[00:00:00] Speaker A: This show is a part of the FM Podcast Network, the home of great music podcasts. Visit
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You are listening to the Dylan Taunts podcast.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Welcome to the Dylan Thompson. Another installment of what is It about Bob Dylan? I am sitting with the illustrious Roberta Reykove. She is a partner at the Raycove and Strasburger advocacy group. She earned her BA from Pittsburgh College in Claremont, California and her Mph. At the University of Illinois at Chicago.
[00:00:45] Speaker A: School of Public Health.
[00:00:46] Speaker B: Among many impressive accomplishments in Roberta's career, she was a senior vice president for External affairs at Cyanite Health System, one of the largest providers of healthcare for low income people, where she directed federal, state and local advocacy and helped Sinai become a national voice on Medicaid, immigration, justice and gun violence. Am I remembering this correctly that you testified in front of Congress?
[00:01:16] Speaker A: I've testified before the state legislature often and I wrote testimony for my betters who testified before Congress.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Yes, I remember you telling me that.
It's impressive. You were appointed to mayor. Lori. Leitz. Mayor's. Health care transition team. And you have served on numerous national and state advocacy councils and you have won numerous awards for your work. Thank you for being with me today.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Well, thanks for having me, Erin. This is just it's a delight to talk with you.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: So let's just jump in. What is it about Bob Dylan?
[00:01:54] Speaker A: Well, I have been a huge Dylan fan for a very long time. And I know we're going to talk about origin stories and all that, but what I loved you just interviewed Anne Marie do I say may or may I say Mai?
[00:02:10] Speaker B: Mai.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: Okay. Anne Marie Mai. And there was a wonderful moment in that interview where she said, he's the greatest artist of our time. And that was so liberating for me because I have a lot of friends who aren't like us, don't fall into this category. And I know they're rolling their eyes all the time at me.
That is exactly how I feel, is that I'm one of those people who will go around saying, I'm just so lucky to have lived in this time when this unbelievable work is being done by Bob Dylan. And I know someone once said, I think might be Nina or someone on one of your shows, that the Nobel Prize was very freeing for those of you who are academics because you had all these people turning up their noses at you and know, what are you really studying about Bob Dylan? And now you could look at them and say, how's your guy doing? My guy got the Nobel Prize. But I think that I fall into that category of people who, over time, have just come to recognize that this is incredible artistry, that this is such an amazing voice and that there isn't another voice like this and probably hasn't been.
I would just hearken back. I know this is going to sound corny. I don't know if you ever saw the Leonard Cohn panel when Dylan won the Ask Cap Award, but there's this wonderful point, and this really just sums it up, where Leonard Cohn is asked, what do you think his impact is on American music? And he sort of veers off from that. He said, a great heart like Bob Dylan comes along once every 400 years, and then he goes on to talk a little bit about that. And he said his work will be a torch for everybody, many generations moving forward, but this kind of thing happens only very rarely, and we're just lucky to have encountered it. And I thought, there it is. That's the perfect statement.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: And that 400 years for me. And I said this to, I think to Rebecca, or maybe to Emery, that I say he's America's Shakespeare. And I've had folks laugh at me when I say that. And yeah, it was Nina that said the Nobel Prize was sort of liberating for us. But even now, people question whether he deserved it. There was just an article that ran that he didn't deserve it. I highly disagree with.
[00:04:48] Speaker A: Know I. It may have been Michael Gray or somebody who said I disagreed with it at the time. Not because I thought he didn't deserve it, but I thought it didn't encapsulate all that. He is right. And literature was too small of a Know I, obviously I'm in your camp. And when the American Writers Museum had this really terrific exhibit for a year, dylan Goes Electric. It's a small museum, small but mighty museum here in Chicago. It was really great. They had the electric guitar there for about a year. You could go and wonderful writers speaking, but one of the things they did was they had a whole wall of quotes from people, from all kinds of famous people who have been artists, who've been influenced by him. And that was the theme that ran through it, saying, there is no one like this.
[00:05:42] Speaker B: Right?
[00:05:43] Speaker A: And he is our Shakespeare, and he is our Picasso. He is all of those things.
That's the camp I sit in.
[00:05:57] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we're in good company.
But and the influence, I think, is an important piece to that. When we look at now what Rebecca Flaman is doing with the philosopher of modern song, and she's influenced by or inspired by what Dylan did in the philosophy of modern song, and those strands kind of go out from Dylan's work to influence other people. And that is to me, another sign of greatness.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: So what is your origin story with Bob Dylan?
[00:06:31] Speaker A: I have a real origin story and a Bob Dylan origin story. So my real origin story is my father was raised in Hipping, Minnesota, till he was twelve. Get out. And so my Dylan's family. So we're Eastern European Jews, right? And Dylan's family, I think, on his father's side came from Ukraine and on his mother's side came from Lithuania. In my case, my mother's family came from Lithuania, but my father's family came from that part of Eastern Europe that was sometimes Russian, sometimes Poland, and sometimes something else. And my grandfather, they were cousins. My grandparents, they were family. They met in Minnesota.
But my grandfather came first. He was evading the draft, the Tsaris draft, and somehow found his way to Hibby, Minnesota, where he was a minor on the Iron Ore Range. And my know followed. And you went to where your family was and so that's how they met. Linda Whitehead in Hibbing has really nicely sent me some information because my grandfather was in International Workers of the World. There was a big strike on the Iron Range that IWW came in and she had a whole hour on the history of that strike, which they did something about it in Hibbing and really nicely sent of. I wish we were related. We're not, but that's my sort of genetic origin story. That's cool.
[00:08:11] Speaker B: Have you been to hibbing.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: Okay, so I have not been to Hibbing. My husband and I don't drive. Someone's going to have to take us there and friends of mine do that. I mean, people drove us to in last October. So I'm either going to have to really lean on my son to drive us up there or my brother, who is a historian, has done a lot of research on our family. And when he comes to town again, I think I could probably get him to he actually wouldn't mind taking a trip up there. Not necessarily look at Dylan's stuff, but to look at our family because it's not easy to get to if you don't drive. Right. Hipping is not super.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: No.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: No, it's not.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: We were in Minneapolis, St. Paul. I was doing research for my dissertation and we happened to be there the end of June, beginning of July, and the government shut down because they couldn't agree on funding. And so all of the archives shut down and we had nothing to do on July 1. And then we thought, let's drive up to Hibig. So that's how I managed to get to Hooting. But it was a four hour drive.
[00:09:21] Speaker A: From Minneapolis, so I'm hoping to get there soon and lean on somebody to get me there.
So that's my genetic origin story. And my other origin story is really I was born in 1950, so when I was in high school, 1964 to 1968, dylan was not on my radar. My friends and I were all British invasion. We were totally British invasion. And my brother, who is apparently the person who should have been introducing me to Dylan, was off at college. So we didn't really intersect a lot in those years. But I ended up going to this very lefty progressive hippie college in Southern California called Pittsburgh. I think it's a little bit less so now, but then it was a pretty wild place and no know, no rules to rebel against, no anything.
And I loved it a lot.
And I was sitting in someone's dorm room there and they put Blonde On. Blonde on and it was like a thunderclap. And that's where it not only changed the way I felt about music, but it changed the way I looked at life.
It was an album that made you think, well, rules are made to be broken and we have to look at everything with fresh eyes. And I was working in the dining hall and I would wait to get paid and then I would go buy another album, and every time I would get paid and move forward from there. And that was the start, but it wasn't like I started as a know. I went diving into the deep end immediately.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: I was going to say, you just jumped in. I just jumped in what you said this morning. I listened to Jim's interview with Keith Mandy and he said that what Dylan does in terms of language, which I thought was such a beautiful thing to say, was that he shows us it's a living process that encourages us to engage the world. And it seems that questioning that constantly thinking about how things are perceived and how they're communicated and the communication between the person who's speaking and the receiver, that's kind of what you're alluding to. And what a beautiful moment to have. And the thunderclap issue or the image that's just so wonderful because it hit you that this is something special.
[00:12:00] Speaker A: There's a wonderful Joan Baez quote when she said something about when people get into Dylan, they get in really very I just that's where I started and.
[00:12:11] Speaker B: I think there's that delineation. I don't know that there are many casual Bob Dylan fans.
I think it is an obsession.
[00:12:22] Speaker A: Yeah. As I say, to know I used to say it's a minor obsession. I could move away from it if I want to, but that actually isn't true, so why not just claim it?
[00:12:34] Speaker B: That is an inaccurate depiction of how we feel about Dylan. So we know that Dylan has said famously in the 1965 San Francisco press conference that he's a song and dance man and so he focuses quite a bit on performance. And I'm interested to know about your first concert. If you became a fan in the when did you first see him live?
[00:13:01] Speaker A: How was that experience? So, first of all, I'm going to say I'm really jealous of my husband because the first time he saw him live was at the Isle of White.
So is there a better origin story? They were camping or whatever. They were up on the hill. He's British. They were camping up on the hilltop and the first time he saw him was there. And then when we were all in Tulsa and we were sitting around having pizza and everybody could vividly remember their first concert. I can't I've seen him many, many know he comes through Chicago a lot. So I've been lucky enough to see him here. I've seen him in North Carolina.
I've seen him in I honestly and everyone's giving the set list. And I was feeling so inadequate because I honestly I know I just don't have that one in my memory bank. And I was just talking to do you know Michael Glover Smith, the so so I was just communicating with he lives here in Chicago, and we met in a cafe, and not on purpose. We were just both in there and looked and said, Wait, I know you.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: That's hilarious. I met up with him in Washington when we saw Dylan in DC.
[00:14:17] Speaker A: Yeah. So he has kind of a photographic memory of every single concert he's been to. And then when we were in Tulsa, we were sitting around having our pizza and all of you, I think Rob started saying, when was your first concert? Then they're all just really off the set think. And it's interesting because I remember other first concerts and I said to really I clearly remember a couple, certainly the Rough and Rowdy Ways. One was very significant because it was this wonderful return. I have very vivid memories of seeing Dylan and Willie Nelson at a baseball, minor league baseball.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: Oh, that was a great tour.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: You cannot imagine how much fun that I remember sort know, okay, this was the Mavis Staples concert. This was the concert where he did the Frank Sinatra songs. And this was a really terrible concert at Northwestern University where we walked out. You know, it's not always at his best, but I don't remember my first concert. And I think it's partly because when I go to see Dylan, I sort of go into a different focused I could give you patty Smith is my other musical obsession. I can tell you the details of every Patty Smith thing I've been to, and I can remember what she wore and whatever. And for whatever reason with Bob, that's not the case for me. And I think it's because I'm so excited that I'm not operating on all cylinders when I'm there. So I know that's like, a bad answer. And I feel so strongly that his truest artist performance and so I wish I could comment on it more, and I certainly can on Rough and Rowdy Ways because that was so vivid.
But we've seen them all over the place here and in different kinds of venues. But my husband will say, oh, yeah, he did this. He closed with this. I'm like, did he?
[00:16:36] Speaker B: I know what my first concert was. I have that down. But when I start to think about the times I've seen him, I'm like, oh, yeah, I saw him there, too. I forget some of the concerts I've seen him. And so I don't think it's an inadequate answer that you're giving. I think it's almost an embarrassment of riches that you've seen him so many times that you can't remember all of the times you've seen him.
[00:16:59] Speaker A: I'm jealous of you know, again, he comes through here a lot.
He comes through chicago a lot. He likes venues. We have all these different venues. I think there was one where he was skipping around the city to five different venues or know over a longer have that we have that opportunity. And I saw him in north carolina because friends of ours called up and said, he's coming, he wants to buy tickets and would you fly out? And we're will always yes. The answer is always yes.
I had a younger colleague at work who knew no one wanted me to drive when I did drive. And dylan was going to be in madison, but not chicago. And he goes, I'm taking you because I can't bear for you to miss people. But I have never, for example, seen him at the beacon, which I would really love to do.
[00:17:55] Speaker B: Neither have i. And I grew up in new jersey. And so my plan is when fingers crossed, he announces the beacon shows for november, I'm going, I don't care if I go into debt for the rest of my life for it, so you should come, too.
[00:18:10] Speaker A: Well, come to and I don't care, whatever it costs. And because again, for him, more so than for so many other artists, when you see him, the work is in a state of becoming all the time.
As a performer, it's hard to explain to people, I had almost ended a friendship with my oldest friend because she's like, well, he doesn't do what people want, and he changes the songs, and that's so bad. And I say, I can't even talk to you.
But that constant state of creation and performance is just so amazing. And I don't know that there's anyone else who actually does that.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: And I think people I agree, people don't understand that he's not a legacy act. He's not going to come out and perform what you want. And even court and I talked about this, that people will say, oh, he didn't do x, y and z.
He didn't do the things that they wanted him to see, they wanted him to do, and they want him to come out with an acoustic guitar and be pre electric dylan, but he's not going to do that for you. And even if he did perform the songs that you wanted to hear, he would be doing them the way he wants to do them now and not in the way that you think that you know them from an album. If you are a casual, you know.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: I love the surprise of we went to when I bought tickets when I was at sinai, our facilities VP was just like me, and we had someone who worked for both of us who didn't know much about dylan heard us talking about all the time. And I was taking my was my colleague who was a Dylan fan. I bought tickets for him and his wife. We could come as our guests and we were all going. And this gentleman who worked for us who had never been, he somehow, someone gave him a really good ticket and he went. And of course, that was during the Shadows in the Night phase. And he was so baffled afterwards. He said to us, Are you sure about this?
And we said, you just have to go with it, Jesse. Just go with it.
[00:20:37] Speaker B: Yeah, you have to enjoy it. So I'm interested. There is a follow up. What was the concert that was terrible?
[00:20:45] Speaker A: The concert that was terrible was I live in Evanston where I've read some people like this concert, but the stage was like, constantly dark. Dylan had us back to us for a very good part of the performance. And it was just I don't expect him to engage, but it seemed like he was sad to be there.
I think he talks about this when he talks about performance. Sometimes it just doesn't happen. And that was that night we walked home. It's not that far for us. And we were saying, well, our broad group of Dylan concerts, this probably won't be at the top, but it's always worth going.
Somebody in your 80s session at Tulsa, which I really love this woman's writing a book on creativity and she said this wonderful statement we have to allow our geniuses, their failures.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: I forget who that was, but I love that statement as well.
[00:21:53] Speaker A: Isn't that I love the statement. I think my husband got her name because he talked to her afterwards.
So even the failures are interesting.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: I agree with that, that we have to give them space to kind of figure out where they go next and it's not always going to be successful. What was the best concert you've ever been to?
[00:22:13] Speaker A: On the flip side of that, so I would say I loved the baseball concert because it was really intimate. We were in a pretty small ballpark in Schaumburg, Illinois.
It was very joyous. The band was terrific, but it was this really incredibly fun concert.
He was having fun. We were having fun. We were eating hot dogs and drinking beer and all the Willie Nelson fans were high and it was like being in kind of a really big living room. Yeah. So I would say of all the concerts I've been to, I enjoyed that one the most. And I would say the Rough and Rowdy Ways concert, which was the second on the tour because it was our first concert. We had been to a little something at the Old Town School. But the first concert when the pandemic ended, not ended, but the first concert when we could go, I'm a public health person. It hasn't ended, but we could go back into this beautiful auditorium and see him. And I think I had written to you that I'm really trying to putting together my public health hat and my Dylan hat, really thinking about what I'm his guide to the pandemic, starting with being our guide to how to live through a pandemic. So beginning with dropping Most Murder Most Foul, and then through everything, through rough and rowdy ways, through Shadow Kingdom and through then this joyous reopening that sort of announced we can go back and hear live music again. And how that? I've been doing a lot of reading on art during pandemics and his approach is really different, but I have no idea where I'm going with it. But that concert was really meaningful because of that.
[00:24:22] Speaker B: I'm like, do it, do it right.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: Yeah, you go down all these rabbit holes about pandemic art and the Black Death.
But that's fascinating.
[00:24:36] Speaker B: Nina wrote something akin to that not going through the public health, but just the idea of Shadow Kingdom. She did it for the set list.
[00:24:46] Speaker A: Book, but the idea of it being.
[00:24:51] Speaker B: This unifying event and we thought we were going to watch something live, but it wasn't live and just how we were. It really is reflective of the moment. But you coming from your perspective in public health would just add so much to that conversation. So I'm going to champion you writing that. Now I'm going to bug you about it.
[00:25:11] Speaker A: Good, because I'm going to work on it. And I thought about Shadow Kingdom in a way. At a time when we couldn't travel, he took us somewhere.
At a time when we couldn't gather, he let us gather that thing about opening the chat for Shadow Kingdom for half an hour. So, hi, I'm here from Know and I'm here from wherever. So it was a was. But he took us to Marseille. He took us to a different time period. It was very different from what everybody else was doing with their at home concerts, which were all great, but of course he's not going to do something like anybody else in the world.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: No.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: And the imagination of Shadow Kingdom in that moment in time is really something special.
[00:26:08] Speaker B: But you're also, and this is not my point, it's Nina's, you're also very conscious of the fact that we are still in a pandemic because they're all masked.
[00:26:16] Speaker A: They're all and I think, you know, when he dropped Murder Most Foul, the message was almost, I know you're there, be careful. I'm here.
It was this really kind of sweet moment of who knows when he was planning on releasing that song, but I really felt like we were all at that point really scared, really terrified. Right? You were afraid when you touched a light post. We still didn't know. We didn't know about transmission.
[00:26:52] Speaker B: We were wiping down groceries, we were.
[00:26:55] Speaker A: Wiping down all that stuff. And we were living and we were isolated and we were sad. And all of a sudden along comes Bob and goes, hi.
And here's a half hour guide to American history just for you that I did and be vigilant and I care about you.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: And also another time when the country had gone through something that was frightening and traumatic and we survived. And so there's a little bit, even though I can't listen to Murder Most Foul without crying because it's so emotional, but there's still maybe a tinge of hope to it that we got through that as well.
[00:27:34] Speaker A: Right. And he wasn't sending know, Yo Yo Ma would do these wonderful concerts of songs of comfort. That wasn't Bob. He wasn't doing songs of comfort for us, was he? He wasn't playing that role. He was saying, hey, I'm going to give you something you can really have a great time with. And it's really challenging because I know that's what you need. You don't need anyone telling you I'm comforting you. You need someone to say, get off your ass and think about this. Right?
[00:28:04] Speaker B: We don't need celebrities singing Imagine on Zoom for us.
[00:28:08] Speaker A: No, not at all. And I'm not going to do anything that is going to be inspirational for you.
I'm going to scare you half to death. I'm going to challenge every brain cell that you have. Right. That's hilarious.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: All right, so we have talked about this via email and you are much more positive than I am. So there is an end date on the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour of 2024 and there's speculation that he's going to end to stop touring and that date and retire.
What does a post Dylan touring world look like for us?
As I said to you many times.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: I don't accept the concept of a post Dylan world period.
And I think his live performances end when he says they will. And one thing that struck me and then I'll get to your question, but one thing that struck me, listening to the Rome concert, he sounds terrific. He looks know Nancy Pelosi's the same age she is and she's running around the so, hey, if she can do it, why can't he do it? He has probably a lot more support.
I'm just going to reject the concept. Probably it's wacky of me to do that, but I will.
But I think that the question maybe you're asking isn't so much what if he doesn't tour it's what would a host Dylan walks among us?
[00:30:07] Speaker B: No, I don't want to ask that question.
I just asked because the post Dylan and I've asked the question that he's human and therefore temporary.
[00:30:18] Speaker A: Is he? No.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: I know among really in court and Jim and Nina Rob and I, we've been emailing about that recently and none of us want to touch the post Dylan world. The post Dylan touring world, by the way.
[00:30:36] Speaker A: I don't either. I don't either.
[00:30:39] Speaker B: Even in a space that we're uncomfortable with, maybe.
[00:30:42] Speaker A: So maybe what I would say to that before I start about doing this Dylan's Pandemic article, because I'm 72 and I think a lot about how do you stay creative, what does creativity look like as you age? And I have up on my wall, if you can see my wall, in my office, I have Dolores Huerta, the great organizer, the great union organizer, and she's in her early ninety s, and she's still organizing. And then I have Dylan up there too. And I probably need to get a picture of Nancy Pelosi and Patty Smith up there.
My later in life idols.
[00:31:25] Speaker B: What about Hannah Arendt?
[00:31:27] Speaker A: Well, Hannah didn't live to be very old. I know she died at 65, but yeah, she's definitely another one.
I think the question may be whether he tours or not. What does creativity look like? And certainly from a creativity standpoint, he's just explosive at this stage in his life. I'm sure you attended. I don't know if you got to see the session on the rail car, and Laura was part of that session. So he's off there and I think he's incapable of not expressing creativity. So what that will look like will probably take all kinds of shifts. But while I think performance is one of his greatest arts, it's not his only one. And whatever you get to have is always challenging and always new and always exciting. So to me, if there is a post performance world, and there may well be, despite my ability to be in a state of denial, then hopefully it will come at us in different ways. I've been really fascinated looking at so many of his paintings, because to me, Dylan is the ultimate Americana artist.
Everything he does is about his vision of the United States, pretty much. And those paintings are both kind of an idealized version of an America that may have existed. And also he's the ultimate. We always get accused, those of us who live in urban centers, about ignoring flyover country. Right.
His stuff is all about flyover country.
That's a great point.
And really seeing this America, and I thought about it when my friends drove us to Tulsa, because I've never driven through Arkansas before.
Okay. So, yeah, I've never driven through that part of I had never driven through the Ozarks, I had never done that, and I'd never stopped in those towns, and they were different from what I expected. So I think he has a lot of things to say through different think. I think this is a man who simply can't stop creating.
[00:34:05] Speaker B: And I quote Mina a lot, but she know he makes better use of his time than we do. And I think part of that is just he's constantly in a creative process that he maybe can't sit still.
I think that's lovely.
So I want to throw you a bit of a curveball. I did ask you in the initial question. That your impressive career in advocacy was talked about. And I asked how that intersected with your interest in Dylan, and we had a little chat about that. But I do know that you love Hannah Arendt and you have a good story about the potential of Hannah Arent and Dylan being in the same place at the same time, but crossover between those two interests.
[00:34:48] Speaker A: Let's talk about yes, well, actually and.
[00:34:53] Speaker B: I apologize for the I love I.
[00:34:57] Speaker A: Love thinking about Hannah Renton. In fact, I brought it up in one of the sessions because somebody talked about the public square in terms of his art and what he's doing in the public square. And, of course, Hannah Rent is all about the public square, but what she's really about. And then I'll tell the story because it's such a cute story and it has so many cute peel offs to it. So I think Hannah Rent's greatest book is The Human Condition. And in the Human Condition, she writes about the difference between labor, work, and then what you do in the public domain action, which is action. She writes about political action, and then what she writes about is the fact that it's only through action that you can attain immortality.
That labor not that labor and work have their place, but in labor, you're creating an object.
You're digging out a coal mine.
You're doing something that is in no way permanent. It's going to go away. In work, it's a little bit more you're doing different processes. And you may have things that go but it's only through action that you create things that you can no longer control. So you operate in the public space. And in my life now, I would call the systems change.
My partner and I counsel not always successfully nonprofits on how do you really change systems. How do you really change not the individual, but how we function this system in the public space? That's what you do. And then she says by creating something that just keeps moving beyond you, you are creating immortality. That's what immortality is. And so for many artists, their work isn't great enough where it's going to do that.
It's good, but it's not you know, one of the things that I know we talked about a little bit, maybe we're going to talk about later is how do you get subsequent generations to do this? But Dylan has already done that in terms of the way his work has influenced other artists and then their work goes on from it. And whether they're recreating his songs or margot Price, for example, talked at the conference about how all of her songwriting goes back to Dylan. That was wonderful, which was really wonderful. Right. And you have so many people who say, everything I've learned to create.
I've learned to create through this. So that is, in a sense, his public space and his claim to immortality lies in other people's creativity and each one of those can go on. It may not be directly the next person may not be relating back to Dylan's work, but they're relating to someone else's creation. So to me, that's the Hannah Arendt type, but the story. So Samantha Rose Hill, who I've never met but communicated with, is Hannah Rent's latest biographer and she's apparently a big Dylan person. I'm dying to find out because she had posted something about, oh, I got a Dylan assignment. I'm so excited. So she posted on Twitter, I found it, I found it. And it was a dinner at the New School, where I knew Bob Dylan and Hannah Brent were in the same great. So she posts this thing and there they are. They're having dinner at the New School. It's a dinner for Yevgeni yev Dushenko. And at Dylan's table he had, says Mr. And Mrs. Bob Dylan. And Kirkvana gets at his table, who apparently doesn't like Dylan very much. And I can't remember who was at Hannah Rent's table. I think John Upke might have been at Hannah Rent's table, but they're in the same room. So she puts this up on Twitter and this just starts the world of people who think about Hannah Rent and Bob Dylan is not large, but we're some there's some website called Philosophers doing things.
They immediately put up a little painting of Bob Dylan and Hannah Rent having dinner together, right?
And then it just kind of spins out from there of people and even grill. Marcus refers to Hannah Rent in folk music. I was like, oh, he's another one. He can join this very small club, but there's probably, what, 15 of us in the world.
At one of the first online convention, one of Anne Marie's colleagues, Peter van Wies, gave a whole paper on Bob Dylan. Hannah Rent in.
So who would have guessed? And it's funny, I came up and I said something in the session because people post a lot of pictures. They do sort of vaguely look alike and they post pictures of it. And then this woman came over and just started yelling at me that I shouldn't be saying that all Jews with curly hair look alike and went off on this kind of wacky.
I know. I was saying, Well, I'm a Jew with the curly hair and I don't look like them.
[00:40:48] Speaker B: That's funny.
People are interesting when they have that shout of the internet space.
[00:40:58] Speaker A: Good grief.
[00:40:59] Speaker B: Well, thank you. And even that painting of Hannah, Ernd and Dylan having dinner, is that public space and what's created beyond Dylan? I hope that so how does your career in advocacy, I mean, obviously that seems like a space where you're acting or living aren't philosophies, but how does that intersect with your interest in Dylan?
[00:41:27] Speaker A: If I can go off on this, I've worked pretty much my whole adult life in different kinds of advocacy and I love it. And it's not what I do. I feel like it's who I am.
And I've been inspired by know, by different music. But Dylan's music, to me, is not inspirational in this, obviously. And he's the first one to say he's not a topical songwriter. That's not what he's doing.
I always love Phil Oakes, but I don't go back and listen to Phil Oakes anymore, except maybe some of his later stuff like Tape from California, because topical songs have a shelf life.
And when my husband and I visited the Woody Guthrie Center and the Bob Dylan Center in the same week back in October, and what really struck me was Woody Guthrie is an activist who uses music, and Bob Dylan is an artist whose music gets used by activists. He's doing something.
So when I thought about this, I went back and know, I am the president of the Grayley Heron Fan Club, and my dream in life is to be his publicist because his work is so great, so good. And I went back and I reread Grayley's chapter on race last night before we could sit down and talk about.
[00:43:08] Speaker B: It, because and that's In Dreams and Dialogues.
[00:43:11] Speaker A: It's In Dreams and Dialogues, a book that everybody should buy. It's out in paperback now. People were bitching and moaning about the academic price, and everyone here you are.
[00:43:21] Speaker B: Gratis being his everybody run out and.
[00:43:24] Speaker A: Buy this book if you've heard this. So his chapter on race should really be a separate book that he expands on, because Rayleigh really understands thinking about race, too.
I worked on the West Side of Chicago for 30 years, and I was very fortunate to be invited to sit at the table in black and brown communities. You're not at the head of the table, but you're invited to be a guest at the table. It's a real privilege and to be able to do that. And I think about race a lot because of seeing what the impact was in these communities in which there's been so much disinvestment and kind of living that in terms of the care we are providing, what we're doing, in the community, the number of people who will come into our trauma center, who have been shot, all of those things and how that reflects back to how we think about race in this country and how we discount black lives and all of that. And so I thought about different songs of his and what he does with this. And Grayley goes into it so well. But the first one when only a pawn in their game, which is not at the same level of sophistication as later songs, but was so prescient in really understanding.
One of the reasons we haven't been able to move forward on issues of poverty and other kinds of things in the United States was a really successful effort to separate low income white people from black. Right. And Dylan writes this song at a very young age. Very young age. He's very courageous. I think about performing it in the settings in which he performs it because this wasn't something people were talking about very much. But if you think Heather Cox Richardson wrote a whole book about this how the South Won the Civil War and he's talking about exactly what she's talking about. Reverend Barber and the Poor People's Campaign is also trying to bridge this gap. So it's not that it's a call to arms, it's a song to make us think about what in my business, we talk about as root.
So from that sense it's a deeper look. Then you think about Blind Willie Mctel.
And with Blind Willie Mctel, it's not a topical song. It's not a song that is giving you direction about what to do, but is a song that is taking you down this incredible path to understand what happened to black people in this country since 1619.
It is a 1619 project song. And agreed.
I think Rayleigh writes really beautifully about how Dylan navigates being the white person doing that and how carefully he navigates that. So he's never pushing a simply he's taking us down this road into very deep places so that you come away with a really visceral understanding.
I look at Murder Most Fowl in the same way where he's not only giving us a lesson on American history, which he is, but he's giving us a lesson about a lot of the rot in America.
And he's not telling us what to he's he's making us feel it. Not lecturing at us, not directing us, but you come away and all those songs change you, right? They change you.
[00:47:25] Speaker B: And he told us early on that that's what he was going to do in Hard Rain, he said, reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it. He's not telling you what to do, he's just telling you what the message is.
[00:47:40] Speaker A: And I think, and again, Gravely does a much more sophisticated job of expressing this. But to be an activist at this time of race relations in the United States, you really have to understand that you're not in charge.
You're a support, you're an ally.
You don't get to lead this.
You have to respect where your place is. And I think he does that really well.
Yes, he inhabits certain characters and certainly blind willing to tell you really feel that.
But I think very respectfully.
[00:48:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree with that.
I'm going to jump a few questions because I think we've talked a lot.
[00:48:31] Speaker A: I know we've talked about sorry.
[00:48:33] Speaker B: No, but it's great.
I'm enjoying so much listening to you and talking with you. And so I'm wondering that question that you alluded to is how do we keep Dylan relevant in younger and future generations? And I know that you have some thoughts on that.
[00:48:50] Speaker A: Yes. And I'll just tell you very quickly, for the first time, after the pandemic last summer, I got together with my brother's whole family, and I have a three year old great nephew who turns out they wanted to watch the great nephews wanted to watch the movie. And no Direction Home popped up on the screen and he started going, bob movie, bob movie. He's three years.
My my niece said he's obsessed with Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Volume Two.
So I think it's sort of a great sign that the music will carry on. I think what we have so much of the great work on Dylan right now is being done by people who are much younger, and it's being done through media and venues that we don't think about and we have to really respect where they're going. So you alluded to what Rebecca's doing. I mean, I want to be Rebecca when I grow up. She's just so creative and smart and full of energy. It's too late for me, but she's like the coolest person I've ever met.
And what she's done with this philosopher of modern song is so clever.
I look at the evolution of Ian Grant and Evan I always forget his name. Laffer the jokerman and what they've done. Their podcast has really grown and changed and really developed over time. And they too have found really different ways of doing this. They just did a 35 millimeter showing of Mast and Anonymous in La. And they had Larry Charles there. And so they're doing this in ways that no one in my generation would ever think about doing. And it's really smart. Yeah, it's really smart what they're doing.
And you think about Ray Padgett is another person who's relatively young. He's 30s, I'm assuming, and he also is doing this really great work.
And so I think that you sort of have to trust that the quality of the work here's the other thing I want to say I forgot, okay. People have to stop being snippy about Timothy Chalamet and doing the movie.
People are he's, what's this going to be like? And is this going to be a stupid biopic? Who cares? I mean, this is your chance if you want to get Future generation. This is like a PR gift from God. It is.
[00:51:30] Speaker B: And I'll tell you, I talked to Rebecca for the Dylan Ponce and we talked about that, about how that is a gift you're right. To Future Generations, because people who love Timothy Chalamet who don't really care about Dylan will see the movie to watch it.
[00:51:45] Speaker A: I know if you want to get the next generation oh my know, I think Jeff Rosen cares about so what a smart move. And look at the cast and then people are know, I'm not going to go see it.
[00:52:03] Speaker B: Why they will they'll get over so.
[00:52:07] Speaker A: But I think that you have to sort of trust that the work will carry itself. Look, I think this is something the Bob Dylan Center and the Bob Dylan institute are really grappling with.
You know, there are a lot of good signs that this will happen. I actually want to fix my great nephew up with Ray Pagett's daughter, who I think is two, because he said something in his dedication about how she wouldn't let them stop playing chimes of Freedom and when they not sorry, changing of the guard, I think. And when they did stop, then she would cry. So I thought maybe they could be a pair.
[00:52:48] Speaker B: Matchmaking.
Yeah. But still, I'm hopeful that it will go on. And in 400 years, if the Earth is still here, people will be talking about Bob Dylan. So what is your favorite Bob Dylan memory? This will be my last question, and then anything else you want to ask. I would love to talk to you.
[00:53:08] Speaker A: All day about Bob Dylan.
Unquestionably. My favorite Bob Dylan memory is the baseball concert. Okay. Unquestionably. I felt like I was in a living room with him. It was just so sweet and quirky and delightful. That is my absolute favorite of anything.
[00:53:28] Speaker B: And who was at that concert with.
[00:53:30] Speaker A: You that you shared? My husband and I drove out to Schaumburg, Illinois, a place we never go to. I think I had to go out there once to get a left handed goalie mitt for my son, but other than that, I would never go to.
It was just it was a beautiful night. It was a lovely setting. We were really close, and he was really happy, and I just would have stayed there for days.
[00:53:59] Speaker B: I love that.
It kind of goes back to what Paul Williams says. Know that ephemeral experience of being with people. And you said the crowd was happy and you were happy, and he seemed happy. And so, again, it really does speak to that interaction between he's singing and dancing and performing for you up there, but then you're responding to him and you're giving the same energy back to him, and it just makes for a wonderful experience.
Anything else you'd like to add?
[00:54:33] Speaker A: No, I think we've covered a lot. We have.
And I really want to thank you, and I hope I didn't jabber too much.
[00:54:43] Speaker B: No, I mean, I've been just fascinated, and I want to thank you for taking the time to talk with me.
[00:54:49] Speaker A: This is just know what is better, to find somebody that wants to do this with you, I think, you know, I coordinated a class on Bob Dylan.
[00:54:58] Speaker B: My question.
[00:55:01] Speaker A: Okay, tell me about that class very quickly. So one of the things you you know, I left my full time job and kind of constructing this next you know, we've got our little consulting business, and I've got my we also take my husband. I take classes at what is the OSHA Lifelong Learning Institute in Northwestern. And the model is that people who are in there actually put together the classes. So with two other people, I put together a class on Bob Dylan. And it was so great because so a couple of reasons why it was so great were the people. First of all, the first day, a third of the class is like, me, these guys are coming in with their giant books of lyrics and whatever, and a third of the class kind of knew something. And a third of the class either didn't know anything, but they were a little hostile. So this one guy in the class and this was such a great moment when we were introducing ourselves, he said, well, I thought he was really punky, so I thought, I'd take this class. Well, by the time we got through the class a couple of weeks later, I get an email from him. He goes, Guess where I am? I'm in Tulsa.
[00:56:11] Speaker B: Oh, that's hilarious.
[00:56:14] Speaker A: He said, I'm at the Bob Dylan Center. I just can't wait for you to see it because it's so great. And then one guy comes into the class and I mean, these are all people over 60, but they were so lively. So the really brave people who took the present the classes on and he had brought in lyrics for most of the time. And he said, I want us to pretend we're to pass over seder and we're going to go around the room and everybody read a line because this is the most beautiful thing I've ever read.
So we go around the room and everyone's reading a line. And then the class was sort of driving towards, should he have gotten the Nobel Prize? And everybody was, yes. But when we got to the Rough and Rowdy section and that class was led by a wonderful doctor who's a huge Dylan fan, and he's an artist, and he had flown down to Nashville to see Dylan with his son, and I think it was probably Key West. And the room was just so hushed and then because at our ages, everybody just said this music brought them to tears, rough and Rowdy ways. So it was a lot of fun to do. It was really wonderful watching the Journey people. And then somebody had been at the Last Waltz concert and it was able to relate those stories. One guy kept bringing in to me rare bootlegs, a poster with his ticket on the back, and he'd say, I want you to have all these. I'm like, I can't take these. He goes, no, you should own these. These are photos. He had taken a concert. So it was really just 14 weeks of fun. But when it was up, my husband's like, oh God, she's going to want to talk about Dylan at home all the time now. Because I know poor David knows more.
[00:58:12] Speaker B: About Dylan than he ever wanted to or thought he wanted.
[00:58:16] Speaker A: Mean, my husband knows music, and he knows much more about music than know it's. But Tulson really, he was the one who said we've got to go back to Tulsa for the so I'm so.
[00:58:28] Speaker B: Glad you did because it gave me the opportunity to meet you in person.
[00:58:31] Speaker A: Me too.
[00:58:32] Speaker B: And I had so many wonderful experiences with talking with you and Michael outside of your hotel room.
[00:58:39] Speaker A: I know. We were right next to each other, right?
[00:58:41] Speaker B: And then we went downstairs and listened to that concert. Concert.
[00:58:45] Speaker A: A little while.
[00:58:47] Speaker B: It was just chatting with you. It was just such a well, and everybody there.
[00:58:51] Speaker A: I mean, that last big dinner we went to in Tulsa where we're all getting our pizza and everybody's telling these stories. And maybe you can do an episode on the Ven diagram between people who teach Irish literature I know. And people who teach Dylan, because there's a Venn diagram there.
I think you've got a piece to write about that. You don't teach Irish literature.
[00:59:13] Speaker B: I don't, but in my PhD, I had to do a Britlet, and as half Irish, I don't particularly love the English. And so I chose Irish modernism as my Britlet and I took a comprehensive exam in it. So I am qualified to teach lit. So I don't actively teach it, but.
[00:59:35] Speaker A: I could yeah, because there's Grayleigh and there's Sean and there's Rob, and it just seems know. Anyway, this has been wonderful. It has been so much fun.
[00:59:47] Speaker B: I'm so grateful to you and thank you so much.
[00:59:50] Speaker A: No, thank you. I'm honored. I mean, the people you've had on your podcast are like me, but that's.
[00:59:56] Speaker B: The brilliance of Dylan fandom and studies is that he encourages so many wonderful and intelligent, insightful, learned, knowledgeable people. And you are right up there on the top.
[01:00:09] Speaker A: Well, that's very sweet and I'm thrilled to have the opportunity and hope to see you either in Houston or Chicago or something.
[01:00:16] Speaker B: Or Odence.
[01:00:18] Speaker A: Or Odence. Right. We have to go to Odence.
[01:00:21] Speaker B: Yes, we do.
[01:00:22] Speaker A: I said to Michael, I think we're all going to go to Odence.
[01:00:37] Speaker B: I look forward to seeing you guys there. I'm going to stop recording.
[01:00:48] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the Dillon Tantes podcast. Be sure to subscribe to have the Dillon Taunts sent directly to your inbox and share the Dillonts on social media.
