INTERVIEWS

Part 1 of a 2-part podcast from Is It Rolling, Bob? 2019, issued 30 June 2019; asking the questions, Kerry Shale & Lucas Hare

Part 2, issued 7 July 2019

Interview by Andrew Muir, author and fanzine editor,
dating from 2002 (when a cheaper reprint edition of Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan was published in paperback).
I'm posting this, from Homer, the slut fanzine, a whole 24 years later, because a fine interviewer brings out the best in his/her subject
and this one allows me to express a good deal about Dylan and many Dylan-related subjects, as well as about my own work and some of the dilemmas faced by any freelance writer:


AM: I’d like to start by talking about your Song & Dance Man books, as it is now 30 years since the first edition and there is significant news relating to the current (third) edition. To take the last first, can you tell us about the reprint of edition three?

MG: Yes. There have been three reprints of Song & Dance Man III already - in May and December 2000 and in April last year. They’re bringing out a fourth now because they have sold out of the paperback again. But the significance of the new reprint is that it is going to be a great deal cheaper. They are bringing it out at £15.99 instead of £29.95. To show that it is different, apart from the price, it has got a new pale blue cover instead of a black background and we have changed the text on the back, and it has a new ISBN. But the thing is, the demand for this cheaper edition has basically come from bookshops, according to the publishers. So this is very good news.

AM: Yes, it is. The hardback is such a treasure though - are there any of those still available?

MG: Yes, there are a few, I have a small pile here in my study that people can still buy at the same price as before. They are all hand numbered and signed, and once they’re gone they’re gone. I mean there were only ever two hundred for the UK market.

AM: I believe you have an upcoming tour where you will be talking about Dylan in general and the book in particular. Was this timed to coincide with the reprint?

MG: No I was doing this anyway, it’s just a coincidence…

AM: ‘Take what you can gather from’ it?

MG: Yeah [laughing].

AM: How did these talks come about?

MG: Well I spent most of the 1990s communing alone with the word processor doing this book and therefore it was extremely necessary and pleasant to be able to get out and actually meet people and be in the same room as other human beings and so on, which I started to do the minute the book came out. There was a tiny launch party for the book, as you know, at the Poetry Society, and then the first ‘gig’, if you like, that I did was at Helter Skelter Books and then I did a seminar for postgraduates at Goldsmiths College. Those were both at the very, very end of 1999. Then through 2000 and 2001 I did quite a lot of talks.
My publisher started off telling me I shouldn’t organise any of these myself because when a bookshop like Waterstones or Borders consented to have an author do one of these signings, the publisher had to subsidise it - had to pay a sort of fee to the bookshop, and therefore the more I set up the more money it cost the publisher. Well, of course, I subsequently found this wasn’t true at all. One day a Borders bookshop rang me and said they were having this special Dylan event and would I be part of it? I said, ‘Well, is my publisher going to have to pay you?’ And they said ‘No!’ So through a series of stages I reached a point where I discovered that actually bookshops would pay me to do this, instead of the other way round, which makes more sense.
The very first one I did before I was being paid was a Waterstones in Manchester and, you know, I travel to Manchester, I’m walking into the bookshop, and outside it says ‘Michael Gray blah, blah, blah - £5 entry’. And I think, ‘Hang on a minute, I’m doing the work here. The whole thing is based on work that I have already done, and then actually appearing and talking and doing stuff is me doing the work, and the bookshop is charging people who come to listen to me, and nothing is coming to me!’ It’s just amazing. But this is the problem with authorship, as soon as you start to talk about money people think how mercenary you are. It doesn’t seem to apply in any other walk of life but it certainly does if you’re a writer. You’re never supposed to think about money. You’re supposed to have a private income or something. If only!

AM: Presumably the publisher apologised for giving you the false information and putting you off doing the talks?

MG: Well I don’t know, that’s a long way back now. Anyway, over the course of 2000 and to a lesser extent in 2001 I started doing talks other than in bookshops and the odd college. I did some in large libraries, some at festivals and so on, and obviously I got paid for these - and as time has gone on and the talks have gone well, the fee that I get has reached the point where I can almost make a living.

AM: I met you just before you were going to give one of those, but I wasn’t allowed in as the audience was very select - it was a private gig!

MG: Oh that was a weird one! That was the last one I did in 2001, and it was in Malden in Essex and it was an all-day seminar for the United Reformed Church. I was talking about Grace and Redemption in the work of Bob Dylan, and I thought it would make a nice change actually from Bob Dylan and the history of Rock’n’Roll, which is my more normal subject. Yes, that was a gathering of vicars or whatever United Reformed Church people call themselves… It was in a church and I showed a bit of Bob’s 1980 Toronto concert on video and things like that.

AM: How did it go down?

MG: It went down very well but actually I didn’t enjoy it all that much. There didn’t seem enough room to branch out. Usually when I do my gigs there are various bus stops I must visit, as it were, in the course of the talk, including the pieces of music that I play, to keep me on the right route. But in between those bus stops I feel free to go down whichever highways or tiny lanes or whatever I feel like at the time, to keep it fresh for me and other people. I don’t read from notes or anything, and I don’t read out long chunks of my book. Usually I don’t read any of it. Occasionally a little bit.

AM: Is the ‘tour’ finalised?

MG: Well I think there are five or six more to come in, but at the moment there are about 20 dates that are firm and fixed. It includes two gigs on remote Scottish islands in September and a mini-tour of Ireland in October. There’s a couple of festival dates this time, but mostly Art Centres. It should be great.

AM: Were you pleased with edition three when it came out?

MG: Yes, I was terribly pleased with the way that they let me do it at whatever length I liked, because I had already had one publisher drop out on me because of the length of it, even though they had known all along that it was going to be terribly long. And - I’ve said this before - I shan’t do the book again. So it was great to be able to do it to my own drum-beat this time, and not be told to go away and cut a hundred thousand words, or something like that. But there were a lot of things that were horrible about it too - about the experience, I mean. Not least having to proof-read it twice; because it’s half a million words, and to proof-read half a million words where you’re paying attention to every semi-colon, let alone every paragraph, is arduous. But first of all you send in the manuscript, and the editor has a look at it, and then he gives it to some copy editor whose job it is to change every time you have written ‘maybe’ to ‘perhaps’, just to sort of justify themselves. And of course it’s madness because they get this thing and they spend a few moments looking at it, but if you think about the sentences you write, and you think about the words you use to bolt together these sentences, then you are likely, as the writer, to have given it immensely more thought than a copy editor has time to bring to it, so it’s not likely that they are going to be making improvements.
I don’t mind in the least it being edited by a real editor who says: ‘Look Michael, this whole section here sounds self-indulgent to me’, or ‘This whole section could do with a rigorous pruning, because it’s just bringing the chapter out of shape.’ But the sort of nit-picky stuff that copy editors do - well I’m much better at the nit-picky stuff than they are. So there was an enormous amount of reinstating of original text after it had been mangled by a copy editor.

AM: And it’s very hard to proof-read your own work because you read it as you meant to type it, as you thought you had…

MG: Yes, that’s very hard too. But I’m talking about what you get back after you’ve sent them the best manuscript you can manage and you have to read the proofs. And I had to do that twice because the number of printing errors and typos and copy editor’s errors meant that when the first set of proofs came back it was swimming with mistakes - and when I had corrected all those and the second lot came back, it was unbelievable: it was just as bad! In the course of making the corrections, a whole new series of things had been made wrong instead. So much so that I found if extremely difficult to imagine that the third time around, which was going to have to be the finished typeset text, it would be virtually error free. But it was. Except that then the index arrived and I had about two days to check it and it was a disgrace! Every sort of mistake an index could offer was there, from mixing up Jerry Lee Lewis with Jerry Lewis to listing people the text only mentioned once yet omitting people who came into it many times over, to listing the group Moby Grape as Grape, Moby.

AM: By which time you were presumably very frustrated and sick of it?

MG: Oh yes, not only sick of it, but going through that process makes it absolutely impossible to know whether what you have done is any good or not. Because you have seen it too much, seen it too close up, and you are just physically very, very tired by that amount of concentration over that long a haul.

AM: You must have been buoyed up by the reception it received - like the praise from Christopher Ricks and the reviews that are collected on the Bobdylan.com website?

MG: Oh, it was fabulous because I had no idea, as I say, if it was any good or not by then, and even if it was any good I couldn’t take it for granted that it would be well reviewed. Because it was so big and it was about Dylan, who had only just begun to be critically popular again, there was really no predicting how the book would be received. It was very easy to imagine that it would be a sitting target for a ‘who needs half a million words about this boring old fart?’ line of attack.

AM: Which would not have been surprising - especially in the magazines…

MG: Yes, especially in the cool music mags and so on. And the first review I think was in Uncut, and that was just fabulous, that was just so good [laughs]! I do think some reviewers just take their line from what others have said and therefore handily for me it meant that anyone who did work like that…You know, the initial review was so good, that tipped them a wink that they should give it a good review too. I don’t actually know if that worked in this case, but I do think that these things follow each other and set a pattern.

AM: It’s certainly true when Dylan tours. I have followed that press coverage for years and very often you can see how much the first reviews are copied.

MG: Yes.

AM: I suppose it’s not too surprising, if someone is working to a deadline and is told to review a show the easiest way is to read back over what others have said the week before, sadly…

MG: Well in this case the funny thing really was that a couple of the reviews, Uncut and Record Collector - and I think it was implied in the Q review as well - they all sort of stated that when the book came out the first time around, in 1972, it had been this breakthrough, and it had been a great book. Well, I couldn’t help thinking ‘I don’t remember this having been said at the time!’ But on the other hand I’m very happy that it’s being said now.

AM: One of the problems about writing such a work on a career that is still ongoing is that there is always a ‘next release’ after your book has concluded. I imagine that it was almost a double-edged experience for you when Love and Theft, with all its riches, came out. On the one hand I am sure you experienced - and still do - great pleasure in listening to it. On the other, it must be galling that it does not appear as the final chapter of your book. It is hard to imagine a more apposite and uplifting conclusion than it would have formed.

MG: [Laughing] Well yes and no. Actually I have no regrets that it came out after the book was finished, because I knew that something would happen. You know that you can never keep up with him, and that is one of the privileges of living your life at the same time as his, because that is what it is always going to be like with a live artist. And even if he had become a recluse and done nothing, there would still be the drama of his mysterious silence. There will always be something beyond the end of the book. And as it happens Time Out Of Mind was quite a useful last album to be writing about. Because a track like ‘Highlands’ did show a part of his talent still completely intact - a part of his talent that went right back to the very beginning of his career. And at the same time a track like ‘Not Dark Yet’ did begin to address these questions of being the older artist speaking for the older person and all that.
Now I do think Love and Theft is a wonderful, wonderful album. We can play games about where it fits into his canon but it certainly does shift things around. Certainly it was wholly unpredictable and it immediately became indispensable, and I love it in many ways. What’s extraordinary about it, for one thing, is that it astonished most of us, if we’re honest about it: that he could do something that good and that unlike the rest – at this late stage of things.

AM: And it did, of course, continue to be informed by, and make references to, the folk and blues traditions you had written about. One can imagine the amount of footnotes ‘High Water’ would have caused.

MG: Yes, it certainly confirms all that material in my book, which stresses the importance of the back catalogue of pre-war acoustic blues and many other things too. There is nothing in Love and Theft that contradicts or undercuts the kind of approach to his work that I had the space and time to fully articulate in the book. But the other side of what you were asking me is, I can’t tell you how pleasurable it was after finishing the book to have a new album that I could simply enjoy as a punter and not have to write about or turn into a professional assignment in any way. It was just wonderful to have a new album - and, as it turns out, a really good one - that I didn’t have to write about. It just felt great!

AM: You have actually answered my next question already. I was going to ask if there was ever going to be a fourth edition but you ruled that out earlier.

MG: Yes.

AM: Is that definite?

MG: Yes, it’s a definite ‘No’. I mean the only proviso…

AM: [Laughing] So it’s almost absolutely, definitely ‘no’.

MG: Ha ha ha! The only proviso would be that if somebody was interested in financing a properly corrected edition of Song & Dance Man III, and one with a decent index, then I would be interested. Maybe.

AM: OK. Going back to the first edition, how did that come about? Or perhaps it would be more logical to begin by asking how you first ‘got into’ Dylan and how, from there, you ended up in the position of bringing out the first in-depth study of his work?

MG: Right, well the crucial thing is discovering popular music as a form of rebellion and liberation. I was born just after the Second world war, and my early years were spent in a drab Britain. I went to a very strict school and my parents were very proper, my father was a great believer in the British Empire and all that.
The most amazing event for me at school was at the annual school revue - it would have been 1957, I believe. Instead of the usual lame sketches, one of the pupils performed three rock’n’roll songs on-stage with a bass and drum backing. This was not just a different form of music, this was like striking at the heart of the whole edifice that I was stuck in. It was fantastic! It just confirmed for me that rock’n’roll was something amazing. So rock’n’roll was the first kind of music that mattered to me. And then I got to University and found that there were all these sort of folky people lying around in the Common Room playing this awful music and awful songs like ‘Masters of War’. Well, they made it sound like they were awful songs.
But there was this one fellow student that I was keen on and, like me, she was reading English Literature. The kind of things that were exciting me at the time included the novels of George Eliot, and the whole literary critical exercise of close-to-the-text analysis, which I was very good at and really saw the point of and loved - while at the same time the other half of me, if you like, was still keen on the original rebellious leaders of the rock’n’roll revolution. I was still interested in Elvis Presley even though by now it was the mid-’60s and he just was making flaccid films and being terrible. Anyway, this fellow student, Linda Thomas - who has remained a friend, I am glad to say, all through the intervening decades - she said to me: ‘You know there is somebody who is a star on a whole other level to Elvis Presley’. I found this almost inconceivable!

AM: It probably sounded sacrilegious.

MG: Yes, because Elvis Presley was the most exciting God-like vibrant creature that had ever walked the Earth. Anyway, she said this other bloke writes his own material and he’s not just interested in, you know, he doesn’t just sing ‘I love you, please be true’, you should give him a listen: and this was of course Bob Dylan. So that was how I got turned onto Dylan. His newest album at the time was Another Side Of.

AM: How did you feel about it?

MG: Well I took quite a long time getting into it, because his voice was a problem to me at first. All my upbringing had been on pop. Smooth singers. Even if they could shout and scream, like Little Richard, they still had this wonderful ‘on the note’ vocal control, and I liked people like Roy Orbison, and Elvis Presley has a wonderful voice, that is part of what he has. Bob Dylan’s voice was problematical for me at first and so was all the rule-breaking that he did. But then some kind of golden penny dropped and I realised that far from having an inferior voice, his voice was actually just the most marvellous expressive instrument. And things were changing so much in Bob Dylan’s own output. 1965 was the most fantastic year to pick up on him.
So anyway, soon there was a sort of unifying of the two sides of me because of him. I could see there was just as much point in a close-to-the-text analysis of this multi-layered, complex, serious minded stuff that he was writing as there was in applying it to the high-brow novels of the 19th Century. So from about 1966, after listening to Blonde On Blonde a great deal, I started to walk around the campus saying, ‘I’m going to write a book about him.’ And that was not because I wanted to write a book, or become an author, but because I wanted to write about Bob Dylan at great length and what else could you do? In those days everything was so different; you were very lucky if you could get any kind of mention of anything to do with popular music into a broadsheet newspaper for instance.

AM: So different from today, now Rock reviews are everywhere…

MG: Absolutely, it’s completely different. Then you were more or less confined to the world of Melody Maker even if you wanted to write short articles about him. And even in 1967-1968, when I started to do a couple of things for magazines like OZ and International Times, Dylan was already threatening to be someone they wanted to topple as newer things came along. Therefore the last thing they really wanted was a sort of Leavisite Lit. Crit. approach - and that is exactly what I wanted to do.

AM: It’s interesting hearing your story of starting off in rock’n’roll in the ’50s, then getting pulled into the folky circles. It can seem to mirror Dylan’s story which is about to go full circle.

MG: Yes, it can. I hadn’t thought of that actually. The only full circle like that which occurred to me was that many, many years later when I went to Hibbing and stood on the stage that he had played on, and touched that piano, I thought how strange it was, at 50-something, to finally arrive at the place and sort of psychic moment that is the extraordinary beginning of the very early Bob Dylan story.

AM: I was going to ask you about Hibbing later, but since you have brought it up now, it seems only proper to ask you about that here.

MG: I finally got to Hibbing in 1998, and it was November, so the streets were covered in snow. It was absolutely perfect. That’s exactly how you would hope to see it, and I loved it. In fact it was so captivating I almost wondered why Bob Dylan had ever left [laughs]! It’s a very atmospheric place, but it is in the middle of the Great North Woods. On that visit I just looked around and was amazed that there was nothing there to acknowledge him. They haven’t exploited Bob Dylan at all. At that point they were hardly admitting that they were responsible for him. It’s ridiculous really…

AM: It’s good news for those - like me - who haven’t yet been and want to visit. That’s surely the best way to experience it: I’d rather see Hibbing than ‘Zimmy’s Home Town’ ….

MG: Absolutely, yes. I did a piece for Isis about this and how it’s great to go there and just knock on Bob Dylan’s boyhood-home front door. But of course in the long term that’s not practicable. But yes, it’s great to have that rather than to arrive in Hibbing and find the ‘Bob Dylan Experience’.

AM: I believe you spoke in ‘Zimmy’s’, the one reference to Dylan?

MG: Zimmy’s is a bar and restaurant on the main street, Howard Street, and it is the only form in which Bob Dylan’s name is visible in the town. There is the library, which was built in the ’50s, and down in the basement there is a room with a small display of photos of him - but there is nothing on the ground floor to tell you it exists: so they are not exactly directing people to it as they come in.
But then I went back, in April last year, when I was doing a series of talks in the States, mostly on campuses, including a couple in Minnesota. In Hibbing I didn’t talk in Zimmy’s, though, I talked at the library: the library hosted the talk. They had had to finance it by getting money from the Chamber of Commerce and Friends of Hibbing Library and this and that and the other. About five organisations clubbed together to sponsor my talk. And it was an honour for me to be there. It was just the most wonderful experience for me. I did my usual sort of talk about why Bob Dylan is important, but then after the interval I did a special extra section specially for Hibbing, to try to persuade them that Hibbing should stop sulking about Dylan the sulky adolescent stomping off and saying ‘you’re boring’ because after all, that’s what adolescents do! I was basically telling them that they should take pride in his achievement and also that he had written some very beautiful stuff about that part of the world and that he was confessing in this material that Hibbing was formative for him, as obviously it was.
It was also thrilling because the crowd was not just Bob Dylan fans but a real cross section of the community. At the end various people came up and talked to me, really appreciatively, and they included two old ladies who told me they’d been friends of Dylan’s mother, who had died not very long before this. Then there were a couple of people who had been in Dylan’s early bands, LeRoy Hoikkala and Larry Fabbro, who came up with his wife and chatted afterwards, and then Dylan’s classmate Larry Furlong, who’d shown me the town in 1998, and who hung around waiting to test out whether I’d remember him. Of course I did!
And people were buying my book at the end - and I have never sold so many books at a single event before or since. It was brilliant. And afterwards I learnt that one of the people in the audience, a very old man at the front who I’d clocked but hadn’t known who he was, turned out to have been Dylan’s old English teacher.

AM: That must have been a treat for you.

MG: It was just wonderful, it was just the most exceptional day. It was also a thrill because just outside Zimmy’s they have a big notice board thing that sits up in the sky like outside an old fashioned drive-in movie house along the highway or something. It said: ‘Hibbing welcomes author Michael Gray, 7pm’ or something like that. It was brilliant.

AM: Did you speak to his old English teacher?

MG: No, not then, because it wasn’t until afterwards that I got told who he was. Later I was told he’d enjoyed the evening and that he had said something like ‘Ah, a man of culture comes to Hibbing!’ I did phone him up subsequently, when I was back in England, and had a conversation with him. Again, that was a privilege.

AM: Did he say anything about Dylan in his class?

MG: Well I wasn’t trying to interview him. I never do that sort of doorstep stuff, but yes, he said something like: ‘Well he was a very bright student, a very able young man.’

AM: I wonder what your 1966 self listening to Blonde On Blonde and thinking about writing a book would have made of the thought of you in Hibbing talking to Dylan’s English teacher all those years later?

MG: All this is the completely unpredictable stuff of life isn’t it? When I started walking around saying I was going to write a book about Bob Dylan, I had no idea when it would happen, or what would be the result of it then or later. I had no idea that it would turn into the thing that I am best known for. I had no idea that Dylan would have the kind of extraordinary career longevity that he has had. All of it, the whole world of it, was completely unpredictable, unguessable.

AM: Back in the Sixties, were you focused mostly on Dylan or were you listening to everything else that was going on, the Beatles, the Stones, The Who, the sounds coming from the West Coast of America and so on?

MG: Oh, I was listening to everything, yes. Except that I was still taking a major stance against British music, basically. Growing up with rock’n’roll, once I discovered life beyond Tommy Steele I always thought that American music was authentic and exciting and British music was phoney and unexciting: and I basically held to that position right through Merseybeat, even though I grew up on Merseyside and used to go to the Cavern. It was OK, but I thought it was amateur thrashing about compared to a Jerry Lee Lewis. So that was essentially my position. Even though people kept telling me that the Stones were great and the Kinks were wonderful and all this, on the whole, most of my attention and expectation was directed towards American music.
But yes, I was completely caught up in the whole 60s dropping-out, underground explosion. Not that I ever wore a kaftan or distributed flowers or anything like that; but the whole thrust of things, the whole promise that there was an alternative way of ordering the world, I bought that, you know. And I thought it was going to mean certain kinds of people were going to be abolished. And of course in the ’70s we got a backlash against that. People like Margaret Thatcher, for instance: they were supposed to be abolished by Woodstock.

AM: Unfortunately it is not that simple.

MG: No. Quite. Even at the time it obviously wasn’t. I was very aware in the ’60s that there was this new snobbery, hip snobbery, that made me very wary. I didn’t feel I fitted in. When I went to the Isle of Wight Festival in 1969 I didn’t feel, ‘here I am among my tribe’. I felt an outsider. But that’s alright.

AM: What situation was the book in at this point?

MG: I think it was still just notes, little pieces of paper. The real serious work on the book was done in 1970-71.

AM: So you knew you had a publishing deal at that time?

MG: Yes, I can’t remember exactly what happened when but it was signed to Hutchinson and then the editor there moved to one of the Granada companies and he took it with him. That delayed things a bit, but I know I had a deal. By 1971, I was living in a cottage in North Devon with a very young child and a very young wife and I thought it was idyllic. It didn’t turn out to be but I thought it was. And I remember that my publisher got the British rights to Tarantula and for the hardback they wanted me to write the dust-jacket notes and these had to be sent through to Bob Dylan for his approval - which I got - and I can remember having to deal with all this by a series of telegrams, and going to the phone box by the bridge over the stream in this tiny hamlet, and having to read this stuff over the phone to this obscure bloke in London. The whole thing was done in a beautifully unslick way.

AM: Again it’s a big contrast with today and e-mail…

MG: Yes. It’s funny though isn’t it? We have all this instant stuff but it doesn’t essentially make any difference.

AM: How do you mean?

MG: Well, you know, the difficulties in communicating are more or less as they were. It only speeds up what people expect. I can remember the one time when I came in from the cold of freelancing and worked for a record company and then drifted from that into managing Gerry Rafferty, it was really obvious in the offices of this record company that if people forgot to post something in time they would messenger it round. And then when fax machines came in they used them instead of the messenger bikes. It was still a way of getting something to somebody because you had forgotten to post it the day before. And so on, and it’s always like that. you know. Back out freelancing again, on the other side of all that experience, there was a point in the ’80s when it suddenly became very difficult to manage any longer if you didn’t have a computer. So I had to get one of those Amstrads. Then there came a point where it was impossible to deal with newspaper editors if you didn’t have a fax. So there is all this extra communication facility but at the same time you are always having to run to oblige it, it’s not just a simple matter of it obliging you.

AM: What effect did the first edition coming out have on your life?

MG: It was all pretty minimal. Writing a book, unless you have a best seller, does not change your life. When the British edition came out I was still teaching at a school in North Devon and living in a cottage. It was like it was my hobby, like an interesting sideline event in my life, no more significant than some trippy encounter. It was just a novelty item on my CV. When I got an American deal I decided it enabled me to give up my day job - I was teaching English in a school in Birmingham by then - but it didn’t really give me enough to give up a day-job on. It was more a question of using that as an excuse.
As you say, there wasn’t any Rock press - not only that, there was not even a Rock Book Section in a bookshop. There were none of these things, the book had to really struggle to get through because it wasn’t going to get reviewed in broadsheet newspapers, although somehow it did get a tiny snippet in The Sunday Times. There was nowhere to put it in a bookshop, nobody knew where to put it.

AM: Was the second edition specifically timed in 1981 for the Dylan tour?

MG: No, Song & Dance Man III is the first time it’s been well timed. The other two were both badly timed. In 1972 he hadn’t been doing anything for ages and ages and he wasn’t at all hip any more, and by the time the book came out in 1981, well, he was here touring but the excitement and critical and commercial success of the 1978 tour had largely evaporated. He was ‘saved’. It wasn’t a good time to bring the book out. I can’t remember how that edition came about really, I think I probably reacquired the rights to the first edition and set about trying to sell it again and Hamlyn took it up.

AM: It was a handsome edition.

MG: Yes, I like the look of it. I mean I’m not sure that the text revision was as good as it might have been but I think I was very pressed for time and my own life wasn’t really altogether at its best then.
AM: What have you been doing since edition three came out, working on something else or just lazing around?

MG: I never laze around [laughs]. You have to work all the time if you are trying to survive as a freelancer. People think it’s great to be your own boss but money is a constant problem. So you have to keep doing things to bring money in and that includes writing pieces for newspapers. But, as I say, I have also being doing the gigs and setting up the new book I’m writing, which is an investigative biography come travelogue about Blind Willie McTell for Bloomsbury. I have to deliver in September this year for publication a year after that. And that’s another thing that Dylan’s turned me onto if you like.

AM: That sounds of obvious interest to the Dylan fan, though of course it won’t be written from that perspective.

MG: No, and I’m not writing it from a blues fan perspective either. I’m writing it as a rattling good yarn for any interested general reader. Basically it’s for people who have never heard of Blind Willie McTell. His is just a remarkable story of a fascinating, unusually gracious man in a very interesting time and place. He was born in 1898 in rural Georgia and he died in 1959, very soon before he would have been rediscovered by the blues and folk boom that Bob Dylan came to New York and bumped into. McTell lived his life mostly in Georgia, although he did travel around a great deal, and he lived it in the pre-civil rights era. He is just a very interesting person to look at. Most travel books don’t really take much interest in music and most books about blues people don’t really take much notice of the environment in which people live. Plus most stuff about the blues has always been about what has gone on in Mississippi rather than in the milder environment of Georgia. So. We’ll just have to see how it goes. You know I write travel articles as well as writing about music, and this book is a way of fusing the two things. I have done a couple of trips now and have another one to do, following in his footsteps to places like Statesboro, which is the focus of his most famous song, ‘Statesboro Blues’.

AM: Has it changed out of recognition or do you feel you are still walking the same road?

MG: Once you get out of Atlanta, Georgia still feels as if he might have just turned the corner and disappeared down the railroad track. It depends what you want to notice. You could notice how modern much of the way everything is structured is, but if you want to you can feel those old, timeless atmospheres very easily. And you can still just about meet people who remember him, even though it is such a very long time since he died. I am almost too late, and many of the people involved are dead - most of them are dead - but you can still meet, and I have met and interviewed, people who remember him. I’ve got some wonderful material. I just hope I can lash it together so that it works both as his story and as the story of getting the story.

AM: Moving on to a slightly controversial topic now. Your recent review/overview of Dylan at Stockholm in April caused quite a stir amongst Dylan fans,…

MG: Really?

AM: Yes, and presumably you knew that it would when you wrote it. Can you tell us a bit of the background to the article? And do you still stand by it?

MG: First of all, I didn’t give a thought to how it would go down in the Dylan internet newsgroup world. I really didn’t give that a thought, and I think it would be extremely damaging to any attempt to do an honest piece of work if you did have one eye on your audience all the time. Obviously if you are writing for a particular publication there is a sense in which you automatically fall into obliging that publication in some way, even if it’s just the kind of length of sentences you use or something stylistic. You in some way settle your own style into some sort of marriage with what you perceive to be the style of the newspaper. So I’m not saying that it’s a virginal, holy process, but I am saying that you couldn’t write anything decent if you kept worrying about what people might think of what you’re writing. And if anybody in the world ought to know that, it is Bob Dylan followers, because if his own stance has ever been about anything, it’s been about that.

AM: It appeared in the UK newspaper, The Daily Telegraph.

MG: Yeah, well, you know, the Daily Telegraph is not my spiritual home, but they like my stuff. It was the Daily Telegraph that first published my travel writing. But it doesn’t represent my politics at all. I don’t read the paper, I only write for it. A.J.P. Taylor used to write for the Daily Express.
As for the Stockholm piece, yes, I stand by it: what is there to apologise for? I haven’t even looked at all this stuff, this fuss and response to it. I mean, I got my copy of Isis and I saw that there were a couple of letters and that people didn’t seem to be very happy, and several people seem to have e-mailed me and told of their unhappiness, but on the other hand several people whose views I respect have also e-mailed me to make approving noises in response to that piece. But, essentially, I don’t understand what the fuss is about. It doesn’t even seem to be just about what I wrote about Dylan! It seems to be about the fact that I dared to make detailed observations about the audience - and in some cases it even seems to be because I’m supposed to have knocked Stockholm!
Well it doesn’t seems to me that I said anything wrong in any of these areas and I think, essentially, I have a right to express my opinion and other people have a right to disagree. But all this jumping up and down about it, I think that is very unhealthy. I had never been to Sweden before, I’m conscious that I spent two nights in a dreary hotel in Stockholm and went to an indifferent Bob Dylan concert there. And that the concert took place in a very unpleasant post-modern housing estate patch of town, and that’s all I’ve said. I haven’t gone in there and said ‘Sweden is pants’, you know. I know perfectly well I haven’t spent enough time in Sweden to know what I think of it. But if it turns out I visit Sweden again and dislike it and then on subsequent visits, it turns out that I dislike it more and more, I’m fully entitled to do that. I am entitled to dislike Stockholm and to like red wine and to prefer Don & Phil to Ant & Dec, and so on.

AM: Fair enough, you are talking about right of opinion; but it seems that this is not always afforded to those who criticise Dylan in performance. There is an intolerance towards that.

MG: Yes, and I find this aspect of the Dylan fan world absolutely poisonous. Nothing could do Dylan a greater disservice than this stance that he is beyond criticism. I criticised the Stockholm concert because it fell so far short of the very standards that Bob Dylan set, not for any other reason. I have no wish to go to a Bob Dylan concert, find it a bad one and say so. But I am certainly not going to go to a Bob Dylan concert, find it a bad one and say that it was great.

AM: It’s also a matter of which show you are reviewing, it’s not as though they are all the same.

MG: Absolutely.

AM: I only saw four of the last leg of shows and saw my best ones, which I enjoyed very very much, first and the poorest, which I didn’t like at all, last; unfortunately for me, as it is preferable the other way round of course. You referred to the Stockholm show as ‘desperately poor’; have you seen shows since and did they impress you differently?

MG: Yes, well I saw the worst one first and the best one last. I saw five this time. I saw the Stockholm one and as I said in the piece, quite straightforwardly, and being very specific, it was bad because he was not committed to being there and therefore he resorted to a series of fakeries and I absolutely defend my right to protest at that. Then I went to four in Britain: I went to Newcastle, which I liked very much. Manchester which I liked less. Then the two shows at Docklands arena – the first one had a wonderful sustained patch in the middle of it and was OK either side of that, I thought. The second one was a really terrific concert. He was riveting and it was an extraordinary achievement that someone 61 years old could do that and be firing on all cylinders in that way.

AM: I haven’t heard that one yet but all reports, and what you have just said, seem to put it as the best after the April shows took off in mainland Europe.

MG: But that doesn’t mean I want to hear the recording of it. Because I do think that, as you and I have discussed privately before, and as do most people: what you get standing there in the presence of the man is not necessarily what you get when you listen to a recording afterwards. The thing about ‘you had to be there’ is sometimes true, I feel. It hasn’t always been: you didn’t have to be there in ’66, the live recordings are out of this world, but the Never Ending Tour I think on the whole, if you were at a great show, you have to have been at the great show.

AM: Actually I haven’t sought out copies of the shows I most enjoyed yet…

MG: You probably want to protect your memory of them by not wanting to listen to them again, don’t you? I think I feel that about the Newcastle show. I felt that he was in a very open, fragile mood and I liked the fact that it was less sort of rock’n’roll than the Manchester one turned out to be the following night, for instance. But it might turn out if I listened to the recording of Newcastle that what I took to be fragile vulnerability is something less jewel-like than that.

AM: And a lot would depend on the quality of the recording, and if there any distractions on it…

MG: Oh yes, yes. The worst recordings are from America, where the audience just talks all the way through, mostly about cheeseburgers.

AM: Or how their travelling to the show went, or those important hairdressing points or where to go after the show…

MG: Oh, they’re just ghastly aren’t they? But, you know, it’s my duty as a critic to criticise: not necessarily adversely but to speak as I find. It doesn’t do Bob Dylan any good to have people going ape-shit over a completely indifferent version of something he could do a lot better if his audience wasn’t so over-excited.

AM: You have to wonder about the effect that has on him too, to get the exact same response whether he just goes through the motions or pulls off an extraordinary performance of something. You did write a lot of complimentary things about Dylan in the article too, though that seems not to have been noticed.

MG: Yes of course, and not only that but I see too that when Isis reprinted the article (without telling me in advance that they were going to do that), they cut out most of the affirmative bits. I think that if they had room for turning over their letters page to the ‘controversy’ of my Stockholm piece then they might have had room to reprint the whole piece if they were going to reprint any of it.

AM: Will you be pointing that out and responding to the letters in Isis?

MG: I’ve had a private exchange of views with Derek Barker about the ethics of that, but I don’t respond in print to people who whinge about me. I’ve kept my mouth shut about it all until this interview, and this is the last time the word ‘Stockholm’ is going to cross my lips.

AM: OK, point taken, I’ll move on. There are a number of upcoming projects mooted that Dylan will be involved in which I view more with apprehension than keen anticipation. I’d be interested in your views on these. For instance, there’s the film role where he is cast to play the part of ‘Jack Fate’.

MG: ‘Jack Fate’ is the worst-sounding character’s name that I have ever come across. It is just so awful, it is unbelievable and it makes you feel that the whole project is doomed: that at best it is going to be Hearts of Fire II. And it is so unfortunate, because I would love to see Dylan do another film, you know, a proper film. I would love to see him have a decent role in a decent film. He doesn’t have to be the centre of attention, as far as I’m concerned. I thought that for instance when, finally, we were able to see the Director’s Cut of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid - I’d always liked Dylan in it, then I had read all these reviews saying it was a good film but that Dylan wasn’t a very good actor, and I hadn’t agreed with them - then the Director’s Cut came out and all over again he was wonderful. And obviously someone as charismatic as Bob Dylan can be - could be - magical on film. But not if he is going to be doomed to playing retired rock singers. I mean ‘Dylan the rock singer’ is the least interesting aspect of Dylan the persona, to me.

AM: You mentioned Elvis’s terrible films earlier, the plot-line seems to have come straight from the same stable.

MG: Actually it’s more like the same stable as Paul Simon’s One-Trick Pony. I just wish that a director whose work you can respect would put Bob Dylan in a significant but not central role. I wish that he would appear in a Robert Altman movie. On the other hand, it makes me feel slightly uncomfortable to sit here predicting doom and gloom for this project, because what do we know about it?

AM: Yes, that’s true. Its just that the little we do know about it…

MG: It’s just that the storyline makes your heart sink, and ‘Jack Fate’ sounds so dire.

AM: I was going to ask about things like the one time rumoured TV show and the more certain-seeming Chronicles project. Given what you have just said though perhaps it is better to leave that…

MG: Yes, best to leave it till we see it. I would just say that, with the single exception of the notes he wrote for the Jimmie Rodgers tribute album, which are simply badly written, Dylan has written surprising, imaginative and delightful prose, and could do with Chronicles. It could be a very exciting thing to read. Not because it may give us the low-down on something but just because, for the first time since Tarantula, it gives us the opportunity to read a good deal of prose by Bob Dylan. A sustained piece of prose.

AM: Given that your many years of study have now provided us with Song & Dance Man’s three editions, and that Christopher Ricks’s book really is forthcoming this time (at least I believe that is the case) – do you think that a time will come when Dylan is widely regarded as a serious artist as well as a popular one? Or does the latter obviate the former so that as in the cases of Shakespeare and Dickens, it can only happen afterwards.

MG: Pass.

AM: [Laughing] Was that a bad question?

MG: No, I just don’t know the answer [laughs].

AM: Thanks very much for your time and words, is there anything else you want to say?

MG: Only that I would like to say that Song & Dance Man III is not just about Bob Dylan. Dylan himself often criticises people who devote themselves to him and so on. For myself, a detailed interest in Bob Dylan has never squeezed out the rest of the world. In some Dylan circles I am proud to say that I am regarded as a dilettante because, for instance, I don’t know how many concerts I have been to. But I do know that there’s a whole world of fantastic places and things that I shan’t get round to because I am 55 years old, and I know that it’s a very rounded universe out there. Bob Dylan is extraordinarily special as an artist and has opened an enormous number of doors. His achievement is unparalleled in the contemporary world, but it’s a wide world.


____________

Interview by Harold Lepidus, The Dylan Examiner, online December 8, 2011

How was your recent speaking tour?
I couldn’t call it a tour  -  it was a short trip to deliver a talk at a Dylan Birthday Celebration Conference at the University of Cardiff in South Wales, and also to take part in a panel discussion about connexions between Bob Dylan and the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (who had been a hero to the Beats). In the end, because of the illness of one of the other scheduled speakers, I gave two talks rather than one. And after Cardiff, those of us on the platform for the panel discussion staged a similar event at the lovely Taliesin Arts Centre in Swansea (also in South Wales).

How did you come up with the idea of putting out your own spoken word CD?
Well, I’ve been noticing the increased popularity of audio-books for a long time now  -  people get tired of trashy radio stations when they’re driving around, and the new technology make it so much easier to listen to things wherever you are. And while most people feel they’re too busy to have much time for reading, an audio-book means someone else can be reading to you while you’re doing something else. But of course the book The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia is 750,000 words  -  far too big to be an audio-book (or, for that matter, to be translated into other languages) -  so the only option was an audio-book of selected entries. So it’s about an hour’s worth, a reasonable single-CD’s length, in a really attractive digipak. Well I think so, anyway. Of course, you don’t have to buy it as a CD, you can download either the whole thing or just individual tracks.

My favorite aspect of the CD is when you place Dylan's activities in the context of its time (Records found in the rear of department stores behind vacuum cleaners, only going to one local concert per tour, etc.). How important was that in your writing?
Placing Dylan’s past in the context of the time has always been important to me. Dylan’s work is music, but it’s also history. And the work you’re referring to in those examples is from the 1960s, and the world was different then in so many, many ways. In my case I’m old enough that I can describe how things were, and how they were perceived, in the 1960s from personal experience  -  and part of the pleasure of being able to draw on that experience in writing about it almost half a century later is to be able to smile, ruefully and fondly, at my own generation’s innocence, folly, enthusiasm and hope. Naturally if you just drone on about the 60s, people who are young now will turn off  -  but if they’re interested in Bob Dylan’s work, and as you know, many are, then they’re interested in the context. All kinds of things they might assume are as natural as the air we breathe in fact had to be invented, and so for today’s youthful music fans, the odd shaft of light received from the quaint, vanished world of the recent past can be compelling. Mostly people can relate easily to the music of the 1950s onwards, but they’re hearing it from within a very different reality. And few things have changed as radically as how we access music now.

The CD reminds me of a great lost bootleg, with all periods of Dylan's career covered in a random order,  from long, rhapsodic meditations of great works like Blood On The Tracks and "Love & Theft" to imagining Dylan frying an egg on stage. How did you choose what to include, and in what order? Did the thought of a Dylan bootleg even cross your mind when deciding what would make the final cut?
Never thought about Dylan bootlegs at all, at the time. I just wanted a broad sample of kinds of entry  -  in terms of period, of length of text (and therefore length of track), of subject and of mood. I found that process of choosing very challenging, but fun. I decided early on, for instance, not to try to include any of the entries on specific literary or musical figures who had been big influences on Dylan  -  not because they’re less interesting than other kinds of entry: on the contrary  -  but because unless it was going to become a 5 or 6-CD box set, it would be really out of balance to have, say, 15 minutes on Robert Johnson or 10 minutes on Hank Williams or, you know, 42 minutes on William Blake when so many other equally important influences would have to be missed out. And this made it so clear that one of the main criteria for choosing entries had to be, how long does it take to read this entry aloud? Which led to deliberately looking for a couple of really short ones and balancing that out with a couple of long ones.
          It wasn’t hard to remember the one about frying an egg on stage, when I was thinking about short ones, and for lengthy ones it seemed only right to choose entries that concentrated on major Dylan works. The entry in the book on Blonde On Blonde is too brief, but we tried Blood On The Tracks and that came in at just over 10 minutes, which seemed appropriate  -  and then I especially honed in on “Love and Theft” because I’ve always felt, right from the moment I first heard it, that it’s one of his major albums, and it has the extra virtue of being from the 21st Century, and I didn’t want the audio-book to just be harking back to the earliest decades. It was also the album that doesn’t feature in my previous large Dylan book, Song & Dance Man III, because that book was completed before “Love and Theft” existed. And the entry on Duluth, the place, begged to be included in the audio-book because it took us all the way back, way back further than the 1960s, to Bob Dylan’s birth.

After decades of music analysis and criticism, what was it like to record your own CD?
I can’t say it felt strange to be recording an audio-book  -  after all, it’s entirely spoken word, and I’ve been giving talks at arts festivals and colleges and so on for around ten years now: and that is the tremendous contrast to writing the books. When I’m writing, my working life is spent alone at the word-processor. To get out and have a live audience, and meet some of my readers, and to be standing on a stage speaking in public instead of sitting at home writing in private: that’s the great contrast. And actually one of the tracks on Bob Dylan Encyclopedia Greatest Hits is about the song ‘Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat’  -  about how it’s so uniquely Dylan yet also coachbuilt on the chassis of an old Lightnin' Hopkins song  -  and that’s an entry I’ve often read out to audiences at my talks. So I’ve known how that works when it’s read aloud: and of course for people who buy the CD version of the audiobook at the end of one of my talks, that track works as a souvenir of the event.

I can imagine Dylan fans enjoying your CD on a long drive (preferably to a Dylan concert), or as a surprise track when listening to their iPod on shuffle. Did you have any preconceived notions of how Dylan fans would listen to the CD, and what has been the feedback so far?
My only preconception was that people would probably use a shuffle feature, much like the way that people use the book  -  by dipping in and out of it, opening it at random, that kind of thing. Feedback has been good  -  but, you know, it hasn’t soared up the charts or anything!

What was it like to write the liner notes to the second version of Dylan's Brandeis CD? How did it come about?
It was a pleasant surprise to be asked, though it is, I have to say, a very minor album. The notes I wrote necessarily had to big it up  -  but yes, a good surprise to be approached. I was e-mailed by someone at Special Projects at Sony-Legacy, and they asked me, and I said I’d be happy to do it, and they FedEx’d me the material (though of course I had it anyway!) and then when I’d written the piece, I sent it to them and they ran it past Jeff Rosen and he said it was “great” and there you have it. I have to say I don’t like the design they’ve used for the notes on the CD, but the vinyl version looks really terrific  -  the whole sleeve, back and front, has been made to look exactly as if it’s an LP from 1963... except that, very kindly, they let me put my website address under my name: which of course is a jarring note in terms of period, but a kindness to me.

How can people order the CD, or any of your books?
They can get Bob Dylan Encyclopedia Greatest Hits as a download from the record company, www.lookatmedance.co.uk or from all the usual suspects, iTunes included, and they can buy the CD directly from my website: and if they do that, they have the option to either receive it still shrinkwrapped or else unshrinkwrapped but signed. My books, well, Song & Dance Man III is finally out of print, after eleven years, but the 2008 Bob Dylan Encyclopedia paperback and my biography of Blind Willie McTell, Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes, can be bought from any good bookshop or from Amazon, and if people want a signed and/or inscribed copy, they can get them from my webiste [Shop page]. Meanwhile, thanks Harold  -  pleasure to talk.

5-minute interview, The Independent, July 2006