There are some video files circulating of outtakes from Bob Dylan’s 2004 interview with the late Ed Bradley on CBS’s “60 Minutes” television show. Actually, “outtakes” is a debatable term. The set of clips are hard to define: they include some material that was in the actual broadcast, but not all that was in the broadcast. Most of what they include wasn’t in the broadcast. It’s not raw footage, however — it has clearly gone through a certain stage of editing, so that you still can’t be sure in every case that Bob’s responses are the complete ones he actually gave to each question. So it is what it is, but it is much more than was heard on the original show. I was pretty underwhelmed by that interview at the time, but seeing the additional material makes it clear that Ed Bradley did a much better job than I thought back then. The problem essentially was the brevity of the segment on the actual broadcast.

Remember, the context of the interview was the recent release of Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles. This was the only television interview that Bob did to promote it. Dylan seemed less than relaxed on camera, but the additional footage reveals that Ed Bradley got him to laugh a few times. Maybe the most striking moment we didn’t see back then is when Ed pulls out an old magazine cover from the 1960s (one Dylan mentions in Chronicles) that shows his face combined with Castro, Malcolm X and JFK, and gets his reaction to it.

Below is a transcript of these clips. I have no knowledge as whether the segments are in correct sequential order.

Clip 1

Ed: Why did you feel you had to change your name?

Dylan: You have an identity of yourself that maybe others around aren’t aware of, so you gotta start over again.

Ed: So you didn’t see yourself as Robert Zimmerman?

Dylan: Y’know for some reason I never did.

Ed: Even before you started performing?

Dylan: No, even then. Some people get born, y’know, to the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean that happens.

Ed: Did changing your name have anything to do with transforming your personality, changing your character?

Dylan: No, I was always pretty set in my ways. I was always the character that I already was.

Ed: Tell me how you decided on “Bob Dylan.”

Dylan: Well I think it’s pretty much — I don’t know, I was talking to the guy in KISS one time, y’know Gene Simmons, he’s a guy that used to have another name. I don’t know what it was. And he just said it popped into his head one day. And who else — I was talking to somebody else too. Well, all the rappers, y’know? A lot of rappers give themselves different names, because that’s who they feel they are, y’know? They’re not that person that everybody knows when they go to school. They’re more into other things and they need another name.

Ed: You were into other things?

Dylan: Yeah, I mean, you call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.

Clip 2

Ed: What would you say the ’60s were like?

Dylan: A blur. I think a lot of new things came in at that time. A lot of old things went out. The image of me being projected at that time was certainly not a songwriter or a singer. It was more like some kind of a threat to society in some kind of way.

Ed: Or a spokesman for the generation?

Dylan: Well, that was another way of putting it, yeah.

Ed: You didn’t see yourself that way?

Dylan: [makes sound indicating negative.]

Ed: How was that a problem for you?

Dylan: You feel like you’re an imposter, when someone thinks you’re something and you’re not.

Ed: Like the people who would show up at your house at Woodstock? [laughter]

Dylan: Yeah, like that.

Ed: So people would actually come to the house?

Dylan: They’d want to discuss things with me. Politics and philosophy, and just all those kinds of things. Organic farming and things, y’know.

Ed: Total strangers?

Dylan: Yeah.

Ed: And they would just drive up to the house and get out and knock on the door?

Dylan: Yeah. They’d come from sometimes a long ways away.

Ed: What did you know about organic farming?

Dylan: Nothing. Not a thing.

Clip 3

Ed: Do ever look at music [that you've written] and say “Wow, that surprised me.”

Dylan: I don’t know how I got to write those songs.

Ed: What do you mean you don’t know how?

Dylan: They were all — those early songs were almost magically written. Ah, “darkness at the break of noon, shadows even the silver spoon, the handmade blade the child’s balloon, eclipses both the sun and moon, to understand you know too soon, there is no sense in trying.” Well, try to sit down and write something like that. There’s a magic to that, and it’s not Siegfried and Roy kinda magic — it’s a different kind of a penetrating magic. And I did it at one time.

Ed: You don’t think you can do it today?

Dylan: [pauses, looks aside and then makes sound indicating a negative.]

Ed: Does that disappoint you?

Dylan: Well, you can’t do something forever, and I did it once. And I can do other things now, but I can’t do that.

Clip 4

Ed: That period in the ’80s when you said you’d lost touch with your own music — “My own songs had become strangers to me — I couldn’t wait to retire and fold the tent — I was what they called ‘over-the-hill’”. Did you really feel that way?

Dylan: Yeah.

Ed: What made you feel that way?

Dylan: Well, most of it if not all of it was my own doing. I was purposeless, I had no purpose out there. As a performer, we need purpose.

Ed: You also wrote that there was “a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find it — I’m a ’60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days — I’m in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion.” Those are pretty harsh words.

Dylan: Well, I’d seen all these titles written about me.

Ed: And you started to believe it?

Dylan: Well, I believed it anyway. I wasn’t getting any thrill out of performing.

Ed: How’d you get past that point? How’d you get out of that rut?

Dylan: I was with the [Grateful] Dead playing a tour, and I couldn’t really get at the stuff they wanted me to do, and I was going to call it a day.

Ed: So, you’re with the Dead and they’re saying, “Hey Bob, play this song, play that song,” and you didn’t feel you could do those songs anymore. So how did you get to the point where you could do them? And have some meaning?

Dylan: Well, for me, the way — I’m sure everybody has revelations in their life at one time or another — but for me it was hearing this little jazz band combo in a small restaurant/bar in San Rafael, and that’s sort of when everything turned around for me.

Ed: What was it about the singer in that band that turned you around?

Dylan: I feel that this guy was performing just for me. And I took it to heart and I just started out again.

Clip 5

Ed: I read somewhere that you wrote Blowin’ In The Wind in ten minutes. Is that true?

Dylan: Probably.

Ed: Just like that?

Dylan: Yeah.

Ed: Where did it come from?

Dylan: It just came. It came from — right out of that wellspring of creativity, I would think, y’know?

Ed: You wrote that “protest songs are difficult to write without coming off as preachy and one-dimensional. You have to show people a side of themselves that they don’t know is there.” Blowin’ In The Wind — what does that show about ourselves, a side that we didn’t know was there?

Dylan: I’m not sure I’d call that song a protest song.

Ed: I know that — and I accept — that you don’t see yourself as the voice of that generation. But some of your songs did stop people cold. And they saw them as anthems. And they saw them as protest songs. It was important in their lives. It sparked a movement.

Dylan: My stuff were songs, they weren’t sermons.

Clip 6

Ed: Let me show you this thing. I almost forgot about this. [reaches and fetches a magazine] You remember this cover? [The magazine is Esquire and it shows a composite human face, with one quarter each belonging to Bob Dylan, Malcolm X, Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy. It's a cover that Dylan mentions in Chronicles, as being something that shocked and disturbed him at the time.]

Dylan: [laughs] No, I don’t, but I’m glad you did!

Ed: A four-faced monster. It was Castro, Kennedy, Malcolm X and you. What was that about?

Dylan: I don’t know.

Ed: Did you ever figure it out?

Dylan: No, I didn’t figure it out. I mean Malcolm, he had a huge following of people, and his message was “by any means necessary.” And mine was, “by no means.” Y’know, and then you got Castro, we all know about him. He started out and he used to blow up police stations and escaped with his life into Mexico, and then he got shipwrecked in Cuba and finally took over the country. So, they equated me with him? And Kennedy, we all know what happened with Kennedy. I mean, I don’t see what the hell I was doing up there. If they put me up there with Elvis, or Frank Sinatra — that might have made sense to me.

Clip 7

Ed: You write that “for sure my lyrics had struck nerves that had never been struck before.” How does it feel when you listen to or perform these songs today?

Dylan: They change their meanings over periods of time. They change their meaning for different situations that a person’s in, and, ah, they hold up because they’re so wide and there’s so many levels in them. So that you don’t have to act them out. Pop songs usually you have to act out. Have you ever seen Mick Jagger do Satisfaction? Well that’s — he acts it out.

Ed: [chuckling] That’s not what you do?

Dylan: No. Oh — he’s a good actor! But nevertheless, y’know, I can’t do that.

Ed: Why do you still do it? Why are you still out here?

Dylan: Well, the destiny thing. I made a bargain with it a long time ago and I’m holding up my end.

Ed: What was your bargain?

Dylan: To get where I am now.

Ed: Should I ask who you made the bargain with?

Dylan: With the, ah [laughing], with the, y’know, with the chief commander.

Ed: On this earth?

Dylan: On this earth and in the world we can’t see.

Clip 8

Ed: As you probably know, Rolling Stone magazine named your song, Like A Rolling Stone, the number one song of all time. Twelve of your songs are in their list of the top 500. That must be good to have as part of your legacy.

Dylan: Oh, maybe this week. But the lists, they change names quite frequently, really. I don’t pay much attention to that.

Ed: But it’s a pat on the back, Bob.

Dylan: This week it is. Who’s to say how long that’s going to last?

Ed: Well, it’s lasted a long time for you. I mean, you’re still out here doing these songs, you’re still on tour.

Dylan: I do, but I don’t take it for granted.

Ed: Bob, thank you very much.

Dylan: OK.

Ed: It’s been a pleasure.

Dylan: Thank you.

[off-camera, someone starts clapping, another person joins in]

Ed: That’s for you.

Dylan: [laughs]

Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:

• 20/20 hindsight
• Tryin’ To Get To Heaven
• YouTube interview — Bob Dylan in 1984

---