Dylan on Obama, Grant, Sam Houston and the accordion

The must read interview of the week features prominent northern Minnesota native Bob Dylan, who was born in Duluth and raised in Hibbing on the Iron Range before leaving for New York and international fame.

Bill Flannigan interviewed Dylan for the Monday London Times. Normally I’m not one for the heavy-handed personal interviews of famous people, but this interview shows a glimpse of what Dylan thinks about and how it informs his writing and music.

What’s getting the most attention is his discussion of President Obama. His fascinating (largely apolitical) analysis of President Obama’s first book “Dreams from my Father” gets at the reason I switched to Obama during the primary season. No president has ever written a book like that before, during or after their presidency. This is a snippet lifted from the Times interview by way of Andrew Sullivan, who shares my fascination.

BF: You liked Barack Obama early on. Why was that?

BD: I’d read his book and it intrigued me.

BF: Audacity of Hope?

BD: No it was called Dreams of My Father.

BF: What struck you about him?

BD: Well, a number of things. He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage – cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.

BF: In what way?

BD: First of all, Barack is born in Hawaii. Most of us think of Hawaii as paradise – so I guess you could say that he was born in paradise.

BF: And he was thrown out of the garden.

BD: Not exactly. His mom married some other guy named Lolo and then took Barack to Indonesia to live. Barack went to both a Muslim school and a Catholic school. His mom used to get up at 4:00 in the morning and teach him book lessons three hours before he even went to school. And then she would go to work. That tells you the type of woman she was. That’s just in the beginning of the story.

BF: What else did you find compelling about him?

BD: Well, mainly his take on things. His writing style hits you on more than one level. It makes you feel and think at the same time and that is hard to do. He says profoundly outrageous things. He’s looking at a shrunken head inside of a glass case in some museum with a bunch of other people and he’s wondering if any of these people realize that they could be looking at one of their ancestors.

But the Obama stuff was only a tiny part of what I loved about the interview. He opines that most presidents enter the office with great intentions and end up beaten men: “You know it’s like they fly too close to the sun and get burned.”

Dylan’s theory about the cultural differences and “ghosts” of the South will blow the mind of both western and eastern philosophy followers. And I further love that he’s studying Ulysses Grant’s battle plans just like most other 66-year-old guys from Hibbing. Bottom line, most aging ’60s icons are slipping into a golden years incoherence but Dylan is finally starting to speak with some pretty profound clarity after a career built on abstraction.

One more gem from another interview about his new album (“Together Through Life” out April 27) posted at bobdylan.com:

Did you write any of these songs with the accordion in mind or did it come up during the sessions?

I use an accordion player when I play off-road shows. It’s a perfect instrument in a lot of ways. It’s orchestrative and percussive at the same time. Actually accordion players were the first musicians that I had seen a lot of growing up.


“Opened his eyes to the tune of the accordion.”

Precisely.

And yes, that would be a reference to the polka bars of the 1950s Iron Range. That same interview has some great stuff about Sam Houston and the Texas Republic. Unbelievable!

Dylan Days is May 21-24 in Hibbing, Minn. Music, literature, art, Dylan history and Iron Range culture.

Comments

  1. Quite a lot of thoughtful conversation from Bob Dylan. As to the accordians – I hung out in the Hibbing-Chisolm corridor as a young iron miner in the 1950s. So I found Dylan’s appreciation of the instrument very much in line with my preferences. As a member of a small minority of KAXE programmers, let’s hear it for Frankie Yancovic and Whoopie John.

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