Bob Dylan on modern Music! Interview Rolling Stone Issue 394 1986

 Toby Creswell: You have said recently that you didn't think rock & roll still existed in its pure form, that it was no longer viable. Would you put yourself in with that?

Bob Dylan: I don't think I put myself in that category. I'm not coming up anymore, you know what I mean? I probably was speaking about the industry itself. I listen to it but mostly I don't pay much attention to modern music. It's everywhere, in places that maybe it shouldn't be. There comes a time to shut off the radio, there's a time to turn off the tube, but the way it's projected into society there's not much of a chance that you can get to do that. There are very few people I know who play the real old-style music. When it first appeared, as I remember it, it was an escape from everything that was going on, which was mainly lies, so when music came it was a direction to pull you in that was out of this myth. But now nobody wants to get pulled out of the myth because they don't recognise it as being a myth. That's what it's like here anyway. They like where they're at, they like what's going on, and music is just an extension of that, so they like it, too. It's nothing different, it doesn't pull you anywhere. 

TC: So what's the solution? 

Bob Dylan: Turn it off. It's a decision people have to make. That's what the Sixties and the Fifties were all about. There are other ways to operate, to survive. There's got to be some type of light, some type of brightness outside of everything that you're given on a mass consumer level. What I can see is the mass monster. I don't know what it's like in Australia, but in America it's everywhere. It's invaded your home, your bed, it's in your closet. It's come real close to kicking over life itself. Unless you're able to go into the woods, the back country, and even there it reaches you. It seems to want to make everybody the same. People who are different are looked at as being a little bit crazy or a little bit odd. It's hard to stand outside of all that and remain sane. Even outrageousness gets to be in fashion. Anything you can think of to do, someone is going to come along and market it. I think it's going to change. I don't think it can stay like this forever, that's for sure. I think it's going to change but for the moment it's hard to find anything that's really hot. 

Toby Creswell Interview  Rolling Stone Issue 394 , January 16, 1986 

Photo: Jerry Schatzberg - Bob Dylan, Thumb and Eye, 1965,

Don's Tunes

Maybe only Joan could get away with this!?

 (what we would call making ‘long bacon’ = sticking your tongue out!) 

- Rolling Thunder Review