On the Road with Bob Dylan

by Larry Sloman

  Backstage, Leonard greets the troops, and everyone repairs to the hotel for a party in one of the downstairs banquet rooms.

  At the party, Ratso is out of control. He is all over the place, introducing Jerry Rubin to Emmett Grogan, getting drinks for Sara, bringing the head of hotel security in to meet Dylan, passing out copies of Joni’s just-released album with the singer pointing out the lucky recipients, even at one point mooching a bite out of Bob’s ham sandwich. So it was a merciful Chesley who dragged the sodden scribe to the elevator, fished his keys out of his pocket, led him into his room, and gently deposited him on his bed as the first rays of sun shimmered through the sheer Château Frontenac curtains.

  Rays of sun that rudely woke Ratso at midday. And nursing an incredible hangover he stumbles downstairs to the coffee shop, peers through half-operative eyes, and makes out the figure of Ronee Blakley sitting at a table with Jeff Raven and Denise Mercedes.

  “Want to see my Polaroids,” Ronee asks Ratso, “I got a great shot of you you gotta see.”

  “That’s about as tempting an offer as giving Lisa a withdrawal slip in a celebrity sperm bank,” Ratso smiles and they head upstairs.

  Blakley picks up her Polaroids and joins Ratso in his room. A curious affinity has grown between these two, a mutual admiration society intensified by the outcast status each enjoys. Ratso of course is the official film shittee, a part that sometimes transcends the celluloid and becomes reality like the time he returned to his car after one of the Boston area concerts and found his tires flat.

  And Blakley has been the critical shittee, lambasted by most of the music critics and snickered at by some of the musicians themselves. Her intensely emotional performances are often passed off as histrionic or amateurish and when she sings backup for Dylan she sometimes leans too far into the mike, propelling her voice like a helicopter over the audience, at times drowning out Bob’s lead. But Ratso admires her resilience, her determination to push things to the limit and to accept the consequences of those actions. He remembers both of them being the last assholes left in the hospitality suites and he also recalls late-night sessions when they shone like saints.

  “Blakley,” he laughs, looking through the surprisingly good Polaroids, “you never quit. That’s what I love about you.”

  Blakley smiles and sips the Coke that Ratso ordered up from room service. “Ronson’s the only one who can outlast me. The only thing is that Ronson just always passes out wherever he is, he doesn’t bother to go to bed.” She cracks up. “When it’s time for him he just goes to sleep like a little angel and people just carry him to bed, you know.”

  “What was it like for you playing in the same arena as Joan and Joni? You being the second wave so to speak.”

  “Well, Baez is a totally professional genius vocalist. She has presence onstage and presence in her personality. She’s so smart, she’s like a whip. She’s funny, she’s nice, she’s helpful, she also has an ego. She’s very queenly and imperious; after all, she was the first, and it’s not just that she was the first, she’s still the best. I mean a lot of people said, ‘Oh well, Baez sure, but she was the first.’ Well, I don’t care if she was the first, she could start right now and she’d still be as big as she is. She’s that good. She helps people.”

  “How did the three of you women relate to each other?”

  “I don’t want to get too much into that,” Ronee looks coyly at Ratso’s running Sony. “I hope you don’t mind. Baez and I related very well, she was the only person, see I was kinda the outsider, the new kid on the block, and I didn’t have anybody traveling with me and being the only woman unaccompanied, I didn’t have a road manager and there were many times when I was trying to be one of the boys so I could be accepted, yet I couldn’t be one of the boys ’cause I wasn’t one of the boys. Or, I was in many ways considered a movie actress. A lot of people really didn’t know that I had been playing for six or seven years, ’cause they never heard of me because I was so underground that I was below ground.”

  “You were in a kind of weird position,” Ratso sets the pictures down, “really the only girl in Guam, Scarlett was like always on with Bob only.”

  “True,” Ronee nods. “Male musicians are mostly the top musicians, there aren’t very many top female lead guitarists for instance. Most of the stars are men. So then when Baez is a star and is a woman, what she gets accused of is acting like a man. It’s the masculine identity to be successful and aggressive.”

  “The guys in the band musta been jealous, in a way, of you, I mean they’re onstage the whole time, and you come out and have the same shot. Was there tension?” Ratso wonders.

  “Only in the fact that I was a newcomer. As I said, it’s a very tight crowd, like anything else, you have to pay your dues and you have to get your stripes. They’re not gonna be given to you. There’s very few people who will just give you your stripes. I mean, Dylan gave me my stripes. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have been on that tour for more than two days. ’cause nobody else would have wanted me around.”

  “Yeah, I remember when I gave him my first article to read and he sent word out to me in the audience that he was really pissed ’cause I bad-mouthed you until someone showed him that one of the words was in italics.”

  Ronee smiles. “I appreciate that. It shows the loyalty he feels for his friends, and in a way, it shows some kind of thing that he and I hit off. We hit it off like that. Well, for one thing, you don’t sit up and play piano for six hours with somebody and not have any feelings for them. We didn’t talk but we played four-handed piano for six hours one night at the Other End and, man, you know after you do that that you don’t need to ever talk to him. What have you got left to say?” She laughs heartily.

  “So what do you think of him now, six weeks later?” Ratso smiles impishly.

  “My impressions of Bob? Oh God, I don’t know, my impressions of him, I think he has, you know, the qualities of sainthood. I think he’s a total weirdo. I absolutely love him and adore him and I don’t care who knows it, even his wife knows it. He knows it. Everyone knows it.” Ronee smiles again and rolls the Polaroids through her fingers. “I’d like to think that I’d do anything for him but I might not, ’cause I want to make sure he’s a person.”

  “Did you get to know him?” Ratso thinks of Bloomfield’s anguish over failing to penetrate the “armor.”

  “I feel that I know him a little bit. The danger is when you’re around people who are really, what can you call him, a certified genius? What can you call him? What can you say about Bob Dylan, he’s affected all of our lives, he’s affected everybody’s life for ten years. I mean what can you say about the guy, he’s not a normal guy. He can’t lead a normal life, he goes to a party, he hides in the bushes. I mean, you know, ’cause if he comes out of the bushes everybody gawks. I mean he can’t just stand around and talk to people.”

  “Yeah,” Ratso cuts in excitedly, “even Ginsberg is mesmerized too …”

  “Sycophancy,” Blakley finishes. “Well, I don’t think that I am and I don’t have that relationship with Bob. And because I think in a way I fight that, I think that I’ve been cruel to him on a couple of occasions and he’s never been cruel to me.”

  “What kind of stuff do you do in the movie?”

  “Bob’s? Once, I did a scene where I baptized myself in the sea, then another scene I played an accused witch in seventeenth-century puritanical Massachusetts, then I did a psychosexual scene with Bobby Neuwirth on the bus, then I did a razor-fight scene with Stevie Soles in the bathroom, and then I did a scene with Dylan where I was crying in the bar and he came in and acted like he’d been following us around, like a groupie, he’d been following me around and I said, Well, look, I’d do what I can ’cause you seem really nice, I’ll see if I can introduce you to Dylan but I’ll have to get through the security guards. But don’t worry, I know a few of them, I think I can do it.’ So then I introduce him to Dylan and it’s Baez dressed up as Dylan, so I bri
ng Dylan in as this kid, just an unknown nervous kid to meet Bob Dylan, and it’s Baez dressed up as Dylan. Ha. And I did a couple of scenes in Niagara Falls where we were dressed in black oilcloth coats. Just the usual, you know,” she shrugs ironically.

  “What’s your fix on this movie as compared to, say, Nashville?”

  Blakley downs the Coke. “My fix on the movie is that it’s great. It’s gonna be a brilliant movie. I would say it’s similar to Nashville in terms of high quality. It’s not gonna be similar in terms of genre, although in the sense that one of the controversies about Nashville was, is it or is it not a documentary? I mean, people were criticizing it all of the time saying the country music stinks, that it’s really not country music, da da da. Well, it wasn’t a documentary, it was fiction, but Nashville approached real life so closely that people actually confused it with real life and yet at the same time, it was surrealistic, so there was constant confusion between irony, comedy, tragedy, sincerity, soap opera, humor, and hysteria with no hint and no lead-in or lead-out. It was the creation of one man’s vision, and so is this film. And the thing about this that’s very similar but goes a step further is that you’ll see people singing onstage then you’ll probably see cuts into some other scenes where you won’t know if they’re actually faking it, acting, or whether the scene was actually taking place.”

  “Was Nashville scripted?” Ratso asks.

  “Nashville was scripted. There’s a big difference between improvisation and writing. Some was improvised, some was scripted.”

  “Well, with this movie it seems everything was improvised,” Ratso remembers.

  “Never on any of my scenes,” Ronee gets indignant. “I wrote some of my scenes and I improvised some of my own scenes. Nashville was entirely structured and scripted compared to this Rolling Thunder movie. Altman is not given credit and neither is Joan Tewkesbury for writing scenes within which actors can work …. Everybody seems to give Altman some magical credit, which is true, he does have the magical genius to have people appear on the set and something happens, but it just doesn’t happen. He discusses things with actors, actors go out shopping for their own props, for their own wigs, their own wardrobes, they go practice in the drugstores, they hang out in the bars, they write and work out their lines, they get everything worked out. They’re professionals from the word go, they don’t just show up on the set and it’s an accident. This whole thing about Altman and improvisation and all his actors not really being actors, you should see the work that his actors put in before they show up on the set. Just because they don’t stand in the room and rehearse.”

  “Did you do research for that character?”

  “Lots of research, yeah.” Ronee’s eyes grow wide. “Oh yeah, I hung around everywhere. I hung around the Opry, I hung around Nashville, I called all the managers of all the stars, and all the record companies, and I went to all the fan club dinners. And I hung out with Dolly, and I hung out with Loretta, and I hung out with Conway. I worked very hard for that part, I studied very hard. I called up Altman every day and told him new little dialogue, new lines I heard, new bits of action, lots of stuff. I studied very hard. See, most people think that I was her,” Ronee leans over and confides to Ratso. “You know that? Everyone thinks that I really was Barbara Jean. See, so they don’t regard it as acting.”

  “That’s a compliment!” Ratso gushes.

  “It’s a compliment, except I can’t get a job,” Blakley frowns. “They think I’m Barbara Jean. If they want Barbara Jean, the girl in the white dress with the Southern accent who falls apart, maybe they would call me, but for any other part, no. What they say is, How did Altman have the genius to find that girl with that ratted hair and that white dress and that crazy neurotic …. I was skiing with Miloš Forman for four days, not as lovers but as friends, we were all staying in the same house, Jack Nicholson’s house, in Aspen for four days, him and me skiing in our jeans, in our crummy army surplus parkas, fighting our way down Aspen Mountain. Finally, on about the fourth day on a trip up the chair lift, he says to me, ‘You know, Ronee, there’s somesing I vant to tell you, I saw Nashville and I thought it was so brilliant, so very brilliant, but you know, up until this very day it’s taken me three days now to be around you but I have to tell you quite honestly that I thought that Bob Altman had just found himself a nut. I thought that Bob Altman had this genius and he had found himself this nut. You know, you’re very together. You’re a very together person.’ I said, ‘Well, thanks, Miloš, you know, I’m not that together.’

  “He said that I represent the new kind of American actor and I think it’s the highest compliment that I could be paid as an actress; he said I represented the new American actor like Jack Nicholson who gives the kind of performance which Miloš called You can’t see through it.’ And it had taken that long and we were staying in the same house and I was wearing jeans, no makeup, and T-shirts, and we were skiing together all day and having dinner and every morning getting up, and it took him four days and he was still seeing that white dress on the ski slopes.” Ronee laughs out loud at that surreal image. She gets up and starts for the door, then pauses. “How dare I impersonate Barbara Jean?” she shouts, then shrugs ironically, blows the reporter a kiss, and scampers back to her room.

  As soon as Ronee leaves, Ratso remembers he made plans to meet Joni that evening to go to Leonard Cohen’s for dinner. So he takes a quick shower, throws on some clothes, and hustles downstairs. At the bar, Joni is waiting with Roger McGuinn, who’ll accompany them, and Steve Soles, who’d like to but is on call to Dylan for a movie scene. Ratso pulls up a barstool.

  “We’re going to a girlfriend of mine’s house first, Ratso,” Joni explains. “She can’t go to Leonard’s, her old man just got back from New York, the fire is burning, and there are children. We’re going to a real Montreal home.”

  “These guys are like society,” Soles explains.

  “Not so much society which implies socialization as it is conservatism. She’s just an old girlfriend from Saskatoon. She was the best woman at my wedding.” “Were you married, Joni?” Ratso forgets.

  “For two years. I was twenty-one when I first got married.”

  “I was twenty when I first got married,” Roger brags. “It lasted four months. I was attracted to her and I didn’t really know. Actually, as it turned out it was a kick we were both on.”

  “Drink up, Ratso,” Joni warns.

  “Are we ready to roll?” Ratso gulps his Tom Collins and gobbles some peanuts.

  In the cab, Mitchell leans back, sandwiched by Ratso and Roger. “This trip is very addicting, isn’t it? I keep on thinking how am I gonna go back to the normality of my situation?”

  “You’re gonna go back with another level of consciousness,” Roger smiles. “You’ll never lose that.”

  “I don’t know if my old man will be able to relate to it,” Joni frets. “I’ve already been going through changes. I wish he could go through it too.”

  Ratso looks out the window at the wet streets of Montreal. The cab begins its steep climb up the mountain and the houses get more and more opulent-looking. They finally locate the address and knock on the thick wood door.

  An attractive thirtyish woman named Ruth answers and throws her arm around Joni. The troupe is ushered into the elegant but cozy house and Joni makes the introductions. Ruth leads them to seats on the plush couch and Brook, her husband, takes orders for drinks.

  “Doug said everything was so super last night,” Ruth bubbles, genuinely pleased to see her old school chum.

  “It was so hyper,” Joni gushes. “Everyone was playing so fast and talking so fast. It was really exciting. Well, we have one more to go. That fire smells so nice.” Ratso settles back with his drink, watching the flames.

  “Are you tired?” Ruth worries. “Your voice really sounded bad on the phone.”

  “I have been sick all the time,” Joni grimaces. “I got a flu in Niagara on the second day. Not a flu but a cold that everyone�
��s trying to get rid of and they’re canceling it out with someone else’s.”

  “Plus you don’t have the sense to go to sleep,” Ruthie mothers.

  “I spent three days up in a row at one point and I was like a space cadet,” Joni giggles. “Wandering around the room and there was music going and I’d still be dancing.”

  “You couldn’t sleep,” Ruthie worries.

  “I didn’t want to miss anything!” Joni smiles.

  Ruth kneels down on the thick carpet in front of her friend. “You really drove me mad two years ago,” she chides Joni. “We had a mother’s helper from London, Ontario, and when she walked in the door, she had a guitar with her and she said, ‘How do you do? I’m the mother’s helper. I want you to introduce me to Joni Mitchell.’ She did not let up for the whole bloody summer,” Ruth remembers. “She just idolized you. The whole summer she asked me what you were really like. I said I didn’t know, that you chug-a-lug beer …”

  Joni cracks up at the memory. “She does what?” Ratso wants to get this straight.

  “She chug-a-lugs beer,” Ruthie grins impishly.

  “This is a long time ago.” Joni starts to turn red.

  “You know,” Ruthie demonstrates, “she glops the beer down without closing her throat. Joni was the best. Can you still stick your fist down your throat?” she roars.

  “I can’t do that anymore,” Joni moans. “I lost it.”

  “She used to do super swan dives off the bed. It just stunned me to have this girl come in and—”

  “Idolize this alcoholic,” Ratso cracks.

  “Then she wanted me to call and get to meet the top models in Canada,” Ruthie shakes her head.

  “Ruthie and I used to model in department stores,” Joni explains, “like we were really heavy in our little town.”