On the Road with Bob Dylan

by Larry Sloman

  “Jesus, these guys are smart,” Ratso says aloud, “pulling this in the most desolate area imaginable, right near the fucking Maine-Canada border. But they’re not smart enough,” and the reporter swerves into a wild U-turn and heads back to Waterville. After about two and a half hours of creeping down 95 riding the brake all the way, he limps back into the Howard Johnson’s and gets his old room back.

  By now it’s 4 A.M., but with the mixture of the music, the prescribed drugs, the illicit drugs, and the paranoia, Ratso’s wide awake. But what to do at four in the morning in Maine? Nothing but call some friends, and since it’s only one on the coast, Ratso dials Mike Bloomfield, a great blues guitarist, who backed Dylan up at his first electric appearance in Newport and went on to play searing guitar on the legendary Highway 61 Revisited sessions.

  “How you doing Larry,” Bloomfield booms. “Where are you man?”

  “In Maine,” Ratso answers disconsolately. “I’m on tour with Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue. But it’s been real weird. What was it like working with Dylan for you?” the reporter tries to compare notes.

  “Well, Larry, the last time was atrocious, atrocious. He came over and there was a whole lot of secrecy involved, there couldn’t be anybody in the house. I wanted to tape the songs so I could learn them so I wouldn’t fuck ’em up at the sessions …”

  “What songs?” Ratso shoots in.

  “The ones that came out later on Blood on the Tracks. Anyway, he saw the tape recorder and he had this horrible look on his face like I was trying to put out a bootleg album or something and my little kid, who is like fantastically interested in anyone who plays music, never came into the room where Dylan was the entire several hours he was in the house. He started playing the goddamn songs from Blood on the Tracks and I couldn’t play, I couldn’t follow them, a friend of mine had come to the house and I had to chase him from the house. I’m telling you, the guy intimidated me, I don’t know what it was, it was like he had character armor or something, he was like in a wall, he had a wall around him and I couldn’t reach through it. I used to know him a long time ago. He was sort of a normal guy or not a normal guy but knowable, but that last time I couldn’t get the knowable part of him out of him, and to try to get that part out of him would have been ass-kissing, it would have been being a sycophant, and it just isn’t worth kissing his ass, as a matter of fact, I don’t think he would have liked that anyway. It was one of the worst social and musical experiences of my life.”

  “What was he like?”

  “There was this frozen guy there,” Bloomfield says. “It was very disconcerting. It leads you to think, if I hadn’t spent some time in the last ten or eleven years with Bob that were extremely pleasant, where I got the hippie intuition that this was a very, very special and, in some ways, an extremely warm and perceptive human being, I would now say that this dude is a stone prick. Time has left him to be a shit, but I don’t see him that much, two isolated incidents over a period of ten years.”

  “What do you see as the cause of that?” Ratso wonders.

  “Character armor. It’s to keep his sanity, to keep away the people who are always wanting something from him. But if a lot of people relate to you as their concept of you, not your concept of you, you’re gonna have to do something to keep those people from driving you crazy, but if that is so strong that you can’t realize who is trying to fuck with you and who just wants to get along with the business, if you can’t tell the difference, it’s very difficult.”

  “How did you relate to him in the early days?”

  “When I first saw him he was playing in a nightclub, I had heard his first album, and Grossman got Dylan to play in a club in Chicago called The Bear and I went down there to cut Bob, to take my guitar and cut him, burn him, and he was a great guy, I mean we spent all day talking and jamming and hanging out and he was an incredibly appealing human being and any instincts I may have had to try and cut him and slice him, which is very common in Chicago, it was a thing that almost all musicians did, and it wasn’t really a mean thing, and any possible interest I may have had in doing that was immediately stopped, and I was just charmed by the man.

  “That night, I saw him perform and if I had been charmed by just meeting him, me and my old lady were just bowled over watching him perform. I don’t know what, it was like this Little Richard song, ‘I don’t know what you got but it moves me,’ man, this cat sang this song called ‘Redwing’ about a boys’ prison and some funny talking blues about a picnic and he was fucking fantastic, not that it was the greatest playing or singing in the world, I don’t know what he had, man, but I’m telling you I just loved it, I mean I could have watched it nonstop forever and ever.

  “The next time I saw him was at a party in Chicago and he was traveling with a bodyguard, a big fucking Arab, named Victor Maimudes, an Arab, and he was a bodyguard, that’s what he was, I didn’t know that then, what did I know? I hung out with the niggers, what did I know about him and his bodyguard, and he was trying to get pussy and, believe me, he got a lot of pussy, and we hung out at that party and we talked, blah blah blah, and I was watching the bodyguard, the next time, I get a phone call from him, would I want to play on a record with him and I said, ‘All right.’ And I really didn’t know he was a famous guy, I really didn’t know, I was so into the black music scene and AM radio that I didn’t know this guy was famous.

  “And I went to Woodstock, and I didn’t even have a guitar case, I just had my Telecaster and Bob picked me up at the bus station and took me to this house where he lived, which wasn’t so much, and Sara was there I think, and she made very strange food, tuna fish salad with peanuts in it, toasted, and he taught me these songs, ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ and all those songs from that album and he said, ‘I don’t want you to play any of that B. B. King shit, none of that fucking blues, I want you to play something else,’ so we fooled around and finally played something he liked, it was very weird, he was playing in weird keys which he always does, all on the black keys of the piano, then he took me over to this big mansion and there was this old guy walking around and I said, ‘Who’s that?’ and Bob said, ‘That’s Albert,’ and I said, ‘Who’s Albert?’ and he said that he was his manager, and I didn’t recognize Albert even though I had met him many times before. He had short hair before and now he looked like Ben Franklin, he looked like cumulus nimbus. I didn’t know who he was and I asked Bob if he was a cool guy and Bob said, ‘Oh, yeah.’

  “We fucked around there for a few days and then we went to New York to cut the record and I started seeing that this guy Dylan was really a famous guy, I mean he was invited to all the Baby Jane Holzer parties, and all these people would be walking around with him, and the Ronettes would come up to him and Phil Spector would be talking to him and I noticed that he and Albert and Neuwirth had this game that they would play and it was the beginning of the character armor, I think, it was intense put-downs of almost every human being that existed but the very few people in their aura that they didn’t do this to. It was Bob, Albert, and Neuwirth, they had a whole way of talking, I used to be able to imitate it. David Blue is a very good imitator of it, as a matter of fact I don’t even think he knows he’s imitating it. It’s just like this very intense put-down.

  “And he was very heavy into drinking wine, to stay calm and loose I guess. We went to this Chinese restaurant and I started putting Bob down, playing the dozens with him and I did it all night long and he and Albert loved it, they were in hysterics because it wasn’t the kind of putting down that they did, it was the dozens, and I talked about his momma and his family and everything, and I had a great time.” Bloomfield cracks up at the memory.

  “Do you really think …” Ratso starts.

  “Oh, and then I remember one time Bob wouldn’t eat and Albert took him to Ratner’s and bought him plates of sturgeon and like mushroom barley soup and he was taking the sturgeon and just piece by little clump putting it in his mouth and saying, ‘Eat, sturgeon, g
ood,’ I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, it was so fucking far out.

  “And we cut the album and that was extremely weird because no one knew what they were doing there. They had this producer who was as useless as tits on a pig, he was referred to exclusively out of his presence as Dylan’s nigger, this big tall guy, a hillbilly, Johnston, he was a good old boy, no doubt about it. I mean there were chord charts for these songs but no one had any idea what the music was supposed to sound like, what direction it was, the nearest that anyone had an idea was Kooper and he was there as a guitar player, and as soon as I came in and started playing, he picked up the organ, he was a good organ player but it was weird for Bob. We were doing songs like ‘Desolation Row’ three or four times, takes and takes of that, and that’s crazy, it’s a long song. I mean the guy had to sing these fifteen-minute songs over and over again, it was really nuts. And the schwartze from Paul Butterfield, Sam Lay, was playing the drums, and the bassist was Russ Savakus, I think it was the first time he had ever played electric bass in his life, he had been a studio upright player for years and years, and it all sort of went around Dylan. I mean like he didn’t direct the music, he just sang the songs and played piano and guitar and it just sort of went on around him, though I do believe he had a lot to do with mixing the record. But the sound was a matter of pure chance, whatever sound there was on that record was chance, the producer did not tell the people what to play or have a sound in mind, nor did Bob, or if he did he told no one about it, he just didn’t have the words to articulate it, so that folk-rock sound, as precedent-setting as it might have been, I was there man, I’m telling you it was a result of Chuckle-fucking, of people stepping on each other’s dicks until it came out right.”

  “You played with him at Newport, didn’t you?” Ratso manages to slip a question in.

  “Yeah, after that the next thing was Newport, meanwhile I joined the Butterfield Blues Band and Albert managed Bob and me, and I figured he’s the manager, he’ll tell me what band he wants me to play with best, he’ll tell me where it makes the most sense. So my druthers was to play with Butterfield, I mean I had absolutely no interest in playing with Bob ’cause I saw that I would be merely a shadow. First of all, I’m a bluesman and the music would take me in no direction that I wanted to go in and I would be a shadow of this guy that I was finally beginning to see was an immensely popular star, and that held no interest for me at all. So we were in Newport and it sort of came down that I was gonna play with Paul, I was gonna join his band, and I think Bob felt betrayed or pissed, or he assumed I wasn’t gonna play with him and I assumed that there was gonna be a business decision made by Grossman, but if I had my choice I was gonna play with Paul and I did.

  “So we set up to play, and Barry Goldberg wanted to play with Bob too, and we were all at Newport, Kooper, me, Barry, and this schwartze Jerome from the Butterfield Band playing bass, and he can’t play and he’s fucking up everything, and we’re practicing there in a room and Odetta’s staring at us and Mary Travers is there and we’re playing and it’s sounding horrible and finally it’s time for the gig and Barry and me are throwing up in these outhouses, literally outhouses, built like wood shithouses and we’re smoking joints and throwing up in there and we get up onstage behind Bob and we play and I think we went over fabulous. I had a fabulous time, I see the lights, the flashbulbs popping, I hear screams and yells. Did I in my wildest dreams, would I have known that we bombed? I thought, hey, rock ’n roll circus, man, heaven, and a year later I found out that we had bombed. I thought we were fabulous. And so Dylan goes up there again after we came down, he’s got a yellow shirt on with a tie pin, he’s dressed like a fucking Pachuco, some kind of Puerto Rican from the West Side of Chicago. He looked very weird with the black leather coat, the tie pin and the shirt without the tie, real spic clothes, so he goes up there and he sings ‘Baby Blue,’ or something, some folk song, and Peter Yarrow apologizes for him and I didn’t even pay attention, see, I was there with the Butter Band and I was gonna play with Joan Baez, too, I was the only electric guitar player there, I would have played with anybody, did I give a fuck? And I thought we had done real well but apparently we had bombed. The next time—”

  “What was Dylan’s reaction that day?” Ratso interrupts.

  “He was uptight all day. He was uncomfortable, I think he knew that this was a much more serious thing than I did. To play with anyone at a folk festival, I would have plugged my guitar into Pete Seeger’s tuchus, really man, and put a fuzz tone on his peter. You know what fucking Pete Seeger was doing? He brought a whole bunch of schwartzes from a chain gang to beat on a log and sing schwartze songs, chain-gang songs, and he was doing that, can you believe this guy? Here’s a white guy, got money, married to a Japanese woman, beating on a log with schwartzes singing All I hate about lining track, whack, this old chain gwine break my back,’ actually saying ‘gwine,’ whack, and Seeger’s doing this and he’s pissed off at us for bringing electric guitars to the fucking folk festival. He brings murderers from a schwartze prison to beat on a log! Oh, I couldn’t believe how fucking crazy it was, man!

  “And fucking Theodore Bikel, he’s drunk. But Albert was cool, though. He beat up Alan Lomax because Lomax gave the Butter Band this rank introduction and man, they had a stone fucking punchout, rolling on the dirt, Albert was really ballsy, kicked the motherfucker’s ass, I loved it. He went to Lomax and said, You know, man, you’re a dumb fucking prick’ and Lomax sucker-punched him and Albert kicked his ass. I was delighted to see that.”

  “But didn’t you get any feedback from Dylan right after?” Ratso tries to focus Bloomfield’s narrative.

  “No man, we thought we did great. Maybe Bob knew we were booed.”

  “What about the rumors that Bob was crying when he came offstage?”

  “I didn’t know, I was with Barry and I said, ‘How do you think we did,’ and he said, ‘Oh, we were fabulous,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I thought so too,’ and then he’s up there playing ‘Baby Blue.’ And when I saw him afterward, he looked real shook up and I didn’t know the nature of what made him all shook up but the next night he was at this party and he’s sitting next to this girl and her husband and he’s got his hand right up her pussy, right next to her husband, and she’s letting him do this and her husband’s going crazy, so Dylan seemed quite untouched by it the next day.

  “So the next time I saw him, I was playing with Butter in the Café au Go-Go and Dylan comes in with Robbie Robertson and he says, ‘I want you to meet the greatest guitar player in the world,’ and he introduces Robbie to me, Robbie who I had already known! And I’m looking at him and thinking, Oh, you little prick, you little dork, uh huh, this is where it’s at, and oh God, it never got clear to me, if he wanted me to play with him he should have said, ‘Man, I want you to get in the band with me.’ He was talking about playing with this one and that one. He should have been real clear to me, ‘Want a gig?,’ ‘Fabulous, how’s it going down?’ But if he had asked me I would have turned him down anyway ’cause I’m a blues player, I wouldn’t have done it, who needs the craziness? It would have been crazy for me.

  “So after that we like drifted apart, what was there to drift apart, we weren’t that tight, but after that when I’d see him he was a changed guy, honest to God, Larry, he was. There was a time he was one of the most charming human beings I had ever met and I mean charming, not in like the sense of being very nice, but I mean someone who could beguile you, man, with his personality. You just had to say, ‘Man, this little fucking guy’s got a bit of an angel in him,’ God touched him in a certain way. And he changed, like that guy was gone or it must not be gone, any man that has that many kids, he must be relating that way to his children, but I never related to him that way again. Anytime that I would see him, I would see him consciously be that cruel, man, I didn’t understand that game they played, that constant insane sort of sadistic put-down game. Who’s king of the hill? Who’s on top? To me it seemed like much ado about nothing b
ut to Dave Blue and Phil Ochs it was real serious. I don’t think Blue’s ever escaped that time, in some ways it seems like he’s still trying to prove himself to Bob. I know David’s one of Bob’s biggest champions.”

  Bloomfield pauses for breath and Ratso wonders how the guitarist evaluated Dylan’s music over the years as opposed to the almost Reichian character analysis he was painting.

  “Well, I love it man, I love Blonde on Blonde, I love John Wesley Harding, and I like that album with ‘Day of the Locusts’ and I love ‘Spanish is the Loving Tongue’ and I love Self Portrait, I even like Blood on the Tracks, God knows I couldn’t play the fucking songs but when I heard the record I liked it. And yet, you know, none of those records are as good as they could be, none of them. I mean, if you look at his peers and look at what a Randy Newman record sounds like, or any good writer-singer, or a Band record, or a Leo Sayer record, I can’t judge, it’s like saying Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, both fabulous, but as far as producing records, Newman’s records are the best-produced.”

  “Why do you think he pays so relatively little attention to that?” Ratso had been dying to ask that of someone close to Dylan’s music, for years.

  “Because the song’s the thing,” Bloomfield booms. “The medium isn’t the message, the message is the message and the medium is sort of ignored and I can’t understand it, because the nearest thing to a tight record was Nashville Skyline and Blonde on Blonde. As a matter of fact, my favorite Dylan record of all is The Basement Tapes, it’s got real good music on it, fabulous singing and good songs, good licks. I don’t know why he does it though. I mean if I was Bob Dylan and the Beatles were making records like Sgt. Pepper, I would want to make a record that was slightly more representative of where rock music was going at that time and maybe he did want to do that but as far as I can see an album has never come out by Bob that was musically equal to the content of the songs or the lyrics. And strangely enough, except for rare occasions, I would rather hear Bob sing his songs than cover versions, but I’d rather hear Bob singing his material better produced.