So it was Streisand who Dylan wanted on his big brass bed!
Revealed after 50 years, the real subject of singer’s hit Lay Lady Lay
SHE might seem a little bit too middle of the road to be a muse for Bob Dylan.
But the freewheeling voice of the Sixties counterculture had Barbra Streisand in mind when he wrote his seductive hit Lay Lady Lady, it was revealed yesterday in newly unearthed interviews that had been hidden for nearly 50 years.
Dylan made the surprising revelation when his close friend Tony Glover, the late American blues artist, asked him if, as had previously been thought, Lay Lady Lay was written for the film Midnight Cowboy.
The star replied: ‘Actually, it was written for Barbra Streisand.’
In the song, from Dylan’s 1969 album Nashville Skyline, the singer beseeches a lover to spend the night with him and ‘lay across my big brass bed.’
Dylan, now 79, was at the time still married to his first wife Sara Lownds, the inspiration for other songs of his including Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands.
Streisand and her first husband, actor Elliott Gould, separated in 1969 and divorced two years later.
The transcripts – which also reveal that Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman, changed his name because he worried about antiSemitism – surfaced at an auction house in the US.
In one when Glover asked him about changing his name, Dylan said: ‘Well, there is Jewish discrimination. A lot of people are under the impression that Jews are just bankers and merchants and watch salesmen...
‘A lot of people think those things – and they’ll just have to be taught different.’
Last night Bobby Livingston of RR Auction in Boston said: ‘The reference to Barbra Streisand is quite amazing. They might appear to be from different worlds.
‘Dylan is such an enigma. He’s always singing about lost love and there’s often this pining for a woman in his songs. As far as anyone knows, he and Streisand were not involved romantically.
‘What makes the Glover interviews so interesting is that he and Dylan were friends. Dylan was talking to him in a different way from other journalists – he was unguarded. He also went back and changed the stuff he didn’t want the public to know. But he didn’t change the Streisand reference.’
The interviews originally were for an article Glover was writing for Esquire magazine, but Dylan lost interest and the piece was never completed. Dylan and Glover broke into music on the same Minneapolis coffeehouse scene. Glover’s widow, Cynthia Nadler, put the documents up for auction, with online bidding due to start on November 12. Various letters Dylan wrote are expected to fetch £4,600 to £6,100 each.
It was previously known that Dylan is an admirer of Streisand. A handwritten card from her, postmarked November 1978, in which she thanked Dylan for sending flowers and suggested that they made a record together was uncovered in the Bob Dylan Archive in 2016.
Streisand, 78, later told the New York Times that around the time of the release of her film Yentl 1983, Dylan sent her his latest album, suggested there were some songs on it she might ‘love to do’, and said in a note: ‘You are my favourite star. Your self-determination, wit and temperament and sense of justice have always appealed to me.’
‘The reference is quite amazing’