by Bell, Ian
*
Once again, the Dylans attempted to repair their marriage. Love and pride endured, it seems, despite the self-knowledge gained in the writing of the Blood on the Tracks songs, and despite the profound bitterness revealed in certain verses of ‘Idiot Wind’. It was one odd, ironic aspect of the album: Dylan had achieved a new ‘mature’ understanding of the human condition, but in his own life he continued to flounder.
He drifted from coast to coast, listening to music, attending parties, performing at a schools benefit in San Francisco organised in March by the promoter Bill Graham. Sara was with him at the show, but whatever hopes she or Dylan entertained for their union were soon confounded. As spring turned towards summer he was in the south of France, spending six weeks with his friend the painter David Oppenheim, and celebrating his 34th birthday with a bout of hedonism that Oppenheim would call ‘pathetic and superb’. Interviewed by the (now extinct) fanzine Fourth Time Around, the painter would also remember his friend as lost, confused and despairing, afraid even to sleep alone.
Dylan had expected his wife to join him in Europe, but he was disappointed, bitterly so. He called her frequently, to no avail. By now, the message was very clear. Her patience was at an end, her tolerance and support all but gone. The couple would not be divorced finally until the summer of 1977, amid horrific rancour, but by that time only the formalities remained. There would be other attempts to find ways to renew their vows before the lawyers intervened, but Sara’s refusal to drop everything and fly across the Atlantic was an unmistakable declaration. By the middle of 1975, to all intents and human purposes, the marriage was over.
In France, looking out over vineyards under a pink sky, Dylan once again pulled himself together. His marriage had failed, but his work remained. He decided to remind people of what, in essence, he was. At that moment, work was all that truly remained for an artist who could not be sustained by celebrity alone. In some strange way he was renewed by the fact. The old tenacity, the defiance of every circumstance, reasserted itself. When people ask how it is that this artist endures, decade after decade, one simple answer is stubborn pride.
The summer of 1975 found him in familiar New York haunts, particularly the old Bitter End club on Bleecker Street in the Village, close to the corner with LaGuardia Place and a short walk from his Houston Street loft. For reasons best known to its owners – who would soon acknowledge the mistake – the old joint had been renamed The Other End. Or rather, the club had been absorbed in February of 1974 by its newly acquired adjacent sibling. Crucially, the latter possessed a liquor licence. There Dylan was soon drinking his wine, listening to music, and meeting old friends such as Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bobby Neuwirth. For a few weeks he was granted the illusion of privacy in a public place. Those with whom he chose to socialise were allowed to approach the presence; the curious and importunate were kept at bay. It was as much as he could hope for.
Dylan was also beginning to wonder what he could do next in his perplexing career. Concert performances built around the Blood on the Tracks songs would have been a fascinating proposition, but the notion seems never to have crossed his mind. The writing and recording of that album had each been singular events, born in the moment, and born of the pressure of experience. The achievement was impossible to repeat and he had no desire to try. As usual, Dylan had begun to move on.
A work finished was not a work forgotten, exactly, but already his acclaimed new album was, for him, a thing of the past. As he began to join performers on stage at The Other End, nevertheless, an idea of performance was beginning to form in his mind. He was striking up new acquaintances and soaking up the old communal energy of the Village. Plenty of celebrities had begun to cluster around the club that summer, but the ambience was – or so they and Dylan chose to believe – a world away from the superstar nonsense, the stadiums, limousines, private jets and idolatry, that had marred the 1974 tour with The Band. Perhaps there was another way for him to take his music to the people, and to deal, finally, with the entities he had named Bob Dylan.
*
Just as Blood on the Tracks was being released in January of 1975, Dylan decided to allow portions of the celebrated basement tapes to see the light of day. Not once would he manage a convincing explanation for this remarkable change of heart. He had long dismissed the great songs recorded casually in the vicinity of Woodstock in upper New York State during the summer and autumn of 1967 as being of no account. In late 1969 he had told Rolling Stone that the tracks were merely demos, that he had been ‘pushed into coming up with songs’. Even when afflicted by writer’s block in the first years of the decade, when partial bootlegs of the tapes were becoming commonplace, he had declined, with a single near-pointless exception, to draw on a catalogue that included ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ and ‘I Shall Be Released’.
Talking in April of ’75 to Mary Travers (she of Peter, Paul and Mary) on KNX-FM Los Angeles for his first radio interview since 1966, Dylan was less than illuminating. A couple of months before Columbia’s The Basement Tapes received its release, he said:
The records have been exposed throughout the years so somebody mentioned it was a good idea to put it out, you know, as a record, so people could hear it in its entirety and know exactly what we were doing up there in those years.
Given that he had taken charge of the project, the ‘somebody’ was almost certainly Robbie Robertson, The Band’s guitar player. Dylan had played no real part in the archaeological effort to collect and restore the old tapes. It seems likely, in fact, that he had no clear memory of exactly what the reels of disdained recordings contained. Hence the entirely misleading claim that record-buyers would hear the Woodstock work ‘in its entirety’. Blood on the Tracks, an international hit, had just spent a fortnight at the top of the Billboard album chart: Dylan had no need of product to satisfy the record company, no requirement for further acclaim. Nevertheless, his attitude towards the 1967 recordings was curious, as it would remain.
Robertson, for his part, sounded disingenuous when he got around to attempting to explain how The Basement Tapes came to be released. He failed even to offer a convincing explanation for his own motives. Interviewed by Crawdaddy magazine for its March 1976 edition, the guitarist was certain only that the legal version of the basement recordings had not been produced to ‘combat’ the tenacious bootleggers. Robertson said:
All of a sudden it seemed like a good idea. I can’t tell you why or anything. It just popped up one day. We thought we’d see what we had. I started going through the stuff and sorting it out, trying to make it stand up for a record that wasn’t recorded professionally. I also tried to include some things that people haven’t heard before, if possible … I just wanted to document a period rather than let them rot away on the shelves somewhere. It was an unusual time which caused all those songs to be written and it was better it be put on disc some way than be lost in an attic.
It was one thing to refuse to look back, but Dylan had a large blind spot where this part of his work was concerned. Several of the songs had provided hits for other artists. A good number had been praised to the skies by the usual critics. Who writes ‘I Shall Be Released’ and acts as though it’s a bagatelle to be rearranged and added, almost as an afterthought, to a makeshift greatest-hits package? In April of 1975, nevertheless, Dylan was still telling Travers that the basement songs were ‘written like in five, ten minutes, you know’ while he and his musicians were ‘drying out’ in their rural retreat. No big deal, then.
If he had been paying more attention, Dylan might have thought twice about some of the choices made by Robertson. After a wave of approbation for The Basement Tapes from critics primed for genuflection – the New York Times burst a corset and called the set ‘one of the greatest albums in the history of American popular music’ – questions were asked. Why had tracks recorded primarily in basic stereo been collapsed into mono if not to give a fake ‘primitive’ patina to the sound? Who thought it clever to add overdub
s of drums, keyboards and guitar to several performances on this ‘historic document’? How come one-third of the twenty-four tracks offered were by The Band – who would receive commensurate royalties – when most buyers were interested, first and foremost, in the songwriter of the age? By 14 August, Rolling Stone’s gossip column, ‘Random Notes’, was reporting ‘a Columbia insider’ to the effect that Dylan had demanded $1 million for consenting to the album ‘because he wanted to help out The Band, who he reportedly said was [sic] having financial problems (denied by a Band spokesman)’. It was soon discovered, in any case, that half of the recordings selected by Robertson to represent his group’s contribution had either not been made in 1967, or had not originated in the improvised studios of Woodstock.
The original basement tapes ran to between 120 and 130 recordings, depending on how false starts, stoned jokes and a handful of allegedly ‘missing’ titles are calculated. These days, after sterling remastering work by the bootleggers, a compendium with 124 takes is easy enough to obtain. Yet, for the sake of The Band, Dylan’s fans were obliged in 1975 to do without ‘I Shall Be Released’, ‘The Mighty Quinn’, ‘I’m Not There’, ‘Sign on the Cross’, ‘Silent Weekend’, ‘All You Have to Do Is Dream’ and even the glorious fun, interruptions and all, of ‘I’m a Fool for You’. That was before anyone mentioned the numerous traditional songs and cover versions attempted in 1967. Dylan’s performances could have filled a couple of fine vinyl double albums easily.
Despite it all, and in defiance of the approbation granted to the work, he gave no sign that he cared. Subsequently he would fail to disguise his contempt when attempts were made to identify those covert, subterranean recordings as the founding artefacts for an ill-defined musical movement known as Americana. He would have no taste whatever for the grand cultural theories piled around the monuments raised to this phase of his career. Something about the circumstances surrounding the Woodstock recordings, or perhaps just the recordings themselves, had left him dissatisfied and defensive.
You can easily believe, of course, that the success of Blood on the Tracks could have been enough to persuade Dylan finally to countenance an album based on the tapes. The former gave plenty of cover, commercially and creatively, for the latter. Nevertheless, a simple fact is worth repeating: even in the worst of times, paralysed by writer’s block and self-doubt at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, he had refused to exploit the great songs of 1967 seriously.
His only concession had come in the autumn of 1971, in the depths of his creative drought, when Columbia had proposed the mistitled double-album stopgap More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits. Dylan had suggested that one side should contain previously unreleased material, but on this occasion the company had been oblivious to the appeal of ‘the legendary basement tapes’. He had therefore re-recorded three of the 1967 songs in an afternoon and put them on an album that did not contain too many certifiable hits. That had been the limit of his interest.
Few others would have hesitated in lean times to fortify flimsy albums with ‘Too Much of Nothing’ or ‘Goin’ to Acapulco’. Nevertheless, eight years after the fact, with Blood fast becoming established as one of his finest achievements, no one was liable to accuse Dylan of desperate measures, or of recycling his own legend. In any case, the bootleg industry and a host of cover versions had already settled the matter. The reviews for The Basement Tapes were preordained, if not already written. The only person who seemed to dissent was Bob Dylan.
According to Rob Fraboni, the studio engineer given the job of restoring the original basement recordings, the artist spent next to no time overseeing the work. It was all one to him, it seems, whether the original, spooky stereo sound captured by The Band’s Garth Hudson was rendered into that spurious ‘authentic’ mono at the behest of Robbie Robertson. Above all, Dylan appeared not to care about the songs involved. If ‘copyright issues’ between himself and his estranged manager, Albert Grossman, had ever been at stake, they were no longer relevant by the summer of 1975. Dylan simply refused to take seriously all the praise that had been showered on his compositions. Omit ‘I’m Not There’? Sanction an album that misrepresented the work done at Woodstock and the legends born of that work? As he seemed to say, ‘What of it?’ In a way, he had a point. The legal double album entitled The Basement Tapes, since greatly improved by a 2009 remastering exercise, would stand in its own right as a significant event in pop’s small universe.
There is, in any case, rubbish aplenty in the remainder of the mythologised bootleg corpus; enough of it, certainly, to rebut some of the extravagant acclaim and the socio-historical theorising. The Woodstock recordings embrace a fair number of duds and worse. There are numerous tracks to which no serious (or sober) artist would lend his name. Nevertheless, Dylan’s disdain even towards the official release and what it was supposed to represent stands as an early example of the wilful artistic self-harm that would become commonplace in the succeeding decades. But nothing in his world is forever.
After touring South America, Central America and Europe in 2012, Dylan returned to the US in the autumn of the year. At first his concert set seemed to follow the structure that had become familiar to audiences across the world throughout the year. Then, at a casino’s 10,000-seat arena in Uncasville, Connecticut, as though out of nowhere (appropriately enough), Dylan opened with one of his less-favoured songs. Why choose ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’, a 45-year-old tune from a body of work he had often disparaged? Only he could say. Before long, however, the song had become one of Dylan’s regular opening numbers. As the tour drew to a close in Brooklyn, New York, at November’s end, there it was again, a piece of the past redeemed.
CHAPTER THREE
A Wanderer by Trade
IN 1975, FOR ALL THAT THE WORLD KNEW, THE SUCCESS OF Blood on the Tracks had replenished Dylan’s self-confidence. Certain of the reviewers had hedged their bets, or grumbled vacuously over ‘production’, but half a million copies of the album had been sold within three weeks of its release. Critics changed their tunes soon enough. By the summer of the year it appeared that Dylan’s old, weird amnesia had been banished for good. Not only had he created a record to surpass Planet Waves easily, he had done something inimitably new, once again, with the songwriter’s art.
The cascading popularity of FM radio in the mid-1970s, with its so-called ‘integrity programming’ and its allegiance to ‘album-oriented rock’, was perfectly timed for the newly ‘mature’ artist. The length of a track was no impediment to the free-format AOR stations and the hippy DJs who refused to treat music as the next best thing to ambient noise. Ambitious recordings were no longer being chopped in half routinely, as had been the fate of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, for the sake of airplay. Songs from Blood on the Tracks that would never have been granted a hearing as singles by traditional stations – even ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ only made it, just, to 31 in America – were given reverent attention. Each play demonstrated that Dylan was as powerful a writer as he had ever been. Surely he no longer had reason to fear the permanent loss of his creative faculties? He would choose a strange way to prove it.
While the likes of Patti Smith and Bette Midler congregated (and squabbled) at The Other End, while Bobby Neuwirth resumed his duties as courtier and master of ceremonies, Dylan began to wonder what might be made of all the talent that was gathering around him each night. The bass player Rob Stoner came to his attention, as did a teenaged multi-instrumentalist named David Mansfield. Mick Ronson, formerly the guitarist with David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars band, came to call. Neuwirth was by now using his own club performances as de facto auditions for Dylan. The guitar player Steven Soles was invited along; the Texan who called himself T-Bone Burnett, another guitar player, arrived in town at Neuwirth’s behest for ‘more fun than the law allows’.1
Watching Ramblin’ Jack Elliott perform on the first Thursday night in July would even prompt Dylan to give the dutifully awestruck club crowd a fine performance of an entirely
new song called ‘Abandoned Love’. Known for long enough as ‘St John the Evangelist’ thanks to a verse that the writer, typically, would later discard, the remarkable piece – in this performance, at any rate – would do Ramblin’ Jack’s own set no favours. As ever, that amiable man would raise no objections. Soon enough, under the guise of guest appearances during performances by Neuwirth, the artist was performing regularly.
Patti Smith, with whom he developed an affinity and a friendship in this period, had only just begun to complete the long transition from fringe performance poet to bandleader. She had yet to release an album when Dylan saw her perform her own ‘Redondo Beach’, a soon to be famous version of Them’s ‘Gloria’, and the old Stones hit ‘Time Is On My Side’ at the end of June. He was taken with Smith in large part because of her honesty, her humour and her utter fearlessness as a performer. Though she would decline an invitation to sign up as cabin boy on Dylan’s next voyage, she was given a better insight into his thinking than most of his old New York friends and colleagues. A 1975 feature in the short-lived New Times captured a moment: ‘She and Bob Dylan sit at the top of tile stairs at a hush-hush Greenwich Village party, trading whispers like two schoolboys.’ Smith would recall the conversation. Dylan ‘had been in hiding for so long’, she would tell Barry Miles in 1977.
And he was working out this Rolling Thunder thing – he was thinking about improvisation, about extending himself language-wise. In the talks that we had there was something that he admired about me that was difficult to comprehend then, but that’s what we were talking about. That’s what we were talking about on the stairway …2
