On the Road with Bob Dylan

by Larry Sloman

  “Do you have to pay for the ads?”

  “In some cases we have bought a few spots, but in most cases the radio stations pick it up off the handbills or word-of-mouth. We’re not hyping anybody, we’re putting the tickets out there and anybody wants to buy them they’re welcome. If they don’t this ain’t no big rock ’n roll hype.”

  “The Variety article talked about the way you booked the Springfield date.”

  “Yeah, how’d we do that,” Kemp says sarcastically.

  “It said Imhoff called up and said we have name talent, wouldn’t say who it was, and speculation ranged from Anne Murray to Elton John. I also talked to a kid promoter in Southeast Massachusetts, that was pissed off ’cause Imhoff bought all the T-shirts he had printed up with the Rolling Thunder logo ….”

  Just then the phone buzzes, signaling another call coming into Kemp’s line. “Go write your story,” he chides the reporter. “Excuse me, sir,” the operator’s voice chimes in, “Carlos Santana is on the line waiting.”

  It’s midnight and still no quotes and Ratso is restless. Danbury ain’t exactly Marina Del Rey but there must be some hip bars, the reporter prays. He hops into the Monte Carlo, stops at the first gas station, and gets directions to a nearby music club. Five minutes later, Ratso locks the car, hops over some puddles, opens the door and gets bathed in the warm sounds of rock ’n roll. The band ain’t bad, the beer is cold and cheap, and there’s this one blonde that keeps eyeing him. They talk for a while, drink a few beers, and it’s two, bartime. Ratso speeds back to the motel and parades the blonde past the awed young night clerk.

  In the room, she settles gingerly down onto the bed, making some space between the sheafs of copy paper, the tape recorder, the strewn cassettes, the bottles of vitamins, the iced juice, and begins to leaf through Hustler. Ratso seizes the opportunity to size her up. Nice tits, bulging out at him from behind the cashmere sweater, but the rest of the body is on the pudgy side. And those tacky white platform shoes, and all that sleazy makeup, and those black patterned stockings, he’d only seen that shit on aging bohemians. Oh well, it’ll have to do, Ratso thinks, after all this is Danbury. He moved onto the bed next to her. “Oh,” she says coyly, “I forgot to tell you what happened after I broke up with my boyfriend. I had an operation last week.” She pauses, dramatically, and looks at the ceiling. “An abortion.” Ratso just moans and sinks back into the bed.

  He finally gets to sleep close to four, his only companion the tape recorder lying on the other twin bed. And once again, after about a half hour of REM bliss, the jangling phone rips him back to reality. It’s Jacques Levy in New York, returning his earlier call.

  “Rolling Stone wants to know details,” he mumbles. “What happened to the concept of small clubs, now it’s big arenas.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Levy scoffs. “What are they trying to do? Are they trying to bad-mouth it already? Why?”

  “Did you see the Variety piece? The headline asked if Dylan was looking for money.”

  “Looking for money?” Levy sputters. “He’s gonna go to the fucking toilet with this.” He laughs heartily. “He’s not gonna make any money off this.”

  “Yeah, and the Rolling Stone people read the Variety article and they told me to add—”

  “Aw, don’t let them do that. Anyway, you know it’s only because Bob’s Jewish,” Levy cracks.

  “I told Kemp the tack is to attack you on the big-arena angle.”

  “OK,” Levy interrupts, “so what do you want? This is my nickel.”

  “I need a reaction to the charges that the spirit of the show has been altered by playing in large halls. By the way, I almost got beat up. I don’t mind playing the role of a harassed reporter …”

  “I can see you as Jimmy Stewart,” Levy laughs.

  “But it wasn’t even filmed that night and—”

  “Sloman, Sloman, don’t tell me these stories, I know about your bad luck. What do you want from me? You want me to defend Bob from the attack that he’s a commercial prick? Is that it? That as far as I know—”

  “That as far as you know,” Ratso picks it up, “the spirit of the thing hasn’t been altered.”

  “Go on, keep going, Sloman,” Levy roars.

  “You say it,” the reporter protests.

  “No, no you say it. I’ll give you a yes or no.” Levy cracks up. “C’mon make up your own quote.”

  “As far as I know the spirit of the show has not been altered—”

  “What is that?” Levy interrupts him. “The spirit of the show hasn’t been altered. It’s ridiculous this charge, why should you even pay attention to it?”

  “I got editors,” Ratso moans and pulls the blankets tighter, “you think I have a free hand? I get it from all sides, you think it’s easy?”

  They hang up and Ratso gets a few more hours sleep, then at 10 A.M. rings up Kemp. “Louie’s bar and grill,” Susan answers, and the reporter says hello.

  “Would you like to speak to Mr. Kemp?” In the background, Ratso can hear the sound of Saturday morning TV. Louie’s watching cartoons.

  “Yeah,” Kemp’s jaded voice floats to Danbury.

  “Louie Kemp was reached while watching his favorite program, Crusader Duck,” Ratso goes into his best anchorman voice.

  “Whaddya want?” Louie growls.

  “Are you awake. You sober? I got two hours, Lou. I need a quote from Dylan,” Ratso pleads. “You know that. Rolling Stone is paying $250 a week to keep me alive on the road and they’ll be pissed off if they don’t get two fucking paragraphs.”

  Louie pauses. “Well, he’ll give you a quote,” he says softly.

  Ratso is speechless. “Great,” he manages weakly.

  “When he wakes up. I don’t know what time that’ll be, he stayed up late last night.”

  Ratso thanks Louie profusely and hangs up. He’s got about an hour to kill so he makes a few personal calls, then reaches Baez’s manager Bernie Gelb and sets up a phone interview for later that day. The last call is to Kinky, who’s playing in Dallas.

  “Keno,” Ratso screams, “everybody’s waiting on pins and needles for you to come, boy.”

  “I’m definitely coming now, Rats. Of course, this could be the biggest debacle you ever pulled off.”

  “My cock is the biggest debacle I ever pulled off.”

  “All right realll nice” Kinky purrs, “that’s a good line. I’ll see you up there somewhere between the twenty-second and the twenty-eighth.”

  Ratso hangs up and starts to work on the article. The phone rings.

  “Larry, it’s Louie. Have you started to write that yet?”

  “I’m transcribing. Doing inserts,” Ratso replies.

  “OK, I just talked to Bob. He’s up, you can call him directly and talk to him for a few minutes. Don’t badger him,” Kemp warns.

  “I’m not badgering him.”

  “I’m just telling you. Listen, just ask him those few questions that you want and that’s it. OK, he’s in room 505.”

  Ratso immediately dials the room. The phone rings, rings again, rings a third time.

  “Bob? This is Larry,” Ratso blurts out when he hears the receiver picked up.

  “Yeah Larry,” a weary, obviously half-awake Dylan greets, “how you doing?”

  “I’m in Connecticut. You got a minute? I gotta do a story in an hour and I need a couple of paragraphs from you. OK?”

  “OK,” Dylan sounds amiable.

  “You up?”

  “Yeah, sort of.”

  “You want me to call back later? I just spoke to Kinky.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s in Dallas.”

  “Uh huh,” Dylan sounds ready to nod out.

  “He says hello.”

  “How’s it going down there?” Bob manages to ask.

  “All right, he’s playing some clubs and shit, I was in the Holiday Inn in Burlington and he’s looking for a piano player and there was this fifty-year-old woman, like a Bel
le Barth type, real ribald, doing raunchy material, telling dirty jokes and her name is Hurricane Hattie.”

  “Oh yeah,” Dylan says with a modicum of interest.

  “So I told Kinky to call her agent. She looks like Sophie Tucker. He’s gonna try to get her into the Jewboys.”

  “Oh yeah, how does she sound?”

  “She’s funny. She’d be great with Kinky to work off him.” Dylan yawns audibly.

  “OK” Ratso gets on with it, “the schmucks at Rolling Stone are such bureaucrats. Did you read my second story yet?”

  “No,” Dylan sounds truly apologetic, “I haven’t had a chance to see it.”

  “Well, I dug it. I’m inspired by the whole tour and the ambience and they call up and they say that I don’t have any details, I don’t have how much money the tour made, all that bullshit. I said, why don’t they get someone who went to business school to write the story if they want those details. I’m writing about the spirit. And there’s this big article in Variety this week with the headline: IS DYLAN INTERESTED IN MONEY? SMALL CLUBS GIVE WAY TO ARENAS, and it’s a real bitchy piece that talks about how much the tour is making now and how they’re playing double dates in big halls.”

  “Oh yeah,” Dylan sounds interested.

  “So that’s the new tack,” Ratso breezes on, “people who are gonna attack you now are gonna go from the angle that it was announced as a tour of small clubs. In fact, that’s exactly what they asked me at Rolling Stone, they said how come it was announced as small clubs originally—”

  “Who announced that?” Dylan snaps.

  “I don’t know, Columbia? Levy told me it was never gonna be small clubs, it was gonna be small halls.”

  “Right,” Dylan affirms.

  “Jacques called me at four in the morning today and gave me a complete rundown so I got the info from him saying that it was never gonna be that. In fact, you even told me the first time we did that interview in the rehearsal studio that you’d do some big dates but mostly small halls.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So anyway, this is the new tack they’re taking. Rolling Stone reads off the figures to me saying the first eleven shows pulled in 75,000 paying customers averaging $8 a ticket, that’s $600,000 gross,” Ratso recites.

  “So what does Elton John charge?” Dylan sounds annoyed.

  “I know that. This show is much better than anything else anyway. You get four hours of solid entertainment to begin with, so the questions that these bureaucrats are asking are questions like ‘Why has there been a change?’ They took that quote you gave me that small halls are more conducive to what you do and said that if Dylan’s feeling that way why is he playing large halls now. The whole thing is because of the original misconception that it was gonna be small clubs like the Other End, that set a framework for these people to say that ten thousand seats is a large fucking stadium.”

  “Yeah,” Dylan says disgustedly.

  “Anyway,” Ratso is running out of steam, “what do you think?”

  “Nothing,” Dylan says cavalierly, “it don’t concern me what those people say.”

  “Lou gave me a quote, he said that everybody’s on salary but Dylan, that you’re not making a cent so far.”

  “Hey look, we got seventy people going around, you know. I don’t know what to tell ya, we just—”

  “What do you want to talk about?” Ratso tries to change the subject. “Why don’t you just talk about the music?”

  “Well, what do you want to know?”

  “I’ve never seen you so loose on stage. I’ve never seen you so comfortable. How come?”

  “Uhh,” Dylan hesitates, “it’s just the element I work best in.”

  “Which is the element you work best in?” Ratso presses.

  “This, uh, this, uh, Jesus Christ you really got me early in the morning, man,” Dylan moans, “I can’t even think. Well, you know, we’re gonna play anyplace that’s gonna have us. We’re gonna go anyplace we can. But we also have a lot of expenses to meet. I mean we’re not gonna go out and play, uh, living rooms, you know. It’s not a nightclub show, I mean. I don’t know who said we were gonna play nightclubs, we were never gonna play nightclubs. That wasn’t ever intended to be. But we are gonna play small theaters and we have played theaters and we’re going to continue to play theaters.”

  “That Palace Theatre in Waterbury was beautiful, man,” Ratso coos, “just like the old Fillmore.”

  “If you do play the big places,” Dylan continues, “like Shea Stadium and all that, you do make a lot of money but you’re also gonna cut your head off, ’cause it doesn’t leave you anyplace to play. So we’re playing theaters.”

  “Forget about the money,” Ratso urges, “I don’t want to stress that. I want to stress the music, like what is it about this kind of show that enables you to, I mean you’re so loose on stage, you’re actually dancing and shit. I never saw you do stuff like that before.”

  “I used to do that in the old days, you know, when I wasn’t popular.”

  “Really old days,” Ratso remembers, “you’re talking now about the Carnegie Hall Halloween concert days.”

  “Right, right,” Dylan agrees, “it’s just the same old thing.”

  “It’s like that Halloween concert in ’64 when you said you got your Bob Dylan mask on and this Halloween you wore a mask, Ginsberg called it a transparent life mask. But it’s great to see you so loose.”

  “Well, what can I tell ya. We’re just playing the halls, I don’t know where we’re booked.”

  “Forget about that, tell me about the music.”

  “Well the music is self-evident, it speaks for itself, you know,” Dylan pauses, “if it’s what you feel, it’s what you feel. If not, it’s something else.”

  “How come from that period of time after the abuse you got, about ’65 or ’66 when people were booing and throwing things on stage until I’d say even this tour, even when I saw you with the Band in ’74 you seemed a little uptight on stage. What changed?”

  “Well we’ve got more elements in the show now,” Dylan struggles for the right words, “there’s much more happening in the show so, uh, it gives you more freedom. You’re not compelled to do a few certain types of, uh, songs you know.”

  “The burden’s not all on your shoulders now?”

  “No, I’m just part of the show.”

  “How come you started wearing the Pierrot clown makeup?”

  “Are you gonna talk about that.” Dylan seems surprised and a bit miffed. “Oh I don’t know …”

  “I got a great quote from Blakley on that.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’ll read it,” says Ratso coyly. “I’ll tell you after you tell me.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Dylan pauses. “I’m going to get into a lot of things that people are gonna say they just don’t understand. There’s always people that don’t understand, always people that try to make more out of it than what it is.”

  “I talk about the makeup …” Ratso tries to explain.

  “Yeah, one reason I put it on is so you can see my face from far away,” Dylan coughs.

  “Does it really enable people to see your face?” Ratso wonders.

  “I think you can see my face from further back, can’t you,” Dylan says with a trace of anxiety in his voice.

  “I think so, yeah.” Ratso finds the quote from his article. “Here … ‘but the effect of Kemp has allowed Dylan the psychic luxury that permits him to perform with the wildest abandon he’s ever summoned up. Never a particularly comfortable figure onstage in the past, Dylan now looks as manically relaxed as Sinatra. When he comes out in pancake Pierrot makeup, the geek who you’ve just handed in your ticket to see, and cups his hands around his lips during the brilliant “Isis,” it’s not Dylan up there it’s a fucking rock ’n roll Jolson.’ And here’s the quote from Ronee: ‘You know why Dylan uses the makeup? Because you’re forced to look at the two most expressive areas of his face,
his eyes and his beautiful mouth. The rest of his face is blanked out by the clown-white makeup.’ That’s her quote.”

  Dylan yawns loudly.

  “You tired? Have you been sleeping better?”

  “I been trying to get some sleep this morning. I haven’t gotten so much.”

  “What have you been averaging so far on the tour?”

  “Sometimes six, sometimes five.”

  “That’s enough,” Ratso decides, “I get about four, five, and I’m not getting headaches …. I should be there tonight, but the reason I didn’t come today was my car was broken into the same day I almost got beat up and I had to stay up all night and wait for the Hertz office to open and I drove back here and got a call from Rolling Stone and they wanted another thousand words. But I wouldn’t go through all this shit if it wasn’t for the music. By the way, how did Joni get on the tour?”

  “Joni? Which Joni?” Dylan sounds surprised.

  “Mitchell.”

  “I don’t know. Is she on the tour? I don’t know if she is or not. I don’t know, she just showed up in the last town,” Bob yawns, “and she got on the bill.”

  “Levy told me he programmed the show like that, blank areas where anyone who’s in town can just fit in.”

  “Well, uh, there are points in the show where that can happen.”

  “That’s good, right? You want that shit.”

  “Sure, I don’t care.”

  “Let me ask you this, do you think it’s the new songs that are making you so animated, is it because you’re singing new material?”

  “Uhhh,” Dylan thinks, “I don’t know, I mean it’s been in me for while, you know. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a natural thing.”

  “Let’s say you didn’t have a new album, do you think you’d still be so excited up there singing?”

  “You mean without the new stuff?”

  “Yeah,” Ratso elaborates, “like if you were singing ‘Blowing in the Wind’ and ‘Bob Dylan’s 8,000th Dream’ or something would you be as excited and running around?”

  “I probably wouldn’t be so confident,” Dylan says cryptically.