I’d just like you to know that I once interviewed a Nobel Prize winner.
It was before he won the Nobel Prize. A long time before. All right, 50 years ago. But it still counts, okay.
It was a youthful Bob Dylan, the just announced 2016 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I was a mere green cadet reporter younger than he was. I was taken along to the interview by an older journalist because I had expressed some enthusiasm for Dylan’s music and my colleague thought I knew something about it.
Like many young rebels espousing civil rights and anti-war, we warbled his celebrated protest songs of the 1960s such as Blowin’ in the Wind and The Times They Are a-Changin, and drove our parents mad with endless repetitions of Mr Tambourine Man.
And there was the rub. While we were still in love with the folk music hero of the early 1960s, by 1966 Dylan had begun the first of his many reinventions of himself.
Shock horror, as the headlines say, he’d gone electric pop. But before I discovered that by getting a free ticket to his concert, we did the interview. It was appalling. When I got up that morning and put on my nice girl’s cream suit with knee length skirt, my overstated pancake face powder and understated pink lipstick with my professional person’s large leatherette handbag, I had no idea I was going to meet Bob Dylan.
Otherwise I would have worn my best denims and something with a lower neckline and a floral scarf. And possibly boots, not my pointy-toed high heels.
But there I was, looking gawky in his hotel room, perched on a nasty green armchair with my notebook on my knee. My colleague looked at me expectantly. I continued to gaze open-mouthed at Bob Dylan, as far as I was concerned the most famous singer on earth.
Maybe the most famous person in the world. My colleague finally stopped looking at me and started asking questions of Dylan, who by this time was looking out the window.
Dylan mostly didn’t answer, and when he did the answers didn’t exactly match the questions. I have no doubt he was sick to death of answering the same things over and over in every place he visited. He was probably also sick of awestruck, dumb bunny journalists who were just wanting to run their fingers through his wild, curling hair.
Finally my colleague hissed at me to pull myself together and ask him how old he was. This was not the kind of question Dylan deigned to deal with. But he did answer me.
“As old as my grandmother’s teeth,” he said.
We were ushered out shortly afterwards by some minder, with me desperately trying to work out how I was going to write a story from this disaster.
My colleague did most of the article and gave me his concert ticket on the grounds that having suffered through the interview he didn’t have to listen to him sing as well.
I sat through the first half of the concert still awestruck, and then dumbstruck when his new backing group, The Band, got going with the electrics. I was not the only fan of Mr Tambourine Man who was shattered.
By the time his tour got to Europe, he was being heckled by “folkniks” and angry fans and receiving scathing reviews from a hostile media described by a biographer as “behaving like a conformist, Neanderthal mob”.
Regrettably, I too wrote a review reflecting the majority media opinion although I certainly don’t remember being hostile — more sadly bewildered.
The most extraordinary thing about my article was that it was misquoted in a retrospective on Bob Dylan’s 1978 tour of Australia. It said I had written a “mean-spirited review” because I couldn’t get an interview. I wasn’t there in 1978, honest. The interview I had got back in 1966 was probably the worst of my life. Like many others, I in fact remained true to Dylan all these years.
His fans include my friend Margaret, who went to Sydney to go to one of his more recent concerts. She’s such a shorty-pie that down in the mosh pit she couldn’t see old Bob, so kindly fans picked her up and passed her overhead to the front.
Last week, we spent a night with red wine and Bob Dylan, communing with other fans we affectionately call members of the Bad Singers Society of Fiji.
They can still warble their way through Mr Tambourine Man and many other songs, often in Hindi, that carry the spirit of the music Dylan still makes. I have but one sneaking regret.
I suppose Bob Dylan’s award means that the other great musical love of my life, poet Leonard Cohen, is out of the running. Sad, but then I’ve never interviewed Mr Cohen.
* Seona Smiles is a long-time contributor to The Fiji Times. The views expressed are hers and not of this newspaper.
