I asked Dylan how far ahead he planned.

“I don’t look past right now,” he said. “Now there’s this fame business. I know it’s going to go away. It has to. This so-called mass fame comes from people who get caught up in a thing for a while and buy the records. Then they stop. And when they stop, I won’t be famous anymore.”

We became aware that a young waitress was standing by diffidently. Dylan turned to her, and she asked him for his autograph. He signed his name with gusto, and signed again when she asked if he would give her an autograph for a friend. “I’m sorry to have interrupted your dinner,” she said, smiling. “But I’m really not.”

“I get letters from people—young people—all the time,” Dylan continued when she had left us. “I wonder if they write letters like those to other people they don’t know. They just want to tell me things, and sometimes they go into their personal hangups. Some send poetry. I like getting them—read them all and answer some. But I don’t mean I give any of the people who write to me any answers to their problems.” He leaned forward and talked more rapidly. “It’s like when somebody wants to tell me what the ‘moral’ thing is to do, I want them to show me. If they have anything to say about morals, I want to know what it is they do. Same with me. All I can do is show the people who ask me questions how I live. All I can do is be me. I can’t tell them how to change things, because there’s only one way to change things, and that’s to cut yourself off from all the chains. That’s hard for most people to do.”

I had Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” album with me, and I pointed out to him a section of his notes on the cover in which he spoke of how he had always been running when he was a boy—running away from Hibbing and from his parents.

Dylan took a sip of wine. “I kept running because I wasn’t free,” he said. “I was constantly on guard. Somehow, way back then, I already knew that parents do what they do because they’re up tight. They’re concerned with their kids in relation to themselves. I mean, they want their kids to please them, not to embarrass them—so they can be proud of them. They want you to be what they want you to be. So I started running when I was ten. But always I’d get picked up and sent home. When I was thirteen, I was travelling with a carnival through upper Minnesota and North and South Dakota, and I got picked up again. I tried again and again, and when I was eighteen, I cut out for good. I was still running when I came to New York. Just because you’re free to move doesn’t mean you’re free. Finally, I got so far out I was cut off from everybody and everything. It was then I decided there was no sense in running so far and so fast when there was no longer anybody there. It was fake. It was running for the sake of running. So I stopped. I’ve got no place to run from. I don’t have to be anyplace I don’t want to be. But I am by no means an example for any kid wanting to strike out. I mean, I wouldn’t want a young kid to leave home because I did it, and then have to go through a lot of the things I went through. Everybody has to find his own way to be free. There isn’t anybody who can help you in that sense. Nobody was able to help me. Like seeing Woody Guthrie was one of the main reasons I came East. He was an idol to me. A couple of years ago, after I’d gotten to know him, I was going through some very bad changes, and I went to see Woody, like I’d go to somebody to confess to. But I couldn’t confess to him. It was silly. I did go and talk with him—as much as he could talk—and the talking helped. But basically he wasn’t able to help me at all. I finally realized that. So Woody was my last idol.”

There was a pause.

“I’ve learned a lot in these past few years,” Dylan said softly. “Like about beauty.”

I reminded him of what he had said about his changing criteria of beauty in some notes he did for a Joan Baez album. There he had written that when he first heard her voice, before he knew her, his reaction had been:

“I hate that kind a sound,” said I “The only beauty’s ugly, man The crackin’, shakin’, breakin’ sounds’re The only beauty I understand.”

Dylan laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “I was wrong. My hangup was that I used to try to define beauty. Now I take it as it is, however it is. That’s why I like Hemingway. I don’t read much. Usually I read what people put in my hands. But I do read Hemingway. He didn’t have to use adjectives. He didn’t really have to define what he was saying. He just said it. I can’t do that yet, but that’s what I want to be able to do.”

A young actor from Julian Beck’s and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre troupe stopped by the table, and Dylan shook hands with him enthusiastically. “We’re leaving for Europe soon,” the actor said. “But when we come back, we’re going out on the street. We’re going to put on plays right on the street, for anyone who wants to watch.”

“Hey!” said Dylan, bouncing in his seat. “Tell Julian and Judith that I want to be in on that.”

The actor said he would, and took Dylan’s telephone number. Then he said, “Bob, are you doing only your own songs now—none of the old folk songs at all?”

“Have to,” Dylan answered. “When I’m up tight and it’s raining outside and nobody’s around and somebody I want is a long way from me—and with someone else besides—I can’t sing ‘Ain’t Got No Use for Your Red Apple Juice.’ I don’t care how great an old song it is or what its tradition is. I have to make a new song out of what I know and out of what I’m feeling.”

The conversation turned to civil rights, and the actor used the term “the Movement” to signify the work of the civil-rights activists. Dylan looked at him quizzically. “I agree with everything that’s happening,” he said, “but I’m not part of no Movement. If I was, I wouldn’t be able to do anything else but be in ‘the Movement.’ I just can’t have people sit around and make rules for me. I do a lot of things no Movement would allow.” He took a long drink of Beaujolais. “It’s like politics,” he went on. “I just can’t make it with any organization. I fell into a trap once—last December—when I agreed to accept the Tom Paine Award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. At the Americana Hotel! In the Grand Ballroom! As soon as I got there, I felt up tight. First of all, the people with me couldn’t get in. They looked even funkier than I did, I guess. They weren’t dressed right, or something. Inside the ballroom, I really got up tight. I began to drink. I looked down from the platform and saw a bunch of people who had nothing to do with my kind of politics. I looked down and I got scared. They were supposed to be on my side, but I didn’t feel any connection with them. Here were these people who’d been all involved with the left in the thirties, and now they were supporting civil-rights drives. That’s groovy, but they also had minks and jewels, and it was like they were giving the money out of guilt. I got up to leave, and they followed me and caught me. They told me I had to accept the award. When I got up to make my speech, I couldn’t say anything by that time but what was passing through my mind. They’d been talking about Kennedy being killed, and Bill Moore and Medgar Evers and the Buddhist monks in Vietnam being killed. I had to say something about Lee Oswald. I told them I’d read a lot of his feelings in the papers, and I knew he was up tight. Said I’d been up tight, too, so I’d got a lot of his feelings. I saw a lot of myself in Oswald, I said, and I saw in him a lot of the times we’re all living in. And, you know, they started booing. They looked at me like I was an animal. They actually thought I was saying it was a good thing Kennedy had been killed. That’s how far out they are. I was talking about Oswald. And then I started talking about friends of mine in Harlem—some of them junkies, all of them poor. And I said they need freedom as much as anybody else, and what’s anybody doing for them? The chairman was kicking my leg under the table, and I told him, ‘Get out of here.’ Now, what I was supposed to be was a nice cat. I was supposed to say, ‘I appreciate your award and I’m a great singer and I’m a great believer in liberals, and you buy my records and I’ll support your cause.’ But I didn’t, and so I wasn’t accepted that night. That’s the cause of a lot of those chains I was talking about—people wanting to be accepted, people not wanting to be alone. But, after all, what is it to be alone? I’ve been alone sometimes in front of three thousand people. I was alone that night.”