You want one? Blank asked why he'd want a cigarette end. That means you can have your own Bob Dylan. Blank, who has a day job, is well-balanced. But there was an incident when I was leaving another Dylanologist's house. He stopped me and mentioned another collector. If anything happens to me Well, remember, tell the police that the guy who did it was How on earth, you find yourself asking, did adulation for a Minnesota shopkeeper's son become so intense?
Some years ago, at a retirement home in Phoenix, Arizona, I interviewed an elderly lady who'd been a friend of Beatty, Dylan's mother, in Hibbing, Minnesota.
A little shy. One night, this young man came on with a mouth organ and guitar. He was relatively unknown, then. I thought he was extraordinary. I said, 'I'd love to get Bob Dylan for this. Saville put Dylan in the May Fair Hotel, where he was thrown out for smoking weed. He came to stay with us. He spent a lot of time in art galleries. Very forthright in his beliefs," says Saville, referring to Dylan's democratic libertarianism, "though he wasn't a political animal, even then.
But people who say very little, especially if they pause, come across as more profound than they really are. Abram Zimmerman, Bob's father, ran a hardware store. His son adopted his new surname while in college at Minneapolis almost certainly out of affection for Dylan Thomas. He was just 20 when Saville brought him over to London and still in thrall to his first great influence, Woody Guthrie, the Oklahoma folksinger whose Midwest accent and vagrant history he did his best to mimic.
As late as October , Dylan would be telling the distinguished critic Nat Hentoff - usually nobody's fool - that, as Hentoff wrote in the New Yorker : "He ran away from home seven times - at ten, at 12, at 13, at 15, at and-a-half, at 17 and at Philip Saville's recollections are in marked contrast to the tone of others who met him in England around this time. There are more than a thousand books relating solely, or in significant part, to Bob Dylan.
Dylan does not emerge as an especially sympathetic figure; the many reverses he experienced in the battle to maintain monogamous relationships are recounted by Hadju and numerous other biographers, and alluded to rather more forgivingly in his own memoir, Chronicles: Volume One.
He is pictured on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan arm-in-arm with then girlfriend Suze Rotolo who, Dylan writes, "had a smile that could light up a street full of people" [not literally, of course, that would be hazardous]. Bob Dylan is known to have been married twice: to Sara and to backing singer Carolyn Dennis There have been a number of other significant girlfriends. Dylan shared certain failings with fellow dandy Oscar Wilde: a propensity for occasional dissembling, minor plagiarism, reckless intoxication, infidelity and a sometimes cruel edge to his caustic wit, but with Dylan, as with Wilde, these sins are, if not excused, then brilliantly outshone by the work.
There are other songwriters of his age whose legacy will endure: Randy Newman and Leonard Cohen prime among them. But whereas their work - however brilliant - has a polished, fundamentally orthodox quality, Dylan, at his stunning best, seems to be in touch with another reality. Not at first. But he turned out to be extraordinary. He worked in a way that was very different from anything I'd ever experienced.
The connection I had with Bobby was telepathic, and when I use that word, I mean it. Some of those numbers were done in one or two takes. Everything with Bob was intuitive. Bruce shows me his copy of Chronicles. It's carefully inscribed, in the author's hand: "To Bruce. It was better to be in chains with friends than in a garden with strangers. Given Dylan's secretive nature, hearing that he was going to publish a memoir in felt a bit like being told that Lord Lucan would be next week's guest on Desert Island Discs.
One distinguished British writer reviewed Chronicles as follows: "If you are not weeping with gratitude by the end, then frankly the age has passed you by. I suspect the reviewer delivered this glowing endorsement in order to get his name on the cover of the paperback, and consequently must have been weeping for a second time when that edition finally appeared, and he found he had been out-grovelled by a man from the Daily Telegraph. Chronicles makes for fascinating reading but is extraordinarily devoid of emotion; very like Scorsese's No Direction Home , it is compelling in terms of musicology and folk history but, biographically speaking, a masterclass in the art of non-disclosure.
Even his most fundamental relationships are blurred: Dylan mischievously refers to his spouse throughout Chronicles only as "my wife", making it impossible, in some passages, to know which one he's referring to. But how can you not forgive the man who wrote the following paragraph? The one thing about her that I always loved was that she was never one of those people who thinks that someone else is the answer to their happiness. She has always had her own built-in happiness.
I valued her opinion, and I trusted her. Even Joan Baez, who was betrayed by Dylan on a number of levels, and who complains that he was "rarely tender and seldom reached out to anticipate another's needs", acknowledges that "his humour was dry and splendid". Dylan toured Britain in both and On the latter tour, ardent traditionalist John Cordwell, enraged by Dylan's second, amplified half of the set at Manchester Free Trade Hall, famously shouted "Judas!
In , Dylan had been greeted by a national press who patronised him on the basis that a pop singer must, by definition, be less intelligent than they were: an assumption which, in Dylan's case, proved dangerous. One of the many bizarre press conferences on that tour, captured in DA Pennebaker's magnificent documentary, Don't Look Back , is exquisitely reprised by Cate Blanchett, who gives a stunning performance as Dylan in Todd Haynes' movie, I'm Not There. Reporter: "How many people who major in the same musical vineyard in which you toil are protest singers?
That is, people who use their music to protest the social state in which we live today? You know something? I never envied one of the famous people I've known. Ever since then, he has struggled to keep his distance from his huge and obsessed fanbase. His elusiveness has, naturally enough, only increased their inquisitiveness. Dylan moved out of Bearsville after the Woodstock festival, complaining that his house was besieged by "druggies". Weberman was the embodiment of everything Bob Dylan was striving to avoid: an invasive fan who saw him as an oracle, and was maniacally dedicated to propelling Dylan back into the spotlight.
Weberman, self-proclaimed inventor of the science of "garbology", rooted through Dylan's bins in the early Seventies. For reasons that are still hard to explain, Dylan let himself be taped speaking on the phone to Weberman in January The bizarre recording is still commercially available.
AJ harangues him for his sluggishness in opposing the Vietnam War. One exchange goes as follows AJ Weberman now lives in a comfortable apartment in Manhattan, purchased with proceeds whose source he has never sought to conceal. For a while we are joined by his fellow counterculture activist, Dana Beal. A few months later, I turn on the news to see that Dana has been apprehended on Highway 6, Ashland, Nebraska, in a van found to contain lb of marijuana.
AJ will post on Facebook that this cargo which weighs far more than he does was for "Dana's personal use". Talking to AJ Weberman, you quickly sense how wrong it is to accuse Dylan of being paranoid about securing his privacy. Many of his fans can be over-defensive of him: the screenwriter Mark Jacobson, reviewing Dylan's interminable movie Renaldo And Clara , disliked the movie to the point that he actually wished the singer dead in print: a remark which, Jacobson tells me, provoked messages causing him to fear for his safety.
Weberman, you sense, is not so much a man on the road to madness, as someone who has arrived there, bought a property and is renting out rooms. Many of Dylan's songs are, in AJ's opinion, coded attacks on him. Others, as he claims in his incredibly libellous book RightWing Bob, are about Dylan's supposed experience in relation to heroin, HIV and racism. Dylan means how long before you realise blacks are nothing but manservants. Why a white dove? This song asks, 'How long before apartheid is going to work in America?
The answer is 'blowin' in the wind'. That means, hang the niggers from the trees. The day Dylan beat him up, Weberman says it felt like a privilege. He knocked me down. I was glad to see him, even though he was banging my head against the sidewalk. Afterwards these bums come over and say, 'Did he get much money? That was Bob Dylan. At one point I mention a relatively obscure Dylan composition called "Sign Language". Weberman looks appalled. Bob has never written a bad song.
Bob Dylan," he adds, with some warmth, "is a genius. Why would so secretive a man keep touring, and expose himself to huge audiences every year? It's not the money, colleagues say.
In he appeared on American current-affairs show 60 Minutes with Ed Bradley, who put the question to him. And I'm holding up my end. I spoke to Bradley a few months after he did the interview, and he agreed that, though Dylan smiles occasionally during this encounter, his body language is not that of a man who is joking.
Just taking a flier on this for a moment, and assuming that he has not entered into a pact with Satan, perhaps one advantage to touring is that, these days, the singer appears able to keep his distance just as well when on the road as off it. This was not always the case. The last writer to get close to Bob Dylan on an everyday basis was Larry "Ratso" Sloman, who began by accompanying him as a journalist on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour and wound up co-producing his video for "Jokerman".
Amid the notorious debauchery of the Rolling Thunder Revue, Ratso managed the not inconsiderable feat of standing out as sleazy; he was given his nickname inspired by Dustin Hoffman's low-life character in 's Midnight Cowboy by Joan Baez. Ratso bonded with Dylan after losing his temper in a hotel lobby in Vermont. I'm going home. There is one thing that never deserted him, I suggest to singer Kinky Friedman, who briefly travelled with the Rolling Thunder Revue, and that is his sense of humour.
Friedman recalls taking a flight when there were no first-class seats left. There are, according to one well-placed source, widespread misunderstandings about the way Bob Dylan works and lives.
First is the notion that he lives permanently on the road. This springs from the title of his Never Ending Tour, a phrase originally invented by a journalist. He stays in relatively modest hotels. When he goes out, though he has security, he isn't accompanied by dozens of bodyguards. Bob Dylan is extremely curious.
The great thing about being on the road is that it allows him to be anonymous without being isolated. And he really likes to be anonymous.
This view would seem to be confirmed by a few recent incidents involving the singer. It seems that the singer must have got his hands on a bottle and applied it with gusto one day in July , when he took a stroll away from his tour buses, which were parked outside a hotel in Long Branch, New Jersey.
When he wandered into the garden of a property displaying a For Sale sign, the occupants called complaining that an "eccentric-looking old man" was on their land, his hood raised against the heavy rain.
He was wearing black sweatpants tucked into black rain boots, and two raincoats with the hood pulled down over his head. The officer took him back to the bus, where she was shown his passport.
Creativity, Dylan says in Chronicles , "has to do with experience, observation and imagination. If any one of those elements is missing, it doesn't work. One of the most uncomfortable filmed interviews he ever gave - a title not easily gained - was in Toronto, with documentary director Christopher Skyes, in the star's trailer on the set of the film Hearts Of Fire.
Reg Presley of the Troggs, who appeared as a guitar-playing extra, told me he was approached on set by Dylan.
Richard Marquand, director of Hearts Of Fire , told Sykes, who was filming an Omnibus special, that the singer was "a pussycat" and "a joy" to work with. The director died of a heart attack before the film was released. Dylan, who is no stranger to using silence to intimidate, sketched Sykes during their brief session.
This allowed the singer to be even less voluble than normal, and put the director in the unenviable position of having to supply the bulk of the conversation. A pause.
He couldn't kinda grasp how this guy Schubert was writing these things. Where do your songs come from? Just as you think the session is going to grind to a humiliating end, Dylan volunteers one of the very few Zimmermanesque reflections ever captured on film. When you look through a window, say you pass a little pub, or an inn.
You look through the window and you see people talking and carrying on. You," he continues, avoiding the intimacy of the first person pronoun, "can watch outside the window and see them all being very real with each other. But when you walk into the room, it's over. I," he continues, repossessed by the spirit of Dylan, "don't pay any attention to it. He booked under a pseudonym, travelling, as any visitor is required to, on a shuttle bus that he boarded at Speke Hall.
His fellow passengers were three ladies from North Wales. Since he had his hood up on the bus, he went unrecognised, until he met the previous group of visitors coming the other way down the drive. It was like meeting Shakespeare. Speaking in the early Eighties, Bob Dylan said: "I don't think I'm going to be understood until a hundred years from now. When I'm dead, maybe people will realise that, and then figure it out.
Even now, it's certain that his reputation as an American legend in the tradition of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman is assured.
But is he a poet in the traditional sense? While it's true that Allen Ginsberg or TS Eliot would be anything but ashamed of a line like "the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face", from "Visions Of Johanna", they would most likely not have chosen to rhyme "kelp" with "help", as he does in his captivating eulogy to his first wife, "Sara". The truth is that, however much ink has been spilt on this subject and, for what it's worth, I write this as a former pupil of the late Stephen Wall, close collaborator of Dylan's chief academic advocate, Christopher Ricks, professor of humanities at Boston University it doesn't matter.
Dylan is, was and always will be rock'n'roll; the key to how he can get away with a line that looks ghastly on the page is simply the mesmeric power of his voice. But how about the widely held belief that Dylan's output experienced a hiatus for - depending on your view - two decades or more, from the late Seventies onwards? Not to mention the performances that came from returning to the folk canon for World Gone Wrong []. Much of the writing of power and worth since that time was predicted by that record.
He was wearing a soiled undershirt and had a cigarette dangling from his lips. As I watched incredulously, the ash on his cigarette grew longer as he peered over the open battery case into which he had just placed a plate assembly, until it finally broke off and fell inside.
Robert R. Christopher C. Kraft Jr. The Flight Directors are from left to right: Gerald D. Griffin , Eugene F. Kranz and Glynn S.
Especially as the Gemini and Apollo flights extended space travel to days-long missions, some of the astronauts quit, if only to avoid being miserable while smokeless in space for days. Wally Schirra, one of those photographed smoking at the Mercury 7 press conference, quit before flying on Apollo 7 in October , a mission he commanded, which lasted 11 days.
Seated at the console are Eugene F. Kranz foreground and Dr. Standing in front of the console are Dr. Charles Berry left , an unidentified man in the center and astronaut Elliot M. Al Worden was the command module pilot of Apollo A few weeks after the mission, he wrote an essay for the New York Times about what it was like to orbit the Moon, alone, while his fellow crew members explored the surface for three days.
The picture that ran with the essay shows Worden at his dining room table with his year-old daughter, Merrill. Ronald Evans was the command module pilot for Apollo 17, the last Moon landing mission. Charles Fishman , who has written for Fast Company since its inception, has spent the last four years researching and writing One Giant Leap , a book about how it took , people, 20, companies, and one federal government to get 27 people to the Moon.
You can preorder it here. Follow along at 50DaysToTheMoon. AWS Deloitte Genpact. Events Innovation Festival. Follow us:. By Charles Fishman 5 minute Read.
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