Who are you?
That's a good question.
Is it true that you've changed your name, and if so, what was your real name?
My real name was Kanodavich.
- Is that the first or the last name? - That's the first name.
Do you think of yourself primarily as a singer or as a poet?
I think of myself more as a song and dance man, you know.
- Now you're doing a record for Columbia. - Yeah. It's coming out in March.
What's it going to be called?
Bob Dylan, I think.
This is a young man who grew out of a need.
He came here, he came to be as he is...
because things needed saying...
and the young people were the ones who wanted to say them...
and they wanted to say them in their own way.
He somehow had an ear on his generation...
and he has set a pace for many people and is now...
Well, he's now continuing in the same way...
and there are many others joining him.
I don't have to tell you. You know him. He's yours.
Bob Dylan.
This is called It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), ho-ho-ho.
This young man was born in Duluth, Minnesota.
He started playing the guitar when he was just a child of 10...
but he says it didn't do him too much good in high school.
He says the trouble with playing guitar is you don't get cheerleader girls.
He is one of the most sought-after folk artists.
I think one of the reasons for his popularity...
is that he has the mind of a poet.
I've been playing on the stage since I've been 10.
I was singing Muddy Waters' songs and writing songs...
and I was singing Woody Guthrie songs.
For 15 years, I've been doing what I've been doing.
You see, when he came to New York...
one of his prime motives was to meet Woody Guthrie...
and Woody was in the hospital with Huntington's chorea...
and he used to play and sing for Woody.
Then I met Bob, and Bob was young...
and he was just recently arriving in New York.
We ended up staying in the same hotel, the Earle Hotel...
the guitar picker's home away from home.
So we became fast friends...
and he'd get up and do stuff that I had just done...
and they'd say, '"He's stealing the wind out of your sails. '"
I said, "I got plenty of wind in my sails. He just likes Woody Guthrie...
'"and sings like the real guys do. '"
When I was a kid at school...
that's all I wanted to be, really, was Bob Dylan.
I was a huge fan of early Dylan...
because at one point, I was a folkie.
I had an acoustic guitar and a harmonica around my neck.
I had my coat hanger, my little harmonica-holder, and guitar...
when I was 14, like all the other guys.
The first thing I played was the old folk song Greensleeves.
There was this folk scene going on. It was the bohemians, the folkies...
the poets, the comedians...
would come out of little coffeehouses.
Like the Gaslight Cafe was a really popular one.
Dave Van Ronk used to run the hootenannies there.
Dylan would go in. People would go and try their new material there.
And at 19, I had my first professional job.
I sang around town, and I had versions of...
I know where I'm goin'
and I know who's goin' with me
I know who I love
but the devil knows who I'll marry
All kinds of wonderful songs...
that drifted to me from various singers.
Those clubs provided a nucleus...
for an instrumental style and a musical style.
It evolved out of...
crushing young modern songwriters in...
with bluegrass players, old-timey music people...
commie folk singers from New York City...
60 and 70-year-old blues men.
One of the things that happened was that the rules were being broken.
No longer was it a matter of singing Earth Angel...
and Rock Around the Clock.
You had people like Bob Dylan.
He's one of the great examples of someone...
who studied and knew the songs of all the '50s bands...
and knew all the blues writing...
and began to write in his own way...
and other songwriters began to do the same thing:
Writing about current politics.
When we all used to work these coffeehouses...
the way they would pay us would be to pass a basket around...
and if Richie was in that night, there wouldn't be any money left...
'cause he was so good he'd get all the money.
All of those people were in the very first days...
of their acts...
and that was part of the magic, is you saw creativity.
So writing was big. There was a lot of poetry still.
There was writing of songs.
There was the beginning of creating social awareness through art.
We were not in competition.
We were students of the same muse.
If somebody did a song of yours...
you were blown away that they would even think...
that your song was important enough to do.
I remember Bobby Dylan was living with me...
in Woodstock for the summer when Blowin'in the Wind came out.
And there was a sense of the enormous moment...
of the linkage of the music...
to the political movements of our time.
That movement of the '60s really had a huge impact...
on my consciousness when I was a child.
I was very aware of the Civil Rights Movement...
and the part that the music played in it.
You hear Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Richie Havens...
and the music was part of a culture.
You'd go to the rallies and you'd hear the music.
Every summer, throughout the early '60s...
fans came from around the country to the Newport Folk Festival.
They came to hear everything from old-timey string bands...
to the newest singer /songwriters.
It was a tradition.
But in the summer of 1965...
Bob Dylan introduced 110 volts of electricity...
that turned tradition on its ear.
The Newport Folk Festival was a great ideal.
This was the era when kids held hands and sang We Shall Overcome...
and they hated rock 'n' roll.
Hold it, gentlemen. No noise now. We got to make the mike check.
By 1965, Bob Dylan was an immense star.
So Dylan comes out with some friends of his.
- Got the tape. - Bring that tape up here.
They were setting equipment up on the stage...
and we'd never seen this equipment because it was heavy sound equipment.
We didn't know what he was going to do. Nobody knew.
This explosion of sound came from the stage.
The audience, and the people backstage were totally shocked.
We'd never heard this kind of volume at the Folk Festival.
The audience was in an uproar. There was screaming and booing.
It was really bad.
Pete Seeger ran into a car and sat in the car holding his ears...
and says, "George, stop that sound." I said, "I can't stop that sound."
The Beatles were doing a benefit at the old Paramount.
I thought that Lennon and Dylan ought to meet. They deserved to meet.
We were backstage, and Dylan stood in the wings on a chair.
Of course, you couldn't hear the concert.
You could hear nothing but the girls screeching.
So after that night, he had my wife drive him over to a place...
where he rented an electric guitar.
Brought it back to my house and started fiddling around with it.
And after that, he went electric.
A lot of people were angry.
I know for a fact that a lot of people felt betrayed.
It wasn't a controversy about acoustic versus electric.
It was a controversy about making music that had the integrity.
It seemed inconceivable that somebody could also have as much integrity...
and be playing rock 'n' roll.
Didn't make sense to them, and so they got furious.
Were you surprised the first time the boos came?
Yeah, that was at Newport.
I did this very crazy thing.
So, you know, I didn't really know what was going to happen...
but they certainly booed. I'll tell you that.
You could hear it all over the place.
His name is Bob Dylan.
It was the moment that separated the men from the boys.
To me, it was the signal that we'd now grown up.
We had now come of age, when Dylan went electric...
and we could now do anything...
and everything, and we did it.
When he went electric...
I thought it was a pioneer move.
I thought it was a very brave thing to do...
to move socially conscious music...
into a whole other arena.
He created a new way that a pop singer could sound.
He basically upped the ante on everything.
Subject matter opened up for the first time.
It wasn't just "my baby and me doing."
The subject matter got very broad, and into all kinds of areas.
He predicted some of the fragmentation of thought, of images...
of the society itself.
He's not just mixing it up album by album or song by song.
With him, it's line by line.
You move into a different world the next line.
To me, it felt about displacement.
"Without a home." That's how you felt.
"To be on your own." That's how you felt.
All of a sudden, everything is up for grabs.
He certainly painted a picture of what was going on around him.
You know, he's Picasso, to me, of rock 'n' roll.
He is, by far, my favorite writer and my favorite singer.
Bob Dylan, I think, absolutely influenced everything...
that came after him...
in pop music or rock music or folk music...
and probably in R & B.
Dylan was the king of folk music at that time...
and he went over to England and met the Beatles.
He said, '"You guys, you don't say anything.
'"You have nothing to say. '"
And it really shocked Lennon.
Lennon really was taken back by this...
because he was a tremendous admirer of Dylan's...
and he started writing more intellectual lyrics after that.
And by the same token, Dylan started experimenting with music more.
So the two of them really influenced each other...
in a profound way.
So you had the Dylan influence on the lyrics...
and the Beatles influence on the music...
and a whole new music was born.
Originally, it was a folkie thing, like...
Hey, Mr. Tambourine man, play a song for me
And I put it in...
Hey, Mr. Tambourine man
play a song for me
Jim McGuinn went to see A Hard Day's Night, took us all to see it.
He saw that 12-string guitar in George Harrison's hand.
I think we saw it at the Picks Theater on Hollywood Boulevard...
and that was it.
I was playing an acoustic 12-string from my folk days...
but it wasn't getting the same sound.
George Harrison had this great-sounding guitar.
It looked like a six-string. It looked like this.
Then he turned it sideways, and I went...
That's what it is. It's a 12-string electric.
So I went and got one the next day.
What Jim did with the 12-string was pretty amazing.
It was a big part of it.
And the harmonies...
David Crosby approached his harmony-singing...
totally unlike anybody.
There was a chemistry.
I'm a natural harmony singer.
It's what I was put here to do, you know...
and anytime either one of them would start anything...
I would start singing harmony to it.
Gene Clark and I would sing unison...
and Crosby would sing a composite part...
developed from thirds and fourths and fifths of the melody.
I guess he was inspired by the Everly Brothers.
It was basically just two-part harmony...
but because Crosby was popping around in the different areas of harmony...
it sounded like more harmony than it really was.
I started incorporating the 4/4 beat with folk music...
and I started doing these things in the Village.
I was living in the Earle Hotel...
and John Phillips and Michelle were in a suite on the second floor.
I used go to their room and hang out with them, and we'd jam.
We were all in the Village, playing the same clubs...
in this turnaround, you know, this carousel.
There was no business in California then. It was all New York.
And we had gone to New York...
to live in New York, to work out of New York...
and I was obviously...
very homesick.
Then we decided just to go somewhere...
and we let Michelle throw a dart at the world globe...
and it landed on Saint Thomas, and that's where we went.
After four months, we came back to New York...
and no one was in New York.
Roger wasn't there. Crosby wasn't there.
It goes on and on.
So we get to L.A., and lo and behold...
everyone was in L.A., with record contracts.
It was a time...
of L.A. Becoming a rock center, a music center.
Young musicians were moving here from everywhere else.
There was a whole generic kind of music...
that was truly peculiar...
and particular to Los Angeles. That was surfing music.
Obviously, the greatest practitioner of surf music were the Beach Boys.
But even the Beach Boys could see that the times were changing.
And Brian Wilson knew that his band had to change, too.
Brian Wilson was in a situation that was very commercial.
He was being asked to perpetuate that commerciality...
and did for quite a while.
I got a phone call from Brian.
He was extremely depressed...
about the prospects...
of having to go out on the road.
Brian's quitting the road was very traumatic.
He was really getting into difficulty in those days.
I had a nervous breakdown as a result of it.
I couldn't handle the strain of going on tour.
I couldn't handle that kind of strain.
It was like, you had to get up every morning...
you had to get on the plane, and go places.
I couldn't handle the strain.
There was too much pressure on him.
He couldn't be writing and arranging and producing...
then going out on the road because there was too much to do.
When he said, "I'm not going to tour anymore..."
and he went in and started making...
much more elaborate, sophisticated music...
he came to the conclusion that there were other things to look into...
that had more to do with personal musical growth.
We went in the studio, tried to get something happening...
where we would be better, musically, than the Beatles.
We realized that they had something going, like...
I wanna hold your...
They had more electricity than we had, you know?
But we wanted to do something...
that had more musical merit than the Beatles.
So we made Pet Sounds, which was Paul McCartney's favorite album.
I wrote that for Carl. It took me 20 minutes.
Nobody believes this story.
I mean, just to get like...
You know, it took me 20 minutes...
to get that whole core pattern.
It took about two hours to get the lyrics. But 20 minutes!
When we made Pet Sounds, we made it based on a prayer session.
Carl and I would pray for people.
We'd get together at my house in Beverly Hills.
We'd sit at this big round table...
and we'd turn the dimmer switch way down low...
to where we could almost not see each other.
And sometimes he'd lead the prayer session...
sometimes I'd lead the prayer session.
But we always prayed.
We prayed that the Lord help us make a spiritual album for people.
Sure enough, the Lord did.
I knew that Paul and the others admired it, too.
They wanted to be able to write music as good as that, or better than that.
It was their yardstick, and it was a competitive thing.
Pet Sounds proved that pop music could be as sophisticated as a symphony.
More and more musicians began experimenting and testing the limits.
Albums became artworks, and the whole world was listening.
It was a weird time. Everything was happening simultaneously.
The other thing was, FM radio came into the forefront...
and all of a sudden kids were exposed to music...
that weren't hit singles.
All of sudden, FM was playing album cuts.
FM opened up the door to underground music...
and that's why it was so important back in the '60s.
Tom Donahue programmed the first underground radio station...
up in San Francisco.
Tom was playing music...
that was being listened to by college students and young people...
and maybe even being played in clubs...
but really had no exposure.
Somebody listening to FM might not even know a top 10 single...
and somebody listening to AM would have no idea who Jimi Hendrix was.
Jimi Hendrix was the first proper electronic composer...
because he was the first one who listened to what he was doing.
Jimi Hendrix was an envelope-pusher.
He was kicking, with extreme force, at all the boundaries of music.
We were neighbors. He lived a block away from me.
We played together a lot in late-night jams in the Village.
Hendrix had a group called Jimmy James and the Flames...
and they played in the Village...
at the same time I was playing in the Village.
He couldn't buy a record contract, you know.
Before, if you were a Black guy in America...
you didn't get the same opportunities.
And he had to go to England.
We're English... Guitar freaks, you know. We love guitars.
They're sort of like another organ on your body.
I remember the first time he played in London.
It was down at a club called the Bag O' Nails.
Everyone was there.
Seeing Jimi Hendrix for the first time, hell of a lot of pain.
Pain, because in his presence...
and in the presence of that music, you felt small...
and you realized how far you had to go.
Eric Clapton suffered with that as well.
We were both really, really shaken by...
"God, what has happened to us?"
You know, a tornado called Jimi Hendrix.
I saw Jimi Hendrix, and I said, "I think it's time to quit."
The underground's erupting...
transforming the musical and cultural landscape.
And in 1967, Jimi Hendrix returned home to a whole new world.
Monterey is very groovy, man.
This is something, man.
This is our generation, man. We're all together, man.
And it's groovy, and dig yourselves 'cause it's really groovy.
What began as a small scene in Greenwich Village...
had turned into a cultural revolution.
The suit-and-tie men were not part of that show.
And since there was not a commercial element...
it was really up from the people, and that was unprecedented.
We're going to do a show, and it's not about money or sales...
it's for free.
And everybody did work for free, except Ravi Shankar...
who came from India with his sitar and had to make $3,000.
Monterey was the first time Hendrix ever played for an American audience.
It was the first time Otis Redding ever played for a white audience.
The first time the San Francisco groups had ever played...
for an international audience outside the city limits of San Francisco.
Woodstock gets the lion's share of the attention...
but this was the real groundbreaker.
It legitimized rock 'n' roll...
as a concert art form.
We tried to find the most talented people who hadn't been exposed.
I first met Janis backstage at the Fillmore...
in San Francisco.
And I'd been told that if I went back...
to the backstage entrance, the artists' entrance...
that I would get in free.
Then the door opened, and Janis was standing there...
and said, "Eric, welcome to the Fillmore."
She shook my hand, and as I pulled my hand away...
I looked, and there was a hit of LSD in my hand...
and I just...
I was so affected by what had happened at Monterey.
I knew it was going to herald a social revolution.
It was the purest form of love...
and peace and caring...
I had ever witnessed, before or since.
It was, you know, peace, love, and flowers.
I had played with The Who...
at Murray the K's Easter Show.
So at the Monterey staff meetings...
I would say, "Just know that these guys are going to come out...
"and wreck everything."
You know, I would suggest that they close.
I couldn't deal with the idea that at this critical concert...
we might go on after Jimi.
And he said to me:
'"You want to be first up there with the guitar smashing. '"
I said, "Jimi, I swear to you, that's not what it's about."
Jimi started to play.
He stood on a chair in front of me, and he started to play.
It was just Jimi on a chair, playing at me.
Playing at me like that.
You know, "Don't fuck with me, you little shit."
Then he snapped out of it, and he put the guitar down...
and he said, "Okay, let's toss a coin."
So we tossed a coin, and we got to go on first.
He then went on immediately after us, I think.
I don't think there was anybody in between.
So I went out to sit with Mama Cass to watch Jimi.
As he started doing the stuff with his guitar...
she turned around, she said to me:
"He's stealing your act."
And I said, "No, he's not stealing my act...
"he's doing my act."
The Who and Jimi were determined to outdo each other...
and I'm not sure who really won.
I mean, Jimi humped the amp...
broke his guitar, burned it up in flames.
The Who blew up the entire stage.
Both acts, both The Who and Hendrix, smashed up equipment...
during their appearance there.
And yet, one is like a violent rape...
and the other is like an erotic sacrifice.
We didn't know that you could do that, you know.
"He's lighting that thing on fire!"
"How dare they break up a drum set?"
They obviously had gotten a new sense of theatrics...
that nobody had even conceived of previously.
You know, what The Who were doing was transcendent in a lot of ways.
But what Jimi was doing was sublimely...
It was an epiphany.
Right now I'm gonna do a little thing by Bob Dylan.
That's his jammer over there.
It's a little thing called Like a Rolling Stone.
There's nobody like him. I mean, there really isn't.
I mean, there's Dylan and Hendrix, and, you know, who else?
There was something really important happening...
which was that this great music that we've discovered...
this great music which is still growing...
this music which now you can write songs about...
what's really happening deep, deep inside of you...
and what's happening around you in the world...
can also sound extraordinary.
That was just a step-by-step progression...
of just expanding the whole idea of "anything is possible."
There were no rules, and you can do whatever you want.
Before that, there were rules...
and only certain kinds of songs were deemed capable of succeeding...
on the radio or the pop landscape.
But the Beatles broke those rules, and got away with it...
as Bob Dylan did here, in his own early way...
as people like The Byrds followed up on.
The Bohemian element that had been a minority became a majority.
It seemed to take over the whole planet.
It was a great sense of...
"Yeah. There's a future.
"There's a future for us all."
Even though, you know, the world was in flames...
over in Asia.