The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [46]
I’d had seven years of roughing it and I felt I had seven years of good times and good life coming. I really felt in 1967 that there were seven big years ahead.
How did you start pulling out of those bad times?
Well, it really started about the time June and I got married. The growth of love in my life and the spiritual strengthening came at about the same time. Religion’s got a lot to do with it. Religion, love, it’s all one and the same as far as I’m concerned, because that’s what religion means to me. It’s love. About the time I married June, we started growing in spiritual strength together. And it shows up onstage.
You can’t fool the audience. You can’t fool yourself. If you’re not yourself onstage, it shows. I’m really happy now. But that’s not the same as being content. I still want to grow more as a performer, as an artist, as a person. So, I’m still working hard at it. I never go on that stage when I’m not scared. There’s always that fear that somebody’s going to throw eggs at you or something.
How would you get yourself up physically and emotionally for a recording session during those troubled years?
I missed a lot of sessions. I’d come into the studio with a fog over my head, not really caring what condition I was in. Just go in on sheer guts and give it a try. It showed up on a lot of my recordings.
What was it about Dylan that attracted you?
I thought he was one of the best country singers I had ever heard. I really did. I dug the way he did the things with such a country flavor and the country sounds. “World War III Talkin’ Blues” and all those things in the Freewheelin’ album. I didn’t think you could get much more country than that. Of course, his lyrics knocked me out, and we started writing each other. We wrote each other letters for about a year before we ever met.
I was playing here in Las Vegas the first time I heard one of his albums. I played it backstage, in the dressing room, and I wrote him a letter telling him how much I liked his songs, and he answered it and in so many words told me the same thing. He had remembered me from the days of “I Walk the Line” when he was living in Hibbing, Minnesota. I invited him to come see me in California, but when he came to California later he couldn’t find my house.
I got another letter that was written in Carmel and by the time I answered it, he’d already gone back to New York. When I was in New York not long after that John Hammond told me that Bob was in town. So he came up and we met at Columbia Records. We spent a few hours together, talking about songs, swappin’ songs and he invited me up to his house in Woodstock. After the Newport Folk Festival, he invited me to his house again.
Some people say that Dylan is aloof or withdrawn, that he is hard to talk to. Did you find him that way?
We never did really talk all that much. There’s a mutual understanding between us. I never did try to dig into his personal life and he didn’t try to dig into mine. If he’s aloof and hard to get to, I can understand why. I don’t blame him. So many people have taken advantage of him, tried to do him in when they did get to him, that I wouldn’t blame him for being aloof and hard to get to. Everybody tells him what he should write, how to think, what to sing. But that’s really his business.
Let’s talk about your own songs. Do you have any special memories about them?
Sure, most of my songs bring back memories. Things like how I happened to write them, where I was when they were released and so forth.
“Train of Love”—I remember writing that in 1955 when I was on the Louisiana Hayride show in Shreveport. Sam Phillips happened to be there. And