Dylan Unguarded
As Bob Dylan’s career blossomed, he kept in close touch with his friend Tony Glover. The pair’s conversations and letters — published here for the first time — show a Dylan that few people knew
On March 18th, 1971, Bob Dylan sat down in his Manhattan office, put his feet up on a table, strummed a guitar, and opened up like he rarely, if ever, had before. He was talking to his old friend Tony Glover, the first of four interviews they conducted that year. At various moments Dylan reacts to being booed at Newport in 1965 (“It was a strange night”), recalls writing “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (“story of a mad kid”), remarks on his craft (“My work is a moving thing”), and dismisses his honorary doctorate from Princeton (“a strange type of degree — you can’t really use it for anything”). Feeling unfairly dissected by dimwitted critics who milked his lyrics for autobiographical information, he fired back. “Do you think Johnny Cash shot a man in Reno?” he asked. “Or that Paul Simon would throw himself down over a troubled Hudson River and let somebody use him as a bridge?” The interviews totaled three and a half hours, and never saw the light of day — until now.
Speaking with Glover, Dylan’s jangled nervous energy of the previous decade had vanished: He was untroubled and erudite, willing to shed light on things he’d never fully explained before. Dylan felt comfortable with Glover, a blues harmonica player and musicologist from Dylan’s home state of Minnesota. Glover was one of the few people with whom Dylan regu
larly kept in touch once he left Minneapolis for New York. In the Newport Folk Festival program of 1963, Dylan wrote that Glover was “a friend to everything I am . . . who feels and thinks and walks and talks just like I do.”
In entrepreneurial mode, Glover hoped to use the interview transcripts — extensively annotated and revised in Dylan’s handwriting — for an article in Esquire. Nothing ever came of the project because Dylan eventually lost interest in it. The fiercely loyal Glover, who died in 2019, safeguarded the tapes and transcripts along with four letters and a treasure trove of other memorabilia he amassed from Dylan over the years. Beside the main interviews, there are six additional recordings of telephone calls between Dylan and Glover from 1969 to 1971.
On November 19th, RR Auction in Boston will sell this historic collection of Dylaniana on behalf of Glover’s widow, Cynthia. It makes for an extraordinary time machine, bringing readers inside the mind of Dylan in the wake of the counterculture Sixties, an era that, from the safe perch of 1971, Glover deemed “a very destructive, mind-, body-, and soul-destroying time.”
The Dylan-Glover friendship began around 1960, roughly the same time Dylan stopped attending classes at the University of Minnesota to play folk and blues music in Minneapolis clubs with Spider John Koerner, Dave Ray, and Glover. All three had consequential careers as musicians in the Twin Cities and beyond. Glover played blues harmonica with a complexity all his own, becoming an inspiration to Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Doors. “As far as harp playing went, I tended to keep it simple,” Dylan recalled in Chronicles about his days in Minneapolis’ Dinkytown. “I couldn’t play like Glover or anything, and didn’t try to. I played mostly like Woody Guthrie, and that was about it. Glover’s playing was known and talked about around town, but nobody commented on mine.”
Dylan was living in New York when Glover suggested the series of in-depth interviews. Only to Glover would he admit that listening to his mid-Sixties album masterpieces like Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited “spooked” him out. “You didn’t sing songs like that and live a normal life,” Dylan said. “In order to be that strong on one level, you have to be very weak in other ways.” Their resulting conversations — published here for the first time — are always upbeat and friendly. For the most part, Glover tried to maintain a chronological approach, starting with Dylan’s departure from Minneapolis in January 1961 to meet his idol Woody Guthrie in Greystone Park Hospital, in Morris Plains, New Jersey, and ending with the release of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II in 1971.
Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University, a CNN historian, and the author of “Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America.”
Glover knew the meeting with Guthrie was especially important to Dylan. In the first interview, Glover wondered if Dylan met other musicians in the hospital wanting to hang with Woody. “I didn’t see any musicians, I saw a lot of other men just sitting around,” Dylan recalled. “That’s the only place we could meet, in the lounge. There’d be, like, 50 or 60 guys sitting around in pajamas. There’d be like little card tables all over the place. . . . I can remember the smell at the place more than anything else.”
Imagining the scene, Glover suggested it must have been difficult talking one-on-one in the crowded hospital. “There really wasn’t much to say,” Dylan responded. “He wanted to hear his songs, and I would play ’em. I knew ’em all at that time. I must’ve known at least 75 of his songs. So there I was, any day I’d go out there, I’d never exhaust the repertoire, ever.” At one point, Guthrie suggested Dylan should visit his wife Marjorie in Howard Beach, Queens, to listen to some of his unrecorded songs. “I took the subway out to the end of the line — this was really out there,” Dylan recalled. “And after I got off the subway I walked through the swamp. This was in February, I think. Eventually I got up to the door — that was one long trip. I remember that more than I remember actually going to see Woody himself — because it was actually easy to get to see him. It wasn’t easy if you lived in California or the Midwest — but if you were right there, just anybody could walk in and meet him at the Morristown hospital. Between 2:30 and 5:00 any visitor could come. . . . Well, I came to New York to see him . . . I was dead set to meet him. And that’s what I did. Must’ve been three days in the city and I was out there. I was high on that feeling for a long time.”
Glover was curious how Dylan made it to New York on his first trip. “Hitchhiked out of St. Paul and wound up in Madison, Wisconsin,” Dylan responded. “Destiny just brought me there, I had no idea. It was just some stroke of luck. I got out of the car . . . and ran into some guitar players. After staying around there for a few days . . . I can’t recall. Think we got a ride from Madison all the way from two young New Yorkers.” As for fleeing Minnesota, Dylan felt it was the only sensible option. “I mean, I had to leave. The only other choice was to sell shirts, or work in the mines, or maybe to learn to fly an airplane. . . . I don’t think I wanted to be James Dean — but there was a period of time when I blocked out everybody else. No one else really meant anything as much as [Guthrie] did.”
There was a sense of tranquility and camaraderie in Dylan’s answers to Glover. It was as if he had gone down Niagara Falls in a barrel and was now in a safe harbor enjoying the sunshine. When the conversation moved toward musical figures like Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, and Ernie Freeman, Dylan glistened. Less so when the conversation turned to his own work. “I could never listen to my albums up to, oh, about 1969 — never could stand them. Hated them. I guess there’s good and bad in all that, you know? In feeling that way.”
Glover was a critic for Little Sandy Review, Sing Out!, Hullabaloo/Circus, and Rolling Stone, and Dylan enjoyed getting the scoop about what was going on in the music industry. His curiosity may have been due to his self-imposed remove. For example, he told Glover that he’d rather read the Police Gazette than Rolling Stone, which had trashed his double album Self Portrait and published a “non-interview” (presumably referring to a 1969 cover story in the magazine).
Dylan was still livid at Newsweek for publishing a nasty exposé piece in 1963, which challenged the authenticity of his hard-travelin’ stories. And he was outraged that Time had recently made his friend John Lennon “look, like, ridiculous” and “like a punk” in a snotty article. “They just really had it in for him, man,” he said with disgust. “They just cut him right down.” When Glover raised the question of why Lennon had said he didn’t believe in Zimmerman on the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band song “God,” Dylan giggled. “That’s his problem, not mine.” Later, he offered, “Well, Lennon is into that shit, taking his pants off, you know? That’s where he’s at. His record is about the same kind of things as that — who gives a fuck, you know?”
A mischievous Glover recounted how foolish Lennon and Yoko Ono came off on The Dick Cavett Show, acting like they possessed LSD recipes for world peace. “I saw that too, man. I couldn’t believe it,” Dylan said, laughing. “I just felt like throwing something at the set when it was over, you know? I just went to bed and was pissed off.”
By contrast, when George Harrison came up, Dylan gushed with unadulterated praise. Not only had the ex-Beatle organized the Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden on August 1st, 1971 — with Dylan doing elegant versions of “Just Like a Woman” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” — but he also exuded tremendous integrity of purpose. “Oh, man, [George] was fantastic,” Dylan said. “I mean, just the fact that he did it — incredible.” Likewise the triple-disc Bangladesh LP, filled with original Harrison material from the concert, left Dylan flabbergasted. “He gets the sound,” he elaborated. “You put the record on, you’re just almost transformed. I mean, you’re just there. You just can’t get out of it once you put the needle down. . . . Really in his own right. He just pulled it together in some kind of cohesive sense, and he rides it, right on top of it, and he’s right there, all the time. Really, he was the only guy who did any talking — I didn’t say shit. He put on a suit, got up there, and said, ‘Quiet now, here’s Ravi and pay attention.’ . . . Lennon couldn’t have done it.”
Couching his questions with courtesies, Glover gingerly asked Dylan why he changed his last name from Zimmerman to Dylan, a touchy subject for any other interviewer. Perhaps, Glover intimated, he was worried that anti-Semitism would hinder his musical career. “Well, there is Jewish discrimination,” Dylan agreed. “A lot of people are under the impression that Jews are just bankers and merchants and watch salesmen. A lot of people think Jews have tails, or they’re gonna eat your daughters and that kind of thing. A lot of people think those things — and they’ll just have to be taught different.” The bottom line was that the “Dylan” moniker was chosen as a way to establish a dynamic showbiz identity. “It allowed me to step into the Guthrie role, with more character,”
“It wouldn’t have worked if I changed my name to Bob Levy or Bob Doughnut. There had to be something to carry it to that extra dimension.”
Dylan delineated. “And I wouldn’t have to be kept reminded of things I didn’t want to be reminded of at that time. I had to be free enough to learn the music, to be free enough to learn technique.”
Not quite satisfied, Glover asked the origins of the folk figure named Dylan. “The character which had to become named Dylan,” he responded, a bit annoyed. “I mean, it wouldn’t have worked if I’d changed the name to Bob Levy or Bob Johnston or Bob Doughnut. I mean, it wouldn’t have worked. There had to be something about it to carry it to that extra dimension.”
Dylan noted that while his 1962 debut didn’t sell very well, he received fan mail from, as he recalled, “very odd places,” like “little towns in Idaho, or Michigan, Ohio, Louisiana, Florida — little places that you hadn’t ever heard of.” That positive feedback spurred him onward. Glover and Dylan both agreed it was the recording of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, with its hit “Blowin’ in the Wind,” that turned Dylan into the newest darling of the folk revival. Glover asked how he composed his signature song. “Every day I’d be writing songs — some I’d remember, some I wouldn’t,” Dylan recalled. “The general scene at that time was to consistently write as much as you could — almost to the point where if you were performing, you’d have a new song to perform that night. You were just writing all the time. Everyone around at that time was doing that. It was like machinery the way you turned out songs in those days. ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ just happened to be the lucky one, the one that stuck. But I probably wrote a song the night before that, and I probably wrote one or two the next day which haven’t been heard, which were probably in the same vein. To me it was just another song. It got singled out because a lot of performers were singing it.”
As if offering a tutorial, Dylan explained that the many-versed, surrealistic “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” was written to “exist on paper” with or without a tune. “That one was a breakthrough — it was a breakthrough because of the form,” Dylan said, insisting the doomsday lyric had nothing to do with the Cuban Missile Crisis. “That song really existed because of the new form — new to me at the time. That ‘da-da-da, dada-da, da-da-da,’ on and on — that was like hypnotizing me. I could just hypnotize myself singing the thing. It just sort of freed me from having to sing all that rhyming stuff where I’d have to remember the rhymes, I had to remember the story, plus the intricate detail. That’s OK when you’re really doing it, but you get beyond it, to something else — I had a hard time remembering all that stuff. See, I did it to write it — the enjoyment for me was writing it — that’s what kept me going.”
Concerned for his own safety, Dylan told Glover a harrowing account of A.J. Weberman, a fake-journalist stalker, threatening his family and rifling through his trash to write sleazy articles about him. To Dylan, this was corroboration of how rotten some reporters were. “I know what was in the garbage, like, you can’t believe what the cat must have had to go through,” Dylan said. “Like, we got two kids still in Pampers, baby Pampers. Like the gar