If you want to write songs, says Bob Dylan, do two things: Make the songs mean something and get a music education. ”If nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain`t gonna suffer for it . . . unless someone`s gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say,” Dylan said during an interview in the October issue of SongTalk. ”You`re better off learning some music theory . . . if you want to write songs rather than just take a hillbilly twang and try to base it all on that.” Nearly 30 years ago, his own ”hillbilly twang” worked splendidly on the ”Freewheelin` Bob Dylan”
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album, but today it seems that Dylan, now 50, thinks times are a-changin` for songwriters.
LEGENDS OF MUSIC II Paul McCartney`s first ”serious” composition, ”Liverpool Oratorio,”
will have its North American debut next month in Carnegie Hall, but the former Beatle thinks the great composers of yesterday are held in too much awe. ”We tend to view classical music as this venerable and sacred thing,” McCartney said. ”A guy like Mozart was simply a pop star of his day. Had he been around (in the 1960s), he would have probably been in the Beatles on keyboard.”
The idea of the composer of ”Don Giovanni” becoming the fifth Beatle might be a musical marriage to be arranged in heaven.
TOO MUCH EXPOSURE Down here in the tropics, the Alaska-based TV series ”Northern Exposure” is a quirky delight, but in Roslyn, Wash., where the show is filmed, some residents would like to put it in a permanent deep freeze. Downtown Roslyn often becomes a Hollywood set, and when the director shouts
”Action!” everyone must clam up: No doors can be slammed and residents must tiptoe around the ever-present tourists. Tuesday night the City Council received a petition, signed by 120 of Roslyn`s 900 residents, seeking more control over when the show is taped. ”Their (the producers) attitude is, it`s their movie set,” argued Lea Beardsley, owner of a local brewery. ”They are doing what they want, how they want, when they want, with no controls.” But not everyone in town is angry. ”We`ve lost our mining industry and we`re tending to lose our timber industry,” said barber Jerry Morris. ”We have to encourage tourism as an industry. We better make hay while the haying`s good.”
GONE FISHIN` There`s a few hundred potential jokes in this one, but we`ll try to give it to you straight. Rep. Richard Schulze (R-Pa.) won the inaugural
Congressional Fishing Tournament (a true Capitol Hill fishing exhibition?)
when he bagged a 1.95-pound largemouth bass (for a largemouth he could have fished in Congress) and won $10,000 from Hearst Magazines to be used for either a local environmental or educational project.