On the Road with Bob Dylan

by Larry Sloman

  “What do you think of the tour so far?”

  “I’m in love with it, man,” McGuinn bubbles like a hippie, “never done anything better in my life.”

  “Who you been hanging out with?”

  “Everybody,” McGuinn bubbles, “I’ve been hugging everybody and telling them that I love them and I mean it too, it’s not bullshit.”

  “I hear the bus drivers are upset,” Ratso interjects.

  “They’re cool. Well, they can’t hang out with the musicians, they’re not allowed to fraternize with us or something. That’s too bad, but that’s the way it is. It’s that old thing of don’t fraternize with the help.”

  “How does communication work?”

  “They give us newsletters every day. I’ve even contributed to them.”

  Ratso swings the car into the parking lot of a small country-style restaurant. He and McGuinn enter and move to the back to a small sunlit patio. The hostess instantly comes over, with menus.

  “Would you like a drink first,” she asks, smiling.

  “Conspiracy, conspiracy,” McGuinn mumbles, pushing his longish dirty-blond hair out of his eyes as he peruses the menu.

  “Have you been getting sick?” Ratso asks, concerned.

  “No, not a bit,” Roger smiles wanly. “I sweat it out. Literally.”

  A rosy-cheeked young waitress appears. “Hello,” she bubbles, “would you like something to drink?”

  McGuinn rolls his eyes. “You mean alcohol. No, no alcohol.” He laughs. “We were just talking about the international conspiracy to get people to drink alcohol,” he explains to the waitress.

  “OK,” she says cheerfully, “how about coffee?”

  “There’s an international conspiracy to get people to use caffeine too,” Roger lectures. “It’s a drug-oriented culture.” He picks up his glass. “What’s in this water? Seriously, I’d like a cheddar-burger to drink. A liquid cheddarburger.”

  “I’ll put it in the blender,” the waitress shoots back, a bit annoyed.

  Ratso orders cheesecake for breakfast and hands the menu back to the girl. “There seems to be such a nice spirit, I mean Baez running around today like a meshugena.”

  “I’m so loose,” Roger agrees, “now I feel like I can fly. I watched Dylan. I learned it from him. I watched him being constricted and tied down. I remember Eric Anderson saying Bob’s making too many kids and being tied down and I noticed that and I said ‘Uh huh,’ and I have two kids by another marriage and I was tied down too. And I watched him blow out, get out of the thing with Sara, I mean he loves her. I love Linda. But I got my work cut out for me and I can’t do it with her around. Linda’s been doing silver and gold jewelry, going to UCLA, she’s been constructive lately. She’s a real smart girl and she was as tied down as I was, but she didn’t realize it. She’s twenty-five. She’s got to have her shit together by that age.”

  McGuinn smiles at his last comment. “What am I saying, it took me that long. Where am I coming from? I’m thirty-three and I’m still a punk. I plan to stay one too. Peter Pan, you know. Never grow up, never grow up.”

  “But that song, ‘Sara,’ man, Levy told me how he wrote that,” Ratso purrs, “being on the beach, remembering where they hung out. It’s like a diary.”

  “Yeah, ‘being at the Chelsea Hotel writing Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you.’ I love that line so much.”

  “It’s so personal, I can’t believe he’s singing that shit.”

  “To the world? Why not? That’s what poets are for. He’s one and he realizes it. I’ve never seen him more upfront, right. He’s out there. It’s great. This whole tour is amazing. Last night I had chateaubriand with Mick Ronson. Then I had a couple of martinis and that’s the last thing I remember. So that’s why I’m being good today.”

  “Your song …” Ratso starts.

  “Oh, I know what I was gonna say,” McGuinn blurts. “There have been some little girls following us around going ‘Roger and Rono,’ it’s like the Ringo thing, like a campaign, they’re pushing for that combination of Ronson and me.”

  The food finally arrives, and Roger bites into his cheddarburger with a vengeance.

  Ratso begins to recount the anecdote in which Dylan had been concerned that Kinky didn’t like him.

  “But he does,” Roger interrupts. “Bob asked me the same thing. We brought Kinky over to the house in Malibu one night, and we all sat around and Bob made Kinky sing all of his songs. Then the next day Bob asked me if he had said anything wrong last night. Bob got drunk and didn’t remember what he did so he asked me the next day. He said, ‘I don’t think Kinky likes me,’ and I said, ‘Kinky likes you, Kinky loves you man, do you remember singing go to sleep little Jewboys or Ride ’Em Jewboys or something,’ and he said, ‘No.’ He didn’t remember it but I told him that everything was fine and he conducted himself perfectly well.”

  “Then Dylan asked me what I thought about that guy, Bruce Springfield?” Ratso recalls. “You think he’s jealous of Springsteen?”

  McGuinn laughs. “It was like that scene in Don’t Look Back,” Ratso continues, “with Donovan. Dylan going, ‘Who’s this Donovan guy?’ But he wipes out Springsteen.”

  “Of course, he does,” McGuinn shrugs.

  “But he seems so insecure,” Ratso wonders.

  “Is anybody not insecure,” Roger counsels. “Look, he’s just a human being …”

  “But he’s the best,” Ratso protests.

  “He doesn’t know that he’s the best yet. That’s the beautiful thing about him.” McGuinn smiles. “If he finds out he’s the best he might quit or something. Let’s not tell him, let’s tell him he sucks.”

  “That’s Kinky’s strategy,” Ratso smirks. “Kinky shits on him every time he sees him.”

  “I do too,” Roger boasts, “I treat him like he’s one of the guys. Because if you look up to him, he doesn’t like that, he won’t respect you anymore. So I kick him around a little bit. But I’m a late bloomer. I’m going to be an overnight success, one of these days.”

  “You got too much too soon with the Byrds, Hillman told me that.”

  “We got indigestion, man,” McGuinn plays with a half-eaten salad, “star lag. Now I’m recovering from it.”

  McGuinn orders another Sprite and Ratso remembers the period when Roger was playing solo, a few years back. It was mortifying, this giant in rock ’n roll history reduced to playing acoustic guitar in small holes in the wall. Ratso recalls seeing him in Good Karma, a hippie health-food restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin. The iconographic voice was still there but it was painful to watch; McGuinn desperately namedropping between songs trying too hard to salvage a modicum of self-worth, introducing “Ballad of Easy Rider” by invoking the name of “Peter Fonda, who’s a good friend of mine.” Ratso had the feeling then that he was watching an acoustic dinosaur.

  “How come you retired the Byrds?” Ratso breaks the silence.

  “David Crosby got down on my case real heavy one day and he and I mutually decided that the original Byrds were the Byrds and let’s not have any more bullshit about it.”

  “That’s when you were doing that hyped reunion album,” Ratso recollects. “I thought that sucked.”

  “I know, I know.” McGuinn shakes his head sheepishly. “That’s because Crosby overdid it, he didn’t let me in on it. He intimidated me on purpose, he intimidated me and I couldn’t do anything about it.”

  “What about Hillman?”

  “He was just there, he thought it was all right. Hillman wants to do another one to save face for that last one and Crosby does too. He realizes his mistake, he does, he and I have talked about it.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t let him produce it!” Ratso rails.

  “No, we should get a professional producer,” Roger agrees, then leans over conspiratorially toward Ratso, his hand shielding his mouth. “The thing is Crosby didn’t produce that album,” McGuinn whispers gleefully. “We all did, and we gave him the credit.”
>
  “And he thanked you no end, huh,” Ratso laughs out loud.

  “He did. He said, Wow, wow, thanks a lot you guys that’s really great. Wow, I needed that.’ We got away with something.” Roger smiles impishly.

  “That’s brilliant. Boy, did that album suck.”

  “I know,” Roger laughs.

  “And that was almost as bad as Byrdmaniax, another all-time low.”

  McGuinn winces at the rattling of that old skeleton. “That was terrible. That was the all-time bottom-out. You gotta make a few bad ones.”

  “Even Dylan put out stuff like Self Portrait and that blackmail Columbia LP, but you know, in retrospect I liked even them,” Ratso marvels, “I like almost anything he sings.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Roger enthuses. “He once came over to my house and looked through my record collection. You know, he’ll look at your books first and then your records, checking you out. He found some of his records in my collection and he said, ‘What do you listen to my records for?’ I said, ‘I like ‘em, you know.’ He said, ‘Don’t listen to my records, they’re terrible’—he was pulling a number. So I said, ‘OK,’ and I actually did stop listening to his records for a while to prove to myself that I could do it. He said, ‘I don’t listen to your records, if I want to hear rock ’n roll I listen to B. B. King or somebody.’

  “Wasn’t that sunrise ceremony great,” McGuinn suddenly veers off course. “Boy, that might have saved my life or something.”

  “You think so.” Ratso seems skeptical.

  “I don’t know, I mean I’ve just felt spiritually OK ever since.”

  “I liked what everyone said.”

  “Everybody was real cool,” Roger sips his Sprite, “except a couple of people who were a little stilted.”

  “Yeah, that chick from Newsweek.”

  “What she say?”

  “I don’t remember, something Newsweekese,” Ratso hisses.

  “Is that like Japanese? Dylan said something very nice. I sort of copied it. He said he hopes that everyone realizes that they are of the same spirit and I said I hope that everyone realizes that everything’s gonna work out all right in the end.”

  “What did Neuwirth say?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t remember what a lot of people said. I don’t even remember what Rolling Thunder said. I thought that was very cool, though, to be involved in an Indian ceremony of that magnitude, my first one. I mean a lot of my friends go out to the desert and hang out with the Hopis and take peyote and get enlightened and stuff like that. I can see where that’s at now, I always thought it was kinda jive. You don’t have to do that, you can just take peyote.”

  “Yeah, I mean Rolling Thunder was talking in English,” Ratso injects, “and afterward he came over to my photographer friend and asked her for copies of her contact sheet.”

  “He lives in the real world,” McGuinn smiles, “he’s just a guy. He’s a very enlightened guy.”

  “Dylan didn’t know about him before the tour,” Ratso reports. “It was just synchronicity.”

  “Oh, I thought the tour was named after him.”

  “No, Dylan told me he named it one day sitting in California listening to the thunder.”

  “If it was Malibu,” Roger smiles slyly, “it was probably the Vanderburg Air Force Base. It’s up the street.”

  “It was actually the air force, huh, not the rolling thunder?”

  “It was probably sonic booms. The Sonic Boom Jet Revue. Not to be confused with Rolling Thunder.”

  McGuinn picks up his napkin and wipes his mouth, signaling Ratso into a frenzy over the large uneaten chunk of hamburger. “Why don’t you eat the meat?” he shouts, pointing to the chunk of ground beef. “I got to take care of you, Roger!”

  McGuinn picks up the hamburger and takes a tentative bite. “Thanks Ratso, you’re right. I need the protein.”

  “I’m down to my last twenty dollars,” Ratso moans, “I’d better call the Rolling Stone office.”

  “You know, this tour I haven’t spent a penny yet,” Roger marvels. “Everybody else is going around shopping and stuff but I haven’t spent a penny on anything. I know what’ll happen by the end of the tour. They’ll have all these suitcases full of shit and they won’t be able to walk around anymore. From experience, I don’t do that anymore. I don’t need it. I’ve got everything I need. I’m an artist and I don’t look back.”

  They laugh.

  “Neuwirth told me he’s got no possessions,” Ratso relates, “doesn’t even have a home. Just his guitar.”

  “So what, that’s his problem,” McGuinn philosophizes. “He crashed at my house a lot. You gotta realize I like him a lot. He’s my old buddy for years.”

  “He is like the glue to this thing,” Ratso admits.

  “Glue? Oh, like stick together,” Roger comprehends. “You know what I think it is. Like, he’s protecting Bob like a watchdog. But that’s what it is and sometimes there’s a little overkill in that. And that’s what you’re being subjected to. The reason I’m talking to you is that I understand the situation. If I felt you were a real threat to Bob or anything …” McGuinn trails off ominously.

  “The reason Dylan talks to me is because he knows that—”

  “You’re not a real threat,” Roger finishes.

  We pay the bill and head out to the parking lot. “The letter should help,” Ratso muses out loud. “I’m not going to hide under tables and pry.”

  “No,” McGuinn climbs into the car, “you’re cool.” He puts his boot against the open door and turns to Ratso. “You know this trick, I learned this from Carlos.” And he violently kicks the door almost off its moorings, quickly bringing his legs in, and calmly waits for the door to slam itself shut. “Not bad, huh.” He smiles.

  Ratso pulls into the Inn’s driveway and McGuinn gets out. “Wanna see something neat,” Roger asks. “We always used to do this with our rented cars.” Stoner and Wyeth have drifted over and McGuinn has a small audience as he circles to the front of the car, takes a deep breath, and vaults onto the hood, jumps from the hood to the roof, alights onto the trunk and gracefully plops back down to earth. To Ratso inside the car, it sounds like thudding thunder.

  Just then, Louie Kemp appears on the front porch of the Inn and beckons Ratso over. “C’mon,” he grabs the writer, “I want to talk to you.” He marches Ratso over to the far end of the porch.

  “You’ve been out of line,” he says.

  “How?” Ratso shrugs innocently.

  “Listen, shut up and listen. Then you can talk. All right, you were out of line first of all in going to the Indian thing. You were really out of line in having that chick come with the camera,” Louie lectures.

  “I didn’t tell her to come,” Ratso protests.

  “She found out by herself, huh?”

  “I didn’t tell her to bring her equipment.”

  “You think she was there for her health,” Kemp rails. “She took those pictures and she runs all around trying to sell them to everybody. She tried to. She tried Time, Newsweek, all those people. Anyway, if she wanted to take pictures she should have asked.”

  “She did. She asked Rolling Thunder.” Ratso settles against the porch railing.

  “Rolling Thunder has nothing to do with …” Kemp leaves the sentence unfinished. His eyes flare behind his dark glasses. “Then she should have just taken pictures of him, there’s pictures of Bob in there. Look, we didn’t want no photographers there. That film should have been taken out of her camera and given to me afterward. That’s the way it should have been done. Instead she runs all over New York trying to sell it.” Louie rolls his eyes.

  “I screamed at her roommate over the phone,” Ratso shows good faith, “I had a long conversation with my editor at Rolling Stone and I told him it was private land, a private ceremony and that the pictures weren’t public domain. I told him it was a privilege for Mary to be there.”

  “For you too,” Kemp shoots back acidly. “I don�
��t know how she got there, but she’s your fucking friend and you’re gonna be responsible for her just like I’m responsible for my friends. And, we’re not pleased with you following the bus and coming to the mansion,” he adds.

  “Shit,” Ratso moans. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “You were already in there, I didn’t want to make a scene when you’re in there. I didn’t want to put you down,” Kemp gets softer, “you gotta learn to control yourself and you don’t seem capable of it. You can do it for a couple of hours and then your enthusiasm gets the best of you. I like you, but you’re out of control.”

  “Have you seen me since the Breakers thing?” Ratso prods.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, I just had a talk with Gary …”

  “Let me finish what I’m saying,” Kemp interrupts. “I think your intentions are good but you’re getting to be more work for me than you’re worth. So just to let you know that I’m serious and I mean business, I’m not giving you tickets for tomorrow night’s concert. And I’ll pick it up again after that if you have your shit together but if you don’t I’ll just have to cut you off.”

  Ratso stays still, demonstrating to Louie that he’s letting it sink in. He knows tomorrow night’s concert is in New Hampshire, way up near the Maine border, a good eight-hour drive.

  “Where’s the concert tomorrow night?” he innocently asks Kemp.

  “Find out for yourself. But there won’t be tickets for you from me anyway. Because you just don’t seem to understand …” Louie says sternly.

  “Why are you punishing me?” Ratso whines.

  “I just want to show you that if you keep on jerking round with me I’m not going to give you any cooperation.”

  “I’m not jerking around with you.”

  “I’ve given you more cooperation than with any other fucking journalist,” Kemp seems to be getting mad again.

  “What about the guy from People. You let him backstage a few times,” Ratso pouts.