Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan in Billy the Kid. Image: Album / Alamy Stock Photo
Share
Bob Dylan may be A Complete Unknown to many, but not to all. Over the years, Big Issue has interviewed some of Dylan’s nearest and dearest – as well as a host of collaborators – gaining insights into what makes such an enigmatic artist tick. To some he’s an intimidating and elusive presence; to others, he’s Bobby, a cute kid with curly hair.
So, with Timothée Chalamet’s portrayal of Bob Dylan‘s formative musical years looking likely to have a whole new generation of fans discovering the work of one of America’s great songwriters, Big Issue digs deep into our archive to bring you some of those anecdotes and reflections. From Joan Baez’s memories of accompanying Dylan on the 1965 UK tour documented in the 1965 film Don’t Look Back to Robbie Robertson, the guitarist who stood by him as audiences rejected his new sound in ’66, here are some insights into the man who claims himself to contain multitudes.
A Complete Unknown includes a look at Dylan’s relationship with fellow folk singer Joan Baez. In 2014, during her Letter to My Younger Self, Baez reflected on those days:
“When I was with Bob, we were very young. We were very involved in doing music and hearing the music but we were also aware that this phenomenon was going around us. I think mostly it was fun at first. Going to England with Bob in the 60s, it was complete chaos. One of the keys to it was, I didn’t do drugs. So I was totally outside the circle of crazy-making people and I felt very shut out. And it was getting to the unhappy part of our relationship, blah blah… I don’t like harping on that. It all got mended. And what I’m left with now is those songs.”
Kris Kristofferson
The late, great country star, who acted opposite Dylan in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, didn’t take the most straightforward path to fame but, as he told us in 2010, the route he took led to some interesting places:
“When I was trying to make it as a songwriter in Nashville I worked as a janitor in the studio where Bob Dylan was recording Blonde on Blonde. Every songwriter in Nashville wanted to come to those sessions but there were policemen at every door. Nobody could get in except me because I worked there. Dylan would go sit down at the piano behind these dark glasses and start writing. It was unheard of in Nashville not to do three songs in three-hour sessions. But he went the whole night without recording anything.
Advertisement
Advertisement
“The band was off playing ping pong or cards and then in the morning he’d call them in and they’d cut a masterpiece. My memory is getting really crappy. When I try to think of the names of individual songs, I can’t, but when I think of the whole thing it was like being allowed to watch Michelangelo work. I got to meet his wife and kids and they were friendly, but I never spoke to Bob. I was too scared. I met him later through Johnny Cash because they were really close. That was a real meeting of the giants.”
Mavis Staples
To promote a tour celebrating her 75th birthday in 2014, the gospel singer shared a surprising insight into her relationship with a certain curly-haired cutie:
“Bob Dylan and I became very close. He was just a little folk singer when we first met, an average kid, but he knew The Staples Singers. He asked me to marry him but I told him I wasn’t old enough. Neither of my sisters was married so I couldn’t jump the gun. I did like Bobby, he was real cute with his curly hair. I admired him so much for his writing. I thought he was a genius.”
Jakob Dylan
A singer-songwriter in his own right, Jakob was Dylan’s fourth child with Sara Lownds. In 2020 to promote his documentary Echo in the Canyon he spoke to Big Issue, not about his father specifically but about the music revolution of the 1960s:
“This is the advent of poetry in music, which makes things limitless. You don’t have to make sense, you don’t have to have an agenda, you could just express whatever the hell you wanted to. These songs require you as a listener to participate, they require you to pay attention – or not pay attention, just be hypnotised by the words. But you have to participate.”
He went on to say that a music revolution doesn’t necessarily result in any real-world change…
Advertisement
“I’ve never really seen music change society in any kind of impactful way. It has the illusion of doing so. And I think the illusion is enough to keep you at it. Sometimes music is just there to entertain people and let them feel better for three and a half minutes. The social impact of this music, how real was it anyway? What change did it really bring upon people? I didn’t live in that time, I’m always cautious and a little bit wary of those scenes and movements.”
Giovanni Ribisi
Actor and director Ribisi may be best known as Phoebe’s brother in Friends. But he also starred in the 2003 opus Masked and Anonymous, written by and starring Bob Dylan. He told us about the experience a few years later:
“Oh man. I’d heard there was another person he’d done a movie with on a different film who was really excited and did the movie to be able to work with him. And the first day they started shooting he shows up and he launches into a conversation with Bob, and Bob turned to him and said, ‘I don’t need any more guy friends.’ So I heard this story which was somewhat intimidating for me, so I think, ‘I’m just going to go there and keep to myself and do the best job I can do.’ And I did. But it was enjoyable, this voyeuristic thing. We shared a trailer with two rooms. I was in one and he was in the other. He had his guitar and he was playing music in there and I would put my ear up against the wall. He doesn’t know about that, I don’t even think he would remember me. But that was special for me.”
Robbie Robertson
When Bob Dylan caused controversy by going electric, The Band was behind him with Robertson on lead guitar, as he recalled three years before his death in 2023:
Robbie Robertson and Dylan on stage with The Band at Madison Square Garden, 1974. Image: Gijsbert Hanekroot / Alamy
“Bob Dylan heard us and asked us to come and hook up with him. And that turned into being part of a musical revolution. I was making music that was the voice of a generation. Playing those electric shows with Bob Dylan in the 60s, I did think at the time I’d never heard of anybody doing this kind of thing before. Someone on the scale that he was – the king of folk music, the voice, the guy that could write songs that caused armies to join together – suddenly changing everything and going in a different direction. And the way that people reacted; we got booed all over the world. And while it was happening, part of it you could laugh at, and part of it you could cry. But for us, it was about saying, ‘You know what? This music we’re making, it’s really good.’ And we didn’t change, the world changed. The world came round to us.”
Bruce Hornsby
Hornsby appears on Dylan’s 1990 album Under the Red Sky. A couple of years ago he told us how that came to be just the way it is:
Advertisement
“I didn’t want to be tardy to the session. Dylan walks in and he introduces himself to everyone. Then takes a bunch of paper out of various pockets, puts all these pieces of paper with various bits of lyrics written on them on a table. It’s right in front of where his mic is positioned. He came over to me and said, ‘Hey Bruce, come here, let me teach you a song.’ He taught it to me [Born in Time] and I taught it to the rest of the band. We played that several times, then took a little break. The great drummer Kenny Aronoff started playing, then Robben Ford, Randy Jackson and I started jamming along. Then Bob comes in. He’s standing there, nodding his head listening to us. He goes to the table, looks at the pieces of paper, picks one, walks to the microphone and starts singing. And that became TV Talkin’ Song. Absolute spontaneity.”
Peggy Seeger
Edward Norton plays Pete Seeger in A Complete Unknown. His real-life half-sister Peggy remembered what the folk world was like before Dylan arrived on the scene in an interview in 2019:
Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, Newport Folk Festival, 1963. Image: Cinematic / Alamy
“Joan Baez came for my autograph in 1961, at the Newport [Folk] Festival. We’ve never had a proper conversation but I’d have loved to. I’d like to do a concert with her but she’s too high up for me. She’s the folk goddess of America. Dylan wanted our autograph too, in Minnesota, when he was still a student wearing a tie and carrying a little briefcase. Two years later, when we went back to Minnesota, Bob Zimmerman had become Bob Dylan. And the promoter said, ‘Remember that funny little guy who followed you around a couple of years ago…’”
Todd Haynes
Will Timothée Chalamet’s performance eclipse the six actors who played Dylan in I’m Not There in 2007? That film’s director explained why musicians are ripe for the biopic treatment:
“I think it has so much to do with the huge footprint that these artists made. In each case they conjure up a very specific time and place. Musically and culturally they reflected the contradictions and possibilities and specificities of the times in which they lived. They inspire a bigger story than just the music itself, even though the music is where it begins.”
Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman
Writer and musician Sloman entered Dylan’s orbit around the time of the Rolling Thunder Revue in the mid-70s as he remembered in 2019:
Advertisement
“When I first did a piece on Bob for Rolling Stone about Blood on the Tracks, he liked it so much he invited me out on the Rolling Thunder tour to cover it. I realised that others look upon these people as demigods, and they’re just normal human beings, the same foibles and desires and insecurities as we all have. Probably the bigger you are the more insecurities. I found that the way to interact with Bob is to treat him like a normal human being. In fact, sometimes I would even make fun of him in a good-natured way.”
