May 26, 2025 • 45 mins
Author Sean Egan joins me to talk about his latest book which discusses Singer/Songwriter/Musician Bob Dylan’s impact from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s. We take a deep dive into the impact of classic Dylan works including Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde, Blood On The Tracks and more!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to my corner of the world. Over to you.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Thank you so much for streaming and listening to this podcast.
We are four plus years going strong. I am so
enjoying it. Today is no different. This is Memorial Day
of twenty twenty five, as we release this episode audio only.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
By the way, we went audio.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Only because my guest, like some this might be the
fourth or fifth audio only episode, so we'll be up
on YouTube and we'll probably maybe have captions.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I'm going to see if I can do that.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
It's a new skill I suppose I can do.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
AnyWho. This is a fun one.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
I spoke with Sean Egan. He is an accomplished author
and he wrote this wonderful new book called Decade of Dissent.
It has to do with the one and only Bob Dylan,
who's been kind of back here in the cultural pattern,
the cultural fabric of our lives here always has been.
(00:58):
Actually today that movie that came out last year, Complete Unknown,
it has He's been talked about a little bit more frequently.
Timothy Chellemah did such a beautiful job portraying a young Bob.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
But this has nothing to do with the movie.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
And later into the episode, I do ask the author
if he had attended a screening of this lovely film. Anyway,
He wrote this book called Decade of Dissent, and it
really chronicles the ideals of Bob Dylan from nineteen sixty
five through nineteen seventy five, his really most important works
(01:35):
throughout his career. I don't know if you call it
a heyday. I'm sure Sean would say, no, that's not
a hey day. Has nothing to do with a hey day.
It's just there was a period of growth nineteen sixty five,
which he describes as a really significant, remarkable year here
in the States.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
I do bring this up.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
That's the Voting Rights Act had been passed, and so
much had been going on in the nineteen sixties, and
Bob Dylan was They're growing on his own, going from
acoustic to electric.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Everybody, well not everybody. A lot of people know.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
That story about that transformation. We touch on that a lot,
and his most classic albums that you could possibly think
of get into.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
A little bit of that and just a little bit
into the back catalog. Bob Dylan, I wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Say is at the top of my phase list, but
he is definitely there as part of the canon of
stuff that I do listen to.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
I think the first time, I really.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
I mean, I knew, I knew about Blowing in the
Wind and those kind of songs since I was a kid.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
I mean, I've always followed a lot of that stuff.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
But yeah, this is just very interesting and it's very enlightening,
and the book is very enlightening. I urge everybody to
go out and get Decade of Dissent by Sean Egan
e g a n. First name is spelled sea N.
He only wanted to do audio only, so I try
(03:04):
correcting as much as I could throughout with the tools
that I have to make this sound as best as possible.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
But I really wanted to do this. I really wanted
to talk with him.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
It's kind of tough when you're doing a phone or
a phone interview phone or as the lingo that those
in the biz use, but just to do it over
the phone and try to get decent sound is insanely
challenging with what I have here, So I tried balancing
that out as best as I could. There might be
points where I'm way too loud. I tried bringing myself
(03:36):
down and showing up so challenging when You've talked.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
For maybe a half hour or so.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Anyway, it's just really interesting going into Bob Dylan talking
about his roots growing up in Minnesota and working for
his dad and seeing the things that he saw growing up,
and just very enlightening speaking with him about the projects
that Bob had gotten into, especially when he was recording
(04:05):
in Nashville. For some reason that I really gravitated to
that the blonde and Blonde material. Highway sixty one is
just an incredible project, great songs that came out of
all those sessions, and he worked with countless, countless people
in his career, Bob Dylan.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
So here goes.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Here is our conversation with the one and only Sean Egan,
author of Decade of Dissent out wherever you get those books.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
I highly recommend. And here we go. So how did
this come about?
Speaker 3 (04:38):
I did an speech in quite a while ago actually
on Highway sixty one revisited and I a lot of
work on it, and Daniel Kramer to the cover photograph.
I had a load of material left over because you know,
a magazine article, even this one's about twelve thousand words,
(04:58):
it was still a lot of material. Your life and
you I always thought that might make the basis of
the book. One day this year is the sixtieth anniversary
of I Didn't Going Electric and Highway sixty one bringing
it All back Home, So it seemed like an appropriate
time to do.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
That decade of dissent?
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Where did you get that from?
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Oh, you're always trying to think of a pithy and
alliterative title, and that one pretty much was perfect for
this particular subject because sixty two his first album. Right
through the sixties, he was a major figure. Which is
not to say that he wasn't a major figure afterwards,
(05:42):
but that was the crux of his career and his
influence and esthetically as well. So that just fell neatly
into my head as a good.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Side of How long did it take you to put
all the materials together through your notes and then finally
getting it from from the very started the idea to
the finished manuscript.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Well, you could say technically fifteen years, because yeah, that
I did the article, But in terms of writing, I'm
quite a quick writer. So I already had the serials
that the interviews were done years ago, and so probably
(06:25):
about six months to put it all together.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, how many interviews do you say you would have
had done for all of this and the interviews?
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Did I do well? I spoke to all of the
peoples a dozen interviews or more.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Yeah, and a lot through audio interviews. Did you take
notes as well, just stuff that you've kept in your vault?
Speaker 3 (06:47):
No, you just recorded.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
I don't endertain what impact in that decade of dissent.
That's basically the thesis for the book is to say,
you know, how much influence did he have on the
world through his music?
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Do you feel that he had on culture?
Speaker 3 (07:08):
I mean, he genuinely changed the world. Before before nineteen
sixty five, there was folk music on one side, and
there was pop and rock on the other side. Pop
and rock, although it could be very exciting and enjoyable,
it was the lyrics are basically banal. There were Moon
in June stuff or novelty stuff, and folk had had
(07:31):
intellectual lyrics, but musically it could be a bit stayed in,
a bit boring. But he put the two together. And
obviously somebody else could have done it. Somebody else could
have put a backing band behind I'm fulky or intellectual
song words. But he's the one who did it, and
(07:53):
he the genius and that made the crucial difference in
the public act this new this new.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Genre, yeah, and bringing it all back, which he was
trying to be at least fair and go fifty to
fifty and say, okay, now I've discovered electric, but I'm
going to give the original fans the acoustic on the
second side. But still it was outraging folkies. Did you
capture a lot of that in the book saying hey,
get it are there's still people like that even today
(08:25):
who felt like, oh, yeah, that was the wrong way
to go.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
No.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
I think that that passed pretty quickly after he proved
intellectual lyrics could work with rock and roll. I mean,
he changed what rock was basically, so there was less
reason for the folkies to be to be snobby about
it before that. I mean, when it happened, it was
a real huge controversy that the folks felt that he
(08:52):
was setting out. And I don't think there was a
sort of specter of McCarthy isn't about at the time. Still,
even though McArthur yere had passed, you know, people were
very attuned to this idea of people being selling out
or keeping quiet, or or being intimidated, and it felt
(09:18):
like some people, it felt like Dylan was part of
that part of that process, not that anybody had intimidated him,
but they might have lost his nerve to an extent.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Yeah, nineteen sixty five was like, you know, the big
Harbinger year. I mean, so much was going on in
the world and it all kind of seemed to converge
at once, and he definitely seemed to be going along
with the times. Did a lot of people feel like, Yeah,
that was the right track to go, was to like,
you got to change, you got to roll at the
times and then even lead people with your music.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Well, he converted a lot of people. He made people
realized that you could marry the two types of music.
And of cause, a lot of pop bands who previously
listened to the beats in the stone suddenly they realized
that popular music had given them so much more than
it had, you know, on an intellectual level, not just
(10:13):
on a visceral level.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Yeah, And you do touch on his upbringing and how
that that had shaped him. His upbringing in Minnesota, and
he couldn't stand the rigidity of his father, who he
had dusted his being in the business, and that seemed
to shape him during the Eisenhower era.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
Yeah, he came from a very middle class family up
on the border with Canada, so it was very cut
off from the kind of society that he wants it
to be in, which is more and more radical and
more and his dad came a good upbringing. Materially emotionally,
(10:55):
I don't think he got much from his father. I
think it was quite close to his mother. His dad
ran a firm ournersure business, and when people who got
furniture from him on the higher purchase couldn't keep up
the payments anymore, the furniture had to be reclaimed, and
Dylan was given the job by his father helping to
(11:17):
go and retrieve that retrieve those goods, and he really
hated it. He hated the humiliation of the people that
he was having to take the furniture back from him.
That's an example of his social conscience and the fact
that he did have sympathy for the underdog from a
(11:38):
very early age, even though he was very privileged himself.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
A lot of empathy I think would have to come
into play with that. Just seeing how the less fortunate
were being treated and having just furniture repossessed had to
lead way to a lot of the material that came
out much later, especially in the mid sixties, and then.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
Before that, of course the protest songs, which are far
more nakedly political. There's a lot of theories about why
he wrote process songs, and some people say that the
girlfriend at the time, Susi Rottolo, was a primary influence
on that, because she was very left wing and very
(12:20):
much an activist. But I don't think any of his
protest songs were ever infincere. I don't think he ever
wrote a song that he didn't believe in, although she
might have. Everybody wanted to impress their girlfriend. Of course
she might have acted as a spur to those to
those songs, but they came from the heart as well.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Yeah, one track that really stands out, Chimes of Freedom.
He wasn't willing to just like say, oh yeah, I'm
going to play to just this one demographic. It left him,
you know, with bigger questions. With a tune like that.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Well, that's a sort of transitional song. It appeared on
another side of Popped in nineteen sixty four, which is
the album which first started to worry his older fans
because there were no real protests of songs on it,
But Chimes of Freedom was a source of protest song,
but much more vague and poetic. And you see just
(13:17):
a generalized statement of sympathy for the underdog. It's a
nice song. It season moving away from stuff like Masters
of War, which is bluntly stating a real hardcore political message.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, and you call nineteen sixty five the Annis Marabellus
of that year, It's a year of significant change. One
other examples that made that such a year of significant change.
Besides the war, we definitely had civil rights here going
on in the United States, which I would think had
a pretty big impact as well on Dylan.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Oh yeah, I mean nineteen sixty five, He and Mirablis
is because he was absolutely everywhere. He released two albums
bringing it all back home in Highway sixty one, We
visit Did Like a Rolling Stone was a huge smash
hit single, even though it was the most unlikely single
you could possibly actually, but he was covering his song.
(14:12):
I mean a number of not just the Bird and
people who had hits or his songs, but every artist
was trying to make it was covering Dylan songs. So
he was he was all pervasive and if you listen
to the beatles December sixty five album Run Soul, that
(14:37):
is like the Fab four formula that they'd already established
but diffracted through the style and the technique of Dylan.
It sounds like a sort of Dylanized Beatles album, So
even titans like that. He was having an implu.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Then, oh for sure, with the Beatles and Dylan meeting
up with them in that year and making it really
a huge change, which led to so much creativity after that.
So I'm sure he was on that cent trajectory. That's
just a really fascinating breakthrough. But what's really amazing is
three albums and fourteen months and got through with a
(15:23):
little help from Albert Grossman, who was the manager at
that time.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
If you can call it help, yeah, I mean artificial
help exactly. His fans called out the anthetanine rock trinogy,
which gives you an idea of parent was able to
maintain this incredible, incredible schedule because Blonde on Blonde, which
came out in nineteen sixty six, it was a double album,
(15:49):
and in between dates, he was in between recording dates,
he was playing live dates, going around the world being
booed to the Rafters because the folkys and the audience
didn't mind the fact that the second part of the
set featured backing band. You know, the psychological effect. Psychological effect.
(16:13):
That must have been huge to go out there and
just be boomed. So he was very fraid around the
edges of the time.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Oh yeah, I think anybody would be. It's just that's
just so much to take in at once. Blonde and
Blonde a very very interesting collection, double album recording nineteen
sixty six in Nashville and done in a pretty conservative
time at that time. But you had some real serious
talent on that really is with Robbie Robertson and Al Cooper.
(16:42):
It's just got to be which you have definitely chronicled
in this book. It's got to be like another building
on that breakthrough.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Yeah, he took Al Cooper and Robbie Robinson, Robbie Robertson
with him to Nashville, New York Buddies and the session
musicians in Nashville. They entered into this wholeheartedly. They never
seen anything like Dinner before, they never heard anything like
(17:11):
Dinner before. But they played beautifully behind these weird songs
that he brought them with their weird time signature and
bizarre lyrics. You know, they used to playing mostly country sessions.
You hear people like Charlie McCoy playing with him. Fantastic musicians,
and it was a very personal album. There were there
were no songs like Desolation Role or Chimes of Freedom
(17:34):
on it. It was all about himself, the journey that
he was going through, a great collection of songs. Like
all double albums, this was the first double album by
the way, by any rock or pop artists. But like
all double albums, you can point the tracks that you
would happily lose, the core of it, stuff like Visions
of Johanna, absolutely majestic recording. The core of it is
(17:58):
absolutely incredible.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Yeah, and someone said that the songs were on a
small scale in subject matter, which has been one of
those chief things that people would say. But it's still
amazing amount of twelve bar blues as well into this.
So it's just just again making that again another left turn.
And then after that gave way to what people are
(18:21):
always looking at as the first bootleg was the Basement Tapes.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Yeah, it seems that Dylan was a revolutionary and whether
he intended to be or not, you know, He recorded
these songs, which later became known as the Basement Tapes,
when he was in Woodstock after he'd had a motorcycle
accident in sixty six, and his manager, mister Grossman, was
(18:48):
sort of pressurizing him to keep coming up with songs
if he wasn't going to record, which he didn't seem
interested in doing at the time, and at least other
people could do cover versions of them. The money plowing in,
and they were really weird, quirky songs with bizarre lyrics,
and also they were recorded in a basement, and so
(19:12):
they had this really basic musty tandard to them, and
they started leaking out to the rock aristocracy because Grossman
wanted people to do covers, and the rock aristocracy played
them to their fellow musician. So although the public wasn't
(19:35):
hearing them, the influential musicians were, and that started influencing
the way that they recorded, and they started turning their
back on psychedelia and the excesses of studio experimentation of
sixty seven. And then finally the public got to hear
them more Dylan's versions because they heard the cover version.
But when this bootleg record came out called Great White Wonder,
(19:57):
which had a selection of unreleased Dylan song from across
his career, especially the Basement tapes. So he caused this
entire industry, the bootleg industry that didn't have anything to
do with here, and he didn't instigate it. Then people
started releasing thousands of thousands of bootleg records of all
(20:21):
artists across the board.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
How long did he keep Albert Grossman? How was how
long was he on the scene and Albert Grossman. I
believe he's worked with other acts as well.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Grossman basically sees being his manager at the turn of
the seventy, although there were because of contractual reason that
there are a few years where he was still technically
receiving monies from him, and either Modeman had got rid
of him. It was a motorcycle accident that there was
a turning point. Dylan used the accident, which was fairly minor,
(20:54):
in order to get out of this insane working schedule
that Grossman had put him on. At that point he
began to get rid of Grossman from his life, and
a lot of the songs on the Basement seemed to
be about Albert Grossman and not necessarily sort of broadside
or denunciations of him, because Dylan himself was beginning to
(21:14):
examine his own conduct over the last few years and
it had become a lot more self critical and a
lot less judgmental. But certainly he's become very disillusioned. Gros.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Yeah, as many in the music business. I keep reading
all these books about how yeah management or you know, lawyers.
You look at the Beatles with Alan Klein and people
like that. They just they learned their lesson way later
that they had been dealing with somebody pretty shady. So
it's always a lesson learned, especially with artists from that era.
(21:47):
What's really interesting is John Wesley Harding from late nineteen
sixty seven.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
That seemed to be another turn.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
That was that Dylan was finding himself in a different way,
which you would say castigating both themselves.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Yeah, it's a sort of continuation in the way of
the of the self that you hear in the basement
tape songs, whereas there's a lot of humor in the
basement tape songs and a lot of sex as well
in John the Wesley Harding. He's just it's a concept album, really,
(22:24):
He's the first track John Wesley Harding is about this
rebellious figure who, if you read read the lyrics or
listen to the lyrics, he's venerated by people, and but
he's not really deserving of the status that he's been
given by them. And then throughout the rest of the
(22:45):
songs he's exploring the psyche of somebody who has done
bad things and has given in reached the state of hubris.
And then the final two songs he's sort of disa
hours all of that and celebrates love. And the preamble
to those final two songs is The Wicked Messenger, where
(23:08):
somebody is told that if you cannot bring good news,
then don't bring any It's almost a dialogue that Dylan
is having with himself throughout the whole album and couching
everything in metaphor and beautiful poetry as normal. But it
really is a journey that he's describing of an individual,
(23:29):
and the individual can only be him.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
If you had to tell somebody who knew nothing about
Dylan or anything like that, what would be the first
album you would say that person should pick up and
take a deep dive into, Well.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
It has to be Highway sixty one revisited. I mean,
it starts with like a Rolling Stone, which is this
blistering denunciation of somebody, you know, absolutely dripping with hate.
Although it is open to the interpretation that the un
that he's talking to in the song is in fact himself.
(24:08):
He does that a lot. He uses the second person
in song to explore his own psychological state. But either way,
whichever way you want to listen to that So that
song is an incredible, classic, unprecedented song. And the album
closes with Desolation Row, which is this twelve minute tour
(24:31):
de force. It's like, it's like an exploration of the
world and an examination of everything that's wrong with it.
It never gets boring, even though it's twelve minutes long.
So when you think about the fact that the album
is bookended by those two Titanic classics, that would be
(24:52):
enough in and of itself, but in between them you've
got the more incredible songs like Queen Jane Proximately and
just like Tom Bum's Blues and It Takes a Lot
to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, which is
one of the most beautiful and tender songs that he's
ever written. And all of that is all on one album.
(25:14):
Is just absolutely staggering.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah, an amazing album, and Ballad of a Thin Man
is one that really stands out to me.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
With the got to mention that I believe I'm writing
saying that's the first Dylan song with a bridge with
a middle eight. And that's another thing that doesn't get
mentioned much in the discussion of Dylan and the nineteen
sixty five and Dylan goes Electric. That was the year
(25:42):
that he began writing his own melodies, because up until
then he'd done that thing that folkys do have, taking
an age old melody so old that it's out of
copyright and putting his lyrics in it. But he decided
that he'd write his own tunes, and if you listen
(26:03):
to The Highway sixty one, it's the first album that
he made where you can't point the track and say, oh,
we got that tune from Nottingham Town or No More
Auction Block or some other eons old folks on. And
he turned out to be a very good melody right there. No,
there's no reason that he would necessarily be that, and
(26:27):
he was already a great lyricist, but he was very
very competent melody wise as well.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Would poetry really inspired Dylan, obviously, He gives a Scott
Fitzgerald a name check in there as well, But like,
what poetry did he grow up on that really influenced him?
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Not sure there was any one particular poet obviously everybody.
But when they think of poetry and Dylan and influencers,
they think Dylan Thomas. And Dylan himself has said he
got his name from Dylan Thomas after denying it for decades.
But he's such a sort of mischievous, playful and convoluted
(27:13):
character that you can't necessarily believe him when he when
he says something, I'm not sure there's much connection between
Under Milkwood and Desolation Row. I'm not too sure that
you can point to any individual poet has influenced in
(27:34):
Dylan is a I mean a lot of this stuff.
He's sort of he invented it, obviously. He he references
Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in Desolation Row. I'll
leave it to other people to decide whether they think
(27:56):
that's any influence of then on on his style. Basically,
the man's unique.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
How much did the record company get involved in the
creation of these like oh my gosh, you're closing out
on an album with a twelve minute song was obviously, you know,
in the era of coming off just singles, but you
know it'd be Dylan and the Beatles and you know,
later the Stones and all that coming out with actual
concept albums. How tough was that with these record execs?
(28:25):
Were they okay and comfortable with a twelve minute closer
like that?
Speaker 3 (28:30):
I'm not sure they were comfortable, But I've never really
heard any boats of the record company trying to interfere
on a very serious level with Dylan's Dylan's product. I mean,
there was this back when he was making freem Bob Dylan,
which came out in sixty three and that was his
(28:51):
breakthrough album. There was there was this track John Birch
Blues talking John Birch Blues, which they insisted not beyond
the album, But that was for reasons of libel, because
he did compare them to Nazis, which is a little
bit over the top. Otherwise, I think they pretty much
left him alone because he was so influential and the
(29:16):
cover versions were pouring in, and they, you know, whatever
misgivings they might have had about how unusual and revolutionary
his music was, I think they pretty much understood that
he should be left to his own devices. The only
(29:40):
real problem that he had by nineteen sixty five was
petty things like Daniel Kramer was commissioned to do recover
photograph of Bringing It All Back Home, and the art
director of Columbia Records and said, no, you can't do that.
We need a proper, a professional, established photographer. And then
(30:04):
Albert Grossman told this man certain terms that Daniel Kramer
was going to take the photograph, and Daniel Kramer ended
up taking the photograph and creating one of the most
iconic album covers of all time. So basically I think
Dylan was left to go his own way.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Yeah, and lucky for him, especially when you're talking to
the sixty seventies and beyond, how record execs get involved
in try to bring an NR people to be involved
in the creation of any kind of a project. What
in nineteen sixty nine, trying to get him to come
to Woodstock that wasn't to be, but he played another festival.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
Yeah. The only reason that Woodstock was originally going to
be taking Blazing Woodstock, which is, you know that was
a pretty out of the way place in upstate New York.
The only reason for that being its location was that
everybody knew that Dylan lived in Woodstock, and Dylan had
(31:08):
been off the road since nineteen sixty six, was given
almost no interviews, and so he was considered to be,
by the standards of the time, a recluse, and they
wanted the people putting together the festival wanted to entice
him out of the semi retirement, and Dylan just wanted
(31:31):
them to leave him alone. He didn't feel too much
of connections to the hippies. But in the end Woodstock
couldn't take place in Woodstock. It moved to Bethel, about
seventeen miles away. I think Dylan, in order to get
away from the Woodstock Cords, accepted an invitation to play
(31:52):
the Isle of Wight Festival. The Islan of Wight is
a little alivened off the southern coast of England, so
he went over there and put the distance of the
Atlantic Ocean between him and the hippies.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
Yeah, very distressed at that time. There was probably a
better venue I would imagine at the Island of White
coming into the madness of Woodstock.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Well, the people wouldn't leave in the lone Woodstock. He
had people fans following him on the lonely country roads
of Woodstock and came home to find a couple in
his bed once and people on his roof and things
like that. He was plagued the.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
So then later on, going into nineteen seventy with self
portraits is I would say that you wouldn't recommend this
one if you were to go through the Dylan catalog
that was talk about it beyond Left Turn.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
Well, that was the ultimate attempt to get the hippies
and the people who considered in the King of the
count culture off of his back. He deliberately made a
terrible album in order to say to these people, Look,
I'm not the person you think I am. You can
stop bothering me now. Although having said that, he has
(33:16):
and I mentioned earlier that he's a very convoluted character,
he has given interview quotes where he's quite angrily insisted
that it was a great album and the people who
slagged it off weren't listening properly to it.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Yeah, really, really, I could give it a lessen. Definitely,
you kind of wonder, I mean, with with a catalog
so huge, it's good to go back in there and
you know, you give it another lesson. And it could
be a whole different experience.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
I mean, if we didn't know who Bob Dylan was,
it's a bit like Paul McCartney and Wings. If we've
never heard of the Beatles, maybe we'd think the Wings
were a fantastic band. Yeah, maybe if we had no
pleaquanceptions and pre knowledge of Dylan, where we would accept
self portrait on its own terms. The Trouble is a
(34:07):
double album of cover version with a lot of land orchestration.
It's not what we imagined Bob Dylan epid.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
That's a good parallel comparing that to the Wing situation,
which is we look at this many years later, it's like, well,
you know, the bop links are not as bad as
some of the rubbish we could hear later on in
our culture, So that that's very interesting. And then you
get to Planet Waves basically that was a company as
tour that seems to be pretty much kind of lost
(34:41):
in the canon.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
Yeah, it's a nice little album. It his comeback album
because after Dell Portray, he puts out A New Morning
a few months later, and then he released nothing, no
album for about three years. Not only was he off
the road, but he wasn't even releasing records, and then
(35:06):
he decided to make it live comeback, and by the
seventies rock music was being staged properly instead of in
converted cinemas or ballrooms. He was able to play arenas,
but by the seventies you needed a product to sell.
(35:27):
If you were on the roads. You couldn't just appropot
nothing put on a gy. So he slapped together A
Planet Waves and it's a very unusual album in his cannon,
because he's not really usually a confessional songwriter. But if
you listen to the album, it starts with on a
(35:50):
night like this, whereas he actually says in the lyric,
We've got much to reminisce, and then he seems to
be writing about his childhood. The song Hazel that's to
be about his first sweetheart back in hitting Minnesota, Echo
Echo Hellstrom, and then the record Climaxes that He's Got
(36:13):
Forever Young They which is about one of his children,
and the record Climaxes with Wedding Song, which is about Sailah,
his wife, the person who had changes life for the
last eight years or so. So he's a very personal
record and a very good record in part.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
And then he just seems to top himself. This is
a good pinnacle. Blood on the Tracks nineteen seventy five.
Now we are fifty years out from this. This is
like basically the latter part of your book, Decade of Dissent. Yeah,
the inspiration and everything that's come with this album just
makes it such an unbelievable classic. How long did it
(36:57):
take him to put that one together?
Speaker 3 (37:00):
Why not long? Because Wedding Song came out in seventy
four on Planet Waves, and Blood on the Tracks, which
is clearly about the collapse of the relationship, was there.
It's seventy five, So in less than the year, he's
put together these songs, which are beautiful and exquisite but
(37:23):
also agonizing because they traced the trajectory of decline this
marriage and this relationship. It's very sad really that Blood
on the Tracks was the first album that could live
up to his classics of the sixties. But in order
(37:45):
to reach that place, he had to endure the collapse
of his marriage. Of his personal life was in disarray,
but it led to the vitalization of his professional life.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
Yeah, what a classic. Blown on the Tracks just really
just captures it so well. And then he just went
on to so much. Obviously, you've probably seen the film
and Bob Dylan that just recently was released. Did you
have did you see it? And if you, if so,
(38:20):
how did you feel about it?
Speaker 3 (38:21):
Everybody assumes that I've.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Seen I know, I want to say if, because I haven't.
Speaker 3 (38:28):
I actually haven't seen.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
It, Okay, two of us.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
The travel with films like that, they have to take
liberties with the truth that they have to have to
conflate to events, because otherwise it gets poets, it gets repetitive.
They also have to give it a conventional narrative art
because the middle and end when life is not really
quite so tidy and petic. I thing like that. They
(38:55):
sort of irritate me when it comes on television. I
will watch it out of curiosity, but it's so problematic
watching something like that, and so I didn't feel any
great compulsion to actually go to the cinema to see it.
But I'm glad it's released because because younger people today
they just do not understand precisely why Dylan was so
(39:19):
important and why him going electric was so controversial. Plus
it keeps his name and his music in the in
the public eye. For thebody think that Taylor Swift is
all and end all of music, will will be surprised
of the reality.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
Yeah, I think it's smart, and you're helping doing that too,
keeping Dylan's music alive like that and Beatles just you know,
they got Paul and Ringo who are really out there
still pushing it and reminding people where all this great
music came from. But it's good than an author like yourself.
And I can understand that looking at a movie like
(39:58):
that where they're taking live with time in facts and
just you know, basically at times saying, oh, they're just
really making it up. So putting out a book like
this is great for the history books. And yeah, it
definitely hats off to somebody like yourself who can do
this and it's out there decade of descent. Can we
(40:21):
where can we find this amazing book?
Speaker 3 (40:24):
Publisher is Jawbone, and yeah, it's available in all good
bookstores and Amazon and et cetera. It's nicely done as well.
The publisher is it's a paperbag, but it's got flaps
like it's a hard bag. So it's quite a handsome
product and hopefully people that will agree with the contents
(40:48):
are quite worthy as well.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
It sounds like you're happy with that and you're happy
with how it's getting published, and we'll definitely look forward
to it. I appreciate you doing a phoner here with
me this afternoon, and best wish on this.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
So are you going to be doing a book tour?
Speaker 3 (41:02):
No, well, I'm doing this all this kind of thing,
virtual tour, starting work on my next book, and so
got to concentry on that.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
That's good. That's very good.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Yeah, and traveling can take a lot out of you,
and it's hard to do both things at once.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
Well, I appreciate you phoning.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
Okay, well, nice to talk to you, and pleasure to
enjoyed the book and we'll see what happened.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Yeah, absolutely, take care, Thanks love.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
And that was wonderful, wasn't it.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
I'm glad that we brought up a self portrait not
too bad these many years later came out in nineteen
seventy and it was just like kind of.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
That low points in his career.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
Everybody's got those, so that was very interesting to bring
that up. And of course all those classic tracks from
Highway sixty one revisited released in August of nineteen sixty five,
so yeah, wow.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
Anyway, yeah, Blonde On'm Blonde, that's it might be one
of my more fa favorite ones.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Just the way that that landed just came very close
to one of my favorites. And then Blunt on the track,
So yeah, some days I like that one better than
Blonde and Blonde. But wow, an incredible, incredible career, just
very prolific and just an amazing, huge catalog for sure.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
How about that.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
Didn't see the film, and neither did I. I probably
will at some point. I don't go out as much
as I used to. I used to go out, Gosh
all the time. I used to go out to movies.
I don't go out nearly as much as I used to.
And I love film and television all that stuff. It's
just I don't get out much. I just don't run
(42:46):
out of the theater. There's just nothing.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
A lot of things are just not even really worth it.
If I'm in like more of a I got to
be in the.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Mood for more of those summer blockbusters now that we're
heading into summer. I don't know, you know, Gun was
just this jingoistic thing.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
It was fun. Editing's great, great sound in it. I
don't know.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
It was the last time I go, gosh, maybe it
was the last time I was in a theater. I
can't remember now when that Top Gun sequel came out.
How many years ago that was anyway, Bob Dylan wonderful,
wonderful artists to talk about. And Shawn Eagan wonderful author
Decade of Descent. Get it wherever you get those books.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
Thanks for if you were listening to me, min now
for listening through this entire interview.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Just really wanted to get this up.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
Not the easiest thing to do over the phone, especially internationally.
I thought maybe I would get somewhat of a better connection.
I have Wi Fi calling here. I don't know it's
on that end.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
It just sounds horrible.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
I really think the mobile phones just sound worse than
they ever did. Maybe they even sounded better twenty years ago.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
I don't know what it is.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
They're terrible, and I really just I'm not a big
fan of talking on them. I always feel like the
connection is going to break. And I got Wi Fi
calling in here because of this area where I live
just is absolutely horrible for mobile phone usage. It's absolutely
just atrocious. I can go on and on about that.
It's just it's terrible. Wi Fi calling definitely helps. It
calms my nerves. I really have like this anxiety, like
(44:19):
like talking on the phone, you know, because we don't
really have landlines much anymore, very few of us do,
and I always feel like I'm going to get disconnected.
It's there's got to be a phobia about that. Somebody
look that up.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
Anyway. Thanks for coming along with me.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
This far and listening to this entire interview. If you
made it through all this way, thank you so much.
And I hope to keep doing more of these not
phoners though, unless somebody can get me. I probably need
to invest in probably getting a mixer of some kind.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
I don't have that.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
I don't have that much money, but yeah, probably if
you send it through a mixer. Somehow, my mic is nice, somehow,
there could be a balance there. I'm sure there's a
way to do it. I just don't want to spend
the money. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Anyway.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
If this made any money for me, maybe I would.
I don't want to sit here and warn about money anyway.
It was just a fun conversation. Really enjoyed it, and
thanks for sticking around, and hope to do more of
these soon take care of Bye.
Welcome to my corner of the world. Over to you.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Thank you so much for streaming and listening to this podcast.
We are four plus years going strong. I am so
enjoying it. Today is no different. This is Memorial Day
of twenty twenty five, as we release this episode audio only.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
By the way, we went audio.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Only because my guest, like some this might be the
fourth or fifth audio only episode, so we'll be up
on YouTube and we'll probably maybe have captions.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I'm going to see if I can do that.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
It's a new skill I suppose I can do.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
AnyWho. This is a fun one.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
I spoke with Sean Egan. He is an accomplished author
and he wrote this wonderful new book called Decade of Dissent.
It has to do with the one and only Bob Dylan,
who's been kind of back here in the cultural pattern,
the cultural fabric of our lives here always has been.
(00:58):
Actually today that movie that came out last year, Complete Unknown,
it has He's been talked about a little bit more frequently.
Timothy Chellemah did such a beautiful job portraying a young Bob.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
But this has nothing to do with the movie.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
And later into the episode, I do ask the author
if he had attended a screening of this lovely film. Anyway,
He wrote this book called Decade of Dissent, and it
really chronicles the ideals of Bob Dylan from nineteen sixty
five through nineteen seventy five, his really most important works
(01:35):
throughout his career. I don't know if you call it
a heyday. I'm sure Sean would say, no, that's not
a hey day. Has nothing to do with a hey day.
It's just there was a period of growth nineteen sixty five,
which he describes as a really significant, remarkable year here
in the States.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
I do bring this up.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
That's the Voting Rights Act had been passed, and so
much had been going on in the nineteen sixties, and
Bob Dylan was They're growing on his own, going from
acoustic to electric.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Everybody, well not everybody. A lot of people know.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
That story about that transformation. We touch on that a lot,
and his most classic albums that you could possibly think
of get into.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
A little bit of that and just a little bit
into the back catalog. Bob Dylan, I wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Say is at the top of my phase list, but
he is definitely there as part of the canon of
stuff that I do listen to.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
I think the first time, I really.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
I mean, I knew, I knew about Blowing in the
Wind and those kind of songs since I was a kid.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
I mean, I've always followed a lot of that stuff.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
But yeah, this is just very interesting and it's very enlightening,
and the book is very enlightening. I urge everybody to
go out and get Decade of Dissent by Sean Egan
e g a n. First name is spelled sea N.
He only wanted to do audio only, so I try
(03:04):
correcting as much as I could throughout with the tools
that I have to make this sound as best as possible.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
But I really wanted to do this. I really wanted
to talk with him.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
It's kind of tough when you're doing a phone or
a phone interview phone or as the lingo that those
in the biz use, but just to do it over
the phone and try to get decent sound is insanely
challenging with what I have here, So I tried balancing
that out as best as I could. There might be
points where I'm way too loud. I tried bringing myself
(03:36):
down and showing up so challenging when You've talked.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
For maybe a half hour or so.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Anyway, it's just really interesting going into Bob Dylan talking
about his roots growing up in Minnesota and working for
his dad and seeing the things that he saw growing up,
and just very enlightening speaking with him about the projects
that Bob had gotten into, especially when he was recording
(04:05):
in Nashville. For some reason that I really gravitated to
that the blonde and Blonde material. Highway sixty one is
just an incredible project, great songs that came out of
all those sessions, and he worked with countless, countless people
in his career, Bob Dylan.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
So here goes.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Here is our conversation with the one and only Sean Egan,
author of Decade of Dissent out wherever you get those books.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
I highly recommend. And here we go. So how did
this come about?
Speaker 3 (04:38):
I did an speech in quite a while ago actually
on Highway sixty one revisited and I a lot of
work on it, and Daniel Kramer to the cover photograph.
I had a load of material left over because you know,
a magazine article, even this one's about twelve thousand words,
(04:58):
it was still a lot of material. Your life and
you I always thought that might make the basis of
the book. One day this year is the sixtieth anniversary
of I Didn't Going Electric and Highway sixty one bringing
it All back Home, So it seemed like an appropriate
time to do.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
That decade of dissent?
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Where did you get that from?
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Oh, you're always trying to think of a pithy and
alliterative title, and that one pretty much was perfect for
this particular subject because sixty two his first album. Right
through the sixties, he was a major figure. Which is
not to say that he wasn't a major figure afterwards,
(05:42):
but that was the crux of his career and his
influence and esthetically as well. So that just fell neatly
into my head as a good.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Side of How long did it take you to put
all the materials together through your notes and then finally
getting it from from the very started the idea to
the finished manuscript.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Well, you could say technically fifteen years, because yeah, that
I did the article, But in terms of writing, I'm
quite a quick writer. So I already had the serials
that the interviews were done years ago, and so probably
(06:25):
about six months to put it all together.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, how many interviews do you say you would have
had done for all of this and the interviews?
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Did I do well? I spoke to all of the
peoples a dozen interviews or more.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Yeah, and a lot through audio interviews. Did you take
notes as well, just stuff that you've kept in your vault?
Speaker 3 (06:47):
No, you just recorded.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
I don't endertain what impact in that decade of dissent.
That's basically the thesis for the book is to say,
you know, how much influence did he have on the
world through his music?
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Do you feel that he had on culture?
Speaker 3 (07:08):
I mean, he genuinely changed the world. Before before nineteen
sixty five, there was folk music on one side, and
there was pop and rock on the other side. Pop
and rock, although it could be very exciting and enjoyable,
it was the lyrics are basically banal. There were Moon
in June stuff or novelty stuff, and folk had had
(07:31):
intellectual lyrics, but musically it could be a bit stayed in,
a bit boring. But he put the two together. And
obviously somebody else could have done it. Somebody else could
have put a backing band behind I'm fulky or intellectual
song words. But he's the one who did it, and
(07:53):
he the genius and that made the crucial difference in
the public act this new this new.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Genre, yeah, and bringing it all back, which he was
trying to be at least fair and go fifty to
fifty and say, okay, now I've discovered electric, but I'm
going to give the original fans the acoustic on the
second side. But still it was outraging folkies. Did you
capture a lot of that in the book saying hey,
get it are there's still people like that even today
(08:25):
who felt like, oh, yeah, that was the wrong way
to go.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
No.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
I think that that passed pretty quickly after he proved
intellectual lyrics could work with rock and roll. I mean,
he changed what rock was basically, so there was less
reason for the folkies to be to be snobby about
it before that. I mean, when it happened, it was
a real huge controversy that the folks felt that he
(08:52):
was setting out. And I don't think there was a
sort of specter of McCarthy isn't about at the time. Still,
even though McArthur yere had passed, you know, people were
very attuned to this idea of people being selling out
or keeping quiet, or or being intimidated, and it felt
(09:18):
like some people, it felt like Dylan was part of
that part of that process, not that anybody had intimidated him,
but they might have lost his nerve to an extent.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Yeah, nineteen sixty five was like, you know, the big
Harbinger year. I mean, so much was going on in
the world and it all kind of seemed to converge
at once, and he definitely seemed to be going along
with the times. Did a lot of people feel like, Yeah,
that was the right track to go, was to like,
you got to change, you got to roll at the
times and then even lead people with your music.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Well, he converted a lot of people. He made people
realized that you could marry the two types of music.
And of cause, a lot of pop bands who previously
listened to the beats in the stone suddenly they realized
that popular music had given them so much more than
it had, you know, on an intellectual level, not just
(10:13):
on a visceral level.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Yeah, And you do touch on his upbringing and how
that that had shaped him. His upbringing in Minnesota, and
he couldn't stand the rigidity of his father, who he
had dusted his being in the business, and that seemed
to shape him during the Eisenhower era.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
Yeah, he came from a very middle class family up
on the border with Canada, so it was very cut
off from the kind of society that he wants it
to be in, which is more and more radical and
more and his dad came a good upbringing. Materially emotionally,
(10:55):
I don't think he got much from his father. I
think it was quite close to his mother. His dad
ran a firm ournersure business, and when people who got
furniture from him on the higher purchase couldn't keep up
the payments anymore, the furniture had to be reclaimed, and
Dylan was given the job by his father helping to
(11:17):
go and retrieve that retrieve those goods, and he really
hated it. He hated the humiliation of the people that
he was having to take the furniture back from him.
That's an example of his social conscience and the fact
that he did have sympathy for the underdog from a
(11:38):
very early age, even though he was very privileged himself.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
A lot of empathy I think would have to come
into play with that. Just seeing how the less fortunate
were being treated and having just furniture repossessed had to
lead way to a lot of the material that came
out much later, especially in the mid sixties, and then.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
Before that, of course the protest songs, which are far
more nakedly political. There's a lot of theories about why
he wrote process songs, and some people say that the
girlfriend at the time, Susi Rottolo, was a primary influence
on that, because she was very left wing and very
(12:20):
much an activist. But I don't think any of his
protest songs were ever infincere. I don't think he ever
wrote a song that he didn't believe in, although she
might have. Everybody wanted to impress their girlfriend. Of course
she might have acted as a spur to those to
those songs, but they came from the heart as well.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Yeah, one track that really stands out, Chimes of Freedom.
He wasn't willing to just like say, oh yeah, I'm
going to play to just this one demographic. It left him,
you know, with bigger questions. With a tune like that.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Well, that's a sort of transitional song. It appeared on
another side of Popped in nineteen sixty four, which is
the album which first started to worry his older fans
because there were no real protests of songs on it,
But Chimes of Freedom was a source of protest song,
but much more vague and poetic. And you see just
(13:17):
a generalized statement of sympathy for the underdog. It's a
nice song. It season moving away from stuff like Masters
of War, which is bluntly stating a real hardcore political message.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, and you call nineteen sixty five the Annis Marabellus
of that year, It's a year of significant change. One
other examples that made that such a year of significant change.
Besides the war, we definitely had civil rights here going
on in the United States, which I would think had
a pretty big impact as well on Dylan.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Oh yeah, I mean nineteen sixty five, He and Mirablis
is because he was absolutely everywhere. He released two albums
bringing it all back home in Highway sixty one, We
visit Did Like a Rolling Stone was a huge smash
hit single, even though it was the most unlikely single
you could possibly actually, but he was covering his song.
(14:12):
I mean a number of not just the Bird and
people who had hits or his songs, but every artist
was trying to make it was covering Dylan songs. So
he was he was all pervasive and if you listen
to the beatles December sixty five album Run Soul, that
(14:37):
is like the Fab four formula that they'd already established
but diffracted through the style and the technique of Dylan.
It sounds like a sort of Dylanized Beatles album, So
even titans like that. He was having an implu.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Then, oh for sure, with the Beatles and Dylan meeting
up with them in that year and making it really
a huge change, which led to so much creativity after that.
So I'm sure he was on that cent trajectory. That's
just a really fascinating breakthrough. But what's really amazing is
three albums and fourteen months and got through with a
(15:23):
little help from Albert Grossman, who was the manager at
that time.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
If you can call it help, yeah, I mean artificial
help exactly. His fans called out the anthetanine rock trinogy,
which gives you an idea of parent was able to
maintain this incredible, incredible schedule because Blonde on Blonde, which
came out in nineteen sixty six, it was a double album,
(15:49):
and in between dates, he was in between recording dates,
he was playing live dates, going around the world being
booed to the Rafters because the folkys and the audience
didn't mind the fact that the second part of the
set featured backing band. You know, the psychological effect. Psychological effect.
(16:13):
That must have been huge to go out there and
just be boomed. So he was very fraid around the
edges of the time.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Oh yeah, I think anybody would be. It's just that's
just so much to take in at once. Blonde and
Blonde a very very interesting collection, double album recording nineteen
sixty six in Nashville and done in a pretty conservative
time at that time. But you had some real serious
talent on that really is with Robbie Robertson and Al Cooper.
(16:42):
It's just got to be which you have definitely chronicled
in this book. It's got to be like another building
on that breakthrough.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Yeah, he took Al Cooper and Robbie Robinson, Robbie Robertson
with him to Nashville, New York Buddies and the session
musicians in Nashville. They entered into this wholeheartedly. They never
seen anything like Dinner before, they never heard anything like
(17:11):
Dinner before. But they played beautifully behind these weird songs
that he brought them with their weird time signature and
bizarre lyrics. You know, they used to playing mostly country sessions.
You hear people like Charlie McCoy playing with him. Fantastic musicians,
and it was a very personal album. There were there
were no songs like Desolation Role or Chimes of Freedom
(17:34):
on it. It was all about himself, the journey that
he was going through, a great collection of songs. Like
all double albums, this was the first double album by
the way, by any rock or pop artists. But like
all double albums, you can point the tracks that you
would happily lose, the core of it, stuff like Visions
of Johanna, absolutely majestic recording. The core of it is
(17:58):
absolutely incredible.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Yeah, and someone said that the songs were on a
small scale in subject matter, which has been one of
those chief things that people would say. But it's still
amazing amount of twelve bar blues as well into this.
So it's just just again making that again another left turn.
And then after that gave way to what people are
(18:21):
always looking at as the first bootleg was the Basement Tapes.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Yeah, it seems that Dylan was a revolutionary and whether
he intended to be or not, you know, He recorded
these songs, which later became known as the Basement Tapes,
when he was in Woodstock after he'd had a motorcycle
accident in sixty six, and his manager, mister Grossman, was
(18:48):
sort of pressurizing him to keep coming up with songs
if he wasn't going to record, which he didn't seem
interested in doing at the time, and at least other
people could do cover versions of them. The money plowing in,
and they were really weird, quirky songs with bizarre lyrics,
and also they were recorded in a basement, and so
(19:12):
they had this really basic musty tandard to them, and
they started leaking out to the rock aristocracy because Grossman
wanted people to do covers, and the rock aristocracy played
them to their fellow musician. So although the public wasn't
(19:35):
hearing them, the influential musicians were, and that started influencing
the way that they recorded, and they started turning their
back on psychedelia and the excesses of studio experimentation of
sixty seven. And then finally the public got to hear
them more Dylan's versions because they heard the cover version.
But when this bootleg record came out called Great White Wonder,
(19:57):
which had a selection of unreleased Dylan song from across
his career, especially the Basement tapes. So he caused this
entire industry, the bootleg industry that didn't have anything to
do with here, and he didn't instigate it. Then people
started releasing thousands of thousands of bootleg records of all
(20:21):
artists across the board.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
How long did he keep Albert Grossman? How was how
long was he on the scene and Albert Grossman. I
believe he's worked with other acts as well.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Grossman basically sees being his manager at the turn of
the seventy, although there were because of contractual reason that
there are a few years where he was still technically
receiving monies from him, and either Modeman had got rid
of him. It was a motorcycle accident that there was
a turning point. Dylan used the accident, which was fairly minor,
(20:54):
in order to get out of this insane working schedule
that Grossman had put him on. At that point he
began to get rid of Grossman from his life, and
a lot of the songs on the Basement seemed to
be about Albert Grossman and not necessarily sort of broadside
or denunciations of him, because Dylan himself was beginning to
(21:14):
examine his own conduct over the last few years and
it had become a lot more self critical and a
lot less judgmental. But certainly he's become very disillusioned. Gros.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Yeah, as many in the music business. I keep reading
all these books about how yeah management or you know, lawyers.
You look at the Beatles with Alan Klein and people
like that. They just they learned their lesson way later
that they had been dealing with somebody pretty shady. So
it's always a lesson learned, especially with artists from that era.
(21:47):
What's really interesting is John Wesley Harding from late nineteen
sixty seven.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
That seemed to be another turn.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
That was that Dylan was finding himself in a different way,
which you would say castigating both themselves.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Yeah, it's a sort of continuation in the way of
the of the self that you hear in the basement
tape songs, whereas there's a lot of humor in the
basement tape songs and a lot of sex as well
in John the Wesley Harding. He's just it's a concept album, really,
(22:24):
He's the first track John Wesley Harding is about this
rebellious figure who, if you read read the lyrics or
listen to the lyrics, he's venerated by people, and but
he's not really deserving of the status that he's been
given by them. And then throughout the rest of the
(22:45):
songs he's exploring the psyche of somebody who has done
bad things and has given in reached the state of hubris.
And then the final two songs he's sort of disa
hours all of that and celebrates love. And the preamble
to those final two songs is The Wicked Messenger, where
(23:08):
somebody is told that if you cannot bring good news,
then don't bring any It's almost a dialogue that Dylan
is having with himself throughout the whole album and couching
everything in metaphor and beautiful poetry as normal. But it
really is a journey that he's describing of an individual,
(23:29):
and the individual can only be him.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
If you had to tell somebody who knew nothing about
Dylan or anything like that, what would be the first
album you would say that person should pick up and
take a deep dive into, Well.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
It has to be Highway sixty one revisited. I mean,
it starts with like a Rolling Stone, which is this
blistering denunciation of somebody, you know, absolutely dripping with hate.
Although it is open to the interpretation that the un
that he's talking to in the song is in fact himself.
(24:08):
He does that a lot. He uses the second person
in song to explore his own psychological state. But either way,
whichever way you want to listen to that So that
song is an incredible, classic, unprecedented song. And the album
closes with Desolation Row, which is this twelve minute tour
(24:31):
de force. It's like, it's like an exploration of the
world and an examination of everything that's wrong with it.
It never gets boring, even though it's twelve minutes long.
So when you think about the fact that the album
is bookended by those two Titanic classics, that would be
(24:52):
enough in and of itself, but in between them you've
got the more incredible songs like Queen Jane Proximately and
just like Tom Bum's Blues and It Takes a Lot
to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, which is
one of the most beautiful and tender songs that he's
ever written. And all of that is all on one album.
(25:14):
Is just absolutely staggering.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah, an amazing album, and Ballad of a Thin Man
is one that really stands out to me.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
With the got to mention that I believe I'm writing
saying that's the first Dylan song with a bridge with
a middle eight. And that's another thing that doesn't get
mentioned much in the discussion of Dylan and the nineteen
sixty five and Dylan goes Electric. That was the year
(25:42):
that he began writing his own melodies, because up until
then he'd done that thing that folkys do have, taking
an age old melody so old that it's out of
copyright and putting his lyrics in it. But he decided
that he'd write his own tunes, and if you listen
(26:03):
to The Highway sixty one, it's the first album that
he made where you can't point the track and say, oh,
we got that tune from Nottingham Town or No More
Auction Block or some other eons old folks on. And
he turned out to be a very good melody right there. No,
there's no reason that he would necessarily be that, and
(26:27):
he was already a great lyricist, but he was very
very competent melody wise as well.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Would poetry really inspired Dylan, obviously, He gives a Scott
Fitzgerald a name check in there as well, But like,
what poetry did he grow up on that really influenced him?
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Not sure there was any one particular poet obviously everybody.
But when they think of poetry and Dylan and influencers,
they think Dylan Thomas. And Dylan himself has said he
got his name from Dylan Thomas after denying it for decades.
But he's such a sort of mischievous, playful and convoluted
(27:13):
character that you can't necessarily believe him when he when
he says something, I'm not sure there's much connection between
Under Milkwood and Desolation Row. I'm not too sure that
you can point to any individual poet has influenced in
(27:34):
Dylan is a I mean a lot of this stuff.
He's sort of he invented it, obviously. He he references
Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in Desolation Row. I'll
leave it to other people to decide whether they think
(27:56):
that's any influence of then on on his style. Basically,
the man's unique.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
How much did the record company get involved in the
creation of these like oh my gosh, you're closing out
on an album with a twelve minute song was obviously, you know,
in the era of coming off just singles, but you
know it'd be Dylan and the Beatles and you know,
later the Stones and all that coming out with actual
concept albums. How tough was that with these record execs?
(28:25):
Were they okay and comfortable with a twelve minute closer
like that?
Speaker 3 (28:30):
I'm not sure they were comfortable, But I've never really
heard any boats of the record company trying to interfere
on a very serious level with Dylan's Dylan's product. I mean,
there was this back when he was making freem Bob Dylan,
which came out in sixty three and that was his
(28:51):
breakthrough album. There was there was this track John Birch
Blues talking John Birch Blues, which they insisted not beyond
the album, But that was for reasons of libel, because
he did compare them to Nazis, which is a little
bit over the top. Otherwise, I think they pretty much
left him alone because he was so influential and the
(29:16):
cover versions were pouring in, and they, you know, whatever
misgivings they might have had about how unusual and revolutionary
his music was, I think they pretty much understood that
he should be left to his own devices. The only
(29:40):
real problem that he had by nineteen sixty five was
petty things like Daniel Kramer was commissioned to do recover
photograph of Bringing It All Back Home, and the art
director of Columbia Records and said, no, you can't do that.
We need a proper, a professional, established photographer. And then
(30:04):
Albert Grossman told this man certain terms that Daniel Kramer
was going to take the photograph, and Daniel Kramer ended
up taking the photograph and creating one of the most
iconic album covers of all time. So basically I think
Dylan was left to go his own way.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Yeah, and lucky for him, especially when you're talking to
the sixty seventies and beyond, how record execs get involved
in try to bring an NR people to be involved
in the creation of any kind of a project. What
in nineteen sixty nine, trying to get him to come
to Woodstock that wasn't to be, but he played another festival.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
Yeah. The only reason that Woodstock was originally going to
be taking Blazing Woodstock, which is, you know that was
a pretty out of the way place in upstate New York.
The only reason for that being its location was that
everybody knew that Dylan lived in Woodstock, and Dylan had
(31:08):
been off the road since nineteen sixty six, was given
almost no interviews, and so he was considered to be,
by the standards of the time, a recluse, and they
wanted the people putting together the festival wanted to entice
him out of the semi retirement, and Dylan just wanted
(31:31):
them to leave him alone. He didn't feel too much
of connections to the hippies. But in the end Woodstock
couldn't take place in Woodstock. It moved to Bethel, about
seventeen miles away. I think Dylan, in order to get
away from the Woodstock Cords, accepted an invitation to play
(31:52):
the Isle of Wight Festival. The Islan of Wight is
a little alivened off the southern coast of England, so
he went over there and put the distance of the
Atlantic Ocean between him and the hippies.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
Yeah, very distressed at that time. There was probably a
better venue I would imagine at the Island of White
coming into the madness of Woodstock.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Well, the people wouldn't leave in the lone Woodstock. He
had people fans following him on the lonely country roads
of Woodstock and came home to find a couple in
his bed once and people on his roof and things
like that. He was plagued the.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
So then later on, going into nineteen seventy with self
portraits is I would say that you wouldn't recommend this
one if you were to go through the Dylan catalog
that was talk about it beyond Left Turn.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
Well, that was the ultimate attempt to get the hippies
and the people who considered in the King of the
count culture off of his back. He deliberately made a
terrible album in order to say to these people, Look,
I'm not the person you think I am. You can
stop bothering me now. Although having said that, he has
(33:16):
and I mentioned earlier that he's a very convoluted character,
he has given interview quotes where he's quite angrily insisted
that it was a great album and the people who
slagged it off weren't listening properly to it.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Yeah, really, really, I could give it a lessen. Definitely,
you kind of wonder, I mean, with with a catalog
so huge, it's good to go back in there and
you know, you give it another lesson. And it could
be a whole different experience.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
I mean, if we didn't know who Bob Dylan was,
it's a bit like Paul McCartney and Wings. If we've
never heard of the Beatles, maybe we'd think the Wings
were a fantastic band. Yeah, maybe if we had no
pleaquanceptions and pre knowledge of Dylan, where we would accept
self portrait on its own terms. The Trouble is a
(34:07):
double album of cover version with a lot of land orchestration.
It's not what we imagined Bob Dylan epid.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
That's a good parallel comparing that to the Wing situation,
which is we look at this many years later, it's like, well,
you know, the bop links are not as bad as
some of the rubbish we could hear later on in
our culture, So that that's very interesting. And then you
get to Planet Waves basically that was a company as
tour that seems to be pretty much kind of lost
(34:41):
in the canon.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
Yeah, it's a nice little album. It his comeback album
because after Dell Portray, he puts out A New Morning
a few months later, and then he released nothing, no
album for about three years. Not only was he off
the road, but he wasn't even releasing records, and then
(35:06):
he decided to make it live comeback, and by the
seventies rock music was being staged properly instead of in
converted cinemas or ballrooms. He was able to play arenas,
but by the seventies you needed a product to sell.
(35:27):
If you were on the roads. You couldn't just appropot
nothing put on a gy. So he slapped together A
Planet Waves and it's a very unusual album in his cannon,
because he's not really usually a confessional songwriter. But if
you listen to the album, it starts with on a
(35:50):
night like this, whereas he actually says in the lyric,
We've got much to reminisce, and then he seems to
be writing about his childhood. The song Hazel that's to
be about his first sweetheart back in hitting Minnesota, Echo
Echo Hellstrom, and then the record Climaxes that He's Got
(36:13):
Forever Young They which is about one of his children,
and the record Climaxes with Wedding Song, which is about Sailah,
his wife, the person who had changes life for the
last eight years or so. So he's a very personal
record and a very good record in part.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
And then he just seems to top himself. This is
a good pinnacle. Blood on the Tracks nineteen seventy five.
Now we are fifty years out from this. This is
like basically the latter part of your book, Decade of Dissent. Yeah,
the inspiration and everything that's come with this album just
makes it such an unbelievable classic. How long did it
(36:57):
take him to put that one together?
Speaker 3 (37:00):
Why not long? Because Wedding Song came out in seventy
four on Planet Waves, and Blood on the Tracks, which
is clearly about the collapse of the relationship, was there.
It's seventy five, So in less than the year, he's
put together these songs, which are beautiful and exquisite but
(37:23):
also agonizing because they traced the trajectory of decline this
marriage and this relationship. It's very sad really that Blood
on the Tracks was the first album that could live
up to his classics of the sixties. But in order
(37:45):
to reach that place, he had to endure the collapse
of his marriage. Of his personal life was in disarray,
but it led to the vitalization of his professional life.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
Yeah, what a classic. Blown on the Tracks just really
just captures it so well. And then he just went
on to so much. Obviously, you've probably seen the film
and Bob Dylan that just recently was released. Did you
have did you see it? And if you, if so,
(38:20):
how did you feel about it?
Speaker 3 (38:21):
Everybody assumes that I've.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Seen I know, I want to say if, because I haven't.
Speaker 3 (38:28):
I actually haven't seen.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
It, Okay, two of us.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
The travel with films like that, they have to take
liberties with the truth that they have to have to
conflate to events, because otherwise it gets poets, it gets repetitive.
They also have to give it a conventional narrative art
because the middle and end when life is not really
quite so tidy and petic. I thing like that. They
(38:55):
sort of irritate me when it comes on television. I
will watch it out of curiosity, but it's so problematic
watching something like that, and so I didn't feel any
great compulsion to actually go to the cinema to see it.
But I'm glad it's released because because younger people today
they just do not understand precisely why Dylan was so
(39:19):
important and why him going electric was so controversial. Plus
it keeps his name and his music in the in
the public eye. For thebody think that Taylor Swift is
all and end all of music, will will be surprised
of the reality.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
Yeah, I think it's smart, and you're helping doing that too,
keeping Dylan's music alive like that and Beatles just you know,
they got Paul and Ringo who are really out there
still pushing it and reminding people where all this great
music came from. But it's good than an author like yourself.
And I can understand that looking at a movie like
(39:58):
that where they're taking live with time in facts and
just you know, basically at times saying, oh, they're just
really making it up. So putting out a book like
this is great for the history books. And yeah, it
definitely hats off to somebody like yourself who can do
this and it's out there decade of descent. Can we
(40:21):
where can we find this amazing book?
Speaker 3 (40:24):
Publisher is Jawbone, and yeah, it's available in all good
bookstores and Amazon and et cetera. It's nicely done as well.
The publisher is it's a paperbag, but it's got flaps
like it's a hard bag. So it's quite a handsome
product and hopefully people that will agree with the contents
(40:48):
are quite worthy as well.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
It sounds like you're happy with that and you're happy
with how it's getting published, and we'll definitely look forward
to it. I appreciate you doing a phoner here with
me this afternoon, and best wish on this.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
So are you going to be doing a book tour?
Speaker 3 (41:02):
No, well, I'm doing this all this kind of thing,
virtual tour, starting work on my next book, and so
got to concentry on that.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
That's good. That's very good.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Yeah, and traveling can take a lot out of you,
and it's hard to do both things at once.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
Well, I appreciate you phoning.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
Okay, well, nice to talk to you, and pleasure to
enjoyed the book and we'll see what happened.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Yeah, absolutely, take care, Thanks love.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
And that was wonderful, wasn't it.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
I'm glad that we brought up a self portrait not
too bad these many years later came out in nineteen
seventy and it was just like kind of.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
That low points in his career.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
Everybody's got those, so that was very interesting to bring
that up. And of course all those classic tracks from
Highway sixty one revisited released in August of nineteen sixty five,
so yeah, wow.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
Anyway, yeah, Blonde On'm Blonde, that's it might be one
of my more fa favorite ones.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Just the way that that landed just came very close
to one of my favorites. And then Blunt on the track,
So yeah, some days I like that one better than
Blonde and Blonde. But wow, an incredible, incredible career, just
very prolific and just an amazing, huge catalog for sure.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
How about that.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
Didn't see the film, and neither did I. I probably
will at some point. I don't go out as much
as I used to. I used to go out, Gosh
all the time. I used to go out to movies.
I don't go out nearly as much as I used to.
And I love film and television all that stuff. It's
just I don't get out much. I just don't run
(42:46):
out of the theater. There's just nothing.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
A lot of things are just not even really worth it.
If I'm in like more of a I got to
be in the.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Mood for more of those summer blockbusters now that we're
heading into summer. I don't know, you know, Gun was
just this jingoistic thing.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
It was fun. Editing's great, great sound in it. I
don't know.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
It was the last time I go, gosh, maybe it
was the last time I was in a theater. I
can't remember now when that Top Gun sequel came out.
How many years ago that was anyway, Bob Dylan wonderful,
wonderful artists to talk about. And Shawn Eagan wonderful author
Decade of Descent. Get it wherever you get those books.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
Thanks for if you were listening to me, min now
for listening through this entire interview.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Just really wanted to get this up.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
Not the easiest thing to do over the phone, especially internationally.
I thought maybe I would get somewhat of a better connection.
I have Wi Fi calling here. I don't know it's
on that end.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
It just sounds horrible.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
I really think the mobile phones just sound worse than
they ever did. Maybe they even sounded better twenty years ago.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
I don't know what it is.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
They're terrible, and I really just I'm not a big
fan of talking on them. I always feel like the
connection is going to break. And I got Wi Fi
calling in here because of this area where I live
just is absolutely horrible for mobile phone usage. It's absolutely
just atrocious. I can go on and on about that.
It's just it's terrible. Wi Fi calling definitely helps. It
calms my nerves. I really have like this anxiety, like
(44:19):
like talking on the phone, you know, because we don't
really have landlines much anymore, very few of us do,
and I always feel like I'm going to get disconnected.
It's there's got to be a phobia about that. Somebody
look that up.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
Anyway. Thanks for coming along with me.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
This far and listening to this entire interview. If you
made it through all this way, thank you so much.
And I hope to keep doing more of these not
phoners though, unless somebody can get me. I probably need
to invest in probably getting a mixer of some kind.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
I don't have that.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
I don't have that much money, but yeah, probably if
you send it through a mixer. Somehow, my mic is nice, somehow,
there could be a balance there. I'm sure there's a
way to do it. I just don't want to spend
the money. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Anyway.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
If this made any money for me, maybe I would.
I don't want to sit here and warn about money anyway.
It was just a fun conversation. Really enjoyed it, and
thanks for sticking around, and hope to do more of
these soon take care of Bye.
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