What Bob Dylan Wanted at Twenty-three

A portrait of the artist trying to move past “finger-pointing” songs, and finding a new voice in the process.

By Nat Hentoff, The New Yorker

October 16, 1964

Bob Dylan:

I looked around and saw all these people pointing fingers at the bomb. But the bomb is getting boring, because what’s wrong goes much deeper than the bomb. What’s wrong is how few people are free. Most people walking around are tied down to something that doesn’t let them really speak, so they just add their confusion to the mess. I mean, they have some kind of vested interest in the way things are now. Me, I’m cool.” He smiled. “You know, Joanie—Joanie Baez—worries about me. She worries about whether people will get control over me and exploit me. But I’m cool. I’m in control, because I don’t care about money, and all that. And I’m cool in myself, because I’ve gone through enough changes so that I know what’s real to me and what isn’t…

I have no work to do. I have no job. I’m not committed to anything except making a few records and playing a few concerts. I’m weird that way. Most people, when they get up in the morning, have to do what they have to do… I might make movies of my friends around Woodstock one day. I write a lot. I get involved in scenes with people. A lot of scenes are going on with me all the time—here in the Village, in Paris during my trips to Europe, in lots of places….

It’s like when somebody wants to tell me what the ‘moral’ thing is to do, I want them to show me. If they have anything to say about morals, I want to know what it is they do. Same with me. All I can do is show the people who ask me questions how I live. All I can do is be me. I can’t tell them how to change things, because there’s only one way to change things, and that’s to cut yourself off from all the chains. That’s hard for most people to do…

Parents do what they do because they’re uptight. They’re concerned with their kids in relation to themselves. I mean, they want their kids to please them, not to embarrass them—so they can be proud of them. They want you to be what they want you to be...

It was running for the sake of running. So I stopped. I’ve got no place to run from. I don’t have to be anyplace I don’t want to be…

Everybody has to find his ownI way to be free. There isn’t anybody who can help you in that sense. Nobody was able to help me…

I used to try to defineI beauty. Now I take it as it is, however it is...

I have to make a new song out of what I know and out of what I’m feeling…

I agree with everything that’s happening, but I’m not part of no Movement. If I was, I wouldn’t be able to do anything else but be in ‘the Movement.’ I just can’t have people sit around and make rules for me. I do a lot of things no Movement would allow…

I had to say something about Lee Oswald. I told them I’d read a lot of his feelings in the papers, and I knew he was uptight. Said I’d been uptight, too, so I’d got a lot of his feelings. I saw a lot of myself in Oswald, I said, and I saw in him a lot of the times we’re all living in. And, you know, they started booing. They looked at me like I was an animal. They actually thought I was saying it was a good thing Kennedy had been killed. That’s how far out they are. I was talking about Oswald. And then I started talking about friends of mine in Harlem—some of them junkies, all of them poor. And I said they need freedom as much as anybody else, and what’s anybody doing for them? The chairman was kicking my leg under the table, and I told him, ‘Get out of here.’ Now, what I was supposed to be was a nice cat. I was supposed to say, ‘I appreciate your award and I’m a great singer and I’m a great believer in liberals, and you buy my records and I’ll support your cause.’ But I didn’t, and so I wasn’t accepted that night. That’s because of a lot of those chains I was talking about—people wanting to be accepted, people not wanting to be alone. But, after all, what is it to be alone? I’ve been alone sometimes in front of three thousand people. I was alone that night….

I might help a friend if he was campaigning for office. But I’m not going to be part of any organization. Those people at that dinner were the same as everybody else. They’re doing their time. They’re chained to what they’re doing. The only thing is, they’re trying to put morals and great deeds on their chains, but basically they don’t want to jeopardize their positions. They got their jobs to keep. There’s nothing there for me, and there’s nothing there for the kind of people I hang around with…

People talk about trying to change society. All I know is that so long as people stay so concerned about protecting their status and protecting what they have, ain’t nothing going to be done. Oh, there may be some change of levels inside the circle, but nobody’s going to learn anything.