Rs1191

44 | Rolling Stone | rollingstone.com
Dylan at home in Woodstock,
1968. “That’s the way to do a
recording,” he told RS. “In a
peaceful, relaxed setting.”

rollingstone.com | Rolling Stone | 45
Dylan’s
Lost
YearsAt the peak of his fame,
he burned down his career
and saved himself – and
made some of his most
misunderstood music ever
By Mikal Gilmore

he turn
ing point was back in Woodstock,” Bob
Dylan once said of a time in 1966. “A lit-
tle after the accident. Sitting around one
night under a full moon. [I] looked into
the bleak woods and I said, ‘Something’s
gotta change.’”
Everything Dylan had done up to then
had been accorded the power of influence
and myth. His early-1960s folk-derived
songs – in particular “Blowin’ in the Wind”
and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” –
had given voice to frustration and anger
over delayed civil rights and advancing
warfare. His electric music – which came
roaring alive in 1965, with “Like a Roll-
ing Stone” – carried a sense of wrath and
of new possibilities. As critic Greil Mar-
cus would note, “The world used to follow
him around.”
The music that Dylan made after 1966
was far different. Some of that work –
the legendary Basement Tapes, and John
Wesley Harding, both recorded in 1967
– has long been considered some of his
best, and most resourceful. But the album
he released in June 1970 – Self Portrait,
a sprawling collection of folk songs and
country music, with a few haphazard live
tracks – was the most surprising and con-
troversial he’d yet made. It was seen as a
betrayal of his efect and potential, and of
the following that had trusted him. It was
Greil Marcus who also wrote, at the out-
set of Rolling Stone’s most famous re-
view, “What is this shit?”
“Would Self Portrait make you want to
meet Dylan?” the review continued later.
“No? Perhaps it’s there to keep you away?”
Dylan himself would later say as much –
that he’d made the album to discourage
those who saw him as a prophet, who in-
vaded his life and demanded he return to
his public and political obligations.
Now, 43 years later, a new collection,
Another Self Portrait (1969-1971): The
Bootleg Series Vol. 10, ofers a diferent way
of hearing that music. Dylan was singing
about a constantly risky search for new
identity and new voice – for a diferent way
of being. He seemed to be renouncing the
ideals of tumult and rebellion in favor of
other verities: home-based idyll and folk
tradition. But through it all, there was an-
other tumult going on: Dylan’s battle with
the world over the nature of his calling and
responsibilities. “I used to think,” he said
in 1968, “that myself and my songs were
the same thing. But I don’t believe that any
more. There’s myself and there’s my song.”
Dylan’s Self Portrait years would be the
most misunderstood passage of his life
and work. “We’ll never entirely forgive
him,” one biographer would later say. Yet
much of what Dylan would do that was
great in the years after flowed from this
antecedent of failure. That is, maybe it
wasn’t a failure after all. Maybe it was bet-
ter than anybody, including Dylan, knew
at the time.
I
n the earlydaylight morn
ing of July 29th, 1966, after an ar-
duous world tour, Bob Dylan suf-
fered a motorcycle accident on
a road near his home in Wood-
stock, New York. “I was blind-
ed by the sun for a second,” he
said later. “I just happened to look up right
smack into the sun with both eyes and,
sure enough, I went blind for a second and
I kind of panicked. I stomped down on the
brake and the rear wheel locked up on me
and I went flyin’.” Dylan’s wife at the time,
Sara Lowndes, had been following in a
car and took her husband to the ofce of
their doctor. Dylan reportedly sustained
cracked vertebrae, and spent weeks in re-
cuperation, then months in hideaway.
His high-velocity career trajectory broke
to an abrupt halt. There would be no major
U.S. tour, as planned, and an upcoming TV
special (Eat the Document) and novel (Ta-
rantula) would have to be delayed. Rumors
spread that Dylan was disfigured, or so se-
riously injured that he might never make
music again. In the spring of 1967, New
York Daily News reporter Michael Iachetta
tracked the singer to his Woodstock home,
and was relieved to find Dylan recovered,
though vague and uncertain about any fu-
ture work. “What I’ve been doing mostly,”
Dylan said, according to Iachetta, “is see-
ing only a few close friends, readin’ little
about the outside world. Poring over books
by people you never heard of. Thinking
about where am I going....But songs are
in my head like they always are.”
The motorcycle wreck has always been
seen as a transformative event – the de-
marcation between the revolutionary rock
& roll poet and the man who would soon
seem content in blithe truths and at a re-
move from concern for events of the day. “I
was pretty wound up before that accident
happened,” Dylan said later, perhaps re-
ferring to drug use that may have includ-
ed amphetamines.
“We all took speed in the Sixties,” says
Roger McGuinn of the Byrds. “Especially
in the folk and early rock scenes. We were
all into Dexamyl spansules and a thing
called Eskatrol, which was a time-released
amphetamine, and Compazine, which
was a psychiatric tranquilizer.” A couple
of months before the accident, Dylan, on
tour with the Hawks, nonchalantly told a
Swedish reporter that he had “been up all
night” on pills.
“I probably would have died if I had kept
on going the way I had been,” said Dylan.
Just how much the accident truly remade
Dylan didn’t become known until 2012,
when he told Rolling Stone that he
had become “transfigured” after the event.
Clinton Heylin, who has written several
books about Dylan, has described the art-
ist as undergoing a “personality change”
in these years.
At the same time, Dylan was remark-
ably busy – and inventive in new ways – in
the year that followed. Early in 1967, the
singer invited his backing band from the
1966 tour, the Hawks – guitarist Robbie
Robertson, bassist Rick Danko, keyboard-
ists Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson,
and, in time, drummer Levon Helm – to
Woodstock. For the next several months,
Dylan and the Hawks (who would re-
name themselves the Band in 1968) re-
corded more than 100 songs. There were
numerous songs that seemed to just come
out of Dylan’s mind and mouth in the mo-
ments they were being played; the collec-
tive body of work became known as The
46 | Rolling Stone | rollingstone.com September 12, 2013
Contributing editor Mikal Gilmore
profiled the Rolling Stones in RS 1183.
BOB DYLAN
“It was nuts,” Al Kooper
said of Self Portrait. “Why
was the Shakespeare of
songwriting doing other
people’s songs?”

Basement Tapes. Dylan loved his new mu-
sical regimen: “That’s really the way to do
a recording,” he told RS founder and edi-
tor Jann Wenner in a 1969 interview, “in
a peaceful, relaxed setting, in somebody’s
basement. With the windows open and a
dog lying on the floor.” Dylan would get
up early in those days, making cofee and
sitting down at his typewriter, sometimes
coming up with lyrics for as many as 15
songs in a day.
“He was very relaxed,” says photogra-
pher Elliott Landy, who visited him in
Woodstock. “He took the garbage out, just
to show me he was having a normal life.
He was a major pop star of the era, but he
was like, ‘This is what I do during the day.’”
While in Woodstock, Dylan also began
studying painting with Bruce Dorfman, an
artist and friend he’d met in the area. “He
loved to talk about his kids,” said Dorfman.
For his first real album since the acci-
dent, Dylan traveled to Nashville in Oc-
tober 1967, writing 12 new songs and per-
forming them on an acoustic guitar with
local players. The sessions went quick-
ly. “Dylan and I were notorious for using
first takes,” said producer Bob Johnston.
He began working with Dylan on High-
way 61 Revisited in 1965 and was expert
at creating conditions that allowed artists
to play and sing without feeling forced into
a manner or performance, and at finding
musicians to fit the atmosphere. “No one
ever counted of for [Dylan],” Johnston
told interviewer Richard Younger. “He’d
start tapping his foot and everybody would
be going and nobody had any fucking idea
where he was going. I told everybody that I
ever came in contact with, ‘Just keep play-
ing. Don’t stop.’”
The resulting work, John Wesley Hard-
ing, was a finely wrought set of parables
of fated and deceitful people, some look-
ing for an escape from those fates. Dylan
insisted that Columbia Records treat
John Wesley Harding inconspicuously:
The album was released two days after
Christmas 1967, and received no promo-
tion. But because Dylan had been silent in
the music world for 18 months – the pub-
lic had no real awareness of the Basement
recordings – Harding quickly became
Dylan’s biggest-selling album to that date.
Just as quickly, it had a huge efect on rock
& roll and its culture. Within months, the
album’s fundamentalist structures and
arrangements had the result of stopping
the psychedelic movement cold. Both the
Beatles and the Rolling Stones – who had
just months earlier recorded psychedel-
ic daydreams Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band and Their Satanic Majesties
Request – were deeply afected by the re-
cord’s ascetic sound, and soon retrenched
their own music. Despite its impact, Dylan
sometimes seemed dismissive of John
Wesley Harding. In June 1968, he would
tell Sing Out! magazine, “If I didn’t have
the recording contract and I didn’t have
to fulfill a certain amount of records, I
don’t really know if I’d write down anoth-
er song as long as I lived....I didn’t want to
record this last album. I was going to do a
whole album of other people’s songs, but I
couldn’t find enough.”
D
espite a less fran-
tic pace, and the wall of
privacy that Dylan was
trying to create, there
was real grief and per-
plexity going on in his
life. In late spring 1968,
Dylan’s father, Abe Zimmerman, died of a
heart attack in Hibbing, Minnesota, at age
56. Dylan had been distant from his par-
ents. He had not initially informed them
of his wedding to fashion model Lowndes
in 1965, nor of his motorcycle accident.
“I don’t have any family,” he had said in
1965. “I don’t dislike them or anything, I
just don’t have contact with them....It’s
easier to be disconnected than to be con-
nected.” But the young rock iconoclast
who had denied his family now had one
of his own (Jesse, his first of four children
with Lowndes, was born in 1966), and the
loss of his father struck him hard. Dylan
broke down at his father’s funeral. “Now
there would be no way to say what I was
never capable of saying before,” he wrote
in his autobiographical Chronicles Vol-
ume 1 in 2004.
Dylan was worried for the welfare of
his new family. In 1968, his fame closed
in on him at his bucolic Woodstock home.
“Goons were breaking into our house all
hours of the night,” he wrote in Chroni-
cles.Ononeoccasion,Dylanfoundacouple
who had just finished having sex in his and
Sara’s bedroom. “What are you doing?” he
asked. “We’re leaving,” they answered. An-
other time, according to biographer How-
ard Sounes, Dylan and Sara awoke to find
a man in their bedroom, watching them.
Dylan bought a gun, and resented bitterly
that these intruders identified with him in
some way. “Whatever the counterculture
was,” he later wrote, “I’d seen enough of it.”
David Crosby remembers taking Dylan to
a cofee shop in Hollywood, thinking that
the two could be unobtrusive and “look at
girls and talk.” It didn’t work: “People were
like, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God,’” says Cros-
by. “We had to split. He was ticked at me
for taking him.”
In spring 1969, Dylan moved his family
across town to a 12-room “arts and crafts”
mansion on 39 acres of land. Dylan also
bought 83 acres of woodland around the
September 12, 2013 rollingstone.com | Rolling Stone | 47
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Revelations
Dylan in 1970. For Self Portrait, he came to
the studio with a bunch of “old books and
Bibles,” said producer Bob Johnston.

property, for additional privacy. “What
mattered to me was getting breathing
room for my family,” Dylan wrote of those
years. “The whole spectral world could go
to hell.”
At the heart of this was a sense that
the world might not let go of its expec-
tations; Dylan didn’t want to be defined
or claimed. He addressed the issue in the
summer of 1968, in an interview conduct-
ed by his friends Happy Traum and John
Cohen for Sing Out! “This is 1968, al-
most the height of the Vietnam War,” said
Traum. “I was very conscious of his mov-
ing away from politics, so I felt it was my
duty to push him on the war and his atti-
tudes toward protest music.”
In the interview, Traum said, “Probably
the most pressing thing going on in a po-
litical sense is the war. Now I’m not saying
any artist or group of artists can change
the course of the war, but they still feel it
their responsibility to say something.”
“I know some very good artists who are
for the war,” Dylan responded. He went
on to tell about his painter friend. “He’s
all for the war. He’s just about ready to
go over there himself. And I can compre-
hend him.”
“Why can’t you argue with him?” asked
Traum.
“I can see what goes into his paint-
ings,” Dylan answered, “and why should
I?...Anyway, how do you know I’m not,
as you say, for the war?” Given the source
– the man who had written “Masters of
War” – and his influence on 1960s pro-
test music, it was an almost unthinkable
statement. Around that time, Dylan even
told Landy that he was going to vote for
anti-civil rights firebrand George Wallace
in the 1968 presidential elections. “He
was a jokester,” says Landy. “I told that to
the guys in the Band, and they said that
you never know if Bob is kidding around
or not.” (Crosby, who knew Dylan in
the Greenwich Village folk scene, sets
the record straight: “He felt very strong-
ly about civil rights. He didn’t like the
war, either.”)
Dylan’s next album, 1969’s Nashville
Skyline, seemed to undermine any re-
maining claims that the radical element
of the counterculture might have on him.
It was a country-western record, replete
with dobro and pedal steel guitar, featur-
ing Dylan singing in a low, almost Bing
Crosby-ish voice that he hadn’t used on re-
cord before. (When asked about his sing-
ing, Dylan said, “It’s time I sing relaxed –
this is my normal voice.”) On the famous
album cover, he smiled and tipped a fron-
tier preacher’s hat in a courtly welcome.
“These are the type of songs I always felt
like writing when I’ve been alone to do so,”
Dylan said. “They’re more to my base than,
say, John Wesley Harding. There I felt ev-
eryone expected me to be a poet, so that’s
what I tried to be. But the smallest line in
this new album means more to me than
some of those songs on any of my previ-
ous albums.”
While taping an appearance on Johnny
Cash’s TV series in Nashville on June 7th,
Dylan gave a written response to a report-
er’s request for an interview with what the
reporter described as Dylan’s “credo” of
the time: “I love children. I love animals.
I am loyal to my friends. I have a sense of
humor. I have a generally happy outlook. I
try to be on time for appointments. I have
a good relationship with my wife. I take
criticism well. I strive to do good work....I
try to find some good in everybody.”
I
f “nashville skyline” had
been a gambit to dissuade
Dylan’s standing among rock &
roll enthusiasts or the counter-
culture, to make plain that he
no longer moved mountains, it
failed. Rock artists – primarily
Dylan’s friends the Byrds, with their 1968
Sweetheart of the Rodeo – had already
begun to make C&W-imbued music. Be-
cause Dylan still had plenty of mythic al-
lure, Nashville Skyline added considerable
momentum to that trend.
The album, which was a hit, also added
to the demand for Dylan to appear in pub-
lic. In August 1969, he cold-shouldered
the three-day Woodstock Music & Art
LEFT:ALCLAYTON/SONYMUSICARCHIVES
BOB DYLAN
The Nashville
Sound
Left: Dylan, Johnny Cash and producer
Bob Johnston in 1969, the year Dylan
appeared on The Johnny Cash Show and
the duo recorded a dozen loose tracks in
Nashville, including “Girl From the North
Country.” The duo had been friends since
Cash wrote an open letter supporting
Dylan in Broadside magazine in 1964.
Below: Dylan’s artwork for 1970’s Self
Portrait. “I did the cover up in about five
minutes,” Dylan said. “And I said, ‘I guess
I’m gonna call it Self Portrait.’ ”

Fair (“an Aquarian exposition”), which
had been scheduled to take place near his
adopted town, leaving home as the event
got under way, heading to England, where
he accepted an invitation to appear, with
the Band, at the Isle of Wight Festival,
for an audience of 200,000. (Asked at a
press conference why he’d come to the
Isle of Wight, Dylan replied, “I wanted to
see the home of Alfred Lord Tennyson.”
“Why?” “Just curious.”) This was Dylan’s
first major concert since the end of his
1966 world tour, in London. He proved,
not surprisingly, something of a reluctant
star. He disapproved of any publicity that
trumpeted him as a storied legend, and
he was seen by some to be nervous and
ragged onstage. His old friend Dave Van
Ronk’s wife, Terri, remembered seeing
him around that time: “He said he doesn’t
like performing in front of big audiences,
but he is going to perform again because
he doesn’t have anything else to do.”
In April 1969, two weeks after the re-
lease of Nashville Skyline, Dylan returned
to the studio in Nashville for the first of the
Self Portrait sessions, and brought with
him sheet music and several songbooks.
“What do you think about doing an album
of other people’s songs?” he asked Bob
Johnston. Johnston later said, “He came in
the studio with old books and Bibles and
started recording.” Dylan covered country
songs, or songs in a country style, includ-
ing the Davis Sisters’ 1953 hit “I Forgot
More (Than You’ll Ever Know)” and Boud-
leaux Bryant’s “Take Me As I Am (Or Let
Me Go)”; “Take a Message to Mary” and
“Let It Be Me” (which had been hits for
the Everly Brothers); and “A Fool Such As
I” (identified with Hank Snow and Elvis
Presley) and “Blue Moon” (a big-band hit
for Tommy Dorsey, written by Richard
Rodgers and Lorenz Hart).
Dylan then set aside Self Portrait
(which was originally to be titled Blue
Moon) until early March 1970. When he
resumed, in a New York studio, his inter-
ests and style were shifting. He was now
singing in a less afected manner, and had
a wide range of folk music in mind – in-
cluding work by contemporaries: “Thirsty
Boots,” a civil rights-era song, by Eric An-
dersen; “Annie’s Going to Sing Her Song,”
by Tom Paxton; “Early Mornin’ Rain,” by
Gordon Lightfoot. Many of Dylan’s other
choices reached back into earlier Amer-
ican and British sources: “Pretty Saro,”
a lovely and rueful song that, according
to researcher Derek Barker, first came to
America in the 1700s from Scot-Irish set-
tlers; “Railroad Bill,” a song about a black
1890s railroad robber, from Carl Sand-
burg’s American Songbook collection;
“Tell Old Bill,” another traditional song
collected by Sandburg; “Days of ’49,” an
1840s gold-rush tale; “Little Brown Dog”
(“Tattle O’Day” on Another Self Portrait),
and, from the late-1880s Francis James
Child ballads collection, “House Carpen-
ter” – which Dylan had performed since
the early 1960s. Dylan also recorded a
moonshiner’s reverie, “Copper Kettle.”
The accompaniment on most of these
tracks, as they appear on Another Self Por-
trait, is raw and spare – Dylan’s acoustic
guitar, joined by either acoustic guitarist
David Bromberg or keyboardist Al Koop-
er, or both. Kooper recalls the sessions as
curious. “I hadn’t played with Bob on rec-
ord since Blonde on Blonde,” he says, “so I
was glad to get the call. When I got to the
studio, it was really weird. He had a pile
of Sing Out! magazines and was going
through them – picking out songs and
just recording them. It just was strange,
strange, strange. It was nuts, I thought.
Why is the Shakespeare of songwriting
doing other people’s songs? And why is
he doing all these old folk songs? What’s
going on?”
Bromberg, who was emerging as a
singer, songwriter and versatile guitar-
ist at the time, views it diferently. Dylan
“had a bunch of magazines and song-
books,” he says, “but he was only looking
in them for some of the lyrics. He knew
the songs: They were all songs that he
liked. There was nothing tentative about
any of it. He’s more than a songwriter.
He’s also a brilliant interpreter – I think
he may have missed that.”
rollingstone.com | Rolling Stone | 49September 12, 2013
FROMLEFT:©ELLIOTTLANDY/THEIMAGEWORKS;©GLOBEPHOTOS/ZUMAPRESS
A Drifter’s Escape
“What mattered to me was getting breathing room
for my family,” said Dylan (at left with his children,
Sam and Anna, at their Woodstock home). “The
whole spectral world could go to hell.” Above: Dylan
with Sara Lowndes, whom he married in 1965.

The recordings in their naked form – as
they now appear on Another Self Portrait
– are inspired, passionate, from a singer at
a new and diferent peak. But Dylan chose
not to release them in that form. The New
York recordings were sent to Nashville by
Bob Johnston, to be overladen by strings
or a rhythm band’s embellishment. Dylan
didn’t attend the overdub sessions, nor
work on arrangements for the sessions;
those were done by Nashville arranger
Billy Walker, who provided symphonic
arrangements for Eddy Arnold’s “uptown
country” sound. The overdubbed orches-
trations were too jarring an efect for an
audience that had so far taken Dylan’s ca-
prices in good faith. The strings struck
some as too suggestive of the sound of
film composer Dimitri Tiomkin, or Man-
tovani, a conductor who specialized in
orchestral arrangements of both popu-
lar and semiclassical music, with cascad-
ing strings.
In the end, almost everything about
Self Portrait bothered people: the mix of
smooth and rough singing, a dearth of
Dylan’s own songs – only five new compo-
sitions (two of them without words), plus
four slapdash-sounding performances
from the Isle of Wight show – and an es-
pecially poor decision to credit the tradi-
tional songs to Dylan’s authorship. Biogra-
pher David Dalton wrote of Dylan, “He’d
mislaid himself, an incredible lapse of at-
tention....He was the one we expected to
carry the ark of the 1960s into the new
dispensation. And when he wouldn’t or
couldn’t be our savior, we would become
resentful of him.”
Despite the fact that there was a re-
markable album hidden within it at the
time, Dylan himself has often disavowed
Self Portrait. In 1984, he told Kurt Loder,
“I said, ‘Well, fuck it. I wish these people
would just forget about me.’ I wanna do
something they can’t possibly like, they
can’t relate to. They’ll see it, and they’ll
listen and they’ll say, ‘Well, let’s go on
to the next person. He ain’t sayin’ it no
more. He ain’t givin’ us what we want,’ you
know?’ They’ll go on to somebody else.” In
Chronicles, Dylan wrote, “I just threw ev-
erything I could think of against the wall
and whatever stuck, released it, and then
went back and scooped up everything that
didn’t stick and released that, too.” Dylan
would also later say that he had simply
forgotten how to write songs in the way
he had before – he called it a period of
amnesia. “In the early years,” he said in
2004, “everything had been like a magic
carpet for me – and then all at once it was
over. Here was this thing that I’d wanted
to do all my life, but suddenly I didn’t feel
I could do it anymore.”
I
n late 1969, he relocated
his family to a double town house
in Greenwich Village, with a
front door that opened to Mac-
Dougal Street. Woodstock had fi-
nally become unbearable. “These
gate-crashers, spooks, trespass-
ers, demagogues were all disrupting my
home life,” he wrote. “We moved to New
York City for a while in hopes to demolish
my identity, but it wasn’t any better there.”
When Dylan erected a wall to shield his
part of the terrace on MacDougal, some
neighbors knocked the wall down while
he was out of town.
Dylan now had a handful of songs –
“Time Passes Slowly,” “Father of Night,”
“New Morning” – that he’d been consider-
ing giving to playwright Archibald Mac-
Leish for his dark new play, Scratch. In-
stead, Dylan brought them to his next
album, New Morning, which he began re-
cording soon after Self Portrait’s comple-
tion. “It was natural,” says Al Kooper, who
ended up producing the album. “I would
come up with the basic arrangements. His
manner was calm. These were mostly day
sessions. He’d go home to his family.”
Dylan recorded only original songs,
and instead of working fast as usual, he
attempted various arrangements of some
songs. “He kept changing his mind,” Koop-
er says. “It reached a point where every-
thing was done, but he still had to decide
the sequence and what version of a song he
was going to use. I said, ‘I think my work
is done here. Do whatever you want, but I
don’t think you need me anymore.’”
Four and a half months later, on Octo-
ber 21st, 1970, Dylan released New Morn-
ing. At first, the album was received as a
triumphant return to form. A headline in
Rolling Stone at the time read we’ve
got dylan back! Dylan himself seemed
to think the album had been an exercise
in treading water. “Some critics would
find the album to be lackluster and sen-
timental, soft in the head,” Dylan himself
noted. “Oh, well....To be sure, the album
had no specific resonance to the shackles
and bolts that were strapping the coun-
try down. Nothing to threaten the sta-
tus quo.”
But there was also unease eating at
the edge of the song “Sign on the Win-
dow”: Dylan’s assertion that love and fam-
ily “must be what it’s all about” came at
the song’s end, as either consolation or
pain to a man who understood that kind-
er dreams can be easily lost in the rain.
If Dylan’s accident had driven him into
his family, to better appreciate it, it also
drove him into a realization that the her-
metic seal of bliss might be imperma-
nent. The politically minded Joe McDon-
ald, of Country Joe and the Fish, said,
“[Dylan] stopped being a rebel and started
being a nice guy, a family man.
He don’t fool me, man.” The
truth is, Dylan’s refuge in that
dream could last only so long:
Though he and Sara Lowndes
were admired as one of the
great romances of the 1960s,
the couple separated and di-
vorced bitterly in the 1970s.
Talking to Jonathan Cott
about the late 1960s, Dylan
said, “I was trying to grasp
something that would lead me
on to where I thought I should
be, and it didn’t go nowhere.”
Which is to say, Dylan’s better self may
have believed in the domestic idyll, but the
reality of its dissolution may have been
home to his more enduring self.
B
y late 1971, demands
for who Dylan should be,
what he should do, hadn’t
ended. Even David Bowie
had issued a call in song
for him to take up his duty
as a moral and political
paradigm. A new breed of obsessives who
called themselves Dylanologists started
plumbing his work and the details of his
life and statements for clues to the mys-
tery of his purposes. One activist even
rummaged through Dylan’s garbage and
staged protests outside his Greenwich
Village home, with marchers who carried
signs that attacked Dylan, for his seeming
indiference to radical causes.
On August 1st, Dylan appeared as an
unbilled guest at George Harrison’s Con-
cert for Bangladesh, at both the afternoon
and evening shows at New York’s Madison
Square Garden. Harrison, who was fresh
from the Beatles after their disintegra-
BOB DYLAN
“I wanna do something they
can’t possibly like,” said Dylan
about Self Portrait. “They’ll go
on to the next person.”

tion, was making his first public appear-
ance as a solo artist. He and Dylan enjoyed
a friendship and mutual respect, and Har-
rison realized that Dylan singing at this
charity occasion would bring it great cred-
ibility. Harrison, though, had a hard time
winning a commitment from Dylan, who
was worried about the large audience that
would see him, and how it might interpret
his participation. At a rehearsal, where
the two friends sang Dylan’s “If Not for
You,” which both men had recorded, Har-
rison, according to rock lore, asked Dylan
to do “Blowin’ in the Wind” – a song Dylan
hadn’t sung in seven years – at the show.
Dylan, apparently irritated, shot back,
“Are you going to play ‘I Want to Hold Your
Hand’?” Even as the concert was ongo-
ing, Harrison didn’t know whether Dylan
would show. “I looked around,” Harrison
later said, “and he was so nervous – he
had his guitar on and his shades....It was
only at that moment that I knew for sure
he was going to do it.” Cott wrote about the
moment in Rolling Stone in September
1971: “People cheered, but they didn’t be-
lieve it, responding the way one does after
having obtained something deeply hoped
for with a kind of passionless disbelief.”
Everything about Dylan’s appearance
that day was a surprise. Just as the rock
world was adjusting to him on his new
terms – as a man with a glorious past but
a hesitant present and an up-in-the-air fu-
ture – Dylan came on like a ghost ready to
regenerate back to life. Performing with
Harrison on guitar, Leon Russell on bass
and Ringo Starr on tambourine – in a
small cluster of accompaniment around a
standing microphone – Dylan sang “Just
Like a Woman,” “Love Minus Zero/No
Limit” and more, plus stripped-down ver-
sions of early masterpieces “A Hard Rain’s
A-Gonna Fall” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Greil Marcus, writing about Dylan at the
Bangladesh concert, noted, “[From] the
first notes of ‘Just Like a Woman,’ it’s clear
that something else is happening. Here he
rises to one of the great performances of
his career. He sings the song the way that
Hank Williams would sing it if he were
still alive, with the ghostly chill of ‘Lost
Highway.’ It may well be the equal of any-
thing he has ever done, and if it took him
five years to regain the power he once had,
then what matters is not how long it took,
but that he has regained it.”
That year, Dylan also recorded “When
I Paint My Masterpiece,” a song about an-
swering a calling, pursuing the implica-
tions of one’s own mind and talents. A pre-
viously unheard early rendition by Dylan,
from March 1971, closes Another Self Por-
trait, with Dylan as his own sole accom-
panist, on piano. “Oh, the hours I’ve spent
inside the Colosseum,” Dylan intoned in
a raspy voice, his left hand rumbling on
the lower keys, like Bill Evans wander-
ing around a dark groove, “dodging lions
and wastin’ time/Oh, those mighty kings
of the jungle, I could hardly stand to see
’em/It sure has been a long, hard climb.”
There’s promise and hope in the song –
“Someday, everything is gonna be smooth
as a rhapsody/When I paint my master-
piece” – but it might also be a feint, some-
thing the singer tells himself rather than
to admit a dispiriting truth. Dylan sounds
already weary from those words’ promise;
he knew well that things weren’t about to
be smooth, like a rhapsody.
From late 1971 to early 1974, Dylan was
more like a rumor than a luminary. He
appeared as a guest musician or a hint of
a voice on other people’s recordings, in-
cluding Doug Sahm’s first solo album. He
also appeared as an enigmatic sidekick to
Billy the Kid in Sam Peckinpah’s Western
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, and wrote a
soundtrack for the film; it produced an
unanticipated hit, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s
Door,” that still stands as one of his most
evocative songs. But there would be no
formal new albums until Planet Waves, in
early 1974 – another record that seemed to
afrm domestic devotions, though it also
forecast a marriage that was starting to
come apart.
Dylan would eventually re-emerge.
When he returned in the mid-1970s –
with barnstorming tours of America with
the Band in 1974 and the Rolling Thun-
der Revue in 1975, and with revealing and
daring new albums, Blood on the Tracks
and Desire – he was confident with the
selves and perspectives that had once
seemed disparate. Years later, in the early
1990s, with Good As I Been to You and
World Gone Wrong, he again recorded ver-
sions of aged and inscrutable folk songs,
and did it in much the same manner as he
did in Self Portrait’s essential form: as a
lone voice, trying to reclaim inspirations
and lessons from the history and artifacts
that had made him strong and remarkable
in the first place. “These old songs are my
lexicon and prayer book,” Dylan told The
New York Times’ Jon Pareles in 1997. “All
my beliefs come out of those old songs.”
The music Dylan subsequently made –
Time Out of Mind (1997), Love and Theft
(2001) and Tempest (2012), among other
albums – have been works about a self
looking for transcendence despite the in-
exorableness of decline, just like the course
of the world he moves in.
Self Portrait did that in a younger voice,
when the whole world seemed up for grabs,
for the singer and the times around him.
Every moment mattered, even if it was
only to shun earlier moments. The mix of
ordeal and bliss and more ordeal he’d been
through between his 1966 motorcycle ac-
cident and the late seasons of 1971 had dis-
abused him of any burden to accommodate
or resist what the world hoped of him, or
to assure himself or others that love is all
there is; that it makes the world go around.
Neither concern would determine him in
the years to come. The Self Portrait years
had freed him of all that.
rollingstone.com | Rolling Stone | 51September 12, 2013
MICHAELOCHSARCHIVES/GETTYIMAGES
Come Together
George Harrison talked Dylan into playing
at 1971’s Concert for Bangladesh in New
York. “He was so nervous,” said Harrison.

BOB
DYLANANOTHER
SELF
PORTRAIT
(1969-1971)
2 DISC CD SET Features:
- 35 Rarities and Previously Unreleased Recordings
from Historic 1969-1971 Era.
LIMITED DELUXE EDITION
4 DISC CD SET Features:
- Exclusive Deluxe-Bound Book Containing
127 Pages of Rare & Unseen Photographs.
- First Complete Release of Bob Dylan’s Historic 1969
Isle Of Wight Performance Newly Mixed From Original
Multitrack Tapes.
SPECIAL DELUXE LP Features
- 3 LPs and 2 CDs. and Exclusive 12” x 12” Booklet.“COLUMBIA” AND W REG. U.S. PAT. & TM. OFF. MARCA REGISTRADA./ © 2013 SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, INC.
THE
BOOTLEG
SERIES
VOL. 10
Available at

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