...it's metallic and bright gold with whatever that conjures up. "

Someone has transcribed and posted the 1978 Dylan Interview in Playboy Magazine, in which Bob used that wonderful phrase, speaking with Ron Rosenbaum. It's a pretty remarkable interview, and a couple years ago Rosenbaum wrote a nice memoir of doing the interview. The two go together.

In Rosenbaum's memoir, he mentions something often ignored, that Bob elaborated some on the sound he heard:

 That ethereal twilight light, you know. It's the sound of the street with the sunrays, the sun shining down at a particular time, on a particular type of building. A particular type of people walking on a particular type of street. It's an outdoor sound that drifts even into open windows that you can hear. The sound of bells and distant railroad trains and arguments in apartments and the clinking of silverware and knives and forks and beating with leather straps. It's all-it's all there

Alas, a lot of the interview is about Renaldo & Clara, and try as I might, I just can't reconcile myself to this disaster. Still Rosenbaum does get some more interesting stuff out of Dylan:

 How many singers feel the same way ten years later that they felt when they wrote tile song? Wait till it gets to be 20 years, you know? Now, there's a certain amount of act that you can put on, you know, you can get through on it, but there's got to be something to it that is real-not just for the moment. And a lot of my songs don't work. I wrote a lot of them just by gut-because my gut told me to write them-and they usually don't work so good as the years go on. A lot of them do work. With those, there's some truth about every one of them. And I don't think I'd be singing if I weren't writing, you know. I would have no reason or purpose to be out there singing. I mean, I don't consider myself . . . the life of the party. [Laughs]

The stuff about the singing, now nearly 25 years  and, what, 1500+ concerts, since that interview is fascianting. But that "life of the party" line is rich.

[Steve's No Direction Home Page]

I can't believe I've never read, or more likely can't recall, the original interview.

Attack of the Chickenshits

xtry, extry: "Nashville Ex-Junkie Makes Nice to Traitor, Is Picked On by Nashville Talk Show Host!" That's what I call dog bites man. And also what I call great hype. I don't think Steve Earle wrote "John Walker's Blues" as a publicity stunt. I think he wrote it as a politically inclined guy with an idea for a song. But that doesn't mean he minds whatever attention he gets out of it. He's an artist, folks. Artists are supposed to get our attention.

I've been listening to an advance copy of the cd for the last two weeks.  It's a really great  album and I think that, if you've enjoyed Earle's work in the past, it would be a cryin' shame to miss it because of one song. 

Especially a song that you haven't heard.  That scenario makes me think of Southern fried fundamental Christians walking a picket line in front of a movie theater showing "The Last Temptation of Christ." None of them have seen it.  None of them ever will.  It was probably a lot of the same people who burned Beatles records when John Lennon said that dumb thing about them being more popular than Christ. How about when Ed Sullivan refused to let Dylan play "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues" because it was libelous just to utter those words? 

I know, I know - none of this stuff involved the murder of 3,000 innocent Americans.  But until you've actually listened to the song, you just won't get it that Earle is not sticking up for the creep.  He just isn't.

Scaremongers notwithstanding, Earle hardly glorifies Lindh, and he also doesn't compare him to Jesus—merely illustrates the poor sap's mania by having him compare himself to Jesus (who is, after all, one of Islam's prophets). In fact, the song is so measured and literary I find it hard to believe the brouhaha will reach Wal-Mart when the album is released September 24.

Anyway, if I were Robert Christgau, I would be really pissed off that the Village Voice didn't see to it that a copy editor got his hands on this piece before it went to press.  Be that as it may, this is very thoughtful.  And as far as I can see, thoughtful is exactly what we need a lot more of these days.

What has been the chief domestic casualty of this war on terrorism that keeps changing its spots? The Bill of Rights as exemplified by political dissent, most believe. How to fight back? Exercise the right to dissent. That's the joy of this record, which, with a crucial push from drummer Rigby, gives off a sense of freedom and defiance that's rock and roll, not protest music.