Bob Dylan Setting Foot On The Road To Stockholm

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Everybody's heard by now that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Some people are getting snarky about it going to him rather than their own personal favorite singer-songwriter, and others are calling those people out for their snark.

Not me, though. I applaud the selection and feel that there can be no more sincere homage to the man than snarking about it. He was, after all, the king of snarkitude.

To prove it, here's an excerpt from the Nat Hentoff interview (you can find the whole hilarious thing here) in Playboy, back when he was only 24:


PLAYBOY: Mistake or not, what made you decide to go the rock-'n'-roll route?

DYLAN: Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas "before and after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy - he ain't so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?

PLAYBOY: And that's how you became a rock-'n'-roll singer?

DYLAN: No, that's how I got tuberculosis.

You have to admit, that's not bad. Kid's got a future ahead of him.

Doesn't suffer fools gladly, though.


Above: Image swiped from GAMbIT Magazine. You can find their list of Dylan's 75 best songs here.

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