| Tuesday, December 7, 2004 |  |
| Bob Dylan Transcript From CBS 60 Minutes | 7 comments |
| 7 Dec 2004 @ 06:07 Dylan Looks Back Dec. 5, 2004 There is no living musician who has been more influential than Bob Dylan. Over a 43-year career, his distinctive twang and poetic lyrics have produced some of the most memorable songs ever written. In the '60s, his songs of protest and turmoil spoke to an entire generation. While his life has been the subject of endless interpretation, Dylan has been largely silent. Now, at 63, he has written a memoir called "Chronicles, Volume One." Correspondent Ed Bradley got to sit down with this music legend in his first television interview in nearly 20 years. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dylan is mysterious, elusive, fascinating – just like his music. Over more than four decades, Dylan has produced 500 songs and more than 40 albums. Does he ever look back at the music he's written with surprise? "I used to. I don't do that anymore. I don't know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written," says Dylan, who quotes from his 1964 classic, "It's Alright, Ma." "Try to sit down and write something like that. There's a magic to that, and it's not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, you know? It's a different kind of a penetrating magic. And, you know, I did it. I did it at one time." Does he think he can do it again today? No, says Dylan. "You can't do something forever," he says. "I did it once, and I can do other things now. But, I can't do that." Dylan has been writing music since he was a teenager in the remote town of Hibbing, Minn. He was the eldest of two sons of Abraham and Beatty Zimmerman. How was his childhood? "I really didn't consider myself happy or unhappy," says Dylan. "I always knew that there was something out there that I needed to get to. And it wasn't where I was at that particular moment." In his book, Dylan writes that he came alive at 19, when he moved to Greenwich Village in New York City – which at the time was the frenetic center of the '60s counterculture. Within months, Dylan had signed a recording contract with Columbia Records. "You refer to New York as the capital of the world. But when you told your father that, he thought that it was a joke," says Bradley. "Did your parents approve of you being a singer-songwriter? Going to New York?" "No. They wouldn't have wanted that for me. But my parents never went anywhere," says Dylan. "My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn't possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world." So what made Dylan different? What pushed him out there? "I listened to the radio a lot. I hung out in the record stores. And I slam-banged around on the guitar and played the piano and learned songs from a world which didn't exist around me," says Dylan. He says that he knew even then that he was destined to become a music legend. "I was heading for the fantastic lights," he writes. "Destiny was looking right at me and nobody else." What does the word "destiny" mean to Dylan? "It's a feeling you have that you know something about yourself - nobody else does - the picture you have in your mind of what you're about will come true," says Dylan. "It's kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it's a fragile feeling. And if you put it out there, somebody will kill it. So, it’s best to keep that all inside." When Bradley asked Dylan why he changed his name from Robert Zimmerman, he said that was destiny, too. "Some people – you're born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens," says Dylan. "You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free." Click to read further More > |