DESIRE WAS RELEASED ON 16 JANUARY 1976 AND HELD BY MOST CRITICS and fans to be a triumph. A second concert was staged for the benefit of Rubin Carter on the 25th at the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, and derided as a shambles. ‘Hurricane’ was performed publicly for the last time at that badly organised and thinly attended show. Dylan had surely done all that he could with the song, with bohemian vaudeville and with the Rolling Thunder Revue. Outbreaks of press cynicism towards certain of his alleged superstar pretensions aside, responses to the tour had otherwise been gratifying. The artist should have quit while he was ahead.
There were some decent arguments urging him onwards. Only one part of America, far less the world, had been granted the chance to witness the latest ‘new Dylan’ at work. Given the media attention afforded to Rolling Thunder, there was, presumably, a demand waiting to be met. Equally, the ad hoc nature of the tour in the autumn and winter, not to mention the impossible financial strain involved in adding two film crews to the payroll, had left a big hole somewhere between gross and net. A lot of money had been made, but a lot had been spent. In January of 1978, the Los Angeles Times would put the cost of Renaldo and Clara at $1.25 million.1 There were sound economic reasons, therefore, for mounting a spring campaign. In Dylan’s specialised line of work, those have rarely proved to be the best reasons.
Desire was a big hit, however. Soon enough it was the artist’s third number-one record of the decade. That should have been the main thing. However much the 105 to 110 hours of film stock expended on the Renaldo and Clara project had cost him, Dylan was not about to go broke with an album sitting at the top of the charts. Desire had also been accepted, almost instantly, as an appropriate follow-up to Blood on the Tracks. This might seem to show that the wisdom of crowds is overrated, but critics and record buyers probably had a point. Dylan could easily have painted himself into a tight corner with his masterpiece. Hiring Jacques Levy might therefore have been something more than a caprice.
If Dylan had intended consciously to put Blood behind him, what was supposed to follow? If Levy’s claims can be taken at face value – and Dylan has seemed to confirm certain of them – the collaborator certainly nudged the artist in the direction of structured narrative, fictional and documentary. Left to his own devices, Dylan would not repeat the experiment, but in 1975–6 it served his purpose. Besides, as Gertrude Stein, recipient of a couple of enigmatic dedications during the autumn tour, would probably not have said, a hit is a hit is a hit.
All of the songs on Desire were treated as Dylan songs. Jacques Levy’s presence was noted, but his contribution was not often examined closely. Most reviews were shaped around ‘Dylan this’ or ‘Dylan that’, the artist first, last and always in splendid creative isolation. ‘Not only is he writing better than ever,’ Billboard would assert confidently, ‘but his songs seem to reflect a new Dylan.’ Reviewing the album in Rolling Stone, Dave Marsh would state, none too helpfully: ‘It’s not altogether clear just what Jacques Levy contributed to the songs. In many ways, they are of a piece with Dylan’s other work.’2
The remark was itself of a piece with several reviews, but likely to baffle anyone familiar with all the work that had gone before. The Desire songs, for better or worse, were a disparate bunch with no clear or obvious precedents, least of all in terms of the music. As far as the words were concerned, the case for resemblances was hard to make. ‘Hurricane’, whether ‘protest’ or not (not), bore no real relationship to a song such as ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’. ‘Joey’ was not another crack at ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’. Marsh believed that ‘Isis’ could have sat easily among the songs of John Wesley Harding, by virtue, no doubt, of its presumed mythic or indeed ‘symbolic’ content. The belief remains hard to fathom. Yet again, the words sung by Dylan – even if they were not necessarily his words - were being subjected to a refined variety of analytical torture. Each question became one question. What did the new songs signify in terms of ‘Bob Dylan’, that enduring monolith? The Rolling Stone critic, for all his reservations, would still decree Desire to be ‘important’.
‘The Night of the Hurricane II’, to give it the full ungainly title employed on the posters, had the hallmarks of a flop sequel from the instant the decision was taken by promoters to move the show from a giant dome in Louisiana to a giant dome in Texas. The concert would be the last significant gesture made by Dylan on Rubin Carter’s behalf. A $10,000 donation from the venue’s owners aside, however, the event would fail to raise so much as a thin dime for the cause. The Madison Square Garden concert, in contrast, had earned around $100,000 for the Hurricane’s legal defence fund. In Texas, despite a $12.50 ticket price and a tribe of famous musicians donating their services for free – ‘expenses’ aside – only a rancorous, complicated argument over what happened to all the money would be left to show for the humanitarian effort.
Carter, perhaps significantly, is said to have been deeply involved in organising the Texas benefit even before the New York concert, despite the fact that very few people in Houston knew about his case and fewer still cared about some local New Jersey controversy.3 As it was, with an audience of 66,000 expected only some 30,000 tickets were sold. Air-travel bills of $45,000 for musicians, promoters, friends, hangers-on and anyone else who could cadge a ride, plus an eventual collective hotel tab of $36,000, were meanwhile on the wrong side of frugality. In the end, claimed expenses would run to over $428,000. Ticket revenues were put at slightly less than $380,000.
The concert programme had promised Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue ‘also starring’, in descending order, Stevie Wonder, Isaac Hayes, Dr John and Shawn Phillips, the Texan singer-songwriter. There would also be ‘many other surprise superstars’. The programme itself contained a long letter from Rubin asking concert-goers to write to the governor of New Jersey on the prisoner’s behalf, reprinted newspaper clippings concerning the Carter affair, and the lyrics of ‘Hurricane’. No amount of rhetoric prevented a fiasco.
The sound in the Astrodome was abysmal and the concert ran, as these things do, for hour upon endless hour. Neither the star, the billed acts nor the ‘surprises’ – Stephen Stills, Carlos Santana, Richie Havens – seem to have impressed the locals greatly. If the pop reviewer from the Houston Post was any guide, the Rolling Thunder legend did not travel well. There was an omen in that. According to Rolling Stone, Bob Claypool’s verdict on the revue et al. was that ‘they stunk. A lot of people left even before Dylan came out. It was boring. People were leaving in floods. A gross event. Weird bullshit.’
If true, it was a dismal moment at which to give ‘Hurricane’, that song born of rage and compassion, its last performance. It soon transpired that ‘Sara’ too had been dropped from the set once and for all, though the loss in that case was not great. In any case, the marriage song, whatever it was worth, had failed in its purpose. ‘Idiot Wind’ would take its place in the concerts given in 1976. The significance of the gesture hardly needed to be decoded.
*
Of itself, the Astrodome debacle did not seem to trouble Dylan greatly. The blame had not been his, not directly. Whether the public and the press saw things that way was another matter. For several months the artist had been identifying himself very publicly with Rubin Carter’s campaign. After all the legal problems, the ‘Hurricane’ single had been rush-released, at Dylan’s insistence, and become a minor hit, reaching number 33 on the Billboard chart. More to the point, the song opened and announced the Desire album. To a great many listeners that seemed, reasonably enough, like a perfectly clear statement of the artist’s concern and commitment. The name ‘Bob Dylan’ still counted for something.
The Houston programme, with that name biggest and boldest at the top of the bill, had been plastered with Rubin’s campaign literature. At Madison Square Garden on 8 December Dylan had behaved as though the scandal of the man’s incarceration was a matter of the greatest urgency. After the Astrodome he seemed, quite simply, to walk away.
He had other things on his mind, no doubt. Perhaps he believed he had done enough. Perhaps, equally, he had begun to develop just a few private doubts about Carter’s character and methods. It had never been Dylan’s habit, in any case, to linger in the vicinity of failure. The Houston show, even on the most generous possible interpretation, had failed badly. Nevertheless, the truly significant fact is that the artist ceased to perform ‘Hurricane’ just as the boxer’s fight against conviction was approaching a crucial moment. As coincidences go, that one tests credulity.
On 9 February, with Carter and John Artis convicted yet again, Rubin received two consecutive life sentences. Dylan, like all the celebrities who had made speeches or taken those choice seats at the Garden, was nowhere near the courtroom. Hurricane’s battle would go on until 1985, but the singer who had been so vociferous, so righteous, was no longer prepared to offer so much as one song. So what became of ‘an innocent man in a living hell’?
Dylan began instead to plan for a tour that would take Rolling Thunder around the cities of the Gulf of Mexico and out into the Midwest. Some of the places chosen were not his traditional territory – fans of the erstwhile folk singer had long tended to be concentrated on the coasts – but an artist with a number-one album doesn’t often pause over such considerations. Equally, Dylan did not pause this time around over the alleged attractions of the ‘small theatres’ that had generated so much chatter in 1975. The venues for almost all of his 26 dates between 18 April and 25 May, Lakeland in Florida to Salt Lake City, Utah, would be in the 7,000 to 12,000 capacity range. Some were a good deal bigger than that. Dylan was ‘interested’ and why not? – in making some money.
Tour rehearsals began early in April at the Belleview Biltmore Hotel in Clearwater, Florida. Dylan had already wasted some time at The Band’s studio, Shangri-La, in Malibu, California, messing around -judging by some of the bootleg recordings - with Eric Clapton. Between them, the pair had managed to come up with a poor version of a dismally inconsequential Dylan song called ‘Sign Language’, a piece the Englishman would nevertheless see fit to record for his own No Reason to Cry album. Even back in Malibu, where Sara spent most of her time at the big, eccentric fantasy house Dylan had part-designed and built on the Point Dume peninsula after the cherished Woodstock establishment was sold in 1973, he had not been at home often. That life was at an end. His infidelities were continuous, relentless, utterly casual and conducted, as any amateur psychologist would have observed, with just a hint of desperation. The pattern of behaviour would not alter once the tour had begun.
He brought Guam and most of the Rolling Thunder ensemble back together in Florida. To his evident dismay, however, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott discovered that his services were no longer required. Instead, the satirical country singer and self-styled ‘Texas Jewboy’ Kinky Friedman would join the touring party. Ramblin’ Jack never discovered the reason for his dismissal, nor what became of precious old friendships. Noting Friedman’s presence, he simply put two and two together. Dylan, with his own thoughts to manage, meanwhile chose to spend as little time as possible with his musicians.
At first, this seemed like a natural reaction to the grim news from New York that Phil Ochs had hanged himself finally on 9 April. Dylan was badly affected, it appears, though whether by guilt because of the way he had often treated a former comrade and fellow musician or by sheer, impotent sadness it is impossible to say. He must have wondered, for all that, if his failure to accept Ochs into the Rolling Thunder community had been some version of a last straw for a man in desperate trouble. There had been no other realistic choice after that bizarre October night at The Other End, but what of it? Isolating himself in Florida, the artist had reason to ponder the impossible hopes that so many still attached to the idea they had of ‘Bob Dylan’. For his part, he began to keep strictly to himself. Communications with the Rolling Thunder troupe would henceforth be limited. Dylan’s reticence became, on many occasions, a stony, indifferent silence. The erstwhile bohemian ensemble were employees and given no cause to forget the fact.
Something else had changed. As the first Florida shows would make clear, songs from Desire were to be less prominent than before, despite – or because of? – the album’s success. Pieces from Blood on the Tracks, transmuted and transformed, with ‘Idiot Wind’ providing the culmination of the basic set, would begin to return in numbers. The change in tone and attitude, impossible to avoid with the inclusion of that venomous diatribe venomously rendered, would become steadily more marked. In point of fact, more songs from Bringing It All Back Home and Blonde on Blonde would be performed during the spring concerts than the remaining works from Desire. The touring company would still travel under the banner of the Rolling Thunder Revue; most of the same people would still be involved; but the difference between one season’s work and the next would be profound. Hard Rain, the live album that would become the official record of the tour, boils still with splenetic fury.
Dylan was on edge, on the edge, trapped suddenly in a misconceived tour, his marriage all but ended, his private life an aimless mess. Critics would notice the results, of course, and much of the time would not care for them. Southern audiences, equally, would often be short on enthusiasm. In due course Dylan would suffer the humiliation of having shows cancelled – Lake Charles in Louisiana, Houston and Dallas in Texas – thanks solely to miserable ticket sales. For some, the uncompromising performances would be very hard to take. Soon enough, word of mouth, travelling fast, would count against the artist, hit album or no hit album. The tour would meanwhile become an act of sustained wrath. As though trying to wring a secret from the instrument, Dylan would take to playing lead guitar. Or rather, for he never attempted to pass himself off as a virtuoso, he would take to attempting to play electric lead guitar.
It would stand as an example of symbolism as the little universe of rock and roll understood the word. It would count, for all the artist’s ineptness with his instrument of choice, as the outward expression of inner turmoil and an assertion – this much every musician understood – of status. He was the star, take it or leave it. The trouble was, to paraphrase one of his own terrible jokes from a later period, that Dylan was not necessarily one of the few guitarists around whose playing was better than having no guitarist at all.
Itemise each of the elements of the second Rolling Thunder tour and you have a recipe for an unholy mess. Strangely, it wasn’t quite like that. The artist was continuing to put his songs through a process of wholesale revision. This time the work was being rethought to suit his mood, and indeed his idiosyncratic guitar playing. Even the sacred ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was turned into a severe, visceral thing during a failed attempt at the Belleview Biltmore to produce footage for a proposed NBC TV special. Here the flower-decked fedora was gone, replaced by a voluminous yellow bandana that made its wearer look like a guerrilla fighter just arrived from the mountains. The song itself was, more than ever, a half-spoken, raging soliloquy, slower than before but deeper emotionally than it had been in a long time.
Dylan had turned an artistic profit from his anger often enough before, but in the spring of 1976 he seemed to be going for broke, like a man with nothing left to lose. It seemed that finally all of it, ‘Bob Dylan’ first and foremost, had become too much for him. He should have been on top of the world with the success of Desire. Instead, he was lashing out. In the process, he would produce music of an integrity that only came to be understood, far less appreciated, after the Rolling Thunder Revue was long gone.
The first attempt at a TV film having ground to a halt thanks to his furious dislike of the staging and much else besides, Dylan found himself committed to providing – and to paying for – a concert documentary while trying to keep his own show on the road amid dire spring weather. It was not a happy tour. The artist poured booze down his throat and his emotions into his performances, but failed to achieve a cure. When Sara turned up in New Orleans just before the show at The Warehouse on 3 May the battle between husband and wife resumed, sometimes in public. She left within a matter of days while Dylan endured the miserable humiliation of cancelled concerts in Texas and the pressure of preparing himself for the TV special. It had been conceived as a big-deal, prime-time affair, with a live album planned to appear simultaneously. Given that the tour had been treated with disdain in several quarters, it was hard to see what Dylan could produce to salvage the situation.
When at last Rolling Thunder reached the chosen venue at Colorado State University’s Hughes Stadium to the north of Denver, the rains were coming down hard. The biblical deluge refused to stop. It poured for days; the stadium was open to the skies; the mountain air was freezing; and the artist was soon in a foul, black mood. Just as he was deciding that Rolling Thunder would play on, downpours or not, and that the film would be made come what may, his wife reappeared with his children and his mother in tow. It was the eve of his 35th birthday and he was in the middle of another affair. None of this was ideal.
In their second-to-last show as an ensemble, soaked and freezing to the bone, real sparks and shocks coming from instruments that refused to stay in tune, the Rolling Thunder Revue played as though every cliché about last stands and dependent lives was a statement of fact. As a show it was anything but faultless, but it was a fiercely determined, even principled gesture. Unless you are precious about musical precision, you can hear as much on the Hard Rain album. Though TV critics would struggle to see much art in the fire and ice of the NBC special, you can still perceive the ragged glory of Dylan and his band on the film, too. At Fort Collins, Colorado, the local crowd, at least as cold and wet as the band, understood what they were witnessing and responded accordingly.
It would count as the lasting mark of this last, impassioned phase of Rolling Thunder. A lot of people, accustomed to the musical puree that passed for rock and roll in the first part of the 70s, had missed the point of the spring tour and would go on missing the point for many years. Those who were alert and eager for what was just around the corner caught the first sulphurous whiff, the first snatches and glimpses, from Dylan and his musicians when they were under siege in Fort Collins. It wasn’t punk, not by any stretch of the imagination, but in 1976 something of the spirit the artist had possessed in 1966 was recaptured and that was the next, better thing.
At Fort Collins, Sara Dylan meanwhile watched her estranged husband perform ‘Idiot Wind’ and ‘Shelter from the Storm’ in a manner, vicious and yet proud, defiant yet regretful, that provided a summation for the songs, for the tour and for their marriage. After one more show at a half-empty Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, a place far better suited to basketball and hockey, it was over. Dylan moved on without a backward glance. He had a whole other movie to complete.
*
After half a century and more, it is just about possible to divide this artist’s work into three broad categories. Some of the things he does are accepted instantly: a ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, a ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, a Modern Times. Other manifestations of his art take a while to gain recognition from his audience before the hosannas are heard: the 1966 tour, the country music, the Street-Legal album, his evangelical songs. In one small corner of hell, however, there are pieces of work so utterly tainted by critics’ first impressions, so encrusted with the residue of received opinion, they seem beyond all hope of redemption. The prose experiment Tarantula would be one example, the Self Portrait album a second and the film Renaldo and Clara a third. Each has been treated unfairly.
Most who claim to know about the book have never read it closely, if they’ve read it at all. The album has rarely been given a proper hearing by people who take their cues in matters of taste from the award of tiny paper stars by critics who seem always to know what Dylan should have been doing instead (generally speaking, whatever it was he was doing before). The movie, by and large, has simply not been seen.
That doesn’t make it a lost masterpiece any more than a good word for Self Portrait transforms the set into the greatest thing Dylan ever recorded. Nevertheless, the film he and Howard Alk began to assemble after the last echo of Rolling Thunder had faded away is not without merit. To indulge in special pleading: the sheer depth of the artist’s faith in this work should at least give more people pause. Dylan believed in the thing, and believed absolutely. He was passionate about it. He knew perfectly well that many people wouldn’t get it. Yet he persevered. It is surely worth enquiring after the reason.
Anyone who says that Renaldo and Clara was simply a vanity project does not know much about the subject of their accusation – Dylan has scrapped better work than his peers could manage on their best days – or what the film cost him. He more or less abandoned Eat the Document, but he stuck with this one. His adventures in cinema have often been unhappy, to say the least of it. The question is therefore worth asking. Why did he care so much about a work that cost him so much time, money and effort and earned him only derision?
It would not see the light of day until 1978. The earliest edit would have taken an entire working day out of any viewer’s life, but even in its first released version, at close to four hours in length, there was the implicit assertion that Dylan did not mean to be bound by Hollywood’s definition of the average attention span. He would lose that battle twice over, first when the long version was massacred by the critics and again when he sanctioned a near-meaningless two-hour edit late in 1978. By then it would be too late. Renaldo and Clara’s dismal reputation had already been made.
So what do you get if you chance upon this work? In parts, a truly terrific concert movie. Should Dylan ever wish to pander to an audience that cares nothing for fancy ideas and improvised acting – a big enough constituency, then – there are still the makings of a remarkable, straightforward Rolling Thunder documentary within Renaldo and Clara. Given the sheer quantity of footage gathered during the tour, much more must be available than has been seen. Equally, the soundtrack to the 232-minute picture as it stands could form, with just a little attention, the album still desired by those who saw the revue or are these days obliged to traffic with bootleggers. Such projects were not even close to what Dylan had in mind. Still, they count as a start.
Second, there remains a lot of cinéma-vérité material that is not without charm, drama or human interest. Evangelists raging on Wall Street and reproachful statues of Jesus, Allen Ginsberg reading his Kaddish, the scene at Kerouac’s grave, interviews with journalists, the singer David Blue playing pinball while telling old stories about the Village: these are neither meaningless nor dull. The fault with the film, the great fissure at its heart, is the attempt to fuse all the other elements into an enveloping drama while forgetting, or failing to understand, dramatic structure. The maker of Renaldo and Clara seems not to have understood that idea well enough even to subvert it. The fact that most of Dylan’s actors were rank amateurs might have been supportable if he had kept their parts simple and coherent. Movies made with non-professionals have worked often enough. Here the director, struggling to weld together different kinds of cinema, overwhelms his players with a ton of ill-explained big ideas while failing to support the actors with useful dialogue, or with any sense of actions and consequences.
Come 1978, Dylan would devote a lot of time to interviews in an attempt to persuade audiences to give his film a chance. He didn’t always help his case. Ron Rosenbaum of Playboy would be lectured on ‘the essence of man being alienated from himself and how, in order to free himself, to be reborn, he has to go outside himself. You can almost say that he dies in order to look at time and, by strength of will, can return to the same body.’4 Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone –who found Renaldo and Clara ‘adventurous and mysterious’, ‘intimate and evanescent’ – would be told that ‘Art is the perpetual motion of illusion’.5 Dylan, who wouldn’t try to take this tale to Poughkeepsie, went on (and on):
I’ve had this picture in mind for a long time – years and years. Too many years . . . Renaldo is oppressed. He’s oppressed because he’s born. We don’t really know who Renaldo is. We just know what he isn’t. He isn’t the Masked Tortilla. Renaldo is the one with the hat, but he’s not wearing a hat. I’ll tell you what this movie is: it’s like life exactly, but not an imitation of it. It transcends life, and it’s not like life . . . I’ll tell you what my film is about: it’s about naked alienation of the inner self against the outer self – alienation taken to the extreme. And it’s about integrity.
Even in the mid-’70s, this kind of talk was hardly guaranteed to sell a movie to the average Bob Dylan fan, far less the average popcorn-muncher, even if the music was better than pretty fair. It is worth observing, too, that this artist would never have discussed his songs in such a manner. He had always understood, instinctively and perfectly, just how destructive such chatter can be. Struggling to explain Renaldo and Clara, he sounded like nothing so much as an extra-intense Dylan ‘scholar’ picking the symbolic bones from the carcass of ‘Desolation Row’. You could speculate, in fact, that the picture might have done just a little better at the box office had he kept his high-flown thoughts to himself.
What was almost touching in such interviews, nevertheless, was Dylan’s intense belief in the film. In a forgiving mood you can argue that it starts pretty well, with Dylan in his strange transparent mask singing ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’, Neuwirth in tow. Then comes a scene in a hotel lobby with reliable Larry Sloman trying to get a room, Blue chatting at his pinball table, then Dylan as our hero sitting in a garage playing his guitar, then a scene – the scene – at The Other End. All of this could pass for intriguing. But suddenly there’s Bobby Neuwirth in a silly Zorro mask, then Sara Dylan and Baez as (presumably) whore-goddesses. Joan Baez grew tired quickly enough of that last juvenile conceit and you can hardly blame her. Long before the supposedly symbolic triangular relationship has manifested itself, the last of a viewer’s hope has fled. The Dylan fan sticks it out, if she or he is honest, for the same old reason: the music. When the final credits are followed by the usual bland legal statement that ‘persons and events in this film are fictitious; their relationship to other persons and events is unintentional’ the only fair response is sarcasm.
Interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, and still maintaining that he had another movie in mind – ‘If we could make a deal with a studio . . .’ – Dylan already had certain excuses prepared. If the film had flaws, it turned out, those had been the fault of others. Clearly, the difference between the movie in this director’s head and what wound up on the screen was vast. That wasn’t his fault, however.
The film could have been much better if people could have had a little more belief, been a little freer. There was a lot of conflict on this film. We had people who didn’t understand what we were doing, but who were willing to go along with it. And we had people working on the tour who didn’t understand and weren’t willing to go along with us. It hurt us. It was good for the show, but it hurt the film.6
Interviewed at around this time by the Canadian weekly Maclean’s, Dylan would attempt to maintain that no one in the audience would have guessed the fictional scenes had been improvised had he not said as much. Later in the conversation, a little self-knowledge would begin to manifest itself. Though the chances of his beloved movie failing had not been mentioned, he said:
Whether it’s a failure or not, I don’t know. It could be. Maybe the movie isn’t for everybody. Maybe there are only two or three people in the universe who are going to understand what it’s about.7
Even at his most defiantly romantic, the loner against the world, Dylan had not gambled for a career in music by backing those odds. Over the years he would spend a lot of time claiming to be misunderstood and claiming that he didn’t care. In reality, rejection of his work never sat easily with him. When Renaldo and Clara paid its brief visit to cinemas he would suffer one of the sharper rebuffs in his creative life. Years later, kind souls and diehard fans would attest that he was right, that he had been misconstrued, that (among other things) he had managed a homage to bohemianism itself with his movie. Obscure and ancient Beat experiments would be adduced. His remarks about Carné and Truffaut, remarks both sincere and calculated, would thereafter keep a few people busy. That wasn’t wholly unreasonable. Like an eager film-school student, Dylan had obviously studied the use of motifs, the implicit arguments over the nature of identity, the jump cuts and the sequencing evident – perhaps only too dazzlingly evident – in Les Enfants du Paradis and Shoot the Piano Player.
The result, in a strange way, was like Tarantula all over again. He had wanted to write a novel; he was, so they said, a genius with words. So why couldn’t he just write a novel? He loved movies; he believed he understood movies; some of his songs, they said, were very like movies. So why couldn’t he just make a movie? Perhaps because Dylan’s gift for songwriting had seemed to come without effort for so long, he fooled himself into believing that any art could be conjured easily.
A better verdict might be that with Renaldo and Clara he came closer to making his dream-movie than most critics were prepared to allow. There have been worse films. Given a chance he would, no doubt, have learned from his numerous mistakes. But he was Bob Dylan, songwriter. A great many people were very clear about that. They were not prepared to allow the artist to abdicate from the duties they had defined. In effect, the reaction to Renaldo and Clara, like the reaction to Tarantula, was an attempt to put him in his place, to force him back to his true calling. In 1978, after his picture was released at last, no studio would be found to offer him a modest budget and a sound stage to call his own.
*
The day had not yet dawned when Dylan could be summoned to the White House to play for presidents. On 4 July 1976, on America’s 200th birthday, he was neither seen nor heard. A few weeks later he would succumb to an aimless interview with TV Guide, a journal of cultural affairs then at its multimillion-selling peak, in an effort to support the Hard Rain concert film. ‘I sometimes dream of running the country and putting all my friends in office,’ Dylan would tell the man from the magazine. ‘That’s how it works now, anyway.’8 Beyond that, he had nothing to say about the state of the nation. He took no public part in the celebrations for the birth of the republic or its two centuries as democracy’s shining light.
Bob Hope was on TV wrapping himself in the flag in an NBC ‘spectacular’ that July weekend. On the Fourth itself, President Gerald Ford, Nixon’s hapless substitute, was in Philadelphia addressing patriots as distinguished as the actor Charlton Heston. Ford was declaring: ‘It is right that Americans are always improving. It is not only right, it is necessary.’ In New York Harbor, Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller was reviewing a fleet of tall ships while six million people, or so the New York Times estimated, looked on. That night fireworks would light up the Statue of Liberty. Across America, as the newspaper reported, it was ‘A Day of Picnics, Pomp, Pageantry and Protest’. Restored steam locomotives were meanwhile pulling a travelling historical exhibition entitled ‘the American Freedom Train’ around the country. Not a city, town or village in America was untouched by the festivities. The nation was awash with speeches and souvenirs.
Gil Scott-Heron, the radical self-styled ‘bluesologist’, maker of Winter in America and From South Africa to South Carolina, introduced one of the few audibly skeptical voices amid the summer’s celebrations with a piece entitled ‘Bicentennial Blues’. In it he nominated 1976 as ‘A year of hysterical importance’, one in which the public had been ‘bludgeoned into bicentennial submission’. Scott-Heron reminded anyone who happened to be listening that the facts of racism, poverty and injustice had ‘got by’ too many Americans, not least those contemplating a vote for the ‘Hollyweird’ Ronald Reagan, then just a grinning former conservative governor of California. On the weekend of the Fourth itself, Scott-Heron was performing his ‘Bicentennial Blues’ poem, all eight minutes and forty seconds of it, before a Boston audience for a concert album, It’s Your World. His was not the voice of the majority.
The year had opened with another nuclear test in Nevada. Inflation, still perilously high at 5.75 per cent, had nevertheless subsided a little; official unemployment stood at 7.7 per cent. One day before the Bicentennial itself, the Supreme Court had ruled that the death penalty, suspended during the four previous years, was not inherently ‘cruel or unusual’ and no offence to the constitution that bound together 218 million Americans. Crime was still a preoccupation for politicians and the media – ‘wars’ on wrongdoers abounded during political campaigns – but making a living was the main concern for hard-pressed law-abiding citizens. Another long recession had ended, statistically speaking, in 1975, but the economy remained weak as the country staged its birthday party. Only with federal help had New York City survived a brush with bankruptcy. Amidst it all, something was stirring.
The novelist Gore Vidal had observed the essentials of the phenomenon in an essay published in the year before the Bicentennial. Describing his experiences delivering provocative ‘State of the Union’ lectures to audiences caught between bemusement, amusement and outrage, Vidal had written of encountering among his fellow Americans a ‘general hatred of any government’. He told of ‘the message that I got from one end of the country to the other: we hate this system that we are trapped in but we don’t know who has trapped us or how’.9
Among conservative Americans, the mood was being articulated loudly. Some believed they had found an answer to their problems. Reagan’s failed challenge to Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination would be remembered long afterwards as the prophetic moment. Earlier in the decade, right-wing institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, the Conservative Political Action Conference and the American Conservative Union (all founded in 1973) had sprung into existence. By 1976, the influential monthly magazine Commentary had completed its shift from left to right and confirmed itself as the house journal of what would come to be known as neo-conservatism. Political reaction would produce action in due course. Preposterous as it might have seemed at the time, the not-so-strange death of ’60s liberalism was all but complete.
Dylan gave no sign that he noticed or cared. This didn’t make him immune, however, to what was going on in his country. Congressional Democrats had done predictably well in elections in 1974 in the aftermath of Watergate. Their party’s candidate, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, would win the presidency on 2 November 1976. During his nomination acceptance speech in New York on 15 July, the new candidate (or his speechwriters) would misquote ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ comprehensively, asserting that ‘We have an America that, in Bob Dylan’s phrase, is busy being born, not busy dying’. The artist would respond like a jaded elder statesman through the august pages of TV Guide. ‘People have told me there was a man running for president quoting me,’ Dylan would say. ‘I don’t know if that’s good or bad. But he’s just another guy running for president.’
Carter’s eventual victory would prove to be a kind of illusion and the briefest of respites for liberal Americans. In time, their Democrat president would become even less popular than Nixon, a phenomenon unthinkable in 1974.10 As the artist had mentioned almost casually to People magazine back in October, ‘The consciousness of the country has changed in a very short time.’ Out in the American heartland political conservatism and yet another evangelical Christian revival were growing in strength, hand in glove. And Dylan had always harboured a weakness for a deity.
*
In November, on Thanksgiving Day, he would appear at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco for what was billed as The Band’s ‘farewell’ concert. It was a last farewell, in reality, to the youthful comradeship that had once bound the group together. When Dylan’s former backing musicians returned to touring in 1983 it would be without Robbie Robertson, the guitarist whose perceived high-handedness and self-regard – there were plenty of other allegations – had alienated his colleagues long before the affair known as The Last Waltz was being organised. By 1976, in any case, Robertson had decided he was weary of life on the road. The other members of the quintet would continue to believe, in contrast, that he had broken up The Band for purely selfish reasons, furthering his own career – under the guidance of one Albert Grossman – while keeping a tight grip on their joint legacy.
Many years later, all of drummer Levon Helm’s bitterness towards Robertson would spill forth in his autobiography. Among other things, Helm would contend that he received not a cent from the show, album and Martin Scorsese documentary movie each known as The Last Waltz. In an afterword to his book published after his passing in 2012, Helm would be quoted by his co-writer claiming that Rick Danko, The Band’s bass and fiddle player, had died prematurely because of sheer overwork (the 1999 autopsy settled for drug-related heart failure). In Helm’s disgusted opinion, Danko had worked too hard for too long because ‘he had been fucked out of his money’. Levon said:
People ask me about The Last Waltz all the time. Rick Danko dying at 56 is what I think about The Last Waltz. It was the biggest fuckin’ rip-off that ever happened to The Band – without a doubt.11
Dylan would remain forever fond of Levon – the feeling was reciprocated – but in late 1976 these were not his problems. For the purposes of album, movie, money and valediction, Robertson appeared to have enlisted any prominent musician who had ever been associated with The Band. There were a couple of others, vapid Neil Diamond conspicuously, whose relationship with anyone other than the guitar player was hard to identify. On Thanksgiving night at Winterland there were poets, turkey dinners for 5,000, ballroom dancing, seven high-end 35-mm cameras and a crew of experienced cinematographers to meet Scorsese’s demand that every last second be captured on film, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Ronnie Hawkins, Paul Butterfield and Dr John were among the performers. There was no possible doubt, however, about the identity of the star guest.
Dylan did his job in the end, but not without almost wrecking the entire production. At the last minute, so it was said, he announced that he would not be filmed. As the tale was afterwards told, he did not want his appearance to steal any thunder due to the concert sequences in Renaldo and Clara.12 Since Warner Bros, had only agreed to finance Scorsese’s lavish array of cameras because of a promise that Bob Dylan would be in the movie, this posed a problem for Robertson and the show’s promoter, Bill Graham. The Band were no longer a hot item in their own right by 1976. The $25 tickets for the evening had only begun to move, in fact, after Graham had leaked details of the guest list to the San Francisco Chronicle.13 Only some feverish negotiations during the intermission – while almost everyone else busied themselves with vast drifts of cocaine – and the intervention of one of Dylan’s lawyers saved the show, the movie and the album.
The Last Waltz would duly become known as ‘the greatest concert film ever made’. Very fine it is too, in places. Dylan’s performance was as good as most and far better than some, if a long way short of his finest. ‘Baby, Let Me Follow You Down’ (twice) and T Don’t Believe You’ were done with sufficient conviction. One of those ineradicable anecdotes-with-no-source prefaced with the word ‘reputedly’ probably catches the artist’s real attitude best. In this tale, Neil Diamond is leaving the stage. ‘Follow that,’ he supposedly says to Dylan. The artist replies, ‘What do I have to do, go on stage and fall asleep?’
*
He was not exerting himself unduly. Whether because he was still refusing to admit the truth about his marriage or because he knew the miserable truth beyond doubt or dispute, Dylan had fallen into a fit of indolence. He still had Renaldo and Clara to see to, but he was not giving his full attention to the editing process. He would turn up here and there – at The Band’s concert, at a riotously intoxicated Leonard Cohen recording session in June of 1977 – but in terms of his career history only one fact would be pertinent. Between the release of Desire in January of 1976 and the summer of 1978, Dylan would fail to produce an album in the studios. Hard Rain, the record intended to document the 1976 spring tour, had been released in September of the year, doing only modestly well in America but reaching number three in Britain. A mostly pointless single from the album, ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’ (with the entirely pointless ‘Rita May’ as its B-side), had failed utterly in November. The rest, save for the sound of approaching lawyers, was silence.
The end was ugly, the aftermath worse. In the papers she would lodge during the divorce, Sara Dylan would state that in Malibu, at the still ‘unfinished’ Point Dume house with its copper onion dome, the quarrels became ceaseless. She would further assert that she began to fear her husband, that she locked doors against him and his volcanic temper. The real issue was other women. Sara would claim that in February of 1977 one turned up at her breakfast table who seemed to be living on the estate. His wife gained the impression, as lawyers say, that Dylan wanted this latest flame to reside in the main house. In the ensuing argument, so it was alleged, he struck Sara on the face and ordered her out of the house. This would be the story released subsequently to the press by one of Sara Dylan’s lawyers.
Court papers would be sealed, however, after she filed for divorce at the beginning of March. We therefore do not know Dylan’s response, if he had one, to the central allegation. What is known is that Sara Dylan moved out immediately and hired Marvin Mitchelson, one of the many celebrity lawyers who seem to constitute a major part of the Southern Californian economy. The community property laws of that state meant the artist was always likely to lose heavily, in financial terms, in any divorce settlement. Mitchelson would make sure of it. Sara, in any case, knew just about all there was to know about Dylan. There were plenty of stories she could have told. Some of those involving the couple’s recent married life were not pretty. She had – and there’s no denying it – tolerated a lot and suffered for her tolerance. It was in Dylan’s interest to yield.
When the divorce papers were filed Sara demanded custody of the five children, child support, alimony, the Malibu house and, the most expensive item of all given Californian law, a division of Dylan’s wealth. The papers listed the ‘Malibu complex; other and diverse property including residence, farmlands and acreage in New York City; East Hampton, Woodstock and Greene County, New York; Minnesota and New Mexico; and undetermined interests in publishing companies, subsidiary and residual recording rights, royalties and literary copyrights’. Sara also wanted a restraining order against her husband. In the bloodless language of the filing, the ‘respondent, Robert Dylan, is hereby restrained and enjoined from harassing, annoying, molesting, or in any way interfering with the peace and quiet and personal privacy of the petitioner, Sara Dylan’. Her demands would fail in only one detail. Because the artist could claim, accurately, to be working on Renaldo and Clara in Point Dume’s editing suite – and because he wanted desperately to keep the house – he would be allowed to go on living there. Beyond that, it was no contest.
Early speculation would put the settlement figure at $6 million, then at $10 million. Later estimates, taking into account those property assets around the country, ran to $36 million plus a continuing half share of the royalties – pick a figure – for songs written and recorded between 1965 and 1977, with the proviso that a further payment would be due to Sara Dylan in the event of Dylan’s catalogue being sold.14 He appears not to have put up much of a contest, if he put up any contest, over the money. That part of the final rupture between himself and Sara was settled quickly and, to all appearances, amicably. The real fight would be over the custody of the children.
His love for them was never in doubt, but somehow Dylan persuaded himself that he, of all people, with his habits, women, fame, fans, creative life and professional obligations, was entitled to believe he could care for his brood. Sara would be ferocious in her determination to disabuse him of that idea. Yet again, his understanding of his several competing identities – Bob Dylan the artist, Bob Dylan the rock star, Bob Dylan the doting father and others besides – was inadequate, worse than naive. Children aside, nevertheless, the divorce was settled at the end of June.
‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ had not foretold this. There had been no mention of Californian community property law in ‘Sara’. In hindsight it was self-evident, nevertheless, that the years of Dylan’s real contentment had been those eight years after 1966 when he had hidden from stardom and stayed away from touring, living with his family at Woodstock or on Cape Cod. For the private man who carried the name, picking up the burden of ‘Bob Dylan’ had been a big mistake. On the other hand, no one had put a loaded gun to his head, or deceived him into thinking that the rock and roll ‘lifestyle’ was an inevitable adjunct to rock and roll music. He had made his own choices. Among other things, he alone had decided that his brush with old Norman Raeben had caused his wife to cease to ‘understand’ him. And plainly, above all, Sara Dylan had been expected to tolerate more than was tolerable, even in a celebrity union.
Still, by the summer of 1977 a central part of his former existence had removed herself from his life. Another muse – for Sara had been that, if she had been anything – was gone. He would still sing the songs he had written because of her, but their essential, original meaning was gone. As so often before and since, Dylan retreated to his farm in Minnesota. Still another girl was with him.
*
He would write a group of songs that summer, just as he had written songs in 1974. This time, however, he would not rush into the studios, as he had done with Blood on the Tracks, to turn his writing into an album at the first opportunity. It might have been better if he had.
On 16 August 1977, while Dylan was on the Minnesota farm, news broke that Elvis Presley had died in Memphis. The artist was distraught for days, yet he couldn’t have been entirely surprised. The grotesque condition of the only king of rock and roll had been plain for the world to see for long enough. Presley’s late concert performances, sweating at the slightest exertion and straining at the seams of those preposterous jumpsuits, had become a joke to everyone but the blue-rinsed, middle-aged faithful. For all that, few had truly understood the depths of Presley’s drugged, bloated degradation. Peter Guralnick, foremost among his biographers, would describe a performer who was scarcely able to sing or follow a melody in his last shows in 1977, ‘a man crying out for help when he knows help will not come’.15 Dylan had known, as most observers had known, that something was seriously amiss in the strange world that Elvis inhabited. Still the death came as a profound shock to the artist.
A part of his past, and therefore of his world, had been eradicated. Perverse as it sounds, the loss of Presley mattered almost as much to Dylan as the loss of his marriage. Or perhaps, possibly, it counted as another of those last straws. Elvis, the music, the lost world of the 1950s, the hope and defiance and unstoppable energy, had been essential to the person Dylan was, or believed himself to be. If those sound like childish, self-involved notions, the truth about this artist is misunderstood. He was of a generation, perhaps the last such generation, for whom pop music was part of the meaning of existence. It’s not a big guess to say that Dylan grieved for himself when he grieved for Elvis. According to what he would tell Robert Shelton almost a year later, he suffered ‘a breakdown’ when he heard about the death.16
I went over my whole life. I went over my whole childhood. I didn’t talk to anyone for a week after Elvis died. If it wasn’t for Elvis and Hank Williams, I couldn’t be doing what I do today.
Dylan seems to have worked hard in Minnesota, but he put the work aside, for whatever reason, when he returned to California determined to reclaim his children. It was as though they represented the one loss, the last loss, that could not be borne. His relationship with Sara, civilised and businesslike as the divorce had gone through, struck an unnavigable reef of animosity. Even her decision to take the kids on a holiday to Hawaii had caused him to believe she was plotting to move them beyond his reach. These parents were in territory familiar to the survivors, poets and superstars or not, of many broken marriages. For the Dylans, it all became as hideous and pointless as any suburban trauma, dragging on week after week in hearings and negotiations between lawyers. The full tabloid tale of court orders and accusations – find your ‘expert’, find your ‘evidence’ – serves no one now. In the end, inevitably, Sara Dylan won the day and established herself somewhere in Beverly Hills. The artist got his children for the holidays.
*
Renaldo and Clara saw the flickering light finally with a pair of premieres, in New York and LA, in the last week of January 1978. The Village Voice would set no fewer than six critics on the movie and five of those would struggle to come up with a decent word to say for the production. The journal’s James Wolcott would observe that so many reputations went down with the film it was like watching the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Mark Jacobson would begin his review by casually wishing Dylan dead for lending his name to a picture that failed to supply true confessions.17 Long after the event, the journalist would concede that the review ‘came out a little more negative than I would have liked’. What ‘came out’ began
I wish Bob Dylan died. Then Channel 5 would piece together an instant documentary on his life and times, the way they did for Hubert Humphrey. The way they do for Chaplin, or Adolf Hitler. Just the immutable facts. Seeing all those immutable facts about Elvis made his dying worthwhile. The high points. What a sum-up. You don’t get much gray, but like the reporter in Citizen Kane found out, gray doesn’t necessarily amount to shit.18
You could say the same about certain movie reviews. Sometimes you begin, just about, to understand the artist’s contempt for journalism. Along the way – having said, with spectacular nastiness, that ‘Dylan had a good reason to beat Sara’ – Jacobson complained because the movie was longer than Citizen Kane, because it ‘revealed’ nothing new about Dylan, because it was a ‘rich kid’s vanity project’, and because – this seemed to be the film’s real offence – the poor critic didn’t get it. Years later, he would confess that ‘you will always write things you wish you didn’t’. There is one infallible solution for that problem.
In America, in any case, Renaldo and Clara’s reputation was left bleeding in the dust. The Village Voice was only the shrill soprano in a chorus of lousy reviews. Writing in the New Yorker, Pauline Kael complained that the movie was both a failed and a dishonest drama, guilty of employing the star’s former lover (Baez) and wife as a kind of ‘tease’.19 Critics lined up to trash the picture while film fans eager for a production with a song in its heart took their pick that year from Grease, The Buddy Holly Story and Animal House.
In Europe, Renaldo and Clara was at least treated with a degree of respect, perhaps because Dylan himself had long been treated as a serious artistic proposition by Europeans, or perhaps because European film critics, with their auteur theories and their art-house cinema loyalties, were always liable to give an earnestly pretentious director a break. In truth, Hollywood’s commercial imperatives still counted for less on the old continent than on the new. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976) had run to 245 minutes in the short version. Jan Troell’s The Emigrants (1971) and its sequel, The New Land (1972), had between them demanded 395 minutes of a viewer’s time. In any case, Renaldo and Clara would be given an out-of-competition screening at the Cannes Film Festival in May and, lest it be forgotten, win the Interfilm Award at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival later in the year. A minority of people, European people, had the temerity just to enjoy the picture.
It made no difference. The film, given only a limited release to begin with, was gone from American movie houses within a few weeks. A further messy edit sanctioned by Dylan towards the end of the year, cutting the running time to two hours and giving more room to the concert footage, did a little better, but it was not enough. Within a few years the director would withdraw the film from distribution entirely. Those who wanted their ‘Bob Dylan’ as they understood him were not to be denied.
He was in no hurry to keep them happy, but suddenly he had no choice. Poverty did not beckon, exactly, but with millions spent on the Point Dume house, millions more on the movie, and tens of millions awarded to Sara, Dylan was obliged to go back to work, like it or not. So he reasoned, at any rate. In May of 1978, he would even confess to the Los Angeles Times that he had ‘quite a few debts to pay off.
I had a couple of bad years. I put a lot of money into the movie, built a big house . . . and there’s the divorce. It costs a lot to get divorced in California.20
Clearly, the divorce was the big ticket on the list. The briefly controversial switch to large venues during the autumn and winter tour of 1975 had been excused, after all, by the need to divert revenues to Renaldo and Clara. No one was obliging Dylan to subsist meanwhile in a vast mansion on a big Malibu estate. The settlement made on Sara was the debt that could not be avoided. But he did not intend to go broke, or even to change the style of living to which he had grown accustomed, on that account.
After the embattled heroics of the spring tour, a revival of Rolling Thunder was neither plausible artistically nor. attractive financially. Perhaps the artist just decided that a trip abroad would do him a power of good. It’s more likely that his newly chosen manager, an individual accustomed to producing concerts for the likes of Presley and Sinatra or managing the likes of Neil Diamond, made the traditional showbiz suggestion. If Dylan needed to raise some money, Jerry Weintraub would happily organise the kind of world tour that was the closest approximation to a licence to print the stuff. Japan, the Far East, Europe, the United States: dozens of concerts and millions of tickets for the sake of one man’s divorce settlement. Set beside this operation, the Rolling Thunder troupe were Boy Scouts up against the US Marines.
It’s not an insignificant detail. In 1978, Dylan would chase the bottom line. All the talk of small clubs, folk roots, bohemia and being happy just to sing and play anywhere for anyone might never have happened. This time musicians would not be selected on a whim and a prayer. This time there would be no messing around with old pals, art cinema or campaigns for the wrongly convicted. Everything would be bent to a single end. Dylan’s accountants could no doubt have supplied all the reasons, priced to the last penny. Those fans who wanted to believe that he existed as a creative singularity inside a bubble called genius would have to cope, as best they could, with this fact of the artist’s life: he liked to talk about living just for the music, but he was not eager to retreat to a poet’s garret. Being rich was very much easier, and a lot more agreeable, than being poor. Dylan was not about to give it all up. American reviewers would not call this ‘the Alimony Tour’ for nothing.
Rehearsals began towards the end of 1977 in a rented Santa Monica factory space he called Rundown Studios. Bootlegs dating from the last week in December of that year still do the rounds. Some of the recordings contain rough accounts of what were then new Dylan compositions, but he still had no plans – none he would reveal, at least – for an album. On this occasion, mercifully, Jacques Levy’s services had not been required for the writing process. At first it would seem that the musicians who began to arrive at the studio were not needed either, what with the distractions of the fight for custody of the Dylan children and the impending movie premieres. Work did not start in earnest until the end of one year and the beginning of the next.
Dylan was now remodelling his old songs habitually, even obsessively, on the basis of experiments in rehearsal. It was as if he realised that he would need some sort of artistic stimulant if he was to remain fully conscious through nine months, ten countries, four continents and one hundred and fourteen shows. By the time it was all over, someone would calculate – these show-business legends always wind up being expressed in suspiciously round figures – that Dylan had played to two million people. By the end, nevertheless, only a very few Americans would believe they had seen the best of him.
Back in Santa Monica he had prepared himself, his eight-piece band and three backing vocalists – the membership of both altered somewhat as the weeks passed – by trying out certain of the new songs and by trying to make the old songs sound new. What began to emerge was not always bad but it was, invariably, weird. With Rolling Thunder, Dylan had moulded his music to suit the musicians he had chosen. At Rundown, he took another step: the nature of the band, girl singers, sax player and all, dictated the ‘arrangements’. Unkind souls, American reviewers in particular, would later conclude that Elvis had been too much on the artist’s mind. Words such as ‘Vegas’ and ‘lounge act’ would be employed. Dylan drew the line at a jumpsuit – though sequins would be sighted - but tolerated several other indignities.
The tour began at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo on 20 February. Three nights in the capital were followed by three nights in Osaka and another five nights back in Tokyo. Within the space of a couple of weeks, Dylan had already made a ton of money with a show that was, in effect, a greatest-hits package – a revue of a different sort – complete in places with a flute, of all things. The first night saw only a couple of novelties in the space of 28 songs. ‘The Man in Me’, never performed in concert after being recorded for the New Morning album in 1970, put in an appearance. ‘Tomorrow Is a Long Time’ and ‘One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)’, two wildly different songs from two very different years in the ’60s, emerged from the artist’s filing cabinet. Japanese audiences seem to have struggled at first with the new arrangements, but the shows sold out regardless. At the start of the tour the feeling was inescapable, nevertheless: this was Dylan cabaret.
Forgiving fans of bootlegs would for years insist that the live album Bob Dylan at Budokan, recorded by the Japanese outpost of Columbia for regional distribution only, was not properly representative of what was going on during this stage of the tour. In truth, the differences from show to show were marginal. The problem was less that the music was bad – some of it has a certain strange charm to this day – but that it was pointless. It sounded at times like a Dylan tribute act in a resort hotel. Money was the only possible excuse. For the bassist Rob Stoner, veteran of Rolling Thunder from start to finish and de facto bandleader, the excuse wasn’t good enough. When Japan, New Zealand and Australia had been ticked off the list and ‘the Far East’ deemed conquered, Stoner quit the tour. For Dylan, this was inconvenient. He was planning to snatch a few days – as ever, only a few – and turn those nine new songs into an album.
*
Street-Legal would be album number 18 of those recorded in a studio and number 23 in the grand total if, that is, the rather fine triple-disc compendium Masterpieces, released only in Australasia and Japan in March 1978, is included.21 By that year, totting up the titles was becoming tiresome, certainly for Dylan. He had long since acquired the habit of treating each new set publicly as just another album, part of the routine, even a chore. The fact that he would spend only four days in April on the recordings that became Street-Legal was symptomatic. He could devote weeks to rehearsing for a concert tour yet expect a modern album – modern even by the standards of 1978 – to be achieved just by rolling the tapes while the band played.
Dylan wanted to record his latest group of songs ‘live’ in an era in which, almost as a matter of habit, artists were assembling tracks from discrete recordings of their constituent parts. With almost two months free between concerts, he was also maintaining – in later interviews it would be stated as a matter of fact – that he had only those four days in which to cut the album. There was no technical reason, however, why his wish for unmediated performances could not have been granted. All that was required was for Dylan to accept that it was impossible to make such an album at the record industry’s equivalent of a moment’s notice, especially when he was employing a pretty big group of musicians. He couldn’t or wouldn’t see it. To defer to technology, even to deign to take an interest in technology, seemed to Dylan to amount to surrender and betrayal. In time, the attitude would become near-fatal to his recorded work. It almost killed Street-Legal.
‘Almost’ is the disputable word. Some who concede that the resultant album was a mess and an audiophile’s nightmare, at least in its first released form, still rank Street-Legal high in Dylan’s canon.22 Of notable critics, Michael Gray has been perhaps the most assertive – and the most honest – writing that this set amounts to ‘one of Dylan’s most important, cohesive albums’, a collection of ‘astonishing complexity and confidence, delivered in one of Dylan’s most authoritative voices, and extremely badly produced’.23 In 1978, most American reviewers would have wondered what Gray was on about, or on. For them, abysmal production was the least of it. Where Street-Legal was concerned, critical opinion in Europe and America would be wide oceans apart.
Perhaps because it yielded an unlikely hit single in the United Kingdom and across Europe in the shape of ‘Baby, Stop Crying’, European buyers and reviewers were always more enthusiastic towards the album than Americans. Street-Legal’s chart placings – number two in the UK, eleven in the US – would make the divergence stark. The additional fact that Dylan’s six nights of concerts at London’s Earls Court Exhibition Centre in June would be viewed by the British press as historic triumphs while his American shows were scorned (on a good night) set a small critical tradition in stone.
When the album was released in June, Robert Christgau of the Village Voice, grading music like chicken portions, would award Dylan C+ and remark that the ‘divorcé’ was ‘too in love with his own self-generated misery to break through the leaden tempos that oppress his melodies’. The reviewer would then wonder if Dylan intended ‘his Neil Diamond masquerade as a joke’. By 1983, to take another tiny example, an extensive Dylan entry in the so-called Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll would note Budokan and the 1978 world tour as examples of Dylan ‘redoing his old songs with some of the trappings of a Las Vegas lounge act’. The entry would fail even to mention Street-Legal.
In Rolling Stone itself, after kicking off his review with the splendidly eccentric claim that Dylan’s ‘Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)’ ‘is really just a pastiche of the best moments’ – best moments? – ‘of the Eagles’ Hotel California’, Greil Marcus would tear Street-Legal apart. The artist had never sounded ‘sillier’ or ‘so utterly fake’. One track was ‘intolerably smug’, another simply ‘creepy’. As for the singing, Marcus would write, ‘it’s simply impossible to pay attention to it for more than a couple of minutes at a time’. Besides, ‘all that raw chanting in big halls . . . has at once produced a new vocal style, and destroyed Dylan’s timing and his ability to bring emotional precision to a lyric’. Comically, way back in 1978, just four short years after his return from an eight-year lay-off and long before the Never-Ending Tour had done real damage to his voice, the artist would be accused of giving far too many concerts. At its indignant, petulant heart, the review would accuse Dylan of ‘not giving a damn whether a record is good enough for his audience’.24
Such commentary did its work. After its release in June, Street-Legal would wind up as the first fully realised Dylan studio album since 1964 – Dylan and the Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack aside – to fail to reach the US top ten. Later it would be identified as, at best, a relative failure after Blood on the Tracks and Desire. Its lack of thematic unity – as though Desire had possessed such a thing – would be held against it. The musical settings provided by that big, brassy band and the backing vocalists would be held to suffocate the lyrics. The contrast between verbal complexity in some of the songs and a certain maudlin, sexist sentimentality in others would be picked out – Marcus would set that ball rolling – as a deep flaw. The charge sheet would say that the writing didn’t hold together, that the ‘slick’ music jarred and that the production was diabolical. The case would have some merit.
In 1978, on first hearing, you were invited to wonder if Street-Legal had been produced at all. Clearly, there was a big difference between what Dylan heard while the band played and the sounds struggling technicians managed to capture from the space at Rundown. Those ‘technical issues’ were at the heart of the problem. Dylan had elected to use his bare-bones Santa Monica rehearsal hall and a mobile recording truck rather than bother to find a professional studio that could accommodate live performance. The technicians’ attempts to adapt Rundown while an impatient star nagged were hurried improvisations at best. What emerged from the resulting murk at the former rifle factory was the worst of both worlds: live performances in collision with 24-track technology when neither was organised to meet the needs of the other. To top it all the final mix would be, politely, a strange affair.
The average record buyer cared nothing for these details and neither did Dylan. The difference was that the customer expected the artist and those around him to take care of tedious technical matters. The fan wasn’t supposed to pause and wonder why the sound was thin, the vocals too often indistinct, the drums sometimes a mere suggestion in the distance. Dylan, who had spent most of the ’60s ignoring the mysteries of the new-fangled stereophonic mix, was at home only in the multidimensional universe of live performance. That wasn’t available in your local record store. Even the release of Desire in the then-fashionable quadraphonic format – for those who could afford the gear – had failed to bridge the gap between Dylan’s reality and what vinyl could deliver. Something had to give, but it wouldn’t be the artist. The still-debatable reputation of Street-Legal was one result.
Set all that aside. Make allowances for those ‘technical issues’. The album remains a disjointed affair. Some of the writing is thrilling and some not much better – for Marcus was not entirely wrong – than Dylan-by-numbers. ‘Changing of the Guards’ is an indisputably (says this writer) great song while ‘Is Your Love in Vain?’ is risible, even embarrassing. Seriously: what was anyone supposed to make of ‘Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow / Do you understand my pain?’ There is something of a gamut to be run, in other words. ‘No Time to Think’, at over eight minutes, is a track that defies the usual description of the artist-as-poet. Overly rhetorical it might be, but it works well enough on the page; less well, hardly at all in places, as a piece of music. ‘New Pony’ is a standard blues metaphor to a standard blues riff and strikes this listener, at every hearing, as tiresome and bombastic. ‘Baby, Stop Crying’ veers between sounding like a corny lament and a description of a domestic scene you would not want to witness. Perhaps, in strict fairness, that was the driving idea behind the song, but the performance seems forced and false.
‘Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)’ is the album’s second great song. It is also a constant reminder of what Street-Legal might have been. Who is the personage addressed, God or overlord? The song begins:
Señor, señor, do you know where we’re headin’?
Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?
Seems like I been down this way before
Is there any truth in that, senor?
And ends:
Señor, señor, let’s disconnect these cables
Overturn these tables
This place don’t make sense to me no more
Can you tell me what we’re waiting for, señor?
Michael Gray has called this ‘a classic post-Vietnam song’ while pointing out the ‘Christ-gesture’ of ‘Overturn these tables’. That reading is entirely fair.25 Gray understands the song as a marker on the last stretch of Dylan’s road to becoming a declared Christian. The entire album is meanwhile understood in terms of salvation lost and found. On its own terms, this counts as a solid argument.
Nevertheless, to read Street-Legal entirely in terms of Dylan edging towards God remains something of a stretch. If religious imagery is the only guide, it needs to be remembered that the artist had been inching towards the idea of salvation for better than a decade without taking the final step. Or rather, he had been doing so without choosing to make a formal declaration of faith and allegiance. A trawl through the basement tapes will turn up plenty of examples of the ‘spiritual Dylan’. John Wesley Harding is meaningless if you ignore its religious content. A sense of God runs through Planet Waves and through Blood on the Tracks. As Gray himself pointed out, He is there plainly – though strangely He was overlooked at the time – in Desire’s ‘Oh, Sister’. Hindsight says it would have been odd if Street-Legal had contained no further sightings, or fresh evidence that Dylan was becoming ripe for a full-blown conversion. He had been a religious writer, one way or another, for years. None of this compensates for the album’s flaws, however. That miracle was not achieved.
One problem in writing about Dylan and religion, whether in the context of ‘Señor’ or any other song, is that the artist had never denied God. In the ’60s he had made all the then-usual statements about churches and organised belief and why they were probably not needed. He had not said, not once, that he did not believe, or even that he doubted. God was invoked repeatedly; religious assumptions were Dylan’s assumptions. Take, for one example, the forever overpraised ‘Masters of War’, probably written at the end of 1962 or in the first days of 1963. Its approach to war and imperialism, though utterly simplistic, is not so far distant from the approach taken in ‘Señor’. Its moral world turns on the betrayal of Judas and the forgiveness of Jesus. Christ is more forgiving than the singer, of course, but there is no scepticism towards the proposition that He exists and forgives.
Dylan caused confusion in the ’60s by persistently denying his Jewish origins, by engaging in satire, by assailing hypocrisy, by finding himself conscripted on behalf of a counter-culture that placed no value on church-going after the alternative spiritual supermarket was declared open for business. Things can become confusing when you have the likes of Allen Ginsberg pouring his patent medicine essence of misunderstood Buddhism in your ear, when people on every side are talking about ‘karma’, and when there is a wife with a taste for all things New Age waiting patiently at home. But an outright non-believer? The Dylans did not raise their children in that manner. He had been coming to terms with the Jewish faith of his ancestors since at least the beginning of the 1970s.
This did not, specifically did not, make him a potential recruit for Jesus – he would resolve the contradiction to his own satisfaction before long – but it was proof enough of his inclinations. Not a single song from the 1960s or the 1970s justifies the supposition that this artist was ever far from God. If Dylan embarked upon a spiritual journey, it was a short trip. Street-Legal merely refined his theological position a little.
‘Changing of the Guards’ is a degree more complicated than anything else on the album and all the better for it. Christ pops up here, too, as a kind of spiritual superhero on behalf of the meek, anticipating the saviour Dylan would embrace before long. Here too, set in the landscape of mythology and Tarot cards, with an Isis figure for a heroine – perhaps the writer had been reading his D.H. Lawrence after all – are the end times: ‘Merchants and thieves hungry for power’, ‘destruction in the ditches’, ‘Renegade priests and treacherous young witches’, ‘dog soldiers’ in the ‘palace of mirrors’. The last verse will promise peace, the fall of false idols and even the conquest of ‘cruel death’ itself. First, pronouns having been switched, Christ militant will have a word.
Gentlemen, he said
I don’t need your organization
I’ve shined your shoes
I’ve moved your mountains and marked your cards
But Eden is burning
Either get ready for elimination
Or else your hearts must have the courage
For the changing of the guards . . .26
In that context, the shuffling of Tarot cards within the song becomes a little puzzling. There is no doubt that Dylan is using the imagery of the old esoteric poker deck extravagantly, though perhaps with less credulity than fans of all-knowing allegorical pictograms would like to believe. Certainly there are explicit references to cards from both the Tarot’s ‘major arcana’ and the minor, whether Fortune, Death, the Moon, the Chariot (‘on the wheels of fire’) or the Tower. The King and Queen of Swords are in the deck, too, as is the Three of Swords with that ‘heart-shaped tattoo’. A lot depends, however, on the pack being employed. For example, the card known as the Tower in English – hence Dylan’s reference – is generally called La Maison Dieu, the House of God, in the sixteenth-century Tarot de Marseille. Equally, many Europeans have a peculiar tradition that the pack is best used just to play games. Perhaps they are not alone.
Did Dylan believe in Tarot? He might well have been a believer in trumped-up anglophone notions of divination. Some fans would love to think so. Interviewing the artist in London in June, Robert Shelton would certainly mention his ‘fascination’ with the pack.27 If Dylan possessed a real faith in the cards, he could even have picked up the idea, entirely spurious, that the Tarot has an Isis connection. Like much else that was exotic and unverifiable, this version of cartomancy caught on widely in the 1970s among those packing for their spiritual journeys.
Equally, the artist might simply have decided that a song with a mock-prophetic intent, even a serious mock-prophetic intent, could stand a little esoteric colour. He wasn’t picky. For Dylan, arresting images were, as they remain, pictures worth a couple of thousand words, functioning as a language in their own right. Asking how Tarot squared with the Christian element in ‘Changing of the Guards’ is probably a fruitless exercise. What we know is that this artist responds first to imagery that he can put to his own use. The verbal fantasy landscape painting evident in ‘Changing of the Guards’ isn’t so different, as a matter of technique, from what Dylan had achieved in ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’, or from what he would achieve in ‘Jokerman’. It might also explain why in due course he would respond with such intensity to the Book of Revelation.
Imagery, not religion, gives ‘Changing of the Guards’ its power, but that’s just the difference – one that Dylan would soon forget too easily – between a poem and a sermon. As far as faith goes, however, what matters about the song is the attraction of the messiah figure for this supposedly Jewish writer. Hitherto, the serious uses to which Dylan had put religious language had been justifiable, more or less, in terms of the Torah. Even this song might have been excused, had there been a need, as a version of Jewish messianic prophecy, of which there is an abundance. Yet looking back it is possible to see just how open Dylan already was to the claim that prophecy had been fulfilled. In London that summer Shelton would assert proudly, ‘He knew I wouldn’t ask him about God.’ The enquiry had been made too many times before.
Street-Legal’s third great song, hampered by its routine arrangement, encumbered by the girl singers whose presence would become a persistent distraction in the years ahead, is ‘Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)’. This is another definitive rebuttal to the claim that Dylan’s writing had begun to falter. It is evidence, probably superfluous, that his need for Jacques Levy’s help on Desire had been personal rather than professional. Again, however, if evidence is required that here was a man lost in life and in the toils of spiritual conflict, most questions are answered.
I fought with my twin, that enemy within
‘Till both of us fell by the way
Horseplay and disease is killing me by degrees
While the law looks the other way
You can understand ‘the law’ in the conventional sense of the forces encountered by a man forever on the road – one idea that never grows old for Dylan – or you can understand it in the Jewish sense on which the writer was raised. It could be a reference to coppers; it could be a reference to the Halakha, the body of laws for religion and for life. You can take the journey itself as spiritual or as another reworking of the shifting narrative trail traced in ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. You can spot the images of personal loss or find something a good deal deeper in the idea of an individual struggling with ‘that enemy within’, himself, his ‘twin’. You can take it, above all, that this Dylan is a man who is approaching God yet is still, given recent events in his private life, somehow incomplete.
There’s a new day at dawn and I’ve finally arrived
If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived
I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive
But without you it just doesn’t seem right
Oh, where are you tonight?
*
Dylan was back on the road by the first day of June. Fully seven nights at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles awaited before he and his musicians were due to cross the Atlantic. Soon enough the artist would be praising the wonderful perceptiveness of British audiences as a heartening contrast to the treatment he could expect at home. In Rolling Stone, Cameron Crowe would report that Dylan’s performances had ‘won over many doubters’ by the end of the LA run, but the burden of the piece would be the tale of ‘glibly professional’ shows that ‘left most die-hard fans and reviewers puzzled’.28 The journalist would quote an unnamed ‘prominent musician’ as a surrogate for majority opinion. ‘There were things that killed me and there were things that really pissed me off,’ the bravely anonymous critic would remark. ‘He could take this show to Vegas and not change one note.’
The important fact that Dylan could wear ‘specially tailored’ clothes, switching between ‘a black studded pants outfit or one with a white sequined thunderbolt design’ – both verging on the criminal, it’s true – would go into the Rolling Stone notebook. The drastic rearrangement of many favourite songs would be observed. That Dylan had taken to styling himself ‘an entertainer’ while indulging in ‘earnest between-song patter’ would be added to the charge sheet. Crowe would even remember witnessing the artist shaking hands with members of the audience. An alleged visit by Dylan to (of course) Las Vegas, supposedly to watch a performance by Neil Diamond, was the only explanation given for this new ‘concert stance’. What’s plain is that the short hop to damning conclusions, hard on the heels of the reviews for Street-Legal, had been achieved.
Britain, too, had made up its mind long before the artist arrived. The difference was that the vote had been cast almost unanimously in Dylan’s favour before a note was heard. But then, the perverse islanders liked Street-Legal. Their music press had not stooped to asinine abuse of the record. Instead, music journalists had rummaged in the superlatives drawer for the old folder marked ‘Best Since . . .’ In the UK, the album would become his biggest seller since New Morning.
Dylan had not played in Britain since the last day of August 1969 and the Isle of Wight festival. Everyone, artist and audience, had chosen to forget the ‘mixed reception’ given to that show with The Band, irrespective of any virtues captured by bootleggers. One performance aside, Dylan had not toured among the British since 1966. Tickets for his run at Earls Court therefore sold out instantly to people who had queued for days; many more could have been sold. Audiences were warm, forgiving, ready to enjoy themselves and eager for him to succeed. In fairness, he didn’t let them down. He and his band had performed better than pretty well in Los Angeles, but in London there was a meeting of minds between the artist and his public. Quoted – or roughly paraphrased – by Melody Maker after the last Earls Court show, Dylan said:
Doing these concerts here has made me realise about British audiences. They’re really something different – they actually come for the words and the songs. That’s what’s missing back home. There they tend to come for . . . not so much the music, more the sideshow.29
This was not mere flattery from a gratified artist. The Earls Court audiences were not dissuaded in the slightest by new arrangements of old songs, or dismayed by alleged hints of ‘Vegas’. Veterans of Dylan shows would long afterwards maintain that these were among the best concerts he ever gave in Britain. Melody Maker’s Ray Coleman would write that ‘Different lines of his songs came over with fresh force’, that ‘Rarely, if ever, has the song [‘Just Like a Woman’] been so brilliantly blown apart and knitted together again’, that ‘his harmonica solo was a riveting joy’. The journalist would remember the notes of the solo ‘bringing the ecstatic crowd to its feet with a mighty roar’. Coleman, who did not insist that the last night was necessarily the best of Dylan’s London run, would even give a special mention to a performance of ‘Señor’. The contrast with the reception the artist would receive in his native land in the autumn of the year would count as remarkable. Either the English capital got very lucky, or the tour lost something important when it returned to the States, or Dylan was dead right about prevailing attitudes back home.
What can be said for certain is that an authentic hero’s welcome still awaited him across Europe. He painted his newest masterpiece in Rotterdam, Dortmund, Berlin, Nuremberg, Paris and Gothenburg. As in London, the latest incarnation of Bob Dylan was accepted without reservation by the French over five nights at the 10,000-seat Pavilion de Paris. David Bowie and Bob Marley had managed only a couple of nights apiece there in the preceding weeks. Europe also allowed the artist and his band – between whom there now existed a genuine rapport – to behave like overgrown cultural exchange students. They took in the sights. Dylan even paid a visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
Back in England, he made amends for the Isle of Wight. The ‘Picnic at Blackbushe’, staged on a Hampshire airfield that had once housed the RAF and, later, the US Navy, had been fully expected to draw big weekend crowds. It was supposed to meet part of a huge and lucrative British demand for Dylan after the adulatory reports of the Earls Court shows. A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on ticket sales said that an impressive 100,000 customers could be expected. On Saturday, 15 July, according to predictably cautious police estimates after the event, something like 200,000 turned up; the real figure was undoubtedly greater. Some of the horde might have been eager to see Graham Parker and the Rumour, Eric Clapton or Joan Armatrading, but the day’s headline act and unquestioned star, resplendent in a top hat borrowed from a hotel doorman, was Dylan. As darkness fell and bonfires began to spark into life in every corner of the site, he commenced a near-three-hour performance that would include six of the nine Street-Legal songs. If your taste runs to coincidence, ‘Señor’ was followed, not for the first time on the tour, by ‘Masters of War’. With everything from a solo version of ‘Gates of Eden’ performed in a pool of blue light to ‘Forever Young’ with Clapton playing along, Dylan’s set culminated in what had become his standard encores. Again, the juxtaposition seemed to make a point: first, ‘Changing of the Guards’, then ‘The Times They Are a-Changin”. The reception from the vast tribe on the airfield was, in that word favoured by benign reviewers down the decades, rapturous. All that remained was to persuade America to take the same view.
It didn’t happen. The final American stretch of this world tour would be a very long haul. Dylan would seem to run out of energy or patience as concrete stadium succeeded concrete stadium in the course of 65 shows. He and his musicians would perform in thirty-one states and three Canadian cities before delivering their valedictory encores at the bizarrely named Hollywood Sportatorium in Florida on 16 December. Harmony within the band would be disrupted, meanwhile, when the artist took up with Carolyn Dennis, one of the singers – in what would become a significant relationship for both of them – after already getting himself involved with another of the vocalists, Helena Springs. For better or worse, Dylan could and did please himself in these matters.
It made little useful difference to performances that would cease to be fresh, confident or assured before the last hike of the globe-spanning expedition was far advanced. Instead, Dylan’s singing would too often seem to bear out the criticisms levelled against the vocals on the album by Greil Marcus. The new arrangements would also lose their original poise and conviction. Monstrous world tours are the enemy of art, as any performer who isn’t too busy counting the money comes sooner or later to realise. Dylan was more alert to the problem than most, but with too many minds already made up thanks to reviews of Street-Legal, and with all the cracks about alimony, Elvis and lounge acts, some of his shows would fail to sell out.
For all that, the artist, apparently unable to think of anything better to do with himself, remained undaunted. By the end he was talking to his musicians of concerts in 1979, of touring ever onwards. After all, he was still making a lot of the money he believed he needed. A gross figure of $20 million for the 1978 tour receipts is generally mentioned. As with Rolling Thunder, Dylan was never likely to quit easily when he was doing what he thought he wanted or needed to do. Critical disdain meanwhile had a tendency to make him more stubborn. As the long pilgrimage neared its end, he began to tell stories, bizarre or revealing according to taste, from the stage. In Jacksonville, Florida, on 13 December, his preface to ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ became an elaborate reworking of vintage Dylan hokum. It was that or a comical parable on the relationship between an embattled performing artist and his audience.
The carnivals [they] used to have in the ‘50s, every carnival used to have a geek. Do you know what a geek is? A geek is a man that eats a live chicken, right before your eyes. He bites the head off, eats that. Then he goes ahead, eats the heart, drinks up the blood, sweeps up all the feathers with a broom. In them days, it cost a quarter to see him . . . Anyway. The geek pretty much kept to himself most of the time. Nobody never did get too tight with the geek. But one day I was having breakfast with the bearded lady and she says, ‘Stay away from that man.’ I say, ‘Why?’ She says, ‘Because he looks at everybody else in the world as freaky, except him. He thinks that he’s just earning a living, and what he’s doing is pretty straight . . .’
The singer then proceeded to claim that being stared at on the streets of Nashville for having long hair in ‘about 1964’ had ‘reminded’ him of the geek and inspired the song. In Lakeland, Florida, two nights later the introduction to ‘Señor’ was stranger still. This artist objected to the myths surrounding Bob Dylan except when he was inventing the best of them.
I was riding on a train one time from Durango, Mexico, to San Diego. I fell asleep on this train. I woke up about midnight and a lot of people were getting off the train. The train was in the station, pulling up to the platform at a place called Monterey. So a bunch of people were getting off the train. On to the platform, the steps, this man gets up to the train. Everybody else gets off. He come down the aisle and took a seat across the aisle from me, wearing nothing but a blanket and a derby hat.
So I was sitting there. I felt a very strange vibration. I was staring into the window, which was like a glass mirror. And I could not help myself any longer, I had to turn around and look right at this man. When I did I could see that his eyes were burning and there was smoke coming out of his nostrils. I immediately knew this was the man I wanted to talk to. So I turned around to the mirror for a while to figure out something to say. And when I had it all together I turned around and he was gone.
By late 1978, for all that, touring and self-doubt were taking a toll. As winter came on, Dylan and most of the band came down with flu. By the time they reached San Diego on 17 November he was still feeling sick, disorientated and exhausted. The performance that night was hard going. Almost exactly a year later, on 27 November 1979, back in the same city, Dylan would tell his audience – a supportive one, on this occasion – of how it had been. This parable was also intended to explain what had become of him and his music in the intervening months. Dylan would relate that it had all happened towards the end of the 1978 concert. Someone in the crowd, he would say, ‘knew I wasn’t feeling too well’.
I think they could sense that. And they threw a silver cross on the stage. Now usually I don’t pick things up in front of the stage. Once in a while I do, but sometimes, most times, I don’t. But I looked down at that cross. I said, ‘I gotta pick that up.’
I picked up that cross and I put it in my pocket. It was a silver cross, I think maybe about so high. And I put it . . . brought it backstage with me. And I brought it with me to the next town, which was off in Arizona, Phoenix. Anyway, when I got back there I was feeling even worse than I’d felt when I was in San Diego. And I said, ‘Well I really need something tonight’
I didn’t know what it was, I was using all kinds of things, and I said, ‘I need something tonight that I never really had before.’
And I looked in my pocket and I had this cross that someone threw before when I was in San Diego. So if that person is here tonight, I want to thank them for that cross.30
The audience in San Diego’s Golden Hall in 1979 would exult when Dylan mentioned the cross. They would be unusual witnesses to his performances that year, rare examples of a crowd being as one with the singer and the statements he had begun to make from the concert stage. His story of the silver cross would be part of his introduction to a song called ‘Slow Train’.
The San Diego crowd would not flinch, unlike other spectators, when Dylan then discoursed on newspaper stories about ‘people in Turkey revolting’, ‘Russians don’t have any food’, ‘all that trouble in Ireland’, and the Islamic revolution that had just destroyed the Shah’s regime in Iran. This audience would not shake their heads in bewilderment when Dylan said, ‘They got a funny bunch of people over in Iran. They have a religion called “Muslims”, you know?’ The artist would remind this crowd that ‘the Bible says, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” . . . We know this world as we see it is going to be destroyed. Christ will set up his kingdom in Jerusalem for a thousand years. We know that’s true.’ In San Diego, where some in the audience had become personally acquainted with the artist by the end of 1979, they would only shout a loud ‘Amen!’ to all of that.