Jonathan Cott: Why have you been able to keep so in touch with your anger throughout the years, as
revealed in songs like Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? and Positively 4th Street?
Bob Dylan: Will power. With strength of will you can do anything. With will power you can determine your destiny. (from the Jonathan Cott interview Dec 1977)
Can you please crawl out your window?
Use your arms and legs it won’t ruin you
How can you say he will haunt you?
You can go back to him any time you want to
“I never wanted to write topical songs, have you heard my last two records, Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61? It’s all there. That’s the real Dylan.”
~Bob Dylan (Frances Taylor Interview, Aug 1965)
[Highway 61] Oh yes, it goes from where I used to live… I used to live related to that highway. It ran right through my home town in Minnesota. I traveled it for a long period of time
actually. It goes down the middle of the country, sort of southwest…. lot of famous people came off that highway.
~Bob Dylan (John Cohen And Happy Traum Interview, June/July 1968)
Dylan’s sixth album and his first fully fledged eagle-flight into rock. Revolutionary and stunning, not just for its energy, freshness and panache but in its vision: fusing radical electric music—electric music as the embodiment of our whole out-of-control, nervouenergy-fuelled, chaotic civilization—with lyrics that were light-years ahead of anyone else’s, Dylan here unites the force of blues-based rock’n’roll with the power of poetry.
~Michael Gray (Bob Dylan Encyclopedia)
Like a Rolling Stone:
How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?
….when we recorded Bringing It All Back Home, that was like a break through point, it’s the kind of music I’ve been striving to make and I believe that in time people will see that. It’s hard to explain it, it’s that indefinable thing..
~Bob Dylan (Paul Gambaccini Interview, June 81)
This is the point where Dylan eclipses any conventional sense of folk and rewrites the rules of rock, making it safe for personal expression and poetry, not only making words mean as much as the music, but making the music an extension of the words. A truly remarkable album.
~Stephen Thomas Erlewine (allmusic.com)
#1 – Subterranean Homesick Blues
Johnny’s in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I’m on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he’s got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again
You better duck down the alley way
Lookin’ for a new friend
The man in the coon-skin cap
By the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten
Bob Dylan: It means singing when you really don’t want to sing. It means singing against your wishes to sing.
–
Dylan’s second west coast press conference in two weeks takes place in Los Angeles. His mood is far less amenable than it had been in San Francisco. The conference lasts just over half an hour.
-Clinton Heylin (A Life in Stolen Moments)
Columbia Recording Studios
Los Angeles, California
16 December 1965 Los Angeles Press Conference.
Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y’know
~Press Conference, San Francisco 3 December 1965
Legendary press conference.
The San Francisco Press Conference was set up by Ralph Gleason at KQED-TV, an educational station, in the bay area of San Francisco and took place on December 3rd 1965. It was broadcast on KQED later that day, just before Dylan and The Hawks played their first night at the Berkeley Community Theater. Source: The Fiddler Now Upspoke, pp. 359-374.
KQED-TV Studios San Francisco, California 3 December 1965 San Francisco Press Conference
Released on the DVD Dylan Speaks, Eagle Media MDV622, 30 October 2006.
