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I was going on my name for a long time, name and reputation, which was about all I had. I had sort of fallen into an amnesia spell … I didn’t feel I knew who I was on stage.
—Bob Dylan, 1997
Q: What did the Grateful Dead fan say when he ran out of drugs?
A: This band is shit.
—Joke in popular currency, c. 1987
The Grateful Dead, by 1987, had become a cultural phenomenon. Renowned, if that’s the right word, for playing without a set list, they had become the rock equivalent of a Christian cult, a lifestyle rock band whose original impetus had become a much mythologized set of lost tablets. Though Dylan’s rapport with Garcia was undeniable—their mutual love of traditional music bound them like no others in their chosen field—one listen to a 1986 live tape of this band should have convinced him to steer a wide berth. Neither of the Dead’s drummers played the backbeat on which Dylan so heavily relied; they were as sloppy in their beginnings as the man himself, rarely warming up from a slow shuffle; they didn’t listen to the singer, let alone respond to him; and if they had ever been able to carry a tune in a bucket, their bucket had now got a hole in it.
The idea of a Dylan–Dead tour had been in the percolator for a long time—ever since Dylan attended one of their shows in New Jersey in July 1972, which somehow sparked rumors of them making an album together. At his Warfield residency in November 1980, he was joined by Garcia the night after Bloomfield, and they had stayed in touch. Then, in early July 1986, Dylan and the Heartbreakers had doubled up with the Dead for three stadium shows, Dylan twice joining the Dead for a couple of songs. The crude insensitivity of their playing on ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,’ the latter of which they had been playing since 1966, should have provided ample evidence of the pall the Dead could cast over any song. And yet the idea prevailed, essentially because Garcia and Dylan’s accountant wanted it to happen.
Jerry Garcia: We always loved his music—we still do. It was one of those things we’d always thought, ‘Wow, that’d be far out’—Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead. So we hit on him later in [1986], and we talked about it and he said, Yeah. And he came around for two or three weeks, and we rehearsed stuff, and tried stuff out, and played through things and goofed around and hung around a lot.
The rehearsals provided fair warning of the shape of things to come. Dylan turned up at San Rafael at the beginning of June 1987, checking into the Stoufers Hotel with Carole Childs. Since this was the Dead, who had played a huge number of Dylan songs themselves over the years, fans were expecting varied sets and surprising selections. In this, they wouldn’t be disappointed. One day Dylan suggested ‘All I Really Wanna Do’ after hearing the World Party version on his way to rehearsals. Putting their communal Deadheads together, the musicians suggested some equally overlooked gems, among which were ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile,’ ‘Queen Jane Approximately,’ ‘Gonna Change My Way of Thinking,’ ‘The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,’ ‘Pledging My Time,’ ‘Watching the River Flow,’ ‘The Wicked Messenger,’ ‘If Not for You,’ and even a couple of songs Dylan only ever demoed for Witmark, ‘Walkin’ Down the Line’ and ‘John Brown.’
When Dylan later defined his attitude to rehearsing a song as sometimes only ‘knowing the title and what key to play it in,’ he was perhaps thinking of these rehearsals. Songs were rarely finished, and the arrangements were nonexistent, save maybe in Deadspeak, where Garcia’s noodling around the melody doubtless acquires whole layers of connotation. Certain members of the Dead were less than enthralled by having a vocalist as unfocused as the band.
Bob Weir: He was difficult to work with, inasmuch as he wouldn’t want to rehearse a song more than two times, three at the most. And so we rehearsed maybe a hundred songs two or three times … This is sorta a standard critique of the way he works.
Dylan seemed to have reached a point in his life where he simply could not relate to his own songs, so detached had he become from prior experience. Hence, perhaps, his reluctance to work on them. However, as the 1986 tour had proved, the way to make things happen was to ease him into the process by playing the ‘real old songs,’ evocations of ‘the only, true valid death’ that would always retain their connection.
Jerry Garcia: He wasn’t writing too much then, still isn’t. I think he was looking for a new direction in which to take his songs … We talked about people like Elizabeth Cotten, Mississippi Sheiks, Earl Scruggs, Bill Monroe, Gus Cannon, Hank Williams. We tried a few of those things out at rehearsal. I showed Bob some of those songs: ‘Two Soldiers,’ ‘Jack-A-Roe,’ ‘John Hardy,’ and some others. Trouble was, Bob seemed to prefer to do these rather than to rehearse his own songs.
Sure enough, when the rest of the Dead permitted Dylan and Garcia to play a little bluegrass, on the likes of ‘Stealin’,’ or reverting to being folkies on traditional standards like ‘John Hardy’ and ‘Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms,’ or country rockers on Hank Williams’s ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ and the Delmore Brothers’ ‘Blues Stay Away from Me,’ or even twisting the words out of Ian Tyson’s ‘The French Girl,’ Dylan would begin to focus on the music. Though the Dead would continue to bastardize the likes of ‘Minglewood Blues’ in their own sets at the shows, it never seems to have occurred to them to let a singer thoroughly steeped in tradition share that road. They preferred to convene the night before each of the shows to confirm which dozen Dylan originals they intended to play the following day. Surprisingly, when they met up at the Red Lion Hotel, outside of Foxboro, on July 3, the night before the first show, it was Dylan who wanted to mix up the set, and the Dead who were angling for a more rigid repertoire—doubtless aware that they had just six shows to shape up in.
As it is, the results couldn’t have been more ramshackle. Within two songs it was obvious, from the large video screens mounted either side of the stage, that Dylan wanted to be any place but where he was (when he figured out how close some of the video close-ups were, he sent very clear instructions for medium shots only at subsequent shows). The protracted tune-ups between songs he carried out with his back to the fans, and during the songs he either kept his head down, glanced up at Garcia (cue solo), or yelped his way through them. The voice sounded like it had incurred more wear and tear in the last year than it had in the eight years before the ’74 Band tour, something his bedraggled appearance seemed to confirm. Nor could he figure out a way to bend the lines, as his backing band played straight through everything—middle eight, chorus, verse—as if it were all the same fodderstompf. One result was versions of ‘John Brown,’ ‘Chimes of Freedom,’ and ‘Joey’ almost akin to free verse, with whole couplets falling by the wayside, as Dylan visibly blanked on unfamiliar words in an unfamiliar meter.
Though the shows simply had to get better, as Dylan’s voice gained some range and the Dead recognized what passed for a cue, songs continued to stutter to an end and Dylan continued to mangle whole lines, one night killing off Joey Gallo in verse two. Though the final show in Anaheim verged on the semi-professional—Dylan pulling out ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ for his ex-wife—the tour did nobody any favors. Still, Dylan could happily bank another coupla million and chalk it up to experience. After all, only the few thousand Dylan fans prepared to brave a sea of tie dye, and those Deadheads who stayed for the Dylan–Dead set, heard the fiasco—and, according to Jeff Tamarkin, in Deadzine Relix, ‘before they came back with old Zimmy, thousands actually walked out.’
As it is, though, Dylan agreed to permit an official document of the tour, a Dylan & The Dead live album, and then, when the Dead provided a suggested sequence, pulled three of the best performances—‘Wicked Messenger’ at New Jersey’s Meadowlands, ‘Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest’ at Eugene, Oregon, and ‘Chimes of Freedom’ at Anaheim—and replaced them with bland Anaheim run-throughs of ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ and ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ songs already well represented on his live albums. He also insisted on the album being remixed after it failed to pass the ghetto-blaster test.
Jerry Garcia: We went over to his house in Malibu which is … out in the country somewhere … and he has these huge dogs which are like mastiffs, about seven of ’em. And so we drive up, and these dogs surround the car, and Dylan’s kinda rattling around in the house, this rambling structure, and he takes us into this room that’s kinda baronial—y’know, big fireplace and wooden paneling and steep roof. And on the table is about a thirty-nine-dollar ghetto blaster and he’s got the cassette and he sticks it in there and he says, ‘Don’t you think the voice is mixed a little loud in that one?’ So we just sat and listened to it on this funky little thing and he’d say, ‘I think there ought to be a little more bass.’
In the years to come Dylan would talk about the Dylan–Dead tour as some kind of turning point, recognizing belatedly where he had taken a wrong turn. As he says, it took a tour like this to make him ‘look inside these songs I was singing, [songs] that … at the time of that tour I couldn’t even sing … The spirit of the songs … had been getting further and further away from me.’ If the Dead’s Deadhead devotees thought ‘their’ band invented ever-changing sets and interchangeable arrangements, the real lessons Dylan took from the shows included how not to tour, what audiences to avoid, and who not to play with. To get to ‘the spirit of the songs,’ Dylan needed to return to a band who knew how to listen and learn.
What he needed most was to remember which songs he could still ‘look inside.’ One such song, which he had refrained from rehearsing with the Dead, was ‘I Shall Be Released,’ a song that promised ‘any day now’ to unchain the singer. He had not returned to the song since the death of Manuel—that is, until he decided to slip it between ‘Masters of War’ and ‘Trust Yourself’ at a show in Switzerland, three gigs into a tour of Europe in September 1987 with the Heartbreakers. The last time he had sung the song had been on a January 1986 telecast, during which the thief in the night reappeared as a lyrical preoccupation: ‘He will find you where you’re staying, even in the arms of somebody else’s wife/ You’re laughing now, you should be praying, [this] being the midnight hour of your life.’ If he was still reluctant to forsake ‘the arms of somebody else’s wife,’ Dylan now chose to make that final couplet even more ominous: ‘You’re laughing now, you should be praying/Tomorrow might be your dying day.’
Like poor Richard, Dylan had generally preferred the traditional route to oblivion, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s or its equivalent, to pills and powder. And, like Manuel, his alcoholic hazes invariably coincided with his darkest hours. By 1987, his drinking had again begun to get the better of him and when Kurt Loder arrived in Jerusalem on September 7 to interview him for a special twentieth-anniversary issue of Rolling Stone, he proceeded to sit through the interview drinking Kamikazes like they were Kool-Aid. Two days after he predicted tomorrow might be his dying day, an almost totally incoherent Dylan fell out of his chair after a hotel piano jam had found him hamming it up on ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ and ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco.’ He was consuming up to four Kamikazes or, later on the tour, Kahlúa, cream, and cognac, before each show. That he could even stand some nights qualified as some kind of achievement. Journalists at the shows couldn’t resist commenting on his shuffling demeanor, referring to his new image as the death-mask look.
And yet, however blasted he felt he needed to be to sing another set of blasts from the past, the Dylan that found himself singing ‘I Shall Be Released’ in Basel on September 10, 1987, suddenly found his performing muse had reconnected the cable. As he found himself stumbling between the old and new lyrics to ‘I Shall Be Released’, reaching for the feeling that had not always been there, he suddenly began to hear her voice again:
Bob Dylan: [In 1987] I’d kind of reached the end of the line. Whatever I’d started out to do, it wasn’t that. I was going to pack it in … I [couldn’t] remember what it means … is it just a bunch of words? … I had to go through a lot of red tape in my mind to get back there … [In Switzerland, though,] it’s almost like I heard it as a voice. It wasn’t like it was even me thinking it: ‘I’m determined to stand, whether God will deliver me or not.’ And all of a sudden everything just exploded. It exploded every which way. And I noticed that all the people out there—I was used to them looking at the girl singers … I had them up there so I wouldn’t feel so bad. But when that happened, nobody was looking at the girls anymore. They were looking at the main mike … I sort of knew—I’ve got to go out and play these songs. That’s just what I must do. [1997]
Dylan himself located the epiphany to the second of two shows in Switzerland, Locarno on October 5, but on the evidence of the tapes it seems clear that full service had been restored almost a month earlier, at the first of twenty-eight shows in mainland Europe, after he had opened the tour with two less-than-transcendent performances in Israel.
The shows in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem had come at the end of a nervous couple of days for the band and crew. Dylan had decided to extend a pre-tour, overnight trip to Egypt, staying at the Marriott Hotel in Cairo. He had just been reunited with his old sidekick Victor Maymudes, on whom the years in New Mexico had visibly taken their toll. Maymudes’s role, initially, was as understudy to Gary Shafner, whom Dylan had informed the morning before the first show that he wished to take a bus across the Gaza to Israel, rather than take the plane. The ten-hour journey in a dust-filled bus, without air-conditioning, might have reminded Dylan of how it used to be, but it also meant that there was no time to rehearse for the opening show in Tel Aviv.
The two shows in Israel, his first ever, were not well received. Continuing the one principle worth acquiring from the Dead—an audacious set list—Dylan had only served to confuse the Tel Aviv locals with the likes of ‘Señor,’ ‘I and I,’ ‘Dead Man, Dead Man,’ ‘In the Garden,’ ‘Joey,’ and, as an encore, the traditional spiritual ‘Go Down Moses.’ After LA Times critic Robert Hilburn queried Dylan’s choice of songs, the following show in Jerusalem gave the Israelis more of what they wanted: ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’,’ ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,’ ‘Rainy Day Women’ and ‘Ballad of a Thin Man.’ Nevertheless, he continued to resent the media’s attempts to place him in a time warp of their own choosing. In Basel, after reading a couple of negative reviews of the Israeli shows, he was heard to grumble, ‘I don’t think everything I’ve done since 1965 is irrelevant!’ At that night’s show, and for the remainder of the Temples in Flame tour, he would prove how disconnected the media had become from genuine performance art in the rock arena, combining audacious rearrangements of sixties classics with a thorough overview of his seventies and eighties albums.
Even with the set list ripped up, arrangements put through the shredder, and the Heartbreakers finally being put through their paces, the press response proved no better than on his two previous European tours. In the US, the only report (Hilburn’s) came from his opening show in Tel Aviv, where circumstances—two shows commuted into one at the last minute, and a Saturday night crowd of young drunks, who heckled the support acts—hardly lent themselves to a transcendent occasion. But then, perhaps Dylan was right when he maintained, pool-side at the Marriott in Cairo, that, ‘the media is the devil and it won’t be long before all it’ll take is one charismatic leader to bring the whole world to its knees.’ Hence, presumably, the restoration of such apocalyptic rants as ‘Man of Peace,’ ‘When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,’ ‘License to Kill’, and ‘Slow Train’ to the set.
Most reviews to the contrary, this renewed association with the Heartbreakers was much more successful than the previous year’s tours, primarily because Dylan began to approach the shows differently himself. Gone were the relatively uniform sets of the previous year, as were all uniform arrangements. The sets were astonishingly varied (fifty-six titles across the fourteen- or fifteen-song sets) and duly abbreviated. Playing between seventy and seventy-five minutes most nights, Dylan was on the first encore of his third show before he repeated a single song from the two previous shows. Though most templates were in place from the two previous tours, the 1987 arrangements at last revealed the Heartbreakers’ understanding of the artist at center stage, and his low boredom threshold, as they sought to reignite the flames of Farm Aid.
Benmont Tench: You can never let your mind drift. He’ll give the most familiar song an odd twist; a change of rhythm or a peculiar delivery. Playing with Bob Dylan certainly gives you a good kick up the arse … One night he’ll do something like he’ll say—onstage—‘Right, we’ll begin with “Forever Young,”’ and the Heartbreakers have maybe played the song once before. Then he’ll say, ‘And Benmont, you start it off.’
Unlike the shows with the Dead, the thirty-date Temples in Flame tour allowed Dylan time to put a little stretch back into his forty-six-year-old vocal cords, and though some shows started shakily, he was pushing himself vocally in a way he hadn’t done consistently for six years or more. As the old confidence began to return, he instructed Gary Shafner’s girlfriend to make up the set list in Copenhagen on the 21st, which she duly did. Despite groaning that they hadn’t rehearsed it, he agreed to do an electric ‘Desolation Row,’ Mike Campbell preserving its original melody line as Dylan weaved a vocal spell up, down, and around his lead. Four days later, in Gothenburg, he told the same lady that if he played ‘Tomorrow Is a Long Time’ that night ‘everything will be all right.’ And, sure nuff n yes I do, he devised a simple guitar–piano arrangement that could pierce the hardest heart. Indeed, this guitar–piano interlude would become a nightly highlight of the shows, later being expanded to two songs by the addition of a ‘Don’t Think Twice’ alternating with ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.’
The real highlights of the shows, though, as Dylan interspersed German gigs with performances in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, were nightly reinterpretations of a familiar trio of disaffected-love songs from 1974, ‘Shelter from the Storm,’ ‘Simple Twist of Fate,’ and ‘Tangled Up in Blue.’ Even if he refrained from rewriting the lyrics, each of these songs came alive as the voice, nicely sanded down by two weeks on the road, relived the price of infidelity.
No matter how much he poured himself into these songs from another lifetime, though, their lessons escaped him. His personal assistant, Gary Shafner, had been with him since the seventies, and a more loyal, reliable right-hand man would be hard to find. The death of his wife from cancer a couple of years earlier had devastated Shafner, but as of the winter of 1986, he had been seeing a vibrant, hands-on sometime realtor named Britta Lee Shain. The extent of her fan worship of his employer, Britta Lee wisely kept from her new suitor until she had successfully finagled her way into his setup. In September 1987, Britta Lee found herself accompanying her boyfriend on Dylan’s third European tour of the eighties, and when Shafner was required to return to LA, two weeks into the tour, to attend to some business, she found herself on the receiving end of Dylan’s charms full-time.
Even after eighteen months spent ferrying floozies, witnessing numerous examples of the unstable nature of the Dylan–Childs relationship, and seeing Dylan in both social and antisocial modes, Britta Lee remained entranced by the man. Dylan preferred to continue to keep his options open, though. Even if he and Britta Lee were now spending enough time together to co-author a song, ride a cycle in tandem, and succeed in finding Finland’s only synagogue, the widow of one of his old session men had duly appeared and moved into Dylan’s sleeping quarters. When, a week later, she returned home, Dylan proceeded to spend a night on the bus with the backing singers, perhaps on the run from some very personal demons.
As the shows maintained their newfound resilience into October, Dylan and Britta Lee seemed to have become inseparable. After the Rome show, October 3, they ended up celebrating Rosh Hashanah together at an Israeli dignitary’s home, even if Dylan preferred to spend a romantic ride reading the Bible he invariably kept next to his journal on the bus. Afterwards, they returned to Dylan’s room, where they were interrupted by Carole Childs calling, asking Bob to pay for some cosmetic surgery. Despite Ms. Shain’s best endeavors, though, Dylan refused to make love on the grounds that it was still a high holy day and, anyway, it would be a sin against his ‘best friend.’ His resolve lasted barely twenty-four hours.
Whatever hijinks had kept Dylan, Neuwirth, and Maymudes amused in the sixties, Shafner was cut from a different cloth and had never adopted the amoral mind-set that made everything permissible when ‘on the road.’ Dylan proceeded to jeopardize a decade-long friendship, and one of the closest relationships of his working life, for a roll in metaphorical hay with a besotted girlfriend, something that cannot be said to reflect well on this particular Bible-reader.
That the lady had high hopes of the way the relationship might go was suggested one night in conversation with Maymudes when, after looking at some pictures Britta Lee had taken of Dylan, she said, ‘I think we should use it as an album cover,’ and Maymudes snapped back, ‘We? I’m starting to get a bad feeling about all this.’ Dylan had no such grand vision, as he duly confirmed the night before his English debut. Having flown in one of his new ponies, he casually suggested a little triad. Britta Lee passed.
The morning after, Dylan awoke to an all-too-stressful reminder that there are some women who will always haunt you, and who know exactly how to call you to account. It was Sara on the phone, and she had just found out about the baby Dylan had been buying clothes for all over Europe. Her slightly hysterical response to the news—claiming that she was primarily concerned about how their children might react to the news—suggested she was as yet oblivious to the existence of Dylan’s two other eighties children. Evidently, Dylan compartmentalized even his (ex-)wives. In fact, he seemed perfectly blase about the current situation, putting the phone down, then teasing Britta Lee, ‘A whole lotta women in this world have my babies.’ Later, Maymudes would helpfully suggest to Britta Lee that she also might have one, as ‘Bob always takes care of his kids.’
However, with Shafner due to fly in the morning after the first show in Birmingham, Dylan was already starting to remove himself from the scene of the crime. Though Britta Lee remains convinced that when Dylan sang, ‘I’m pledging my time to you/hoping you’ll come through, too,’ that night at the NEC, he was singing it just for her, his actual intent, as always, was to play the Jack of Hearts. Unfortunately, he had not apprised Britta Lee of the rules of the road, and when Shafner joined her in her room, she told him she was in love with Dylan.
The fallout was almost immediate. Shafner flew back to LA, where he promptly took Carole Childs out for dinner and spilled the beans. Childs raced home to give Dylan his second long-distance berating of the week, informing him that she would be on a plane for London the following morning. As Childs was flying in, Shain was flying out, having been packed off by a worried man. When Shain told Dylan she couldn’t get a flight out until morning, he just said, ‘What’re you crying to me for? [Tour manager] Elliott Roberts is the one who’s holding your plane ticket.’ Hasta la vista, baby.
If Dylan was ducking out from beneath the wreckage, yet again, he now threw himself into the final three shows of the Temples in Flame tour with a new urgency. The night before Shain’s departure, he conjured up a marvelous harmonica-driven ‘I’ll Remember You,’ while the night after, he sang, for the only time on the tour, a glorious ‘To Ramona’ in the piano—guitar slot, the most conciliatory of his ‘I know better’ songs, this one coming from the heart. The final show he was determined to make special. Apart from admonishing this ol’ heart of mine, and musing about another simple twist of fate, he sang of salvation and damnation in fairly equal measures. In a fitting finale, he segued from ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ to ‘Chimes of Freedom’ before bringing the tour full circle with a second and last performance of ‘Go Down Moses.’
He knew it was time to let these people go. In particular, the Heartbreakers had their own careers to resume. Dylan would never again find such sympathetic musicality that never overplayed and always deferred to his better instincts. He had, however, rediscovered the drive to perform, and though his songwriting muse hadn’t as yet rejoined her elder sister, he now knew he needed to find a standing band he could retain and refine. Saved from the more serious ramifications of Shafner’s warranted enmity by Maymudes’s return to the fold, Dylan returned to LA with Childs, after sharing a couple of days with George Harrison and his wife in Henley. Before resuming his search for a permanent band, he found time to turn on his TV set and tune in to NBC’s ever-popular Saturday Night Live.