"You know," said Donebie, "Hawkins is still playing at the Nickelodeon down on Yonge Street. He's always there-or whenever he wants to play there, anyway. Just about owns the place. You ought to check him out." I make a note, and, after the first show (my notes remind me: "Overall feel of concert is LAZY"), I call the club. Ronnie is right by the phone and will be happy to see Rolling Stone, spill some beer and stories, and, "Hey, Levon said he might come down tonight."
The Nickelodeon is an eat-drink-and-dance place, with pizza table cloths, red flowery paper lamps, and a required coat check, just like in all the fancy restaurants in town. It feels like a hustlers' hall, a singles spot where, if you don't score, there's always Jingles upstairs, where you can take pictures of guaranteed naked ladies.
At the club, in a cluttered storage room full of discarded chairs, Hawkins was as hearty and jovial as ever. He's still cutting records, he said, but he hasn't had a record big enough to pay for a tour. He mostly stays fixed here, six nights a week, five sets a night-except when his boys are in town.
"I was over at the hotel room last night and we brought back memories for seven hours," he said. And he saw the show tonight-"first time I've seen 'em play since they left in 19 6 5 "-and paid due compliments.
"They were always two years ahead of their time. Robbie was the first guy to get into white funk, in Canada or anywhere." Hawkins urged me to stay, see if Levon shows up.
Minutes later, at 12:3 0, an hour and a half since the end of the Dylan concert, the Nickelodeon broke into applause and cheers. Levon, and Robbie Robertson, and Rick Danko, and Bob Dylan, and friends, had passed the checkroom, all their coats, fur caps and mufflers intact. It was a nice little 39th birthday present for Hawkins, and he leapt through the crowd to exchange warm greetings with Dylan, who wore shades and would stay mostly quiet through the night.
Hawkins jumped onto the stage with his latest congregation-a six-piece outfit that had Bill Graham nodding favorably-and told the buzzing crowd: "They came all the way from L.A. to hear me sing `Forty Days!"' One of the waiters slapped his open hand, softly, repeatedly, against a counter. "Goddamn," he said to another worker. "Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan."
Hawkins introduced a special number. "I remember Robbie called it one of Bob's best songs at one time,' he said, and moved into a mellow country version of "One Too Many Mornings," one of Dylan's earlier true-love songs, from 1964. A couple of birthday dedications later, Hawkins was rolling through "Bo Diddley" and worked in a couple of verses of "The Ballad of Hollis Brown." Dylan nodded and smiled.
After Hawkins' set, the crowd was quiet, a nickelodeon full of Dylan-watchers, picture-snappers. I got a good close-up look at him, for the first time, and he looked tired, in no shape to be club-nobbing, but not unapproachable. Later, at two o'clock, while the club tried to kick everybody out, Graham looked to be trying to set up a private jam session, talking soothingly to the people in charge. But they didn't go for it, and Graham resigned himself to the usual: a spread of food and wine on the artists' floor at the hotel.
Bob Dylan has had reason to avoid Rolling Stone; we'd been among the most critical about his recent albums; the most cynical about his motives for the tour, launched in combination with a new label deal and a new album. He didn't need the media, didn't want to do interviews, all reporters were told.
Still, his most intimate protectors insisted, Dylan would be happy to have a chatif you happened to run into him. Now, Graham invited us to join the post-concert nibbling and listening-to-the-new-album gathering, and at 2:30 A.M., I entered the most boring hotel suite I'd seen since my own Holiday Inn room back in Philadelphia. McClure and Bruce Byall, lighting manager on the tour, were chatting on a couch; Barry Imhoff was eating a plateful of snacks, and a lone teenaged girl wandered around wondering what she was doing.
But soon enough, there was a burst of noise from the hallway and a gang of Band members and buddies were scurrying past, followed by Bob Dylan, still in shades. He made a turn toward the party room, stopped in front of me, and continued to yell, halfpuzzled, half-joking, after the little mob.
My moment had come. I introduced myself and he kept his smile on as we shook hands. His was cold, offered downward, with not much of a grip. Then he excused himself, but promised, without my asking, "I'll be right back and we'll talk." Ten minutes later, at 3 A.M., we sat side-by-side on couches and chatted, in idle, for maybe ten min- utes..."How'd you like the show?"..."Well, you see, I wasn't feeling that great, I just had a flu shot today"..."No, eighteen thousand people yelling isn't that much of a thing. It's nothing new. See, I used to sit in the dark and dream about it, you know. It's all happened before"...and then I suddenly felt nervous, without a notebook and not quite sure what to say. I suggested an interview-say, maybe in Montreal, when he felt better. He agreed, and I made my escape.
The next night, still in Toronto, Dylan looked better onstage, sporting a hat for the first time along with his by-now regulation black suit, twisting his left heel in time with "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," working with organist Garth Hudson through "Ballad of a Thin Man," and leaving the stage with a spread-armed curtsy. The Band seemed inspired, especially with a near-perfect reading of "I Shall Be Released" by Richard Manuel. As before, Dylan fluffed the second and third lines of "The Times They Are AChanging, " but the audience waited and roared for the main lines. On "Like a Rolling Stone," the audience, in perfect unison, fast-clapped along with the song. This is the one song no one listens to, the Dylan anthem, the cause for celebration. The concert is marked down as the best since the second show in Philly.
And Toronto, for many of the Band, is home-or, at least, home enough so that the party after the show reminds one of Big Pink. In one room is a gathering of the next of kin, folks, stepfolks, and friends. Full of etiquette-it is after midnight, after all-they are chatting and listening to Planet Waves on a cheap "compact" hi-fi bor rowed from the hotel; "Tough Mama" is playing, and on the television (TV sets in touring rock stars' hotel rooms are always on, no matter what's happening in the room) is a movie starring Jimmy Stewart and some tough mama, a red fright-wigged woman wielding a shotgun, and as Dylan begins the final chorus, the woman blows up a houseboat.
The gathering is dissipating, and in another room, a drunken would-be groupie demands Dylan's presence. She staggers around, going nowhere slow, until Dylan shows up, asking for a blanket. She shouts at him, and Dylan goes into his I-don'tunderstand routine, slips into the bathroom and out again, before she notices. Later, Renee, a tall, blonde beauty, is talking with Robbie Robertson. Robbie, who looks years younger than he did in the Big Pink days, when his chin-thin beard, glasses and dark clothing gave him the look of a devout Russian Orthodox Jew, is listening attentively, like a priest. He seems to be humoring her, but no one can tell.
I had met Robbie at the Nickelodeon: the next day, we met in his room and talked about the tour-how it started, exactly, how the Band felt being largely considered a backup.
"We expected it," he said, "because we know who Bob is, right? And because we also knew that it had been eight years since he had ever done a tour, and we knew it was going to be an incredible level of anticipation for his music. We just can't ...we have a job to do. You can't say to yourself, `Oh, my god. Call Bob. Tell Bob he's got to get back out here.' The first time we played with him, when we walked out there, people would actually start booing and throwing things, so this is actually like a big, big departure. This is nothing, to have a couple of people yell, `Dylan!"'
The Band and Dylan, said Robertson, have always thought about touring since the last tour, in 1966. "We were going to do another one, and Bob had the motorcycle wreck. And for a long time it didn't seem like a good idea to us at all. All of the sudden it started to become clear. There was a space, an opening, a necessity, almost, that just pulled you into it. It was no clever maneuver on anybody's behalf to put the things together, to expand our audience or get a few extra albums. Everybody just felt the same way at the same time."
The impetus was a rock concert-the all-time biggest festival gathering, the Watkins Glen festival, where they played before 600,000.
"There was something different about it," he said. `At Watkins Glen we were playing, and we would do little things, intricate, subtle things that the audience would react to that I'd never seen them react to before. There was an alertness to the audience that I could not believe."
The whole thing is especially ironic because the Band is almost as reclusive as Dylan, having not played any dates for a year and a half before Watkins Glen, choosing to spend their time with families, working on albums, and playing with Dylan.
After the festival, an enthusiastic Robertson told Dylan about the new sensations he'd received. `And he went for it all the way."
Rehearsals began three months before the tour. "We sat down and played for four hours and ran over an incredible number of tunes. Just instantly. We would request tunes. Bob would ask us to play certain tunes of ours, and then we would do the same, then we'd think of some that we would particularly like to do." They must have gone through some eighty numbers, said Robertson. But the session wasn't really a rehearsal. "For our situation and our mentality, it seemed so absurd to get into a room and run over 'Positively Fourth Street.' We'd go, `What is this? Remember the kickoff? Who cares what the kickoff was?' You know. We just can't approach it like that." After that one meeting, he said, "it was over. We said, `That's it."'
So, onstage, oftentimes a song will end quite abruptly; another may wheeze and fizzle to a tardy conclusion; Dylan will stop a number to change the beat.
Even while planning the tour, Dylan and the Band were nervous, said Robertson. "Not a real emotional nervousness, but also a physical endurance nervousness. Like Bob was saying, `Shit, I haven't done nothing in eight years, all of a sudden I'm going to go out there and hit for forty concerts?' We're not really outgoing people," Robbie said again, "we're just not the kind of people that can-'Sure, turn us loose!"'
Once the tour was certain, the Band would call Bill Graham, whom they had worked with, doing concerts, and David Geffen, chairman of Elektra/Asylum Records, now Dylan's label.
Robertson told Dylan about Graham and Geffen, Dylan approved, and the two went to work, convincing the group that if they were to avoid box-office riots, they had to play more than ten dates, and in larger-than-theater halls. It was also Graham who proposed the ticket prices (criticized in some cities as too high, averaging $8 and reaching a top of $9.50), and the Band and Dylan-who left all money matters to their various attorneys and to Geffen and Graham-agreed.
"The decision," said Robbie, "was made by Bill and David, and they put their logic together and explained it to us. We left it up to them because they could be a little bit more objective than us. They would say, `Listen, Joe Blow gets $7.50. Just Joe Blow, so I would think you guys should charge that, and if there's two of you, you should charge'.... And they had all kinds of reasons. `If you don't, then people are going to think that something is wrong.' Me? I just said, `You know better than we do.' You have to give people room to move around in and do things. If you do it all yourself you go crazy."
Dylan echoed Robbie: "I put it in Bill Graham's hands," he said. "I just let people know I was ready." He added: "Originally, I wanted to play small halls, but I was just talked out of that."
Bill Graham, the man who has an answer for just about anything, was even equipped with the proper language for this tour. In Montreal, at the end of the first concert at the Forum, after the encore, he told the crowd, in fluid French, that Dylan had gone and would not be back. The next night, the voice that has sent countless antagonists up against countless walls was again soothing and Frenchy, telling the people to please not smoke and crowd into the center aisle.
One woman, who came to Montreal from Plattsburgh, New York, seemed disappointed with Dylan, after "Lay Lady Lay." It was the new way he had of singing it, no longer country-comfy and inviting, but snarl-joking, stretching last words and snapping them off with a grit of his teeth.
"I liked the old Dylan," said the woman, an employee at the state college in Plattsburgh. "Here, on this song, I felt he was ripping me off, just singing a song to get through it. He's not sharing a part of himself with us." She broke into applause, minutes later, when Dylan went into "The Times They Are A 'Changing," and joined the ovation while Dylan offered two bows and a clenched left fist. She nodded her approval again as the solo Dylan worked his way through "Gates of Eden." And when "Rolling Stone" came around, she was on top of her chair, standing atop her cotton coat and clapping along. (Dylan: "`Like a Rolling Stone' is just as real today as it was then. The audience is reacting the same as back then. It was always the one that got the best reaction.") And here, when Dylan returned for the encore, the ovation continued on, and did not die, the way it had in the other cities.
"Always love to come back to Montreal."
While friends of Dylan said he had stayed off the road mostly because his family came first, he left his wife and children behind. With him on the first few stops of the tour was Louie Kemp, a friend of Bob's since the days in Hibbling when they went to camp together. Louie stuck close to Dylan, from hotel to hotel, and accompanied him wherever he went. In Chicago, they checked out a show at the Earl of Old Town. In Philadelphia, Dylan spent off-hours ice skating. In Toronto, he planned to see The Exorcist at a local university movie house, then canceled out.
In Montreal, Dylan also took it easy, staying on a diet of vegetables, fruits, herb tea and distilled water. His one known foray into the streets-aside from shopping tripswas to pick up a loose NO PARKING sign to take back home. I remember a Rodney Bingenheimer story about him and Dylan driving around Hollywood one night in search of signs; now, propped up against a couch in his suite, there was the evidence of such a hobby.
On the scheduled day of the interview, I waited through the morning and early afternoon. I decided to busy myself by going over my notes from the seven shows I'd seen and compiling a list of which songs Dylan was doing most often, and how many different numbers he had done in his concerts so far, at an average of eighteen songs per night, with the Band adding another nine or ten.
It turned out that Dylan indeed had-and played-favorites. Of thirty-two songs he had tried thus far, twelve numbers had appeared in, at least, six of seven concerts. In every show, he had performed "Lay Lady Lay," "Ballad of a Thin Man," `All along the Watchtower," "It's Alright, Ma," "Like a Rolling Stone," and two from Planet Waves, "Forever Young" and "Something There Is About You."
"Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," "It Ain't Me Babe," "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," and a new number, "Except You," had been done in every show but one, and "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)" had been sung seven times in five concerts.
"I Don't Believe You" had been done five times, scattered out evenly, and "Ballad of Hollis Brown" was also a five-timer. "Times They Are AChangin"' had been done twice in Chicago, and once each in Toronto and Montreal.
The rest of the list included one-time acoustic shots of "To Ramona," "Mama, You've Been on My Mind," "Song to Woody," "Maggie's Farm," `As I Went Out One Morning," and "It Takes a Lot to Laugh (It Takes a Train to Cry)." Twice each, he had done "Rainy Day Women (# 12 & 35)," "Just Like a Woman," "Hero Blues," "Love Minus Zero (No Limit)," "Gates of Eden," "Girl From the North Country," "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," and the new "Wedding Song." Three times each, he had performed "Tough Mama" (another new, gritty love song), "Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat," and one of his own stated favorites from the protest days, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll."
"It's more interesting for me to be able to move things around," said Dylan. "These are the songs that were important for us, for me, for people we knew. They're mostly songs that've been recorded through the years."
I hadn't heard any songs from New Morning or Self-Portrait yet, I said.
"Well, we'll do some from New Morning. We've got three or four numbers. But SelfPortrait, I didn't live with those
songs for too long. Those were just scraped together." To, say, pay some sort of tribute to the songwriters you liked? Dylan smiled and nodded.
Dylan has been well-known to be antagonistic during interviews, challenging the wording of questions, offering totally evasive or fabricated responses. He does, in fact, give mostly half-answers, and one is not encouraged to pursue his replies. His face says to take a second to let it soak in, see the self-evidence for yourself.
The first time we'd talked, Dylan had mentioned a special enthusiasm for doing the Texas dates, in Fort Worth and in Houston January 25th and 2 6th, just before the five New York shows.
"Maybe it's just the Mexican influence," he said. "They're more receptive to my kind of music, my kind of style," said Dylan. "In the old days..." he paused. "I hate to call them the `old days,"' he thought out loud, and laughed. `Anyway, I did New York, San Francisco, and Austin. The rest were hard in coming."
The tour, he said, wasn't planned to take advantage of a lull in the music business, or to make a statement in a time of national crisis. "I saw daylight," he said. "I just took off."
Did he miss being onstage?
"Sure," he replied. "There's always those butterflies at a certain point, but then there's the realization that the songs I'm singing mean as much to the people as to me; so it's just up to me to perform the best I can."
What kind of feeling did he get, singing the "protest" and "message" songs again, especially considering what people might read in his decision to revive those songs?
"For me, it's just reinforcing those images in my head that were there, that don't die, that will be there tomorrow. And in doing so for myself, hopefully also for those people who also had those images."
In an earlier chat, Dylan had implied that it was a "new time," in which people were united in their political thinking. I mentioned a comment by a member of The Committee, the comedy troupe, that much of the country still needed turning around, as evidenced by the overwhelming re-election of Richard Nixon, after four years of fairly obvious nonsense, and by the underwhelming call, at this point, for his removal.
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 26