it with you,” and if you can’t take it on the plane, then it will go in last and they will put it in “fragile hold.”  And so, a couple of hours later when I got to the gate they were expecting me and told me to take it with me and talk to the crew.  So when they made the first call for people with children or special needs, I figured that was me.  Well, even though it’s a small guitar it wouldn’t fit in the overhead, goddamn jumbo jets, they make the overheads smaller and really squeeze you in too.  Makes no sense.  You’re on a longer overseas flight (Boeing 777) and you have much less leg room than you do on a regular domestic flight  on a DC 29 or a 727 or 737, and as you know I ain’t exactly tall.  Anyway, then I tried to fit in a closet and it wouldn’t fit in there either, and they wouldn’t let me put it behind the seat and I was in the last seat.  But as the plane took off, I saw one of the flight attendants pick up the guitar, and they put it somewhere in first class  where of course a Martin belongs.

Despite the lack of legroom, British Airways is a pretty classy way to fly.  Good food, 2 bottles of wine, and lots of movies.  One very cool thing is on one of the channels you can watch the progress of the flight.  They have a map of the earth that they show from several angles, and a little graphic plane that shows you exactly where it is.  The also give you the altitude, speed, tailwind, and time and weather at point of origin and destination.  The jumbo jets take off FAST, and soon we were over Ireland and then the Atlantic.  The plane had a hell of a tailwind which the pilot announced before take-off, 65 mph.  Well as the Beatles once said, “turn left at Greenland,” and down through Nova Scotia and over Maine past Boston.  I always try to get a window seat and I could see it all though it got cloudy (probably smog) around Boston.  The plane started descending from its 40,000 ft altitude after NYC and suddenly there it was in all its gambling glory, Atlantic City in full view.  From there maybe 15 minutes up the AC Expressway (by car it takes an hour) and down to Wilmington for a u-turn for the approach into Philly.  Those planes probably need that 30 miles to land.  Then it was on through customs where agents stand with German shepherds to sniff your luggage.    Customs was pretty much a breeze.  One guy asked me to open my guitar case, and then says, “A Martin!  What kind of stuff do you play?”  And then it was out to wait for my friends to pick me up since the plane touched down 45 minutes early.  And then it was home to extreme jet lag that lasted a few daze, over 2,000 messages on RMD, and quite a bit of culture shock. 

The jet-lag was definitely worse coming home than going there, though maybe the excitement and adrenaline of actually being in England played a part.  Coming back you’re going against the jet stream (at least someone told me that, and it makes sense ’cause it’s  a seven-hour flight going and eight returning, though in my case returning was 7 hrs, 15 min. ’cause of the tailwind) and that that may play a part.  I stayed awake the first night as long as I could, but woke up the next morning at 5:30 am and could not get back to sleep (“I get up in the morning, but it’s too early to wake”) but then I remembered I was still running on England time, and there it would’ve been 10:30 am which would’ve been very late for me to get up.  So I got up went out to a diner for breakfast, came home and began hitting the thread button like mad on RMD, somewhat amazed to see that Paul Bullen had hijacked RMD in my absence.

And that my friend is where the story and the trip ends, because it never would’ve happened without RMD.

I met Steve Brown 28 years ago.   It was on South Street.  And the fact that we met, totally by chance, on the street and became close friends says something about our relationship.  We met on a Sunday in spring, and there might have been some sort of South Street walk going on.  This was the old South Street, before McDonald’s and chain stores, when artists were living in storefronts.   I was playing my guitar on the street for change, and this guy came up as I was getting close to finishing and watched for a while.  I did a song that I didn’t think anyone could’ve known, that my brother wrote and that Happy & Artie Traum had recorded.  Hardly anyone knew about this record, but this guy knew the song, which completely blew my mind.   So we talked and traded phone numbers and I went home thinking I had met someone special.  

A few days later I called him, and he invited me to where he was living in Germantown on Wayne Avenue in what I quickly found out was called “The Wayne House.”  Not long after I arrived we went for a walk and ended up at his cousin Mike’s apartment.

Within a couple of weeks, I moved into Mike’s apartment and my life changed.  It was different times then.  The war was on.  Nixon was running for re-election and George McGovern was opposing him.  

We were all the same age.  Mike was 21, and Steve and I were about to become 21 that summer.  We quickly discovered that not only did we like the same music, but shared the same views on politics, on life.

Steve would show up just about every day, and every time he came, it seemed he had another friend with him.  He always seemed to have a bunch of things he was trying to do all at the same time and was full of life, energy, ambition.  He was fun to be around. And he was funny.  For one thing, he could do a great Harpo Marx.  But Steve’s humor was sharp, offhand, observant, absurd and cutting.  He could find humor in just about anything, and it would come out any time, at any place, at any occasion.  And that humor turned into our own lexicon, our own absurd language with references that went back for years to some crazy second in time.  

And those times were crazy, and music was our bond and our passion.  I probably went to more concerts with Steve than anyone else, and we thought nothing of traveling hundreds of miles to see those shows.  To Harrisburg to see Merle Haggard, to Virginal to see George Jones, to Hartford to see Bob Dylan & The Rolling Thunder Revue.   Wild all night drives in some old car on the verge of breaking down, and being in a car with Steve at the wheel was an adventure to begin with.

The first ten years I knew him Steve had an ongoing series of cars and car dramas.  The first car I remember him owning was a baby blue ‘61 Mercury Monterey that could fit seven people comfortably.  If a car could have personality and humor, that Mercury had it and riding around with Steve in general back then always felt like being in some comedy. Steve was very generous about letting me use it, but each time there was some kind of drama like going to use the turning signal and have it come off in my hand.  

One time, Robbie Saltzman, Steve and I drove to Massachusetts for a little vacation.  The wipers had stopped working, and the part was on order for months.  Of course, on the day of the trip it rained.  So, we tied string to the wipers, and while Steve drove, Robbie sitting in the back would pull the wipers to the left, and sitting next to Steve, I would pull them to the right―for 300 miles, almost to Boston.  We got a lot of stares that trip, especially waiting in line at the tollbooths.

Somewhere along the line he discovered the Slant 6 engine, and had a series of Plymouths, his favorite being a white Valiant station wagon he named Vernon.   His last Slant 6 was a humongous gold Plymouth with a three-on-the-tree stick shift.  By this time, Steve was playing music regularly and his sound system included two very large and cumbersome speakers that would only fit in the back seat.  Just moving these speakers was an ordeal to begin with and getting them into the back seat was no small feat.  And every time he put those speakers in or took them out of that car another piece of upholstery came with them.

But the thing about Steve was that very shortly after I met him, I felt as if I’d always known him.  My family had moved out of Philly when I was a kid, and I felt that if I had lived in Philly my entire life, I would have met him years earlier.  You meet Steve, and you meet his ever-widening circle of friends and you meet his family.  Cousins and more cousins after that, and as it turned out, some of those cousins did know my family, which only completed the circle.  And his family made me feel like family, and I will always be grateful to Hershel and Lorraine, and Adam and Susie and Mike and Teddy for that.  If you lived with Steve, and his family was having a dinner or something, you went to the dinner.  It was never, “Do you wanna come?” it was “You’re coming.”

But for me, more than the fun stories, more than memories of endless late-night hearts and pinochle games, more than the music, the tons of gigs and all-night rides, Steve was the friend I could really talk to, for the hard stuff, the heavy stuff.  We had no secrets.  And I knew that I could count on him, no matter what.  And he never let me down.  

I didn’t see as much of Steve as I would’ve liked in the past ten years.  Steve’s family―as it should be―was his priority, and instead of music, the topic of conversation was Amanda and Paul.  And whenever he spoke of them, it was always with pride and joy and love.

But this only made the times we did get together more special.  We called each other Brown, which Steve told me cracked Heidi up and in turn she would always call me Brown.  We’d play phone tag endlessly and nine times out of 10, the message we would leave each other was “Brown? Brown.”  During one of the many sleepless nights I had after Steve got sick, I started trying to think of how many Brown/Brown phone messages there were floating around somewhere in space. 

And so for the past few weeks, I just keep thinking that Steve’s out there somewhere with all those messages.  The Texas songwriter and mystery novelist, Kinky Friedman says that when you go to heaven, every pet you ever owned comes running out to greet you.  And so I think Steve is out there with his cat Puss, and his dog Doogie, and maybe he’s playing cards with Kenny Miller, or watching Babe Ruth, or Otis Redding or Hank Williams, or jamming with Rick Danko.  And I know he’s singing, and coming up with great one-liners as he’s watching us right now.

Steve Brown was my friend on this earth for more than half my life, and my life changed, and changed for the better because we were friends.  He may not be here right now, but he’ll be with me forever.

—Peter Brown

This is just part of the Ginsberg section in the book ‘NYC Babylon: From Beat To Punk’ by Victor Bockris, published by Omnibus Press.

There is a lot more about Dylan but this bit blew my mind. Ginsberg pins down with quite alarming accuracy and insight some of the truly rare and unique magic Dylan makes onstage. I hope Dylan has read what his friend Allen had to say about
him as a poet, and a performer.

The interview was taped in Dec 77. He’s talking here about Idiot Wind:

Well, it just seemed a very noble song, like the kind of nobility you don’t often see, the nobility of a great bard. Which is what the whole Rolling Thunder tour was about. And also a very strange alchemical thing in the sense that he had to take all this money and all this machinery and all this electricity to create a ten-foot-square spot where he would be completely free to stamp his foot in time to what he hears in his own head as music, and create on the spot a new rhythm each time
he played ‘Idiot Wind’ or any other song, and play each song differently each time with all the musicians completely there in their bodies, alert, listening, sensitive, receptive, and respondent to his changes of time and beat, his elongation of the vowels, so they get up on the stage and howl, in the sense of elongated vowels, with complete self-confidence and authority and solace, solitary loneliness, in the middle of 27,000 people and half a million dollars worth of equipment: in a ten-foot square place where one person can totally express
himself freely and actually express a good deal of the emotion of the crowd of people around him, speak for people in a sense, speak for others, speak for himself and others at the same time. So ‘Idiot Wind’ seems to me like an acme of that.

On the Hard Rain album, even in diminished volume, there’s still the sense of slowdown of time and the slowdown of the song and even the gaps in the song where there’s a moment of silence, and you don’t know whether the song is continuing, and all of a sudden it continues with the same logic as before. So he’s stepping in and out of time. It’s
noticeable in the fantasticalness of his pronunciation of consonants. The thing that I kept thinking is that expression on his face which looks like pain and/or disdain, or sneer, is really just a mouth working, his face trying to pull back his
teeth to pronounce his ‘t’s clearly enough to be heard into the microphone, to hear a single ‘t’ or an ‘s’ above all the roar of the other electrical instruments, to be heard as a human syllable and be understood by the ear so that music had word, it had word in there. That’s why he’s a great poet in the sense of great orator. That’s the best oratory I’ve heard, or the best recitation of poetry. It was a great poetry reading …

In between the concerts we made movies, almost every day there was a scene to act in, so that would take up half a day or morning: we worked very hard putting on a concert and making movies simultaneously, no chance to get up and laze around all day and not worry about anything and then jump into another concert. Dylan actually was working on the afternoon of a concert: like going out to Kerouac’s grave in a caravan and sitting there, and then having a concert in Lowell that night. Singing all the night before and having to
get up at 10 am or something, a lot of energy.
Since the tour, he’s just disappeared from my vision. Gone back up to heaven.

Interviewed September 13, 2004 

When did you begin your music career? 

I didn’t start playing out on my own till the early ’70s at various venues usually coffeehouses in the Philadelphia area. 

Who are your main musical influences? 

There’s a huge list, but at the top for a very long time would have to be Bob Dylan, The Band and Van Morrison.  But there’s other people I’ve also spent a lot of time listenening to such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Leadbelly George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Hank Williams Willie Nelson, and Bill Monroe would have to be in there as well.  I’ve made it a point to listen to and see as many of the greats as I can.  So that would include virtually all the Chicago as well as country blues artists, all the traditional country artists and later the honky-tonk artists, and then of course, all the rock and roll that was happening when I was a kid as well as soul and R&B. 

If you had to pick a couple of songs you have written that you are most proud of, what would they be and why? 

They’d usually be the ones that when you’re writing them, you have a feeling that you’re onto something.  I felt that with “You Don’t Have To Close The Door” which judging by audience reaction is also my most popular song.  That song just seems to really hit people.  Early on, people who’d seen my band would come up me, sometimes even if they happened to see me in the street and say, “What was that song about the train?” 

But I also like the songs that seem to write themselves, the one’s that come fast.  They end up being the one’s that stay with me the longest.  Of the one’s on the album, I’d have to say “Insignificant” and “You’re Not There” in terms of truly realizing what I was going for when I wrote them both in terms of mood and lyrics.

I’ve got four songs.If you don’t mind, I was wondering if you could go over how they came about or what was going at the time.

“Matter Of The Heart”

This is about the end of a relationship and it actually ended on the summer solstice which is what the line “at the end of the longest day” refers to.  The hook line (which is also the title) “You might think it’s a matter of the mind, but I know it’s a matter of the heart,” came into my mind and I couldn’t shake it.  I think I carried that in my mind for a really long time before I wrote the song and it took about 9 months after this breakup for the song to crystalize.  Then it took until the album to get it right.  I tried it with several bands, but it took Frank Campbell, a fine engineer and bass player from Austin who basically produced by album to realize what I was going for musically.

“You’re Not There”

I actually wrote this in a bar.  I was going out by myself drinking and looking for love in all the wrong places.  I ordered a beer, had a seat at the bar and the song came into my head.  Luckily, I had my pocket notebook on me and wrote it down.  I knew I had something.  I finished writing and forgot about going out for the night, went home and took out the guitar.  It was actually about a relationship that had ended a long time before, but every now and then showed signs of coming back to life.

“Here On Earth”

This is another song that kind of came out of nowhere.  I was writing a bunch of songs at the time.  I’d been seriously injured in a robbery and couldn’t sing for a couple of months.  All these songs had built up in my mind when I started playing again, and when I wrote this, I may have just finished either “Up Against It” or “Mystery Mountain.”  It was in the afternoon and the title came into my head.  I just started writing and it pretty much came out the way it is.  This big list of the horrors and evil of the world.  I knew I had to find a positive way to end which was about the only thing I really had to do with shaping it in a sense.  I really had to concentrate at the end because one of the people I lived with at the time came home, and I knew I had to finish the song.  When Tangible Music picked up the album, the guy who ran the company thought the end was corny, but when I was writing it, I was keeping in mind something Woody Guthrie had said about hating songs that make you feel like you’re no good (or something like that).  For whatever crazy reason, that was also in my mind while I was writing it, so the goal was to try to find a ray of hope somewhere at the end.

I really do believe in the muse, in the theory a lot of songwriters have including Dylan and Van Morrison that the songs are out there and you kind of tune in and they come.  You have to be in a place and a state of mind to receive them of course.  As Arlo Guthrie says, “Songwriting is like fishing.”

“Walkin’ In My Sleep”

This is really a song about a lost opportunity.  It’s about two people who were in love with each other and missed the chance due to a bunch of outside pressures and influences.  By the time they admitted it to each other, it was too late.  Obviously it’s written from the point of view of let’s do it anyway, what the hell.  It’s probably the most upbeat song on the album, but it’s actually about something very sad.

Where do you want to be in the next few years with your music career? Any long term goals?

Oh God, it’s really hard to say.  For one thing the music business is just in a not good state at the moment in terms of doing anything creative.  The major labels for the most part are ruined, due to the corporate thing taking over the world.  Things are changing.  Of course there’s the whole do it yourself thing, but having recorded in a real and good studio with both an engineer and musicians who really knew what they were doing, I would want to do it that way again.  I would like to find another cool small label.  The label that put out my album went out of business a couple of years ago.  It was a learning experience in a lot of ways both good and bad.  But I know what’s involved in making a record and what needs to be done to really make it happen.  Tangible Music knew some of the things, but there were areas they didn’t concentrate on, so I learned from that.  I’m trying to find that person I can work with who not only believes, but also has the power or whatever it is to open some doors.  I have some newer songs, some I’m very proud of, so I’d like to be able to get them out there and see what happens.

What’s your fondest career memory so far?

It was probably making the album.  There’s been some good gigs of course along the way, but the album was realization not only of a dream, but of a sound for these songs, a sound I heard in my mind, but wasn’t truly able to achieve with whatever bands I’d had.  For whatever reason, all those musicians in Austin such as Cindy Cashdollar, Casper Rawls, and all the others who played on the record were able to pick up on what I wanted and lay it down, with me actually saying very little, occasionally suggesting the sound or style of a guitar player, or maybe a certain feel.  They were just able to listen to the songs and pretty much immediately pick up the feel I was going for and get it right.  So it was fulfilling and it was validation of everything I’d been trying to do in writing these songs for years and years.

Do you have a preference when it comes to playing, whether it’s acoustic or electric?

I really like them both.  I’ve been playing solo more often mainly because of economics.  I’ll go for the acoustic first because I started on acoustic.  And the thing about playing by yourself is you can take the song wherever you want it to go, you don’t have to worry about it.  You want to do a solo, you just do it, you want to hold a note longer, go for it.  Sometimes I work with another guitar player, named Larry Broido, who is a great great player, and he usually plays electric and there’s been times when we’ve really taken the stuff to a whole other level.

But there’s a fun thing with a band too.  I probably put on more of a show with a band, cause you get inspired to do certain things on stage.  The trick is holding a band together long enough so the music grows.  That’s hard at this level.

You are also an writer, tell people what you write about and who you have wrote for?

In terms of being published I’ve written mostly about music, though I’d like to take it into other areas.  I wrote for a now gone (that corporate thing again) alternative paper in Philly for several years, doing album reviews, concert reviews etc.  They let me write what I wanted to write which was great and were very happy if you went beyond the norm which I sometimes did.  I also wrote for Gadfly Magazine, which was a very cool magazine about popular culture with really well-written, intelligent articles.  By the time I finally got something in there, they had stopped being a print publication and were only on-line.  They went out a couple of years ago, though the stuff is still on-line.  I’ve also written for Bobdylan.com and The Band website.  I got an amazing response to the stuff on Bobdylan.com.  I never considered myself a critic, more a journalist.  I was never into putting stuff down unless I absolutely had to.  My attitude was I’d rather turn someone on to something good than turn them off to something bad.  I had the same attitude when I did radio.

When you are on the road, what CD’s would be found in your CD player?

Well I have a ten-year-old car and it has a tape player, so you’re not going to find any CDs because I’m too poor to upgrade.  Either way, it wouldn’t be anything current unless it was by someone I like and I don’t like too much that’s current.  But there’d probably be some combination of the people I mentioned under influences or if I had say the new Steve Earle album or Gillian Welch, that would be in there too.  But generally there’d be some Bob, some Van, maybe some Johnny Cash, some Otis Redding, some George Jones, some Muddy Waters.

My uncle was once quite a heavy duty reporter.  He was the Bulletin’s Science Page editor but before that was a reporter.  One of the memories of my childhood was a front page pic in the Bulletin of him interviewing Nixon, I believe when he was vice president.  He was ten years younger than my father, something of a boy genius and also quite insane.  He had a nervous breakdown when I was a kid and my dad told me what went down later.  He eventually moved to Pittsburgh and became a TV anchor and remarried and once he remarried no one in the family saw him again.  He may or may not still be alive.  It was like he turned into another person.  When my grandmother died, his mother, he would not come in.  My father’s other middle brother knew how to get in touch with him, and the day she died my dad and I were over at my uncle’s and I listened in on the call.  It was just nuts.  

As to Andrea Mitchell and Greenspan, God knows why she married him.

Speaking of presidents, Harry Truman was one of the financially poorest presidents ever.  When he left office, he could barely afford the train fare back to Missouri (this was before presidents got pensions and shit).  The Rethuglicans (as John Lettiere use to call them) have been upset since Roosevelt did four terms.  Really upset.  They feel they and only they are entitled to the White House.  Of course Hillary feels she is entitled to the White House.  Is Hillary a Republican?  Well not like they are now.

Peter never got to hear Rough and Rowdy Ways, but these were his thoughts on JFK and the Kennedy saga. I imagine his response to Murder Most Foul would’ve been an email simply saying: Holy fuck!

I find nothing wrong with figuring out who killed JFK.  I’ve read a lot of books on it, not all, there’s still one I want to get and I can’t even remember the name right now.  Buried in Tarantula is some line about how the Warren Commission wasn’t up to snuff or something like that.  I think Oswald was involved, but he might’ve been what he said he was.  I know this.  If you or I were in the army and defected to the Soviet Union, and then changed our minds, we wouldn’t get our passports back in 24 hours. 

The naysayers, the ones who say no conspiracy, fuck them and the ones who use computer graphics to make their case, fuck them too.  The people who controlled things wanted the Kennedys out of the picture.  I am convinced that was the turning point in this country, when things started to get weird to what we have now. 

Some people like to point their finger at LBJ, I don’t think so.  He wasn’t enamored of the Kennedys, but that wasn’t his style.  And I think the same people who killed JFK killed his brother.  Sometime in the past 20 years, maybe 30, but I think more like 20, I decided Teddy was set up. 

I’m a very big fan of The Godfather.  I have the saga set where it’s in chronological order.  I’ve watched it more than any other movie.  So you know the scene in II where they frame the Senator?  One night I was watching it, and I went holy fuck, Teddy! 

Teddy was never really able to explain what the hell happened.  So it wasn’t too hard really, they kidnap him, they kidnap her, he wakes up, his car is in the creek with her in it, he makes up a story.  It would have been too weird to kill him too, so they made it so he could never be president.  

It’s not that I think the Kennedys were anything great ’cause I don’t and they weren’t.  They acted on civil rights because they were forced to, not because they wanted to.  RFK worked for Joe McCarthy and did other horrible shit.  Who knows if JFK was really gonna pull out of Vietnam?  We’ll never know.  It wasn’t about Vietnam anyway, the assassination was about Cuba. 

That said, I do think RFK underwent some kind of change, and I do think he would have won the nomination and the election.  He couldn’t say anything of course, and none of the Kennedys said anything for years, but I suspect RFK knew something wasn’t on the up and up about his brother’s death.  He was attorney general, a powerful man. 

When Oliver Stone’s film came out and the media all combined to attack it, particularly people like Cronkite.  Well, I always thought it was pretty much what the film said.  It might not have been the guy Garrison went after in New Orleans, but it was some combination of mob/military/cia probably backed by oil money. 

In 2003 I spoke with Larry Charles on the telephone for what felt like several hours. At that time I set up a website called the Masked an Anonymous Database, collecting press shots, news clippings, behind the scenes stories from the film, early copies of the script and a discussion forum.

Due to this work I was able to get a contact for Larry’s PA, he knew about the website and was more than happy to spend some time talking about the film.

This is the complete unedited interview which features a lengthy and I think very unique critique on Dylan the artist from someone who worked so closely with him and who was willing to go to great lengths to explain the work and the relationship with Dylan. The resulting interview would not have been possible without Larry Charles’ honesty and sincerity.

(Trev Gibb) Have you visited the ‘Masked and Anonymous Database’?

(Larry Charles) Yes I have its amazing!

I’m happy you like it…

Oh I’m very pleased, I’m very touched actually.

I’ve got so much to ask, I’ll try to filter through, but how I’ll approach them I’m not sure… I’ll plunge ahead…

We’ll just riff around and I’m sure that something interesting will come out of it.

I think the movie speaks much truth. Did you intend it to be a social commentary?

Well you know, it’s interesting, we never had any intention at all or any concern about results or consequences. We really started from a very purely organic place, just exchanging ideas thoughts; sometimes a word or an expression in a very almost unconscious, automatic, writing it up technique, without imposing any order on it and letting the order and patterns emerge out of it naturally.

The film is very poetic in feel,  the way phrases are spoken seem philosophical and profound…

I agree, that’s you know… Bob inspires you to reach these heights you didn’t think were possible.

It must’ve been an experience meeting Bob Dylan?

There’s nothing to describe it. It was the most life changing experience of my life…its just meeting your guru, just holding a mirror to you and the world and saying look. That’s what it’s like being with him, just surprising you at all times, confounding you at all times, confusing you. But all with the end result of cracking open your head and just seeing more deeply and more clearly.

Dylan always seems discreet, but his discretion speaks a thousand things at the same time, he seems to evoke and provoke so much…

He does and he’s very enigmatic and very complex and very dense, which is no surprise. And so he will never say, “This is what I think”. He will have something and he will say it and I will say “Wow you really feel strongly about that!” and he’ll say, “Well somebody does”.

The film is so layered; it’s colourful, provocative, like a puzzle…

Yes, the last piece of the puzzle was you. That to me is the key. When I go around the country to these screenings I tell people it is a puzzle and the last piece is you. You have to kind of be involved and interact with it. And wherever you are in your life at that moment you’re gonna see certain things in that movie like you do in a Bob Dylan song. And you may come back a year from now or ten years from now and be in a different place and see the movie in a different light as well.

The film has only really played in America. Is it going to play England any time soon?

Yes it should be opening. I know there’s a film festival in England that it’s gonna open at. BBC films, was one of the financial partners, so it’s definitely meant to open in England. It’s gonna open all over Europe now; over the next couple of months, actually.

There have been rumours of a DVD release coming out soon, is there any plans finalised for what will appear on the DVD?

There is a DVD that’s going to come out I believe in February, with some deleted scenes and some other bonus stuff. But that’s not the definitive version there’s still yet my directors cut somewhere down the line, if we can get the financing together we’ll put that out too, that’s kind of more expensive to put together.

Will there ever be a definitive version? There’s so much going on and so many scenes that didn’t make it.

Well right. By definitive I only mean like… everything, we shot everything that’s in the script. And there is a version of that, that from a historically archival position might be worth having out there as well… I also have hours and hours of bob rehearsing. And I kept a camera rolling while he was doing all the music, never cutting so I have all the between song patter and warm-up stuff, and I feel like there’s a great historical archive there not to be exploited commercially, I think that would be wrong, but at some point down the line, way down the line perhaps, it should have some historical value.

It’s very intimate… Most of those live scenes with the band. The camera perspective creates such an intimate feel.

As far as the music goes, one of our earliest conversations was how to shoot the music. Bob had some very specific ideas about how he thought music should look and what’s gone wrong with music on film and why he has felt that he had never actually been well represented performing on film. And we went back and looked at some things we both liked a lot. Like old Johnny Cash shows, and even Ed Sullivan and The Grand Old Opry shows with Hank Williams and we found they basically used one camera and put you right there and there was an intimacy created between the musician and the home audience And we really responded to that, and nowadays people are afraid to stay on that one shot – and we cut and we cut, and this kind of MTV style – and we made a conscious decision to go back to this more pure version of presenting the music and it wound up being very dramatic.

You get right in perspective-wise. It’s very direct. The cinematography on the whole is so rich. One frame is like a photograph with so much going on in every part of the screen.

I’m glad you noticed that. Thank you very much, that was an effort to… we were both attracted to density and I tried to just fill the frame up at all times with a lot of information. The way Bob’s songs filled with references and allusions so that you could go back over and over again and listen to and never get tired. I wanted this to have that same quality.

There appears to be layers at every level in the film. One of the sections on the website actually deals with the idea of allusions and references.

Yes I’ve read that, it’s great.  The thing is again I’ve been to about 20 cities where I’ve hosted screenings and answered questions and what’s so great is that the audience, as I said, the audience being part of the puzzle, and the puzzle pieces can be moved around and create a different puzzle each time. Also, besides the last piece being you, the puzzle itself is constantly shifting. But people see things in the movie beyond even what was intended and those are valid quite often. I’ve heard interpretations of aspects of the movie that were certainly not conscious on our part. But when I looked back, I go “absolutely! That’s a very valid interpretation of what’s going on there”

The film is like a living thing in the sense that it will grow through time and have a resonance like Dylan’s songs do. Even politically some of the references in there could apply to now or ten years ahead.

Or a hundred years ago, Yes. Well that was one of the themes. We didn’t intend for it to be as prophetic as it turned out to be, it was again no intention to comment or be topical in any way, we were more interested in talking about the idea of the cycles of history and how history repeats itself. We think we’re unique, we think we’re in a unique time but really this is just another cycle of history that resembles every other one that’s come before it and as it turned out it winded up being very prophetic and topical as well.

Were you thinking about W. B Yeats and “Turning and turning within the widening gyre”?

Yes, well when you’re with Bob again you with a Bard on that level. Someone who is… whose job it is in life to be thinking about those things and commenting and writing about those things, so you’re in that state of mind when you’re with him and inevitably in the way Bob has throughout history – his own history – your tapping into things, into a certain psyche again almost unconsciously but inevitably.

I’ve seen this film countless times, I found it initially very overwhelming but it made me more willing to engage with it and to explore.

Yeah, well people who are willing to engage with it, that’s usually the reaction. What happened with some of the critics was that they were so overwhelmed at first that they checked out and they never got to engage with it and see all the levels and the layers and all the different things that were available to them in the movie. But people like you, and again, I’ve gone around the country to all kinds of obscure places and the audience is very willing to engage and they have that sense of being overwhelmed. And then they let it wash over them and they enter into it and experience it and they wind up having a great experience from it.

How do you feel the film sits amongst the more mainstream cinema we see?

Yes, well most movies today are very cut and dry. It’s a very risk-averse business now because there is so much money involved. They need people to come in and move on. And this is not a movie that’s intended that way. This is a movie that’s intended to be savoured and revisited like something you’d see in a museum or a poem you’d read in a book, rather than mass-market entertainment.

I do feel it will gain a cult status somewhere along the line. As I’ve said it has richness and a resonance.

Bob was very clear about that. And his work, often a lot of his greatest work, has been met with disdain when it comes out. And then later on people go, “Wow! You know ‘Slow Train Coming’ is a brilliant album”, or whatever… You know what I mean? And I look at this that way also. This is not done for a commercial acceptability; this is done to make a statement. And it’s out there and people will find it and it will always be there for them.

I think Dylan said, “What’s wrong with being misunderstood?”

Yeah that’s Bob. I mean when we were working on it he had a line that he wanted to put in and he said he had a line and I said, “Bob I have to say even in the script I don’t think people are gonna understand that line”. And he said, “Well what’s so bad about being misunderstood?” And I think he was saying… He’s a person; he’s been understood, he’s done that, he’s now willing to risk being misunderstood in order to reach a deeper level of understanding. And that’s a very courageous place for an artist to go.

I think that’s true artistic temperament.

Exactly, well that’s why, this was conceived, financed, produced… Everything about this movie was done outside of that system. I mean again there was no intention, no result that was desired. There was no commercial consideration in making this movie. This is a purely instinctive process which is really an anathema to the making of movies today.

It is such a shame that the critics could not engage with this movie.

Well Bob again in his way told me that the critics wouldn’t get this movie, but the audience would if they had a chance to see it and that has been born out buy my own personal experience. I think the critics are now sort of for the most part, part of a larger system, a more corporate system. And this (the movie) just doesn’t fit into any niche that they can really relate to. They don’t have time anymore, there’s not that kind of serious film criticism that there was 20, 30 years ago. They don’t have time to write the kind of detailed soft pieces about a film, even if they wind up rejecting it, they don’t have time to even think about it before they reject it. Here it’s just so easy to go “Oh Bob Dylan, Oh Larry Charles… Oh it’s a difficult movie, how dare they make a movie. I’m not going to engage in this” or “I’m not gonna try to look into the movie I’m not gonna try to be part of the movie.” And the end result is a lot of bad reviews obviously.

‘Masked and Anonymous’ has a mood of the Carnivalesque, for example, ‘Desolation Row goes to the Movies’.  The colour, the lighting, the characters and so forth… There is a circus feel, especially in the case of the main soundstage.

Yes, well it was a great synthesis of various things that were going on in our heads at the time and if we started today it might be totally different, you know.

One of my favourite performances is that of Luke Wilson, who seems to have a more moralistic voice in the movie.

Luke was great.

He just gets the part down perfectly, so real, so convincing.

Luke is also one of these people. He travelled with me quite a bit on this tour I did and he’s one of these people also who totally gets it. I mean people either understand how cool it is to make a movie with Bob Dylan or they don’t and he was one of the people, he was the first person to commit to the movie. He just called me up and said look “I will do anything in this movie,” and he and I became very close friends through the making of this movie.

Yeah he appears to be a really good guy.

Yeah he’s a great guy

All the actors who contributed all provide really great performances. John Goodman’s performance for example.

It’s fantastic… It’s a great performance.

All the characters to me have this underlying cynicism that’s rounded off with satire. In fact the film is full of dark humour and black comedy.

Well right, the dark humour and black comedy, which is so much a part of Bob’s music also, was missed by a lot of people, a lot of the critics I think. Whereas, the audience was able to see it and I think by the same token the performances are so monumental, but very distinctive and unique and non-naturalistic in a way and yet they also give dimensions of the characters, at the same time that it was again hard for critics – used to a straight ahead naturalistic performance – to kind of gage what this performance means, you know Jessica Lange or John Goodman.

This is no normal movie and the actors are really absorbed into the characters.

Yes they committed and that’s the kind of actors they are. If you look at Jessica Lange and John Goodman and Jeff Bridges body of work, Penelope Cruz… you see, they’re very risk taking actors, they’re willing to go out there and they work. They were all great.

One of the scenes that only got to me later on was the scene in the movie about the shooting gallery of world leaders. That’s hilarious!

Yeah, yeah that was really funny, I agree. Well again we initially set out to have different look-alikes and I couldn’t find good look-alikes of the versions I wanted and finally we started to, well at a least there’s a good Ghandi, and it was like, let’s use that. So it was again, you know, the synchronicity of it. You had to be very open to the synchronicity of it to take advantage of it.

A lot of key scenes in the film take place on staircases, such as Jack Fate’s release from prison, his conversation with Oscar Vogel and his visit to his mother’s grave. There are also references to stairs in the dialogue, like when Pagan Lace says, “We’ll take the stairs” or when Fate says, “My fall from grace didn’t end at the bottom of those stairs.” What was the logic behind the staircase motif running through the film?

Yes, Yes, absolutely. Right that’s true. You know something. What you just said actually was one of those things that happened at the screenings, I hadn’t thought about that. There’s a lot of staircases imagery in the film. I just was attracted when I went around scouting I was attracted to staircases in around LA there are a lot of dramatic staircases hidden from view. If you ever seen Laurel and Hardy’s, The Music Box, there were incredible staircases in L.A., on the side of hillsides and I’d be struck by them as we drove by. And I’d say we could do the scene here, we could do the scene there.  Something unconscious was drawing me to them.  That’s a very interesting comment, I hadn’t even thought about that. But I actually see it now. It’s totally valid.

The poetic feel of the movie and especially some of the lines in the movie is astounding… lines such as: “Hospitals built as shrines to the diseases they create” and “Vietnam War lost in the whore houses of Saigon”, and importantly “We spend our time trying to kill time, but when all is said and done time ends up killing us”…

I know. Sometimes Bob would come in with a line a like that and say do you think we should use that and I’d go, “You crazy!!?? It’s such an amazing line, you just changed my life with that line”, you know. But Bob is very irreverent in relation to his own work and he’s very willing to… he doesn’t like it to be pretty, he likes to twist it and push it and make it sound wrong, you know, ‘Only time will tell who has fell and who’s been left behind’. You know, he really likes to sort of flirt with the wrongness of it, to see what might be elicited by that and with a lot of these lines he would play with them and you know where I might be really satisfied with the pretty version of it, he would want to push further and deeper and see if we can kind of twist it around somehow. It was a fascinating process to go through.

‘Masked and Anonymous’ totally subverts the notion of how a film should be. It isn’t a movie as you would define a movie, it isn’t a conventional movie, but that’s why it’s so great. Once you get into it there’s so much.

I totally agree, I mean I want to almost not call it a movie, because it’s so Brechtian and so theatrical and so literary and so poetic… It seemed almost limiting to call it a movie.

So is it a work in progress?  Every time it expresses something slightly different.

Yes, well one of the things that I’ve said and I’ve felt a lot about this, is the concept of the finished product. We’ve come to believe in this society that something is finished, but that’s really an illusion and this is a movie that really can be… if I could I would work on it for the rest of my life and change it and play with it and re-do it, and take the pieces apart and put it back together. Really it’s a flowing fluid thing rather than a finished product.

The passion that watching the film creates seems to last and especially in your case

Well I feel responsibility to it. I feel that it was something that was born out of a very organic, pure process and I feel like it’s my responsibility to take care of it. It’s a very precious thing and yet it’s a very resilient thing and I want people to experience it. I really think that everybody who winds up experiencing it is glad they did. But its been hard to get it to people, that been the biggest obstacle really.

Well again, that’s the inspiration that he has been to me, I mean he is a purely instinctive person, he doesn’t judge his thoughts. These are my thoughts and they might have levity they might not, lets find out. He really just follows his instincts. Look, they made him Bob Dylan so he has reason to trust those instincts and so that was the philosophy I adopted. It was like, “we’re just gonna trust our instincts here and see where it takes us”

One of the phrases that strikes me, and seems to resonate through the movie is the phrase “As long as I keep talking I know I’m still alive”. All the characters seem to be governed by this idea, this frustration, in finding something real, such as Pagan Lace’s tragic pleas of, “Save me, save me”.

Yes, exactly. That’s exactly right. There is a sense of the film on one level being about communication and the breakdown of communication and how do we even hear, what do we hear? What is the process by which we hear someone else, when the words come out of someone else’s mouth? Things like that we were interested in. We’re interested in language itself. Language itself becomes a theme of the film. What is the purpose of language? How is language used to transmit ideas? These are kind of interesting, complex themes that are there again, part of the fabric as well.

Of course the film itself uses language in many different ways, not just musically, or vocally, but its there visually, it’s in what you hear and what you don’t hear. It’s everywhere. It’s often only suggested. In fact there are suggestions everywhere in the film. And all of these things going on simultaneously can lead you off in so many different directions.

Right, and even when your seeing a visually dense frame you are also hearing a cacophony usually in the background of that frame as well, that could be peeled away as well to hear a lot of different things going on too.

Well. even the reference to “Evil Doers” as spoken by Edmund certainly has a resonance with the ‘here and now’.

Yeah and at the same time there’s a kind of, almost a quaintness to that expression. And Bob is very interested in that and I think if you listen to ‘Love and Theft’ its there too. And I think this is part of that same period in his work which is the juxtaposition of the old and the quaint and the old fashioned with the post-modern. He’s trying to really juxtapose those forms and see what happens.

I was wondering is there any connection between ‘Love and Theft’ and ‘Masked and Anonymous’? Did either/or inspire the other? Did some of the lines from ‘Masked and Anonymous’ appear in ‘Love and Theft’ and so forth?

Yes, what happened was, he was working on ‘Love and Theft’ at the same time and in fact I had the privilege of going to the recording studio and what happens is, a lot of lines that didn’t wind up in ‘Masked and Anonymous’, winded up in Love And Theft and vice versa. Again we’re mixing and matching and sort of making our own puzzle. And so there were quite a few things like that, that emerged. Again, it was part of his interest at the time. I think from ‘Time Out Of Mind’ through this movie you can almost look at now as a period, like the born-again period, or the electric period. And I think that now he’s done that, the culmination is maybe the movie, now I think you’re going to see him drift for a while until he finds that next thing that interests him.

This movie explores the idea of things that are not defined, in many ways and Dylan doesn’t go for perfection.

Right, he very much embraces the imperfect, and the beauty of the imperfect, the beauty of the flaw and he’s not afraid of that. And that’s part of his courage as an artist. Also, you know, he recognises the illusion of perfection… This goes back to the idea of the finished product also, which is why there is such a wealth of Bob Dylan bootleg material also.

And ‘Masked and Anonymous’ is as much an example of this performance art.

Yes

As Pagan Lace says about the songs, “They may not be recognisable”, the idea of change and the thing with ‘Masked and Anonymous’ and even Dylan as a performing artist is that you may see something once, but the next time you see it, it won’t be the same.

That’s right; it’s constantly fluid and ever changing. It’s like a natural bi-product of who he is. Very interesting that way… he’s very comfortable also – and inspired me to be more comfortable – with the concept of ambiguity. He is willing again to court ambiguity, court confusion, in order to explore the ambiguous nature of whatever it is we’re talking about and when people are finally able to straddle that ambiguity they get some deeper level out of the work and people who don’t, people who cant handle the ambiguity, turn away and those are the people that don’t wind up benefiting from him.

The film will continue to grow I know that in maybe ten years time a line in the film will jump out like never before, it will have a resonance. This even applies with ‘Love and Theft’. I don’t know if Dylan or anyone else is aware of this, though he probably chuckles to himself over it, but there are lines in ‘Love and Theft’ that come from…

The Japanese book?

Yes

Yeah, the ‘Confessions of a Yakuza’… Yeah, well a couple of things about Bob: First of all, he is like one of the last of the well-read people, you know what I mean? He’s so well read and well read in the sense that he can quote anything. He can quote the Bible, he can quote Rimbaud, he can quote Yeats, he can quote whatever it is and he has just a really innate knowledge of literature, no matter what the source, in many different languages also. By the same token, he is constantly… he has these fragments, these bits rolling round in his head all the time and he’s constantly – almost like a roulette wheel – trying different bits together and seeing what happens and so when people say, “Oh this is from ‘Confessions of a Yakuza’, I think he laughs, because he’s taken a totally non-poetic sentence, perhaps out of the middle of a paragraph of ‘Confessions of a Yakuza’ and turned it into art.

The album itself conjured up the feel of the America South in places, so how can you take a line from a Japanese book about a gangster and make it part of what appears to be a vision of the American South or the lost American South?

Exactly, taking these seemingly mundane lines from this Japanese book and totally re-imagining them in this other context. It’s the way art is actually made and I think again it was a quick little glimpse into his process, which is fascinating.

In ‘Masked and Anonymous’ that whole idea applies also, references, allusions and so forth and I guess therefore there’s a lot linkage to people like T. S. Eliot.

Absolutely, well again we’re talking about juxtaposing a lot of different forms, almost stripping them together, one after the other; a biblical reference might be followed by a reference to Shakespeare, which might be followed by a film-noir reference. Just constantly pushing and mixing and matching and seeing if they hold together, it’s an experiment to see if they hold together.

There is definitely a noir influence there…

Yes, that was a big influence. We talked about movies like ‘Key Largo’ and I’ve described it as ‘sci-fi-film-noir-musical-comedy’. And I see Bob as this kind of post- apocalyptic Humphrey Bogart or Clint Eastwood. Yeah and I think Bob is very much of that era also. Those were movies that probably really made an impression on him.

Well, ‘Empire Burlesque’ is made up of lines from ‘The Maltese Falcon’ and so forth.

Yes, yes.

And of course while watching ‘Masked and Anonymous’, watching the performances and watching Dylan’s performance as well as the use of lines in the film harks back to that whole idea.

Absolutely, that was again, very intended, very intentional.

Most of the critics who see the film don’t see an art form. They have resentment to its experimentative nature and this whole Yakuza situation with ‘Love and Theft’ only fuels their negativity and fuels controversy.

Right, well people thought they had something, again, this sensationalistic aspect of the media today. People thought, “We’ve caught Bob Dylan somehow”. But instead what they did was – and this is why the story fell apart – because it was so much more complex and so much more enigmatic and ambiguous then the way it was presented, that the media couldn’t handle it after a while. It’s like, if you really want to enter this world, the world of Bob’s head, you better take your shoes and get ready for a long journey.

And “You’ve got to be born on my side”

That’s right, that’s right, and the media was not prepared to do that, and of course this movie is also a movie where Bob really confronts the media and this is another reason why the media have been somewhat resistant to it.

The media in many ways controls the minds of people. It’s destroying art, and there’s a lot of lines in the film that apply to that idea: “They have a reach and resonance more than even they themselves realise”.‘Masked and Anonymous’ also addresses this issue of the media and corporate powers.

It creates an anxiety and makes it much easier to make people vulnerable and therefore controlled

Truth again…

Well when you’re around Bob that’s what’s coming out of him. You know, he’s somebody who’s seen more than you have and knows more than you know and if your wise you listen and he will tell you everything you need to know, but your gonna have to do the work of interpreting it and that’s how the movie is also, its like Bob is telling you everything, this is another aspect of the movie. This is Bob telling you everything about himself also, but it’s not laid out clearly, you have to do the work of kind of putting the pieces together.

I think it may have been Andrew Motion, or perhaps Sean Wilentz who spoke of how in ‘Masked and Anonymous’ Bob is able to say the things that as Bob Dylan he cannot say, but it can be done as Jack Fate. 

Absolutely, well there is an aspect of Bob, you know, he needs to be called Bob for instance, because ‘Dylan’ is our problem. Dylan is what we’ve imposed on him and he holds on to his Bob-ness his humanness in way, his realness, because if he gets sucked into the Dylan part, that’s the mythological part that everybody has kind of created, that is almost too gigantic a burden for him to carry.

Yes, it must be hard to retain any form of reality or even normality when you’re faced with that.

Yes…

In a documentary made about ‘Hearts of Fire’, Bob talks about looking through the windows of a pub and seeing people being very real, but once he’s walked into the room, he knows that will disappear.

Right, right. Well I think also when the time comes people will start to see the connection between Bob’s cinema work. One of the things I realised after the fact, I was watching ‘Don’t Look Back’ recently and I realised that the scene where he has the argument with the English journalist, that’s Jeff Bridges character forty years ago. And then wow! It started to connect to me and then also and I’d seen ‘Don’t Look Back’ five times and I watched it again recently and at the end of the movie, there Bob’s sitting at the back of a limousine after a performance, staring out the window, driving away and the camera just stays on him and I’m thinking that’s a parallel ending to the ending of our movie.

Yes, the end of ‘Masked and Anonymous’ where he’s handcuffed in the van. 

Yes and I thought to myself, you know, when I had the idea of that last shot of Bob’s face in the movie, you know that image just popped into my head and I loved that image. And then when I saw ‘Don’t Look Back’ I thought “God, that’s a beautiful companion piece now”, and again, blurring that line between fiction and reality, and despite the mythological fable-like quality of the movie, there’s also a documentary-like quality to it as well. And I love that idea of blurring that line.

Everything he does is about moving to the next stage, to something different and it’s very the case with this movie you’ve made with him.

Good, good, thank you.

Also with Jeff Bridges there is a connection to the Dylan of 65-66, these characters all representing different things at once.

Yes, yes, and those connections work on some levels and they’re more apparent on some levels than others and its there for you to favour and explore and examine and analyse.

How did it feel to be moving form the territory of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ to ‘Masked and Anonymous’?

Well it was great, it’s just an expansion of who I am. ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ taps into a lot of wonderful things and Larry David is brilliant in a very parallel way actually to Bob. I often compare them, because they’re both sort of visionaries, they can do what they do, they can’t alter their vision based on the market place. This is what they have to offer, if you like it, great, if you don’t like it, this what they have, there’s no choice in the matter.

Learning how to collaborate with Larry was good preparation for working with Bob in a lot of ways. In fact I’m about to give Larry, for Christmas, the 15 CD set.

The Remaster Series?

Yes, the Remaster Series. I’m gonna give him that, because he was not that conscious of Bob and he came to see the movie and he liked it and he liked the soundtrack, so I’m giving that as a gift.

The soundtrack itself is very clever, it has this multicultural aspect. The mixing of cultures is very apparent, That L.A., South American feel. Why did you go for that whole feel?

Well what I went for was a combination of things. First of all, I collected images photographs; journalistic photographs from third world countries for a couple of years. And I just saw similarities in them and at the same time I really spent a lot of time in downtown L.A. which is this juxtaposition of various culture, the sort of crossroads of numerous cultures, African, Spanish, Mexican, Central America, South America, Eastern European, American, poor, rich and then I would look at the these pictures of third world countries and they looked a lot like downtown Los Angeles and I started to sort of get this idea of the cacophony of this country, that if you look at one direction in Los Angeles you see Beverly hills and the beach, but if you look in the other direction it’s a third world country. This kind of weirdly cacophonous, multi-ethnic, third world country and so I loved that idea of exploring that a little bit more deeply, and then I started thinking about the cover songs in different languages and then Jeff Rosen was generous enough to just open the vaults to me and give me access to all those covers. There’s thousands and thousands of these foreign covers and I just started listening to them and some just drew you in so powerfully like the Japanese version of My Back Pages, yeah and “this is such a natural here”. It also makes a statement in the movie that people don’t realise the impact Bob Dylan has had on their lives, he’s so pervasive its almost overwhelming.

Do you have a favourite cover?

Well I think the Japanese version of ‘My Back Pages’… I was looking for a song to open the movie with and that song somehow combined the energy and the force and the power and the confusion and lucidity, it just said everything all at once to me. It really was a very inspiring moment and I recognised that could be the first song. So I love that, I really like almost all the music, there’s so much that we couldn’t put in the movie and so much we couldn’t put on the soundtrack. And again it’s amazing when you think about it that Bob has such a gigantic Japanese following, yet the difficulty of translating him into Japanese is monumental apparently, and yet there is this incredible powerful cult around him in Japan.

Well when he goes to Japan it’s always a huge thing.

It’s a huge thing yes.

My favourite is the song that is used when Fate goes to visit his mother’s grave and I think its Sertab’s ‘One More Cup of Coffee’.

Yes ‘One More Cup of Coffee’, fantastic also.

It has this real transcending feel, it rises, it has an almost synthetic, yet organic orchestrated feel to it.

Yes it’s very dramatic that’s one of my favourites as well. It has a dram to it a kinda Middle Eastern exoticism to it; a mystery. Again it captures the best of Bob’s music, it reinterprets it.

Even the original has that Hebraic or Middle Eastern feel:

Yes, yes, it does

Was the closing song going to be ‘City of Gold’?

No. You know, again I only had a certain amount of input into the soundtrack and they felt they wanted to put some bonus tracks on that were not from the movie and I argued to put more stuff from the movie on the soundtrack. ‘City of Gold’s’ a great song, which I loved, but I felt there were also songs from the movie we couldn’t put on as well. They were pieces of songs that we used that we didn’t get to put on the soundtrack. And maybe at some point again there will be a more, quote, ‘definitive’ version of the soundtrack.

Apart from complimenting the movie, the soundtrack is also works brilliantly as separate entity, but when you listen it enhances the vision you have of the film.

It’s definitely a great album, I love the album and again you almost want more and there is a lot more out there obviously.

The soundtrack also works as a nice covers compilation.

Yes, yes, well I mean just the American stuff alone, the Jerry Garcia stuff and The Grateful Dead stuff and I mean I didn’t even bother trying to use the Jimi Hendrix version of ‘All Along The Watchtower’ or Neil Young’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, Neil Young does an amazing version of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’.

Neil Yong did ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’? I’ve never heard that.

Ahh it’s on one of his live albums. It is absolutely breathtaking. And there’s a great version that I almost used of Bruce Springsteen doing ‘Chimes of Freedom’. That is an amazing cover and so some of the American covers that are not quite as prevalent are amazing and intense.

What were the songs you shot for the film that didn’t make the cut?

Yeah, well as I said when we filmed the music we kept the camera rolling. He was supposed to do six songs and he wound up doing 22. I think there are four of his performances on the soundtrack. So that leaves like 18 songs that I have, fully filmed. There’s probably a handful of those that are traditional songs that he reinterprets with the band.

‘Dixie’….

Yeah well ‘Dixie’ was done initially as a warm-up song for whatever the next song was and it was just so stirring, it was like, “let’s film this!”

Yes and the theme of that song and the history of that song says so much and resonates throughout the film as well. That was again one of those happy, quote, accidents, these synchronistic moment, where it’s like wow you’re justifying the movie with this song.

What other plans for the DVD as such do you have, such as extra scenes and so forth?

Well that’s about all I know about it really. I mean again my input on things like the soundtrack and DVD are: They come to me, they ask me my opinion, I give my input, my very impassioned input and then other people make final decisions about it and I had to let go of it to some degree on that level. And I’m sure it will be very high quality. You’ll see a really high quality transfer of the high def, which is good.

What was it shot in again?

It’s called 24p. 24 frames progressive scan. Its high definition and it’s gonna look great in that format actually, so I’m happy about that. And in terms of stuff I know they’re gonna put on, there’s a lot of material that didn’t make it into the final movie, some whole scenes that were cut and in a version of the movie that eventually didn’t make it into the final version and those will be sort of added as bonus’ as well as at least one song that we shot.

Did he record ‘Standing in the Doorway’?

Yes he did and I think that will… I think that’s going to make it onto the DVD actually. Beautiful version of it…

Well it took him a few years to perform it live, so when it happened it was a big thing.

Yeah it’s a great version of it actually and also you’ll see the uncut ‘Cold Irons Bound’ which is also a stirring version of that song.

Yeah, he has a great band too.

Yeah those guys are amazing. And again even that era, kinda is over in a sense. The band has gone through some personnel changes and so it captures that period with that band which was tremendous band for him, they were just really tight, really together, really knowledgeable, and you see them as you do in the movie, musically communicating with each other through the movie.

There’s an understanding among them, as there is with the actors in the movie, an understanding of what needs to be achieved.

Right, well you have to get lucky sometimes. We had very game, risk taking people involved in the movie who were ready to commit, ready to take a leap and it produced an amazing thing you know.

Was, ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’, recorded for the film? Because it was suggested in the screenplay…

‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’… I’m trying to remember frankly… ‘Wicked Messenger’… It may have been. I can’t remember right now… I think we did ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’; yes I’m pretty sure we did it. Hold on one sec (leaves to find out)…

I think there’s a section where….

Where Luke and John are talking about it. 

Yes where I believe they’re talking about life and death and applying it to ‘Drifter’s Escape’, but I think in the screenplay it applies to ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’.

Yes, that’s right, I’m pretty sure. Well again it’s one the things, it’s part of the ambiguity and as Penelope says, “The songs are imprecise and open to interpretation”. And that was one of those moments yes.

The fact that in the screenplay it says ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’ and you use ‘Drifter’s Escape’ is interesting, but still acceptable, because it still applies to the song.

Well, and Bob loves the idea of playing with that. I might say, “Well you know the song’s going to be fragmented” and he’d say, “Good, let’s do that then”, he’s also for fragmenting, deconstructing whatever’s constructive. “Let’s see what happens if we break it apart, lets see what happens if we turn it upside down, lets see”.

People say he isn’t a good singer or a good musician, but if you take away what people say, he is very much a Jazz musician. He works with improvisation, with phrasing. Even his melodies… He sings his songs differently each time, does counter melodies in opposition to the original tune.

Absolutely, he phrases things differently each time, he changes his voice. He has so much more control over his music than people recognise. Even now, he’s doing this voice now, that’s a kind of wizened old mans voice. Like a Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf voice. But it is a voice.

The thing about this voice is that, the words and the music if even 30 years old, they resonate completely differently, they take on wisdom and an experience, they become convincing. The voice adds the depth that the songs only hint at.

Exactly, it changes the meaning of the song and that’s one of the things he’s always looking to do is reinvent the songs for himself, he never listens… I was with Jesse, his son one day and I was talking about how on ‘Love and Theft’ he doesn’t really play harp and that I had been listening to ‘Pledging My Time’ on ‘Blonde on Blonde’ and he does this avant-garde, Miles Davis sort of harp solo, and how brilliant that was. And Jesse says, “From the day he walked out of that recording studio for ‘Blonde on Blonde’, he has never listened to that record again”. And that’s the way he is you know, he needs to keep it fresh, keep it looking forward, don’t look back. He needs to be constantly reinventing it; he can’t get sucked into the nostalgia of it. This is the curse of Bob Dylan in a sense, in that he can’t really enjoy his music like we do, he has to be continuingly be reinventing it and that’s an interesting dilemma for him.

Dylan can do something amazing on guitar, harmonica, or be it his vocal style and then a year later, or a month later, or a week later he does something else completely different which ruins what happened previously and people will say, “Dylan cant play guitar, he cant sing”, but sometimes he can play guitar beautifully and he can sing beautifully, it depends on how you catch the moment and what he’s doing.

And I think he’s – as I was saying before – the whole thing about being misunderstood: He’s played the good guitar, he’s sung the songs nicely already, he’s done that. If you look at ‘Dont Look Back’, you see him just standing on stage, him and a guitar, he’s amazing, he can play that guitar, he can play that harmonica, he can sing the songs, hit the notes, he’s done that now, he’s looking to explore what would happen if he risks going almost off, if he risks almost getting to the edge of the expectable version of the song. What will happen, he’s curious about that process and he’s willing to risk it. And of course the audience, who loves him, is willing to go there with him you know. And cynical people who aren’t willing to go there are gonna look at it cynically and he’s learned to live with that.

Well, what you said about Miles Davis totally applies, and Joni Mitchell has said that Dylan and herself as well as Miles, are pioneers, the willingness to experiment, to change the boundaries of what it is your working within, or outside of even.

Well this is why in my opinion – look I respect deeply Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones – but they have essentially become nostalgia acts and Bob is not a nostalgia act, he is still a vital artist, recreating and creating new work all the time, night by night, and that’s one of the reasons now, over the last few years especially with this band he had, he became a great concert draw, again because I think he was inspired by groups like The Grateful Dead to come out every night and reinvent the show. So you never knew from night to night what you were gonna get.

Well this band was very important. Charlie Sexton in particular seems to work on a deeply emotional level. So he would feel the song, feel the emotion and then transcribe it, whereas Larry has all the riffs, all the clichés and all the genres and he pumps them through. He has the scientific side and then you have Charlie Sexton weaving within that. And then on the other side you have Dylan who’s on a completely different level again, totally trying to subvert it, each time.

Well watch Charlie, watch Bob during the movie and you see… Charlie really was… played a really crucial role in channelling Bob for the rest of the band and kind of waiting on Bob to see where Bob was going and then he would then almost musically explain to the band and then the band was kinda able to follow along. Charlie was a really important conduit in the band as well; because he is such an intuitive musician, that he was able to join with Bob and then he was able to also communicate that musically to the band. Tony has that also, Tony also in his way is doing the same thing.

A lot of musicians such as McCartney have to a certain extent stayed with the same mould and that’s the great thing with Bob, he doesn’t.

Well I mean look, The Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney, certainly have amazing songs and it is great to hear Paul McCartney can still sing the songs like he did in 1964, it’s amazing and my hats off to him and The Rolling Stones too. I saw them recently, here in L.A. and they sounded great but they are basically recreating the records at this point and they’re not really stretching, I’d rather Paul McCartney do ten less songs and stretch… I had the same experience with John Fogarty, I went see John Fogarty about two years ago and I love John Fogarty and I’d never seen him live. He came out, he did every Creedance Clearwater song exactly as it was on the record and he did them perfectly, but when it was over you never felt you needed to see him again.

Paul Simon is very similar in that aspect.

Yes exactly, you don’t feel you’re… You feel like your getting a pre-packaged event. That if you went back next year you’d get the same thing, instead of next year maybe he’ll do a whole different set of songs, a whole different way, which is what Bob offers you. And I think that its hard for these massive acts to sort of do what Bob does, which is, really experiment and really extend his range, it’s a scary thing, a very risky thing.

Now Bob’s out of the constant media scrutiny he’s able to experiment without worrying.

Yes and have this fervent following that is willing to be there with him and be part of that with him.

There are certainly many performers out there now who has been co-opted, who are merely agents of corporations, knowingly and unknowingly.

Well even the idea of the protest songs that they want him to sing, we made that list, it’s the irony that these protest songs are owned by large corporations, you know, how much impact can they have? The counter culture has been co-oped. So here are these great songs, these great protest songs but they’re owned by the media conglomerates who use them to make money and there’s kind of a bitter irony to that. I think that we’re exploring there.

Returning to some scenes in the film. The scene in the bar when Luke is speaking to Fred Ward and there’s a line in there which in the context I find hilarious.

“If you want the world to be round its round, if you want the world to be flat its flat”… “Who’s presiding over this slaughter house, me or you?”

Yes there’s that and when the guy replies with “I know some things too!”

Yeah, yeah, and then Luke says, “The more you know, the more you’ll suffer”.

Which is like a mantra really, “The more you know the more you’ll suffer”, that almost explains Bob’s psyche to a large degree, he knows so much, you know, that it’s a burden to be him on a lot of levels.

That whole period from ‘Time Out Of Mind’ to the film interestingly deals with the whole essence of time. One of the lines Dylan says is “We try to kill time, but in the end time ends up killing us”.

Yeah well and that’s Bob, you see him exploring that theme in ‘Time Out Of Mind’ and ‘Love and Theft’ and this movie. And you see that in contrast to ‘Dont Look Back’ or ‘Highway 61’, where mortality is kind of an abstract concept. Here there’s a reality to it, a gravity – no pun intended – to it. And that’s a big difference; you’re seeing his thoughts through that prism.

The experimentation with time is something prevalent especially in ‘Time Out Of Mind’ and in particular for me in my favourite Dylan song, ‘Standing in the Doorway’ which kind of stops time.

Yes, that’s really true. And we talk about time and dreamtime and things like that in the movie too and we’re playing with that idea as well in the movie.

“In my dreams I’m walking through intense heat”.

Yes, and then he said, “I don’t pay any attention to my dreams”. I mean Christian Slater has a line and its been cut down now. There’s a longer version of that scene where Christian Slater says to Chris Penn, “Have you noticed when you dream a dream seems to last many hours, but only lasts a few seconds?” and Chris Penn says, “No not really”. So we’re discussing it and we’re also having fun with it at the same time, we’re playing with those ideas and exploring those ideas.

How do you feel about the scholarly response to the film?

Well I think that whether it be Andrew Motion, or Sean Wilentz or Greil Marcus, I think anybody that’s willing to step back and think about this movie and then enter into it, and dive in and explore it and wander around in it the way Bob sort of does, is gonna be rewarded with a lot of very interesting cross-references and allusions and ideas and themes that you don’t normally see in a movie and so in a lot of ways, you know, like Art Form chose it as one of their ten best films. It seems it requires people who are not working as movie critics to have the patience and time to explore the movie.

Do you have a favourite Dylan song, although that’s probably a difficult question?

Yeah it really is. I was listening to ‘Hard Rain’ as I was coming in today, and I was thinking about ‘Desolation Row’, and I was also, I always loved and wanted to put in the movie, ‘The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar’, which is one of my favourites and another favourite of mine is from ‘The Bootleg Series’, and its called ‘Angelina’. It depends on my mood to a large degree. But those are some of the song I tend to go back to.

The songs that seem to strike you are the epics and they fit into the mould of ‘Masked and Anonymous’ in many ways.

Yes and that’s why I didn’t use more of those kinda songs in the movie. It seems superfluous almost to use ‘Desolation Row’ in this movie. There are a lot of great obscure songs. He has beautiful simple songs – the ‘Blood On The Tracks’ period – about relationships are so resonate, ‘Brownsville Girl’… I love ‘Joey’. There’s just a whole range. I love… This is a song I wanted him to do and for a long time he was going to do for the movie, was, ‘Senor’, but we wound up using the Jerry Garcia version, which has a beautiful guitar solo. So I could probably be naming favourite songs forever.

Interesting you mention ‘Brownsville Girl’, there’s supposedly a script for that somewhere.

Well there is one. I believe that Jay Cocks has written a script.  I don’t know what the status of the film is, but I know that a script does exist and has been floating around and I hope that it gets made.

Are you hoping to experiment further with Bob?

Oh even as we were finishing this movie we started working on a sequel so we have been talking about that for quite some time. Whether we will get a chance to sit down and get to work on it any time soon, I’m not sure. But we talked about that not long before we finished this one… we started talking about the next one. I mean he had a great experience making the movie and I think he’d like to do it again.

Well he’s obviously found the right person to do it with.

Well we had a very good collaboration, it was very fruitful I mean the fact that we managed to get this all the way through the system and out there on the movie screen was the miracle really. That’s what I tell people.

The promotion for the film perfectly suits it also, not too much and not too little and also going on tour with the film and talking about it is also a great help.

Yes exactly. Yeah it helps contextualise it for people too, which I’ve been happy to do.

Of course most Dylan fans were bound to like this film but overall I think the response has been warm and receptive.

I think so, I’ve been very… It’s been very moving actually to be at these screenings and have people thank me for making the movie and that’s a tremendous personal experience to have and I’m grateful to Bob for giving me that chance.

At Sundance you seemed hesitant and expecting a backlash.

Yeah, but you know, it was even reported that I said, “Aren’t there any questions?” and I was even doing that with humour, and but it’s reported at a certain angle and it sounds like a totally different experience that it actually was. I mean I actually tell people and I’m quite honest about this, that Sundance was a tremendous experience. At the first screening there was so much expectation and so much backlash and so much controversy. But there were two more screenings that were also just amazing, and the audience responded tremendously to those. But those are not really reported about and I was there with Luke and a bunch of people and we went to those screenings and I talked at those screenings. Those were a little more intimate and a little less pressure on them and I almost wish we’d started that way, instead of this big centrepiece premiere with all the stars.

Bob showed up on form as usual, complete with woolly hat and a blonde wig.

Yeah, yeah. [laughs]  Always masked and anonymous with him, yes.

Dylan’s humour is so underplayed. Once when Dylan performed with Joni Mitchell, the press the next day said “Dylan Smiles” as if to point out that he has no sense of humour. The straight-faced Sundance performance is proof of this.

Right, exactly, exactly. No he was having fun. The making of the movie pleased him. He enjoyed the process, he enjoyed the challenge, he enjoyed the interaction with the other actors, again he found another thing he wanted to understand and he was a quick learner obviously and really observed the lessons quickly and wound up having these amazing experiences with these other great actors.

What was it like between scenes?

Well first of all because I shot on 24p, I also was not even cutting, I was just kinda jumping on the set and making some adjustments and going back in.  Maybe my most brilliant directorial touch was saying to Bob right at the beginning, “Listen, we have 20 days to shoot this movie, if you go back to the trailer after each shot, each take, the crew is just not gonna care, but if I get you a comfortable chair and you sit on the set between takes and so as the crew walks by carrying the cables, carrying the ladders, they can go “Hi Bob” and you can nod at them, these people will die for you” and he said “ok”. And so he sat on the set throughout the entire movie and never went to his trailer. So everybody who worked on the show was able to have a personal relationship with Bob and so those people then were willing to do whatever had to be done to make this a great movie, every single person on the movie, and he was just available and accessible to them and that worked out great.

The director of ‘Hearts of Fire’, tried to get a similar approach, because people normally approach Bob in a very weird and strange way and you have to get away from that problem.

Yeah right, well Bob was in a different place for this movie then he was for ‘Hearts of Fire’. And I think he was more curious and more open and there was a lot of other great actors hovering around. I mean I would walk onto the set and there would be Bob and Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange just kinda hanging out and talking and I was like “Wow! I have to do something now”. So it was just a great environment to be in, such a heightened environment.

Did he have much advice for the actors?

He would have instinctive advice about movement, he would have certain things in mind in terms of movement or the way a certain lines should be spoken occasionally and he would suggest that very, very occasionally, but normally once around the set he was an actor and did not try to impose his ideas on anybody else.

Bob’s acting I think is very natural in one sense and perhaps this is because you said. “Just be”.

Yes exactly and that’s not easy to do but he was able to do that.

There is still a layer between him and the camera, but the acting is still really great.

There’s a certain level of honesty to it that is very powerful and not typical and I think that also threw a lot of people. It’s a strange and unsettling performance really and to most people it comes as a shock, so I think that’s why some people had some resistance to it, because again it was kind of like, “Wow this is something I don’t really understand”, it strips away everything and adds new layers at the same time.

When he’s shaving at the mirror in the trailer and Jeff Bridges comes in I think that harks back to ‘Renaldo and Clara’ in one sense where Renaldo is looking in the mirror. Very similar

Yes, yes, absolutely. And then Jeff is looking in that mirror also and they’re both looking back at each other and reflecting on each other, almost like alter egos. A lot of that is almost Bob debating with himself in a sense. The journalist winds up being an interesting shadow figure for Jack Fate and vice versa.

Yes, there’s an underlying dialogue between them…

Yes almost like one of them is a ghost in a sense.

Who is it that plays the version of ‘Angelina’ near the end?

That’s a man named Bruce and I wanted to use the actual recording and we couldn’t make the instrumental parts work. It didn’t seem to work with the words, it got intrusive, so we had him come in and basically do an instrumental version that we were able to use and he did it in a couple of other places in the movie as well. I was very committed with trying to use actual songs from wherever, but there were a couple of places where I just couldn’t make it work, we couldn’t make the music edit work, so he was able to come in and adapt for the specific space we were talking about.

There’s also a part in the movie with a riff that sounds like ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ as well.

Yes, that also I think… I had started with a gospel version of ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’. I think it might have been Mavis Staples actually. But as the sequences got more polished, I needed that riff and I dunno if we took the riff from the Staples song or whether Bruce did another version of that there. But, there were a couple of places where we were playing with that a lot, to fill in space in certain places and where the actual songs themselves could not be adapted and we would have to go back and create a piece based on that. Also in the hotel room when the young Jack Fate meets up with Angela Basset for the first time, we used a kinda dubbed version of ‘Political World’ there that was kinda very interesting also, that was really fun to play with.

I thought that reminded me of something.

Very, very far under the surface you’ll hear Bob’s voice going “Political world, political world”, but it’s very mixed down.

Have you ever heard ‘Farewell Angelina’

I’ve heard ‘Farewell Angelina’ too which is also amazing, that was the thing, there was obviously this falling into Ali Baba’s cave or something, there’s a treasure trove and you don’t know where to start sometimes, there’s so much great stuff to choose from. I mean even the song on the jukebox in the bar; I experimented with so many different songs before I finally decided on ‘He Was a Friend of Mine’.

It almost has a crackly LP feel to it…

Yes, well it is off an LP, it’s the old version of the song that he originally did. So again I would just like instinctively put different songs up against certain images and seeing if it felt right… That wound up working great.

Did Bob ever think about recording his rarer songs and using them?

Well I mean he… We recorded so many songs that he recorded a number of older songs and redid them in his way and a lot of that stuff just didn’t end up making it into the movie. So there is a quite a bit of Bob music, that is just now in the movie right now. In fact I was just thinking as I said that, there is a rehearsal take of ‘All Along The Watchtower’. Its like an ‘All Along The Watchtower’ jam without a vocal that I didn’t find till after I finished the movie. I’d forgotten that he had done it and I thought, “God, that alone is a fantastic kind of instrumental”, almost like an Allman Brothers version of ‘All Along The Watchtower’, that was just great.

I can imagine that being great, because what you tend to see when a spontaneous jam moment happen is – although he’s not a conventionally great guitar player – he’ll come up with a cool riff and never go back to it again. He’ll do it once and then all of a sudden Larry or Charlie would pick up on that riff.

Exactly, exactly and they can elaborate on it and then suddenly it takes off. And then one of them will start a lead off of that and then it starts to soar.

I can imagine this ‘All Along The Watchtower’ is like that.

Yeah it’s really something. I have to remember to mention this Jeff Rosen, because that’s something that should come out at some point it’s really quite spectacular….

I think I’m gonna have to get going, I’m enjoying this so much, I could do this all afternoon.

I have to go back to ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’, but thank you very much

Well I never thought I’d be able to speak to you as long as this.

Oh that’s my pleasure. I so deeply appreciate what you’re doing and deeply appreciate your love for the movie and your devotion to it, I mean its been a great experience talking to you, I can’t thank you enough for all your hard work.

When Peter Stone Brown started singing Friday night I knew it was going to be a great performance.  It occurred to me that this was probably Peter’s first gig since the show at MSG (which turned out to be the case) and that he was undoubtedly still soaring like most of us in the audience from what Dylan did on Monday, still tuned in to the mystery of it.

About halfway through the show, Peter announced that this was his first gig in Greenwich Village (at a place called the Baggot Inn on West 3rd) — or his first club gig, anyway, since he’d sometimes played al fresco in Washington Square Park, just a block away.  “I played songs like this,” he said — and launched into a powerful version of “Golden Vanity”.  I felt as though I was getting the inside dope on what it felt like to cross the lonesome sea under canvas in the days of sail, which Peter cannot possibly have any personal experience of . . . but a guy who heard the song from a guy who heard the song from the guy who wrote the song picked up something about it that’s just there in the words and music, and anyone who knows anything about lonesome highways and music and singing can get to it again, if he’s willing to follow the wind.

Then Peter did an equally powerful version of “As I Went Out One Morning”, Dylan’s riff on an 18th-Century ballad, and he summoned up the bard’s improbable introduction of “La Bell Dame Sans Merci” to a pop cartoon of Tom Paine, and I was in that dreamscape with them all.  And then one of Peter’s own songs, “You Don’t Have To Close The Door” — “I would take the train, but that train don’t stop here anymore” and the sadness of it merged with the spookiness of the earlier two songs, and Peter decided to take it all one step further, into madness, perhaps . . . and he sang “Moonlight”.  Crooning that sinister but still sexy invitation, with its over-ripe imagery of nature rotting sweetly like human flesh, of oaks taking up the lover’s moan of despair, or lunacy, or desire, depending on how you look at it.

Just a passage of four songs in the middle of a memorable set — but such a long journey, on ships whose timbers have long since shattered, on trains that pass by without stopping, across rivers swollen with tears, in the company of spirits, to places that don’t have names.

More than 20 years ago I decided that if there’s any Bob Dylan song that will go down in history as poetry, if any song will outlast him and stand the test of time it’s A Hard Rain‘s Gonna Fall, a song that becomes more true and more scary every year.  It’s an apocalyptic vision.  It’s not about love and compassion, that’s for sure.

Poetically it is amazing and I’ve never heard a version by Bob I didn’t like. One of the more interesting versions Bob did is from the first Rolling Thunder tour where he rocked it up using a speeded up version of the “Hoochie Coochie Man” blues riff before each line in the verse.  It totally blew me away. The Concert for Bangladesh version is also incredible and quite possibly the standout of that song for me. The one done with the orchestra in Japan in 1994 ain’t bad either.  

In the far distant future when Dylan’s songs are studied, I am willing to bet that this will be one of the major songs under contention.

When Patti Smith announced she would sing the song at the Nobel ceremony, I thought if any singer will bring out the poetry and the intensity of that song, it’s her.  When I watched the clip, I quickly realized on the third line that she didn’t learn the song.  And considering the last line of the song, I was truly astounded.  What went wrong?  I don’t know, except I don’t think she really knew the song. It wasn’t about showing humanity, it wasn’t about singing with soul, it was about paying tribute and simply knowing your song well before you start singing at an awards ceremony that was quite controversial to begin with.

For years Dylan fans circulated petitions and all the professors wrote big essays on why Dylan should get the Nobel Prize and then it did happen, well, I listened to Bob Dylan to get away from stuff like the Nobel Prize. 

But if you’re going to do it, then do it right and learn the song, so you can show all the people on that committee (and all the professors and social critics) who thought  it wasn’t deserved why it was deserved.

On that count, the performance unfortunately failed.  It’s one thing if you break a string, or forget a line or fuck up a verse now and then.  It happens.  But in this case, it was clear on every verse, she didn’t learn the song.  Maybe she thought she knew it. But to me, one of the biggest no’s in performing is stopping a song.  I don’t care who it is.

I felt embarrassment watching Patti Smith. But I will always be grateful to her for being both hip and smart enough to pick Dark Eyes as a duet on 1995 Fall Tour.  It was the highlight of every night.

Dylan looked so fucking young, and I know he didn’t look that young. But that was in the days where he could turn and look 20 years younger and sometimes more.