Put your hand on my head, babe — do I have a temperature?
I see people who are supposed to know better standing around like furniture.

Bob Dylan: 80 things you may not know about him on his 80th birthday
By Paul Glynn
Entertainment reporter

"I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now."

Bob Dylan sang those wise words at the tender age of 23, on his track My Back Pages.

As he reaches his 80th birthday on Monday, we've decided to ignore the advice of the famous Dylan documentary Don't Look Back and celebrate the life and career of the US singer-songwriter.

Be warned though before we get started, this list is about as long and exhaustive as some of the verses on his last album...

1. Bob Dylan is not his given birth name. But you already knew that, right? So here are 79 more facts about the artist formerly known as Robert Allen Zimmerman.

2. He has sold more than 125 million albums around the world.

3. Despite his success and cultural impact, Dylan has never had a number one single in the UK or US. For context, Mr Blobby, Crazy Frog and Las Ketchup have all topped the charts.

4. A poll of musicians, writers and academics, conducted on Dylan's 70th birthday, found his best song to be 1965's Like a Rolling Stone, which the singer once said was his most honest and direct work. "After that I wasn't interested in writing a novel or a play," he said. "I knew I wanted to write songs because it was just a whole new category."

5. Bruce Springsteen said the track, with its opening snare kick, sounded like "somebody kicked open the door to your mind". While another high-profile fan, U2's Bono, called it "a black eye of a pop song".

6. When asked what his songs were about, in a 1966 interview with Playboy magazine, Dylan quipped: "Some are about four minutes, some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve."

7. Surprisingly to many, the counterculture icon did not play at the 1969 Woodstock festival. Dylan was a Woodstock resident at the time (the festival was actually about 40 miles away) but he got a better offer - £35,000 to headline the Isle of Wight festival instead, with The Beatles watching on.

8. Speaking of The Fab Four... Dylan was the first man to introduce the band to marijuana, Sir Paul McCartney recently revealed to Uncut. 'We all ran into the backroom going, 'Give us a bit!'" said Sir Macca. "So that was the very first evening we ever got stoned!"

9. Many of his songs are more familiar to mainstream audiences as cover versions. For example Adele's version of Make You Feel My Love, The Byrds' Mr Tambourine Man and All Along The Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix. "He played [my songs] the way I would have done them if I was him," he said of the late guitarist. Dylan himself has recorded covers of Frank Sinatra and Paul Simon tunes.

10. Malibu resident Dylan has 17 houses around the world according to biographer Howard Sounes. One of them is reportedly in the Scottish Highlands.

11. The troubadour has won 10 Grammy awards, including three for his 1997 album Time Out of Mind, which many critics considered to be a return to form after a long artistic slump.

12. He was born into a Jewish family in Duluth, Minnesota, before moving upstate to Hibbing.

13. Country singer Hank Williams, and bluesmen Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker were among his musical heroes growing up, along with the king of rock 'n' roll Elvis Presley. The Rebel Without a Cause James Dean was his celluloid hero.

14. Dylan saw Buddy Holly play live locally just a few days before he died in a plane crash.

15. As a youngster he played piano and guitar in several summer camp/high school bands. Their names included The Jokers, The Shadow Blasters, The Golden Chords and (our personal favourite) The Rock Boppers.

16. He wrote in his high school year book that it was his ambition "to join Little Richard".

17. Working as busboy in a Fargo restaurant, after finishing high school, remains the only normal job Dylan has ever done. But in another life he'd like to have been a soldier. In his 2004 memoir Chronicles he wrote he'd always pictured himself "dying in some heroic battle rather than a bed".

18. After moving to Minneapolis to study he turned his attention to folk music, swapping his electric guitar for an acoustic, which he played in cafes around the city's bohemian Dinkytown area.

19. He became totally enchanted by US folk singers like Odetta and Woody Guthrie, who he would later visit in a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey and play his own songs to him.

20. His first original composition of any note was called Song for Woody, and he even began to sing and talk like the Oklahoma singer.

21. Guthrie offered Dylan his stash of unused lyrics but his young son Arlo was unable to find them when Dylan came knocking. Almost 40 years later, the lyrics were put to music by Essex folksinger Billy Bragg and Chicago band Wilco.

22. In his book, Dylan revealed that aside from Guthrie and Irish folk group The Clancy Brothers, the biggest influences on his songwriting were blues legend Robert Johnson and Pirate Jenny - a song from the Brecht/Weill play The Threepenny Opera.

23. Having briefly operated under the name Elston Gunn, including while playing in Bobby Vee's band, Dylan then settled on his now famous moniker - a nod to the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

24. Dylan was a university drop-out. He never did finish his Liberal Arts degree at the University of Minnesota.

25. He read works by French symbolist poets like Arthur Rimbaud and American beat writers like Jack Kerouac. The On the Road writer's spontaneous style "blew a hole in my head", Dylan once remarked.

26. He moved to New York in 1961, to chase his dream of becoming a big music star.

27. He would regularly perform at venues in Greenwich Village such as Cafe Wha? and The Gaslight Cafe, where performers would pass around a basket at the end of each set and hope to be paid. Dylan once said he would get a dollar and a cheeseburger to play his harmonica all afternoon alongside another singer in the village.

28. After nine months in The Big Apple he secured a deal with Colombia Records, feeding the company's PR executives "pure hokum", as he later put it.

29. His first trip abroad involved an eight-week stay in a freezing cold London in the winter of 1962/63, where he learned traditional English folk songs like Scarborough Fair, and (for contractual reasons) cut an LP under the pseudonym Billy Boy Grunt.

30. Early on in his career, he would make up tales about his background, telling journalists and radio presenters that he was an orphan, from New Mexico and that he used to travel with a carnival.

31. His self-titled debut album consisted largely of covers of traditional folk and blues numbers, such as The House of the Rising Sun.

32. His breakthrough follow-up, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, carried a picture of him and his girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo, on the cover. A performance of the song Don't Think Twice, It's Alright is believed to have brought about the end of the couple's relationship.

33. Blowin' in the Wind, the opening track on the album, was the song that made Dylan famous - initially thanks to the Peter, Paul and Mary version - and it also forever aligned with him the civil rights movement and anti-war protests.

34. The song has a similar melody to that of the African American spiritual song No More Auction Block. It came about as musician Agnes 'Sis' Cunningham urged artists like Dylan to put contemporary activist lyrics to old tunes which she then published in her Broadside magazine.

35. Dylan performed the number near to Dr Martin Luther King Jr at a march on Washington DC in 1963, becoming the voice of a generation in the process - a label he always rejected.

36. He said that Dr King's famous I Have a Dream speech that day affected him "in a profound way".

37. At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan shocked fans and the music world by plugging in and rocking out, backed by a band that had been hastily-arranged the night before.

38. For the next year or so on tour around the world, Dylan and his band The Hawks were regularly booed when they went electric - including at London's Royal Albert Hall. He was famously even called "Judas" by one gig-goer in Manchester. "I don't believe you," replied Dylan. "You're lying".

39. The period that followed - with his trilogy of more abstract and surrealist bluesy folk rock albums, Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde - saw Dylan turn pop music into an art form, according to Sean Latham, director of the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies at the University of Tulsa.

Speaking on Radio 4's documentary series, It Ain't Me You're Looking For Babe: Bob Dylan at 80, Mr Latham said: "The closest parallels we can draw in fact are not to other pop stars but to say Picasso or James Joyce."

40. Dylan married Sara Lownds, who had worked as a model, in secret in 1965, and they had four children together. He also adopted her daughter from a prior marriage.

41. For a short while they lived at the famous Chelsea Hotel in New York.

42. One of their sons, Jakob, became known as the frontman of the 1990s band The Wallflowers.

43. Dylan did a screen test at Andy Warhol's studio, aka The Factory, and walked away with a print of an Elvis portrait.

44. He was injured in a mysterious motorbike accident in July 1966.

45. The singer then stopped touring and became a bit of a recluse for most of the rest of the 60s, living in a remote artists' colony in Woodstock, upstate New York. "Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race," he wrote in Chronicles. "Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on."

46. During this period he learned to paint, read the bible and would jam with his with 1966 touring bandmates - who would become affectionately known as The Band. The collection of historical ballads and traditional songs they recorded were released many years later under the name The Basement Tapes.

47. The Band's star-studded final gig, which featured Dylan, was later the subject of a Martin Scorsese documentary entitled The Last Waltz.

48. Fans broke into Dylan's property (and bed), and he eventually moved back to Greenwich Village, where he was similarly hounded by Dylanologists.

49. The star rarely read the contracts he signed early on, and as a result he and his long-trusted manager Albert Grossman ended up suing each other in the 1980s.

50. Re-inventing himself again as a country singer, he wrote Wanted Man with Johnny Cash, who debuted the track live at San Quentin prison in 1969. Dylan made a rare appearance on his famous friend's new TV show.

51. His 1975 album Blood on the Tracks tackled the topic of his separation from Sara.

52. Its opening track Tangled Up in Blue saw him experiment with timeless painting-style techniques in the muddled narrative of the song. The singer said it took "ten years to live and two years to write".

53. Dylan returned to the live circuit in 1974, playing arenas with The Band - one of the first major tours of its kind.

54. The following year he gathered a collection of entertainers - including beat poet Allen Ginsberg, singers Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and violinist Scarlet Rivera - for a travelling circus-esque US tour called the The Rolling Thunder Revue. Dylan even drove a motor home for the circuit of small town venues, which was mythologised in a Scorsese Netflix film.

The finale of the first leg of the tour constituted a benefit concert for imprisoned boxer Ruben Carter - the subject of Dylan's recent song The Hurricane - and featured a cameo from fighting champion and activist Muhammad Ali.

55. At times during the unique tour, Dylan painted his face white and wore a mask, while former girlfriend Baez dressed up as him.

56. Baez has stated that the lyrics to her song Diamonds and Rust relate to her relationship with her fellow singer.

57. He started to re-imagine his songs at this time, reworking the tempos and styles so they were almost unrecognisable. A decade later, after sustaining a debilitating hand injury, Dylan said a jazz singer inspired him to play and sing his songs using a totally different technique.

58. In 1978, Dylan released a cubist-inspired film he had written and directed during The Rolling Thunder Revue tour, called Renaldo and Clara. The almost four-hour long feature starred his (by-then ex) wife Sara and Baez, as The Woman in White, and it was an expensive flop at the box office.

59. Dylan had a period of Christian revelation in the late 1970s, following his divorce, after a fan threw a small silver cross on stage. He got baptised and released several albums containing contemporary gospel songs like Gotta Serve Somebody.

Speaking about his faith in 1997, however, the musician told Newsweek: "I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music, I don't find it anywhere else. I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists all of that, I've learned more from the songs than I have from any of this entity."

60. Sporting a dangly earring, Dylan played a rather ragged rendition of Blowin' In the Wind at the global charity event Live Aid in 1985, backed by Rolling Stones guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood at Philadelphia's JFK Stadium.

61. His song Blind Willie McTell, a tribute to the late bluesman, was released in 1991, oddly eight years after it was recorded.

62. Dylan married his backup singer Carolyn Dennis in 1986 and they had a daughter together, before divorcing in 1992. This second marriage remained a secret until Sounes' book, Down the Highway, was first published in 2001.

63. He formed a supergroup called The Traveling Wilburys in 1988, with his famous friends George Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne. They each had band nicknames and Dylan was known as Lucky. Lucky Wilbury.

64. He was inducted into the The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that year too.

65. His album Love and Theft was released on 11 September 2001 - the same day as the plane attacks on New York City.

66. Dylan won an Oscar and a Golden Globe award earlier that year for his track Things Have Changed, which featured in the Michael Douglas movie Wonder Boys.

67. He had his own weekly one-hour satellite radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, from 2006 to 2009.

68. Dylan's name appears on the wall of Blackpool's Opera House, alongside other acts to have performed there, such as comedians Little and Large and Roy Chubby Brown.

69. He's a hip-hop fan. Dylan raved about Ice-T, Public Enemy, NWA and Run-DMC: "They were all poets and knew what was going on," he wrote. Some consider his own 1965 track Subterranean Homesick Blues to be one of the first modern rap songs.

70. He's also allegedly a master thief. Chronicles: Volume One (to give it its full title) was a New York times best-seller, however critics claimed its author, Dylan, had cribbed certain passages from Marcel Proust, Mark Twain, Time magazine and even a guide to New Orleans.

71. The 2007 Dylan-inspired film I'm Not There became Heath Ledger's last movie to be released during the actor's lifetime.

72. A 160ft wide Dylan mural by Brazilian street artist Eduardo Kobra (pictured below) was unveiled in downtown Minneapolis in 2015.

73. Dylan was awarded the US Medal of Freedom in 2012 by then-Present Barack Obama; before receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature four years later, for having "created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition". He became the first songwriter to win the prestigious award, but it was collected on his behalf by another - the priestess of punk Patti Smith, who nervously sang A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.

74. He eventually delivered a Nobel lecture in the form of a spoken word piece with added piano tinkling and references to the plays of William Shakespeare and Homer's hero, Odysseus. "My songs are alive in the land of the living, but songs are unlike literature, they are meant to be sung and not read," he explained.

75. The last British gig of Dylan's so-called Never Ending Tour, which kicked off in 1988, saw him and Neil Young co-headline a UK show for the first time, at London's Hyde Park in 2019. He's played roughly 100 gigs a year for the last 20 years.

76. His first new song in eight years, Murder Most Foul, was released last year and it comprised of a 17-minute rumination on the 1960s and the assassination of JFK. It made Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, his 11 minute-plus epic from 1966, seem pretty poppy by comparison.

77. In December, he sold the rights to his entire song catalogue to Universal Music Group (UMG) for an undisclosed fee. The New York Times claimed the deal could be worth more than $300,000,000

78. Dylan has been a keen painter and visual artist for decades and his work is currently on display and up for sale at the Castle Fine Art gallery in Manchester.

79. Last week, it emerged Dylan had agreed to become an honorary patron of the The Bob Willis Fund - a new charity in memory of the late England cricketer. "Bob Willis was a great sportsman who left too soon," Dylan noted. "I'm happy to help keep his flame and cause alive."

Willis once told the BBC's John Wilson that he had changed his middle name to Dylan as a young man, in honour of his favourite musician.

80. The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma - a museum dedicated to artefacts from his huge archive - will open to the public in May next year.

So if you made it to the end of this list and are still craving more, now you know where to go for more Dylan facts.

But actually...

brownreasontolive wrote: Tue May 25, 2021 1:53 pm

no wonder he never tried that supergroup shit again.

hbiden@onlyfans.com wrote: Tue May 25, 2021 4:03 pm no wonder he never tried that supergroup shit again.

Lest we forget Dylan and the Dead!

brownreasontolive wrote: Tue May 25, 2021 5:08 pm

hbiden@onlyfans.com wrote: Tue May 25, 2021 4:03 pm no wonder he never tried that supergroup shit again.

Lest we forget Dylan and the Dead!

this post has been reported.

"My cruel weapons have been put on the shelf," from "Workingman Blues."

Pretty much all of "Leopard skin pillbox hat" is incredible, but this is my favorite bit:

"I see you got a new boyfriend,
I never seen him before.
I saw you making love to him,
you forgot to close the garage door."

"Yes and you, you sit around and ask for ashtrays, can't you REACH?"
- She's Your Lover Now, 1966

Jokerman (live on David Letterman with members of the Plugz, 1984)

That video of him doing "We Are The World" is so great. There's a choice we're MAY-KING!! We're saving our own liiives. A real dose of vinegar amidst a lot of sugary sweet.

here's the unedited (less edited?) wsj interview:

Bob Dylan Q&A
By Jeff Slate

While the book covers a lot of ground, many of the songs were written and released in the 1950s. Was that a significant time in shaping the modern popular song? And did the post war technology boom – the evolution of the recording process, the ubiquity of the radio and television, electric instrumentation – play a part in that, do you think?

I think they all played a part, and they still do play a part. But yes, the book does cover a lot of ground, and the 50’s was a significant time in music history. Without postwar technology these songs may have dissipated and been overlooked. The recording process brought the right people to the top, the most innovative, the ones with the greatest talent.

How did you first hear most of those songs? And do you think the way you first heard them – I’m assuming on the radio, as well as television and in films – play a part in your relationship to them?

I first heard them on the radio, portable record players, jukeboxes. We didn’t have a TV, and I never heard them in films, but I was hearing them in my head. They were straightforward, and my relationship to them at first was external, then became personal and intense. The songs were simple, easy to understand, and they’d come to you in a direct way, let you see into the future.

How do you listen to music these days? On vinyl, CD, streaming? And is there a way you prefer to hear music?

I listen to CD’s, satellite radio and streaming. I do love the sound of old vinyl though, especially on a tube record player from back in the day. I bought three of those in an antique store in Oregon about 30 years ago. They’re just little, but the tone quality is so powerful and miraculous, has so much depth, it always takes me back to the days when life was different and unpredictable. You had no idea what was coming down the road, and it didn’t matter. The laws of time didn’t apply to you.

How do you discover new music these days?

Mostly by accident, by chance. If I go looking for something I usually don’t find it. In fact, I never find it. I walk into things intuitively when I’m most likely not looking for anything. Tiny Hill, Teddy Edwards, people like that. Obscure artists, obscure songs. There’s a song by Jimmy Webb that Frank Sinatra recorded called, “Whatever Happened to Christmas,” I think he recorded it in the 60s, but I just discovered it. Ella Fitzgerald’s “A-Tiskit, A-Tasket.” Janice Martin, the female Elvis. Have you heard her? Joe Turner is always surprising me with little nuances and things. I listen to Brenda Lee a lot. No matter how many times I hear her, it’s like I just discovered her. She’s such an old soul. Lately, I discovered a fantastic guitar player, Teddy Bunn. I heard him on a Meade Lux Lewis – Sid Catlett record.

Performers and songwriters recommend things to me. Others I just wake up and they’re there. Some I’ve seen live. The Oasis Brothers, I like them both, Julian Casablanca, the Klaxons, Grace Potter. I’ve seen Metallica twice. I’ve made special efforts to see Jack White and Alex Turner. Zac Deputy, I’ve discovered him lately. He’s a one man show like Ed Sheeran, but he sits down when he plays. I’m a fan of Royal Blood, Celeste, Rag and Bone Man, Wu-Tang, Eminem, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, anybody with a feeling for words and language, anybody whose vision parallels mine.

Waterloo Sunset is on my playlist and that was recorded in the 60s. “Stealer,” The Free song, that’s been there a while too, along with Leadbelly and the Carter Family. There’s a Duff McKagan song called “Chip Away,” that has profound meaning for me. It’s a graphic song. Chip away, chip away, like Michelangelo, breaking up solid marble stone to discover the form of King David inside. He didn’t build him from the ground up, he chipped away the stone until he discovered the king. It’s like my own songwriting, I overwrite something, then I chip away lines and phrases until I get to the real thing. Shooter Jennings produced that record. It’s a great song. Dvorak, “Moravian Duets.” I just discovered that, but it’s over 100 years old.

Music is made very differently now, and your grandchildren are hearing songs for the first time in whole new ways, like via Spotify. Does the way you first hear a song matter? Do you think that has changed the relationship of the listener to the song?

The relationship you have to a song can change over time. You can outgrow it, or it could come back to haunt you, come back stronger in a different way. A song could be like a nephew or a sister, or a mother-in-law. There actually is a song called “Mother-in-Law.”

When you first hear a song, it might be related to what time of day you hear it. Maybe at daybreak – at dawn with the sun in your face – it would probably stay with you longer than if you heard it at dusk. Or maybe, if you first hear it at sunset, it would probably mean something different, than if you heard it first at 2 in the afternoon. Or maybe you hear something in the dead of night, in the darkness, with night eyes. Maybe it’ll be “Eleanor Rigby,” and it puts you in touch with your ancient ancestors. You’re liable to remember that for a while. “Star Gazer,” the Ronnie James Dio song would probably mean a lot more to you if you first heard it at midnight under a full moon beneath an expanding universe, than if you first heard it in the middle of a dreary day with rain pouring down.

One of my granddaughters, some years back, who was about 8 at the time, asked me if I’d ever met the Andrew Sisters, and if I’d ever heard the song “Rum and Coca Cola.” Where she heard it, I have no idea. When I said I’d never met them, she wanted to know why. I said because I just didn’t, they weren’t here. She asked, “Where did they go?” I didn’t know what to say, so I said Cincinnati. She asked me if I would take her there to meet them. Another time, one of the others asked me if I wrote the song “Oh, Susanna.” I don’t know how she heard the song, or when, or what her relationship to it is, but she knows it and can sing it. She probably heard it on Spotify.

And since everything is at our fingertips, has streaming democratized music? Are we back to the days when “Strangers in The Night” can top “Paperback Writer” and “Paint It Black” on the pop charts?

We could very well be. There’s a sameness to everything nowadays. We seem to be in a vacuum. Everything’s become too smooth and painless. We jumped into the mainstream, the big river, with all the industrial waste, chemical debris, rocks, and mudflow, along with Brian Wilson and his brothers, Soupy Sales, and Tennessee Ernie Ford. The earth could vomit up its dead, and it could be raining blood, and we’d shrug it off, cool as cucumbers. Everything’s too easy. Just one stroke of the ring finger, middle finger, one little click, that’s all it takes, and we’re there. We’ve dropped the coin right into the slot. We’re pill poppers, cube heads and day trippers, hanging in, hanging out, gobbling blue devils, black mollies, anything we can get our hands on. Not to mention the nose candy and ganga grass. It’s all too easy, too democratic. You need a solar X-ray detector just to find somebody’s heart, see if they still have one.

What’s the gold standard for a song these days? What song will walk off with the trophy? “Paint it Black” is black as black can be, black as a crow’s head, a galvanizing song. “Paperback Writer” sounds good, too. The biographer, the ghost writer, doing it long hand. I can visualize that song; see it in my mind’s eye. “Strangers in the Night,” that, too. A couple of people who don’t know each other on the dark side of things. I don’t know which one I’d vote for. I have sympathies for them all.

There are already dozens of playlists on Spotify of the songs listed in your book, made by fans. Virtually the entire history of recorded music is available to anyone with the few touches of their finger. Try to imagine if you’d had that available to you in the 50s. How does a young creative person navigate that?

You’d just have to cruise through it the best you can, try to unravel it, feel your way in until you get somewhere. There’s a lot of outstanding music in the past. Works of genius, and much, if not all of it, has been documented. It would take more than a few lifetimes to hear it all. Musically, it would be too much to comprehend. You’d have to limit yourself and create a framework.

Do you think there is anything about the technology used today to record music that would have changed the impact or value you place on the songs you’ve included in the book, and especially the performances, or is a great song a great song?

I think a great song has the sentiments of the people in mind. When you hear it, you get a gut reaction, and an emotional one at the same time. A great song follows the logic of the heart and stays in your head long after you’ve heard it, like “Taxman,” it can be played with a full orchestra score or by a strolling minstrel, and you don’t have to be a great singer to sing it. It’s bell, book, and candle. Otherworldly. It transports you and you feel like you’re levitating. It’s close to an out of body experience.

A great song mutates, makes quantum leaps, turns up again like the prodigal son. It crosses genres. Could be punk rock, ragtime, folk-rock, or zydeco, and can be played in a lot of different styles, multiple styles. Bobby Bland could do it, Gene and Eunice, so could Rod Stewart, even Gene Autrey. Coltrane could do it wordless.

A great song is the sum of all things. It could be the turning point in your life. Louis Armstrong does it like a scat singer, Jimmy Rogers can yodel it. It’s timeless and ageless. It’s a field holler, it’s blood and thunder, it’s on easy street and in the land of milk and honey. It’s everywhere. It can be sung by a lead singer or a backup vocalist; it’s non-discriminating. A great song touches you in secret places, strikes your innermost being, and sinks in. Hoagy Carmichael wrote great songs, so did Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer. Some people you wish had written songs: J.Frank Dobie, Teddy Roosevelt, Arthur Conan Doyle, people like that. They probably could have written great songs but didn’t.

You write in the book that “everything is too full now; we are spoon-fed everything.” Do you think that technology aids or hinders everyday life, and especially creativity?

I think it does both. It can hamper creativity, or it can lend a helping hand and be an assistant. Creative power can be dammed up or forestalled by everyday life, ordinary life, life in the squirrel cage. A data processing machine or a software program might help you break out of that, get you over the hump, but you have to get up early.

Technology is like sorcery, it’s a magic show, conjures up spirits, it’s an extension of our body, like the wheel is an extension of our foot. But it might be the final nail driven into the coffin of civilization; we just don’t know.

Creative ability is about pulling old elements together and making something new, and I don’t believe silicon chips and passwords know anything about those elements, or where they are. You have to have a vivid imagination.

Let’s not forget, science and technology built the Parthenon, the Egyptian pyramids, the Roman coliseum, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, rockets, jets, planes, automobiles, atom bombs, weapons of mass destruction. Tesla, the great inventor, said that he could take down the Brooklyn Bridge with a small vibrator. Today, we can probably do the same thing with a pocket computer. Log in, log out, load and download; we’re all wired up.

Technology can nurture us, or it can shut us out. Creation is a funny thing. When we’re creating or inventing something, we’re more vulnerable than we’ll ever will be, eating and sleeping mean nothing. We’re in “Splendid Isolation,” like in the (Warren) Zevon song; the world of self, like Georgia O’Keefe alone in the desert. To be creative you’ve got to be unsociable and tight-assed. Not necessarily violent and ugly, just unfriendly and distracted. You’re self-sufficient and you stay focused.

Keypads and joysticks can be like millstones around your neck, or they can be supporting players; either one, you’re the judge. Creativity is a mysterious thing. It visits who it wants to visit, when it wants to, and I think that that, and that alone, gets to the heart of the matter.

You write about how so few songs of the video age went on to become standards.
Do you think music videos – which are still prevalent – ultimately hurt songwriting and songwriters?

Who is going to write standards today? A rap artist? A hip hop or rock star? A raver, a sampling expert, a pop singer? That’s music for the establishment. It’s easy listening. It just parodies real life, goes through the motions puts on an act. It’s a computer model.
A standard is something else. It’s on another level. It’s a song to look up to, a role model for other songs, maybe one in a thousand.

As far as videos go, they can hurt an artist if there’s no justification for them. For some artists, videos are necessary, they can recreate an emotional state of a song. Death songs would make great videos, like “Tell Laura I love Her.” Car songs too, like the one about the sky-blue Jaguar and the Thunderbird. There’s a Creedence song, “It Came Out of the Sky,” that would make a great science fiction movie. If you think about it, films have become the new pop music videos. Hans Zimmer, John Williams, they’re a new kind of superstar.

It doesn’t seem to me that many of the songs included in the book were written “for hire.” Do you think that them coming from a place of inspiration, rather than on deadline, helps elevate them?

Having a deadline can be terrifying. You got to pay back a loan by 12 o’clock on Thursday, have a song ready to record by 9 in the morning. Things can get completely out of hand if you don’t think it out ahead. Sometimes, you have to play for time, be cool, and believe you can do anything, then do it on your own terms.

Still, many of the writers here did work in a goal-oriented manner, or scheduled time to write / create. Do you think that’s conducive to great songwriting?

Most of the time you do it when the mood strikes you, although some writers might have a set routine. I heard Tom Paxton has one. I’ve wondered sometimes about going to visit Don McLean, see how he does it. [please don't, bob.] My own method is transportable. I can write songs anywhere at any time, although some of them are completed and redefined at recording sessions, some even at live shows.

What inspired this book? Do you read books about songwriting and/or music history (and what are some standouts, in your mind)? Also, how did you choose the songs and how did you narrow your choices? Did you learn anything about the songs / artists – or even the art of songwriting – while writing the book?

I’ve read Honkers and Shouters, Nick Tosches’ Dino, Guralnick’s Elvis books, some others. But The Philosophy of Modern Song is more of a state of mind than any of those.

Some of the artists here had pretty colorful – and sometimes checkered – histories. What do you think about the current debate separating the art from the artist? Do you think a “weakness of character” can hold a songwriter back?

People of weak character are usually con artists and troublemakers; they aren’t sincere, and I don’t think they would make good songwriters. They’re selfish, always got to have the last word on everything, and I don’t know any songwriter like that. I’m unaware of the current debate about separating the art from the artist. It’s news to me. Maybe it’s an academic thing.

Is there a technology that helps you relax? For instance, do you binge on movies via Netflix, because you mention streaming films in the chapter about “My Generation”; or do you use a meditation app or workout app, especially while you’re on the road?

My problem is that I’m too relaxed, too laidback. Most of the time I feel like a flat tire; totally unmotivated, positively lifeless. I can fall asleep at any time during the day. It takes a lot to get me stimulated, and I’m an excessively sensitive person, which complicates things. I can be totally at ease one minute, and then, for no reason whatsoever, I get restless and fidgety; doesn’t seem to be any middle ground.

Two or three hours in front of the tube is a lot of binge watching for me. Too much time to be involved with the screen. Or maybe I’m too old for it.

I’ve binge watched Coronation Street, Father Brown, and some early Twilight Zones. I know they’re old-fashioned shows, but they make me feel at home. I’m not a fan of packaged programs, or news shows, so I don’t watch them. I never watch anything foul smelling or evil. Nothing disgusting; nothing dog ass. I’m a religious person. I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it.

As far as being physically active, boxing and sparring are what I’ve been doing for a while. It’s part of my life. It’s functional and detached from trends. It’s a limitless playground, and you don’t need an App.

You mention how important Ricky Nelson being on TV every week was important to his career and to rock and roll. That has been replaced by a whole new set of technologies. But, as you write, it “turns out, the best way to shut people up isn’t to take away their forum – it’s to give them all their own separate pulpits.” Do you use social media, and what do you think of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, which you also mention a few times?

I’m only name dropping those names. I’ve everything to learn when it comes to that. I only know the basic elements.

I think these sites bring happiness to a lot of people. Some people even discover love there. I think it’s a wonderful thing. These sites can bring pleasure and infinite joy to millions. It’s like opening a window that’s been shut forever, and letting the light in. It’s fantastic if you’re a sociable person; the communication lines are wide open. A lot of incredible things you can do on these forums. You can refashion anything, blot out memories and change history. It’s boundless. But they can divide and separate us, as well. Turn people against each other.

What was your lockdown like? You made a highly acclaimed album and released a streaming special that was quite elegant and elaborate, plus, you wrote this book, but I have to imagine a lot of it was spent at home trying to find outlets for your creativity. Did technology play a role in that?

It was a very surrealistic time, like being visited by another planet or by some mythical monster. But it was beneficial in a lot of ways, too. It eliminated a lot of hassles and personal needs; it was good having no clock. A good time to put some things to an end.

I changed the door panels on an old 56 Chevy, and replaced some old floor tiles, made some landscape paintings, wrote a song called “You Don’t Say.” I listened to Peggy Lee records. Things like that. I reread “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” a few times over. What a story that is. What a poem. If there’d been any opium laying around, I probably would have been down for a while.

I listened to The Mothers of Invention record Freak Out!, that I hadn’t heard in a long, long time. What an eloquent record. “Hungry Freaks, Daddy,” and the other one, “Who Are the Brain Police,” perfect songs for the pandemic. No doubt about it, Zappa was light years ahead of his time. I’ve always thought that.

The book makes it clear that you’re a true fan of most of the artists included. But are you able to listen to music passively, or do you think maybe you are always assessing what’s special – or not – about a song and looking for potential inspiration?

That’s exactly what I do. I listen for fragments, riffs, chords, even lyrics. Anything that sounds promising.

You write about how lyrics are not necessarily poetry; that they are “meant for the ear and not for the eye.” But how important is the first line of a song?

Very important. It might not sound like something you know, but if you trust it, it will get you closer to what you do know.

Ringo Starr told me that he believes being a good musician – and songwriter – makes you good at other things – in his case cooking – because you’re in tune with your senses. What are your thoughts on that idea?

I love Ringo. He’s not a bad singer, and he’s a great musician. If I’d had him as a drummer, I would’ve been the Beatles, too. Maybe. Didn’t know he was a cook, though. That’s encouraging.

You write that, “the thing about being on the road is that you’re not bogged down by anything. Not even bad news. You give pleasure to other people, and you keep your grief to yourself.” Is that why you keep doing it?

No, it’s not the reason you do it. The reason you do it is because it’s a perfect way to stay anonymous, and still be a member of the social order. You’re the master of your fate. You manipulate reality and move through time and space with the proper attitude. It’s not an easy path to take, not fun and games, it’s no Disney World. It’s an open space, with concrete pillars and an iron floor, with obligations and sacrifices. It’s a path, and destiny put some of us on that path, in that position. It’s not for everybody.

What style of music do you think of as your first love?

Sacred music, church music, ensemble singing.

What’s your favorite genre of music these days?

It’s a combination of genres; an abundance of them. Slow ballads, fast ballads, anything that moves. Western Swing, Hillbilly, Jump Blues, Country Blues, everything. Doo-wop, the Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, Lowland ballads, Bill Monroe, Bluegrass, Boogie-Woogie. Music historians would say when you mix it all up it’s called Rock and Roll. I guess that would be my favorite genre.

Would you like to discuss the significance of any of the artwork used in the book?

They’re running mates to the text, involved in the same way, share the same outcome. They portray ideas and associations that you might not notice otherwise, visual interaction.

Why is the “crew from Dunkin’ Donuts” thanked?

Because they were compassionate, supportive and they went the extra mile.

I like "Before the Flood" a lot. I prefer it to any of The Band's studio material.