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Dylan quotes - The Bradley 60 Minutes interview: (where is
Jesus in all this?)
** I slam-banged around on the guitar and played the piano
and learned songs from a world which didn't exist around
me," says Dylan. He says that he knew even then that he was
destined to become a music legend. "I was heading for the fantastic lights," he
writes. "Destiny was looking right at me and nobody
else."
What does the word "destiny" mean to Dylan? "It's a feeling you have that you know something about yourself - nobody else does - the picture you have in your mind of what you're about will come true," says Dylan. "It's kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it's a fragile feeling. And if you put it out there, somebody will kill it. So, its best to keep that all inside." When Bradley asked Dylan why he changed his name from Robert Zimmerman, he said that was destiny, too. "Some people you're born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens," says Dylan. "You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free." ** His success, however, has lasted a long time. Dylan is still performing
all of his songs on tour, and he says he doesn't take any of it for granted. So
why is he still out there?
"It goes back to that destiny thing. I mean, I made a bargain with it, you
know, long time ago. And I'm holding up my end
to get where I am now," says
Dylan.
And with whom did he make the bargain? "With the chief commander," says Dylan, laughing. "In this earth and in the world we can't see." _______________________________________________________________________________________
What was the toughest part for him personally?
"It was like being in an Edgar Allan Poe story. And you're just not that person
everybody thinks you are, though they call you that all the time," says Dylan.
"'You're the prophet. You're the savior.' I never wanted to be a prophet or
savior. Elvis maybe. I could easily see myself becoming him. But prophet? No."
Does he ever look back at the music he's written
with surprise?
"I used to. I don't do that anymore. I don't know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written," says Dylan, who quotes from his 1964 classic, "It's Alright, Ma." "Try to sit down and write something like that.
There's a magic to that, and it's not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, you know?
It's a different kind of a penetrating magic. And, you know, I did it. I did it
at one time." Does he think he can do it again today? No, says Dylan. "You can't
do something forever," he says. "I did it once, and I can do other things now.
But, I can't do that."
"My stuff were songs, you know? They weren't
sermons," says Dylan. "If you examine the songs, I don't believe you're gonna
find anything in there that says that I'm a spokesman for anybody or anything
really."
"But they saw it," says Bradley. "They must not have heard the songs," says Dylan. "It's ironic, that the way that people viewed
you was just the polar opposite of the way you viewed yourself," says Bradley.
"Isn't that something," says Dylan. "If the common perception of me out there in the
public was that I was either a drunk, or I was a sicko, or a Zionist, or a
Buddhist, or a Catholic, or a Mormon all of this was better than 'Archbishop
of Anarchy,'" says Dylan,
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