Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll

by Ben Fong-Torres

  He still did better than most. There were those that were forced out of town-and there was Alan Freed.

  Freed was the biggest of the pioneers, and he was rich from radio, television, live concerts and-of course-"gifts," from songwriting credits on Chuck Berry composi tions to-and this was his downfall-cash. On the eve of the payola hearings, he lost both his radio and TV jobs; the next year, after the hearings, he was indicted again on payola charges in Los Angeles. Shortly before his death in 1965, he was indicted for evading $47,920 in income taxes. The first case was finally dumped in 1964, and Freed was fined $ 300. But he was dying, by then.

  "I was the last friend Alan had," says Clark, "and I don't want to say what he did wrong. He made a lot of mistakes. I never met the man in my heyday, when I was king and he started it all. I met him afterwards, and he was groveling around, and I tried to get him a job, and two days before he died, I was called to contribute to keep him in the hospital, and it was just one of those terrible.. .bad scenes. You don't want to know about it."

  But I did, and, interestingly enough, Lance Freed, Alan's son, could not recall such a closeness between his dad and Dick Clark.

  "There was a cordial, professional relationship before the hearings," he said, "but there wasn't a lot of contact afterwards." With his dying father in a Palm Springs hospital, Lance remembered people calling and bringing food. "But I never recall Dick Clark calling or coming down."

  Later, on the phone, Clark corrected himself. "It was not an intimate friendship; I was one of several trying to get him back going again.. .Alan was the king; he found it, he had the gut reaction. He wasn't bright enough."

  While Dick Clark, from Syracuse University, in business administration, was bright enough?

  "What you're intimating now," he said, "and you're right: I had a little more education. Alan had raw emotions; I knew the game."

  Dick Clark will survive. He is grossing between $ 5 and $ 6 million a year with his enterprises. On TV, he is busier than ever, doing specials for NBC, hosting a game show on CBS, dominating the area of rock on ABC, with productions of In Concert shows and specials. And, of course, there's American Bandstand, still, as far as he's concerned, in its prime. Clark will continue to host the show until someone runs him out of the network. Then, he says, he would syndicate it. What's he holding onto? "First and foremost," he replies, "it pays very well. And secondly, it's become such a gigantic part of my personal life, it'll be a big trauma when it's canceled."

  In Dick Clark's world, some things-the need to work, and make money, and maintain a name-don't change. But even he admits that there is more to today's nostalgia-mania than the remembrance of old times, so exploitable, as he knows, through albums, movies, and TV

  "I look back on those as not the prime, but the fucking good old days," he says. "Those were more fun days, because, I guess, all of life in the fifties and the early sixties was more fun than it is now.

  "We're rapidly getting back to that. We're all trying to get back to a simpler, less aggravating way of life. I don't think we'll accomplish it."

  -August 16, 1973

  Rolling Stone

  In 1975, I went to Las Vegas to see and interview Olivia Newton-John at the Riviera. Dick Clark was hosting an oldies revue at the Thunderbird. We arranged to meet. I was with Dianne, my future wife, who used to rush home from high school to catch the cool music and the even cooler dancers on American Bandstand, and who thought of Clark as a distant uncle.

  After Clark's show at the Thunderbird, he, along with his own future wife, Kari, took us on the town. On our way out of the hotel, we'd bump into Dion DiMucci, Cornelius Gunther of the Coasters, and others who'd just performed in the revue. In his car, Clark began regaling Dianne with backstage stories about the Bandstand stars-that is, the teenaged dancers. He could not have been more charming.

  He never complained about the 1973 article-it wouldn't have been gentlemanly, after all-but it's stuck with him all these years. Interviewing him in 1998 for my book on the history of Top 40 radio, I encountered this opening remark: "You know, the writings you laid down still come back to haunt me." I expressed surprise. "Oh, people come back and dig that old shit up. Now that we've got computers, you can pump up anything that anybody ever uttered."

  And yet, he patiently answered my questions about Top 40, about his impact on the format, and on his unrelenting pace. "It's a miracle to be busy this long," he said, "so I've got nothing to complain about."

  lillOckill' on Bijiall's Door

  It was Bob Dylan's first tour in the United States in eight years. He had the Band behind and with him. Thirty-eight shows in forty-three days, from Chicago to Los Angeles. By 1974, Rolling Stone had covered Woodstock and Altamont; George Harrison's bash for Bangladesh and the Rolling Stones for Nicaraguan earthquake relief; the Stones, the Grateful Dead, and the Jefferson Airplane on tour. We knew all about going on the road with rock stars.

  But those bands were always going out. A Dylan tour was real news, and we attacked it the way the Washington Post and The New York Times were going after the Nixon White House.

  We ran advance stories on the itinerary and on ticket prices. For Dylan's six weeks on the road, we'd have three issues. I'd cover the opening shows, in Chicago, Philadelphia, Montreal and Toronto. I would file two pieces: A news story describing the first concerts; then a cover story on Dylan, with an interview. Then, while I was writing up the interview, our New York editor, Loraine Alterman, would cover the Madison Square Garden concert, and a free-lancer, Paul West, would file a report from Atlanta. We would have reminin- scences from the poet Michael McClure, and our own Ralph J. Gleason. Then, as Dylan and band approached the West Coast, I'd pick up the final shows.

  It was not, of course, quite that simple. Dylan's people approved my being on parts of the tour, gave me the band's itinerary, so that I could book flights and hotels accordingly, and provided necessary tickets and backstage passes.

  But Dylan? We were on our own. They could make no guarantees. It was, be there and say a prayer.

  For two cities, I didn't get near Dylan, but I didn't panic. The business at hand-reporting on the first two concerts, and the response to it from both fans and behind-the-scenes people-was enough to keep me on the run. I pounded out a quick, 3,500-word article ("Dylan Opens to a Hero's Welcome"), threw it in the mail (we didn't have fax machines

  handy back then), and headed off for Canada.

  On the flight, I began to sweat. I had a cover story to write next. And there were no guarantees that I would be able to talk with Bob Dylan.

  As it turned out, getting him to sit for an interview took only a little luck and a bit of pluck. It was at the interview that I began to panic again. As I set up my cassette recorder, Dylan eyed it as though it were a poisonous tarantula. "No, man, no tape," he said in his patented whine of a voice.

  I was startled, but I understood. There were Dylanologists hounding him in those days, going through his garbage and publicizing its contents. There were bootlegs of everything Dylan sang and uttered.

  No tape.

  I had plotted out my questions carefully, keeping in mind Dylan's penchant for elusive answers and his elliptical way with words. I'd draw him into a real conversation about where he-as well as his music-was at. Now, my plans were shot. I'd have to write as he spoke, making eye contact only when one of us came up for breath. Writing as he spoke, I wouldn't be able to truly listen and come up with follow-up questions. I'd always be catching up to his last sentence-that is, if I understood it at all.

  How did I do? I'll let you know in the epilogue.

  W E A R E I N T 0 R 0 N TO, the third stop of the Bob Dylan tour. Locked in by snow and still locked out, so far, from the inner circles of Dylan and the Band, I'm reduced to television in my hotel room. A newsy talk program called The CITY Show, named after the station's call letters, is on. For some reason, the moderator, a sporty-looking fellow, 50 or so, looks familiar, but the camera cuts to the program's "youth r
eporter," whose report this evening is an earnest attack on Dylan, the tour, and tour producer Bill Graham. He is asking where all the money is going; he is characterizing Dylan as a "manipulator" of his fans and the press, secreting himself from the public after that convenient little bike spill and, now, exploiting his absence from the scene. He also has heard that Dylan's show is comprised mostly of older songs, and this, too, is a pisser for him.

  The moderator, the man with those penetrating, close-set eyes I've seen before, comes to Dylan's defense:

  "I believe there's a freedom to just sit down if you want to," he tells the kid. "The public doesn't own Dylan; that's why he appealed to you in the first place. There's something sad about it; it's like Hemingway writing one book and the audience reading it over and over again and wanting nothing else."

  As for Dylan's manipulation of the media, he continues, "You know I don't like to talk about my son too much on the air, but Neil has found that he's not dependent on all this damned media coverage." (Now I recognized the gentleman: Scott Young, Neil's father and a newspaper columnist in Toronto.) He goes on: "Just a line in the papers is enough. I've seen in Neil two different aspects. One is the concert, where he doesn't have to do anything-show up and they're pleased. The other is, he has a film out now, and it's not a successful one. Warner Bros. decided not to release it, and now he owns it. We talked about it, he talked about bringing it to Toronto. I told him if you've got something to sell, and people are clamoring for it, sell it.

  "Dylan is trying," he concludes, "to re-establish that there still is a Dylan around."

  The next night, I met Dylan, bumping into him in the hallway up on his floor, and he agreed to talk-later, in Montreal. Three days later, in Montreal, thirty-three floors up at the Chateau Champlain, Bob Dylan sat across the table, at ease, in white western shirt and jeans, still sleepy at 3 P.M.

  He's always interested in what his audience is thinking, so I told about the impression his new love songs seemed to be making. Critics-from Chicago through Philadelphia and Canada-were saying he'd mellowed out, "blunted his image," "drained the venom from his voice." He'd move from urgent, surging metaphorical poetry to clinch-cliches, stereotyped images, and an emphatically stated need for his loved one, a complete turnaway from his previous posture of independence, individualism, and defiance.

  Of course, he's played with such talk before. In "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," he rhymed "moon" and "spoon." In Montreal, just last night, between "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "Gates of Eden," he told the audience: "That was a love song, and this one's another love song."

  With a wife and five children, Dylan is being called a family man, or, as Jonathan Takiff, pop critic for the Philadelphia Daily News put it, "a dutch uncle."

  "Yeah," said Dylan. `But those things don't make a person settle down. A family brings the world together. You can see it's all one. It paints a better picture than being with a chick and traveling all over the world. Or hanging out all night.

  "But," he maintained, "I still get that spark. I'm still out there. In no way am I not. I don't live on a pedestal.

  "Fame threw me for a loop at first," Dylan continued. "I learned how to swim with it and turn it around-so you can just throw it in the closet and pick it up when you need it."

  The turning point, he said, was in Woodstock, "a little after the accident. There I was, sitting one night under a full moon, I looked out into the bleak woods and said, `Something's gotta change.' There was some business that had to be taken care of, that we don't have to go into." I nodded, not mentioning the breakup with manager Albert Grossman, but reminding him of the problems he'd had fulfilling contracts for a book and a TV special.

  "It was too much," he said. "It finally broke the camel's back. Now it's the same old me again."

  Whatever that may be.

  O N E O F THE R E A S 0 N s for following Dylan around, even if ultimately you learn that he's just the same old him, is that so many people are looking for so much from the drifter's return-for some kind of statement, either from the mere act of his re-emergence or from something a "new" Dylan may have to say. But too many of those that are filling up the papers and the airwaves with their Dylanalyses never heard, really heard, the man in the first place, or refused to accept what they were told: "It's not to stand naked under unknowing eyes/It's for myself and my friends my stories are sung," he sang, in "Restless Farewell," even before "My Back Pages."

  Dylan says he's touring only because he wants to play his music for the people. But the people, the papers say, want more than music. They want The Word.

  "I don't understand that attitude," says Robbie Robertson of the Band. "I don't ever remember him ever delivering what they believed he delivered, or what they think he's going to deliver now. I mean, I heard a lot of terrific lines and songs. He certainly had a way of saying something that everybody felt, a way of phrasing it and condensing it down. But people have a fictitious past in mind about him."

  I agreed. But even if I, for one, never saw Dylan as a messiah, idol, prophet, leader, or even a particularly great singer, I must admit that Dylan has touched me. And the nerve that was hit ties somehow back to the sixties. During the second show in the Chicago Stadium, near the end of "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," it hit. It wasn't the song, a simple enough affair over an even simpler acoustic guitar run, that did it. For me, Dylan made a statement through a tone he was painting with his bitter-truth voice, a feeling of knowing resignation, the uplift deriving from the knowledge that here was a guy who'd seen it all, saw through it all, and...well, had a way of phrasing it, of condensing it down.

  I watched this still-small, still-vulnerable figure, behind his guitar, looking up and bawling, "I got nothing, Ma, to live up to," and I shivered and thought of my older brother Barry, a probation officer and community worker murdered in the summer of 1972, in the midst of the gang wars of Chinatown. He left a mother and father who cannot stop mourning, and when "It's Alright, Ma" pulsed through the verse about how, for those blind to "death's honesty," life "sometimes must get lonely," I found myself wiping away tears with an index finger and thinking something toward Barry, something excusably maudlin like: "Can you see? Bob Dylan, someone you heard and liked a lot, is here."

  Later, talking with reporters from The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, I learned that they, too, had had the chills. And in the next city, Jon Takiff- "Philadelphia's Mr. Cynical," the publicist for the Spectrum rock auditorium called him-would walk away from the press box and tell me that "Like a Rolling Stone" had made him cry.

  PHIL OCHS WAS IN PHILADFLPHIA the day Dylan arrived. Ochs had a gig at the Main Point, a small club in suburban Bryn Mawr. Ochs used to hang out with Dylan, wanted to be as big as Dylan, admired Dylan's successful switch to rock, and served as a target for Dylan's celebrated personal attacks on Village friends. The most popular of the incidents had Ochs getting thrown out of Dylan's limousine one day, for not thinking "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window" would be a smash.

  By Philadelphia, Dylan and the Band had their show pretty well set. The clutteredattic look of the Chicago shows had been modified; Dylan and the Band came out strong, with six straight Dylan songs, concluding with Dylan cool-jerking the piano for "Ballad of a Thin Man," followed by six Band tunes. Dylan returned for three more, finished up with "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." An intermission of exactly fifteen minutes was broken by Dylan's return as a solo acoustic artist for about five numbers, ending with "It's Alright, Ma." The Band came back for three or four more, finishing up with "The Weight" from Big Pink, and Dylan returned with a couple of newer songs, from Planet Waves, and the finale, "Like a Rolling Stone." And the encore was "Most Likely You Go Your Way (I'll Go Mine)."

  Michael McClure, the poet, joined the tour in Toronto. Together we will go after his old friend Bob Dylan. McClure is uncomfortable; in the snow-sludge-slop-shuffle outside, he has lost his scarf, without which his neck is incomplete; he is seated just below the bank of s
peakers perched atop a tower at one corner of the stage, and he's got his ears finger-plugged to balance out the insistent highs. But he can still smell-and he can see. "You see how much cleaner these kids are?" No, I don't. The poet/playwright picks out a row of three boys in Pendleton shirts. They are indeed clean shirts. "See? Canada hasn't been fucked over by the War Machine!"

  The Toronto audience is as respectful of Dylan as the States crowds, but even more attentive. There's less of the screaming for requests during pauses between numbers; less of the demands for Dylan while the Band is doing one of their own sets. But of course, this is Band territory. CHUM, the FM rock station, even embraces Dylan, referring to him as being "from Hibbing, Minnesota, very close to the Canadian border." Dylan himself, later, will admit a special feeling for Canada that gets him smiling a crack more onstage, gets him saying, twice in one show, "Great to be back in Montreal!" and singing a particularly strong and croony version of "Girl from the North Country." Dylan, later, will explain, looking out the wall-wide arched window in his hotel room, out beyond the office buildings, into the bleak woods: "Canada seems to bridge a gap between the United States and Europe. It's a certain flair. And this is where I came from, this kind of setting-lakes, and boats and bridges."

  In Toronto, before the first of the two shows there, I call on CHUM and find a Dylan freak named John Donebie, who remembers that Dylan's been in town three times before, twice as a solo artist, around '62 and ' 6 3 , and, in 1966, with the Hawks, who got huffily dismissed by one local critic as "a third-rate Toronto rock & roll band." In fact the Hawks-and it's well-known-came up as the backup band for Ronnie Hawkins, the Arkansas rockabilly singer who'd moved to Canada in 1960. (His hits were in '59-"Forty Days" and "Mary Lou.") The Hawks, all from Canada, except drummer/Arkansas native Levon Helm, got tired of the roads they traveled, mostly in the Southern states and along a short stretch of drink joints on Yonge Street in Toronto. Away from Hawkins, they continued to work Canada, were found by the blues artist John Hammond, Jr., sat in with him on a couple of albums, and met Dylan.