YouSaid · the spoken record

Bob Dylan

lines on the record: 59
first: 2022-07-27
most recent: 2022-07-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“They will change your life. Imagine if he never picked up bound for glory. I said to myself, I was going to be his greatest disciple. I wasn't even sure if he was alive anymore. The book makes it seem like he was a character from the old past. His friend Dave actually knows about it. He says, he got me up to date on him, that he was in ill health somewhere in the East, and I pondered that. One thing for sure. Woody Guttree had never seen nor heard of me, but he felt that it felt like he was saying, I'll be going away, but I'm leaving this job in your hands. I know I can count on you. It was time for me to get out of Minneapolis. New York City was the place I wanted to be, with only a few tattered rags and a suitcase and a guitar, I stood on the edge of town and hitchhiked east to find Woody Guttrie, although I might have been slack in a lot of things, my mind was ordered and disciplined.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who grew up in the Depression and Dust Bowl days, migrated west, had a tragic childhood, a lot of fire in his life, both figuratively and literally. Woody's got a fierce, poetic soul. He divides the world between those who work and those who don't and is interested in the liberation of the human race and wants to create a world worth living in. Bound for glory is a hell of a book. I decided then and there to sing nothing but gutry songs. It's almost like I didn't have any choice. I'm going to finish the section, but pause there and just think about this. What is the difference in Bob Dylan's life if he never picked up that book? There's so many examples just like that. That's why I feel extremely comfortable being an evangelist. Everybody I come in contact with, the podcast, everybody talk to. Read biographies. Doesn't matter who it is. Whoever you just happen to be interested in.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Record player itself had just picked me up and flung me across the room. A voice in my head said So this is the game. A great curiosity had seized me and I had to find out who Woody Gutrie was. It didn't take me long. My friend Dave happened to have Woody's autobiography bound for glory and he lent it to me. What a fantastic title for an autobiography, bound for glory. I love that mentality. I went through it from cover to cover like a hurricane, totally focused on every word and the book sang out to me like the radio. Guttrie writes like the whirlwind and you get tripped out on the sound of the words alone. Pick up the book anywhere, turn to any page, and he hits the ground running, kind of like what Bob did with his own autobiography. Who is he? He's a hustling ex-sign painter from Oklahoma, an anti-materialist.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I ever heard of Woody Guttry, I said sure I had heard him on these other records with these two other musicians. Then she asked if I had ever heard him all by himself on his own records. I couldn't remember having done that. Flo said that her brother had some of his records and she would take me over there to hear them. That Woody Guttrie was somebody that I should definitely get hip to. Something about this sounded important and I became definitely interested. When the record started to play, I was stunned. I didn't know if I was stoned or straight. What I heard was Woody singing a whole lot of his own compositions all by himself. All these songs made my head spin. It made me want to gasp. I couldn't believe it. He had such a grip on things. He was like none of the other singers I had ever heard, and neither were his songs. It was like the”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so this part of the book is how bad do you want it? By this time I was making three to five dollars every time I played at either coffee house or another place in St. Paul called the Purple Onion Pizza Parlor. He is doing shows at a pizza parlor. This is a guys can sell 125 million records. The place I was living was no more than an empty storage room with a sink and a window looking into an alley. No closet, a toilet down the hall. I put a mattress on the floor. I met an actress, an inspiring thespian named Flo Castner. Flo was odd looking but beautiful in a wacky way. She had long red hair dressed in black from head to head to foot, and she had a folksy demeanor. She was a mystic. She believed in the occult power of trees and things like that. She was also very serious about reincarnation. We used to have strange conversations. One day she asked me”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then he goes back and gives you the prehistory of why he was so obsessed and he discovered Woody in Minnesota. So he goes back to this time. This is when he's around in college, but he dropped out. I found the local record store in the heart of Dinkytown. What I was looking for were folk records. This is when he locks himself in the booth and just listens to this over and over again. I then went further up the street and dropped into the 10 o'clock scholar, which was a coffee house. I was looking for players with kindred pursuits. The first guy I met in Minneapolis, like me, who was like me, was sitting around in there. It was John Corner. Performers like Corner and myself would go anywhere to hear anybody we thought we hadn't heard. I loved all these ballads right away. They were romantic as hell and high above the popular love songs that I had ever heard. I was beginning to feel like a character from within these songs, even beginning to think like one.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one song that had hooked me up when Leeds Music, the one that had convinced John Hammond to bring me over there in the first place, was an homage in lyric and melody to the man who had pointed out the starting place for my identity and destiny, the great Woody Guttrie. I wrote the song with him in mind and I used the melody from one of his old songs, having no idea it would be the first of maybe a thousand songs that I would write. My life has never been the same since I first heard Woody on a record player in Minneapolis a few years earlier. When I first heard him, it was like a million megaton bomb had dropped.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was doing my best. I had to thoroughly feel that I was earning my fee. Nothing would have convinced me that I was actually a songwriter, and I wasn't, not in the conventional songwriter sense of the world. So that's what I mean about he writes like he wants to make sure you're paying attention, you have to fill in a lot of the stuff for yourself. Without warning, now we're back to the Bob Dylan of 1961, the Bob Dylan trying to be signed, trying to achieve his life's dream. And he spends a lot of time expounding on that same theme that Bill Gurley talks about in running down a dream, how to survive or how to succeed in thrive in a career you love. And that's this professional research. And now he gets to his hero, Woody Guthrie, the main person he wanted to meet when he had Weenie hitchhiked to New York. As far as serious songwriting went, the songs I could see myself writing if I was that talented would be the kinds of songs that I wanted to sing outside of Woody Guttrie, I didn't see a single living soul who did it.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pulled in for the night and I shut the bike down. It was a nice ride. We stayed at a bed and breakfast cottage. I laid down, listened to the crickets and the wildlife out the window in the eerie blackness. I liked the night, things grow at night. My imagination is available to me at night. All my preconceptions of things go away. Sometimes you could be looking for heaven in the wrong places. Sometimes it could be under your feet or in your bed. Next day, I woke up. I felt like I had figured something out.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Main theme. He just said that nature has all the answers to your problems anytime he feels like lost or he just wants to get away. He goes out, gets away from the city, and goes into nature. It felt good to be off by ourselves. I looked at my wife. The one thing about her that I always loved was that she was never one of these people who thinks that someone else is the answer to their happiness. Me or anybody else. She always had her own built-in happiness. I valued her opinion and I trusted her.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's this idea that if you find yourself stuck, take a break, grab your lover, and get out of town. I was up early and I rooted my wife out of bed. Daylight was two hours away. What's wrong now? she said. I hadn't thought that anything was wrong. Within minutes, she had slipped out of her loose robe and was making coffee. By daybreak, we were riding on the Harley and had crossed the Mississippi River heading towards Route ninety. No purpose in heading there. It was just a place to go. I was feeling stuffy. I needed to get out of town. Something wasn't clicking like when the world is hidden from your eyes and you need to find it. I park the bike close to an old water tower. We got off and walked around. We walked along adjoining roads that were dwarfed by ancient cypress trees some seven hundred years old. It felt far enough away from the city.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to make great music again. And so he starts writing a bunch of songs for the first time in maybe over 10 years. Dylan winds up, I think Bono comes over, I think they're having dinner at Dylan's house, if I remember correctly. And Bono asks Dylan, like, do you have any new songs? Do you have any new music? And Dylan goes and pulls out all of these compositions that he wrote. It had been decades before he had like a productive spurt that is happening at this point in his life. And Bono's reading over the lyrics, he's like, hey, I have a producer that you need to go and work with. And so Dylan is going to work with the producer that Bono recommended on this album called O Mercy. And so they set up shop in this mansion in New Orleans and they're recording new music and in some cases great music. But there's also times during the making of this album where Bob Dylan feels lost. And so I just want to read a story that takes place because this, I think, again, something that Dylan would suggest over and over again. It's going to take place over a couple of years.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was like I forgot how to button my own pants. I wondered if I could still do it, and I wanted to try. Returning to the grateful dead's rehearsal hall, I could not wait to get started. I wanted to see if I could sing using the same method that the old singer used. At first it was hard going, like drilling through a brick wall. All I did was taste the dust, but then miraculously something internal came unhinged. In the beginning all I could get out was a blood choked, coughing grunt, and it blasted up from the bottom of my lower self, and this is the main point, but it bypassed my brain. Get out of your own head. It burned, but I was awake. This was relevatory. I played these shows with the dead and never had to think twice about it. I had that old jazz singer to thank. And so this idea of taking a break, getting out of your own mind is something appears over and over again seems to be very useful for Bob Dylan in his career. After that, he's like, okay.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is the part where I said, I think this is the closest here it gets to quitting. I had been on an 18 month tour with Tom Petty. It would be my last. I had no connection to any kind of inspiration. Whatever was there to begin with had all vanished and shrunk. Tom was at the top of his game, and I was at the bottom of mine. My own songs had become strangers to me. I couldn't wait to retire. The mirror had swung around, and I could see the future. An old actor fumbling in garage cans outside the theater of past triumphs. And this is where he is saved by an old jazz singer. He's supposed to be playing a couple shows to the grateful dead. They're practicing. They say, hey, why don't we do some of your old songs, Bob? And Bob's like, yeah, okay, I forgot something at my hotel, and he walked out, said I'll be right back. He was planning on never returning. And I think the main...”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The previous 10 years had left me pretty whitewashed and wasted out professionally. Many times I'd come near the stage before a show and would catch myself thinking that I wasn't keeping my word with myself. I had single handedly shot myself in the foot too many times. It's nice to be known as a legend, and people will pay to see one, but for most people once is enough. I hadn't actually disappeared from the scene, but the road had narrowed. There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him. I did try a few times, tried hard to force it. In nature there's a remedy for everything, and that's where I'd usually go hunting for it. Think things out. But it was no use. I felt done for an empty, burned out wreck, too much static in my head, and I couldn't dump the stuff. I am in the bottom. Pit of cultural oblivion.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then this is 17 years after the last story. He's 46 years old. He's lost and broken down. And so as I was reading through the section, I left a note a few pages from now. I was like, this is the closest thing he gets to ever quitting. Always prolific, but never exact. Too many distractions had turned my musical path into a jungle of vines. I'd been following established customs and they weren't working. The windows had been boarded up for years and covered with cobwebs. And it's not like I didn't know.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hear an awful roaring in your head. I knew what those kind of songs were like, and these weren't them. It's not like I didn't have any talent. I just wasn't feeling the full force of the wind. I was listening to some of the playbacks and they sounded okay, but it wasn't great. Some critics would find the album to be lackluster, oh well, others would triumph it finally as the old hymn is back. I took it as a good sign. All this happened in what critics would later refer to as my middle period.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He remains the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of young America, and this part made me laugh too, because that's the end of what the person introducing him said. And then we hear his inner monologue. He goes, oh, sweet Jesus. It was like a jolt. I shuddered and trembled. Remember, this is exactly what he was, he spent the entire chapter saying, I don't want this. It's making my life miserable. And this is why people call him a recluse. Oh, sweet Jesus, it was like a jolt. I shuddered and trembled, but remained expressionless, the disturbed conscience of Young America. There it was again. I couldn't believe it. Tricked once more. The speaker could have said many things. He could have emphasized a few things about my music, and this is a sentence I've never read in any other book before. I was so mad I wanted to bite myself. And then he ends the story after whispering and mumbling my way through the ceremony. I was handed the degree. We piled back into the Buick.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was living on record royalties. Sometime in the past I had written and performed songs that were most original and most influential, and I didn't know if I ever would again, and I didn't care. And so it's around this time in his life that Princeton decides to give him an honorary degree. I'm going to read my entire note, which is kind of long before I read when he explains over these three phages. The way Bob Dylan writes is incredible. His description of his friend, the famous singer David Crosby, made me laugh. We also see his response for representing anyone but himself and a sentence that I've never read before. The book is full of them. As you've already read a bunch of sentences that I've never read anywhere else before, so that you might already pick up on that. But it says early in the week we had gotten back from Princeton, where I had been given an honorary doctorate degree. It had been a weird adventure. Somehow, I had motivated David Crosby to come along. Crosby was a colorful and unpredictable character. He wore a cape, didn't get along with too many people, and had a beautiful voice. And this is the synthesis that made me laugh. He was an obstreperous companion.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Light at all costs. What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing, not a damn thing. In my real life I got to do the things that I loved the best, and that was all that mattered, and he's in describe what he feels matters the most, and it really speaks to how complicated being a human is, the idea that we can give our entire heart and soul and life energy into achieving a goal like he did, of becoming a folk singer, getting to the very top of his profession and realizing I don't want it. I think it also speaks that the feeling that you don't want it might be temporary and to not give up because Bob is still touring. He's in his 80s. He's still touring to this day. In my real life, I got to do the things that I love the best and that was all that mattered.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he's feeling violated. He feels like he can't get away from the image of who he is in the public's eye. And he's also continuing to make music because he likes to make music. But he doesn't, now he's wrestling with. He's like, oh, I may never create work that good again. And the crazy part, what he's about to tell us, he's like, I don't even care at this point in his life in 1970, Bob Dylan. He's like, I don't even care if I ever do. And so he writes, the novelist Herman Melville's work went largely unnoticed after Moby Dick. Critics thought that he had crossed the literary line and recommended burning Moby Dick. By the time of his death, he was largely forgotten. I didn't know that. That's crazy. I had assumed that when critics dismissed my work, the same thing would happen to me, that the public would forget about me. I owed nobody nothing. I wasn't going to go deeper into the darkness for anybody. My family was my light and I was going to protect that.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was fantasizing about what I was fantasizing about was a nine to five existence. A house on a tree lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. That would have been nice. That was my deepest dream. After a while, you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gets out, this is Bob Dylan's house, and these people just abuse him and his family. I cannot believe when I got to this part. This same house, where again, the house that he's raising his family in, this same house that my family was in, intruders started to break in day and night. Peace was hard to come by. Road maps to our homestead must have been posted in all 50 states. Moochers showed up, goons were breaking into our place all hours of the night. This was so unsettling. I wanted to set fire to these people, these gate crashers, trespassers, demagogues were all disrupting my home life. Everything was wrong, the world was absurd. It was backing me into a corner, and then he has this inner monologue. He's like, I don't even want this. Listen to what he's fantasizing about. No place was far enough away. So obviously you're going to have to get out of there. And so that's what he's talking about. I don't know what everybody else was fantasizing about.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he says, it's the kind of recognition that comes when you're doing the thing for the thing's sake. That was Bob Dylan in the 1950s. This is Bob Dylan in 1970. And he's like, I did the songs for the song's sake because I wanted to do them. And as a result of doing that, it resonated with other people. And then the press runs like, hey, I'm a voice of a generation. He's going to accept this honorary degree from Princeton, which I'm going to share this part. It's really funny because he's running from this. This label is like, I don't want this label. And he says somebody else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never anything more than what I was, which is a folk musician. And he's saying having this label put on you with all this pressure that your voice of a generation that he didn't even identify with or even understand. He says it would have driven anybody mad. And so he talks about, hey, I'm getting away. I'm trying to be less famous. He buys a house in Woodstock, California, or Woodstock, New York, and he's just trying to raise his family there.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through me. It wasn't even like that I was having to compose them. So this idea is like I was just trying to be true to myself. And because I was true to myself, it resonated with other people. But then all the other interpretations and the building up of the press, that's your thing. That has nothing to do with me. And when I got to that part, it made me think of something that he said almost 100 pages earlier in the book where he's talking about the influence of that brief interaction with Gorgeous George where it just kind of fueled him. And he says something at the end there that I think is advice to you, to you and I for anybody that wants to get to like not only the top of your profession, but also doing work that you feel is worthy that of your life energy. We all have one life. We're all going to die. We have limited time. And so therefore we have to really think long and hard about how do I want to spend my time? What is the work that I want to do, the craft that I'm going to engage in that I'm going to give one third or one half of my limited time on earth here?”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whose families had been left wounded. And then when I got to this part where he's describing what's taking place at this point in his life, I wrote the Bob Dylan of 1970 is not the Bob Dylan of 1961, nor does he want to be. I didn't belong to anybody then or now. I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything else in the world. I was trying to provide for them, to keep out of trouble, but the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of. Being true to yourself, that was the thing. I was more of a cowboy than a pied piper, and so that's something he's going to repeat over and over again. He's listen, these songs, just like he told Steve Joss many years later. I made songs for me. They just came.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That and I had been to the ends of the earth, and now I was back. And so that line is really important because he's saying I left 10 years ago in search of my dream. I have now on the other side of that dream I have experienced. The older order of things, but something else did too that my father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me, but he didn't understand me. We had more in common now than ever. I too was a father three times over. There was a lot that I wanted to share and to tell him. And so that part is also devastating to the reader because it's like we have so much more in common. I'm older. I understand your perspective now. There's so much I want to talk to you about and he can't. And he never will be able to again.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so now he fast forward nine years into the future, skips over the apex of his fame, and starts with his father's funeral. The previous week had left me drained. I had gone back to the town of my early years in a way I could never have imagined, to see my father laid to rest. Now there would be no way to say what I was never capable of saying before. Growing up the cultural and generational differences had been insurmountable. My father, who was plain speaking and straight talking, had said Isn't an artist a fellow who paints? When told by one of my teachers that his son had the nature of an artist. It seemed I'd always been chasing after something, anything that might lead me into a different place, some unknown land down river. I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in. When I left home it was like Columbus going off into the desolate Atlantic.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was awfully close, and that is important that it really struck me when I reread this last night, what's happening there. To me, the first part of the first sentence where it's like, I've been here for months, I'm wondering, how am I going to get into recording studio? How am I going to get signed? That is Bob Dylan from the perspective when he's 20 years old. And he ends it to me is the older Bob Dylan almost talking to himself because he knows the outcome. The future was nothing to worry about. It was awfully close. And if you think about it, even the structure of the book is amazing because the first three chapters is all about Bob Dylan becoming Bob Dylan. It starts with him getting signed and it ends with him wondering am I on the right track and the older version in my opinion of himself saying yeah it's right there don't worry”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Poetic songwriting, the architectural forms are like marble pillars, and they had to be there. You can learn a lot about the structure of songwriting by listening to his records, and I listened to them a lot and had them internalized. In a few years' time, the folk and jazz critic for the New York Times would review one of my performances and would say something like, he breaks all the rules in songwriting except that of having something to say. The rules, whether that critic knew it or not, were Hank's rules. And then he ends this section of his life asking and then answering, how do I know I'm on the right track? March was coming in like a lion, and once more I wondered what it would take to get into a recording studio, to get signed by a folk record label. Was I getting any closer? The future was nothing to worry about.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writing about all these people that he studied and admired and the people that influence his work. I didn't have to experience anything that Hank did to know what he was singing about. I learned later that Hank had died in the backseat of a car on New Year's Day. I kept my fingers crossed, I hoped it wasn't true, but it was. It was like a great tree had fallen. Hearing about Hank's death caught me squarely on the shoulder. The silence of outer space never seemed so loud. When I hear Hank sing, all movement ceases. The slightest whisper seems sacrilege. In time I became aware that in Hank's recorded songs where the archetype rules of poetic songwriting, remember Bob Dylan, not at this point is clear, but now he's referred to as maybe the greatest songwriter of all time. And he's saying, I just studied Hank. These are Hank's rules. He's going to get there in a minute. I became aware that in Hank's recorded songs where the archetype rules of”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guy named Gorgeous George. That happened to me when Gorgeous George, the great wrestler, came to my hometown. In the mid-1950s, I was performing in the lobby of the Veterans Memorial Building. I was playing on a makeshift platform in the lobby, and suddenly the doors burst open and in came Gorgeous George. He roared in like a storm. In all his magnificent glory, he had valets and was surrounded by women carrying roses. He was wearing a majestic, fur lined gold cape. He brushed by the makeshift stage and glanced toward the sound of the music. He didn't break stride, but he looked at me. He winked and seemed to mouth the phrase You're making it come alive. I never forgot it. It was all the recognition and encouragement I would need for years to come. Sometimes, that's all it takes, the kind of recognition that comes”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a morbid fascination with this stuff. I had always pictured myself dying in some heroic battle rather than in bed. I wanted to be a general with my own battalion. And so at this point he has a flashback to when he was in Minnesota and he's just trying to play any gig he can. He's extremely young. I think he's like 17 or 18 at this point. And he forms all these bands and then they keep breaking up and he's like, I don't care. I'm going to keep going forward no matter what. So he says, I kept forming these bands because I was determined to play. There was a lot of halting and waiting, little acknowledgement, little affirmation, but sometimes all it takes is a wink or a nod from some unexpected place to vary the tedium of your baffling existence. And so he is talking about the importance of words of encouragement. And there's a super famous wrestler, professional wrestler at the time, that is going to see Bob Dylan play and provide that word of encouragement.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just incredible. There's one other book I want to talk to you about that he wrote about, and this is just amazing because in this case, Dylan is going to sound like a captain of industry instead of a folk singer. So he picks up the Clossowitz book. So he says, I also looked at Vaum Krieg, the Closowitz book. They called Closhowitz the premier philosopher of war. The book was published in 1832. And Klaus had been in the military since he was 12. His armies were highly trained professionals, not young men who served only for a few years or more. His men were hard to replace, so in the middle of this, I double underlined two things that Bob was talking about because I think they're applicable to you and I, thinking about the people you want to work with, you want highly trained professionals. And number two, you want people that are hard to replace. His men were hard to replace, and he talks a lot about how to maneuver into position where the other side can see there's no fighting chance and they basically lay down their arms.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the slave holding elite. He once referred to a colleague on the floor of the chamber as slinking in his own slime. Stevens was hard to forget. He made a big impression on me. He was inspiring. Him and Teddy Roosevelt may be the strongest US president ever. I read about Teddy too. He was a cattle rancher and a crime buster, had to be restrained from declaring war on California. He had a big run in with JP Morgan. Roosevelt backed him down and threatened to throw him in jail. Either one of those guys, Stevens or Roosevelt, or even Morgan, could have stepped out of a folk song.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I read a lot of the pages aloud and liked the sound of the words, the language. And as he's reading and telling us the story of this education he's giving himself, he's always relating it back to his craft, folk singers could sing songs like an entire book, but only in a few verses. I'd always returned to the books. I would dig through them like an archaeologist. That's exactly what I feel like I do. I read, soon I read the biography of Thaddeus Stevens. He lived in the early part of the 1800s and was quite a character. He's from Gettysburg, and he's got a club foot. He grew up poor, made a fortune, and from then on championed the weak and any other group who wasn't able to fight equally. Stevens had a grim sense of humor, a sharp tongue, and a white, hot hatred for the bloated aristocrats of his day. He wanted to confiscate the land.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He says, I read a biography about Robert E. Lee. Robert E. Lee had grown up without a father. Lee had made something out of himself nevertheless. Not only that, but it was on his word, in his word alone, that America did not get into a guerrilla war that probably would have lasted till this day. The books were something. They were really something.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up some book to the middle, read a few pages, and if I liked it, I went back to the beginning. I was looking for the part of my education that I never got. Sometimes I'd open up a book and see a handwritten note scribbled in the front, like in Machiavelli's The Prince, there was written The Spirit of the Hustler. There were endless rows of books that he starts reading about one of the books he read was about Alexander the Great. I just read a biography of him too. If you haven't listened to it, it's Founders Number 232 and his description of Alexander the Great's fantastic. Alexander the Great marched into Persia. When he conquered Persia in order to keep it conquered, he had all of his men marry local women. After that, he never had any trouble with the population. No uprisings or anything. Alexander knew how to get absolute control. I wanted to read all of these books. And he's reading a lot of biographies.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now he's staying with another friend this front has a giant collection of books. This might be my favorite part of the entire book. This is still pre-record deal. This is him still trying to figure things out. So he says, I turn the radio off and went into the other room. A windowless one with floor to ceiling library. The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn't help but lose your passion for dumbness. There were all types of things in here. Books like Thucydides, The Athenian General, a narrative that would give you chills, which is exactly what happened to me during this section. It was written 400 years before Christ, and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior. It's like nothing has changed from his time to mind. There were novels by Balzac, Hugo, and Dickens. I usually open”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His songs had songs within songs. He was deadly serious. There wasn't anything else on the radio like him. I'd listen and wait for another song, but next to Roy, the playlist was strictly Dullesville, gutless and flabby.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now he gives us an incredible description of this musician that he greatly admired. This guy named Roy Orbinson. And again, another theme, he realizes, hey, there is no one else like Roy. Roy had no peer. So Bob Dylan writes, Roy had transcended all the genres. His stuff mixed all the styles and some that hadn't even been inventing it. With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to Mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop, and he meant business. He was singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car off a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttering to yourself something like man, I don't believe it.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, when he's not practicing, when he's not playing, he's reading. And I'll go into more detail about that. He starts making friends with the eminent dead, which is some advice that Charlie Munger gave to you and I about why he's read hundreds of biographies. He thinks it's essential. And so Dylan's saying, I'd read all this stuff. Voltaire, Rousseau, John Locke, Martin Luther, visionaries, revolutionaries. It was like I knew those guys. Like they'd been living in my backyard.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so another main theme of the book that appears over and over again, and one that really surprised me is incredible how much reading this guy is going to do. And he takes ideas from everything that he reads and applies it to his work. This is just incredible writing about a long chain of historical figures. He's now tying it in because again, he doesn't really talk too much about, he'll give you like little hints about his early life, right? But this is not, again, it's not organized in like any other biography or autobiography that I've read before. So since I was born in the spring of 1941, the Second World War was already raging in Europe, and America would soon be in it. If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning. It was like putting the clock back to when BC became AD. Everybody born around my time was part of both. Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he talks about the contrast many, many times. I'm going to skip ahead a few pages, give you another example. The contrast between how cold it is outside and the fire that is burning inside of him. Now, what I'm about to read to is amazing if you really think that one, he's still unknown. He hasn't recorded his first album, and he doesn't even have his own place to live. He does not have enough money to have a place of his own. I walked over to the window and looked outside. The air was bitter cold, but the fire in my mind was never out. It was like a wind vane that was constantly spinning.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exclusive to entrepreneurship. But I think entrepreneurs know exactly this feeling where he's just like, I know something's about to happen. I'd soon be hired to play at the gaslight and I would never see in the basket houses again. Those are like those crappy little places he had been playing before that. Outside the temperature was about 10 below, but I didn't feel the cold. I was heading for the fantastic lights, no doubt about it. Could it be that I was being deceived? Not likely. I had no false hope. I'd come from a long ways off and had started from a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else. That is the 20 year old Bob Dylan. Think about the 60 or 70 year old Bob Dylan when he said, life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. We are witnessing him create by”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To a rush. There was nothing between the man and me. So Dave is just sitting at the bar playing a couple strings on the guitar. And so this is where Bob sees this as opportunity. I stepped over and asked him, how does someone get to work at the gaslight? Who do you have to know? Van Ronck looked at me curiously with snippy and surly and asked if I was a janitor. I told him no, and he could perish the thought, but could I play something for him? He said, Sure. Dave liked what he heard and asked me who I was. Then said I could come down about eight or nine that night and play a couple songs in his set. That was how I met Dave vonk, and so he talks about that as his first big break in New York City. And then he talks about the mentality of an entrepreneur, anybody that's chasing their life dream. I guess it's not just...”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could. The madly complicated modern world was something I took little interest in. It had no relevancy, no weight I wasn't seduced by it, but he was seduced by history. He got a lot of ideas from going through and studying the history of his industry. He would take lines from songs. He would take tones. He winds up learning how to play a guitar-specific way by studying something that happened many decades before him. But he does repeat this idea that the modern world, he's just really not interested in it. It doesn't really pay attention to it. And so says, Izzy would pull out records for me and then I'm going to list to some of these people. These are the people I looked up. I didn't know who they were, like Charlie Poole and Big Bill Bronzy. And so one day when he's in Izzy's, this is where he's going to seize the opportunity, why he can't, one of the reasons he came to New York City. One winner day, a big burly guy stepped in off the street. It was Dave Van Ronk. He was gruff with a don't give a damn attitude. My mind went in.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he says you had to know a trick or two to survive. Now let's go back the same exact page a few paragraphs later, he repeats this over and over again. There's only one me and he's not doing it from a place of arrogance by any means, okay? What really set me apart in these days was my repertoire. It was more formidable than the rest of the players. My template was hardcore folk songs. And we see it's very binary. You either love Bob Dylan or you don't listen to him at all. I'd either drive people away or they would come in closer to see what it was all about. There was no in between. There were a lot better musicians around, but there wasn't anybody close in nature to what I was doing. Again, there is no one like me. That's exactly what he's telling us. Again, that's like the third or fourth time I'm on page 18. And if you read the book, that idea, that main theme just jumps out to you over and over again.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Public, and my whole life was becoming what I practice. I kept my sights on the gaslight, however. And so he's describing these like crappy little places that he's forced to play. He calls them dense. The mastery of language this guy has is just unbelievable. I really hope you pick up the book because it's just really incredible. Talent scouts did not come to these dens. They were dark and dingy, and the atmosphere was chaotic. On weekends, if you played all the joints from dusk until dawn, you would make maybe $20. You had to know a trick or two to survive. So he's playing from the time the sun sets, the sun rises, making less than 20 bucks in a weekend. He's just crashing on other musicians. And one of the best parts of the book is that he meets all these crazy characters and he's just gifted at describing these personalities. These people jump off the page. They just make life really interesting. But part of that is he's like just crashing, you know, maybe he'll spend a night at somebody's couch for a few days and then move to somebody else's house for a few days.”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got to meet this guy, Dave Van Rock. I'm listening to his albums. I'm copying him. Okay, I'm going to hitchhike across the country with no money. I'm going to wind up playing at the club he's going to play. That actually happens. He goes up and I'll talk about this later, how he seizes the opportunity for the very first time that he sees Dave Von Rock in person, but we're not there yet. He's like, okay, I can't just jump into the gaslight, right? It's this closed circle. I don't know anybody. I don't have any resources. I don't have a network. So I'm just going to go out and play all these crap. Usually like containing like a few blocks in New York City is where all these folk singers and people are performing. And so that's where he goes. It's like, I'll just take any opportunity I can get. And so he talks about this. I wanted to play for anybody. I could never sit in a room and just play all by myself. I needed to play for people and all the time. You can say that I practiced in”
2022-07-27 · Founders · #259 Bob Dylan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source