"On a typically soggy March mess of a day in Manhattan, Bob Dylan, wearing black jeans, biker boots, and a white sport coat over a white T-shirt, sat slouched on a stool at the far end of a small downtown studio. The crowd of cameramen, lighting technicians, makeup people and producers had withdrawn for a bit to consult their equipment, leaving Dylan to strum and hum on his own. As his long nails raked the strings of his Martin guitar, he began huffing softly into the harmonica racked around his neck, and soon a familiar melody filled the air. Could it be? I moved closer to cock an ear as Dylan cranked up the chorus. Yes, no doubt about it - Bob Dylan was running down the first-ever folkie arrangement of "Karma Chameleon," the Culture Club hit.
Soon, however, he was surrounded by tech people again. The audio crew punched up the tape of "Jokerman," a song off Dylan's latest album, Infidels, and as the video cameras rolled, the star obediantly lip-synced along. Dylan had been doing take after take of the number all morning and most of the afternoon without complaint. "Jokerman" would be the second video for Infidels, and he knew it had to be good. The first, for the lovely ballad "Sweetheart like You" had been a flat and lifeless embarrasement. So two of Dylan's most trusted friends - Larry "Ratso" Sloman author of a book about Bob's 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour, and George Lois, a brilliant New York adman who met Dylan during the ill-fated legal-defense concerts for fighter Rubin "Hurricane" Carter a decade ago - were called in to assist.
It was Lois who came up with an agreeable video format for the stiff, camera-shy Dylan. Bob's face would only be seen onscreen during the song's choruses; the verses would be illustrated by classic art prints from Lois' own library: paintings by Michelangelo, Durer, Munch - and, in a wry touch, a Hieronymus Bosch painting titled The Musician's Hell. Lois' most innovative concept, however, was to superimpose the song's apolcalyptic lyrics over the images throughout the video - a technique Lois laughingly dubbed "poetry right in your fuckin' face." The result, as it later turned out, makes most run-of-the-mill rock videos look like the glorified cola commercials they generally are."
And then goes on to talk about "is Dylan relevant today, and who is he today" etc. for a few more paragraphs and then the interview starts.
