Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  The curtain was prominently in place onstage after the break; from behind it came guitar-strumming sounds, and the curtain slowly rose to reveal Dylan and Joan Baez singing “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Dylan was wearing his first-half sombrero gear, including a vest and flowing scarf; Baez, dressed in what looked like gigantically flared blue bell bottoms, had her trademark long hair cropped to her shoulders; and so the duo weren’t the same as in 1964, and yet they were, at least aurally—a numinous throwback to an earlier, more earnest time. “Thank you,” Dylan replied to the applause; then he called out, “Bob Dylan and Joan Baez”—announcing himself in the third person, as if we had just seen the return of a beloved but bygone act, as if the Bob Dylan doing the talking were not the same person who had just performed. He was playing around with his persona again, and hers, and he was mixing up the past with the present.

  Dylan and Baez—or was it “Dylan and Baez”?—sang four more numbers, none of them familiar from their old repertoire together: Merle Travis’s mining song from the mid-1940s “Dark as a Dungeon”; a new, bouncy arrangement of “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” from John Wesley Harding (which Dylan dedicated to the people of Lowell, Massachusetts); Johnny Ace’s 1950s rhythm-and-blues ballad hit “Never Let Me Go”; and “I Shall Be Released,” dedicated to Richard Manuel, and accompanied by the backup band. The little duet concert within the revue had wafted back and forth from country music from before the folk revival to reworked Dylan compositions from his not-so-quiet years of retreat in Woodstock, leavened by a scoop of early soul. In its own way, the dreamlike set encapsulated—musically, visually, and spiritually—how Dylan had pulled together the circus that he had forecast, vaguely, to Roger McGuinn.8

  “Roger!” Dylan shouted, spilling drinks all over the table as he sprang up to embrace his friend. “Where you been, man, we been waiting for you all night.”

  It was after 2:00 a.m., sometime in late October 1975. McGuinn had been in Gerde’s Folk City before he went down to Chinatown for a meal with his band’s guitarist, his road manager, and the writer Larry Sloman, from whose book about the Rolling Thunder Revue this story comes. When they had finished eating, Sloman persuaded McGuinn not to return to his hotel but to stop for a nightcap at the old Bitter End on Bleecker Street (which had been closed and reopened as the Other End), where McGuinn had played years earlier as an accompanist for the clean-cut Chad Mitchell Trio. “C’mon Roger,” Sloman importuned, “I hear Dylan just got into town and even if he’s not there I’m sure Levy’ll be there,” meaning Jacques Levy, the Off-Broadway director who had cowritten McGuinn’s best-known post-Byrds number, “Chestnut Mare.” The night finally ended at four in the morning, in the Kettle of Fish bar, with Dylan, animated, very much the center of action and attention, talking about his new cause, which was to win freedom for the imprisoned prizefighter Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. He mused about old friends and rivals like Phil Ochs and talked about his impending and practically impromptu tour. He offhandedly invited McGuinn and Sloman to join the troupe as, respectively, performer and scribe.

  Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in the Rolling Thunder Revue, performing in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 13, 1975. (photo credit 5.7)

  The largely—though not completely—haphazard recruitment for the tour matched Dylan’s improvisational instincts, but it was also the product of Dylan’s return to a familiar staging ground, safe and surrounded by new friends and old. As the summer began, the Village was fairly desolate: New York’s fiscal woes had become critical, and the old downtown coffeehouse scene had long since succumbed to an influx of head shops, fast-food joints, and schlocky “hippie” clothing stores. Things began happening, quietly, once Dylan started popping up late in June. Just before the Fourth of July weekend, he joined Ramblin’ Jack Elliott onstage at the Other End and played several numbers, including the debut of a new song, “Abandoned Love”; later in the summer, he recorded a backing harmonica track for a studio album by David Blue. Word got around that Dylan was back in town when he wasn’t holed up out on Long Island with Jacques Levy, working on a new batch of songs; then, in late July, Dylan recorded the songs at the Columbia studio in midtown with an ever-changing pickup band (which included, at one session, both Eric Clapton and Emmylou Harris). Old-timers as well as denizens of the rising punk rock scene along the Bowery—including the new sensation, Patti Smith—played at and frequented the remaining folkie outposts, Gerde’s, the Other End, and the Kettle of Fish.

  The culmination came on October 22, when Dylan and friends gathered for an appearance by David Blue at the Other End, followed the night after by an invitation-only surprise birthday party for Gerde’s owner, Mike Porco, which Sloman’s book describes well. The very next day, Dylan finished up work on the new album, Desire, and on October 30, after only a couple of days’ worth of spur-of-the-moment rehearsing, the Rolling Thunder Revue opened in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Maybe, it occurred to me much later, that mask of Dylan’s had something to do with Halloween.

  Although the roster was not exactly a “come one, come all” affair, it amply reflected Dylan’s past. From the old Village scene, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (Woody Guthrie’s living alter ego) and Bob Neuwirth (Dylan’s sharp-tongued sidekick from the mid 1960s who had reestablished himself, in New York, as one of Dylan’s alter egos) made the cut; bloated, hollow-eyed Phil Ochs (who would commit suicide five months later) and a disappointed Eric Andersen did not. Dylan deepened the tour’s 1960s connection by inviting Joan Baez, who, after citing her own schedule, signed on. Roger McGuinn was another link, as was the lesser-known David Blue (who would not actually perform onstage), as were Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky (who were supposed to be, respectively, the tour’s bard and the chief baggage handler), as was the Beat-circle poet Anne Waldman. Going back a bit further was the rock and roller Ronnie Hawkins, whose former accompanists the Hawks, later the Band, had been Dylan’s steady backup musicians until now.

  Yet Dylan had no intention of touring in an oldies show. Patti Smith amiably turned him down, but one of her old boyfriends, the up-and-coming playwright Sam Shepard, signed on, ostensibly to help write the screenplay for a movie Dylan hoped to make out of the show. Totally out of the blue, Dylan also hired Mick Ronson, lately the lead guitarist in David Bowie’s glitter band, the Spiders from Mars. From the Desire sessions band, he recruited the bassist and bandleader Rob Stoner (lately a member of the band Jake and the Family Jewels, performing as Raquin Rob Rothstein), the drummer Howie Wyeth (a nephew of the painter Andrew Wyeth), and the violinist Scarlet Rivera, whom Dylan had spied walking down Second Avenue, brought in for an audition, and hired on the spot. When Emmylou Harris dropped off the scene, Dylan signed up Ronee Blakley, a singer best known for her role in Robert Altman’s recently released film, Nashville, for which she would win an Oscar nomination, and whom Dylan met at the David Blue show at the Other End barely a week before the tour began. The Fort Worth–raised guitarist T Bone Burnett, the multi-instrumentalist David Mansfield (not yet twenty and most recently a member of a band called Quacky Duck and His Barnyard Friends), and the percussionist Luther Rix (who had played congas on “Hurricane” and earlier recorded as a sideman with, among others, Bette Midler) filled out the band, although space on the bill was set aside for other performers to join once the tour had picked up steam.

  There was never any question who the star was, but Baez (singing solo as well as in duets with Dylan), Elliott, McGuinn, Blakley, Neuwirth, and (during her brief stints on the tour) Joni Mitchell all got their individual turns. Ginsberg was supposed to recite poetry, but almost all of these appearances were cut; Ginsberg did appear onstage, though, for what became the revue’s nightly closing number, “This Land Is Your Land.” The rest of the musically motley congregation took the band name Guam, which, depending on which source you believe, signified either a place that none of the band members had ever visited or the island from which U.S. bombers had taken off on their first set of runs over Vietnam in 1965, und
er the official military name Operation Rolling Thunder.

  Another odd refraction—and updating—of old times was Dylan’s championing of the ex-middleweight Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. After never quite living up to his enormous promise in the ring, Carter had been convicted of first-degree murder in connection with a robbery-related shoot-out that killed three people at a bar and grill in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1966.* Carter insisted that he had been framed, singled out because of what he called his staunch advocacy of civil rights and criticism of police brutality; the police and prosecution contended that he had been part of a revenge killing following the murder by a white man of a black tavern owner in his own Paterson establishment a few hours earlier. In 1974 Carter published his side of the story as a book, The 16th Round, and sent a copy to Dylan. The singer took the book with him to France, found the story compelling, visited Carter in Rahway State Prison after he returned to the States, and rallied to the former boxer’s defense.

  Two years before the slaying in Paterson, Dylan was singing in concert about professional boxing as cruel, exploitative, and immoral, in one of his early songs of protest, “Who Killed Davey Moore?”:

  “Not me,” says the man whose fists

  Laid him low in a cloud of mist,

  Who came here from Cuba’s door

  Where boxing ain’t allowed no more.

  “I hit him, yes, it’s true,

  But that’s what I am paid to do.

  Don’t say ‘murder,’ don’t say ‘kill.’

  It was destiny, it was God’s will.”

  Now Dylan was sticking up for a fighter who, he would later write, “could take a man out with just one punch,” but who truly fought just to make money and then be on his way, “up to some paradise”—a soulful man who, Dylan believed, had been railroaded because he was black and had a reputation as a militant, a “revolutionary bum” to white people, a “crazy nigger” to blacks.

  This was not exactly the story of Medgar Evers or Hattie Carroll—but it was a story, Dylan was convinced, of gross official manipulation and racial injustice, regular themes in his earlier writing. Dylan had stepped away from political movements long ago, but now he had found a single cause he could help lead. By writing and recording a song, he told his friends and associates, he would help set Hurricane Carter free.

  As the Rolling Thunder tour got under way, Dylan was leaning on Columbia to release his song about Carter as a single and to do so as quickly as possible, in order to achieve maximum political effect; “Hurricane, Parts 1 and 2” duly appeared in November. It was the sole song from Desire that would be available in stores while the revue was touring, which was more than strange. This was still an age when artists and their record labels scheduled tours in order to promote newly released recordings (whereas today, thanks to downloading and the Internet, recordings often do more to help promote the concert tours). Dylan had never completely heeded the convention; the three newly written songs he performed at the Halloween concert in 1964, for example, did not appear on record for nearly five months. Still, according to the merchandising wisdom of the day, a Dylan tour in the fall of 1975 made little sense. (The album would not finally appear until just after New Year’s.) But Dylan was on fire, eager to perform his newest work, and not just “Hurricane,” along with revised versions of older material.

  All of this—the collapsing of old and new, the impulsiveness, the additional elements of poetry and politics—meant that the Rolling Thunder enterprise would be utterly different from Dylan’s tour with the Band in 1974. And at the very heart of the show, the music was bound to be something new, as Dylan and his bandmates experimented with rock and folk-music sounds, in combinations as yet unheard. It would further complicate any comprehension of what the Rolling Thunder Revue was supposed to be, and what it actually was.

  When the “Bob Dylan and Joan Baez” duets ended, Baez departed the stage, and Dylan performed “Tangled Up in Blue,” solo, on acoustic guitar and harmonica. It was one of only two performances during the entire concert of a song, already released, that sounded reasonably close to the recording, and Dylan sang and played it beautifully. Yet even now, he did not ignore the injunction to make it new.

  As a crude audience bootleg tape of the concert affirms, Dylan changed the pronouns in the second verse, removing any sense that the singer was the man described in the song. He changed a pronoun and more in the next verse. “He”—not “I”—“had a job in Santa Fe, working in an old hotel,” Dylan sang:

  But he knew he didn’t like it all that much,

  And one day it just went to hell,

  So he drifted down to New Orleans,

  Lucky not to be destroyed,

  Lived for a while on a fishing boat,

  Docked outside of Delacroix.

  This darkened the song considerably. Dylan also cut my favorite verse in the song (which I missed at the time), about reading poetry by an Italian poet from the thirteenth century. In the final verse, he vowed to get back to “them,” not “her.” The former friends who originally had become “carpenters’ wives” had now become “truck drivin’ wives.”

  Dylan’s onstage lyric improvisations over the succeeding decades, notably with “Tangled Up in Blue,” have become one of his concert trademarks, and they can sometimes sound like mere exercises in verbal dexterity.* But changing the pronouns in “Tangled Up in Blue”—the pronouns being, as Dylan himself has said, one of the keys to the song—matters a great deal, in this instance distancing the singer from the stories in his song while diminishing the song’s romance. Above all, maybe, Dylan showed that he had written a song whose meanings could change as much and as often as he desired, by flipping just a word or two.*

  After the applause died, Dylan returned to the microphone. “I want to dedicate this to Brigham Young,” he said—a funny if slightly screwy introduction to a song that began, “Oh, sister,” the song’s eventual title on Desire. Playing slowly, Dylan’s guitar and harmonica interwove with Rivera’s violin to form a new variation on the thin, wild mercury sound. (Curiously, after the years of playing with Paul Griffin, Al Kooper, and Garth Hudson, Dylan did not include a keyboard on the Rolling Thunder Revue apart from some occasional piano playing by Howie Wyeth; he worked out a different timbre with Rivera and David Mansfield’s fiddles and Mansfield’s pedal steel guitar.) Yet as the song proceeded—Dylan’s words were easy to understand here—it turned into a demand for sex as a woman’s religious duty, and the Brigham Young dedication didn’t seem odd at all, and that was deeply odd. This song’s holy seduction lines were very different from the jokey, hip “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” of 1964. The new song’s lyric “We died and were reborn / And then mysteriously saved” sounded more evangelical Christian than Mormon, but certainly sacred. The last verse—saying, basically, sleep with me tonight, for tomorrow I may be gone—was more in the old Dylan vein, even the traditional ballad vein, but did not efface the song’s sanctified injunctions. Since when had Dylan become so religious?

  Then the revue took another sharp turn. “ ‘Hurricane,’ ” Dylan said. The audience clapped hard, having already heard Dylan’s new political cause song as a 45 rpm single, and there were yelps as soon as Scarlet Rivera’s fiddle started keening.

  Although known early on as a protest singer, Dylan had never been consistently good at writing narrative songs out of the newspaper headlines.* Some of Dylan’s early compositions about civil rights and various injustices—“The Death of Emmett Till” and “Ballad of Donald White”—sounded forced and formulaic, and they concluded with platitudes. “Oxford Town” was better, its anger leavened by a sense of unheroic, even comical idiosyncrasy, in its lines about how “me and my gal, my gal’s son / we got met with a tear gas bomb” and turned tail for home.

  “Only a Pawn in Their Game” was a major advance, bidding listeners to understand the inner and outer worlds of the white racist who had murdered the civil-rights leader Medgar Evers. With fierce internal rhymes—“From
the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks / And the hoofbeats pound in his brain”—Dylan shifted the onus of moral condemnation from white supremacy alone to murkier areas of politics and class. The dramaturgy of racial conflict turned out not to be as simple as Dylan had depicted it in “Emmett Till.” “Only a Pawn”—which Dylan sang to the crowd at the March on Washington in August 1963—forced its listeners of goodwill to think again, and think much harder, about a struggle they thought they fully understood.

  Then, in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” Dylan created a surpassing work of art—a song of indignation about an incident that, unlike the others he had written about, might easily have gone unnoticed. The song is perfectly economical and at times almost hushed; its lyrics, like its outrage, are completely under control. Recall the verse about Hattie Carroll and her children, never sitting once at the head of the table, not even speaking to those at the table, just cleaning up all the food from the table—the table, the table, the table, Dylan’s rendering of that element of oppression which is deadening monotony. The song’s conclusion required changing only a few words in the four-line chorus—turning “Take” into a fearsome “Bury,” “away from” into “deep in,” and “ain’t” into another elision, “now’s”—to deliver Dylan’s devastating point: that what’s truly so terrible isn’t the kitchen maid Hattie Carroll’s lonesome death as much as the law’s injustice.