Astrid Have It!

“We were playing at the Bitter End in New York and Bob Dylan came down. During the course of a meeting after the show, we were all standing around and talking in a very small office. Because of the respect I have for his writing ability, which is monumental, I said to Bob, ‘Do you have any songs?’ and he said, ‘Well, yeah.’ So we passed the guitar around - there really wasn’t a lot of room. He sang ‘Lay, Lady Lay’ and you couldn’t quite make out what he was singing - he talks very much like he sings, only a little less so. And I misinterpreted the lyrics as ‘Lay, lady lay across my big breasts babe’ [instead of ‘across my big brass bed’!!]. Now, I’m not going to ask him to enunciate, and nobody else said anything when he had finished, so there was a kind of pregnant silence. Finally I said, ‘Well, I don’t think we can get away with that!’ He didn’t ask why not. At least I had the audacity to say that we couldn’t get away with the lyrics. Donald didn’t say anything. I don’t know how he interpreted the lyric, but I definitely had it wrong, because when the song came out, I said, ‘Ahh!‘”