HARKING BACK TO DYLAN DAYS

The moving, talking past is going to haunt us all. Once upon a time there were oil portraits, old letters and journals and books and, for a century or so, there’ve been photographs, occasionally hand-tinted at slight extra cost to produce an interesting, embalmed look. All silent and still.

But, in an age of portable tape recorders no larger than a man’s hand, and home movies and videotape cameras smaller than a breadbox, the all-moving, all-talking past is going to be with us, down to the last trickle of electrical energy.

An afternoon of my life arrived in the mail the other day, carrying a fair piece of the ‘60s along with it. I’ve intermittently tried to forget the event, but 20 years have lent it a kind of saving perspective.

January, 1966. Bob Dylan, then the hottest item in popular music, his “Like a Rolling Stone” and other songs heard everywhere, a big bash at the Hollywood Bowl behind him, had decided to give a press conference, for reasons that remain inscrutable these two decades later.

A man from Columbia Records called to say that Dylan had asked if I would moderate the press conference. I’d met Dylan a few months earlier at a smaller press gathering in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel after the Bowl concert. It had been a grim affair of unanswerable questions pursued by questionable answers, all centering on the matter of his real name, not then known. Dylan, it was said, had been amused by what I had written.

Wisdom and prudence, now augmented by hindsight, suggested that the right response would have been to run for the hills. But those were innocent days, and the chance for a close-in look at Dylan’s carefully constructed no-name, no-background mystique was very appealing.

On the appointed day, the lobby of the CBS/KNX building on Sunset was so jammed with reporters and a vast semicircle of television and newsreel cameras you’d have thought Lyndon Johnson and Nikita Khrushchev were going to arm-wrestle.

I met Dylan in an upstairs office and asked, fatefully, if he wanted to open with a statement. He said he would like it known he preferred not to answer any questions about science or trigonometry. Good luck to us all, each and every one.

A young woman, who then wrote for what she described as teeny-bopper magazines and who was confessedly awed by Dylan, arrived at the press conference with a tape recorder. Now, it is her tape of the 40-minute shambles that’s being sold by mail order to the Dylan faithful and other collectors of the period. (The young woman has gone on to motherhood and other pursuits and has opted for anonymity.)

It all comes back. The late and dignified television figure Clete Roberts was the senior journalist present, invading a milieu he admitted was alien to him. He asked the first question, noting there was a new breed called protest singers in the land. How many were there? “A hundred and thirty-six,” Dylan said, after slight thought and amid laughter. Roberts wondered if Dylan wasn’t putting him down. “There may be 142,” Dylan agreed, amid more hooting laughter.

It got worse from there, and I prayed for invisibility to descend upon me.

Asked about his real name, Dylan said it was Kanusovich. First or last name, somebody else asked. First, he said, not volunteering the last. The subsequent revelation (not at the press conference) that his name was Bob Zimmerman did not bring down the republic or diminish the jangly originality and power of his songs of that period.

The questioners were divided between the music writers, tending toward the reverential, and the other journalists, for whom Dylan was a news phenomenon--and not, in the circumstances, a particularly engaging one.

Did he have movie plans? Yes, Dylan said, he was going to play his mother, and the film would probably be called “Mother Revisited.”

It was all nonsense, conducted amid rising mutual exasperation. When one journalist confessed he understood none of Dylan’s songs, and kept pressing for meanings and intentions, Dylan said, “Now you’re makin’ me mad,” although in the same low and sleepy voice in which he’d said everything else. If you don’t understand, he said, the songs aren’t for you anyway, probably the most sensible and telling answer of the day.

The afternoon, foolish and abrasive in equal measure, was perceivable as a piece of history even then. Why it was becomes even clearer with the passage of time. A gap of more than generations was being played out in that overlit lobby.

Dylan may well have been exercising, in both pride and sardonic amusement, his power to command such media attention. But the conference could also be seen, even then, as a satirical comment, in the form of a happening, on the kind of inquisitional coverage he had begun to receive.

But Bob Dylan in 1966 was also a mumbling symbol of disquiet and dissatisfaction in the society, a disestablished warrior who seemed to represent almost everything that alarmed an older generation about a younger generation. Clete Roberts was not wrong to pick up on protest as a theme to lead with.

Vietnam was an unstated but implicit item on the afternoon’s agenda, and with very little imagination and foresight, you could have predicted from that one inane confrontation much of the wrenching national angers and Angst of the later ‘60s and early ‘70s.

There was film at 11.

An accompanying press release says that for devout masochists, the audio tape is available from Corona-Pacific Productions, 1237A West 6th St., Corona 91720, for $19.95, which is 50 cents a minute. If there is a videotape available, I think I would like to be spared--a little suffering goes a long way.