Dob Dylan führte ein Interview mit USA TODAY und sprach dabei auch über Bruce Springsteen:
Dylan's art is forever a-changin' Posted 8/28/2006 10:36 PM ET
By Edna Gundersen, USA TODAYSANTA MONICA, Calif. — Bob Dylan is not in the mood to reminisce.
"There's no nostalgia on this record," Dylan insists, disputing critics who hear bygone times on Modern Times, which arrives today. "Pining for the past doesn't interest me."
Mining his past, however, is a boomer preoccupation. Last year, Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home, accompanied by a soundtrack and companion scrapbook of memorabilia, traced Dylan's early rise. It followed 2004's autobiography, Chronicles: Volume 1, and the sixth edition of Dylan's Bootleg series. An upcoming biopic and Broadway musical also raid Dylan's back pages.
Yet Dylan did not sew up 20th-century glory to sit in the grandstands now. The '60s trailblazer who reinvented pop music and revolutionized songwriting is still a groundbreaking artist at 65, according to critics dazzled by Modern Times, Dylan's 31st studio album and third in a career renaissance launched by 1997's Time Out of Mind. Asserts Rolling Stone: "There is no precedent in rock 'n' roll for the territory Dylan is opening."
In earthy blues, ragtime and rockabilly, the language shifts from mischievous to mysterious and romantic to rueful as Dylan surveys a crumbling world in doubt-shrouded songs about love and vengeance, faith and fate.
The 10 songs, recorded with his touring band in January in New York, "are in my genealogy," he says. "I had no doubts about them. I tend to overwrite stuff, and in the past I probably would have left it all in. On this, I tried my best to edit myself, and let the facts speak. You can easily get a song convoluted. That didn't happen. Maybe I've had records like this before, but I can't remember when."
Perched on a chair in a beachside hotel suite, Dylan fervently discusses his new music, smoothly evades unwelcome topics (politics) and dispenses disdain slyly. Asked to elaborate on today's hit-driven environment, he cracks a broad grin and says: "I don't want to disparage anyone in pop music. I'm sure it's all good. I'm sure people are thriving."
Modern's pared lyrics and spirited music evolved naturally, with Dylan never in fevered pursuit.
"The obsessiveness about songwriting is far away from me," he says. "I can let it go for long periods. I don't need the songs. When you're younger, you keep writing so you have them to play. After a certain point, you can't play it all, anyway. It gets harder to find a purpose to do something different.
"What I have to do is space out and almost hypnotize myself, without drugs, of course," he says with a laugh. "Those are my best songs, when I'm not really conscious. Once my motive is established, it's up to me to find the ideal terminology, vocabulary, rhythms to work it out. I don't like writing songs where I have to come up with a far-fetched poetic thing and find a melody later. I've done that, and it doesn't work that well for me."
He completed 14 or 15 songs last September, shelved those he considered "lukewarm" and pruned others. Tattered hymn Workingman Blues #2 pays homage to Merle Haggard, who has pledged to write a Blowin' in the Wind sequel, Dylan says.
Writing poignant waltz When the Deal Goes Down "demands all your attention," he says. "There's no song you're listening to that's influencing it. The song you wrote before is irrelevant. All you can do is hang on and hope you do it justice."
The initially nettlesome Nettie Moore "troubled me the most, because I wasn't sure I was getting it right," Dylan says. "Finally, I could see what the song is about. This is coherent, not just a bunch of random verses. I knew I wanted to record this. I was pretty hyped up on the melodic line."
Shifting from playful romps to haunted ballads, Dylan encounters angels and lazy sluts, floods and the plague, a blind horse, a sick mule and Alicia Keys, his quest in Thunder on the Mountain. He never met the R&B ingénue but admired her performance at the 2001 Grammys. He says: "I liked her a whole lot. People stay in your mind for one reason or another."
The unusually accessible Modern still leads into dark mazes, and Dylan isn't handing out flashlights.
"Words go by awfully quick," he says. "Maybe it's hard for a listener to comprehend them all. Maybe they don't want to. I couldn't say what these songs add up to, any more than I can say what the rest of my songs add up to. They mean what they say they mean. They strike you where you can feel it, and you can feel what they mean. With this kind of music, you want to move somebody, and you have to move yourself first."
Still making planet waves
Dylan's undiminished authority springs from supernatural talent, says friend and admirer Tom Petty, stating simply: "He's better than all of us. Backing him in the '80s had a huge effect on our band. Bob has a spontaneity that comes from folk or even the best jazz artists. It's very fresh and alive. We learned if the song is durable and good, you can approach it a lot of ways. He gets better and better. He's had his patchy periods, but we all hang with him because we know any day he might write the best thing he's ever done."
Dylan's evolution runs counter to the industry's growing reliance on forged images, synthetic sounds and boundless technology. When recording spare folk albums Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993) in his garage, an engineer suggested he pin a microphone to each guitar string.
"It was the height of insanity," Dylan says. "There are so many layers on records today. There are so many tracks in studios, and producers think they have to use them. This is no art form. It's just corporate sound. Because there's very little there, you have to dress it up with all these tracks. For me, everything has to have a purpose or it should get lost.
"The beat stuff people play, that's as far away from real rhythm as the sun is from the moon. Those beats make people pose, but they don't make people move or change their lives. They're low-key and laid-back, and that's what popular music has come to. Even metal is ponderous."
He stops himself and chuckles.
"I hate to go on my soapbox about the recording industry. I'm sure there's a lot of good songs getting recorded today, but I can't hear them. I'm just hearing buzz. There's a superficiality to it which might be successful, but people forget about it real quick and go on to the next one instantly. I don't want to be a performer like that."
Dylan aims to tell a truthful story and nourish it on stage. Keeping it real doesn't mean copping ideas from CNN or responding to the conflict du jour, which is why you won't find an updated Masters of War on Modern Times.
"Didn't Neil Young do that?" he jokes, referring to the rocker's recent anti-war disc. "What more is there to say? What's funny about the Neil record, when I heard Let's Impeach the President, I thought it was something old that had been lying around. I said, 'That's crazy, he's doing a song about Clinton?' "
Topical songs "are not my thing. I'm not good at it. Stuff you read in papers is secondhand information. My stuff is my own experience."
Contradicting a label report, he doesn't regard Modern as the last in a trilogy, because Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind, produced by Daniel Lanois, is an odd fit.
"I had no band," Dylan says. "I didn't pick half the musicians. It was a mystery to me how I was going to get anything out of those sessions. It was just a mess. There was hardly any communication."
Under the pseudonym Jack Frost, Dylan reluctantly produced 2001's Love and Theft and Modern. He says the only producer he ever felt comfortable with was "Bumps" Blackwell, who guided early Little Richard and Sam Cooke records and co-produced 1981's Shot of Love.
"He made simple records and understood my stuff inside out. A producer should be raised on the same kind of music. When I bring in a song, it's not that well known — to me or anyone else. How can I expect to show someone the intricacies and nuances?"
A freewheeling free agent
Dylan waxes ecstatic about his current sidemen, yet he's a defiant solo artist who dismisses the concept of bands as little gangs.
"The performers who changed my life were individuals," he says. "They didn't conform to any sense of reality but their own. The last performer who stood up to be counted as an original is Bruce Springsteen, I think. Individuals move me, not mobs. People with originality, whether it's Hector, Achilles, Ted Turner or Jerry Lee Lewis or Hank Williams."That explains why he has been drawn to boxing since high school.
"Almost everyone else played a team sport," he says. "I liked boxing because it was just you and you alone. And you didn't get hurt. It seemed like you got mangled in football and hit in the head with baseballs. Team sports were not my cup of tea.
"I took a professional opponent on the road with me, and I'd box in the afternoons to focus my mind. This guy could walk across a football field on his hands. I kept it up. Still do, as much as I can. I'd like to race a car around a track. Those guys are really alone too."
Dylan is a busy loner. As he wraps up his third tour of minor-league baseball parks, he's planning a fall arena tour that starts Oct. 11 and enjoying his weekly DJ stint on XM satellite radio. He has yet to carve out time to write the second Chronicles book.
He's only peripherally entangled in other enterprises. Todd Haynes is directing I'm Not There, a Dylan biopic with a half dozen actors portraying the bard at various stages. Twyla Tharp plumbed his catalog for Broadway-bound dance musical The Times They Are A-Changin'. He consented to both projects without much hand-wringing.
"A lot of people are very protective of what they've got and rightfully so," he says. "But so much has been done to me and to my work, and it's been exploited on such grandiose levels with no thought of me, that you get to a point where you don't care anymore. Anything that comes your way is better than somebody taking it their way.
"I don't care about image. I don't have any image problem. It matters not to me which commercials or movies or TV shows they're in or not in or how many are being sung in clubs or school plays."
No ranking of best artists, songs or songwriters fails to name him. He topped Paste magazine's list of greatest living songwriters in June, then led the August issue's roster of greatest dead songwriters, because he'd obviously be there eventually, anyway. Always ahead of his time. Dylan laughs at this news. Once hungry for immortality, he no longer sweats his place in the pantheon. He doesn't need to.
"I got past that," he says. "Posterity has to take care of itself. All that's important in the present time is: Do the songs work for me when I play? I can't get away with singing cover songs like Rod Stewart. Nobody's going to buy it, first of all. I love those songs, but I have to play my songs, and they have to work in a crash-and-burn kind of way. There's more to my music than the lyrics. You would only know that if you have open ears and an open mind, and you give me a clear channel."
He laughs. "Give me an unpaved road to your heart."
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