On tour, Dylan still rolling like a stone
By Jennifer Bowles
Associated Press Writer
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Forget the tributes, drop the hero worship: Bob Dylan just wants to be known as a working musician.
"It's all about a livelihood. ... It's all about going out and playing," he said, his blue eyes sparkling. "That's what every musician who has ever crossed my path strives for."
Yes, but Bob Dylan isn't just the Average Joe musician.
Wearing jeans and cowboy boots topped off with a black Australian cowboy hat, he strolls into a small, stuffy room in his manager's office. He sits down in a chair, leans back and plucks the hat off his head, propping it on his knee where it rests for nearly an hour.
Dylan, who rarely gives interviews, is
clearly uncomfortable at first, not divulging much and giving terse replies. But it doesn't take long for him to shed his elusive facade, exhibiting annoyance at today's music, bashfulness about his own achievements and fervor about taking his guitar and harmonica on the road again.
"To me, it's a dream come true," he says. "What could be bad about traveling places, seeing different things, moving? It keeps you alive."
In his latest North American tour, he's paired up with old pal Carlos Santana, allowing concertgoers to hear the contrasting sounds of Dylan's folksy rock music and Santana's fusion of Latin American, African and blues rhythms.
It was Dylan who inspired Santana back in the 1960s with such classics as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Like a Rolling Stone" —
songs that helped bring social consciousness to rock'n'roll.
Santana said, "Life to me is like light, and you're the projector, man. If you don't like what you're showing just change the light. He (Dylan) made me aware of that.
"With most bands, as soon as you unplug the amplifier it's over. Not with his music, not with my music. When people go home, men or women, they feel pregnant with his consciousness."
While Dylan hears all this coming from his friend seated on a nearby couch, he stares off into the corner as if he's not listening. When asked about the adulation, he says simply: "Well, my feelings are the same about Carlos' music. It's great to be supported by your fellow musicians."
At52, Dylan's stature as rock'n'rollsage is perhaps only rivaled by the late John
Lennon. Although he has inspired everything from a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award to an obsessed fan sifting through his garbage, he tries not to think about it.
Dylan has carried his music through three decades of constant change, but he's not real happy about how the music industry has evolved.
"Music can save people, but it can't in the commercial way it's being used. It's just too much. It's pollution," he said.
Dylan, who started his career playing in coffee houses, shared his romantic notion of music.
"Music is what saved me in this world," he said. "It gave me something to do when others around me were just doing stuff which didn't interest me. My heart wasn't into any of that other stuff.
Author's sleuthing for ideas outpaces peers
"The music grabbed me."
By Matt Wolf
Associated Press Writer
LONDON — In "Prime Suspect," her best-known TV series, Lynda La Plante created a policewoman whose sleuthing often outpaced that of the men on her beat.
So is it any surprise that La Plante herself could be said to have done the same, as a television writer?
For her new series "Framed," La Plante traveled to a secret destination on a fake passport to spend two weeks in a remote villa where she was locked in her room each night.
The goal? To witness the workings of a "supergrass," an English term for an
The four-hour movie, starring Timothy Dalton as a reclusive "supergrass" and David Morrissey as the ardent police officer who tracks him down, began yesterday at 7 p.m. CDT on the Arts & Entertainment network. It continues tonight.
informer or someone who turns state's evidence, so that "Framed" would have that ripped-from-the-headlines look.
La Plante's method of writing "Framed," as usual, was "to find the character" — to seek out an actual person, or persons, as the basis for a fictionalized program.
Such has been her approach from her first hit series "Widows" in 1983, in which she trawled the world of prostitutes and prisons
to tell of several East End women who turn to crime.
The impetus for "Framed" came from a headline in a British tabloid newspaper about a supergrass, presumed dead, who had been sighted in Spain.
La Plante's own sleuthing in the summer of 1989 led her back and forth between London and Miami until $500 brought her a forged passport for further travel, and the promise of meeting the real Eddie Myers.
"It was totally journalism and detective work," she said. "It's nice because it alleviates hours in front of a word processor to go out and be a supersleuth."
But why would an informer trust her?
"I was on an illegal passport ... (and) could have been in trouble, so I was not likely to go to the police," said La Plante, 47, an animated redhead whose north of England directness jars amusingly with a posh accent cultivated during her erstwhile career as an actress.
La Plante may choose unusual material for a female writer, but she expresses no interest in conforming to gender expectations.
"What I find quite strange is the confusion in people's minds about me," she said with a smile, between puffs on a cigarette. "They think I must be some horrific, macho, guntoting woman because of the material I write."
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ENTERTAINMENT '83 • K-you • September 24. 1993