when are you going to stop?

After I typed in a post on this site last Friday, it occurred to me over the weekend that -- for any readers with a different time-frame / reference-point from mine or Bob Dylan's -- I might "have some explainin' to do" ....





Only two points, I guess -- first, the nonsense.  Bob Dylan developed a defense against reporters and interviewers, of using double-talk, surrealist wordplay -- "I wind up in Phoenix.  I get a job as a Chinaman." 


"It's so cold...I'm robbing my own bicycles..." 


I have some early interviews on a CD given to me as a gift, and when you listen to those, you totally "get" why Bob would be kind of a smart-aleck in his answers, after a while -- the only thing sillier than his answers were the reporters' questions. 


I don't know why. 


Maybe journalists of the time were so thrown by this new rock-folk phenomenon, they didn't know what to ask, and didn't take those assignments seriously because it was "entertainment" news.  (They'd do the same thing to the Rolling Stones, asking them, "All right, so when are you going to -- STOP -- playing music?"  [LOL]





Mick Jagger, gently, with sheepish grin:  "Well we're not going to stop; we're going to continue...")


ROFL  (rolling on floor laughing)


And second, the "thirteen-year-old girl" references -- would not sound at-all appropriate today obviously.  At that time (the Playboy interview was in 1966) --





Dylan would have been referring, with irony and satire, to the scandal that had engulfed Jerry Lee Lewis eight years before when he had married his 13-year-old cousin. 


(Yikes -- I hate all that "celebrity-scandal" muck-raking, Like -- I don't WANT to know these things. 


I love Jerry Lee Lewis's music, I just want to enjoy and learn from and be inspired by that. 


I don't want to hear all that awful stuff -- none of our business -- I don't care -- and why oh why


I'm-begging-you


with a ka-jillion humans on the earth couldn't you have found someone to marry that's of-age and yer-not-related-to in the Name of Jesus Mary and Joseph


plus none-of-my-business


and please don't tell me...


No no no! [holding my hands over my ears and calling out very loudly, "Lah-lah-lah!!!"]...)








That scandal had swamped Jerry Lee Lewis's music career for a while...and Dylan's reference would have been a "riff" typical of the era, in the music business -- not making fun of Jerry Lee, but perhaps satirizing the hysterical-prurient-scandal-mind-set...


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..."Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up....Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road."...





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