by Larry Sloman
“He’s running his whole fucking defense, for the most part.”
Dylan leaned in and stopped tapping his nails. “The first time I saw him, I left knowing one thing. That this man—and I got a lot out of the book too but after meeting him I realized that the man’s philosophy and my philosophy were running on the same road, and you don’t meet too many people like that, you know, kinda that are on the same path mentally, you know.”
“But he was behind bars …”
“And the difference was that he was behind bars but shit, man, there are more people walking around outside of them bars that are more of a prisoner than he is inside the bars.”
“So you came back …”
“I went back to see him the next time that I had a chance. I went back to see him because I considered him a friend and this time I felt like going back because I wanted to see him, you know, I would go back right now. I would just like to go see him, wherever he was.”
“Rubin tells me you took notes …”
“I took notes because I wasn’t aware of all the facts and I thought that maybe sometime I could put it, condense it down and put it into a song.”
“Did you believe him all along?” I asked, playing the devil’s advocate.
“Oh I always believed him, sure,” Dylan flashed, a bit miffed. “I never doubted him for a moment. He’s just not that kind of man. You’re talking about a different type of a person. I mean he’s not gonna walk into a bar … he’s not the guy. It’s just like the guy who was there in the hospital when they asked him, ‘Is this the guy?’ and the guy said, ‘No,’ and he only had one eye to see. You never thought he was guilty. I don’t know how anybody in their right mind is gonna think he was guilty of something like that.”
“People who read the newspapers might think he was guilty.”
“Ah,” a look of disgust crawls across Bob’s face, “the newspapers railroaded him too.”
“How’d the song come about? You got back and had the germ of an idea to do the song. Why?”
“Well, I was just in town, you know, and saw Jacques on the street. We ran into each other and we had seen each other off and on throughout the years, so we wound up just over at his place sitting around and I had a few songs. I certainly wasn’t thinking of making a record album but I had bits and pieces of some songs I was working on and I played them for him on the piano, and asked him if they meant anything to him, and he took it someplace else, and then I took it someplace else, then he went further, then I went further, and it wound up that we had this song which was out there, you know. Was I doing my bit for Rubin? I wrote that song because it was tops in my mind, it had priority in my mind at the time to get that song done. Richard came up to the studio and I gave him a cassette.”
“What do you think the reaction to the song’s gonna be, in terms of people thinking of it as a return to protest. Sort of Hattie Carroll Revisited or something.”
Dylan rocked back in his chair, reflecting for a moment. “Look, there’s an injustice that has been done, and you know Rubin’s gonna get out,* there’s no doubt about it, but the fact is that it can happen to anybody. We have to be confronted with that. People from up on top to the bottom, they should be very aware that it can happen to anybody at any time.”
“It’s the system. It transcends the one-to-one relationship, really. I mean, you wrote this song about a cat that personally touched you, Rubin the man. But the song goes way beyond that. Lines like that ‘pig circus’ shit …”
“Well, it can always go beyond that. The intention was just to keep the facts straight, which didn’t happen, as you know. I wasn’t aware of all those facts, they just told me there were other cats there, yeah right, the wrong people …”
It’s about twenty minutes into the interview and it’s clear that this isn’t the most pleasurable task in the world for Dylan. He keeps glancing over at the clock, moving around in his seat, snapping his fingers in the air, like the j.d.s in West Side Story. I decided to change the topic.
“Why tour?”
The question took him by surprise.
“Why tour? ’cause, uh, I think that’s what I have to do. It’s in my blood.”
“And your blood is on the tracks?”
“Yeah, hah, my blood is on the tracks. Well, somebody’s blood is on the tracks.”
“Why small halls?”
“Why small halls? Because the atmosphere in small halls is more conducive to what we do. We’re gonna play big halls too, but there’s no pattern for it. We got a big show so we’re gonna have to, you know, we got expenses to meet. So we’re gonna have to play some big halls; I think the biggest one is maybe twelve thousand. Where? I really don’t know.”
“The strongest handle that I have on this whole thing right now, is it’s like a family thing, really. I was talking to David Blue the other night and we were saying about how you rode your fame to the fullest, then it was like you were recycling some of it ….”
“These are all the people that have meaning in my life, they’re all involved in the show. I wouldn’t do it otherwise.”
“And the film?”
“Well, I’ll tell ya about the film. That’s a whole other story. The film is … We’re just getting all set up into position right now. What does the film have to do with it? I’ll tell you what the film has to do with it. Howard Alk, ten years ago, we made this other movie.”
“Eat the Document, right. But that was never released.”
“No, the film wasn’t released, the film didn’t have much to do with anybody. That film was a project which we did to rescue a bunch of garbage footage that was shot on one of our tours. The whole thing fell through, but Howard and I, we got together and decided if we ever get the chance again to shoot good footage before we get to the editing room, some things that we can connect, we can make a fantastic movie on the screen. There’s so much here already and we ain’t even left town yet. We haven’t even gotten into what we’re gonna get into. We’ll probably end up making four or five movies with the footage we got. The public can definitely be into this one.”
“Let’s talk for a minute about the resurgence of the Village scene. It’s like there’s all this energy being generated now, a real sense that it’s happening again, and you’re sort of like a catalyst, like a flashlight. It seems like you’re coming back and hanging out again, really …”
“I don’t know. I’m only aware of where I am at a certain time. I’m not aware of what it’s like after I’m gone or what it’s like before I get there.”
“Where are you at?”
Dylan smiled, looked around at the decrepit room, then fired back:
“Right now. I’m right here, speaking with you in this, what is it, a toilet. I don’t know, it’s some kind of backstage somewhere in somebody’s house.”
“Just driving around the Village with you the other night, though, it was like a weird feeling, like an outtake from some movie. What’s it like for you?”
“For me? It’s the same. You mean driving that car that night? Uhhh. I don’t know, man, this is my life. I’d be doing it one way or the other.”
“But you’re doing it on the same streets.”
“Oh, you mean being back on the same streets. Right. I feel it, I can feel it. When I’m in New York I can feel that buzz from fifteen, twenty years ago. I can feel it from the ’30s. I can feel it from the ’20s in New York. Certain parts of New York I can imagine what it was like in the 1800s. New York does that to me.”
“You did research for this album?”
“No, that’s not right. You mean you want to know how the song ‘Joey’ came about. You know who turned us on to that. I was with Jacques. I was leaving town and Jacques says he was going up to some place to have supper and I was invited to come if I felt like it and I was hungry so I went with him and it was up to Marty and Jerry Orbach’s place and as soon as I walked in the door, Marty was talking about Joey. She was a good friend of Joey’s. They were real
tight. I just listened for a few hours, they were talking about this guy, and I remember Joey. At that time, I wasn’t involved in anything that he was involved in, but he left a certain impression on me. I never considered him a gangster, I always thought of him as some kind of a hero in some kind of a way. An underdog fighting against the elements. He retained a certain amount of his freedom and he went out the way he had to. But she laid all these facts out and it was like listening to a story about Billy the Kid so we went ahead and wrote that up in one night. I was living around Little Italy so I was always walking around there and I spent a couple of days down there but, uh, Little Italy, I don’t know the difference between Little Italy and Chinatown really.”
“Canal Street?”
“Yeah, hah, I think we might recut Joey’ and put it on the next album.”
“You’re sort of like back on the streets now. I mean I don’t know where you were. Planet Waves certainly wasn’t like the stuff you’re doing now. That seemed to me to be about reconciling everyday domesticity with bizarre artistic vision. I thought Planet Waves was a great fucking album, though.”
“You told me. You were one of the few cats that ever told me that.”
“I told Leonard Cohen that you got slaughtered on that album and he said it was because most critics are like children, they can’t comprehend songs that deal with the complexities of lasting relationships. How’d you feel about the critical reception Planet Waves got?”
“I didn’t feel any way about it.”
“You didn’t. You musta …”
“When it got slaughtered? No, I was on the road at the time and I didn’t read any of that. Who slaughtered it?”
“I don’t remember names. I just read reviews. They all jumped on the fucking Blood on the Tracks express, though. How’d you feel when they attacked the Pat Garrett LP?”
“Oh, Landau [Jon Landau, reviewer for Rolling Stone magazine], man. He’s got his head up his ass. He wrote that article from a very inexperienced and immature position because he had no reason to say that about it. He wasn’t connecting it to the film. He’s into rock ’n roll, man, the way it was in the ’50s.”
“Did the attacks spur you on?”
“No, Landau I had already crossed off as someone who just didn’t understand. Those attacks don’t do nothing to me. I’ll tell ya why. It doesn’t do nothing to my art or me because for me it’s always going by, it’s … I’m gonna be busy doing the next thing. They’re concerned with that thing and they can be concerned with that thing, that’s their trip, that’s not my trip.”
“But your trip is communication …”
“I’m involved with communication but not with … I’m only involved in communication when it’s live. If the people dig it, it’s enough. Take something like Rubin’s book, though. There aren’t too many people who can do that to ya. Who can write and come across.”
“So you make records and come across …”
“Well, I didn’t come across in the right way for those people. They expected something else. They expected Blonde on Blonde ten years later, they’re still expecting Blonde on Blonde. I mean these people, they’re still looking in the same mirror. They look in the mirror and they don’t realize that they’re seeing somebody different than they saw ten years ago. Photographs have meaning for them.”
“So an album like Self Portrait …”
“Did you like that one too?”
“Sure did.”
“Well, that means more to me than all the fucking critics who say that it was a bad album.”
“At any rate, it seems that the criticisms of Self Portrait, especially that piece in Rolling Stone, spurred you to do New Morning two months later because you were doing a fucking album every ten years at that point.”
“No, that’s wrong. We had a few of the tracks for New Morning before that Self Portrait LP came out. I didn’t say, ‘Oh my God, they don’t like this let me do another one.’ It wasn’t like that. It just happened coincidentally that one came out and then the other one did as soon as it did. The Self Portrait LP laid around for I think a year. We were working on New Morning when the Self Portrait album got put together. Some of that stuff was left over from Nashville Skyline.”
A few questions back, Lou Kemp had come into the room and by this time was hovering over us, clearly trying to remind Bob about the rehearsal.
“Is it time to rehearse, Louie?” Bob asked.
“They’re all waiting for you,” Kemp replied.
“OK man,” Dylan nodded, “see ya later,” and the songwriter picked himself up, straightened his sleeves, and moved on to the next thing.
The next thing was a quick rehearsal with Joan Baez. Baez had just arrived the previous Thursday, literally rushing to Porco’s birthday party straight from the airport, so she’d had less of a chance to rehearse with the ensemble. And the first strains of their harmonizing on “Oh Sister” showed that roughness. Baez looked composed though, almost serene in a Paris Match T-shirt and corded dungarees while Dylan, always the outlaw, stalked the stage in denim pants and black leather jacket.
They started into an uptempo tune and Bob yelled out to Levy, who was directing with a clipboard in his hand at the rear of the hall. “What are we doing?” Dylan queried, “running over the songs we did before?” Levy nodded and Dylan moved back to the mike he was sharing with Baez. Ken Regan, the tour photographer, was about five feet in front of center stage, shooting flash from a chair. T-Bone was sprawled across the couch, fast asleep.
Next was a Johnny Ace song, “Never Let me Go,” Baez sloping her arm around Dylan’s shoulder, a weird flashback to ’63, when she first introduced the ragamuffin poet to her own concert audiences. Stoner and Wyeth picked up the beat and Mick Ronson and David Mansfield picked up guitars and they all broke into fragments of a few songs, ending up riffing on a fast, almost country-ish version of “Tangled Up in Blue.” “We need McGuinn’s banjo here,” Baez commented, then sat on a chair onstage, leafing through a lyric book.
An audience was forming in the hall, as Ramblin’ Jack strolled in to look over some Polaroids, Scarlett was wandering around in black fedora, T-shirt, and black vest, and Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, a New York poet, took seats near the side. Dylan and Baez were dueting on “Tears of Rage,” Baez with the lyric book open in her lap, but even that didn’t help as Dylan playfully changed the lyrics. Baez looked askance at him. “Don’t worry,” Dylan chuckled, “I’ll tell ya later,” and he went on, Baez holding back, then leering at Regan who was shooting her holding her nose. “Print that one, huh, Ken.” Neuwirth and Blakley walked in, Neuwirth looking collegiate in vest sweater and tennis shoes, while Blakley was L.A. bohemian in a multicolored smock, loose black pants, and beret.
Meanwhile, Dylan continued his improvisation, “I want you to know just before you go running off for something that was done to you, I myself thought it was the only thing for you to do,” and Baez chimed in on the chorus. But the song just petered out and Joan looked perturbed. “Do you wanna figure out an ending or is that it?” she asked Dylan. Dylan frowned. “Aw, let someone else figure it out, I’ll just forget it.” He was desperate for a smoke and within seconds a cigarette was rushed up, just as, earlier, some juice instantly appeared when he pointed toward the container.
While the songwriter took a breather, Baez was busy leafing through the Dylan songbook. She looked up brightly. “‘Times they are changing,’ we should do that one, give the people their money’s worth.” So Dylan and she broke into the old protest classic, but Baez, frolicsome, played with the words and delivered a mock sermonette, “Beware the water that runs into the sea, accept it or soon you’ll be just like me.” Dylan looked at her a bit incredulously, and they tentatively started into “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” another old Dylan ballad. But they weren’t clicking. Baez was awkwardly trying to follow Dylan’s erratic phrasing, looking more and more frustrated.
“You don’t want to smoke that,” Baez frowned matern
ally, and plucked the cigarette out of Dylan’s lips and crushed it on the floor. She returned to leafing through the songbook, throwing out suggestion after suggestion. “How about ‘If Not For You’?” No response from Dylan. “I wanna try ‘Wheels on Fire,’” Dylan blurted out and started strumming, while Baez continued to peruse the book. Stoner started into a rockabilly tune, and Peter Orlovsky began bouncing behind Ginsberg, his long ponytail flailing in the air like a pennant. Dylan joined in on the rocker and Stoner screamed to him, “We don’t have too many rockers.”
Baez meanwhile found it. “Let’s do ‘Hattie Carroll.’” Dylan’s eyes lit up. “Sure, yeah, that one,” and he started a slow strum. All activity stopped in the room. Even the roadies stopped to listen as Baez punctuated Dylan’s emotional singing with some funereal scat singing and a few blasts of hand trumpet.
Dylan immediately broke into a new version of “If You See Her Say Hello,” and Ronson, who was sitting on the lip of the stage, looking like a lost sheepdog with his blond shag hairdo, grabbed a guitar. Mansfield, who had played mandolin on “Hattie Carroll,” switched over to steel guitar, as Dylan spat out the new words, “If she passes through this way most likely I’d be gone, But if I’m not don’t tell her so, just let her pass on,” turning the mournful lost-love ballad into a revenge song.
The song spurted to an end, and Dylan seemed pleased. Imhoff, who had been watching from the corner, scurried over to me at the break. “Don’t you know the worst thing you can do is write while an artist is performing?” he chided. Ginsberg meanwhile was screaming up at Dylan from his seat. “Do the princess and the prince discuss,” a reference to “Gates of Eden.” Dylan looked gently down at him, “We can’t do everything, Allen!”
“Isis” came off impressively and then Wyeth got a phone call and a break was called. Dylan took advantage of it by jumping off the stage and striding to the back of the room. He couldn’t sit still, though. In a few minutes, Wyeth returned and they started into “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” Neuwirth and Dylan sharing the lead vocal, bouncing the song along with an infectious good-timey beat. Everyone in the audience was hopping around, Ginsberg and Orlovsky, like little kids, pulled their chairs closer to the stage, eyes glued to the performers.
