Nat Hentoff (born June 10, 1925) is an American historian, novelist, jazz and country music critic, and syndicated columnist for United Media and writes regularly on jazz and country music for The Wall Street Journal. Hentoff was formerly a columnist for Down Beat, The Village Voice, JazzTimes, Legal Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Progressive, Editor & Publisher, and Free Inquiry. He was a staff writer for The New Yorker, and his writing has also been published in The New York Times, Jewish World Review, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Commonweal, and in the Italian Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo. (More from Wikipedia)
About his next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, which was released later in 1964, Bob Dylan told Nat Hentoff in New Yorker magazine: “There aren’t any finger pointing songs [here]. . . . Now a lot of people are doing finger pointing songs. You know, pointing to all the things that are wrong. Me, I don’t want to write for people anymore. You know, be a spokesman.”
(May 2013)
Prior to beginning work on his next album, Highway 61 Revisited, Wikipedia reports: “In May 1965, Dylan returned from his tour of England feeling tired and dissatisfied with his material. He told journalist Nat Hentoff: ‘I was going to quit singing. I was very drained.’ The singer added, ‘It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you.’
“As a consequence of his dissatisfaction, Dylan wrote 20 pages of verse he later described as a ‘long piece of vomit’. He reduced this to a song with four verses and a chorus – ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. He told Hentoff that writing and recording the song washed away his dissatisfaction, and restored his enthusiasm for creating music. Describing the experience to Robert Hilburn in 2004, nearly 40 years later, Dylan said: ‘It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that. . . . You don’t know what it means except the ghost picked me to write the song.’”
(June 2013/2)
