Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan

by Bell, Ian

  It didn’t solve the riddle. The fact of Bob Dylan could no longer be undone. The artist would toy with an impossibility during the Rolling Thunder Revue while insisting on the centrality, in all things, of the intimidating name on the marquee. He would play around, indeed, with Arthur Rimbaud’s declaration, ‘I is another,’ donning his masks and his whiteface as though to disown each and every one of his colliding multiple identities while insisting on the words he sang in Bob Dylan’s name. This time, sometimes, he would manage the feat triumphantly. But it would certainly be the last time.

  *

  One week before the expeditionary force set off, a party was held at Gerde’s Folk City in honour of Mike Porco, the restaurateur turned club owner who had nurtured the young Dylan – though at no great financial cost – and helped him to secure his cabaret card back in the grubby, glorious days of 1961. Porco would sell Folk City before long, but as October drew to a close in 1975 he was delighted to have the Rolling Thunder crew join him for his 61st birthday celebrations. Fond memories could be rekindled; thoughts of the good old days, thoughts held in some quarters to be among the revue’s motive forces, could be given another airing. Honour could be done to Porco and to the past.

  It didn’t quite turn out that way. Among those present, the spectre at the feast, was the ruin of the handsome man who had once been Phil Ochs. That October, so lost to unquenchable alcoholism as to be delusive and dangerous – psychotic, in the usual parlance – he had less than six months left before suicide became an invitation impossible to refuse. Once he had championed Dylan only to be spurned and mocked – yet sometimes praised beyond the skies – in return. Ochs, still on occasion presenting himself as a ‘topical singer’, was another kind of remnant of a shared past. In 1975, he was a reminder that not all memories were golden, that not everyone from the old Village had survived intact, if they had survived at all.

  By October, Ochs had been banned once and for all from The Other End. Sometimes, without any of Rimbaud’s fancy poetic conceits, he believed himself to be another person entirely, a character by the name of John Butler Train. This individual, he would insist, had murdered the ‘real’ Phil Ochs. He began to carry weapons, hammers or knives, habitually. He was near to destitution and too often violent. Some old friends were in genuine fear of this character. That night at Gerde’s, wearing Dylan’s hat, desperate for attention and desperate to be added to the list of former comrades joining the Rolling Thunder Revue, Ochs turned in a shambolic performance that was, reportedly, by turns sad, brave and profoundly disturbing. In the footage that would appear in Dylan’s film Renaldo and Clara, capturing the final images of Ochs as he prepared to take the stage, he looked like the very sick man he was. There was no chance whatever of his being allowed to enlist with the troupe. The artist’s whims, if whims they were, did not test each and every boundary of sympathy, or of common sense.

  He had been an obsession for Ochs from start to finish. In the beginning, Phil had simply exulted ceaselessly, joyfully, over Dylan’s talent. The Highway 61 Revisited album had caused this old-style singing activist to laugh in sheer delight at its daring. Ochs had defended Dylan resolutely against the obtuse Stalinist folk-left crowd after the great Newport ’65 ‘betrayal’. Amid all the doctrinal hair-splitting over electricity and popularity he had been eloquent and loyal. For thanks, the artist had dismissed this best of fans as a mere ‘journalist’, booting him out of a limousine for the crime of failing to praise an inferior pop single sufficiently. Ochs, always painfully sincere and desperate for friendship, could bring out the cruelty in Dylan for reasons the former never understood and the latter never bothered to explain.

  Later, as incessant boozing turned every thought into a toxic mash, Phil would talk about Bobby endlessly, but the talk could alternate without warning between the old admiration and a vicious, drunken hatred. A Rolling Stone article at the end of August, a piece devoted entirely to Dylan’s return to the Village, had described the first performance of ‘Abandoned Love’ on 3 July. Almost in passing, the reporter had noted: ‘A staggeringly drunk Phil Ochs stopped by and yelled at Dylan for a few moments. Dylan didn’t seem to mind.’20 The incident could probably stand as a metaphor, if one were needed, for the artist’s relationship with a lot of people, fixated fans above all. He didn’t make Phil Ochs crazy, but his music and the fact of his genius didn’t help. Love and maddened anger were never too far apart.21

  As ever, Dylan travelled on. One last stab at rehearsals would be attempted on Cape Cod, during a few days spent at a plush, secluded place called the Sea Crest Beach Motel in the northern end of the Massachusetts town of Falmouth. It was about a 30-minute drive away from the first concert venue. Incongruously, a fund-raising mah-jong tournament involving 165 little old ladies – or ‘nice Jewish mommas’, as Sloman would call them – was in full swing when the revue descended on the place. One evening, ready or not, the prim tile-tossers were treated to a few numbers by Rolling Thunder members, for the benefit of the cameras, and to the otherwise surreal spectacle of ‘one of America’s foremost poets, Mr Allen Ginsberg’ reading from Kaddish, his long and passionate elegy – ‘Proem, Narrative, Hymmnn [sic], Lament, Litany and Fugue’ – for his own Jewish mother.

  In her memoir, Baez would remember the mah-jong but place the event in Portland, Maine. ‘They didn’t know how to respond to this world-famous literary figure with the long beard,’ Baez would write, ‘who started out mildly enough but ended up shouting about bearded vaginas, his eyes growing round and wild behind his glasses.’22 Wild, perhaps, but whatever Baez heard that night her brief sketch was not entirely fair to Kaddish, or indeed to the Jewish women in the audience. The great poem is visceral, even gruelling, but deeply felt and, for some people, intensely moving.

  At the motel, Dylan looked on silently as the cameras rolled and these elderly Jewish women, so much like his own mother Beatty Zimmerman, listened to the threnody for poor, crazed Naomi Ginsberg. As his biographer would write, ‘It was as if Allen was finally reading it to Naomi herself.’ No one doubted that the audience found the performance hard going, but Sam Shepard, for one, would remember the poet receiving a burst of applause at its end. Baez, who came on next to leave the women ‘charmed’ with the tedious, venerable ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, must have forgotten the detail.23

  *

  The Rolling Thunder Revue opened on 30 October in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in one of those little venues that were supposed to be the concert party’s reason to exist. The War Memorial Auditorium, seating perhaps 1,800 with the addition of temporary seating, was hardly a club, but it made an opening statement – the one that would count – about Rolling Thunder’s intended ethos. The town itself, where zealous if seasick Pilgrims had anchored their Mayflower in 1620, meanwhile provided a symbolic touch as America prepared for its 200th birthday. A decade before, Dylan had performed his ‘115th Dream’ on the Bringing It All Back Home album as a comedy wandering sailor fresh off the famous boat. One couplet contained a joke that had faded somewhat, for the writer at least, in the intervening years: ‘I said, “You know, they refused Jesus, too” / He said, “You’re not Him.”’

  The first of the Plymouth shows was sold out, as was the second. On Halloween, the second night, he had his plastic Bob Dylan mask on, masquerading, but the disguise was a weird affair. All agree that the thing was transparent and seemingly moulded to his face. Sloman – who was present for most of the tour before getting himself fired – would make mention of sequins. In other words, you could see through this mask, it took the shape of ‘Bob Dylan’, but it was camouflage. Whatever the gesture was intended to convey, it was not conducive to the playing of a harmonica. On each of the occasions Dylan appeared in his plastic contraption he was soon forced to rip it off – and perhaps that was the whole point – in order to make music.

  The shows had a shape and a structure to which they would more or less adhere for the remainder of the year. That much was Levy’s doing. Lighting c
ues, an intermission, support acts, curtains opening and closing, the slow revealing of the star as he emerged from the darkness: these were theatrical devices, simple as vaudeville, but powerful. Nevertheless, ‘theatrical’ was hardly a novelty in rock music by the middle of the 1970s; if anything, it was becoming the kind of curse that only punk’s avenging angels could lift. Exactly a year before Dylan’s opening in Plymouth, David Bowie had been in the middle of an extravagant seven-night run at New York’s Radio City Musical Hall during his Diamond Dogs tour. The people wanted ‘theatrical’? The angular Englishman had delivered it by the gross ton. On his vast stage Bowie had contrived a cityscape complete with skyscrapers, a movable catwalk, a giant hand, numerous dancers, a cherrypicker crane to raise the star on high, even some music: catching an audience’s attention no longer came cheap. Dylan and Levy were seeking something that was the opposite of grandiose, street theatre in contrast to the grand rock operatics of Bowie, but they were at one with the times. A single performer with just a guitar and a harmonica would have failed those new Dylan-Levy songs. That was a matter of opinion, of course.

  The pattern of the first shows, the pattern that would remain, can be described easily enough. Guam would open with perhaps half a dozen non-Dylan songs amid Neuwirth’s banter. Ronee Blakley, the artist and singer who had spent part of the previous summer starring in Robert Altman’s Nashville – she was another who had cancelled a tour for Dylan’s sake after being noticed at The Other End – would generally take a solo spot or two. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott would then perform a short set, in the early days of the tour with only his own guitar for accompaniment, before stepping aside, without preamble or introductions, as the artist strode from the gloom of the wings to deliver a pointed ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ with Neuwirth vocalising at his side. On the first night in Plymouth, by Sloman’s account, this ‘ironic song about the limitations on artistic achievement’ became a ‘heraldic [sic] triumph’.24

  Got to hurry on back to my hotel room

  Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece

  She promised that she’d be right there with me

  When I paint my masterpiece

  Most who saw the shows have maintained down the years that even multiple bootlegs (Dylan’s crew taped everything), footage from Renaldo and Clara and the 2002 album Bob Dylan Live 1975 do not give an adequate impression of the Rolling Thunder Revue. On-the-spot journalists such as Sloman tended, as reviewers do, to piece together their notes from phrases like ‘and the crowd goes wild’. As with a lot of Dylan’s concert work, a determined effort of deduction, grasping at echoes and old shadows, nevertheless allows the semi-educated belief that, some of the time, something special was going on. Crudely, the artist did not disappoint. Often enough, he did a lot more, singing with a sureness and commitment that revealed the strained, stentorian efforts of Tour ’74 for the contrivances they were, a commitment that could often dispel any doubts over the Desire material. Dylan’s fearlessness in reworking his own songs, even the works treated as holy relics by too many fans, was meanwhile remarkable in itself. Live 1975 is proof enough that, at their best, the Rolling Thunder ensemble justified all the glowing reports.

  Dylan would perform perhaps five numbers with Guam as his first offering. Then the yellow stage curtain, a curious affair designed to mimic a proscenium arch, emblazoned above with the name of the show and decorated below with joke images of jugglers, strongmen and gymnasts, would fall: intermission. The homage to Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis was plain enough to anyone who knew the picture. Then, just before the curtain rose again, two familiar but invisible singers could be heard. As the tab went slowly upwards, ‘an amazing sight’ was revealed: Dylan and Baez together again. Here was Jacques Levy’s cherished coup de théâtre, corny as hell but undoubtedly effective. ‘Close your eyes and it could have been Newport in 1963,’ said a certain dazzled journalist.25 That was, no doubt, the general idea.

  Invariably, the pair would commence their evening’s collaboration with ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’, or with ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. The degree of calculation was self-evident, though few in the audiences cared. Dylan was employing Baez to evoke memories. He might have been averse to nostalgia, but he was not afraid to risk the disease for the sake of the show. After four or five songs together, he would leave Baez to continue with the help of Guam and sometimes with the aid of Roger McGuinn. Often, as though in a display of pride, she would perform her own ‘Diamonds & Rust’, a wistful song (one of her few compositions) about that long-gone affair with the star of the show. McGuinn would then offer a song or two: ‘Chestnut Mare’ or ‘Eight Miles High’, another big hit for the Byrds. Finally, Dylan would return for a half a dozen more songs, never forgetting ‘Hurricane’, before proceedings were brought to a close, on almost every occasion, with ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ and a rendition of Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’. There were no encores.

  Things would change as various celebrity guests joined the tour for one night or more, but not by much. After the first shows had granted the audience close to five hours of music-as-theatre in exchange for their $7.50 tickets, Levy managed to tighten things up a little. Nevertheless, Rolling Thunder was always a long night. Dylan’s own, unimpeded performances might embrace no more than a dozen songs and last not much more than an hour in total, sometimes to the annoyance of paying hecklers who had not come to see Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, McGuinn or Ronee Blakley, but that was the deal. Rolling Thunder was a revue. It said so on the last-minute posters that appeared just before tickets were briefly put on sale by hall managers sworn to secrecy – any breach would result in cancellation, or so ran the promoters’ threat – weeks before. Audiences saw and heard what Dylan wanted them to see and hear, even if that meant listening to Bobby Neuwirth or Mick Ronson’s glam-rock guitar. Anyone whose patience wore thin could always spend their time wondering what the artist meant by it all.

  He gave them plenty to ponder and digest in Rolling Thunder’s first phase. Desire had not yet been released, after all. Thanks to Columbia’s twitchy lawyers, the final version of ‘Hurricane’ had been recorded only six days before the revue’s opening night. It would not be in the stores until November, when the tour was deep in chilly New England. Around half a dozen of the pieces Dylan performed in the concerts would be entirely new to audiences who tended to learn every syllable of his work by heart. It seemed inescapably obvious, too, that he was amending the style of his old songs to suit both his new band and his new material. Revision, as in rethinking and rewriting, had become the order of the day. For Dylan, Rolling Thunder was still another new beginning. Blood on the Tracks, whose songs were given only minimal exposure on the tour, was already far behind him.

  Reviews were pretty good; some were very good indeed. Though Lou Kemp tried to keep most of the reporters at bay – and seemed to enjoy giving Sloman a tough time – any Dylan tour was a media event. The idea that he, Neuwirth, Elliott and Baez could ever have gone rolling around the back roads of America like merry prankster troubadours untroubled by baggage of any description had always been a nonsense. Dylan and the Rolling Thunder troupe could not even alight on small towns like Plymouth, Durham in New Hampshire, or Augusta in Maine without causing a fuss. In fact, precisely because such places never saw an authentic superstar the fuss became inevitable. Legends, as someone probably said, are not born but made. Spontaneity can take a lot of planning.

  Dylan, though, was as disloyal as ever in his performances to any key in which any given song might once have been recorded. Sometimes – and this is apparent on bootleg recordings – the key would change from night to night. Sometimes it could change in the middle of a song. Tempo could also seem entirely arbitrary, a matter of the artist’s intuition or mood. It is a tribute to the Guam musicians that they learned an essential thing about Dylan as a performer: he did what felt right, in the moment. By common consent a weight of responsibility therefore fell on Rob Stoner,
the bass player, to watch the maestro’s every muscle, anticipate the impending changes if he could, and guide his colleagues. The artist’s instincts became the band’s instructions. They could not rely on what they had learned or thought they knew about a piece of music. It was unprofessional behaviour on Dylan’s part, in the usual sense, but it was art. Most of the time.

  Here began the generation-long audience game of spot-that-tune. Writing of the very first show, for example, Sloman would describe a rendition of ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ – entirely correctly, if recordings of the Halloween concert and subsequent tapes are a guide – as ‘almost bossa nova’. Live 1975 opens with an account of ‘Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You’, to take another example, in which every word of the Nashville Skyline original save the chorus has been rewritten, while a wistful melody has been pummelled into the shape of a rock song. ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ meanwhile became the unlikeliest of candidates – though the transformation was unimpeachable – for retooling as a ferocious, straightforward piece of rock and roll. Even the newer pieces from Desire were not immune to this seemingly arbitrary treatment. In fact, they seemed to be prime candidates for refurbishment only weeks after they had been recorded, as though Dylan was already bored with their musical settings, or – more likely – already dissatisfied with what had been managed in the studio.

  So it was that in 1975 yet another theory about the artist began to emerge. This one held that he did not mess around with favourite songs just to keep himself awake. Instead, he was creating art anew while the audience looked on. After the so-called Never-Ending Tour was inaugurated in June of 1988 and began to become a fixture in the lives of Dylan’s most devoted fans, the theory grew steadily more elaborate. The artist, so we heard, was asserting that a song only truly exists in performance. He was reminding us that no song – no piece of art? – is ever complete in any real sense. Dylan was demonstrating that concerts and concert tours were creative works in their own right. ‘Bob Dylan’ and what he was presumed to intend were parts – this kind of chatter caught on quick – of a construct.