Read Online The Dylanologists by David Kinney - Free Book Online Page B

others took as given. He quickly grew tired of answering questions from reporters who were uninformed by anything more than the media echo chamber, the tabloid journalists and radio hosts who wanted to ask him about folk music and protest songs and how it felt to be the spokesman for the generation. He had moved on.
    He upended journalists’ assumptions and turned their questions inside out. He dismissed them as a bunch of “hung-up writers” and “frustrated novelists.” He lashed out with humor, anger, sarcasm, and silliness while his entourage of knowing hipsters hooted on the sidelines. “Why should you want to know about me?” he asked one helpless journalist in England. “I don’t want to know about you.” He got writers to agree to spoof interviews. Hentoff did one for Playboy in 1966. It got to be hard, after a while, to tell what was real and what was not, which was exactly how Dylan wanted it.
    In December 1965, four months after Forest Hills, he reacted incredulously to questions at a press conference to promote a pair of concerts in the Los Angeles area.
    â€œI wonder if you could tell me,” one questioner asked, “among folksingers, how many could be characterized as protest singers today?”
    â€œI think there’s about a hundred and thirty-six,” Dylan deadpanned. “It’s either a hundred and thirty-six or a hundred and forty-two.”
    â€œWhat does the word protest mean to you?”
    â€œIt means singing when you really don’t want to sing,” he said.
    â€œWhat are you trying to say in your music? I don’t understand one of the songs.”
    â€œWell, you shouldn’t feel offended or anything,” Dylan said. “I’m not trying to say anything to you.”
    â€œWhat’s the attitude today among your people?”
    â€œ Oh, God, ” Dylan cried. “I don’t know any of these people.”
    Of all the questions, this last one always seemed to flummox him the most. His people. How to begin talking about his people? He was not willing to play along. Wasn’t anybody listening to the songs? They needed to think for themselves and to wrestle free of the nonsense they had learned in school. “You don’t need a weatherman,” he sang, “to know which way the wind blows.” He never sang, “Come along with me and I’ll lead the way.”
    His fans seemed to grow stranger, needier. “He was paranoid to start,” Village folksinger Dave Van Ronk said. “All of a sudden five million people were pulling at his coat and picking his brain, and he couldn’t take it when just five people were doing that. His feeling was that the audience is a lynch mob. What he said was: ‘Look out, they’ll kill you.’” Everybody was trying to grab a piece of him. They wanted so much. They wanted to claim him and know him. They wanted to understand what was inside his head. They wanted explanations and facts. People would appear from far-off places—both physical and metaphysical—and ask him questions they told him they’d wondered about for years. Dylan said he found himself thinking, “Wow, man. What else can be in that person’s head besides me?” He insisted that he had no message for anyone, that his songs were just “me talking to myself.”
    Not long after Newport and Forest Hills, Dylan sat for another conversation with Hentoff, and he ruminated about the responsibility of leaders and the weight they must carry on their shoulders. “You don’t fuck around, you know, in other people’s lives,” he said. “To try to handle somebody else’s life, you really have to, you know, to be a very powerful person.” He didn’t want to be that person. He didn’t want to feel responsible for anyone but himself. If people wanted to listen, great, but he couldn’t save their souls.
    Dylan had fled