Chasing Dylan: Trying to get a word with the troubadour
HE’S one of the world’s most influential musicians with more than three dozen albums to his credit, but Bob Dylan prefers to let his music do the talking. Ahead of his Adelaide concert our music writer wonders if the secret to landing an interview is blowin’ in the wind.
SECURING an interview with Bob Dylan is … tricky. A chat with Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama or even the Pope are probably more achievable goals for a journalist than 20 minutes on the phone with Robert Zimmerman.
Late Australian mountaineer and writer Lincoln Hall once sent a copy of his book about climbing Mt Everest to Dylan’s manager Elliot Roberts, along with a request for a chat before his upcoming tour. Hall hoped that his amazing tales of derring-do might inspire Dylan to agree to a talk.
Roberts rejected the request with a note that read: “Climbing Mt Everest is easier than getting an interview with Bob Dylan”.
I’ve never climbed Everest, or indeed done anything likely to impress the world’s greatest living songwriter, so I long ago gave up believing that one day I’d talk to the boy from Duluth, Minnesota (although I ask every tour). My last request elicited the following brief email: “Mr Dylan does not do media interviews”.
That’s not strictly true though. He does do interviews, just not very many.
Someone who has interviewed Dylan (twice!) is rock journalist, author and promoter Stuart Coupe, and he says the experience is every bit as surreal as you might imagine.
His first interview was a face-to-face exclusive in an Auckland hotel bar during 1986’s True Confessions tour.
Coupe had convinced promoter Michael Gudinski to allow him to follow the tour and file stories back to Australia, but he knew an interview was a pipedream at best.
“I was standing with Gudinski towards the end of the Auckland show and he said, ‘You’re driving back with me to the hotel tonight. You’re talking to Dylan’,” Coupe recalls.
“Of course you’re never going to say no, but a little bit of prep time would be nice.”
Coupe produced a long feature article that was published around the world. Dylan hated it.
“He got angry for two reasons – one was that I said he had a limp handshake, and he just puts his hand out and gets you to move it up and down for him. Which is true, he makes no effort,” Coupe says. “The other thing that he got pissed off with was that we were kept waiting for a couple of hours, and I asked Gudinski what was happening and he said that every night Dylan goes to his room and calls his kids.
“Now, I thought that this made him a candidate for father of the year, and it wasn’t something that he should be embarrassed about, but Dylan really took Gudinski to task over it, and said I didn’t need to know that.”
Coupe says he was feeling the heat from two sides on that night in New Zealand – pressure from Dylan, who clearly wanted to be anywhere else but had been told that ticket sales in Australia weren’t going well and that he should do at least one interview, and pressure from the rest of the press contingent who were jealous he’d landed the scoop.
“The bar in the hotel was kind of a fishbowl, with all the media travelling with Dylan sitting outside looking at me like they wanted to kill me,” Coupe laughs.
It probably didn’t help that he was, ahem, “pharmaceutically enhanced” at the time.
“Look, I can’t say that everyone had been taking drugs, but I’m happy to say that I had been taking drugs,” Coupe says.
“Anyway, I’m thinking, ‘this is going nowhere’, and I remembered that in Spin magazine some months earlier Dylan had done an expansive interview where he said that if he could go back in time he would have liked to have been a journalist himself.
“He said he would have liked to have interviewed Hank Williams; so I asked Dylan, ‘what would you have asked Hank?’. He looked me right in the eye for what was probably 30 seconds but felt like about five minutes, and he leaned over and said, ‘I’d want to know where he got his drugs from’.
“He saw straight through me!”
Dylan obviously doesn’t bear a grudge, or (as Coupe suspects) he had forgotten about the incident because in 1992 the journalist was granted another interview, this time on the telephone.
The singer’s mood is famously changeable, and Coupe says that this time he got “Happy Bob”, which he says surprised him given how terribly the shows were going.
“That tour was diabolical by anyone’s standards, but he just wanted to talk and talk! We talked about playing with The Band, we talked about how he was reading Shelley and Byron and Keats, everything,” Coupe says.
“The most memorable thing was at the end he asked, ‘Do you know Brett Whiteley?’ I said ‘not really, but we go to the same Japanese restaurant in Kings Cross’. He said if you see him again tell him that the drawings he gave me on the last tour still look good to me. I thought you’re only going to have this conversation once, so I looked up Brett Whiteley and called him and told him.”
Legendary rock promoter Michael Chugg has toured Dylan nine times – dating back to 1986 – but the straight-talking Tasmanian’s love affair with the singer goes back much further.
“I still remember the first time I ever heard him,” Chugg says.
“I was at the home of an old journo – well, he was a young cadet journo back then – called David Dawson who worked at the Launceston Examiner. Smokey we called him.
“I went over to his apartment one day and he played me Jimi Hendrix, some Stones, and then he played me Dylan. I loved him ever since.”
Chugg is the first to admit that Dylan isn’t exactly a talkative character – there have been whole tours where he’s got nothing more than a “Hi Chuggy” – but he has managed a few intimate moments with his musical idol across those nine tours.
“I do remember one time down in Christchurch when I was sitting in the back of the van after a show and I felt this sweaty back on my back – Dylan had sat down behind me, his back to mine,” he recalls.
“He said, ‘Hey Chuggy, what’d you think of the drummer?’ I’m sitting there thinking, ‘what the f..k do I say to that?’ Anyway I said, ‘I thought the drummer could’ve been better, to tell the truth!’ He agreed with me.
“Another time I was standing out the front of the airport with his long-time production manager (Al Santos) and Bob walks out and says, ‘Hey Chuggy, hey Al, how’s it all goin’?’
“Al was standing there with his mouth open and I said, ‘what the f..k is wrong with you?’ and Al says, ‘That’s the first time he’s spoken to me in 12 years’.”
Dylan also famously has an aversion to video screens, which are standard at most concerts, making life hard for those in the nosebleed sections.
“I remember once that I convinced him to use the video screens at a festival,” Chugg says. “They made us sit the camera at the mixing desk – perfectly still – on the longest throw (zoom) you could get. So looking at the video screen was the exact equivalent of looking at the f..king stage!”
All of this leads to the obvious question – why would a man who doesn’t enjoy publicity, shuns company and hates having his image beamed up on the big screen choose to make a living as a touring musician?
Coupe’s theory is that Dylan has been on the road for so long (his Never Ending Tour actually began in 1988) that he feels it’s his home, much like the old bluesmen and folk singers he modelled himself on as a young musician.
“I think he considers himself a journeyman, in the most literal sense of the word,” he says.
“His heroes lived on the road, and he lives on the road. However he never looks like he’s having the greatest time.
“But there’s something so magnetic about him, despite the fact that on every level there really shouldn’t be.”
Advertiser photographer Tricia Watkinson has photographed thousands of people across her 27-year career, but only two that she counts as legends – Neil Diamond and Bob Dylan.
Watkinson was assigned to photograph Dylan at Adelaide Airport before his 2001 tour, and had been warned that he was, “shy, aloof, grumpy even”.
“I was even jokingly wished luck upon leaving the office due to his apparent reputation,” she recalls.
However it wasn’t Dylan who was grumpy, it was his pushy minder who was hell-bent on controlling every aspect of the photo opportunity.
“Bob arrived and the fans started screaming as he walked through the arrivals gate,” Watkinson says.
“He kindly stopped for autographs and a few photos with his excited cheering fans and I happily snapped away.
“Almost immediately the PR person I had introduced myself to just moments earlier jumped in front of my lens and said something to the effect of, ‘no, not with that person’. I was a bit taken aback and confused. Surely these were his fans, real people, what did she mean?”
Watkinson spent the next few minutes attempting to photograph Dylan interacting with his fans while the PR lady tried equally hard to stop her.
“Frustrated and a little disheartened, and almost out of time, I decided to no longer push my luck and just go with the few photos I managed to get and walk away,” she says.
“About 10 feet from the exit doors, as I was rushing to get out before the crowd, Bob Dylan and I happened to come together in a funnel-like movement, pushed together as the large crowd and his entourage all tried to get through the exit at the same time.
“So it’s just me and Bob standing on the outside near the taxi stand, doors jamming and shutting behind us, and, for a brief moment, all turned bizarrely quiet.
“Bob Dylan turns to me with a kind, almost concerned face, and the conversation went like this: ‘Hi love did you get the photo you needed? Do you need me to help so you can set something up?’
“Gobsmacked, I foolishly replied, ‘Oh nah it’s okay I’ve got something, I’ll let you go’.
“As his car arrived I put my hand out and said, ‘Thank you anyway. By the way I’m Trish from The Advertiser newspaper’, and with a warm return handshake and a lovely charming smile he replied, ‘Hi Trish, I’m Bob Dylan’. Grumpy and aloof? No way.” ●
Bob Dylan plays Bonython Park, Saturday August 11. Tickets at ticketmaster.com.au