Douglas Brinkley, the author and historian, has been out and about doing interviews of his own to promote his interview with Bob Dylan in the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine. (It’s certainly a measure of the degree of fascination in our culture with Dylan that such a thing is occurring, i.e., media outlets having someone on just to talk about talking to Bob Dylan.)

On Friday last, he spoke for some time to radio host Don Imus (thanks a million to reader Jay for tipping me to this). Particularly interesting are some things Brinkley remarked upon that didn’t make the print article. My own selected transcriptions are below. It starts with talk about Dylan’s taste in art, and progresses to how “old-fashioned” he is (don’t dare say conservative!) in a variety of ways. (Some of the audio of the interview is here.)

Imus: He talked about how much he liked Rembrandt, and a couple of other guys, and he gave a shout-out to Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko — which I was kind of surprised he liked either one of them, but — and then his thoughts on Picasso I thought were interesting, didn’t you?

Brinkley: I really did. What he said — he just didn’t like Picasso. He thought that he didn’t work hard enough. He had spent a whole day, when he had off, at the museum, wandering around. I only could put a line or two in it, because we did hours of interviews. But he went on about Rembrandt for so long because he had just seen those paintings and remembered each one. He’s very old-fashioned. I mean the thing I got from — and I kind of knew this going in but it struck me stronger — he’s just a regular guy from Minnesota. I mean people make him into being something different. He’s from way up north, that iron ore Mesabi range, Hibbing, Minnesota near the Canadian border, and he very much likes places like Manitoba and Saskatchewan, that belt up there, and he’s a home town guy for all of his complexities. In fact he went on for me so long about the virtues of Duluth, Minnesota, hoping that I would get it in the article because he said he always tells people how much he likes Duluth and it always gets cut. So I made sure I kept just a little bit in there about how special he finds the city of Duluth. He’s really gearing his energy back towards Minnesota and he wants to spend more and more time up there.

[Imus later brings up Dylan's statement during the interview that "morality has gotten a bad rap."]

Brinkley: Well he is, y’know, Bob’s righteous. He has a — I have a theory — some people who’ve spent their life getting vested in America, like John Dos Passos the novelist and John Steinbeck, as they get older they all get a little more about morality, and also very pro-American. Dylan really loves the United States. There’s no question to me this is — I remember in the sixties when he played with the Band in Europe, and dropped an American flag behind it. But part of our talk that didn’t make the interview is just how much he misses the can-do-ism of America. I said in the piece it’s as if he wants a Sousa band playing on every main street. He likes an America that made quality products, not cheap junk. Probably more the old mom and pop store America than Wal-Mart America. He’s just old-fashioned in those ways. I came out of him that he’s really a 1950s kind of guy, when America was in black and white; not the pyschedlic sixties that’s in technicolor. And he champions American poetry, novelists — we do everything in the arts better in America than anywhere else. There’s a touch of nationalism in him which is I think surprising to some people.

Surprising to some people, without a doubt, particularly people who have accepted the caricature of Dylan from the media over the years. Not so surprising to people around here, I suspect.

Brinkley also appeared on TV, and specifically on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show last week. He reiterates some of what he told Imus, and has more on the Sarkozy/Dylan encounter. Here’s a few things I thought to transcribe from that:

Brinkley: He knows more about American popular music than anybody. He’s going out like a gnarled bluesman, carrying his own guitar, going from gig to gig [...] He’s an expert on American music from the 1920s and 30s [...]

Joe: Fascinating part of your story was when Sarkozy came back stage in his black turtleneck and blue jeans [...] What did Dylan say about that encounter, looking at Sarkozy?

Brinkley: He liked him. There’s an old-fashioned side to Bob Dylan. For example, he told me that he doesn’t like the Euro, that he prefers the currencies of Europe with the old pictures on them. And he was asking Sarkozy about globalism, about the modern economy. Dylan has a kind of nationalistic streak to him. [...] He kind of liked the cut of Sarkozy’s jib because of the way he’s promoting French culture. I might add, Dylan’s very loved in Europe. I mean here y’know he’s a big artist, but in Europe they see him as the premier American recording artist, of the past hundred years, even bigger than Elvis.

Joe: And you say that Dylan said that looking at Sarkozy was like looking in a mirror, looking at himself. How was that?

Brinkley: Well, I think it — look, first the Sarkozys came to his show and they came backstage to spend time with him. But it’s really, Joe, that notion of culture. Bob Dylan likes the fact that America needs to defend its cultural roots — he’s an unabashed America-lover, and it’s a side people don’t know because he writes songs that are often kind of categorized as protest music. But the fact that, for example, Sarkozy coming back into NATO, would he bring France back into NATO, but at the same time being very tough on protectionist issues in France. They just sort of hit it off.

[Dylan and Sarkozy actually discussed France returning as a full member of NATO?! --Ed]

[Brinkley is later asked about whether Dylan was a hard interview.]

Brinkley: He couldn’t have been warmer and more of a gentleman. We had a great time talking. I brought a little Radio Shack tape recorder. We would do the interviews at night. I was doing it for history, not just this story. And I went to areas he likes to talk about. Y’know, he’s an expert on Civil War songs, both from the south and the north. We talked about that. We talked about Walt Whitman. He misses the kind of poetic vision of Whitman’s America, when everything was very big. We talked about John Ford, the movie director, he loved those old westerns and in some ways it informs this new ten songs that he’s just written. [...] But he told me Joe that the thing that was very important to him was when he walked off of that Ed Sullivan Show, because all of Minnesota — little Bobby was on Ed Sullivan and they rehearsed the song and then the censors wouldn’t let him play it and he left. And he said, “From that point on, I was basically on James Dean Boulevard.”

This thing about Ed Sullivan and the famous Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues incident is interesting, although it seems like we’re not quite getting the whole import of Bob’s remarks. In the print interview, he says this:

Ed Sullivan was behind me, but the censors came down, and they didn’t want me to play that particular song. I just had it in mind to do that particular song. I’d rehearsed it, and it went down well. And I knew everybody back home would be watching me on the Ed Sullivan Show. But then I walked off The Ed Sullivan Show, and they couldn’t have a chance to see me. So I don’t know what that says about me as a person.

And then add this to the story: Back in 2004, Dylan did an interview with David Gates of Newsweek. Again Dylan talked about the Ed Sullivan moment, but it didn’t make the print interview. Instead, Gates brought it up in an online chat he did promoting the interview. It was back in the early days of this website, and our reporters covered it. With regard to what Dylan might write about in a future volume of his memoir Chronicles, Gates said this:

he does have ‘blood on the tracks’ stuff and material about ‘freewheelin’ and his walking off the ed sullivan show, which, by the way, he regrets having done. what else he’s written, or might plan to write, don’t know.

So David Gates said directly that Dylan regrets having walked off the Ed Sullivan Show. In any case, it’s clearly something Bob has thought a lot about, and brought up now on several occasions in big interviews. He sees it as some kind of big turning point, and — I think it’s fair to say — not necessarily a positive one.

Perhaps he thinks that if he had done the show, and sung Don’t Think Twice or A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall or something else, things somehow would have been different. Maybe less James Dean and more, well, Elvis. That’s my take, anyhow.

…

Still more to come on the Rolling Stone interview that keeps on giving …

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