Tell-tale signs as tough guy Bob admits to tears of pride on Broadway

Dylan, who often portrays some of the most macho characters in modern music, has revealed how his own songs reduced him to tears on Broadway.

Conor McPherson’s musical, Girl from the North Country, has always received praise for its off-beat choice of Dylan’s songs – including Slow Train, Is Your Love in Vain? and Sweetheart Like You.

But the ultimate accolade came when Bob – whose alter egos have been the dust-bowl wanderer, the travelling troubadour, Billy the Kid’s bean can-counting sidekick, the gun-slinger, the horse riding civil war veteran, the gnarled lifer and the river boat captain – admitted he wept as he sat in the stalls of the Belasco Theatre in New York.

Bob has been receiving as much publicity in 2020 as he did when his career first took off in the 1960s.

But his heart-felt admittance of his tears of pride has probably done more to fire up the hearts of his fans new and old than ever.

This is what he said in a New York Times interview in the run-up to the release of his new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways.

“Sure, I’ve seen it and it affected me. I saw it as an anonymous spectator, not as someone who had anything to do with it. I just let it happen. The play had me crying at the end. I can’t even say why. When the curtain came down, I was stunned. I really was. Too bad Broadway shut down because I wanted to see it again.”

Ol’ Bob, coming up 80, also admitted there are songs he really wished he had written, particularly some by his old mates the Rolling Stones. He said he would have liked to have written the Goats Head Soup centrepiece, Angie as well as Ventilator Blues and Wild Horses.

He also gave a rare incite into his songs and their meaning. He talked openly about his 1971 work of baroque genius, When I Paint my Masterpiece. Unusually, he waxed lyrical saying. “I think this song has something to do with the classical world, something that’s out of reach. Some place you’d like to be beyond your experience. Something that is so supreme and first-rate that you could never come back down from the mountain. That you’ve achieved the unthinkable.

“That’s what the song tries to say, and you’d have to put it in that context,” he continued. “In saying that though, even if you do paint your masterpiece, what will you do then? Well, obviously you have to paint another masterpiece. So it could become some kind of never-ending cycle, a trap of some kind. The song doesn’t say that, though.”

He opened up about his band too and had only good things to say about guitarist Charlie Sexton.
Sexton began playing in Dylan’s band in 1999, leaving in 2002 and returning in 2009. He said: “There aren’t any of my songs that Charlie doesn’t feel part of and he’s always played great with me.

“He’s not a show-off guitar player, although he can do that if he wants, He’s very restrained in his playing but can be explosive when he wants to be. It’s a classic style of playing. Very old school. He inhabits a song rather than attacking it. He’s always done that with me.”

And he talked about the deaths of John Prine and Little Richard.”Little Richard was my shining star and guiding light back when I was only a little boy. Both of those guys were triumphant in their work, Little Richard I grew up with. And he was there before me. Lit a match under me. Tuned me into things I never would have known on my own. So I think of him differently. John came after me. So it’s not the same thing. I acknowledge them differently.”

Bob also touched on his own mortality when he said: “ Oh, that’s the big question, isn’t it? How does anybody do it? Your mind and body go hand in hand. There has to be some kind of agreement. I like to think of the mind as spirit and the body as substance. How you integrate those two things, I have no idea. I just try to go on a straight line and stay on it, stay on the level.”

Dylan confirmed he has been sheltered in his Malibu home for the past few months and said his new creativity was helped by proximity to the Pacific Ocean. He said: “It’s a cure for something that I don’t even know I have. A fix of some kind. It’s like a spiritual thing.”

About the coronavirus pandemic Dylan was a bit wary but said: “I think it’s a forerunner of something else to come.

“It’s an invasion for sure, and it’s widespread, but biblical? You mean like some kind of warning sign for people to repent of their wrongdoings? That would imply that the world is in line for some sort of divine punishment.

“Extreme arrogance can have some disastrous penalties. Maybe we are on the eve of destruction. There are numerous ways you can think about this virus. I think you just have to let it run its course.”

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