by Bell, Ian
Shelton would assert – but only assert – that Dylan ‘tried to bring it all back home with the Rolling Thunder Revue’.10 In the biographer’s mind ‘it’ meant Greenwich Village in the early 1960s and everything the Village scene had signified to those who were involved. That might have been a part of it, judging by the cast Dylan would assemble in October. Those such as Neuwirth, Elliott and Ginsberg certainly wanted to believe that the lost hope of ‘the last movement’ (as the artist himself described it to Shelton in 1971) could be found again. A kind of Beat-folk aesthetic was no doubt involved. There was a belief, too, that Dylan was repaying old debts, personal and musical, to certain of his old Village cronies by inviting them along for the ride. One problem is that several of the suggestions intended to explain the origins of Rolling Thunder contradict several of the other suggestions. Sentiment, a desire to revisit the past, might well have touched Dylan after a few brandies during after-hours sessions at The Other End, but it does not sound like a wholly compelling motive.
He was always nostalgia’s sworn enemy and always more ambitious than that. By October, he had a movie running through his head, new songs to sing, a new band in rehearsal, Rubin Carter’s cause to further, and certain half-formed notions about performers and the nature of performance that he needed to convey. Neither a Gerde’s Folk City reunion tour nor a counter-culture revival show could have been looming large in his thoughts. Old friends and colleagues would play significant roles in the Rolling Thunder Revue, but roles they would remain, whether the players knew it or not.
Levy would meanwhile ‘direct’ the affair while attempting to bear in mind that, as ever, Dylan did not take direction. Sam Shepard would sign on to write dialogue for the proposed movie before discovering, almost instantly, that the thing was to be improvised, guided only by the star’s intuitions, thus rendering any script entirely redundant. Ginsberg, called at four in the morning after having had no contact with Dylan for four years, would be recruited as a kind of on-call bard only to find that there was no demand, not even once, for his services on the concert stage.11 Neuwirth would perform, of course, as a kind of part-time master of ceremonies and full-time court jester. In 2004, in a foreword to a reissue of Shepard’s Rolling Thunder Logbook, T-Bone Burnett would write of ‘a bus full of musicians and singers and painters hurtling through the dead of night fuelled by White Russians and other things, making a movie, writing songs, and playing’ – at least when they got it right, as the guitarist conceded – ‘some of the most incendiary, intense and inspired rock ’n’ roll, before or since’.12 That was just one side of the story.
As one of the core group of musicians who did the real work on stages that could sometimes be crowded with upwards of 30 people, Burnett knew the whole tale as well as anyone. Rolling Thunder shows were not brief affairs. The ten-piece band that came to be known, whimsically, as Guam – with Neuwirth included in their number for no obvious reason – could be called upon to play for the best part of five hours during the two-act concerts. Musicians aside, the retinue also included the usual stage, sound and lighting people, road managers, accountants, assistants of various sorts, and – lest any of the artistes grew too starry-eyed about their bohemian journey into the heart of authentic America – an eight-strong platoon of security personnel. In addition to Dylan, Guam, Jacques Levy, Scarlet Rivera, Ginsberg, Jack Elliott and a series of guest performers, Les Kokay has put names to 75 people who were entitled to claim Rolling Thunder service medals.13 Whatever the tales told about his gypsy caravan, the artist was not travelling light.
Among the multitude would be two entire film crews engaged for the task of attempting to capture the contents of Dylan’s mind on celluloid. One would be led by Howard Alk, the cinematographer who had been involved intermittently in the editing of Eat the Document, the artist’s botched attempt to make sense of a mass of documentary footage from the 1966 world tour. Charged with supplementing – or surpassing – Alk’s efforts with the second crew was Mel Howard, later to be given credit as producer of the finished (more or less) film that Dylan would call Renaldo and Clara. Shooting began ‘spontaneously’ before the troupe had even left New York.
Lou Kemp, Dylan’s boyhood friend from Camp Herzl, the Zionist summer school in the Wisconsin woods, was meanwhile handed the mind-boggling task of getting this entire ragtag army on the road and delivering it to its selected destinations, if possible in absolute secrecy. The star, for one example, would be booked into hotels under the name Phil Bender. Kemp had tagged along as a companion, and sometimes as Dylan’s protector, on parts of Tour ’74. Rolling Thunder, in which his authority as designated tour manager became both official and onerous, was a very different kind of job. Though Kemp shared his role as ‘co-captain’ with the experienced promoter and technical director Barry Imhoff, it was a notable change of pace from the old pal’s day job running the family fish-shipping business. Or perhaps not.
Dylan had thrown around invitations to this adventure without appearing to think twice about the consequences. On the other hand, he seemed to know exactly what he wanted from his revue. Whatever Neuwirth or anyone else had to say about old times and collective endeavours, it was his show. Dylan could have taken to the road with the finest musicians money could lease or buy. By the middle of the 1970s, as the first chaotic Desire sessions had demonstrated, there was no shortage of people prepared to lend their talents to his cause. A few, such as Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen, would have the self-possession and the common sense to keep Rolling Thunder at arm’s length, but they were the exceptions. Most others flocked to Dylan whenever he said the word. He had given the impression, nevertheless – what with picking up violin players in the street – that he was selecting his confederates according to whim. Some of those who joined him on the tour were big names with big reputations. Others, like Scarlet Rivera, were complete unknowns before they stumbled into Dylan. Clearly, it all made sense to him. Or rather, as so often before, he would make sense of it in due course, whatever it amounted to.
For all that, Rolling Thunder’s reputation as one of Dylan’s boldest and most satisfying ventures into public performance was earned. The revue might have been chaotic. It might have misfired more than once. It might have seemed like self-indulgence, a caprice, a superstar’s flight into the fantasy of artistic liberation, a project dependent on big money that seemed to scorn the big-money amorality of the entertainment business while – let’s not forget – pushing still another album. Often enough, nevertheless, it worked.
In its second incarnation in 1976, Rolling Thunder would end dismally, in (at best) a kind of pyrrhic victory for the artist’s thrawn determination. It would lead Dylan nowhere in particular as a writer. It would count, in that regard, as a failed experiment. That might be one reason why the star kept the work achieved in the late autumn and early winter from the great mass of his audience until 2002, when at last he sanctioned The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue. Even that fine album emerged as little better than a sampler, despite its extravagant title, excluding as it did most of the other acts who were reckoned to be integral to the touring shows. Only three duets with Joan Baez made it to the official release.
On the other hand, you could bear in mind that Dylan made no effort whatever to repeat this ‘legendary’ exercise, as though to assert that if lightning won’t strike twice, thunder cannot follow. When had he ever repeated himself? Before the twenty-first century, when the difference between the groove of touring and a well-worn rut became hard to discern, Dylan had no patience whatever for the idea that he might, now and then, retrace his steps. The revue meant a lot to him while it was happening; when it was gone, it was gone. Yet if performance-in-the-moment truly counts as one large part of his art, this version of willed amnesia is of no small importance.
Sometimes, when by some combination of luck, alchemy and temperament it worked, Rolling Thunder was glorious. The glory rested, furthermore, on an artistic strategy that
would become profoundly important in Dylan’s career. The stage became the place where he would reinterpret and reimagine his songs, musically and lyrically. Sometimes the transformations were drastic indeed. That, above everything else, would become the lasting point of the touring revue. In effect, Dylan rewrote himself. In the process, he found one alternative to the wearisome, dispiriting process of making records. He had chewed on the idea before, but in 1975 he swallowed it whole. A song need not be, could not be, a single, immutable thing.
*
Dylan had kept certain of the Desire musicians hanging around after the last of the recording sessions. He had also taken up residence at the Gramercy Park Hotel on Lexington Avenue and begun to welcome others to this new base of operations. According to Don DeVito, Columbia’s representative at the tapings, the artist had been dropping hints since mid-July that he had concerts in mind.14 Nevertheless, the band members who joined him for a fortnight’s rehearsals in New York in mid-October – very ragged rehearsals they were, too – reportedly had no inkling that they were preparing to hit the road. They certainly had no idea about the sort of trip Dylan had in mind. The procession of famous names who began to appear at the rented studio space might have counted as a clue, you would think, but since Dylan was unforthcoming the musicians, it seems, did not enquire further. Instead, if the Renaldo and Clara soundtrack and bootleg recordings of their ramshackle efforts are anything to go by – why mere rehearsals were taped at all is still a mystery – they thrashed away at song after song in an effort to satisfy their enigmatic boss.
Among the celebrity faces materialising in Midtown Manhattan was one who would be given a co-star’s co-equal billing in Dylan’s cherished film project, yet later describe it as ‘monumentally silly’, a series of ‘mind movies’ enacting ‘whatever dream [he] had had in the night’. That winter, for the benefit of the journalist Nat Hentoff, she would dismiss the artist’s venture into art cinema as ‘a giant mess of a home movie’.15 A lot of sober American critics – the Europeans were more forgiving – would soon enough concur with her judgement of the near-four-hour piece Dylan would call Renaldo and Clara. It left a question unanswered, however. So what was Joan Baez doing in the film, and on the tour, a long decade after being discarded with brutal finality by the artist with whom she had once discussed marriage and children?
We have her word for that last part. By all accounts, nevertheless, the once and future Queen of Folk came straight from the airport to a party at Gerde’s before joining rehearsals. Baez, for one, was under no possible illusions about the nature of the job on offer. Attempting to rebuild her finances that year, she had been about to embark on a tour of her own when the message from her old lover came. Some skirmishing had followed – no one ever doubted her pride – but in the end she had taken the deal. Quoted by Hentoff in his Rolling Stone piece, Baez would explain that she had ‘told the people dealing with the money that although it seemed like fun, they’d have to make it worth my while to change my plans’. Thanks to Dylan, the revue of course had ‘integrity’, she would tell the writer. Nevertheless, her lawyers had worked out a contract, ‘a very detailed contract’.
Baez was not a special case. Roger McGuinn had also postponed a tour at Dylan’s behest that autumn. The singer who owed one large part of his career to ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ – and another part to Jacques Levy, his erstwhile co-writer on ‘Chestnut Mare’ – was a sincere enthusiast for Rolling Thunder, as he would remain. Yet, as the former Byrd would explain to the writer Sid Griffin, he had refused Dylan’s offer and then, after a change of heart, had instructed his agent to have his own shows called off. As McGuinn would then put it: ‘They arranged to do that and worked out a deal where I got a fee for the whole tour … But let me tell you, this was not about the money!’16
No doubt that was true for one and all. Admiration for Dylan was not to be circumscribed by tawdry concerns. On the other hand, these were professional musicians who did not expect to be asked to donate their talents for free for weeks on end, irrespective of anyone’s breezy idealism, the media’s myths, or the naivety of fans. Idealism, even the stars’ own idealism, was not a professional imperative. You still have to wonder, nevertheless, why Baez came running for the sake of an artist who had cast her aside, one who had not only broken her heart but left her disillusioned in 1965. The popular explanation is that somehow she was still in love with Dylan and still capable of believing that the old ‘integrity’ could flow through him. She was not so trusting, however, that she would neglect the small print of her very detailed contract.
Things were more complicated than they seemed. One suggestion made by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s biographer is that the original Dylan-Neuwirth plan to ‘just get a bus and travel around and sing’, first proposed on 3 July, was conceived as a small and simple affair.17 As Elliott heard it, the trip would be just the three of them – and Joan Baez. In this account, she had been central to the madcap scheme from the start. So had Dylan simply taken her consent for granted, or was Rolling Thunder created from the outset around the otherwise astonishing assumption that he and she could work together again, if not in harmony – they never quite managed that – but in some rediscovered spirit of mutual tolerance?
Perhaps Baez sensed an opportunity of her own at a time when, by her confession, she was trying to restore her public profile. Perhaps, just as a decade before, there was a mutual benefit to be had from the adventure. Why did he invite her, after all, given their shared history? One answer seems simple enough. ‘Dylan and Baez Together Again’: that headline would certainly sell some tickets for the begetter of the Rolling Thunder Revue among fans eager for another taste of the good old ’60s days. It would not do his nominated co-star any harm either, of course.
In 1987, in the first of her autobiographies, Baez would describe one of the little Renaldo and Clara vignettes she found so risible.18 In this scene, wearing a faded satin dress borrowed from ‘an old gypsy lady’ and expected to produce dialogue out of thin air, she would ask and answer her own questions. Such as: why had Dylan never told her about Sara? Such as: what would have happened if she and the artist had married ‘way back then’? Her answer: the relationship would have failed because she was ‘too political’ and because he lied ‘too much’. In Baez’s recollection, Dylan said nothing at all during this excruciating impromptu scene, certainly not while the cameras were running. Improvisation, oddly enough, was not his forte, in her opinion. In point of fact, he would reply – diffidently, it’s true – that he had married the woman he loved. On a cold, grey November day he would stand at the bar in the rural restaurant, one of Arlo Guthrie’s haunts, smiling fixedly but ‘embarrassed’, digesting news that was, Baez would write, no news at all.
The scene at Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge – in western Massachusetts, not in upstate New York, as Baez seemed to believe – would not be the main event of the day for most of those present. A lot of eating, drinking and off-the-wall singing would go on while Ginsberg wandered around reading Moby-Dick in memory of Herman Melville’s recent departure from the area. By then the troupe would have played two shows at the Springfield Civic Center, only the fifth stop on the tour. In the restaurant in the little town of Becket, in Berkshire County, Mama Frasca would be far more interested in her female guest than in Dylan. After chicken, spaghetti, liqueurs and some ad hoc filming, Guthrie would play old rock and roll songs on the house piano.19 It would make for a convivial day. Just like the artist, however, Baez would stand at the centre of her own small, private drama on the Rolling Thunder tour.
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In Manhattan, while Dylan and Baez rehearsed, Larry Sloman noticed a couple of small details. They did not to strike the reporter as particularly odd. In fact, they involved two tiny gestures recorded by the writer as though they were only to be expected and somehow only fitting. In the middle of the 1970s, the bastard genre called rock journalism was still struggling to shed its deference towards the demigod geniuses of pop music. (Sl
oman’s own book would aid the process greatly, ironically enough.) What the writer saw was Dylan in need of a cigarette and a cigarette appearing instantly, as if by unspoken command. Earlier, when the artist had shown symptoms of thirst, he had simply pointed, without a word, at a container of fruit juice. Sloman could perhaps have mentioned a line from a song that ought to have appeared on Blonde on Blonde in 1966, but inspiration passed him by. The line goes: ‘Yes, you, you just sit around and ask for ashtrays, can’t you reach?’
Dylan was at the point in his life when the idea of fetching his own cigarette no longer occurred to him. The notion that he should even have to ask for a drink had become strange. In October of 1975, he was just 34, still a young man, but he had been one of the bigger stars for better than a decade, for most of his adult life. This made him a perfectly normal member of the pop industry’s elect, but strange, perfectly so, to almost everyone else on the planet. Unlike most of the rock aristocracy, however, Dylan was proposing to venture out on the road amid the palpable fiction of a communal, cooperative enterprise. He was about to present himself, albeit as the main event, as one of a company of touring players.
There was a creative need behind his desire, but the desire involved an impossibility. It also involved the weird, evolving phenomenon the twenty-first century would know simply by the shorthand ‘celebrity’. Here was one artist beloved by many people who could never be one of them. Here was one, they said, who ‘spoke’ to them, but he could no longer speak, not in any simple, unmediated fashion, to a single one among them. For a poet, it was a bizarre predicament. Still some wonder why he donned masks or blanked out his face with deathly white makeup on the Rolling Thunder tour. Like the blank-eyed self-effacing painting of himself he had made for the cover of Self Portrait, it was one way, perhaps the only way, to say, ‘Listen to the music.’
