Bob Dylan as Philosopher


Daniel Dwyer
Philosophy Department
Xavier University
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Dylan quotes with a philosophical bent (below)

Bob Dylan and Self-Deception (My ongoing project)

Cincinnati Post: Dylan as Philosopher  (Interview after the publication of Dylan's Chronicles)

Dylan in the Classroom (Xavier Alumni Magazine Piece)

Appearance on Boston's WBZ radio (An overnight talk radio gig on philosophy and pop culture with superhost Jordan Rich)

Expecting Rain (Up to the minute links to the day's Dylan literature)

QUOTES

On giving "Shelter from the Storm" to the World Wildlife Fund commercials: "The WWF is a good cause, I support them, and am proud to lend my music to this effort. Early on, animals were the only ones who liked my music. Now it's pay back time."


Asked whether or not he was an ascetic, Dylan lit another cigarette and asked what the word meant. "I don't think so. I still have desires, you know, that lead me around once in a while. I don't do things in excess, but everybody goes through those times. They either kill you, or make you a better person."


"Great paintings shouldn´t be in museums. Museums are cemeteries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men´s rooms. . . .  It´s not the bomb that has to go, man, it´s the museums." (Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, Positively Tie Dream, August 1965)


"I am a conscious artist. . . .  I had a teacher who was a conscious artist and he drilled it into me to be a conscious artist, so I became a conscious artist."


"If I wasn't Bob Dylan, I'd probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself." (Playboy interview, 1978)


"You're gonna make me give myself a good talkin' to." ("You're gonna make me lonesome when you go," 1974; compare Aristotle, Nic Eth 1165b1-11)


"But I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." ("My Back Pages," 1964, Dylan was 23 years)


"Insanity is smashing up against my soul
You could say I was on anything but a roll
If I had a conscience, I just might blow my top
What would I do with it anyway
Maybe take it to the pawn shop." ("Highlands," 1997)


[On working on "Like a Rolling Stone":] "I'm not thinking about what I want to say, I'm just thinking 'Is this OK for the meter?' . . . It's like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and it goes away, it goes away. You don't know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song."

"It was said that World War II spelled the end of the Age of Enlightenment, but I wouldn’t have known it.  I was still in it.  Somehow I could still remember and feel the light of something about it.  I’d read that stuff.  Voltaire, Rousseau,  John Locke, Montesquieu, Martin Luther—visionaries, revolutionaries. . . it was like I knew those guys, like they’d been living in my backyard." (Chronicles, 30)


Dylan, Chronicles: “[My grandma] told me once that happiness isn’t on the road to anything.  That happiness is the road.”


On his 2004 bio, Chronicles: "It's not the kind of book where it's a short life and a merry one.  It's more abstract, drawn out over long periods of time.  I worked the book, if you want to call it that, in patterns.  I portray life as a game of chance.   It works on a variety of levels, like some of the best songs do."


"Give us some lyrics, you famous lyricist." - George Harrison to Dylan while writing 'Handle With Care', Traveling Wilburys


"I remember seeing a Time magazine on an airplane a few years back and it had a big cover headline, 'IS GOD DEAD?' [an issue dated April 8, 1966, cleverly coinciding with Easter] I mean, that was -- would you think it was a responsible thing to do?" asked a perturbed Dylan. "What does God think of that? I mean, if you were God, how would you like to see that written about yourself?"


"Do you believe in God?," asked Philippe Adler of the French magazine, L'Expresse. "Let's say, as He shows Himself," Dylan responded. (circa 1978)


Dylan said, 'Allen [Ginsberg], do you have a quarrel with God?' and I said, 'I've never met the man' and he said, 'Then you have a quarrel with God.'


Rolling Stone (November 04): "I saw you play at the Newport Folk Festival a couple of years ago (2002).  What was up with the wig and fake beard?"  Dylan: "Is that me who you saw up there?" 


Larry “Ratso” Sloman, On the Road with Bob Dylan, 318, on the film made during the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue:
--Ratso: “You should seen this scene we just shot, a big Hollywood-opening-type thing in the lobby for CBC.   I played you, man, it’s on TV tomorrow.
--Dylan: On TV?  Where?  They thought it was a Bob Dylan interview and it’s going out all over the world?
--Ratso: No, just CBC.  It was a parody.  But I imitated you great.
--Dylan: Oh yeah.  Well, what was it like?  What was it like being Bob Dylan?  I wish you’d tell me.


David Letterman: "What did the Pope say after hearing Bob Dylan [in the Bologna 1997 concert]? -- 'I speak twelve languages and I still couldn't understand him'."


As questions still lingered, in some circles, as to where he "stood" spiritually (despite his repeatedly sharing his views), Dylan shared this provocative nugget with Martin Keller during their interview in the summer of 1983: "People want to know where I'm at because they don't know where they're at."


Tino Markworth, in his "Too Much Educated Rap: Bob Dylan and Academia," commented on the scandalous idea of "Dylan Studies" at Stanford conference in 1998: “Postmodern theorists are . . . dismissive of the elitism implied by claims for Dylan's greatness and would rather spend their time studying the sexual and class themes of Madonna's oeuvre or deconstructing the power relationship and homo-erotic latency of the Skipper and the first mate in Gilligan's Island.

J. Dylan (1969-)
"We'd be in the dressing room, and Tom Waits would come in, and I'd be so excited that here was Tom Waits, but suddenly he wouldn't be able to speak because he was in awe of my father.  I'd be like, 'Come on, you're Tom Waits, the coolest guy in the world . . . say something. . . .  So Tom Waits is going, 'Mnnub, mnubbb,' and I'm like, 'Don't fall apart on me, man, you're my hero.'"


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