Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Bob Dylan predicts the future

In "Dylan On Dylan", there is a transcript of the televised 1965 San Francisco press conference, parts of which, if I have my facts straight, were included in Scorsese's "No Direction Home" documentary. Dylan's answers are variously unhelpful, cryptic, scornful, obtuse and contemptuous. In short, reading it is a hoot. One question and answer, however, necessitates a double-take on the part of the 2007 reader:
Question: If you were going to sell out to a commercial interest, which one would you choose?

Dylan: Ladies garments.
And it came to pass that, in 2004, Bob Dylan appeared, for money, presumably, in an advertisement for Victoria's Secret, purveyor of, yes, "ladies' garments".


[It is probably safe to assume that the missing apostrophe in Dylan's answer is not the fault of Dylan himself, although as what we are reading is someone else's transcription of what he said, we will never know. It is hard to recognise a spoken apostrophe.]