On the Road with Bob Dylan

by Larry Sloman

  “No one is saying you shouldn’t do that,” Ratso returns the service from left field.

  “No, I’m not saying I shouldn’t either, that’s why I stayed in New York for three days to re-examine my attitudes in different spaces of consciousness, away from people consciousness, hyper consciousness, lampshade consciousness …”

  “Coyote consciousness,” Ratso can’t resist.

  “Out-of-control consciousness,” Joni hits back.

  “Let me finish that first story about Dylan and Rubin hooking up,” Ratso backtracks a half hour.

  “I see there’s a certain amount of genuine human motivation and a whole lot of like political bullshit …”

  “Of course there’s gonna be political bullshit involved in getting him out of jail,” Ratso screams. “It’s gotta be done.”

  “I mean even in performing, like the inflammation-of-the-crowd psychology …”

  “Sure, they turn the lights up, boom up the sound …”

  “The ways the press reviews it. They’re impressed with the roars.” Joni sinks into thought. “There’s so many subtleties to it, but three times I’ve had to curb my bitterness.”

  “Sure,” Ratso picks up the ball, “what if you came on first? Here’s a special guest star, Joni Mitchell.”

  “It has a lot to do with the position on the bill to the press,” Joni admits.

  “And that whole thing was supposed to be negated on this tour.”

  “What,” Joni almost shrieks, “billing? Do you know how much politicking there was? Do you know how many times when I started to get too hot in my spot, how like I let people cut my power off? Let me talk to you a moment about the fallacy of power. It depends on what your ideas about power are and how stable you are emotionally, from a point of view of clarity and emotional stability, this is like a philosophical cliché but to the wise man the victor and the loser are both fools. You know, the victor puffed up in his celebration of victory and the fool depressed from losing. Now that’s a concept I understand from time to time, unless I get emotionally insecure. It’s related to applause and feedback too, and as a result you can be invulnerable to that as a measure of your worth as an artist. But people have different priorities depending on the subtleties of the life experience that they’re interested in, so some people find it’s hard to follow a roar, maybe it’s really harder for them to follow a silence. It’s bad if somebody bombs out there; it’s hard to go on like if people have been put in a pensive mood. Like it’s hard to change moods and everything, like my main reason for coming out on this tour initially was to see the show. Then I was going up to Toronto to visit some folks; then I was going to Vancouver to see my parents. It was like a cycle, I had my ticket and everything, then I got sucked into it and the magic happened for me at Niagara Falls.”

  Joni’s cigarette is all ash by now and she absentmindedly flicks it onto the carpet. “I couldn’t get off it and I got sick then too, and I had no pipes or anything and I didn’t sing any familiar material and I was going on as a front runner. Now OK, dig the odds for making a splash, going on in that position in the show, and also having it manipulated so that even your exit offstage is controlled in a way. I allowed it to be controlled for a while …”

  “Who controlled it?” Ratso cuts in.

  “The people involved. The musicians in the show. Like three times I had this ego battle and it was emotional immaturity, knowing that it really didn’t make a difference in that my longevity as an artist is not affected in any way by what position I’m in in this thing or whether they say Joni Mitchell was ineffective or whether they don’t even mention my name in the article, but from time to time when you get emotionally low I begin to say, ‘Like wait a minute, I’m a sophisticated musician in a naive kind of way. I’m a sophisticated observer …”

  “You know what,” Ratso leans in toward Joni and whispers conspiratorially, “you’re as good a songwriter as anybody on the tour.”

  “You’re right,” Joni blurts, “see! Remember when we talked and you put me in a bag with women and I said that you should come around me when you widen your horizons and stop limiting me to gender, you know. Because really, I have a lot of anima-animus, a lot of male perspective. I’m talking about roles; it has nothing to do with gender.”

  A minute later, Soles comes in and he and Joni start frantically packing, as the singer has a plane to catch in about an hour. Ratso just sits back and watches the frenetic activity.

  “I have this terrible itch in my throat,” Joni complains. “Maybe it’s hotel ear rot. This room is too classy. I really wanted to skid it before I left town.” She shrugs.

  “You should have stayed at my place,” Ratso laughs. “You could have crashed on my couch.”

  “My voice is gone,” Joni rasps. “I sound like an old spade. I lost like ten notes on this tour. They are just gone forever. I’m just a prisoner of notes. I guess I’ll have to do more with the four I have left.”

  Joni’s almost finished packing when Soles lugs out the huge framed plaque that Imhoff has presented to all the performers, a plaque made up of all the backstage buttons, ticket stubs, and ID cards from the tour. Joni frowns at the sight of this.

  “Want this, Ratso?” she suddenly brightens.

  “Jesus, I’d love it.” The reporter laughs at the irony of getting thirty-five backstage buttons at once at the end of the tour when he couldn’t cop one during the whole trip.

  “It’s yours,” Joni smiles, “there’s no way I can get it back.”

  Slocum is truly touched and as they start down the hall, lugging the suitcases, he realizes how fond he’s grown of the singer, and how much more appreciative he is of her work. And as he hails the Checker and copes with getting all her luggage together and getting her frazzled self together, and when she pecks him a good-bye kiss and climbs into the cab, and heads off toward LaGuardia, with just her blond mane visible as the cab disappears slowly into the late-afternoon Madison Avenue traffic, and as he turns and walks back into the hotel, the reporter feels a strange emptiness inside.

  An emptiness that’s assuaged a bit when he immediately inherits her room and starts making a battery of calls. He calls Lois, he tries Dylan, he calls Kinky, and then he calls Rubin in jail, greeting him with “Carter, you motherfucker.”

  “Hey Larry, you son of a rascal you, what’s doing?” the boxer laughs.

  “I need to get a quote from you, a reaction to the concert, a quote.”

  “Dylan is a fantastic human being …” Rubin trails off.

  “Keep going, keep going,” Ratso chants.

  “That’s it,” Rubin stops, “that’s it.”

  “You gotta give me some copy, schmuck,” Slocum screams.

  “You write it,” Carter yells. “You write it, you smuck, say I said it. Just don’t say nothing bad about Bob.”

  “But Rubin …” Ratso starts to protest.

  “You do it. You’re a writer, you know what to do. Listen, smuck, I gotta go, speak to you soon.”

  Ratso shakes his head and decides to call Phil Ochs. Phil had deteriorated since the last time Ratso had seen him, at Porco’s birthday party. He was more ragged, deeper into the depressive cycle of the manic-depressive syndrome that ravaged his soul. He had taken to drinking again, and mutual friends had reported to Ratso during the tour that Phil had been found sleeping in alleyways, and flop hotels, and one night, even in the bathroom of the Chelsea Hotel. But Ochs had attended the Garden concert and he had seemed a bit better to Ratso, at least as well as he was when the reporter lived with him the previous year. And, at the urging of some friends, Phil had left the city and was living in the Rockaways in Queens, crashing at his sister’s place. It was there that Ratso reached him.

  “Phil, how are you doing?”

  “I’m hanging in,” the meek, gentle voice fights its way out of his body.

  “What did you think of the show?”

  “I loved Dylan.” Phil perks up a bit, as he did whenever he discus
sed Bob with Ratso. “I thought it was the best I’d ever seen him.”

  “Really.” Ratso, unaccountably enough, seems pleased.

  “Absolutely, absolutely, because of the new material. And the band was incredible, especially the violin. I loved the new material. It’s classic. I loved ‘Durango.’ The whole thing was just incredible.”

  The reporter tries to draw Phil out but the folksinger was really not in the mood to talk and Ratso, being no stranger to the terrors of the dampening of the spirit, respects the emotional state that he found Phil in. Slocum wishes Phil well and hangs up, totally unaware that this would be one of the last times that he would ever hear that sometimes soft, sometimes vibrant voice.

  Ratso gets restless again so he wanders down to the lobby for a breather, and five minutes later, Kemp comes out of the elevator, suitcases in hand. A curious bond had begun to grow between these two adversaries, an admission that beneath the built-in role conflict that set them at each other’s throats, beneath that automatic hostility, these two men still managed to share certain things. A deep admiration for Dylan, of course. And a love of lox and salmon, although Ratso could never stomach the other fishes Lou thrived on. And, a common respect for the merits of individual entrepreneurship whether it be supplying Sunday brunch to the multitudes or providing the copy in the newspaper that the masses read with their brunch. It seemed that they both instinctively realized that the next day that newspaper would hold only the bones from the fish of the previous day’s meal.

  So it was a gesture of camaraderie when Ratso leaps out into Madison Avenue and waits five minutes, in the shivering cold, finally flagging down a Checker for the fish peddler. He opens the door.

  “Well, Lou, this is it,” Ratso smiles.

  “Yeah, well you behave yourself and don’t bother Bob.”

  “You know, I think I’m going to miss you,” Ratso smiles again.

  “Too bad I can’t say the same,” Louie cracks and starts into the cab.

  “C’mon, don’t I even get a handshake?” Slocum pouts.

  Louie pauses and grudgingly grabs Ratso’s fingertips giving them a short, firm squeeze with his own. “Take care, Ratso,” Louie half-smiles.

  “Bye, bye,” Ratso waves as the cab pulls out and then he quickly runs back into the hotel, to prepare the bait and think about the biggest catch of them all, waiting up there in that room with the fishing season only seconds old.

  But Dylan was no easy catch. For days Ratso tried to snare him for an interview, calling his room at all hours, hanging out by the hotel, hanging out with him at parties, at a film screening, even bringing Sara some chicken soup direct from the Lower East Side when she was bedridden with a cold. Then finally, Ratso got a bite.

  It happened late one morning. Ratso woke Dylan up and the singer told him to call him back in an hour and they could do the interview then. Ratso took that to mean over the phone, and an hour later, with his equipment set up, he dialed the hotel and coolly requested Dylan’s room. Two rings go by.

  “Ratso,” a bleary but cheerful voice floats downtown.

  “Yeah, how’d you know it was me,” the reporter wonders.

  “Listen, I’m talking with my beloved …”

  “Oh, no,” Ratso curses.

  “You just interrupted me again,” Dylan jokes, “every time I’m talking to her the phone rings and it’s you, or there’s a knock on the door and it’s you, every time I’m trying to talk to her and get some really serious discussion out of the way, the fucking phone rings and it’s you or the doorbell.”

  “Hey, man,” Ratso gets indignant, “I haven’t been sucking on your soul today and I don’t want to get in between you and her at all.”

  Dylan chuckles. “All right, so what do you want? What do you need right now?”

  “Well, I have a list of questions.”

  “OK,” Dylan says amiably enough, “give ’em to me.”

  “All right, it’s the end of the tour, right …”

  “What do you mean?” Dylan objects, “end of what tour?”

  “Well, what is it?” Ratso probes, “a hiatus?”

  “Hiatus? You mean Hyannis?”

  “Oh, you’re starting in Hyannis again?” Two can play the game. “Playing for the hoi polloi? Is this is a resting point now?”

  “What resting point?” Dylan laughs. “We never rest.”

  “I know, man,” Ratso testifies. “Do you ever sleep? What are you doing now?”

  “What am I doing right now?” Dylan pimps.

  “No, not right now, I mean in terms of your public persona.”

  “Public persona, huh?” Dylan spits the words out warily.

  “In other words, you just completed a tour …”

  “No!” the singer shouts. “Yeah, well we’re regrouping.”

  “OK, a regrouping. And then what?” Ratso pries.

  “Then we’re gonna hit it again,” Bob oozes enthusiasm, “we’ll be out there again.”

  “People should be looking for you?” Ratso asks and Dylan laughs. “Where are you gonna be next?”

  “Well, lookit, there’s no way of knowing that at this point, there’s no way of knowing nothing. I mean we just play, we don’t do the paperwork.”

  “Right, I agree with you,” Ratso approves. “Talk a little bit about the spirit of the tour, because I’ve never seen such a great, I mean I’ve been on the road with a couple of groups and I’ve never seen such a close camaraderie and brotherhood and feeling of …”

  “Well, that’s because we’re all brothers and sisters,” Dylan says half-reverently and half-caustically.

  “I’ve seen that closeness before but all I’m saying is that I’ve seen less ego clashes on this tour than on any tour I’ve seen.”

  “OK,” Dylan’s getting impatient, “what’s the next one?”

  “That’s it? That’s the answer?” Ratso feigns shock.

  “Yeah, what’s the next question,” Dylan grabs the offensive.

  “How do you respond to the one tack that people take to attack the tour, namely that it’s the same old shit, that the original concept of playing for the people has been subverted and it’s the same crass commercialism?”

  “Is this a question, Ratso?” Dylan sounds like he could fall asleep before the question is articulated. “Is this a question?”

  “Yeah, what was the original guiding philosophy behind what you were doing?”

  Bob whispers to someone in the room for a few seconds then comes back to the phone. “What’s the philosophy behind anything, Ratso? When a bricklayer goes to work every morning, what’s his philosophy?”

  “Well, he’s probably got a pretty well-defined philosophy even though it may not be articulated,” the reporter remembers his sociology courses.

  “All right,” Dylan yields, “lemme sleep on that one.”

  “All right, sleep on that one,” Ratso allows, “because what I was leading up to, was, hello, are you still there?”

  “Yeah,” Dylan yawns.

  “The question was that people have attacked this tour—”

  “They’ve attacked it?” Dylan sounds perfectly incredulous.

  “Yeah, I’ve read attacks on it,” Ratso barks.

  “Who?”

  “Rolling Stone, for example, after they ripped up my article and wrote their own bureaucratic garbage …”

  “You know why they attacked the tour, Ratso?” Dylan leaps in, a mile a minute. “Because they hadn’t seen it. They sit in their offices on their asses and can only fantasize about it. They are the establishment. OK, so you can’t be responsible for people that haven’t seen the tour, that’s like somebody who doesn’t know you.”

  “What about that early publicity that it was only gonna be in small clubs?”

  “I don’t know how that got started. I didn’t start any of that stuff.”

  “Did you read the Paul Simon attack on you in Newsweek yet?” Ratso casually slips one in.

  “No,” Dylan
yelps, “read it to me.”

  “OK, basically it says, ‘But Simon the cerebral and careful craftsman of some of pop’s most memorable melodies, “Bridge over Troubled Waters,” “Mrs. Robinson”’ …”

  “Who remembers those?” Dylan jumps in. “What meaning have these songs in anybody’s life?”

  “Wait, wait,” and Ratso continues to quote, “‘“Pop music is in a terrible state right now,” he says. “It stinks. Only a handful of people are doing something good … Dylan comparisons make me emotional,” says Simon. “There’s hardly a point of comparison except we’re the same age. He writes a lot of words. I write few words. In the sixties Dylan for the first time used the folk tradition of Woody Guthrie and sang a grown-up lyric. He single-handedly took the folkie emphasis on words and made it the predominant style of music in the seventies. But what he spawned is boring.” Pensive and soft voiced, Simon gazes out of his picture window overlooking New York’s Central Park. “When I listen to Dylan I think, Oh no, not the same three- or four-chord melody again …”’”

  “Hey lookit, Ratso,” Bob bursts, “you can play a song with one chord.”

  Ratso laughs. “‘Simon goes on, “The staple of American popular music is all three- or four-chord, country- or rock-oriented now. There’s nothing that goes back to the richest, most original form of American popular music—Broadway and Tin Pan Alley—in which sophisticated lyrics are matched with sophisticated melodies.”’”

  “Hey, Ratso,” Dylan again, “you can play a song with one note.”

  “‘Simon says, “When I started writing I didn’t think there was any space for me between Dylan and the Beatles—they had it covered. I was writing little psychological tunes based on wandering melodies. Now I’m trying to get closer to Broadway and Tin Pan Alley.”’”

  “Well, I hope he gets where he wants to go,” Dylan laughs.

  “But he’s not the only one. There are lots of people who say that you’re a great lyricist but you just don’t understand music.”