Shower arose from the N.W. hard thunder caught us in a verry hard rain
John Ordway, Lewis and Clark expedition, June 1805
Michael contended against Satan in the rolling thunder . . .
William Blake, Milton, ‘Book the First’
SOMETHING TO DO WITH RAILROADS? SOMETHING TO DO, PERHAPS, with the relentless, fruitless mid ’60s high-altitude bombing campaign waged by America against North Vietnam? Was this roadshow inspired by the Shoshone celebrity shaman who had given his name to a very successful book amid all the New Age outpourings of 1974? Was it a borrowing from the title of a 1972 album by the Grateful Dead’s drummer? Or did the Rolling Thunder Revue acquire its designation just as the artist described?
I was just sitting outside my house one day, thinking about a name for this tour, when all of a sudden, I look up into the sky and I hear a boom. Then, boom, boom, boom, boom, rolling from west to east. Then I figured that should be the name.1
Larry Sloman, reporting manfully for Rolling Stone, would describe Dylan punching the air, ‘like a prize-fighter’, to illustrate the sounds he remembered having heard at that moment. The artist’s description of the event was, in any case, just as good as any other. The tour’s chosen title was an apt enough metaphor for rock music, for the explosive noise that could seem, sometimes, to fill the air, to echo, resonate and decay. The tag also seemed to catch the sense of a changed emotional climate in an America hovering on the edge of its 200th birthday, its ‘Bicentennial’, after all the civil-rights upheavals, the long nightmare of the war in South East Asia, the disgrace of Watergate and the economic turmoil enveloping working people as the western world’s long, paradisal post-1945 boom came to an end. Rolling thunder: an approaching disturbance in the atmosphere. It was not a sound that could be ignored easily.
You can read too much into such things, of course. Where the Rolling Thunder Revue was concerned, many did. Amid the sophomoric philosophising and the grandiose claims of consciousness-raising effects – Dylan was less guilty of the offence than Ginsberg and certain others, to be fair – it was just a concert tour. A lot of cocaine was taken along the way. Groupies descended on the strolling players like hungry camp-followers. Egos grew inflated or became bruised according to the mood or the occasion. As with any concert tour, some nights were a lot better than others. The artist had meanwhile prepared a new album whose sales would prosper wonderfully in the wake of all the attention. Ginsberg, typically, might have announced to Sloman that the revue was ‘the vision of the Sixties becoming real’, but we should be wary of the gilded legend.2
Most of the big names in attendance, and some of the smaller fry, had a well-developed sense of how to sell a show and a healthy respect for the magical powers of hyperbole. Bobby Neuwirth, that satellite forever in Dylan’s orbit, the acolyte who traded ineradicable ebullience against his modest talents, would give Rolling Stone’s Nat Hentoff both barrels full of bullshit as the first phase of the carnival neared its end. In this version, the entire Rolling Thunder project had materialised at the bottom of a glass or three one night at The Other End. Neuwirth, co-conspirator with Dylan back in the days when the artist was subjecting hapless victims to his rhetorical ‘mindfucks’ in Village bars, laid it on thick for Hentoff, but he knew no other way. If Dylan was involved, nothing else could possibly compare with what had been devised.
Me and Bob and Ramblin’ Jack decided we were going to go out and tour in a station wagon, go out and play Poughkeepsie. That didn’t turn out to be possible. So we did this instead. And this ain’t no Elton John show, you know. This ain’t no fucking one-fourth of the Beatles show or nothing like that. This show, we got it all, man. Between us we got it all. And it just gets better and better and better.3
Neuwirth, joking or not – probably not – was invoking the erratic cross-country trip Dylan and three stoned courtiers had undertaken in a powder-blue station wagon in February 1964. By the 1970s, the odd little journey had become part of the artist’s expanding mythology, a Kerouacian (supposedly) expedition into the American heartland long before Easy Rider and the peregrinations of all the happy, hippy pilgrims. Neuwirth had joined that 1964 trip as a substitute sidekick just as it neared its end. Late in 1975, somewhere in New England, he was telling the man from Rolling Stone – ‘I think you have to see Neuwirth to remember his singing,’ Hentoff would note, dropping dry sand on his page – the fantasy tale of how Dylan had almost played little old Poughkeepsie, that blameless butt of New York snobbery and jokes. Instead, here were a group of elite performers who just got ‘better and better and better’.
In another version of Rolling Thunder’s genesis, Dylan had been contemplating this kind of tour for a long time. There is only anecdotal evidence for that claim, and not much of it. Howard Sounes asserts in his ample 2001 biography – without the usual copious documentation – that ‘For years Bob had been talking to friends about a touring-revue show, maybe travelling by train, playing small towns’.4 Sounes concludes that Dylan’s juvenile fantasy of itinerant musicianship and carnival life, the one best expressed in his 1963 song ‘Dusty Old Fairgrounds’, had stayed with him. If so, all those talks with ‘friends’ – The Band’s Robbie Robertson was doubtless one, though he mentioned the matter only after Rolling Thunder had come and gone – failed to lead anywhere in particular.5 Tour 74, Dylan’s first real effort at live performances since 1966, had found no use whatever for small towns or railroad trains.
On the first page of his book about the revue, Larry Sloman merely offers a strictly rhetorical ‘who knows?’ in answer to the question of inspiration, adding that ‘a hundred different versions’ were available according to who was doing the talking. In his Dylan biography Robert Shelton, only partly confirming Neuwirth’s tall tale, wrote that the idea ‘took fire’ during the hot summer nights of 1975.6 Sean Wilentz, in his Bob Dylan in America, would later quote an anecdote from Roger McGuinn’s blog in which the artist and the former Byrd are tossing a basketball around in California in the spring of ‘75. Out of the blue, apropos of nothing at all, Dylan announces a desire to do ‘something different’, ‘something like a circus’.7
People magazine, having interviewed the artist for a cover story just before the tour began, was given a clear idea by someone of what the Rolling Thunder Revue would entail. Dylan was not named as the source, though the journalist was astute enough to mention, as an afterthought, that he ‘creates in a genre in which minimal art is almost impossible’. Nevertheless, according to People, the ‘itinerary would detour the megabuck impresarios, the multiseat superdomes, the computerized ticket networks and re-create the modest small-club mini-tours that characterized the years when he first left Hibbing, Minn.’8
Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s biographer meanwhile offers a verbatim statement by the artist, presumably one drawn from Elliott’s memories of the night in question.9 As they drank together on 3 July after the Other End show in which ‘Abandoned Love’ was first performed, Dylan had sounded his old friend out about a notion. Thus: ‘Neuwirth and I were just talking about an idea, where we’d get a bus and travel around and sing and do little concerts in little halls.’ Ramblin’ Jack was then asked, as though the question was necessary, if he was ‘in’. Neuwirth had, not for the first time, embroidered his story just a little, but Elliott was as good a source as any. He could identify the when, if not the why. As to that, Sloman, writing after the tour’s end and publishing in 1978, was probably closest to the truth. No one but the artist truly knew or yet knows what he heard in the thunder.
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.
*
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. (Sloman’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’
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 cues, 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 theatre, 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.
It would all become very complicated indeed, its richly satisfying post-structuralist debates undermined just a little only when, now and then, Dylan did in fact seem a tiny bit bored with ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ number several-hundred-and-counting. A better bet was that he was wedded from the start to the practices of his real spiritual fathers, the bluesmen, those musicians who failed to repeat themselves because they didn’t know how to manage such a thing. Like Dylan, they did not understand music in those terms. If each moment in life was different, each performance, or at least each tour, must surely reflect the fact. The precise, album-perfect copy was the real ‘construct’. The attempt to play the same song in precisely the same way night after night, city after city, was the truly eccentric and truly noxious habit. It was also camouflage, by no coincidence, for superstars who were supremely bored and utterly cynical. The problem with Dylan’s method, if it can be called a method, is that the artist has to be brave and brilliant to pull it off. He also has to care. In the autumn and winter of 1975, Dylan cared.
*
Out on the road, barely a week into the tour, Larry Sloman would run into a bitterly angry Sam Shepard. The playwright was discovering that there was less to his contracted role, if there was anything at all, than he had been promised. He was thinking of quitting – as he did, before too long – mostly because ‘they’ had made ‘some assurances to me in terms of money’ and those assurances, he said, had not been fulfilled. In Sloman’s account, Shepard would rage against the ‘anti-money, anti-establishment position’ that allowed the unnamed ‘they’ to ‘rip you off and it’s all right ‘cause it’s an anti-materialist thing’.26
The point would become a source of press speculation. How much was Dylan spending on this ‘guerrilla tour’, this vagabond’s gesture of artistic dissent, and how much, in fact, was he making? Taxed on the issue by Rolling Stone, Lou Kemp would say only that ‘everybody’s on salary. We’ve got 70 people to house, move and take care of. We gotta pay for this film that’s being shot and that’s costing an arm and a leg. So far Dylan has not seen a penny. He’s the only one who hasn’t gotten paid yet.’27
Expenses must certainly have been high, with ten members of Guam on the payroll and 15 people assigned to movie-making, plus all the rest. Equally, the romantic idea that Dylan was to play only small ‘theatres’ would fade quickly after the tour’s first week. Columbia had refused to underwrite the revue; some of the big names had entirely satisfactory contracts; a lot of bills had to be met. By the fifth show in Providence, Rhode Island, the ‘low-key’ Rolling Thunder Revue was playing to crowds of 12,000 in a single hall. Variety, the entertainment industry’s inimitable journal of record, had already taken note of an apparent change of heart in its edition at the beginning of November, its headline asking sweetly if Dylan was suddenly ‘interested’ in money.
Venues capable of containing audiences ranging in size from 10,000 to 16,000 (as in Toronto) became the rule rather than the exception. With tickets priced at a standard $7.50 – towards the high end, but not unreasonable, though they would later rise to $8.50 – most journalists could do the arithmetic.28 By now, Larry Sloman was under orders from his Rolling Stone editors to keep a close eye on the box office and the money that was assumed to be rolling in.29 In the mid-’70s, the cry of ‘sell-out’ was still a curse. It did not simply mean that every last precious ticket had been sold. So where was the ‘integrity’ invoked by Joan Baez? Like Dylan’s revenues, a lot of it would wind up, albeit briefly, on the cinema screen.
The fact told a story of its own. The original notion cooked up in the Village of four old friends hopping aboard a bus to ‘travel around and sing’ as the ragamuffin mood took them had become a slightly comical memory even before the New York skyline was out of sight. There was certainly a Rolling Thunder bus. It became home from home for most of the troupe, even if that meant exhausted souls taking turns to grab one of the few bunks available amid all the drinking, drugs, revelry, singing, squabbling and snoring. Depending on the anecdote, life on the bus was either one long party or hell on wheels. Dylan, in contrast, travelled in his own private motorhome and didn’t often socialise with most of the employees.
In an obvious sense, he couldn’t be blamed for that: everyone wanted a piece of ‘Bobby’. A lot rested on his shoulders during this tour. Those songs didn’t rewrite themselves. Jacques Levy might have been investing the concerts with a theatrical structure while everyone worked hard for the sake of protracted shows. But to the artist fell the job of filling that giant ‘Bob Dylan’-shaped hole at the centre of everything. He was entitled to respite and to privacy. If nothing else, his mystique demanded it. Still, that deluxe motorhome destroyed anyone’s lingering illusion that Dylan could ever again be first among bohemian equals.
He had last fulfilled that role at the end of April 1962, when the first recording sessions for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan began. The old Village days, when all were broke and all were hustling for work, could only have been revived if the democracy of poverty and youthful ambition had been restored. In what sane world was that remotely possible? Then as now, fame in pop music was built on hierarchies, not on egalitarianism. For all its musical strengths and all its dazzling performances, the Rolling Thunder Revue was an alternative-lifestyle fiction sold to big crowds who still wanted to believe in the promise, whatever it once had meant, of ‘Bob Dylan’.
If he was making any money at the box office, the artist’s honest excuse was that the ‘evolving’ movie was indeed costing what his fish-merchant friend called an arm and a leg. Dylan was bearing the entire monumental cost. It is a pity, therefore, that he failed to pay enough attention to what was going into his picture. Keeping Sam Shepard happy and writing scenes worth filming would have been cheaper by far than all those clumsy improvisations shot on a wing, a prayer and the artist’s dime. Soon enough – in the middle of May 1976 – Dylan would be handing an importunate Allen Ginsberg $15,000 in recognition of his work on Renaldo and Clara. The older poet would reckon he was entitled to the cash for ‘acting in [the movie] and setting up the scenes and dialogue’.30 Even those who admire the film might struggle to justify that invoice. Those who admire Ginsberg can meanwhile ask themselves what happened to all that anti-materialist Buddhist ‘non-attachment’, all that radical ’60s rhetoric.
The incident gives a rough clue, nevertheless, to the kind of money Dylan must have been paying to Baez, McGuinn and all the others working for love and whatever else was specified in their contracts. The Guam band was a big, expensive proposition in its own right. Ravaged Elvis Presley, his last studio recordings behind him, was also out on the road that year. He too could summon better than 30 individuals to the stage, what with a six-piece band, eleven singers and a small touring orchestra, all flogged onwards yet again by the insatiable Colonel Tom Parker. But a ticket to see Presley was costing $10 in 1975 and the King was due to mark New Year’s Eve in front of 60,000 people at the Pontiac Silverdome, a football stadium in Michigan, picking up $300,000 personally for just an hour’s work.31
Dylan was trying to face in two directions. On the one hand, he wanted his modest, understated, friends-making-music show with its ‘anti-money, anti-establishment position’. On the other hand, he was trying to run a big, even grandiose touring ensemble on a scale Elvis would have recognised while footing the bill for a horribly expensive movie. ‘Theatrical’, like the picture business, didn’t come cheap. How much was he making? Plenty and not enough.
*
What with cocaine on demand, the adrenalin rush of performance, the looming, ever-watchful cameras and the usual oppressive intimacy of life on the road, almost everyone involved with Rolling Thunder went a little crazy. Often they had a real camaraderie, it’s true, but there were some big personalities among them, with egos to match. Baez, with her own guaranteed spot on the bill and a pleasantly superior dressing-room – fruits of that detailed contract, no doubt –could be imperious. Neuwirth’s needling humour was not to all tastes on all occasions, especially after drink (or whatever) had been taken. As Joni Mitchell would observe on first boarding the bus, they could seem like ‘cruel people being cruel to each other’.32
This troupe were under an unspoken obligation to behave as a tightly knit group – as if life on the bus allowed any other choice – but they were also expected to defer instantly, automatically, night after night and day after day, to a wholly unpredictable individual. Musicians by trade, they became hostages by habit, like all touring bands. The difference for the Rolling Thunder ensemble was that its members would also find themselves turned into actors, after a fashion, for scenes in a movie Dylan did not readily discuss, far less explain. Some of those involved failed even to realise that one day they would be listed as ‘characters’ – though this might have been the artist’s droll choice after the fact – in Renaldo and Clara.
Neuwirth as ‘The Masked Tortilla’? T-Bone Burnett as ‘The Inner Voice’? Ginsberg as The Father’, David Mansfield as The Son’, and the visiting old Canadian rocker Ronnie Hawkins – this was surely labouring a point – as the unholy ghost, ‘Bob Dylan’? But then, everyone involved in Rolling Thunder was a character, in the several senses of that word. The fact that they had to come up with their own lines while their lives became anecdotal, if not ‘legendary’, was presumably part of the point the artist was trying to make about existence as performance. The interesting question is whether the nominal director – the name ‘Bob Dylan’ would occupy that role in Renaldo and Clara’s credits – exempted himself from his own strictures.
Plymouth, Dartmouth, Lowell, Providence, Springfield, Burlington: the old New England towns, the places where America began, came and went as the Bicentennial approached. From the start, Ginsberg had been promoting the idea that the semi-evolved film should attempt some sort of comment on the state of the nation, but an idea so coherent and obvious suited neither the tastes nor the talents of Dylan’s movie-making collective. Renaldo and Clara would wind up, as cineastes rarely say, as a bit of this, a bit of that and a portion of something else entirely. The film would combine those inept improvisations with remarkable concert footage and an assortment of interviews. For many, the old cliché about the whole and the sum of its parts would spring to mind. It became a tour movie, in short, with pretensions. Anything worth saying about the American experience would be said, as ever, in Dylan’s songs.
At Lowell in Massachusetts, during the tour’s third stop, he had paid homage at Jack Kerouac’s grave. It turned out to be one of Renaldo and Clara’s best sequences. Ginsberg had recited one of his lost friend’s favourite poems, Shakespeare’s 97th sonnet: ‘How like a winter hath my absence been / From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! / What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!’ The poet had then quoted a few lines from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, in its turn a Dylan favourite. Sitting cross-legged on the grass, the two men had then improvised a slow blues with guitar and harmonium. Momentarily, Dylan had paused to pick up a fallen autumn leaf and store it in his pocket. The lurking, ever-present movie camera had caught it all, of course, but Dylan, clearly moved, had seemed able to ignore the apparatus for once. The nature of the debt had altered with the years, but he owed much to the Kerouac whose work had once set him afire, and helped to set him on the road.
Still the Rolling Thunder Revue pressed on. Whatever the financial concerns behind the scenes, Dylan seemed to the paying public to be enjoying himself. Suddenly he was almost garrulous on stage. His song introductions began to resemble a comedy turn. In Providence, Rhode Island, the audience was told that ‘Isis’ was ‘a true story’. Just before the opening bars of ‘Romance in Durango’, innocent customers were invited to remember that ‘raw lust does not hold a candle to true love’. In Burlington, Vermont, the venerable, much-analysed ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ was dedicated ‘to all psychology students’.
On 15 November, at the Niagara Falls Convention Center, ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ was delivered, supposedly – and why not? – ‘for Gertrude Stein and Modigliani’. In New Haven, Connecticut, before ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’, the audience was informed: ‘This song is dedicated to da Vinci.’ At one show, ‘Oh, Sister’ was performed ‘for Henry VIII’; at another, Dylan decided that ‘Durango’ was for ‘D.H. Lawrence, if he’s here tonight’.
In Hartford, Connecticut, the artist said of ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’: ‘I wanna dedicate this to Wallace Stevens from Hartford, a great renowned poet. Wherever you are now, we wish you the best of luck.’ In Quebec, the song was performed for the benefit of ‘the great French poet Arthur Rimbaud’. In New York’s Madison Square Garden, on the final night of this wandering vaudeville tour, ‘I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine’ would be sung ‘for Herman Melville, who’s sitting . . .’
It wasn’t all comedy. Almost without fail, something was said by Dylan, night after night, about the plight of Rubin Carter. The show staged in Worcester, Massachusetts, on 19 November was typical: ‘This song is called “Hurricane”. If you got any political pull you can help us get this man out of jail and back on the streets.’ Dylan would also tell a New England crowd of learning ‘that Massachusetts was the only state that didn’t vote for Nixon. We didn’t vote for him either.’
Perhaps the funniest moment came in New Haven on 13 November. A shout – ‘Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan’ – had gone up from someone in the crowd. The artist, preparing to perform a revised ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, had replied deadpan: ‘No, I don’t think so. I think you’ve got me mistaken for someone else.’
In New Haven, meanwhile, Joni Mitchell joined the show and the motley crew on the bus. She would stick with both all the way to the ‘Night of the Hurricane’ at Madison Square Garden, reputedly becoming the sole participant in the revue to pay her own way. Bruce Springsteen was also to be seen at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in New Haven on 13 November, but the chances of a performance ended, it seems, when Dylan ruled out an appearance (what with one thing and another) by the full E Street Band. On 2 December the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, an ice-hockey arena capable of accommodating more than 16,000 customers, would see performances by Ronnie Hawkins, plus Mitchell, plus Gordon Lightfoot, all in addition to the existing vast cast and their leader. Some 54 songs were performed by various artists during that second Toronto show. Things, it could be argued, were getting out of hand. Only Leonard Cohen brought a breath of elegant good sense to proceedings when he declined politely to participate in the Montreal concert on 4 December on the grounds that it would be ‘too obvious’.
At some point, just to complicate matters further, the film-makers Alk and Howard decided – or so Howard later asserted – that it would be a nicely ‘creative’ idea to bring Sara Dylan and her husband together for the sake of the movie. It led to uncomfortable scenes and a degree of slapstick backstage when, more than once, the artist’s girl of the hour was hustled out through one door while his wife entered through another. Sara Dylan had neither the taste nor the aptitude for life on the road. By then she and Dylan were married in name only, joined as parents – when he had the time – and by what once had been held in common. How he persuaded her to drag herself from California to New England in such a circumstance remains a mystery.
Nevertheless, Renaldo and Clara thus began to develop into the tale, roughly speaking, of a triangular relationship with, supposedly, mythological overtones. Dylan played Renaldo (obviously), alongside Sara/Clara and Baez as ‘The Woman in White’. Sympathisers would argue that the piece thereby achieved emotional tension and coherence, particularly in its original near-four-hour version. They could never explain away the fact that amateur actors – Sara Dylan had some slight experience, it’s true – tend invariably to produce amateur dramatics. Dylan might have had complicated ideas for his picture, but he, of all people, seems not to have realised that complexity is best expressed by professionals.
*
Rubin Carter wasn’t getting out of jail any time soon, despite anything Bob Dylan might have to say about the matter. The struggle to win the boxer a second trial would end horribly in December 1976 when he and John Artis were once again convicted, but on the ‘Night of the Hurricane’ – Monday, 8 December 1975 – hope still remained. Thanks in part to Dylan, Rubin’s case was a cause célèbre liable to attract celebrity liberal attention even, or especially, from those who did not necessarily understand every last detail. As the New York Times would report, all of a sudden any number of ‘prominent political figures’ had found time to show support for Carter and claim places on the guest list at Madison Square Garden. Famous athletes commanded excellent seats while ‘among the show-business personalities’ the likes of Candice Bergen, Ellen Burstyn, Dyan Cannon and Melba Moore were spotted. There would be more speeches at the Garden than the artist would tolerate in normal circumstances, but he was given little choice. On this night, despite his best efforts, ‘Mr Dylan’ – the Times house style altered for no man – was a long way from the ‘reaffirmation of the old Dylan rootlessness’, as the paper described it, that had been part of Rolling Thunder’s avowed point and purpose.33
John Rockwell, the writer of the piece, found it necessary, in fact, to dish a little dirt amid some judicious praise for the Carter benefit. Rolling Thunder had grown into an arena show, like it or not. Its size, wrote the journalist, had ‘provoked some cynicism and charges of hypocrisy, especially since Mr Dylan’s friends and tour members have been more enthusiastic than usual with their populist rhetoric and assertions of Mr Dylan’s selflessness’. Rockwell continued:
There are reportedly three films being made, at least some which may well make money, and Mr Dylan is apparently thinking of renewing the tour in Europe two months from now. The stories of warm good feelings among tour members have been partially purchased by a skulking, in-crowd exclusivism, and there have been persistent tales of dissension and ego clashes, too.
Dylan was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. If he stepped away from public life his absence was mourned or condemned. If he got involved only ‘populist rhetoric’ was worth mentioning. No one had said a word about hypocrisy when he and The Band were cleaning up amid a huge demand for tickets during Tour 74. They had played the Garden twice during that campaign, to great acclaim. In any case, from whom ‘reportedly’ had the tale of three films come, with the supercilious assurance that one or more could ‘well make money’? What was being implied by the use of the phrase ‘partially purchased’, far less the description of ‘skulking, in-crowd exclusivism’? Mr Rockwell was naming no names and making no claims on his own behalf, but he was happy to clothe gossip in the affectless style of the New York Times.
A lot of it happened to be true, of course. There was an undeniable contradiction between much of the Rolling Thunder chatter and the economic realities of staging the biggest little tour anyone had seen. The artist had been fooling himself, and therefore his audience, by pretending that ‘the old Dylan rootlessness’ could be dusted down, that the mythical minstrel boy could sing as and when he pleased, answering to no one. But what – for Mr Rockwell didn’t say – was he supposed to do? Retreat again into the old seclusion and wind up being labelled as a weird recluse, victim of a thousand mad ‘theories’? Tour as the Stones had been touring in 1975 – six nights at the Garden in June – with the arrogance of decadent princelings, with their mocking giant inflatable phallus, their circus elephants, their truckloads of Merck coke and their habit of keeping audiences waiting for hours? Had Variety ever wondered if the Stones were ‘interested’ in money? If Rolling Thunder had succeeded in anything, it had succeeded as one musically vibrant rebuttal – others were being prepared at that very moment – to the decayed nonsense ‘rock’ had become by the mid-’70s.
Dylan had met Rubin Carter again on 7 December and performed at the Correctional Institution for Women – confusingly, men were held there too – in Clinton, New Jersey, where the boxer was then an inmate. It had been a strange affair, afflicted with what Larry Sloman would describe, inimitably if unhelpfully, as ‘a strange vibe’. The band had played, Ginsberg had recited, Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez had been followed – to the delight of the otherwise unimpressed inmates, who gave her a standing ovation – by the soul and R&B singer Roberta Flack. ‘Hurricane’ had then been given one of its final performances for the benefit of the TV news cameras. A press conference had followed in which, as so often, Carter had made his case with eloquence and passion. For all that, there had been a sense of artifice, even of something a little phoney, about the affair. It was a sense best captured, ironically enough, by an infamous photo opportunity staged for People magazine.
The Clinton prison was no maximum-security installation: Rubin was no longer being treated in that manner. The joint had no bars to speak of, no gloomy, echoing cell blocks. A scene was therefore contrived between Dylan and Carter involving a floor-to-ceiling gate normally used simply to close a hallway. The prisoner was placed on one side, his would-be liberator on the other. The photograph acquired was a fake, in other words, and the ‘bars’ an implausible prop. The magazine would nevertheless run the image across two pages late in December. Why did Dylan go along with the stunt? Presumably because he thought it might do Carter’s cause some good. Did that, too, count as hypocrisy?
The ‘Night of the Hurricane’ was advertised just over a week before the event. Tickets, said the ad in the Times Sunday ‘Arts & Leisure’ section, were to be sold only through the Garden box office. As a consequence, thousands of fans had queued through the small hours for a pair of the 14,000 available seats. On Monday night these faithful souls would see Dylan appear, as he had appeared throughout the tour, in a hat resembling a pale fedora that was decked, as usual, with flowers. The crowd would wonder, as other crowds had wondered, what the white face paint signified. They would hear a telephone call from Rubin Carter relayed through the hall’s public-address system. They would be treated to several unnecessary speeches and in turn treat Muhammad Ali, once again heavyweight champion of the world, to the unprecedented experience of being booed to the rafters for his attempt to turn Hurricane’s night into a lame pitch for a no-hope Tennessee politician. Above all, mercifully, the audience at the Garden would hear the artist at something close to his best.
Dylan had been reluctant to bring his show to New York. The revue’s premise might have been long lost, but it seems he could sense the reaction he was liable to receive from disdainful Times critics and others besides if he turned up at the city’s biggest venue with his gypsy ensemble. George Lois, a Madison Avenue advertising executive who had taken up Rubin Carter’s cause, was obliged to beg the artist – ‘I went up to New Haven and got down on my knees,’ Lois would tell Rolling Stone – to act against his better judgement.34
Backstage, there would be a brief moment of hysteria thanks to a rumour, a rumour Dylan would come close to announcing as the truth, that Carter was about to be released. Out front, Robbie Robertson would join the band for ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’, the song dedicated mockingly to Albert Grossman, that exorcised ghost of a former manager, ‘who won’t be our next president’. Effortlessly, Dylan would prevent his show from turning into anyone’s political rally. He at least had learned something since the 1960s. If the press or anyone else wanted a truly political point, it would be there in the Rolling Thunder Revue’s customary closing song, Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land’.
*
So what had Dylan intended and what, in fact, had he done? A homegrown version of Les Enfants du Paradis would be one slightly odd answer. It happens to be true, but the fact does not sit well with the usual descriptions of Rolling Thunder, or the usual dismissals of Renaldo and Clara. If nothing else, the director deserved credit for his taste. At a stretch, you could even transpose the film’s central plot situations to the tour – and the movie, and the album – Dylan devised. He had said something of the sort to Sam Shepherd, after all. That does nothing to explain the artist’s motives, however, in making these works.
Despite all its contradictions, Rolling Thunder did become a kind of anti-tour by a performer who still seemed to flinch at the self-exposure involved in public appearances. You could say, too, that he was experimenting with form – if a rock and roll tour counts as having form – and trying to see if there was a new way (or a very old way) to reach audiences. He was conducting an audit of his own life and career, very possibly, through all those roles and masks, with some of those who had played their parts in his existence as his cast, with the cameras rolling. Perhaps, equally, he didn’t know quite what the hell he was doing, or what he wanted, but was content to follow his instincts in the hope of finding an answer. That sounds like him. Not for the first time, you remind yourself: no one made him do it. In this phase of his life, nevertheless, a new question became pertinent.
Dylan had won the sort of creative freedom granted to very few: what did he mean to do with it? He had followed his first ambitions ruthlessly and won his prize. Now what? The people demanding his return to active service on the ideological front lines had grown fewer, but the campaign for Hurricane Carter had shown that those shrill types were still around. They had attached the label ‘protest’ to the song written for the fighter almost instantly, while Dylan-Levy had intended, instead, a kind of campaigning journalism. The difference was overlooked. It was tangential, in any case, to art.
Campaigning, even on his own terms, was not an occupation liable to hold the artist’s attention for too long. He might also have begun to wonder whether Rubin Carter, ruthless in his desperation, was not using ‘Bob Dylan’ much as everyone else, given half a chance, had tried to use Bob Dylan. Spiritual kin the two men might have been, but the Hurricane never did show much interest in the music being made on his behalf. During the prison concert, Rubin had paid attention only when the song written in his name was being performed. His favourite Dylan song, the boxer had declared when pressed, was ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. That seemed to be simply because the verses spoke to Hurricane Carter – so he said – about the plight of Hurricane Carter.
For all his comical travails, Larry Sloman was no slouch as a reporter. As he had come away from the press conference at the Clinton prison, he had wondered about the Hurricane’s polished performance for the assembled press. Troubled, Sloman reached what still seems a valid conclusion. Carter was no murderer, the journalist thought, but ‘he sure as hell might be a damn good con artist’.35 Given the distance he would put between himself and Rubin’s case in the year ahead, when the campaign to have the boxer freed was a long way from over, Dylan might well have been inching towards a conclusion similar to that reached by Ratso. At the very least, a few second thoughts were very probably in order. Carter was fighting for his life but doing so with the guile of one who understood how to gain and keep the sympathy of nature’s liberals. He was not culpable on that account, necessarily, but the sight of Rubin working a room full of journalists could make a person uneasy. Patently, for whatever reason, the artist’s devotion to the cause was ebbing. Within less than two months ‘Hurricane’ would receive its final performance.
So what was Dylan’s role to be, if any, in his field of art and within his industry? What was his choice? Things had changed; America had changed. Spokespersons on behalf of generations were falling out of fashion as the last of the counter-culture disappeared into squalor while cocaine and smack became the seductive and unforgiving drugs of choice. It was a poor exchange, whatever Dylan thought about the politics and political movements of the ’60s. To that extent, at least, there was probably something in the claim that Rolling Thunder was a last hurrah for the spirit of Greenwich Village. The artist’s great knack had been to make startlingly new music from the sense of old times and other places.
Blood on the Tracks had demonstrated his continuing artistic potency. Desire would prove to the world that he was still capable of surprising changes of direction. By the mid-’70s, nevertheless, a simple fact of life had to be addressed: he and his audience, his first audience at any rate, were so much older than before. As a generation, they were no longer being swept along by the old sense of infinite, unstoppable change, by the unexamined ’60s belief that just about anything was possible. There was disillusionment, damage, cynicism amid the retreat into all those New Age fairy tales. America’s 1976 Bicentennial, advertised as a moment of national reaffirmation and renewal, would meanwhile be the briefest respite from a nagging sense of foreboding. Perhaps Vietnam had done more damage to the country’s once invincible optimism, its formerly incurable faith in American exceptionalism, than anyone truly realised. Before long, the question would become commonplace: had the republic’s best and most potent years come and gone?
For Dylan, weary for so long with grand statements about his life and his songs, there were the usual strange parallels. They could have said much the same things about him. That had a lot to do with his origins and his age, of course, born in the middle of the country and growing up in the middle of the American century. But the arc of his career, rising amid the great national prosperity and seeming to fall away as national optimism fell away, as the promise of the ’60s fell away, as the great upsurge of rock and roll fell away, seemed to trace the graph exactly. Nothing so pessimistic was said when Desire was perched at the top of the album charts, of course, but it would be said before too long. Soon they would begin to say that Bob Dylan’s best years, the years of effortless creativity, were behind him, long lost and gone forever.
*
So what was the Rolling Thunder Revue in its best and brightest moments? In January 1976, back in London, Yorkshire-born Mick Ronson gave as good an account as any of the ties that had bound the first of the tours together. The guitarist also said something important, by his lights, about the nature of Dylan’s art. Even in Ronson’s inextinguishable Hull accent, it counted as a testament of faith.
With Bob, you just know. If there was something he was looking for in a song, you’d try to find it without being told. And that’s the thing about Dylan. I’d follow him anywhere, no questions asked. That whole tour was this huge, huge adventure. A real treasure hunt. There was Joan Baez. McGuinn. Ginsberg – he’s a grand lad, is Allen. There was Dylan. And there I was, too. For a lad from Yorkshire like meself, it were truly out of this world . . . There’ll be nowt like it again. Fookin’ nowt.36
*
There was one thing more, a casual statement that soon enough would sound like a presentiment. Back in October, interrogated by People magazine, the artist had been taxed as usual on the subject of ‘the Bob Dylan myth’. He had been as evasive as ever. He had never learned to enjoy this line of questioning. Finally, however, he came up with an answer. The myth of ‘Bob Dylan’? ‘It was given to me – by God.’37