WHAT SONG are you listening to right now?

Rock 'n' roll, I don’t know, rhythm and blues or whatever, I think it’s gone. In its pure form. There are some guys true to it but it’s so hard. You have to be so dedicated and committed and everything is against it.... The whole machine would have to break down right now before that would happen. It was easier before. Now it’s just rock, capital R, no roll, the roll’s gone, homosexual rock, workingman’s rock, stock-broker rock, it’s now a highly visible enterprise, big establishment thing. You know things go better with Coke because Aretha Franklin told you so and Maxwell House coffee must be OK because Ray Charles is singing about it. Everybody’s singing about ketchup or headache medicine or something. In the beginning it wasn’t anything like that, had nothing to do with pantyhose and perfume and barbecue sauce...you were eligible to get busted for playing it. It’s like Lyndon Johnson saying "We shall overcome" to a nationwide audience, ridiculous...there’s an old saying, "If you want to defeat your enemy, sing his song" and that’s pretty much still true. I think it’s happened and nobody knows the difference.... It’s all been neutralized...nothing threatening, nothing magical...nothing challenging. For me I hate to see it because it set me free, set the whole world on fire.

St. Andrew’s Hall, Detroit, July 6, 1999. Between versions of “Sil­vio” and “Man in the Long Black Coat,” Dylan pauses and says: “This afternoon I went over to the Motown Museum. I went over the Motown Museum and went in, and I asked the man there, ‘Where’s the Smokey Robinson stuff?’ And he says to me, ‘I don’t know where the Smokey Robinson stuff is,’ I say, ‘Say what? You don’t know where the Smokey Robinson stuff is?’ ‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t know where the Smokey Robinson stuff is.’ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘that’s why I’m here. That is what I am looking for, the Smokey Robinson stuff. That’s what I am here looking for. I am here looking for the Smokey Robinson stuff.'”