Page 14 - BiTS_08_AUGUST_2024

up on 4th Street. It was the centre of my life. I was sure I knew who the Tambourine Man was. I
had seen the characters and the players on the streets of the Village. I felt like these songs could
have just as easily been about my own life. It’s about being able to relate, and how someone else,
in this case Bob Dylan, said it better than anyone else could have.

BiTS: Have you had a chance to show the new album to Bob? If so how did he respond?

RB: I won't go into personal details except to say that
somebody who works with him was able to get my
recording to him. I can put it this way. I contacted that
person and said, ”Nobody's more ‘Positively 4th Street’
than me.” More than that is not my place to say.

BiTS: [Laughing] That's absolutely wonderful. With your
father’s shop, that could not be more accurate.

RB: Yeah, I knew it was accurate, so it was a fun thing to

say.
BiTS: You've intrigued me with your notes in talking about
‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ about the lines that you put about

the piebald man. I've never heard of the piebald man
before. Can you describe this character to me?

RB: [Laughing] That's my own term, by the way. Nobody
else called him the Piebald Man. There’s a chapter about
him in my book, “When A Woman Gets The Blues”. I called
him the Piebald Man because he wore a multi-colored
Shakespearean outfit, perhaps that of a court jester. He was
always in the same suit. He would come down the street
staggering a little bit. His shoes were pointed and rounded
at the tip with a bell at the end, and a hat split into two
crescent shapes that had little bells at the end. Maybe he was an actor. Or maybe he just wanted
to look that way. There were a lot of characters in Greenwich Village, and everybody just accepted
it. Artistic expression was valued above all else, and you could be whoever or whatever you
wanted to be.

BiTS: Absolutely, yeah. I understand. You've already mentioned the title track ‘Positively 4th
Street’, there's a lot of dispute about what the song is actually about. What do you think it's about?

RB: Some people probably know who it was written about. I have no idea, and it doesn’t really
matter. To me it is simply a hard hitting song about a failed relationship, a painful yet faintly
amusing window into the intense emotional landscape of a breakup. The words “you’ve got a lot
of nerve, to say you are my friend”, are pretty evocative. As always with Dylan, these are things

that people think, but may not always be bold enough to say.

BiTS: That's the key line, isn't it?

RB: Yes. And it’s the emotional impact of that line more than who it was written about- the
universal meaning is what matters to me. It's the same thing I felt meeting the rediscovered Blues
artists. People would tell me that this person was born in this year and in that place, and I would
say, “OK, thank you, I didn't know that.” But for me it was all about being with that person face to
face- sitting together, hearing their music, experiencing the raw emotional energy in a person’s
eyes—say Son House or Skip James, Reverend Gary Davis or Mississippi John Hurt, Fred