Nomadic Voice

at Queensland Diagnostic Imaging Limestone Xrays https://www.instagram.com/p/B5Y6bKOhDzj/?igshid=bud4zww54tcc

I don’t know exactly what to say, so Dylan picks up the slack. He lights a cigarette, moves over to the sofa, takes off his glasses and smiles a shy smile. “You know,” he says, “sometimes I think about people like T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters — these people who played into their sixties. If I’m here at eighty, I’ll be doing the same thing. This is all I want to do — it’s all I can do. I mean, you don’t have to be a nineteen – or twenty-year-old to play this stuff That’s the vanity of that youth-culture ideal. To me that’s never been the thing. I’ve never really aimed myself at any so-called youth culture. I directed it at people who I imagined, maybe falsely so, had the same experiences that I’ve had, who have kind of been through what I’d been through. But I guess a lot of people just haven’t.” He falls silent for a moment, taking a drag off his cigarette. “See,” he says, “I’ve always been just about being an individual, with an individual point of view. If I’ve been about anything, it’s probably that, and to let some people know that it’s possible to do the impossible.” Dylan leans forward and snuffs out his cigarette. “And that’s really all. If I’ve ever had anything to tell anybody, it’s that: You can do the impossible. Anything is possible. And that’s it. No more.” — Mikal Gilmore, 1986 https://www.instagram.com/p/B4_eW_rBefZ/?igshid=9eqez8p36poc

“There’s a certain non-transparency to life that keeps me motivated. I try not to work in a linear way. That’s incumbent on what’s given to you at any given moment. There might be inconsistencies to that, nevertheless, it does give you a degree of independence you might not get any other way.” — Bob Dylan, 1994 Image © Vi Khoa Duong, RMIT University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, April 10, 2011 (at RMIT University Vietnam) https://www.instagram.com/p/BdbUUhnnuUg/?igshid=dw3kc7fd4ogv

“Following your own way, every day looks different from the others. Yes, there was a time I didn’t feel understood, and it’s true, it was a problem. Now I don’t think about it, you know, people have changed, I’m not seen the way I once was. I feel much more free, not restricted.” — Bob Dylan, 1993 Image © Paolo Brillo, Palafabris, Padova, Italy – June 15, 2010 (at Padua, Italy) https://www.instagram.com/p/BeNjsirHVew/?igshid=177834ykvz5q7

I had all the vernacular all down. I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head – the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries – and I knew all the deserted roads that it traveled on, too. I could make it all connect and move with the current of the day. When I started writing my own songs, the folk lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and I used it. — Bob Dylan, 2017 https://www.instagram.com/p/BjJYQ8zh50I/?igshid=56oo4mct0225

Bob Dylan and His Band are one-third greaser rock, one-third Frenchman Street New Orleans rumble and roll, and one-third greasy, loose-elbow Texas swing. Nightly, he is re-staging his treasured memories, re-visiting his favorite places: The southwestern Roadhouse, the blue, loud streets of New Orleans, and the VA Halls and roller rinks he played when he was a teenager, when he stood behind cheap cigarette-burned upright pianos and pounded out dry and wet hump prom rock for flattops and acne-scarred moon-faced greasers under the low, vodka-blue skies of Minnesota’s flatlands. — Tim Sommer, InsideHook, 2017 Image © Paolo Brillo, Verona, Italy - April 2018 https://www.instagram.com/p/B29Z4DDhSYR/?igshid=1m07fijrk4evr

I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom, someone who’s not afraid to jump in front of a freight train to save a loved one’s life, to draw a crowd with my guitar, that’s about the most heroic thing that I can do. To play a song to calm the king, well everybody don’t get to do that. There’s only certain things a King wants to hear. And then if he don’t like it, he might send you to the gallows. Sometimes you feel like a club fighter who gets off the bus in the middle of nowhere, no cheers, no admiration, punches his way through ten rounds or whatever, always making someone else look good, vomits up the pain in the backroom, picks up his check and gets back on the bus heading out for another nowhere. Sometimes like a troubadour out of the dark ages, singing for your supper and rambling the land or singing to the girl in the window, you know, the one with the long flowing hair who’s combing it in the candlelight, maybe she invites you up. Maybe she says ‘Sing me another song, sweetness, sing me that song about the cat and the fiddle, the knave and the long sea voyage’ or maybe she don’t. You gotta be able to feel your dream before anyone else is aware of it. ‘Your parents don’t like me they say I’m too poor’... Gotta learn to bite the bullet like Tom Mix, take the blows, like the song says. Or like Charles Aznavour, ‘you must learn to leave the table when love is no longer being served’ but that’s a hard thing to do. You got to be strong and stay connected to what started it all, the inspiration behind the inspiration, to who you were when people didn’t mind stepping on you, it’s easy to say but the air gets thin at the top, you get light-headed, your environment changes, new people come into your life... — Bob Dylan https://www.instagram.com/p/BLzgTK9gNDi/?igshid=p6bq4rs7djfq

I’ve had a God-given sense of destiny. This is what I was put on earth to do. Just like Shakespeare was gonna write his plays, the Wright Brothers were gonna invent an airplane, I was put here to do this. I knew I was gonna do it better than anybody ever did it. — BOB DYLAN https://www.instagram.com/p/BMNbbwkgbL8/?igshid=lwp6jf0bb3yv

Well, I guess some people go out in the streets every day, you know. They look into their garage and they see their car and... Other people can go out in the street and see their lilac trees. And other people can go out to their porch and water their plants. And you can also go out in the street and see a hobo. — Bob Dylan, 1963 https://www.instagram.com/p/BVGRXO0jkd7/?igshid=157clzbs0k3yz

Well, most people know that it’s warmer if you have long hair, and everybody wants to feel warm. If you think about it you’ll realise that your hair is in your head; all around your brain. Mathematically speaking, the more of it that comes out the better. A lot of people who’d like to think more open-mindedly don’t realise that it’s easier to do that if your brain isn’t smothered in hair. — Bob Dylan, 1966 https://www.instagram.com/p/BXG_1N3H76x/?igshid=zdzq1iaq0o1n

He plays, with the most fitting of poetic justices, the part of Alias. In the public life of the musician he is the man of uncertain identity. In the movies he is the man with no name. — Michael Watts, 1973 https://www.instagram.com/p/BX_iz6Rn4Xu/?igshid=14mlv4hrbpco4

The expressions on Dylan’s face, in person, seem to compress and encompass versions of his persona across time, a seventy-five-year-old with a nineteen-year- old cavorting somewhere inside. Above all, though, it is the tones of his speaking voice that seem to kaleidoscope through time: here the yelp of the folk pup or the sarcastic rimshot timing of the hounded hipster-idol, there the beguilement of the Seventies sex symbol, then again— and always—the gravel of the elder statesman, that antediluvian bluesman’s voice the young aspirant so legendarily invoked at the very outset of his work and then ever so gradually aged into. — Jonathan Lethem

“It’s all music; no more, no less. I know in my own mind what I’m doing. If anyone has imagination, he’ll know what I’m doing. If they can’t understand my songs they’re missing something. If they can’t understand green clocks, wet chairs, purple lamps or hostile statues, they’re missings something, too.” — BOB DYLAN

“What passes for romance to me is not romance at all but just sentimental garbage. Romance to me is built on heroism and identity, where identity is all spelled out and it’s not necessary to go back into someone’s life to find out who that person is – where identity is spelled out by actions. That, to me, makes for a romantic tale. Anything else just goes into this psychological, mental gymnastics of thinking about the past.” — BOB DYLAN

With this in mind, I mention a recent comment to me by the blues guitarist Buddy Guy: “Musicians don’t retire, son. They just drop.” A brief smile is the response. “Well, I’ve no plans myself right now to draw any line within the sand. What’s more likely is some day I’ll just wake up and decide that I have had enough. And if and when that happens, I won’t have any problem with walking away. I’ve fulfilled every single thing I wanted to do. I feel like there is nothing left for me to prove.” He has no plans, he tells me shortly, for writing his autobiography. Because all he wants the world to know about his life is contained within the songs, perhaps? This remark provokes a narrowing of the eyes, and then the following statement: “I don’t even consider this work as part of my life. Not even close. My life doesn’t revolve around my work. Not even a little bit. I mean, I’ve got millions of fans and I know that and I’m more than happy to go out there and play for them… But that’s not my life. My life is private and personal and completely filled up.” With which Bob Dylan stands, pats my shoulder and gives a conspiratorial wink. Seconds later, he is gone. 
— Alan Jackson, 2001