On the Road with Bob Dylan

by Larry Sloman

  And then it rolled out to California. Solomon sent Dylan a copy of Rubin’s book, Dylan began it and couldn’t put it down. He decided that as soon as he came east, he’d go out and meet the man. And he did.

  One of the first things that Dylan did when he arrived in New York that summer was to take a ride with Richard out to Trenton State Prison, Rubin’s latest home. I went out there too, a few months later, and talked with Hurricane. We spent about three hours together that day, holed up in the back of the prison library, Rubin nattily dressed in brown boots, pressed slacks, and turtle-neck, sipping coffee from a plastic container. Carter had been rotting in this shithole, refusing to eat convict food, refusing to dress in convict garb, refusing to be fucked in his convict asshole. Just obsessed with one thing, devoting all his energies for his freedom, not maniacally, but with a calm, fervent devotion. It was like being in the eye of a hurricane.

  And Rubin spoke about Dylan. “I sent Bob a book some time ago. I was thinking about getting people with a high visibility, that means celebrities, and Bob Dylan was one of the people that Richard suggested to send a book to. So we sent a book to him and we never heard anything from him, and then one day Richard got a call from him and he said he wanted to come down here after he read the book.

  “So when he came down here, of course I didn’t know much about Bob Dylan. I’ve listened to some of his records when I was free on the street and he had a lot of truth in what he was saying and this was his particular medium upon which to do his thing, but I really didn’t know him as a man. So when he comes here, I’m sitting here, now two of us meeting for the first time ever, and he knows more about me than I do him at this time ’cause he had the book, so I’m sitting here talking to this man, and it wasn’t but a second that I’m sitting here talking to him and I see that here’s a man, here’s a man that not only is this a man that knows what he’s looking at, but he sees what he’s looking at and by seeing what he’s looking at he’s understanding what he’s seeing, and understanding what he’s looking at, and I’m saying, ‘Wow, he’s from the Midwest and I know that they don’t have the problems that the urban places have with the black-white thing.’ I’m sitting there listening to this man, he don’t talk too much, he do a lot of listening, I’m sitting here talking to this man and I say, ‘My God, two men always can meet no matter what their backgrounds are, no matter what their colors are, no matter what their philosophy might be or persuasions of any kind,’ and then I realized that that’s why Muhammed had to go to the mountain because two mountains never meet but two men can always do this and I just felt good after talking to him for four, five hours.”

  I asked Rubin what they talked about.

  “We sat right here where we’re sitting right now. We talked about some of everything, religion, God, society, people, that’s what it all boiled down to—life, living, instead of death and dying. It seems like this society … this is one of the main things that we covered, in this society that has become contrary to all nature, we have become people who are wasting the water, the air, the soil, the fields. The only thing that we seem to be promoting in this country is concrete. We talked about growing, a part of life, at any rate, when Bob left he said, ‘I want to come back,’ I mean knowing that this man is almost a recluse, almost a hermit, and just the fact that he come down here and he was straight home from France and he was telling me that he had to go to France to get away from people because people suck his soul, just suck his soul, just suck him dry. I mean, here’s a man that’s trying to get the public to, er, give the people some truth here and the people don’t even understand what he’s saying. He’s so far ahead of his time.”

  “Did he talk about that?”

  “Yeah, his reaction was … well, I don’t know what his reaction to it was, I can only give you my opinion of what I feel his reaction was, ’cause I don’t want to put no words in his mouth, so anything I say here is not straight out of his mouth, it’s paraphrasing. I might be saying more than he said or I might not have gotten his message at all, but he was saying that he was seeing things that it seemed to him that other people just couldn’t see and he couldn’t understand why they couldn’t see it and the only thing that he could do was to put it to music because, as I said, he don’t like to talk much and I understand that because at one time I couldn’t talk so therefore I could relate so closely to this man because of his desire to be alone, because of his not wanting to talk, because of his thoughts, I could relate so closely with him and I said, ‘Damn, here come a man from a totally different background and yet so similar so I think that there are two things about all human beings that are true, that we all are the same and yet we’re all different and upon those two facts all human wisdom is founded. So the man was just simply fantastic, there’s no doubt about that, I mean when he walked in here I liked him, when he walked away from here, I loved him because he was real. There’s no phoniness about him and when he says that he was gonna write a song about me …”

  “Right after the first visit?”

  “Well, he never really told me, he didn’t say he was gonna write anything, but as I am sitting here talking to him, he was jotting little things down….”

  “Almost like interviewing you?”

  “No, no, but he was looking at me as if to say, ‘Who are you, man?’ I mean that’s what he was saying. ‘What are you? Tell me who you are? Are you what I see?’ But he wouldn’t put those questions in words, but that was what he was saying ….”

  “Did you tell him who you were?”

  “I tried to. I tried to tell him who I was, but he knew who I was, he knew who I was. Like I said, two men can always meet, he knew who I was, you see, and he just wanted to know if I knew who I was.” Rubin explodes with a hearty laugh. “Later on, I called him up because he gave me his telephone number and he told me he was gonna write a song. This was June, July, something like that, time here means nothing to me. I don’t know about the time, I just go day by day by day because yesterday is only a dream while tomorrow is only a vision and I believe that the day well lived, the day well planned, the day well thought out makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope so I don’t go by time, time don’t mean anything to me. The only thing means anything to me is that I don’t have my freedom. At any rate, when he told me that he was thinking about putting something together, it didn’t mean anything to me one way or the other but it made me feel good that indeed this man really understood what I was talking about, that if you’re gonna do something for me or I’m gonna do something for you let me do it now! Let me not hesitate or neglect. I’m trying to get this down right. Tomorrow’s not promised to us. There’s been many many songs and monuments written and erected for people after they were dead but the fact that this man, a man of his magnitude, not only of his celebrity, if that’s a word, but a man of his understanding, for him to do this to me when I’m alive, where I can enjoy it, where I know that somebody feels about me the way that he feels about me, I mean that just makes me feel proud, man. That makes me proud, that makes me feel good. Dylan’s willing to help anybody that’s willing to help himself and that’s beautiful as far as I’m concerned.”

  We started talking about “The Hurricane” and I asked Rubin what he thought about the song in comparison with other socially relevant tunes Dylan had written, like “George Jackson” and “Hattie Carroll.” Rubin frowned.

  “I don’t know, man, because I’m not too much into his songs and things like that, not here, not here, ’cause all that soothing music, this ain’t no place to be soothed. This is a place, man, to be very very angry. Angry intelligently. You’re being brutalized and killed here, this is not a place to sit and listen to music. No time for music, man, this is a place to be serious. No no no man. I read, I must continue to grow because everything around me is dying.”

  “But Rubin, some of Dylan’s stuff is revolutionary in the sense that it’s tremendously aware of the absurdity of the system. Take an al
bum like Highway 61, that’s not escapist music ….”

  “He got one song that I really like that I do listen to constantly. ‘It’s All Right Mama, I’m Only Bleeding.’ I like that, man. I don’t talk to many people in here but when he sent me that album, I called some young guys to my cell and I told them, ‘Listen!’ See we have a lot of people in here that are misinformed in their mind, their thinking is incorrect, they love their enemies and hate their friends. They hate each other, and I said, ‘Listen to this. Now this is a white man talking here, listen to what he’s saying about you. He know more about you than you know about yourself.’

  “So even when Bob was here I was telling him, ‘My Lord, you are a sixteen-cylinder man operating on four cylinders,’ because black people don’t even know who he is and that is a sin. They’d rather listen to somebody talk than listen to the truth. If this man could get to all people, if people would be educated to this man, whew—if he could travel on sixteen cylinders, whew. I told Bob he was a sixteen-cylinder man operating on four cylinders and he laughed, he laughed, but it’s true. If his audience included blue, black, green people, because his songs are about people, and there’s no division in his songs, in his messages, that’s why I dug him coming from where he’s coming from.”

  “What was your reaction to Bob’s song about you?”

  “I ain’t got no reaction. I never react to anything, that’s negative. A reaction is like when all these people are shooting at the President, then everybody steps up and says we need stricter gun control, that’s a reaction because it’s not there to solve the problem, just to give a cosmetic solution to a very serious problem. An action would be why are these people so frustrated that they got to shoot at the President. It’s because of the economic and political system that’s forcing people to become powerless. These aren’t paid assassins, they’re little housewives, little mixed-up children, feeling helpless. That’s the most predominant social emotion out in society today. Everybody feels so powerless to influence anybody to change anybody, to direct their own lives and destinies. So when you look at powerlessness by its more personal names, helplessness and weakness, that brings that sense of powerlessness all the more down on people.

  “But I feel good about the song. Bob sent me a demo of it and I sat down and listened to it first and—eeehhh, it was a song to me, but the more I sat there and listened to it and really understood what he was saying, I said, ‘Wow man, this cat’s a genius, this guy is a genius.’ It was just totally fantastic. So the more I listened to it the more incredulous I became. It’s more inspiring to me to know that Rubin, man, keep on pushing, ’cause you got to be doing something right you got all these good people coming to try and help you.”

  Rubin’s plight became of such paramount importance to Dylan that at first it seemed that Bob was having difficulty writing the song about Hurricane because he was too emotionally involved in the situation. Jacques Levy, who cowrote most of the Desire LP, told me about Dylan’s difficulty:

  “When the Hurricane thing started, Bob wasn’t sure that he could write a song at that point. He was just filled with all these feelings about Hurricane. He couldn’t make the first step. I think the first step was putting the song in a total storytelling mode. I don’t remember whose idea it was to do that. But really, the beginning of the song is like stage directions, like what you would read in a script, ‘Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night/Enter Patty Valentine from the outer hall/She sees the bartender in a pool of blood/Cries out My God they killed them all/Here comes the story of the Hurricane/’ Boom, titles. You know, Bob loves movies, and he can write these movies that take place in eight-to-ten minutes yet seem as full or fuller than regular movies.”

  “Hurricane” was certainly full, eleven one-two punch stanzas to the body of New Jersey Injustice. Perhaps too full. Because the original lyrics Dylan and Levy wrote contained one major factual mistake; they confused Alfred Bradley with Albert Bello and placed Bradley in the bar at the scene of the crime. So on Friday, October 24, a series of harried phone calls were made by George Lois to Dylan at the Gramercy Park Hotel.

  Lois was standing in his cavernous, immaculate Fifth Avenue office, the model of advertising chic, in his army-surplus safari jacket and kelly-green sneakers, running over the lyrics to “Hurricane” with Dylan on the other end. “Yeah, yeah, they say it’s potentially libelous the way it stands now. It was Bello who was in the bar, not Bradley. Yeah, yeah, now in stanza seven it should be Bello that says, ‘I’m really not sure!’” A puzzled look crossed Lois’ face. “Wait a minute, no, I’m sorry, that is Bradley saying that, yeah, yeah, I’m mixed up now.” And Lois handed me back the phone, with a by now thoroughly confused Dylan hanging on. “Tell Lois we’ll get right on it and rewrite it and call ya back,” Dylan decided and hung up. About two hours later the phone rang, and this time Jacques Levy was on the line, ready to read the new lyrics. Lois grabbed a pen and started the corrections. “And another man named Bello, right, moving kinda mysteriously, that’s great, that’s a great image, you can just see him prowling around, great correction, yeah, yeah.”

  And so around 10:30 that night, Dylan strode briskly into Columbia Studio I, where a Janis Ian mixing session had been preempted, followed by Kemp, Levy, producer Don DeVito, Howie Wyeth, Scarlett, Stoner, Soles, Blakley, and percussionist Luther Rix. Dylan was wearing the same shirt he had on at Gerdes and was nervously pacing and strumming his Martin as Wyeth set up the drum kit. The engineers were setting up the soundproof baffles that absorb sound leakage between players. Scarlett, resplendent in a sleeveless Creem magazine T-shirt, was isolated in a booth at the left, with Wyeth and Rix set up behind her, Soles and Blakley, who were to sing backup vocals, near the center of the studio, Dylan at a stool at the right, and Stoner about five feet to Dylan’s left. As warmup, Dylan broke into “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy,” the beautiful song that Ochs performed the night before. Then they started into “Sitting On Top of the World,” followed by the Arthur Crudup song “It’s All Right Mama.” At 11:15, the studio lights were dimmed.

  But there were still some technical problems, so Dylan moseyed over to the piano and started jamming with Blakley. He tired of that, picked up his guitar and started a familiar strum. “We’re gonna send this out to Larry, he’s out there somewhere,” and Dylan broke into a spirited version of Kinky Friedman’s “Ride ’Em Jewboy.” But by midnight all the technical problems had been resolved and DeVito called out for a first take. Bob kicked the song off with a bit of acoustic guitar and Scarlett’s haunting violin jumped in, but then Dylan’s harmonica slipped from his neck. “Hold it, my harp rack fell.” After that false start they started in again, but it wasn’t really cooking, and everyone felt that. During the playback Dylan came into the studio and consulted some of us. I told him it sounded muffled and he reported this to DeVito. “We all blew the phrasing,” Stoner added. “Hey Howie, can you play just as good on the next one as that one?” Scarlett seemed perturbed. “The arrangement’s not right,” she whispered to me. “It’s not the same feel we had the first time we recorded it.”

  They went back into the studio and set up for another take. “Let’s get the old-time mikes,” Dylan quipped. “Hey Don, where’s the tequila.” A second take was attempted but the tempo slacked off and it was stopped. They started in again, and hit an uptempo groove. DeVito’s head started nodding, and he was shouting to no one in particular, “Not that slow waltz, that’s it, that’s it! All right!” There was a pause between takes and Dylan and Stoner broke into some old country tunes like “I’m Dreaming Tonight of My Blues Eyes.” “Let’s sing this one for Johnny,” Dylan announced. “Send it out to everyone who loves Johnny Cash,” and they broke into “I Still Miss Someone.” Take three began at 1:25, slow at first, then building up in intensity, until the tempo fell off. DeVito clicked on his mike and announced into the studio, “Hold that tempo, Bob, that was starting to smoke.” On the next take, everything jelled; Wyeth did some ethereal drumming, an
d Dylan seemed satisfied. Kemp leaned over to DeVito and smiled. “He knows it’s good.”

  They began take five, Blakley doing some sort of pagan dance, waving her hands in the air, and at the end, Dylan blew some harp, weaving it in with Scarlett’s violin, a weird interplay. They faded out slowly, and DeVito announced, “A good rehearsal.” It was clear that Dylan was getting restless. “Hey Don, it’s past rehearsal time,” he moaned. “What was the matter with that one besides fucking up the lyrics?” DeVito ordered another take and Dylan kids, “But Don, we all got dates tonight.” DeVito pointed to Lou Waxman, the middle-aged engineer. “Keep ’Em here with Lou, they don’t call him Lou the Tongue for nothing.”

  The sixth take was incredible, the band really smoked, and Dylan rode that energy, straining, punching out the words as Blakley did some cheerleader moves, and Bob screamed. “But one time he coulda been the champion of the woorrlllldddd.” DeVito nonchalantly called them in for the playback. “I think we got it covered, let’s do just one more for insurance.” It was close to 2 A.M. and Dylan lit up a cigarette and took a long drag. He obviously needed prodding. Levy took up the battle: “I think the next one might be great.” But Dylan was stubborn: “C’mon, we want to get this out, time is of the essence, Don. Maybe you ought to decide which take by a roll of the dice. I mean, we can always do it better. What does everybody think, let’s vote.” So a straw poll was taken with Dylan polling the band. “Scarlett says no,” DeVito looks at Steve and Howie who seem dissatisfied, “Steve and Howie vote yes,” DeVito added. “They do?” Bob blurted, “OK, let’s do just one more. I might just fade away. I mean we can do it seventy-five times but I just want to get it out on the streets.”

  Everyone went back into the studio, but Dylan lingered in the control room. Some cheese and wine had been brought in and I was nibbling on the Brie. “Hey Larry, did you hear the song I dedicated to you before.” I nodded, “Yeah, it was great, you even got some of the words right; I’ll tell Kinky.”