"Sure," Dylan agreed, "there's still a message. But the same electric spark that went off back then could still go off again-the spark that led to nothing. Our kids will probably protest, too. Protest is an old thing. Sometimes protest is deeper, or differentthe Haymarket Riot, the Russian Revolution, the Civil War-that's protest.
"There's always a need for protest songs. You just gotta tap it."
What, I asked Dylan, had he been doing to keep his vocal cords in shape? Had he been singing regularly, at home, through the years off the stage? He said he hadn't. "We've been through the big tours before," he said. `Actually, I'd like to have a little club where I could sing when I felt like it."
What about the changes his voice and vocal style have gone through over the past few albums? Dylan looked past me, then out the window again. "That's a good question. I don't know. I could only guess-if it has changed. I've never gone for having a great voice, for cultivating one. I'm still not doing it now."
As for the rearrangements of songs, the harder, snappier way he's singing some of the older songs: "You'll always stretch things out or cut it up. just to keep interested. If you can't stay interested that way, you'll have to lose track. But I'm me now, that's the way it comes out."
What? You're meaner now?
"What? Oh, no. I'm me now." Dylan laughed. He could just see the headline.
Is Dylan planning to stay in Malibu?
"No," he said, "We're just there temporarily. It was cold in New York and we didn't want to go back there after Mexico [and the shooting of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid]. I can't stay away from New York!"
How did he get the role of Alias in the Sam Peckinpah film?
"Just one thing into another. [Pause] They took me on because I was a big name. I've seen myself on screen; movies don't impress me. That part didn't scare me off at all. I just hoped I didn't get shot during the movie.
"I don't know who I played. I tried to play whoever it was in the story, but I guess it's a known fact in history that there was nobody who was the character I played in the story.
"No, I don't want to be a movie star." he continued, "but I've got a vision to put up on the screen. Someday we'll get around to doing it. The Peckinpah experience was valuable, in terms of getting near the big action."
Would Dylan do more films before tackling his "vision"?
"The Peckinpah movie brought me as close as I'll get." he said. "I've been on sets of movies and TV shows, but they were small-time compared. They spent $4.5 million on Billy the Kid, had all the top people. So that was really heavy, gave me the vibration. When I finally do mine, it'll have that vibration."
What about his latest business moves?
"I don't think about it," said Dylan. "Just had to get out of some legal hassles from back in the old days."
Dylan, in earlier announcements, had planned to have his own label, ironically named Ashes & Sand, the name of the holding company he'd set up back in the old Albert Grossman days. Dylan smiled, laughing at himself.
"That only lasted a quick few minutes," he agreed.
What were the advantages to having his own label? Was Dylan advised by an outside party to form his own company? "I advised myself it was a good thing, and then I advised myself that it wasn't. I just didn't need it."
What about the Dylan album, the collection of Self-Portrait outtakes Columbia had released on the eve of the Dylan tour, after Dylan split from the label to go with Ashes & Sand, and then Asylum? David Geffen had charged Columbia with holding the album over Dylan's head, threatening to release it unless he resigned his contract. "That's when they sealed their doom," Geffen said. Speaking on Dylan's behalf earlier in the tour, Geffen had characterized Dylan's response to the album as utter repudiation. "He disclaims it," Geffen said. "He doesn't know that Dylan."
Dylan described the material on Dylan as outtakes, sung "just to warm up. They were just not to be used. I thought it was well understood." But, he said, he couldn't understand all the critical downgrading of the album.
"I didn't think it was that bad, really!" he said.
IT'S BEEN A TOUR OF LUCK AND COINCIDENCE, running into Neil Young's father, Ronnie Hawkins, and Bob Dylan himself. But there was also the leaflet I picked up outside the Nickelodeon, blood-red headlined: 40 DAYS! AND NINEVEH SHALL BE DESTROYED. It was dated November 12th and distributed by the Children of God, a local religion franchise. "Forty Days," of course, was Ronnie Hawkins' first major hit.
Here, sitting with Dylan, I also thought about the headlines that had surfaced upon his arrival in Philadelphia and Toronto. In Philly, the Evening Bulletin carried a story: "Fewer Jews Reported in Philadelphia Area" (population decreased 7 percent in the last year). In Toronto Dylan was greeted with this headline in the Globe and Mail: `Apathy, Alienation Reported Rampant Among Young Jews."
"It is not the slightest bit surprising (but nonetheless shocking and depressing) that no less than 88 percent [of converts to Christianity] consider the Jewish religion 'valueless,"' said the report issued by P'eylim of Canada, a Toronto Jewish organization.
Religious images have long been part of Bob Dylan's music. In 19 71, he visited the Wailing Wall in Israel. Now, on tour, it was rumored that he was planning on handing over his cut of the profits to the Israeli cause; that he was an "ultra-Zionist."
"I'm not sure what a Zionist really is," he said, putting down the rumors as "just gossip." As for the religious images that surface regularly in his music, he commented, after a good pause: "Religion to me is a fleeting thing. Can't nail it down. It's in me and out of me. It does give me, on the surface, some images, but I don't know to what degree.
"Like da Vinci going in to paint The Last Supper. Until he finishes it, no one knows what The Last Supper is. He goes out and finds twelve guys, puts them around this table, and there's your Last Supper. Or Moses. He found a guy and painted him, and forever, that guy will be Moses. But why Moses or The Last Supper? Why not a flower? Or a tree?"
Dylan had earlier mentioned an astrological influence on his return to active performance, the removal of an obstacle, Saturn in his planetary system. I asked him to elaborate.
"I can't read anybody's chart," he said, "but the thing about Saturn is, I didn't know what it was at the time, or I would've gone somewhere away. It's a big, heavy obstacle that comes into your chain of events that fucks you up in a big way. It came into my chart a few years ago and just flew off again a couple of months ago."
Who'd clued him in on Saturn?
"Someone very dear to me."
-February 14, 1974
Rolling Stone
A few days after the publication of "Knockin' on Dylan's Door," Jann Wenner showed me a note from Ralph J. Gleason, the jazz and pop critic at the San Francisco Chronicle ; the man who'd helped Jann start Rolling Stone, and who was a columnist for the paper and a mentor to us all. He was an avid champion of Dylan, from folk to rock.
"Ben's story and interview with Dylan in this issue is the best thing I have read about him," he wrote, "not only on the tour but the best thing I have EVER read about Dylan."
Jon Landau, our chief music and book critic, added, in his own note: "It's the only Dylan piece that counts."
Not long after the tour, Jann had an idea: a quick book on the tour. We'd use our articles, add some reviews and a list of the songs Dylan sang. Oh, yes: To fatten it up a little more, Jann asked, could I type up a transcript of my interview? I was horrified. I'd barely been able to decipher them for the story I'd cranked out. I couldn't vouch for the accuracy of the notes.
But Jann was in a hurry to make the book deal. Whatever I had would have to do. So, good soldier, I did it. The book, entitled Knockin' on Dylan's Door, was out by July.
The next month, I ran into Dylan. I was in St. Paul/Minneapolis, on tour with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Dylan was hanging out backstage. In the frenzy of the moments before the band hit the stage, Dylan waved me over and signaled that he wanted to talk. We found a side room.
He had seen the book, he said, squinting as he spoke. "Did you have a machine running?" I was stunned. Of course not, I said. He'd seen me shut off the cassette recorder and set it aside. I hadn't thought to arm myself with a, say, voice-activated backup.
"Well, there's this interview in the book," he said. I explained that it was taken from whatever notes I'd jotted down, and apologized for any mistakes.
He shook his head. "No, no," he said. "Just wonderin'..."
We headed back toward the stage. There was more than music in my head. There was a feeling of.. .triumph. I'd gotten it right.
THE REUNION OF
CROSBY, STILLS, NASH & YOUNG
love harmony singing. Always have, always will. From the Ames Brothers, the McGuire Sisters, and the Platters to the Everly Brothers, the Beach Boys, the Mamas & the Papas, and the Eagles, I'm a sucker for that stuff. Well, maybe I wasn't so crazy about a Gaylords song about Chinatown or chopsticks, which always rubbed me the wrong way. And the Chipmunks were great, but I kind of outgrew them.
The point is, when I had a chance to sit in on one of the first recording sessions for Crosby, Stills, & Nash, I knew I was somewhere special. It was early 1969, and, while toiling for the employee magazine of Pacific Telephone, I was freelancing for Rolling Stone and various other publications and newspaper syndicates. Through the photographer Jim Marshall, I hooked up with Judith Sims, editor of a magazine called Teenset. She was hipping it up, changing the name to Aum, and grabbing as many bylines as she could from magazines like Rolling Stone.
And so it was that I was in Los Angeles, at Wally Heider's Studios early in March, listening to the hypnotic harmonies of David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash. All of us in that studio were transported-not only by the music, but also by the personalities of these escapees from the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the Hollies, respectively. They were the first "supergroup," and they damned well knew it.
Disharmony would come in time, but those early run-throughs of "Helplessly Hoping" and "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" still stand among my favorite musical moments in life. At Rolling Stone, I became the band's primarily chronicler, covering their expansion with Neil Young and Dallas Taylor in late 1969, filing news updates every few issues, as they split up, regrouped, and fell apart again. Finally, in 1974, they announced an official reunion, and we gave them the Dylan treatment. News reports about the plans for the tour; a report on the first concerts, followed by a full-length feature.
Well, not exactly full. As it was with Keith Richards on the Rolling Stones visit in Hawaii, Neil Young chose to maintain a low profile, away from the media. He would emerge in later stories, but, regrettably, not this one.
As Ei.t.io'r ROBERTS, THEIR MANAGER, so daintily put it, they were pissing in the wind, these boy wonders of his who could make a million at the snap of four sets of fingers.
And yet, year after year, this all-time favorite group from out of the Woodstock era, these symbols of harmony in music, would try to get back together and would fail. "We really did try, every year." Nash would say. "It just didn't fucking happen because it wasn't real."
From the beginning, in the spring of 1969, Crosby, Stills & Nash had been preparing the public for their breakup. I initially met them while they were cutting their first album, and they were all saying, and this was the bottom line of my story, that they were not a group.
From the Byrds, the Buffalo Springfield, and the Hollies, the three men had had enough, they said, of outsized egos. Now they would band and disband as they pleased, go solo or form various duos for tours and albums as they pleased.
They have been true to their founding principle. And it makes no sense.
After you've become the biggest in the biggest of all entertainment businesses, you're supposed to look the other way and slip right by those old principles, on the way to a four-way easy street. And if the public wants a reunion, a manager's supposed to make sure it damned well gets one. Even if his wonders have to stay in different hotels, travel in separate curtain drawn limousines, and sing from isolation booths.
But Elliot Roberts is a laid-back sort of guy. Anybody who's got a slice of several million dollars a year, who for four years sees the fortune's dissipation because, well, because "it wasn't real," and who doesn't commit horrendous acts of violence born of frustration-that person has got to be stone laid-back. Or he's happy with the fortune he's already made. Or he's a real friend. Roberts, it would be fair to say, is a bit of each.
"I have to give him a great deal of credit," says Graham Nash, "for his patience, to deal with the fucking mad people that we are." But Nash remembers the founding principle: "I don't like that word, reunion," he says. "To be perfectly honest with you, I never felt that we were totally apart. I always felt that eventually we would grow up and realize what was happening. We've always been musically connected."
Musically, there is no question about CSNY. If you're into living-room rock, fireplace harmonies, and just a taste of good old social consciousness, this is your group. At the concerts this time around, there were those who were there to remember. Instantly, they were thankful again for "Chicago" and "Ohio" as well as for "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" and "Our House." Over the years. Crosby, Stills & Nash have shown up at a Young concert. Nash and Crosby have shown up at a Stills show. They've probably done a lot of visiting to each other's living rooms. There clearly is that musical connection.
So why couldn't they get along for long enough to work together? What tore them so far apart that even music couldn't reunite them for so long? They had, each of them, been unable to escape that mysterious thing called ego.
At the St. Paul, Minnesota, Civic Center, the lights are doused, 19,000 voices rise out of the darkness, and all you see are the blue fluorescent lights playing onto the Indian rug; it looks like a snowdrift onstage as Crosby, Stills, Nash, and bassist Tim Drummond face off to establish the rhythm. Neil Young, in a Buick service department jacket and patched cords, is behind the organ. The power builds-it's "Love the One You're With"-and a floorful of people are suddenly shake-hopping in place. On "Wooden Ships," springing up from central casting, there's your clenched fist, front center, just as the chorus begins.
In the middle of the acoustic set, Young introduces "For the Turnstiles" by saying: "Here's a song I wrote a long time ago. There's a couple of really good songwriters here tonight; I hope they don't listen too closely." Minutes later it's Stills, and he, too, pays tribute to a songwriter in the crowd: "This one's for Bob," he says, "because I know I've been that mad before." Head bowed and hands flailing, he flies into "Word Game."
Through most of this set, Bob Dylan, in cowboy shirt, jeans, and shades, has been standing in the midst of a small group on the floor off to the side, behind backstage barriers. Dylan is in his home state for a visit with family and friends. He's with Louie Kemp, his buddy from their childhood days in Hibbing, just north of here.
As the acoustic set makes its transition back into electric, Dylan wanders off. He is willing to have a few words. Over Young's rock-star recall, "Don't Be Denied," Dylan shouts that he's in town to attend a funeral.
I say I enjoyed hearing the album of his tour, that it sounds better than most of the nine shows I covered.
"Wait till you hear my next album!"
"How far along is it?"
"I haven't started yet!"
I ask Dylan how he's liked the CSNY show so far, and he responds with questions about Frank Sinatra's problems in Australia and about the weather in San Francisco. A moment later, after he's absorbed some more music, he turns and shouts: "I like to play small rooms!"
"Your next record should be a comedy record," I yell.
`All my records are comedy records!"
Later that night-in fact, early the next morning-Dylan pops up at the St. Paul Hilton, into a fifteenth-floor suite of beautiful Midwestern women and weary rock and roll tourists. He talks briefly to Stills, eyes three guitars on the floor, picks one up and herds Stills into an adjacent
room for a session of new Bob Dylan songs. The only other member of the audience, through the two-hour show, is bassist Tim Drummond.
`Aw, fuck!" Drummond laughs the next afternoon. He is staying behind while the tour moves into Denver to allow Crosby, Stills & Nash to catch the Eric Clapton show.
"Dylan's got an album," says Drummond. "It's great and it's completely different from Planet Waves. It's gutsy, bluesy, so authentic. I heard eight or nine songs and it's the first time I've sat in a room and liked everything I've heard."
Drummond, it turns out, will provide most of the information I need about Neil Young. Young, the so-called reluctant star of the group, is the lone holdout-staying away by driving off after each show in a GMC camper van toward the next town. Elliot Roberts will say: "Well, he just doesn't want to talk; he says he's got nothing to say." And later: "He never likes the way he comes out in print. He says it sounds like someone else." Young has his year-and-a-half-old son, Zeke, with him on this tour, along with their dog, Art (who swaggers around backstage wearing full photo-ID credentials), and he is determined to spend time with his kid and avoid hotels and airports. "He likes to be on the road," says Crosby. "He loves driving down the old highway." Graham Nash: "He doesn't trust a lot of people."
So it is Tim Drummond who will trace Neil Young through the years, through the changes and up to the reunion.
Drummond, 34, played with Conway Twitty ten years ago, split and settled in Cincinnati, got discovered by James Brown and became "the only paleface in his band." Tired of the road, he moved to Nashville to do session work. One day, he was walking down the street when a photographer friend stopped him. "He said Neil Young was at Quadraphonic Studios [Young was in town to be on the Johnny Cash TV show] and was jamming and needed a bass player. So I showed up and the first song we cut was `Heart of Gold."'
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 27