Original subtitles

Dylan continues to re-invent himself

and l think that's a real talent.

You know, most people in the music business,

they come up to bat once, twice, if they're lucky.

Dylan doesn't do that.

Dylan takes different things and creates something new out of it.

He absorbs, not just from the world of music

but from the world of literature.

When he puts those two worlds together...

And he was really pretty much the first guy in commercial pop music

to have great success

that put together commercial music, commercial rock and roll,

with any kind of world of literature.

He inspired...

everybody.

Yet he's still a link in the chain to Clarence Ashley

and Charlie Poole and Uncle Dave Macon

and all those people from the past.

Dylan is a crossroads of American literature,

he's a crossroads of American musics,

he's a crossroads

of all sorts of American culture.

He conquered the world of folk music.

He moves into electric music.

He's considered... lt's a role he didn't want.

He's considered the voice of the counter culture. He moves into...

He dethrones himself. He resigns.

Then he moves into country and western music,

which is considered the music of the right wing

or the enemy or those that are pro-military.

Then he abdicates again and takes a certain amount of time off.

He comes back with Blood On The Tracks. Then he goes into gypsy music.

Then he becomes a bit of a big-band entertainer,

a more broad entertainer who does between-song patter

with the Street Legal and Live At Budokan years.

Why does he do this?

He's a restless guy. He's gotta change, he's gotta adapt.

We can see the Jack Elliott, Woody Guthrie stance,

of their early folk years.

We witness the young rock and roller

remembering how great Little Richard and Chuck Berry were, come 1965.

But he's also a fan of the Beat poets.

He's also a fan of Freewheelin' Frank Reynolds

and Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg.

When he does Chuck Berry and Little Richard,

he does it with sort of Beat-poetic lyrics. He does something new there.

Dylan's journey had a humble origin.

He was born Robert Allen Zimmerman

in Duluth, Northern Minnesota, in 1941 ,

and grew up in the largest of the lron Range towns, Hibbing.

When Bob Dylan was growing up in Hibbing, Minnesota,

he was restless.

He entered his teen years wanting to do something with his life

and he had an uncle that owned four local movie theatres

where Dylan was allowed to attend any time he wanted.

So he had quite an appetite for cinema

and absorbed a lot of dialogue

and witnessed that there was a great, wide world out there.

Although his first love was rock and roll

and he wrote in his high school yearbook under ambition,

''To join Little Richard''...

Before he even left Hibbing

he had already encountered something else.

And that was a series of Leadbelly 78s

that had been given to him,

l think as a Bar Mitzvah present.

And he rang up his friend

and fellow rock and roll amateur across town

and he said, ''This is the real thing.

''You've gotta hear this''.

ln the summer of 1959, at the age of 18, Dylan left Hibbing

and enrolled at the University of Minneapolis,

where he found himself in the bohemian district of Dinkytown.

Dinkytown was like a kind of Greenwich Village to come.

lt was a sort of early training in coffee houses and sleeping on floors

and swapping his original electric guitar for an acoustic.

lt was in Dinkytown that he first heard Woody Guthrie on record.

lt was too late for him to hear Woody Guthrie live.

Finally, he starts touching down in Chicago

and in Chicago in January of '61

he hitches a ride in an lmpala

and goes all the way to New York City with two friends.

And he comes to New York

and particularly to Greenwich Village and Lower Manhattan,

which is in a sense the capital of bohemia,

The capital of non-conformist America.

Every tendency, whether aesthetic

or political or philosophical or social,

that was in any way non-conformist

or challenging

finds itself down there

and down there has the freedom to experiment and explore.

He arrived in New York with his usual, immaculate timing,

at absolutely the right moment to catch the excitement,

the full force and excitement of the folk revival,

which was, of course, in part a blues revival.

And at the same time, there were these old blues guys

who had been rediscovered-

the great Son House, Skip James,

Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt.

There was a whole tranche of great figures.

And suddenly, they were plucked from their obscurity

and plonked onto coffee-house stages.

And young guys like Bob Dylan could sit at their feet

and watch their hands actually on the guitar

and learn a great deal from them.

And Dylan was mopping up everything, absolutely like a sponge.

What he finds in Greenwich Village

is all kinds of loose threads.

The political threads he picks up

are first of all the threads of what was called ''the old left''.

The communists dominated, though they weren't all party members,

but influenced by the Communist Party movement of the '30s and '40s,

famously called the Popular Front,

which was a cultural movement in America.

The Village is a kind of laboratory

of political, social and sexual experimentation.

So he also meets anarchists.

lzzy Young, who ran the folk centre,

and was one of the first sponsors of Dylan,

was a committed anarchist

and there weren't too many public anarchists in New York

or anywhere else in the United States in 1961 .

He stays with Dave Van Ronk,

the great folk singer and blues revivalist,

who has a huge influence on him as a person.

And Van Ronk was a Trotskyist, a hardline Marxist,

but also a wonderfully sensitive interpreter of the blues.

He also gets involved in... The very first protest song he writes

is about Emmett Till, who was the young, black man

who had been murdered by a lynch mob

in Mississippi some years earlier.

And he writes that for a benefit rally

to be held for an organisation called CORE,

the Congress of Racial Equality.

The Congress of Racial Equality was a Gandhian socialist organisation

which, about a year after Dylan wrote the song for them,

became the principal organisation

to organise the freedom rides

which broke apartheid in public transport in the South.

He also meets the young people

from the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee, SNCC,

which was always called Snic,

which was the major grass-roots organisation

of young, black and white college kids,

which from 1960 on, they launched the sit-ins in the Deep South

to smash Jim Crow, which was the American system of apartheid.

lt's important to remember that the America Bob Dylan grew up in

was, in many respects, like South Africa under apartheid.

Black and white were de facto and de jure kept separate.

Black people, in large parts of the United States

were denied the right to vote.

When Dylan was growing up, over one third of the United States

legally prohibited sex between black people and white.

That's the kind of society that Dylan is rebelling against.

And one of the most important

and vital and exciting electric currents

that was in the air of Greenwich Village when Dylan was there

was the sense of self-confidence that young people were getting

from the fact that their counterparts in the Deep South

had done something, broken through a barrier

that, for generations, people thought in America would just be there forever.

So, suddenly, what's impossible

seems possible, not only for black people,

not only for American politics,

but also for young people personally.

And so this gives Dylan the confidence to break barriers,

which he does consistently throughout the 1960s,

and ironically, and very importantly also,

it gives him an audience willing to go with him.

When he came, his influences were starting to be the older blues players,

but the already-existing influence, without a doubt, was Woody Guthrie.

l mean, that was the influence.

Dylan had already discovered both Guthrie's music

and Guthrie's wonderful autobiography, Bound For Glory

when he was back in Minnesota.

lt was listening to that music and reading that autobiography

that inspired Dylan, compelled Dylan,

to get on the road,

to get out of the background that he had been given,

but which meant nothing to him,

and find his own America, find his own influences,

and go and find and visit Woody himself,

who was very ill in hospital at the time.

For Dylan and others in the folk community,

Guthrie's songs, especially the Dust Bowl Ballads,

were seen as the authentic voice of the American working man

and Woody himself as a hero straight out of the pages of John Steinbeck.

But he was not Tom Joad.

He was not this travelling saint, casting bread upon the waters.

He was Woody Guthrie...

a flawed man,

an impossibly flawed man in some ways.

But a genuine human being and a creative genius.

Guthrie's legacy

is one of showing

generations of later singers

that they can write meaningful songs

that document social problems, social conditions...

and make a statement.

His other achievement, of course,

is that he gave us a group of marvellous songs to sing,

which may or may not have political relevance today,

but certainly are gambling songs.

One of Woody Guthrie's contemporaries,

a guitarist who's been cited as an influence by Bob Dylan himself,

was Tom Paley, one of the original New Lost City Ramblers.

l think of Woody mainly as being a songwriter and singer.

He thought of himself that way, as well.

He could play a little fancier than he would usually do on his records

or in public performances.

But he was not a great star as a guitarist.

But he played a number of instruments.

He also played a little bit of mandolin, a bit of fiddle.

But he was a good performer

and he wrote some remarkably good songs.

Woody Guthrie was first and foremost a lyricist.

He rarely, if ever, wrote an original tune.

That wasn't his strong point, writing new tunes.

But he would write complete new songs, using an old tune

or sometimes blending a couple of old tunes, l suppose.

Or doing an old tune and altering it slightly.

But it was his texts that were the main thing.

lt's interesting, when Dylan did arrive in New York in January 1961 ,

one of the first things he did was go out to Greystone Hospital,

which is situated on ten acres of a very bucolic, rural,

north-central New Jersey plot of land,

went to Guthrie, you know, just went right in, banged right on in,

sat at the great man's bedside and sang to him.

Sang a lot of Guthrie songs cos Guthrie couldn't perform any more.

He could barely function, he could barely sit up in the bed.

Probably the most important of Guthrie's followers

was Dylan's mentor, Pete Seeger.

Arguably, more than any other performer,

Seeger was responsible for continuing to keep Woody's music alive

after he was hospitalised with the nervous ailment, Huntington's Chorea.

And he had, you realise, such a short creative life.

He started making up songs when he was in his early 20s, l guess.

The dust storm came when he was 23.

And he probably had been making up songs early...

Maybe he made them up as a teenager.

And then, in his late 30s, he kept having these dizzy spells.

His wife thought he was drinking too much.

And by the time he was 40,

the doctors told him he had this incurable, hereditary disease.

His mother died of it. She'd died in a mental hospital.

And he went off to a mental hospital

and only got out on weekends, occasionally, to see his family.

And then when Dylan heard his voice and heard these sounds...

He says somewhere... l think he was interviewed in '84 in Dublin,

outside Dublin, at Slane,

and he talks a lot about Guthrie then.

And he says the first thing is the sound.

Whatever you want to do, you've got to have a sound.

He didn't see it as unique.

He saw it as not too dissimilar from the sound of the Carter Family.

When Dylan started out singing,

particularly in Minneapolis St Paul, in Dinkytown -

he was living above a pizza parlour -

a lot of his crowd then said before his great discovery of Woody Guthrie

he sang in something like the smoother, almost crooning vocals

of Nashville Skyline.

That's the way Merle Travis would do it.

Sing that line one more time.

Just like me.

When he discovered Woody Guthrie, he lost that voice.

He consciously got rid of that voice.

He became more of a plainsman.

He became more of the rough-hewn Minnesotean.

He started singing in a Guthrie-esque style

and playing guitar in a rougher, Guthrie-esque fashion.

And it's a guy called John Pankake, again up in Dinkytown,

who takes him aside and says, ''lt's no good trying to be Woody Guthrie.

''Not only will you never be Woody Guthrie

''but Ramblin' Jack Elliott has already done it, thanks very much.

''You'll have to do something else''.

No, l would say

Jack Elliott is the exception that proves the rule.

No one tried to imitate Woody that closely.

We might like to learn from him,

his style of song-writing,

no, but we didn't try and imitate.

And even Bob Dylan didn't try and imitate him.

l don't think he ever heard Woody sing

because when Bob came to New York

Woody could no longer talk clearly

or play the guitar.

But it was not only Guthrie's sound and his records that influenced Dylan

but also his writings.

He had been introduced to Guthrie's Bound For Glory,

his seminal 1940s autobiography way back in Dinkytown, Minneapolis.

One of the things that l find really noticeable in Guthrie's book

is that he talks about

hobos and tramps

and the dispossessed

really so much from the inside and with so much warmth.

And without the kind of political finger-waving

that Dylan was very easily put off by.

lt's so freeform.

lt is like On The Road a generation earlier.

Even though Guthrie only met Dylan on relatively few occasions,

it is reported that Woody recognised Dylan's talent and his potential.

He prizes the fact that Guthrie himself

is quoted as saying, you know,

''Ramblin' Jack Elliott sounds like me

''and Pete Seeger sings folk songs

''but that Bobby Dylan, he's a folk singer''.

So, you know, he achieves almost...

almost through imitation and mimicry,

but by bringing his own soul into it

he achieves this position of being looked at

as a kind of new Guthrie.

And l think the folk scene was desperate

for a young, hungry, sexy, iconic figure

to take Woody's place.

Seeger, as talented as he is, as dramatic as he is,

as politically courageous as he is,

is not the iconic - in media terms - sexy figure that Guthrie was.

He's never gonna be, he never has been.

Dylan could have worn those clothes.

But it's apparent as we look back on Dylan, hindsight being 20/20,

that he didn't wanna wear that particular suit of clothes.

lf Pete Seeger wasn't the ideal frontman for the American left,

he was still a huge influence and a mentor to Bob Dylan in the early '60s.

Seeger's the major carrier, from the '30s and '40s,

of the popular-front, communist-influenced folk tradition

into what came to be known as the folk revival of the late '50s and '60s,

which is the door that opens for Dylan,

gives him an audience, gives him a format

within which he can express himself.

A man identified in this publication as a communist

is the same Pete Seeger

who is the associate editor of these various folk-singing songs

that are available throughout the United States,

specifically aimed at young people.

lt was very politically motivated

and you have to look at Pete's background.

Pete's father was one of the great musicologists

that this country's ever produced.

His mother was a composer and a musicologist.

He came from a very, very liberal background

so he was always very, very politically oriented

and politically motivated.

And now we are concerned that the communists are moving into this field

and that they're going to pervert

this wonderful form of entertainment

so it will satisfy their own needs.

So we're calling on the House Committee

to make an investigation in this field,

to determine whether or not our concern is well founded

and, if it is, then to expose it

so the American people, and particularly our young people,

can be alert and aware of what is happening.

Anybody who thinks there's anything subversive about these songs

ought to listen to them.

This is the craziest kind of charge l've ever heard.

The American Constitution, God bless it,

says that you have a right to your opinion

and you can keep it to yourself if you want to.

And l was finally acquitted by the courts of the USA

and vindicated, l believe, in this opinion.

So if somebody comes up and asks me am l a communist,

l say, ''You can ask me any old question, you can call me all names,

''now you call me a traitor to my country, l'll sue you''.

But you can call me any kind of a communist, socialist, anarchist

upside-down, right-side-up, nudist, vegetarian

and l say you got a right to your opinions, l've got a right to my opinions.

About the songs, l'll tell you.

lf there's any song l sing that you think is wrong,

you ask me, cos l'll be glad to talk about them.

That's my public life, singing songs.

The influence of Pete Seeger

cannot be underestimated in this whole thing.

Pete Seeger is the guy that kept the whole scene going.

ln British terms, he was the governor of the scene.

Guthrie spent the last 15, 16 years of his life,

dying in his early '50s,

unable to do anything but lie in a hospital bed.

Pete Seeger, on the other hand,

continued doing the benefits, doing the concerts,

did the famous world tour in the early 1960s

where he went around the world playing American folk music,

coming back with a song or two from each country.

One can argue he not only kept the American folk tradition alive,

that he started the world music tradition in the United States.

Well, Pete was very important in the New York folk scene,

in that Pete and Woody

and Brownie McGhee

and Sonny Terry and Leadbelly,

they were somehow the ones we regarded as the real thing.

Well, l mean, l was also aware of, in a sense, the realer thing -

people like Clarence Ashley

and Charlie Poole and the Carter Family.

And we were trying to learn,

to some extent, to play like they did.

Well, l remember when l first started...

l started in January '45,

two months before l turned 1 7.

And l remember doing things, playing...

And when l discovered something Woody did was this...

this hammer on, then l started...

And l would use that at every possible place.

lt got to the point where l was overloading everything l did with that.

Till it was coming out of my ears.

And then, eventually, l learned, ''l'm sort of overdoing it

''and they don't overdo it like that''.

But it was a way of learning the new trick.

lf Woody Guthrie was lionised by Dylan and the folk-music scene

as being the real thing,

this also applied to another outsider, Huddie Ledbetter,

more commonly known as Leadbelly.

Leadbelly's history, in brief, was he was a musical prodigy

who was in jails in Texas and Louisiana for murder.

Both times, self-defence.

A typical, you know, artistic temperament and that kind of thing.

But anyway, he eventually sang his way out.

ln Louisiana's State Penitentiary goes John A. Lomax,

Library of Congress curator,

collector of American folk songs.

They were on field trips for the Library of Congress, John and Alan Lomax.

When they got to Texas and Louisiana,

they were finding all these wonderful singers

who knew spirituals and blues and songsters

and everyone pointed him...

pointed the Lomaxes to Leadbelly

as being the really primo songster,

you know, repertoire of 500 songs and instant recall.

Just once more, Leadbelly.

That's fine, Leadbelly. You're a fine songster.

l never heard so many good Negro songs.

Thank you. l sure hope you send Governor O.K. Allen

a record of that song l made up about him cos l believe he'll turn me loose.

Leadbelly, l don't know this governor. You mustn't expect too much of me.

Governor Pat Neff of Texas, he turned me loose

when he heard the song l made up about him.

So, you were in the Texas Penitentiary, too, Leadbelly?

Yeah, l started 35 years for murder, but it wasn't my fault.

A man was trying to cut my head off.

That's mighty bad, Leadbelly.

l believe Governor O.K. Allen, if you send him a record of that song,

l believe he'll turn me loose.

Leadbelly, l'll try.

Thank you, sir, thank you, sir. Thank you.

Leadbelly was paroled

and he was paroled in the custody of John Lomax.

And for the next few years he was a chauffeur

for John Lomax

and really had to toe the line

and it was a real massa relationship.

Yes, Mr John Lomax is staying here.

He's in room 109.

ls that on the first floor?

Yep.

Hey, hold on a minute.

Come in.

Boss, here l am.

Leadbelly. What are you doing here?

No use you trying to run away, Boss.

l came here to be your man.

l'd like to work with you the rest of my life.

You got me out of that Louisiana Pen.

You can't work for me.

You're a mean boy. You killed two men.

Please don't talk that way, Boss.

- Have you got a pistol? - No, but l got a knife.

Let me see it.

What do you do with that?

l'll use it on somebody that bother you, Boss.

Please, Boss, take me with you.

You'll never have to tie your shoe-strings any more

if you keep me with you.

All right, Leadbelly. l'll try you.

Thank you. l'll drive you all over the United States

and l'll sing all the songs for you.

You be my big boss and l'll be your man. Thank you, sir.

That lasted for, l guess, a year or two

and then he was pretty much on his own, you know.

The Lomaxes tried to promote him.

John Lomax does take the Louisiana Negro convict to be his man.

Takes him to his home in Connecticut,

where Leadbelly's longtime sweetheart, Martha Promise,

is brought up from the South for a jubilant wedding.

Then hailed by the Library of Congress's music division

as its greatest folk-song find in 25 years,

Leadbelly's songs go into the archives of the great national institution.

ln liberal circles he was hailed

because they realised that he was a songster of the people

and sang topical songs and that kind of thing.

And to a lot of people he was a freak.

l mean, he was held up for exhibition, you know.

''Here's this guy that killed people and he sings songs''.

Tremendously influential guy.

You couldn't characterise him as a blues singer

or a gospel singer.

He did everything. He was a songster in the truest sense of the word.

And an all-pervasive influence on Woody,

who played and sang with him.

As far as Dylan is concerned,

the connection, however remote, really is linear

because you have Leadbelly,

Pete Seeger, the Weavers,

Oscar Brand - you know, the people who were active,

the political singer-songwriters,

and then filtering down to the '60s,

where we have the newer people coming,

like Dylan and, after him, Springsteen

and some of the others from Greenwich Village.

Another blues artist championed by Alan Lomax

was Blind Willie McTell,

the subject of a Dylan song recorded on the lnfidels sessions.

Famously, Dylan finally writes a song

naming one of these old, blues guys that he's been influenced by.

ln 1983, he records Blind Willie McTell.

That's the title of the song.

Every stanza ends with ''No one'' or ''Nobody'', depending which stanza.

''No one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell''.

As a teenager, l mean, l was enthralled by his guitar playing

and by his... the poetry of his songs, you know,

and the odd cadence of his voice, that kind of thing.

He was very mysterious.

He is one of those voices you can recognise immediately.

And Dylan will have heard him first

on the Sam Charters compilation LP, The Country Blues,

which was issued to accompany Charters' book of the same name

in late 1959.

And one of the shining tracks

on that album is McTell's Statesboro Blues.

And it's singing about the town that he grew up in.

Wasn't born there. He was born elsewhere in Georgia.

What interested me was McTell's unique voice,

but also the fact that he's from Georgia, not Mississippi,

which is what most people write about.

And he challenges every sort of stereotype

that people have in their heads about old blues singers.

l think a lot of Dylan fans were surprised when Dylan sang

''No one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell''

because when they then went and listened to McTell,

they found this almost Roy Orbison-ian tenor voice,

this sweet, clear, light voice.

He wasn't one bit the sort of pleasingly primitive,

rasping, Howlin' Wolf, Charley Patton figure

that people are so fond of regarding as...

You know, the more primitive the better,

the more authentic the better.

So, for many people, McTell was actually a bit on the lightweight side.

And then l heard Blind Willie McTell

and it was like...

getting a crush on his sound.

lt was like, l used to get crushes on these poets

and be all into their words and everything,

and then Blind Willie McTell completely blew me away.

Blind Willie McTell has a voice that's like pure sex.

No, it is so awesome.

So then, basically, l think my biggest influence,

my realest influence, is Blind Willie McTell.

And l just sewed this on my hoodie.

The hoodie's not worth it, it's a crappy hoodie, but l...

When Dylan comes to recording material by McTell

on the World Gone Wrong album,

he sings an old ballad that McTell does, Delia,

and he also sings one of McTell's early 1930s masterpieces,

Broke Down Engine Blues.

Above all, McTell is an interesting man

in an interesting time and place.

An under-attended place, Georgia,

and an under-attended time still.

He was born in 1903, he died in '59...

literally about ten weeks

before he might have been rediscovered

and plonked up onto one of those coffee-house stages,

where he would have had no trouble whatever

coping with a young, white audience.

The reasons for the rise of blues and old-time music,

especially for those like Dylan with left-wing sympathies,

are various and complex, both aesthetic and political.

After a brutal Great Depression in the 1930s in America

and brutal depression elsewhere in the world,

the Left in America witnessed its problems,

and the way to confront its problems.

One of those problems was not just that they had

a political agenda they wanted to get across,

as they didn't know how to get it across.

They had adapted from the Wobblies in the 1880s, 1890s,

the idea of sing-alongs at their meetings,

to sort of get the crowd that was assembled excited

and sort of create a family feel

and make a large auditorium feel more intimate.

Once upon a time, we had a group of union people in America.

There were many of them on the west coast.

They used to call them the Wobblies, lWWs.

And they had a little songbook they used to put out.

They were frankly in favour of changing the economic system.

Seeger and Guthrie, at a sing-along in Seattle in the early 1940s,

coined the word ''hootenanny'' and got that word around.

And they somehow stumbled across, in the '40s,

''lf we'd use these sing-alongs and use folk music

''and use American songs that most people know or should know,

''we will create a patriotic, American,

''wholesome feel for what we're doing.

''And that will help play down and placate and pacify

''those that feel we're too close to the Communist Party''.

The communists found that folk singing achieved their purpose

and they were able to use very specific propaganda lines

of which l'm going to give examples.

Many people would never willingly listen to a communist speak

or perhaps even read a book written by a known communist,

but the communists knew how to use the softening-up process

to prepare the fertile minds of youth for their propaganda.

Well, l'm thinking of my own feelings.

l mean, l came from a reasonably educated family...

and a left-wing family

and l had the feeling, ''This is the music of the people''.

And that was an important concept for someone on the left, somehow,

rather than, ''This is the music of the big corporations''.

We're not singing songs about pie in the sky.

We're listening to one person with a banjo

or four people with stringed instruments.

We're singing about a railroad coming through,

we're singing about jobs coming through,

we're singing cowboy songs from the west,

we're singing She'll Be Comin' Around The Mountain,

Wildwood Flower.

We're singing songs that are as American as apple pie or as baseball.

And when they discovered that folk music

could be this vehicle to assemble the troops

and a vehicle to bring everybody together

while getting across a political message, they hit paydirt.

But for Dylan and others,

the attraction of the music was not just political.

lt appealed on a far deeper and more profound level.

The America that's sort of handed on a plate to Dylan

seems so bland and pre-packaged

that he needs an antidote to it.

He needs something that feels more real and more urgent.

And like many other people, artists of the time,

including many people on the left,

they went back to Americana,

to what we now call American roots music -

it wasn't called that at the time -

because they see in that something more authentic

than, if you like, airbrushed, Hollywood America

or Broadway musical America.

There's all these American murder ballads.

that have inexplicable violence.

One minute they're saying ''l love you''

and then the man's hitting the woman over the head.

Yeah, like Knoxville Girl, which is based on...

The Banks Of The Ohio is a good one.

Banks Of The Ohio is the same way.

l mean, he's...

Man and woman walk by the river, man picks up stick, hits woman...

He says, ''Will you marry me?''. She says, ''Yes''.

He throws her in the river and kills her.

Knoxville Girl, they go for a walk and he just throws her in the water.

There's no motivation whatsoever,

but in the antecedents -

they come from England or lreland -

there's always some kind of, you know, hint about the fact that she's pregnant or...

People go in the woods to have sex in Europe.

ln America they go in the woods to kill each other.

What Dylan finds in the language of Guthrie's Bound For Glory

and then, soon after, in the language of the old blues masters

and the great country singers and all of the artists collected on

Harry Smith's wonderful Anthology Of American Folk Music,

is a language that seems more idiomatic,

more democratic, more rough-hewn,

truer to the realities of life.

Less polished, less slick.

lt's not the language of Hollywood,

it's not the language of Broadway musicals.

lt seems to him to have a greater authenticity

and a deeper truth.

And he imbibes all that, he takes all that influence,

and in a sense, he personalises it and he modernises it.

ln Chronicles, Dylan writes beautifully about this.

The point he keeps coming back to

is almost that he can't explain the appeal,

but that the attraction operates on such a deep level

that you don't know for sure

what these strange images mean

but they unleash emotions, deep emotions, inside you.

And the format, which is essentially

a simple format of repeated verses,

which you can also find in the Bible, of course,

it does two things. One is it makes it easier to memorise

and easier to popularise

and that's not a bad thing.

l think that, with very few exceptions,

when Dylan has departed from the basic format of popular folk music -

verse, chorus - he's rarely been so good.

To understand this old-time music,

it is necessary to trace it back to the source,

either to the blues or to the old English, lrish and Scottish folk songs.

ln America, these ballads seem to have been preserved almost intact

from when they first came over with the original settlers.

A lot of people today are very aware

that a song like The House Carpenter

comes from the song The Daemon Lover,

which is from around 1660 or so forth.

And they wonder, how did it survive

in the United States of America for hundreds of years.

lt mutated a bit, but it's identifiable as The Daemon Lover.

Doc Watson sings it, you can say, ''That is The Daemon Lover''.

lf you've heard or read the Child ballad lyric of The Daemon Lover,

it's the same song.

How could that have happened to that song and so many songs?

We know that when the ships came over

they don't just bring immigrants, they bring the immigrants' culture.

On those ships, what was brought over

would have been mobile, light, easy-to-move instruments.

The key one, not the only one,

but the key one is the fiddle,

which is the primary, dominant instrument

in country and western music.

And when the fiddle went into the Appalachian mountains,

it stayed there.

What happened in America, if you can follow me here,

is those early immigrants,

and their songs, music, food, dress and culture,

clung to the Eastern Seaboard.

The Appalachians were the first great barrier.

They never really conquered the Appalachians

as a mountain range, in getting over it.

People went into the Appalachians,

as in western North Carolina,

one of the great repositories for American folk music,

but they couldn't get much through the Appalachians.

Not only were they left there,

when electricity came in, in the teens and the '20s

of the 20th century,

they were the last people to get electricity.

Which means until Roosevelt started having his obviously socialistic,

rural, electric power co-operatives,

nobody wanted to bring electricity to Appalachia.

So those people had, for the last 150, 1 75 years,

the exact same songs over and over and over,

like The Daemon Lover mutating into The House Carpenter.

They didn't get electric lights,

they didn't get the Grand Ole Opry on the airwaves,

they didn't get this or get that. They got it last.

Funnily enough, when Appalachia was explored or exploited,

whatever phrase you wanna use,

what did they come down from those hills with?

The banjo from West Africa, that they'd had for 1 75 years.

The fiddle that they'd had for 1 75 years.

The mandolin which they'd had for, say, 100-and-something years.

Those are the three key instruments

of folk music, of bluegrass music, of country and western.

ln the Appalachians, not only the song

but forms of speaking English were preserved.

Cecil Sharp famously went roving round the Appalachians

early in the 20th century

and found intact an incredible, a rich variety of song

from a couple of hundred years earlier. Yeah.

But the real staying power of this material

is its magical quality,

which is something Bob Dylan talks about,

specifically when he's differentiating between traditional song

and the kind of protest material...

and Tin Pan Alley material that he found so boring.

He says this in the Playboy interview in '66,

when he is at his most, you know, druggy and hip

and unstraightforward.

At the height of that period, he talks in that delightful interview.

He says traditional music won't die, can't die.

These songs about roses growing out of people's brains

and people who turn into swans,

they're not going to die.

lt's political music -

those are the songs that are going to die. They're already dead.

And he talks elsewhere about the mystery of traditional song.

And that's what preserves it, really.

Because there isn't any authentic version.

A song that Dylan uses on World Gone Wrong in 1993,

which he says in the notes that he gets from Tom Paley -

Love Henry, this very ancient ballad.

But you can find a version in Arkansas

that's completely different from the version you can find in Middle England.

And so on.

lt's not as if there's one, preserved Appalachian version.

There's always these different variants everywhere.

That was a version called Henry Lee

and here's the Love Henry,

the one that l got from the Alabama folk songs book,

and that Dylan apparently got from me.

And so on. Very different sound from the...

One of the earliest things that happens to Dylan

in terms of discovering repertoire

and the breadth of the musical world that he can inherit,

is the Harry Smith anthology, American Folk Song.

He was an avant-garde film-maker.

He made very, very strange kinds of stuff,

going back to Daliesque stuff from - and Jean Cocteau -

you know, around 1930, that kind of stuff.

And also a poet.

And he was a guy whose musical breadth

of traditional roots music was unbelievable.

Harry Smith was a west coast artist,

the archetypal American misfit/bohemian,

who dabbled in almost everything.

He was a big collector and archivist

of Native American lndian artefacts,

music and artwork.

His anthology, the Harry Smith anthology,

took three and a half or four years

of commercially released 78s just from this one intense period.

And he put out this set around 1950, thereabouts,

four Folkways, with six LPs.

And there was everything. There was Cajun music,

there was Blind Willie Johnson, there was blues,

it was white string bands, country string bands,

white solo banjo players, all that kind of stuff.

lt was the very first time that white and black, old records

had been compiled together,

cheek by jowl, on the same compilation.

Everything in the Anthology Of American Folk Music, Harry Smith's thing,

all those were commercial, high-selling records, you know.

They were not little pieces of weirdness or Americana...

These aren't field recordings, by any means.

Yeah, they were professional recordings,

like Robert Johnson's recordings.

That wasn't a field recording, that wasn't some kind of academic exercise.

Those were records that were made for money.

They were good records by the standards of the time.

Harry's knowledge of music was absolutely astonishing.

His sleeve notes for that particular anthology were wonderful.

He did a succinct description of each song, for instance.

l mean, Froggy Would A-Wooing Go

was summarised as sort of,

''Frog...'' What was it? ''Frog, mouse nuptials nixed by parents'' or something.

lt was one of those... Astonishing stuff.

Certainly, everybody in the Village who was a musician, had it.

lf they didn't necessarily own a copy,

they had a reel-to-reel tape recording.

And until Sam Charters' 1959 collection,

The Country Blues,

on which Dylan would have for the first time heard, for instance,

Statesboro Blues by Blind Willie McTell...

Until the Sam Charters, Harry Smith was absolutely it.

He was a key to, you know,

all this old music on record.

Many, many years later,

Harry Smith was living in the spare room at Allen Ginsberg's apartment

and Allen brought Dylan round to meet Harry for the first time.

Harry, typically, refused to leave his room

so Dylan never did get to meet him.

lt's absolutely classic.

lf he could possibly do something to damage his career

or generally make people pissed off, Harry was your man.

On the back of the Harry Smith collection,

a lot of artists from the '20s and '30s were rediscovered

and brought to the folk clubs of Greenwich Village.

lt was the first time that we had heard a lot of these musical forms

and it really set us to start

not only exploring from a recordings point of view,

but going out into the field and finding these people.

Look at the people we rediscovered.

When l say ''we'' l'm talking in a generic sense.

Son House, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt.

l once was talking to Hurt about his rediscovery

and he said, ''What kind of rediscovery?

''l recorded for Okeh in 1928, '29

''and l went back to Mississippi and l never moved.

''No one ever came after me''.

Mississippi John Hurt was a guy who made recordings in the '20s

which everybody found absolutely wonderful.

They're not really blues. They're songs from the 19th century

played in this intricate guitar style.

Collectors, people who collected these old 78s,

decoded them. They listened so carefully

and heard references to this town called Avalon.

They looked on a map and there's a tiny town in Mississippi called Avalon.

So they went to Avalon.

And there he was, sitting on his front doorstep,

where he was when the scout from the record company in the '20s found him.

They brought him to the Newport Folk Festival,

took him round to coffee houses and he had a fantastic time.

He loved every minute.

He made money, he gave some money to his wife and his kids

and then died of old age.

And it was a wonderful saga.

Mississippi John Hurt was only one of the performers from the '20s

who inspired Bob Dylan

and whose careers were reborn in the early '60s.

We had an organisation in New York called Friends of Old Time Music.

We brought some people up, some of the genuine country musicians,

the old-time country musicians, up to New York.

One of the first groups we had up

was Clarence Ashley and his group,

which consisted of Clarence Ashley, Doc Watson,

Clint Howard, Fred Price and Gaither Carlton.

Now, some of us there were familiar with Ashley

and had heard a lot of this music before.

But for most of the public, Ashley was an almost unknown name.

And so, in order to get people to come in, we had to be on the bill, too.

So it was New Lost City Ramblers and Ashley's group.

Ashley's adaptation of traditional songs

such as The House Carpenter, with Coo-Coo Bird,

were amongst the repertoire of Bob Dylan

and many of the '60s folk club circuit.

Ashley's one of those - there's so many in this genre -

that had great success, briefly,

great success but briefly, in the late 1920s.

When the '30s rolled around -

you had the stock market crash in October 1929 -

the record industry, it's comparable today, was doing extremely well.

A lot of people were getting Victrolas,

which you cranked up,

put this nail-like looking stylus down upon a vinyl record

and played a 78rpm recording.

A lot of Americans had that.

But after the stock market crash of October 1929,

record sales went in the tank.

But Ashley, he's one of those guys that had his big splash,

recorded these 78s and then the lights went out.

And it remained dark for 30, 40 years,

until Tom Paley or John Cohen

or Joe Boyd or whoever,

Paul Nelson, went and rediscovered these guys.

ln New York, Dylan improved as a stage performer to such an extent

that a review of one of his concerts in the New York Times

led to a record contract with Columbia.

The interesting thing about what Dylan says about making his first album

is he didn't want to put his best stuff on there.

He didn't want to sort of make the first album

a display of all his talents,

a revealing of all he could do.

He always wanted to keep something in reserve.

And so, if you like,

there are surprising things on that first album,

things that he wasn't singing every night in the folk clubs.

Baby, Let Me Follow You Down

is a song with many different versions and roots,

going back to Memphis Minnie and Joe McCoy.

Can l Do lt For You, Parts 1 and 2,

hundreds of people do it and Dylan takes it specifically from Eric von Schmidt,

who's one of the Cambridge crowd, if you like.

And he says he takes it from him,

in a very attractive intro to the song on that album,

in which he gives Rick von Schmidt,

as he mischievously calls him there, a namecheck.

l say mischievously because no one ever called him Rick von Schmidt.

He's always Eric von Schmidt.

So, a sideways tribute, if you like,

and in that sense, very typical of Dylan, maybe, too.

One of the many performers who recorded Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,

and an artist Dylan would have learnt from first-hand,

was Reverend Gary Davis.

This song come to me when l was waking up

in Lake George, New York.

Reverend Gary Davis was the master of an old-fashioned style,

kind of ragtime guitar mixed with gospel.

He was from South Carolina, where there was a great tradition along the east coast

of these finger-picking, arpeggio-based,

sort of blues guitar styles.

Very, very different from Mississippi, from Delta blues,

which is much darker and more abstract, in a way.

And Gary was part of that school.

And a nephew or something, l think, brought him up to the Bronx

in the '40s, the late '40s, l think...

when he was too old to make it along the back roads,

sort of as an itinerant preacher and singer in South Carolina.

And somehow, he connected with some of the young kids

who were starting to learn how to play folk guitar.

And he became a teacher

and a lot of young musicians that Dylan would have known,

Stefan Grossman being one,

who sort of absorbed everything he possibly could from Reverend Gary

and then he himself became a teacher of guitar

and you can find Stefan Grossman's guitar lessons on DVD.

And that all started with lessons from Reverend Gary Davis

and a lot of the New York folkies were...

To the degree that they had real skill on the guitar,

very often it was because they'd taken lessons from Gary.

Now, l had two slightly damaged 78rpm, ten-inch records

of someone called Blind Gary,

who sang religious songs.

An absolutely, spectacularly marvellous guitarist.

And one of the people they brought up during that concert

was someone they introduced as Reverend Gary Davis.

And l'd never heard of anyone under that name.

But they led a blind man out on stage.

''A blind man with a guitar,

''and religious, Reverend, and the name is Gary.

''Could it be Blind Gary, whose...?''

And it was! l was so excited about that.

Now, he was spectacular.

He and Blind Blake

must have been about the two best guitarists ever

in the American folk and blues range.

lt's interesting for somebody that's known primarily, not exclusively,

as a songwriter -

the first album of Bob Dylan only has two original songs on it.

He touches on Woody Guthrie, certainly,

he touches on Leadbelly.

He does the Josh White arrangement of House Of The Rising Sun.

He does some Jesse Lonecat Fuller type stuff.

And it's odd that you think John Hammond Senior

signed this guy

because of how he interpreted folk songs and the image that he gave across.

He did not sign Bob Dylan as a songwriter

cos, as l said, the first album only has two original numbers.

He signed Dylan obviously because he feels

Dylan is a link in the traditional music chain.

One of the key tracks - in fact, the last - on Dylan's first album,

is Blind Lemon Jefferson's See That My Grave ls Kept Clean.

Jefferson wasn't the first male blues singer to record.

But he was the most successful, the first superstar

in 1920s blues vocal-and-guitar music.

His See That My Grave ls Kept Clean

was, interestingly, issued both as a blues song

and as a religious song

on different couplings by Paramount.

But while it's difficult to actually tie down

exactly where the origination of this, who actually composed this...

Copyright control will hold that Blind Lemon Jefferson holds the rights,

but the song was about, was known to have been a familiar song

under different titles throughout Texas at the time -

One Kind Favor, Two White Horses -

there was all variations of it.

Jefferson's version was probably a little bit of a wry mis-type

of Gus Williams's See That My Grave ls Kept Green.

This was recorded by various country artists -

The Carter Family and Bela Lam.

But following in the footsteps of his idol, Woody Guthrie,

many of Bob Dylan's songs, especially those from the second album,

Freewheelin' Bob Dylan onwards,

are based on older melodies, either in a blues or ballad form.

But in the folk world, this is seen as part of the ongoing tradition.

lt was part of the process.

Martin Carthy, the English folk singer. He, if you like,

taught Dylan a couple of songs, which Dylan rushed off and rewrote.

Martin Carthy doesn't feel that he was used by Bob Dylan.

He does feel that it was part of the folk process, if you like.

Dylan was mopping up everything.

The songs Dylan learnt from Martin Carthy

were Lord Franklin's Lament, the basis for Bob Dylan's Dream,

and Scarborough Fair, which Dylan used

as the foundation for Girl From The North Country.

ln 1964, with the Another Side Of Bob Dylan album,

Dylan openly declared that he was moving away

from the political, traditional folk, arena

and, along with the finger-pointing lyrics,

he lost the acoustic sound and embraced electric rock and roll.

When he hears the Beatles - and he also hears the Byrds

doing the first electric versions of his own, earlier folk songs -

he says, ''l can do that''.

Many people said, ''You're just going commercial, Bob''.

''lt's just that he wants to make more money''.

The problems come when major artists seek bigger audiences

and then dumb down their work.

That's not what Dylan does.

What's his first big rock hit? Like A Rolling Stone.

lt's six minutes long,

it has a whole series of incredibly obscure verses

of the sort that you never found in Beatles music

or in any rock and roll.

The tone of it is vituperative and vicious.

lt's six minutes of anger.

He brings a completely novel, hard-edged

and decidedly uncommercial spirit

to the rock and roll format

and it becomes a huge hit.

ln fact, the music that Dylan makes

from '65 on...

l would say the three albums, Bringing lt All Back Home,

Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde,

represent the acme of his work

and, for me, the acme of popular culture...

in the 20th century.

And they're among the great works of art in any medium,

high culture or low culture, of the 20th century.

They've stood the test of time.

After Blonde On Blonde, Dylan turned once more

to his roots and simpler forms -

not the blues or the ballad tradition

but his other great love, country music.

His interest in this form

dated back to Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family in the '30s

up to Hank Williams and, more recently, Johnny Cash.

The Carter Family featured on Harry Smith's groundbreaking anthology,

and Bob Dylan used their song, Wayworn Traveller,

as the basis for Paths Of Glory

and, arguably, The Times They Are A-Changin'.

But the Carter Family's most enduring legacy

was Maybelle Carter's scratch-style, finger-picking guitar.

lt was a singing style, a sort of family singing style

with a couple of instruments.

And particularly, Maybelle's style on the guitar got to be...

Boy, it was the fundament of a lot of modern country playing

and, with a bit of elaboration,

became the kind of flat-picking style

that's used in bluegrass, too.

l'll try something in the style of the Carter Family.

Something like Maybelle's picking.

A strange thing about this song,

well, about a lot of their stuff,

was that there'd be odd irregularities in rhythm in it.

lt wasn't all straightforward and square.

You'll hear some strange things in this.

That's just a bit of it, a burst of it.

A.P. Carter heard people singing these songs

in different towns all around

and he knew these were gems and he knew they were worth recording,

worth saving and worth writing down,

albeit he didn't need to put them down in his name,

but that's just the way things were done back then.

But he, too, was searching for some kind of authenticity,

something real, some kind of meaningful song-line to hang on.

l think it's just Americans, in general,

are rootless people with no sense of home, no sense of place.

And maybe these songs make you feel like you have a place

that has a history, that has a tradition

and you're not just swimming in a vacuum of scary commodities.

Another country pioneer that Dylan admired

was the Singing Brakeman, Jimmie Rodgers.

l think he influenced the whole country genre

by showing white people that it was really OK

to work within the black tradition,

the white version of the black tradition.

Contrary to popular perception,

there was tremendous interplay between white and black musicians

in the '20s and '30s.

The popular mythology is the blacks were on the one side,

the whites on the other side, never the twain shall meet.

That was not the truth then.

When you spoke to, you know,

like l have, Mississippi John Hurt and a lot of other musicians

and they would tell you how they would play dates

with the white guys in the area.

This was nothing unusual.

From an early age, Dylan was a big fan of country music

and he talks about this in Chronicles.

ln particular, he talks about the influence of a number of major country artists -

Jimmie Rodgers and Johnny Cash, but especially Hank Williams.

lt's important for people whose idea about American country music

is that it's all rather slushy and sentimental

to understand that there is another tradition of American country music,

which is tragic and desperate

and is the music of struggle and poverty and loneliness.

And no one expresses that

more vividly and poignantly than Hank Williams.

Williams was a great songwriter.

ln common with Woody Guthrie,

the other major lyrical influence on the early Dylan,

he was an absolute master

of the economy of telling a short, tragic story with no waste

and making each word count.

There's a fascinating moment in the documentary, Don't Look Back,

in which Dylan, in a hotel room, picks up a guitar

and sings Hank Williams' masterpiece, Lost Highway,

which is a song about how the individual finds himself

completely alienated from and unable to communicate with

all kinds of other people.

The ethical mores that society gives him

just somehow don't fit him

but nor can he find true love.

And of course, in that song,

he uses the image ''like a rolling stone'',

the image of an individual rolling along,

free-rolling, not really in control of his destiny.

And at the time that Dylan sings that song -

he sings it beautifully, it's one of the high points of Don't Look Back -

within about a couple of months of that, he writes his own song,

Like A Rolling Stone.

So l think Williams is one of the major influences on Dylan.

But it's a little ironic

that when Dylan comes to make his own country record,

Nashville Skyline,

there's almost not a hint of Williams in it.

lnstead, it's the schlockier, domesticated,

more sentimental side of country music

that he echoes there, and not that iciness.

ln Williams sometimes, you really can feel the touch of the devil in it.

You can feel what it's like to be way out there,

all alone, with no hope at all.

He's one of the great artists of despair.

Even more than the rather saccharine Nashville Skyline,

The Basement Tapes and John Wesley Harding

were testament to Dylan's love of country music.

When you look at John Wesley Harding, those songs,

this is someone who's spent the year

focusing on great new originals

in a prolific songwriting period, but songs from where?

The Basement Tapes, which went before it,

are Dylan doing... l think he does four Johnny Cash songs.

He does songs, originals of his own, fooling around the basement,

with a very Hank Williams, Luke the Drifter, tenor to them.

Country and western really played a big part for our Bob in '67,

l am gonna guess as a reaction to psychedelia.

He never felt comfortable with

the big production values of psychedelia.

So, of course, when you get later in the year

and he's gonna record his first new record

of Bob Dylan material in 18 months,

what is John Wesley Harding reminiscent of?

A young Hank Williams. A young Hank Snow.

That kind of stark feel,

that would have appeared on Sun Records,

is obvious on John Wesley Harding.

You have Johnny Cash's strummed rhythm guitar,

a primitive but heartfelt vocal,

muted bass, muted drums.

That's the sound of John Wesley Harding, as well.

lt's a little more contemporary because Bob Dylan's Bob Dylan,

but he's been listening to these rootsy, country and western artists,

the Cashes, the Snows.

On Basement Tapes, they do a wonderful version

of several Carter Family songs.

He does a wonderful Wildwood Flower,

where Bob plays autoharp. Hard to believe, but he does.

But you cannot discuss what has shaped Bob Dylan's life and work

without digressing from the musical field

and examining his greatest literary and aesthetic influence, the Beats.

Dylan makes it clear in Chronicles that reading Kerouac, Ginsberg,

Burroughs and the other Beats was a huge influence on him.

lt's important to remember that the Beat movement

is intimately associated with the folk revival.

What you would have in the coffee houses

in the late '50s and early '60s

was a guy who'd stand up

or a woman who'd stand up with a guitar and play a couple of songs

and then a poet, or would-be poet, would stand up and declaim verses

which might be great and might be absolute rubbish,

but everyone had their chance.

There was a democratic spirit

in both the folk revival and the Beats, at their best,

that gave the confidence to Dylan and millions of others

to say ''l can be a poet. Oh, that's what writing poetry is''.

The big one for Bob Dylan is the Beat poets.

And like his desire to meet Woody Guthrie,

and the thrill he had when he became friends with Ramblin' Jack Elliott,

there's a reflection of that with the Beat poets.

He became buddies, dear buddies,

with Allen Ginsberg, as we all know.

And, as many people don't know, he was also close to guys like Michael McClure.

lf someone like that has something to say,

Dylan has a tendency to go moth-to-a-flame.

''l gotta get as close as l can to these people

''and learn as much as l can as quickly as l can''.

That's where part of Dylan's whole attitude,

his whole stance as an artist, is Beat.

lt's that refusal to rehearse properly,

it's a contempt for a certain kind of polished professionalism.

lt's a belief in the spontaneity of the moment.

Dylan's entire live-performance oeuvre,

right down the decades,

is a testament to the power of living in the moment, to trusting that.

Some of the things he gets from the Beats are the spontaneity,

the free association,

the contempt for the established parameters of high culture,

for the notion of what makes a great poem,

a perfectly formed artefact.

Ginsberg and the rest are saying, ''No, that's not what makes a great poem.

''What makes a great poem is spirit and rhythm and vision''.

ln other words, the Beat movement

is a challenge to high culture.

And a whole strand of Dylan

is about the fact that he sees what he's doing

as of equal value to anything in the great cultural tradition of the West

but he also sees it as being somehow more authentic

because it has an intimate relationship,

if you like, a democratic relationship with popular culture.

What he also gets from the Beats is this wonderful combination

of the language of the street

with the language of vision,

of visionary poetry,

whereas prior to that in American literature

you had naturalistic literature -

Theodore Dreiser, Nathanael West and so forth.

And you add the high-falutin', visionary stuff -

Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot.

The Beats say, ''No, we want it both ways.

''And what's more, we want it both ways

''because in academia you can't have it both ways''.

So they're anti-academic and Dylan is always anti-academic.

Dylan wasn't just influenced by the Beat poets as poets,

and as literature.

He was influenced by the Beat poets

as men and women, in the way they lived their lives.

People have talked of Bob Dylan sessions

where there's 1 7 people in the studio,

on the floor as the tape rolls.

Sometimes there's two bass players.

Think about that.

Everyone from Eric Clapton

to Scarlet Rivera to Bob Neuwirth

has talked about Dylan sessions.

And there's an accordion player, a pedal-steel player and a drummer.

And there's the aforementioned two bass players

and four guitar players and this and that.

Blood On The Tracks was a lot of that at first.

And you think, ''How can someone record that way?''

And l think it comes from the Beat poets.

What is in the moment and is of the moment

best represents the moment.

That's why Dylan has these extraordinary recording sessions

where he goes in, not having shown the band the song before.

They don't know what they're gonna play

and they maybe get two passes at it, just a couple of passes.

He may have his guitar in a different tuning

from the standard A440 Spanish tuning, as we call it.

He has a dropped-D tuning or open-G tuning or what have you.

So most of the musicians,

who can read certain chords if it's in Spanish tuning,

are now looking at a guy making weird chords that they don't know.

This is his modus operandi.

Where did he get such an off-kilter, if you'll allow me,

such a bizarre modus operandi?

From the Beat poets. From the City Lights bookstore.

lf the Beats were arguably the major poetic influence on Dylan,

you can also easily trace other seminal figures in his work.

ln one way, of course, he's a Beat poet with a guitar.

But at the same time,

you can hear Blake and the Bible in...

And you hear the Bible in Blake,

you hear the Bible in the blues.

All this stuff fuses together in Dylan.

l think, you know, that Robert Browning is there,

the dramatic monologue.

But whether Robert Browning

is as important as Robert Johnson is an open question.

But Dylan, as we've examined,

has always taken an anti-intellectual stance.

Dave Van Ronk has this conversation where he says,

''You know that song of yours, Hard Rain's Gonna Fall?

''That's really like Rimbaud or someone. D'you know the work of Rimbaud?''

And Dylan says, ''Who?''

And when Van Ronk goes round to his apartment a few months later

there's a compilation, an anthology of French Symbolist poetry,

which Dylan has obviously very heavily thumbed through and worked on.

And what he gets out of the Symbolist poetry he reads

is the idea that song lyrics don't have to be explicit.

That the meaning doesn't have to be reducible to a newspaper story.

That condensed and intense images

are themselves carriers of meanings

which cannot, need not be interpreted.

The other great influence on Dylan's work is religion,

specifically the Bible, and the depth and intensity of its language.

l think the origins of Dylan's interest in the Bible

are essentially linguistic.

lt's true that later on, much later on in his career

he says that he found some sort of spiritual truth in it

and l wouldn't gainsay that.

But initially, when he's writing his great music of the '60s,

in which there are many biblical references,

both in the folk and in the rock and roll period,

it is the same fascination

that he has for the language in Hank Williams

or the language in Robert Johnson.

lt is that it is a language

that seems to have a deeper mystery,

that is less smug and superficial

than the common language of newspapers and television screens.

l think what first attracts him to the Bible

is just the sheer, weird intensity of the language.

He enjoys that and it filters right into his music.

lf we continue to describe Bob Dylan's career as a journey,

at this point in time it is safe to say

that, as far as his recordings are concerned,

he has come full circle.

Dylan's last two records, which were Love And Theft,

which came out around 9/1 1 ,

and Modern Times, which was a number one album in the United States,

which is pretty darn good for a guy who's had a 40-year career...

He's now gone back to the wellspring where he gets his mail.

He's what we nominally call plain roots music.

He's doing songs that wouldn't be out of place

on the Charley Patton 78 like High Water Everywhere.

He's doing songs like Workingman's Blues #2,

which wouldn't be out of place on a Merle Haggard record.

He's apparently, and l think obviously,

looked in the mirror and thought, ''What is it that l do?

''Who am l and where do l get my mail?''

He's taken a step back and gone back in once again

to the roots music that inspired him so much on his first album.

And playing that music again,

playing it in a very honest, straightforward,

not primitive but yet elemental way. And look what's happened.

He's had two great aesthetic successes in a row

and two great commercial successes.

To summarise Bob Dylan's songs and career,

to neatly label and categorise them, is impossible,

and against all the instincts and the philosophy of his work.

From the early '60s onwards,

he has always rejected being packaged and defined

by either journalists, his fans or the record business.

But if, as we have seen,

Dylan's work has been inspired and shaped by those that had gone before,

it is safe to say that he also equally inspired and shaped

those who followed in his footsteps.

After Dylan, the popular song

and the role of the singer-songwriter

would never be the same again.