Carelessness

10 October 2007

Found the fragment below (via Boing Boing) in some New York Magazine collected 'Top Ten Most Incomprehensible Bob Dylan Interviews of All Time'. It's from an interview with Playboy, February 1966 and Dylan's speaking about how he chose his career. Nice text.

Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas "before and after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chilli and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy — he ain't so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?

In the same place there's a link to a clip from D.A. Pennebaker's brilliant 1966 Don't Look Back in which Dylan lays into a Time magazine journalist with a barrage of questions and statements. "Will you see the concert? But are you going to hear it?"

Now looking forward to Todd Haynes's forthcoming Bob Dylan biopic – I'm Not There — in which Dylan is played variously by Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Christian Bale and an 11-year old boy (amongst others).