On the Road with Bob Dylan

by Larry Sloman

  We both watch Dylan in silence for a minute. “What’d he just say,” I ask Ginsberg, “‘Arabian jewel’?”

  “I think ‘radiant jewel,’ ‘mystical wife,’” he corrects.

  “What an amazing song, listen to the chronology,” I yell. “After the beach scene, he talks about Woodstock, then living in the Chelsea Hotel. I wonder what she feels when she hears this?” We both start singing the chorus.

  Dylan starts up the last stanza, “Now the beach is deserted except for some kelp …” Ginsberg leans over, “A sort of wave of consciousness goes through the audience when he goes through that stanza, a sudden realization of what he’s doing. Back to the beach now.”

  “This is like ‘Shelter from the Storm,’” I note, “but it’s better, closer to the bone.”

  Ginsberg smiles. “He revealed his heart,” he gestures with one finger in the air; “for Dylan to reveal his heart completely is for me a great historical event. For any man to reveal his heart completely is a great historical event. It gives other people permission to reveal their hearts. Look at the way he’s bouncing now. He’s very relaxed.” Allen leans forward, devouring the scene. “Hum, Hum, Hum,” he shouts with his hands cupped to his mouth.

  “What does that ‘Hum’ mean,” I inquire.

  “It’s a mantra for intellectual penetration,” Ginsberg explains, with his eyes fixed to the stage. “It’s from the heart.” Dylan swings into “Just Like a Woman,” eliciting a roar from the audience.

  “It’s brilliant to go from that complete announcement of his totally open heart to some ancient open heart song,” Allen admires, “completely transformed for them now. Everybody has thought about Dylan endlessly for ten years and now he’s taken all those thoughts and summarized them and he’s putting out the definitive statements about what we thought. All the fantasies people had about his children and his wife, he’s out there doing them.” He returns to the song. Dylan is hunched over the mike, his face temporarily hidden by the hat with the fresh flowers. “Queen Mary she’s my friend,” Dylan confides, “yes I believe I’ll go see her again.”

  “He’s right out there now,” Ginsberg points, “giving. He’s completely in his body, completely in the song, completely at one with his universe.”

  “I just don’t fit,” Dylan howls, as Allen hurries down to make his cue. And a few minutes later, the poet is behind a mike in the rear, beating on his finger cymbals to the Woody Guthrie classic, staring at the back of the little guy with the open heart.

  There’s another concert tonight, so I file outside with the ecstatic audience and look for a place to eat. Outside, I spot Bob Gruen, a freelance rock photographer, and Chris Charlesworth, a New York correspondent for Melody Maker magazine. They’re hungry too and we settle on the Red Rose Cafe, a funky pizza parlor.

  The jukebox is blaring “George Jackson” as we enter and grab a booth.

  “What a scene,” Gruen moans. “I had to smuggle my cameras in. After the shit Pulin went through in Plymouth, man, they confiscated his cameras and he didn’t get them for hours. You should have seen ’Em tonight, I had lenses in the hood of my coat, cameras in my boots.” Our lasagnas come, and the waitress politely asks for $2.35 each upfront. She mumbles something about lots of walkouts.

  Suddenly, I hear a familiar sound wafting through the room. It’s the concert; “Oh Sister” is playing on someone’s cassette. Bootleggers in Springfield! I investigate. Across the room, they’re sitting around a booth, three of them, one lean, Italian-looking; one larger, ruddy-faced; one a petite brunette, real wired. I join the table and tell them I’m covering the tour for Rolling Stone. Instant assault.

  “What’s the tour like? Is Sara with him?” the skinny one asks.

  “Is he at ease on this tour?” the burly one demands simultaneously. They laugh and we all introduce ourselves. There’s Sal, the thin ascetic-looking one, Sheila, who seems about to pop her gourd, and Ken. They’re all around thirty and all teach in New Jersey high schools. All stone Dylan fanatics.

  “We all went to see him several times on the last tour with the Band,” Ken says, “and the audience was so nice like everyone was dying to stand up and just scream but instead everybody like took it easy because they didn’t want to scare him away. Do you think that has anything to do with him coming back here now? Like, he’s so free and easy onstage now.”

  “I think seeing Rubin in jail affected him strongly, Rubin trying to reach out and touch people after years of being reclusive and antisocial,” I suggest.

  “I’ve never seen him like this,” Ken marvels, playing with the remains of his spaghetti, “he looks like he did in 1966, like in Eat the Document.”

  Sal lights up. “Yeah, we saw that at the Whitney Museum when it played. Went ten times, every day. By the way, do you know what ever happened to Don’t Look Back?”

  “He sued,” I offer, “took it out of circulation.”

  “In Eat the Document, though, he seems as tight as a wire,” Ken shakes his head, “but right now, we were right behind the stage and he turned around and he looked just like Buddha. He just smiled, he was so relaxed.”

  Sal is leaning over the table now, just waiting for a chance to jump in. “I saw both shows in Providence,” he blurts, “and what really blew my mind was the way he was emoting. He was acting, it was like a play. He was just there. Besides the makeup, the expressions on his face were like Eat the Document.”

  “Why do you think he’s wearing makeup?” I throw out.

  The three of them pause in their tracks, then Sal addresses the class. “I don’t know,” he muses, “I think it’s because he wanted to create a Pierrot figure on the stage. You hand in your money and you go watch the geek and there he is onstage and he’s doing that, in other words, he’s saying, Don’t take me too seriously, I’m one of the clowns in my songs.”

  “He always said he was a trapeze artist,” I counter with a smile.

  “What I really liked too was the reconciliation with Joanie,” Sal adds. “Like for so many years she’s been in such pain, every time I’ve seen her in concert she’s talked about him and sung to him. The last time I saw her was at the Felt Forum and she said, ‘Everybody tells me to leave Bobby alone, that there’s nothing he cherishes more than his privacy, but I’ll do anything I can to get him back onstage.’”

  Ken suddenly snaps out of a reverie and looks at us with urgency. “You know, Sal said earlier that when you see Dylan at so much peace it’s almost like he’s going back and I asked him how we can explain Dylan going back to his roots. It’s like if he’s going back, if you read the Scaduto book, he’s a real fuck, he burns everybody. Yet here he is sending bridges.” His voice trails off quizzically, and he scans us for a response.

  Sal scowls. “We met Scaduto,” he smirks, “he’s an asshole. We were interpreting songs, asking him what things meant and he didn’t even know. At Brentano’s, it was an autograph thing. We had to answer all the questions for him. How can anyone write a book about Dylan and give one paragraph to Blonde on Blonde and mention the Basement Tapes in one sentence.” Sal shakes his head in disgust.

  “It could have been Guy Lombardo he was writing about,” Ken moans. “All it was, was police reporting.”

  “He couldn’t penetrate Dylan’s circle,” I suggest. “After all, the people that he interviewed all had lost contact with Bob.”

  Sal stabs at the leftovers of his veal. “He interviewed people like the dish-cleaning woman at the Cafe Wha?, Beattie Zimmerman’s next-door neighbor, shit like that. Where were the interviews with Robbie Robertson and Mike Bloomfield?”

  The table falls quiet, Sal and Ken lost in some private Dylan reverie; Sheila, who’s stayed silent, seems to be biding her time till the second show starts. Ken breaks the silence: “What do you think about that People interview, like when he said he can’t elude the Dylan myth any longer, it’s what God wants?”

  “He’s doing God’s work,” Sal flatly states.

  “I t
hink he believes that,” I say softly.

  “Do you think it’s a sign that on this tour he isn’t doing any stuff from Planet Waves or Blood on the Tracks?” Sal inquires.

  “I tried to teach McGuinn to do ‘Never Say Good-bye,’” I laugh, “but he never had time to learn it. What do you think of Planet Waves anyway?”

  Ken laughs, “After waiting so long for something …”

  “After waiting all those years, of course we were ecstatic,” Sal lectures, “but looking at it in perspective, last night we were playing the tape over and over again and listening to his new material we taped at the concert, it seems to me that since he’s made the decision to come back, he’s been trying to gain his ground. He did the Planet Waves LP, he did the tour with the Band, but he looked nervous, uptight. He didn’t seem to be partying through most of that. Then came Blood on the Tracks, which was a gigantic step in the right direction, but I still don’t think he was capturing the sound that he wanted to. But with this new material it seems that he’s getting back to what he really wants to do.”

  “But what about the songs in that period?” I ask.

  “A lot I didn’t think were effective,” Sal shrugs.

  “Blood on the Tracks was,” Ken asserts.

  Sal grabs his fork and starts puncturing the air with it. “It seemed to me that Dylan reached a peak that no one else had managed to get near in Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61, that whole madness period, just pre-bike accident, and then he had the accident and went through all these heavy changes. He withdrew, tried withdrawal, it didn’t work, he wanted to get back, he was itching. Made a number of abortive attempts to get back. Withdrew from those. Finally decided to take a lunge, did Planet Waves. Planet Waves, to me, relates more to New Morning than it does to Blonde on Blonde but this new material relates more to Blonde on Blonde.”

  “He said to me the problem was that everyone expects another Blonde on Blonde,” I note.

  Sal sighs, “But the intensity, the perfection of that record.”

  “Planet Waves is a precise LP,” I interrupt, “a tremendous statement about the balancing of domesticity with the concerns of a mystical artist. It seems from that LP that he had to make a choice and now he made the decision.”

  “The choice we wanted him to make,” Sal acknowledges with a smile.

  “I asked him why he tours and he told me ‘It’s in my blood,’” I add.

  “Look,” Sal bangs the table, “it’s like in ‘Going, Going, Gone,’ you could just see the changes he seemed to be going through there. He wasn’t sure, living on the edge, playing it straight, but I gotta get back before it gets too late. See, he decided to go back to the edge again.” Sal smiles smugly.

  “If you perceived all this from the LP,” Ken counters, “then the album was successful. That’s what Larry’s trying to say.”

  Sal grimaces. “I’m just playing devil’s advocate here. I love everything he’s done.”

  “That’s why you asked me before why do I care about knowing about Sara.” Sal is staring at me. “It’s ’cause Dylan reveals pieces of his life, like a mosaic, on his records. You’re intensely interested in what’s going on in his life, of course, you see yourself in it, but everything about him, everything he does, you want to know.”

  It’s time to leave for the Civic Center, but first the New Jerseyites are having an instant lottery. They have three tickets, one in the second row, one in the fourth, and one in the tenth. Sal carefully shuffles and places them face down on the table. They take turns picking. “I got it, I got it. The second row!” Sheila screams at the top of her lungs, jumping up and down. She hugs Sal.

  We walk the few blocks to the arena discussing Dylan, of course. Sal is just about to explain his analogy between Springsteen and Donovan in Don’t Look Back, when we come up to a kid singing in the mall right outside the hall. But this isn’t just another panhandler. I stop.

  “This song is dedicated to Bob Dylan,” this kid is singing. He’s weird-looking, small, skinny, looking something like a cross between Paul Simon and Woody Allen. With a voice like a Lily Tomlin character. “My name is Roger Cowen,” he’s talk-singing. “I’m from around here. I was born and raised right here in Springfield, Mass., and I’m proud to be here. I came in from New York City just to play the Rolling Thunder Revue before this concert in my hometown. Yeah.”

  With his exaggerated jerkiness and perfect atonality this kid’s a natural for the film, I thought to myself. I interrupt the recitation and ask him if he wants to be in a movie. He leans over toward me and continues strumming. “Do I want to be in a film?” he whispers. “Sure, I want to be in a film.” Then he suddenly slams down on his strings, stomps his foot, and begins to howl, “It’s all part of the Rolling Thunder Revue!”

  The second show is incredible. Everyone’s really loose, T-Bone going so far as to dress up like the Red Baron, with goggles, long scarf, and aviator cap. And midway through the opening set, a black-leather-pantsed Arlo Guthrie ambles on and picks out two new numbers aided by McGuinn on harp. Then Dylan bounds on, and he’s singing incredibly, leaning sensually into the mike, then turning to the band half in authority and half in awe, then back to the mike, even gesturing gently to the sky on the line “make me a rainbow.” The film crew is shooting tonight so everybody’s a bit hotter than usual. In fact, Dylan’s almost verbose with his introductions. “This is a tune from south of the border,” he cracks before “Durango.” “Remember now, raw lust does not hold a candle to true love. We’re doing this tonight for Sam Peckinpah. Glad you could make it, Sam.”

  At intermission, I walk back to the bar for a drink. And right by the entrance with her long feathered hat and sad-eyed stare is Lisa. We walk in and sit on stools as a waitress out of the ’50’s takes our orders, a martini for me, a beer for Lisa.

  “I gave a feather to Dylan,” Lisa whispers, “Denise gave it to him for me. She gave it to him and he asked her what kind of feather it was and she told him to ask me.” Lisa smiles. It seems she had to drive back up to Vermont, pay her rent, tell her boss she had a sick relative, load up the old Chevy with fresh blank cassettes and her beat-up old guitar, and then head straight back for the caravan. She found out about Stockbridge, hung out all afternoon on the street outside the hotel, and lucked into seeing Baez who took pity on her.

  “I was standing there,” Lisa relates, “and Joan came over and shook my hand. She said, ‘What are you doing, just standing there and watching the confusion.’ Then she told her road manager to give me a ticket. She said I’ll be her guest, that I wasn’t annoying anyone. I saw Bob too, he was alone, looking at windows of the shops. I asked him about the feather and he told me it was in good hands.”

  Lisa swigs from her draft and tries to pump me for information on my last few meetings with Dylan. “I told him it really gets tough sometimes,” she sighs, “and he just said that I’ll survive. I said, ‘I’ll never find the rainbow at the end of the highway,’ and he said, ‘It’s all within, man.’” Lisa sighs again. It’s almost time to go back to our seats. I down the martini and get up to leave. “Remember the song Bob dedicated to Herman Melville?” Lisa suddenly asks. “Who is Herman Melville?” I just roll my eyes and laugh. “Ah,” I growl, “go back to school, man!”

  The pace is just as torrid in the second half of the concert. Dylan and Baez open it with flawless duets then Baez keeps up the tempo with a set that evokes a standing ovation from drummer Wyeth. Then Dylan scampers on, looking funky with a few days’ growth of stubble spotting his face. “We heard that Rubin is getting a new trial,” he exults before doing “Hurricane,” “and we also learned that Massachusetts was the only state that didn’t vote for Nixon.” A pause, then a chuckle. “We didn’t vote for him, either,” he slyly adds. “Hurricane” is great but the rumor is unfounded. And he still seems to be thinking of Nixon when they break into “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.” “Take these bugs out of my ears,” Dylan ad-libs, “I can’t hear through them anymore.” The final
e is wonderful, Arlo back on to do a chorus of his father’s song and getting the loudest ovation of the night.

  As soon as they head offstage, I bolt for the door and rush out to meet Roger Cowen. He’s standing there with his beat-up guitar and his tall friend, Dan, and we battle the crowd back into the arena. Larry Johnson is waiting for us, and escorts us out to the floor.

  All around us, chairs are being folded up, the stage is being broken down, and the echoes of these activities eerily reverberate around the empty hall. Meyers has arrived with his camera strapped to his shoulder, and he’s directing Roger to stand at a spot somewhere in the middle of the floor. Roger looks nervous, this scruffy, five-foot gnome with the beat-up guitar. His friend Dan towers behind him.

  Meyers signals he’s ready. “OK, Roger,” I direct, “why don’t you do that song you did outside the hall, then I’ll ask you some questions.” Cowen nods, as Meyers rolls it. Roger takes a deep breath and then he closes his eyes and leans his head back, as if he were entering some sort of self-induced trance state. Suddenly he rocks forward, slamming down on his guitar strings and shrieks in a high-pitched warble:

  May you earn your blessings

  From the work you do

  Your words will be judged

  By what you do

  On the Rolling Thunder Revue

  Rolling Thunder Revue

  Rolling Thunder Revue

  How about you?

  It’s amazing, there’s something absolutely compelling about this duo, the brash, gutsy little songwriter and his shy, lean vocal partner. It’s the rawness, the edge of mania in their faces, the desperation in their voices. They look like a schizoid version of Simon and Garfunkel. Cowen is slapping the side of his guitar during the refrain, and now he assaults the strings again:

  Every man has the will to serve the Lord