Steve Jobs

people age,” he noted.
    Some people, he added, don’t age well even when they are young. I asked who he had in mind. “John Mayer is one of the best guitar players who’s ever lived, and I’m just afraid he’s blowing it big time,” Jobs replied. Jobs liked Mayer and occasionally had him over for dinnerin Palo Alto. When he was twenty-seven, Mayer appeared at the January 2004 Macworld, where Jobs introduced GarageBand, and he became a fixture at the event most years. Jobs punched up Mayer’s hit “Gravity.” The lyrics are about a guy filled with love who inexplicably dreams of ways to throw it away: “Gravity is working against me, / And gravity wants to bring me down.” Jobs shook his head and commented, “I think he’s a really good kid underneath, but he’s just been out of control.”
    At the end of the listening session, I asked him a well-worn question: the Beatles or the Stones? “If the vault was on fire and I could grab only one set of master tapes, I would grab the Beatles,” he answered. “The hard one would be between the Beatles and Dylan. Somebody else could have replicated the Stones. No one could have been Dylan or the Beatles.” As he was ruminating about how fortunate we were to have all of them when we were growing up, his son, then eighteen, came in the room. “Reed doesn’t understand,” Jobs lamented. Or perhaps he did. He was wearing a Joan Baez T-shirt, with the words “Forever Young” on it.
    Bob Dylan
    The only time Jobs can ever recall being tongue-tied was in the presence of Bob Dylan. He was playing near Palo Alto in October 2004, and Jobs was recovering from his first cancer surgery. Dylan was not a gregarious man, not a Bono or a Bowie. He was never Jobs’s friend, nor did he care to be. He did, however, invite Jobs to visit him at his hotel before the concert. Jobs recalled:
We sat on the patio outside his room and talked for two hours. I was really nervous, because he was one of my heroes. And I was also afraid that he wouldn’t be really smart anymore, that he’d be a caricature of himself, like happens to a lot of people. But I was delighted. He was as sharp as a tack. He was everything I’d hoped. He was really open and honest. He was just telling me about his life and about writing his songs. He said, “They just came through me, it wasn’t like I was havingto compose them. That doesn’t happen anymore, I just can’t write them that way anymore.” Then he paused and said to me with his raspy voice and little smile, “But I still can sing them.”
     
    The next time Dylan played nearby, he invited Jobs to drop by his tricked-up tour bus just before the concert. When Dylan asked what his favorite song was, Jobs said “One Too Many Mornings.” So Dylan sang it that night. After the concert, as Jobs was walking out the back, the tour bus came by and screeched to a stop. The door flipped open. “So, did you hear my song I sang for you?” Dylan rasped. Then he drove off. When Jobs tells the tale, he does a pretty good impression of Dylan’s voice. “He’s one of my all-time heroes,” Jobs recalled. “My love for him has grown over the years, it’s ripened. I can’t figure out how he did it when he was so young.”
    A few months after seeing him in concert, Jobs came up with a grandiose plan. The iTunes Store should offer a digital “boxed set” of every Dylan song every recorded, more than seven hundred in all, for $199. Jobs would be the curator of Dylan for the digital age. But Andy Lack of Sony, which was Dylan’s label, was in no mood to make a deal without some serious concessions regarding iTunes. In addition, Lack felt the price was too low and would cheapen Dylan. “Bob is a national treasure,” said Lack, “and Steve wanted him on iTunes at a price that commoditized him.” It got to the heart of the problems that Lack and other record executives were having with Jobs: He was getting to set the price points, not them. So Lack said no.
    “Okay, then I will call Dylan directly,” Jobs said. But it was not the type of thing that Dylan ever dealt with, so it fell to his agent, Jeff Rosen, to sort things out.
    “It’s a really bad idea,” Lack told Rosen, showing him the numbers. “Bob is Steve’s hero. He’ll sweeten the deal.” Lack had both a professional and a personal desire to fend Jobs off, even to yank his chain a bit. So he made an offer to Rosen. “I will write you a check for a million dollars tomorrow if you