by Lloyd Sachs
Bob Neuwirth, Dylan’s onetime sidekick, road manager, poetic muse, and musical consigliore (“If ever there was a renaissance man leaping in and out of things, he would have to be it,” Dylan wrote in Chronicles: Volume One), remembers things differently. “Dylan and I decided after two beers that it would be hilarious if he and I and Ramblin’ Jack [Elliott] got into a station wagon and played pop-up shows,” he told me in 2015, flashing back to the summer of 1975. They would drive from city to city, performing where they could, with whom they could.
During an engagement at the Other End in New York’s Greenwich Village the first week in July, Neuwirth hosted an unlikely assortment of performers. Through the week, the likes of Ian Hunter, David Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson, Gordon Lightfoot, Ringo Starr, the Blues Brothers John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, celebrities such as Muhammad Ali and Caroline Kennedy—and Dylan—turned the gig into a cultural happening. “I was asking people who wandered by the bar to play with me,” said Neuwirth, an Ohio native who made his name on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, folk scene. “T Bone was in Texas, hiding out or making records. I called him and said you gotta come up here. He said send me a ticket. So I did.”
According to Neuwirth, he first encountered Burnett a few years earlier in Woodstock, where Stephen Bruton moved in 1970—hoping, among other things, to play with his idol, Van Morrison, who was living there. (Their only encounter, alas, was at the local bank, where the Belfast Cowboy was withdrawing money in order to move to California.) When Burnett came up for a visit, Neuwirth, who was among the musicians hanging out in upstate New York, was invited to meet him. Girls and tequila were on the program. “I liked the surrealistic songs he was writing,” Neuwirth told me.
Burnett, who had never been in the Village, was overwhelmed by all the music happening there. “It was Valhalla,” he told Uncut. “It was freedom.” In addition to joining Neuwirth’s amazing, expanding band at the Other End, Burnett accompanied him for a song at Gerdes Folk City, where Dylan was among those celebrating owner Mike Porco’s birthday, and participated in late-night jam sessions at the Broadway loft of the abstract painter Larry Poons. Holding forth on guitar and grand piano, Dylan aired out songs from Desire, which he was in the process of recording.
“I had to twist T Bone’s arm into going on Rolling Thunder,” Neuwirth told me. But Burnett seemed to be in mid-tour form at a pre-Thunder party. As recounted by Larry “Ratso” Sloman in On the Road with Bob Dylan, “T Bone had a bag of golf clubs on his back, a driver in his hands, and Neuwirth was screaming, ‘Playing through, playing through.’”
Neuwirth is credited with putting together the touring band, which became known as Guam; bassist Rob Stoner was the musical director. The players included the violinist Scarlet Rivera, who became famous for her searing solo on “Hurricane,” Dylan’s fiery epic about wrongfully imprisoned boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, and the boyish nineteen-year-old string prodigy David Mansfield. With Frank Zappa providing transportation for the musicians and their significant others via his bus, Phydeaux, the Rolling Thunder Revue kicked off on October 30, 1975, in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Neuwirth acted as emcee and sang harmony with Dylan. The core cast included Joan Baez, the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn, and Mick Ronson. They were joined along the way by such artists as Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Ronee Blakley (a star of the Robert Altman film Nashville), and Roberta Flack.
Though a virtual unknown to audiences, Burnett couldn’t help drawing their attention: Who the heck was that skinny kid with the Big Bird look towering over his fellow musicians (not to mention tour companions like Allen Ginsberg)? “I stood at the back of the stage and didn’t move,” Burnett told the Telegraph. “It’s inhibiting when you’re a foot taller than anyone else and you have to bend down to the mike. I wasn’t made for that.”
David Mansfield recalled a less-reserved Burnett. “He would use his height sometimes to lunge across the stage,” Mansfield told me. “He would make stage moves that because of his appearance were very striking. Mick Ronson, in comparison, would strike all these guitar-god poses.” In what became a regular feature of the concerts, Burnett, lampooning his Texas image, lassoed Roger McGuinn from the wings following the singer’s rendition of his Byrds hit “Chestnut Mare.” Quipped Joan Baez in her best Newport Folk Festival hillbilly accent, “Roger dang near got himself lassoed to death!” And, accurately characterizing Burnett, she proclaimed, “He’s one of them rushed-up fellas!”
Some members of the troupe, put off by Burnett’s antics, wanted Dylan to cut him loose. With all the guitarists in the show (as many as five), Burnett’s absence as a musician might not have mattered. His guitar skills, as good as they were, were not the reason he was on the tour to begin with, said Neuwirth, who as band organizer had been drawn to his outsize personality and overall talent. But, Mansfield told me, Burnett was “the only guy in the Rolling Thunder Revue who could play a Texas shuffle properly.” He added, “Dylan liked the idea of this ragtag gypsy caravan, this oddball collection of people. I mean Bob appeared in whiteface the whole time. This tall, string bean cowboy fit right in.”
Dylan incorporated footage from the tour into Renaldo & Clara, his misbegotten, four-hour theatrical film extravaganza. Burnett, who doesn’t like to be photographed or filmed, asked to be left out of the epic, but he was cast in it anyway, briefly showing up as the Inner Voice and “Buddy Holly.” In his book Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary, Tim Riley describes Burnett as “the most unselfconsciously comic presence in the film . . . and a major discovery.”
The playwright Sam Shepard, who was invited by Dylan to join the tour sight unseen, ostensibly to fashion a script for Renaldo & Clara, writes in his Rolling Thunder Logbook that Burnett had “a peculiar quality of craziness about him. He’s the only one on the tour I’m not sure has relative control over his violent, dark side. He’s not scary; he’s just crazy.” Shepard cites the destructive behavior that his future collaborator would unleash in restaurants “if he wasn’t served when the hunger hit him.”
In a 1983 Rolling Stone interview, Burnett admitted to being “mean and sarcastic” during the tour and “laughing in the face of death.” In a 1996 interview with Los Angeles Magazine, though, he said, “I was never really all that crazy. But I would behave metaphorically at times.” He followed that up by saying, “I wanted to know how far I could go, that’s for sure.”
Burnett made his presence felt in a more agreeable way by singing harmony on various tunes and hustling songs, including two by his Texas friend Roscoe West (né Bob Barnes). Ronson sang “Life on Mars” (not to be confused with David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?”) and Burnett sang “Hula Hoop,” a slap at corporate types he co-wrote with West. With its seething lyrics (“I’ve never been to art school / But I kinda like Picasso / If I had one of his paintings / I’d only piss it off in Reno”), sung over a slinky, conga-fed groove, the tune provided a peek into the songwriting persona Burnett was developing. Another of the spotlight numbers he sang during the marathon sets, which could run as long as five hours, was Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.” Burnett had met the brash Los Angeles rocker in 1973 at a Sunday gathering hosted by Don Everly following the contentious breakup of the Everly Brothers, the legendary act for whom Zevon was musical director. Burnett and Zevon became friends and chess partners. Burnett said he first heard “Werewolves” the day after Zevon wrote it (LeRoy Marinell and Waddy Wachtel received co-writing credits). He began performing his reggae-tinged version of the song two years before Zevon recorded it. “It seemed like a good tune to do for a crowd who had never heard me, or it, before,” Burnett says in Sid Griffin’s Shelter from the Storm: Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Years.
Singing over a lacerating steel guitar, Burnett left his own manic imprint on the knife-in-cheek classic. Among the celebrity dance pairings he imagined “doing” the Werewolves were Babe Ruth and Brigitte Bardot and the British film stars Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed of Ken Russell’s 1969 film Women in Love. He name-checke
d the Texas soul great Joe Tex, Carl Douglas (of “Kung Fu Fighting” fame), and the Band’s Rick Danko.
By most accounts, the second leg of Rolling Thunder, which began in early 1976 and featured such new faces as the Texas singer-songwriter and humorist Kinky Friedman, lacked the galvanizing power and cohesion of the first half. But one of its highlights was Burnett’s “Silver Mantis,” a folk song co-written with his high school artist friend John “Flex” Fleming about a Japanese warlord’s daughter who is saved from a kidnapping by a lowly servant only to see her father toss the servant in prison in a jealous rage.
“There’s T Bone!” Dylan said, introducing Burnett to the hometown crowd at the Tarrant County Convention Center Arena in Fort Worth. “Sing a song called ‘Sashiko’!” Never mind that Dylan got the title wrong and mispronounced the name of the princess. He was so fond of the song that he positioned it nicely between “Lay Lady Lay” and “Idiot Wind,” played bass on it, and had Joan Baez sing harmony. Burnett, who played some piano, also got to sing “The Dogs,” another Fleming co-write, this one inspired by COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), the 1970s rights group dedicated to the repeal of prostitution laws.
The impact that Dylan had on Burnett, who reportedly teared up during the great one’s renditions of “You’re a Big Girl Now,” was enormous. “Dylan opened the borders and wrote about life from a whole other point of view,” Burnett told the Los Angeles Times. “I had started trying to do that. Writing songs that weren’t just about girlfriends and boyfriends and cars.” Less simply, Burnett was influenced by the freedom Dylan enjoyed in departing from realism in his lyrics and indulging in righteous anger. Burnett also was impressed by the looseness and changeability of Dylan’s music, as well as the pacing of his shows. “Dylan doesn’t give you an arrangement; you busk along . . .” he told Sid Griffin. “He wasn’t one for getting everything all bolted down.” Indeed, as Mansfield recalled, what was a waltz one night might become a blues shuffle the next.
Beyond all that, the Rolling Thunder experience instilled deep community values in Burnett. Though Dylan was the obvious focal point, and the reason fans filled the seats, these shows weren’t just about him. They were about a group of diverse artists who were striving for unity, for common cause, for an uplifting grassroots vision at a time when the United States (with Gerald Ford in the White House) was sorely missing one. Burnett has never stopped pursuing that kind of group experience. Again and again, whether performing with a troupe called Void at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 1999; joining Jackson Browne and Nanci Griffith in a 2001 benefit for Minnesota’s Gyuto Monastery hosted by Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard; putting together stage extravaganzas like the 2010 Speaking Clock Revue with the likes of Elvis Costello, Neko Case, and the Punch Brothers; recording the all-star ensemble album Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes; or teaming up with John Mellencamp and Stephen King on the musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, Burnett has found greater meaning in “we” than “I.” He has strived, as he would sing on his next recording, to “keep it in the family.”
CHAPTER 4
Alpha Male
Disillusioned, burnt out, drugged out, or all of the above, many survivors of the sixties turned to religion as part of what Time magazine dubbed “The Jesus Movement” on its cover of June 21, 1971. “There is an uncommon morning freshness to this movement, a buoyant atmosphere of hope and love along with the usual rebel zeal,” read the accompanying story. “Their love seems . . . deeper than the fast-fading sentiments of the flower children.”
Well, maybe and maybe not. But coming off the positive energy and uplift of Rolling Thunder, Burnett was drawn to a nascent spiritual movement in Southern California—one that embraced rock music as a powerful medium for Christians to fellowship with God, at a time when conservative churchgoers distrusted the metaphor. Spearheaded by musicians like the “Jesus rock” singer Larry Norman (whose 1969 Capitol recording Upon This Rock is considered by some to be the first Christian rock album) and the former Righteous Brothers pianist (and manager) John Wimber, these churches offered a more open and casual form of Bible study.
In the mid-to-late 1970s, around the time that Burnett, Steven Soles, and David Mansfield began embracing religious expression as the Alpha Band—and the born-again Christian Jimmy Carter became president—Burnett and his wife began attending Bible classes at the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in West Los Angeles. Soles, Mansfield, and other friends followed. Reportedly prodded by his girlfriend at the time, Dylan began studying there in 1979 with his personal pastor, Kenn Gulliksen. Some of the musicians (not Dylan, who sat in the back, incognito) performed in the church band, for which Soles wrote songs. “People in the arts were flocking to the place,” Mansfield told me. “Sometimes, people were dragging their friends there just to hear the music.”
Burnett, who in the face of attempts to stereotype him as born-again has always personalized his approach to religion, drew from these studies what he wanted and needed in consolidating his beliefs and renewing his faith (which didn’t include the speaking in tongues, divine healing, and “signs and wonders” promoted by some branches of the Vineyard). “T Bone talked about this stuff all the time,” said Mansfield, who as one of the last members of the circle to commit to Christianity—he had not yet done so when he joined the Alpha Band—came under some intense pressure. “T Bone and Steven were laying it on pretty thick,” he told me. “They challenged me pretty hard.”
In other ways, there was nothing typical about the Alpha Band. Rather than create noise for themselves in the music capital, the new band left Los Angeles in the summer of 1976 and set up shop in the historic New Mexican town of Tesuque, outside of Santa Fe. Dylan’s longtime road manager and aide Victor Maymudes (whose recollections are the basis for his son Jacob’s 2014 book, Another Side of Bob Dylan) had remodeled a property in the town and turned it into a nightclub. The Alphas rehearsed by day and performed bar-band style by night. In a short amount of time, they created their own scene. When they felt ready, they invited the major record labels down to hear them. Arista Records founder Clive Davis sent his young associate (and future film producer of note) Roger Birnbaum, who flipped for the band and urged his boss to see them for himself. Davis came and did a double flip. “He practically got down on bended knee to sign us,” Mansfield told me. “It was very bizarre.”
After dishing out a reported $6 million for them, Davis proclaimed the Alpha Band the most important act since the Beatles (“We should have quit then—our case was hopeless,” said Mansfield) and installed them as co-headliners at Arista’s August convention in Camelback, Arizona. They shared the bill with the Funky Kings, a short-lived LA country-rock band featuring Jack Tempchin (writer of such Eagles hits as “Peaceful Easy Feeling”) and Jules Shear (a future songwriting hero known for such hits as the Bangles’ “If She Knew What She Wants”). In his 2013 memoir The Soundtrack of My Life, Davis says the Alpha Band “brought the house down.” Carried by the momentum and media exposure of Rolling Thunder, how could this group fail?
The fact that they took their name from Alphaville, the chilly 1965 sci-fifilm by nervy French director Jean-Luc Godard, should have been a sign that Burnett, Soles, and Mansfield (plus a rhythm section including B-52 Band members David Jackson and Matt Betton) weren’t going to be rolling out any easy-feeling FM hits. To be sure, there were whiffs of the Band and Little Feat, Bo Diddley, and Buddy Holly in their sound—and plenty of Texas blues and border music. Early on, Mansfield told me, Burnett gave him a cassette tape of songs by Elmore James, Jimmy Reed, and other blues greats “to absorb and study.” But couched in Marxist parables, sci-fiscenarios, existential dramas, and snarling performance art, The Alpha Band (released in late 1976) did not connect with mainstream listeners.
Burnett was settling into what Mansfield called “the Jeremiah phase of his new-found Christian faith” (Jeremiah being the great prophet who spoke against false prophets in warning his people that Jerusalem would be des
troyed unless they mended their ways). And though as a social critic he largely took aim at corrupt institutions rather than individuals, there was a little Professor Harold Hill as well in his warnings of doom with a capital D for people who didn’t reorder their priorities, rein in their excesses, and find a higher power in which to believe.
Set to a throbbing beat, “Interviews” is a spooky rip on skewed modern values from fifty million years in the future. One of its star attractions is a circus barker who resembles the soft porn king Russ Meyer. Broken in during Rolling Thunder, “The Dogs” is a surrealistic, Spanish-tinged tale of “forbidden women” in “Hollow wood.” The honky-tonk noir “Last Chance to Dance” could be a sketch for a Robert Rodriguez film. “Your knife is on the table,” sings Burnett, “My gun is in my boot / If you promise not to cut me / I’ll promise not to shoot.” Among the lighter tunes are the twangy ballad “Dark Eyes,” an excuse for Mansfield’s airy violin and mandolin solos, and “Keep It in the Family,” which boasts an irresistible shuffle and bounce along with collegial group vocals.